The Other Calling: Theology, Intellectual Vocation and Truth (Illuminations: Theory & Religion)

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The Other Calling

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Illuminations: Theory and Religion Series editors: Catherine Pickstock, John Milbank and Graham Ward Religion has a growing visibility in the world at large. Throughout the humanities there is a mounting realization that religion and culture lie so closely together that religion is an unavoidable and fundamental human reality. Consequently, the examination of religion and theology now stands at the centre of any questioning of our western identity, including the question of whether there is such a thing as ‘truth’. ILLUMINATIONS aims both to reflect the diverse elements of these developments and, from them, to produce creative new syntheses. It is unique in exploring the new interaction between theology, philosophy, religious studies, political theory and cultural studies. Despite the theoretical convergence of certain trends they often in practice do not come together. The aim of ILLUMINATIONS is to make this happen, and advance contemporary theoretical discussion. Published Sacrifice and Community: Jewish Offering and Christian Eucharist Matthew Levering The Other Calling: Theology, Intellectual Vocation and Truth Andrew Shanks

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The Other Calling Theology, Intellectual Vocation and Truth

Andrew Shanks

A rock-pool waiting in the sunlight for the tide to rise: the Other calling, cry of exilelacerated skies . . .

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ß 2007 by Andrew Shanks BLACKWELL PUBLISHING 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of Andrew Shanks to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1

2007

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shanks, Andrew, 1954– The other calling : theology, intellectual vocation and truth / Andrew Shanks. p. cm.—(Illuminations : theory and religion) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-1-4051-5766-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-4051-5767-4 (paperback : alk. paper) 1. Philosophy and religion. 2. Religious thought. 3. Intellectuals. I. Title. BL51.S485 2007 201’.61—dc22 2006030825 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 10.5/12pt Sabon by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed and bound in Singapore by COS Printers Pte Ltd The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishing.com

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Contents

Introduction: Why Theology?/ What is an Intellectual?

1

Part I: Philosophy 1 2

The Incompleteness of Philosophy Alone Philosophy and Folk Religion: Two ‘Forms’ for a Single ‘Content’ 3 ‘Philosophic Politics’ (I): Strauss among the ‘Moderns’ and the ‘Postmoderns’ 4 ‘Philosophic Politics’ (II): Strauss and the ‘Ancients’ 5 Anti-Philosophical Philosophy (I): Koje`ve’s Critique of the ‘Cloistered Mind’ 6 Anti-Philosophical Philosophy (II): Epicurus, Rousseau

25 30 42 60 78 92

Part II: Theology 7

Beyond Metaphysics: ‘The Science of the Sacralization of Honesty, in Theist, Catholic Form’ 8 Coleridge’s Notion of the ‘Clerisy’ 9 Sacramentally Rooted Thought 10 ‘The Conflict’: From Amos to Hegel, and Girard 11 What is an Intellectual?/ Why Theology?

115 120 131 154 199

Index

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Introduction Why Theology?/What is an Intellectual?

I

Why theology? Why this choice, when it comes to one’s sense of intellectual vocation, to define it so decisively in terms of loyalty to a community of faith? Why this methodological starting point, from the hazard of faith; which straight away implicates me in so much bad, as well as good company? I want to make the very boldest claims for theology. Not, be it noted, just for one particular form of theological doctrine, but for the whole questioning enterprise – as it brings me into the close company not only of those with whom I agree, but also of others with whom I utterly and passionately disagree. I want to affirm the whole enterprise, as such; not on any particular basis of supposedly correct metaphysical opinion, but on quite another basis. On what other basis, exactly? To get my argument underway, let me begin by shifting the terms of discussion. Consider: what is an intellectual? II

What is an intellectual? What, dear intellectual reader, are you, in that capacity? (The way I am using the word, anyone who is prepared to give this text anything more than the most cursory of glances must ipso facto count as being one.) I would argue that an intellectual – any intellectual, every intellectual – is someone, ideally, called to be a priest. In the biblical phrase, a priest ‘after the order of Melchizedek’. The belonging-together of all true intellectuals, all thinkers, in the truest sense – I want to call it a ‘priesthood’. I mean: a priesthood which transcends all differences of religious culture or metaphysical persuasion. Indeed, ‘priesthood after the order of Melchizedek’, as I would understand it, is none other than the priestly service of the very purest open-mindedness. Thus, this is in principle a ‘priesthood’ which potentially includes intellectuals from every different sort of given religious background.


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Only, I am thinking of my own experience of being, in the institutional sense, a priest. In my case: a priest of the Church of England. I am thinking of what it is that I most appreciate about that role, in so far as it transcends the specific institutional context in which I find myself. For it seems to me that what I discern here is a form of vocation far more generally extended. And this, in the end, is the value I see in theology: that it is the direct thinking through of such vocation. III

Of course I recognize that, in our – still, for the time being – increasingly secular European world, it may well seem odd, anachronistic, indeed somewhat overblown, to speak of intellectuality in these terms. I guess that to most people it will, at first sight, appear to be a thoroughly perverse suggestion. But hear me out. I am talking about priesthood as a state of mind, a sense of responsibility. What concerns me here is the underlying state of mind which my job – with (as jobs go) unique directness – ideally requires me to cultivate. For what is it, to be a priest? A priest is first and foremost a representative figure. As a priest, I am an intellectual forever seeking to relate intelligently, and so far as possible also intelligibly, to the very deepest concerns of a largely non-intellectual community. Or let us put it in more positive fashion: what term is there, untainted by condescension, for those who are not intellectuals? Although it is cumbersome, let us perhaps say: ‘the salt of the earth’ – this at least has the merit of being biblical (Matthew 5:13). It is my responsibility to think not only on my own behalf – and not only on behalf of those to whom I am united by a shared education – but rather, in the most rooted and genuinely responsive way, as a representative of the whole prayer community to which I belong; and therefore in the most open, soul-searching communion with the salt of the earth. I am meant to help the members of that community, in the most all-inclusive fashion, poetically articulate their very deepest hopes, fears, regrets and resolutions for the future, in the face of the highest truth we know, corporately reverenced as sacred. And so, in principle, my job is to be a solidarity builder, helping draw intellectuals and others, the salt of the earth, together into a real communion. That is to say: a communion bound together on the basis of an infinite aspiration to moral seriousness; an infinite demand for true self-questioning thoughtfulness, first of all in the sense of kindness; a maximally attentive liturgical appropriation of the corporate past. But in seeking to fulfil this role, I think I am simply attempting, in my own particular institutional context and fashion, to live up to what is, in principle, a vocation common to all intellectuals. To be an intellectual, I want to argue, is straight away to have a calling. In this broad sense: a ‘priestly’ calling. Which, however, our secular


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society – unfortunately – tends not to recognize. For secularism is all too often an over-reaction to the corruption of specific forms of corrupt institutional priesthood, resulting in an all too sweeping depreciation of ‘priestliness’ in general. I want to speak here of a calling to ‘priesthood after the order of Melchizedek’. In Genesis 14:17–20, the priest-king Melchizedek appears just for a moment, symbolically right on the threshold of salvation history, to pronounce blessing on Abram – who, at this early stage, has still not yet become ‘Abraham’. And Abram, by way of homage, pays Melchizedek tithes. Borrowing the title from Psalm 110:4, where it is applied to a king, the author of the New Testament letter to the Hebrews also acclaims Jesus as a member of Melchizedek’s order; indeed, as its high priest (5:1–10; 6:19–7:19). For here is a form of priestliness predating the Levitical/Aaronite priesthood, to which of course Jesus did not belong. This priesthood of Melchizedek – which precedes the confessional otherness of Israel, and which thereby also sets the pattern for the pre-ecclesiastical priesthood of Jesus – is thus a symbol for priesthood at its most primordial. Melchizedek, in Genesis, is, one might say, a potentially symbolic figure, without as yet any clear significance; a name, as it were, in waiting for a role to play. But what else is the truly primordial ‘priesthood’ if not in fact, precisely, the authentic community of all true intellectuals, simply as such? ‘The order of Melchizedek’: let us appropriate this archetypal image for a poetic representation of what one might also call the primordial priesthood of all thinkers. In other words: the spiritual community of those for whom what is ultimately sacred is none other than the shaking power of the very purest, or most open, thoughtfulness. A priest, in the biblical sense, differs from shaman or sorcerer in being a solidarity builder on the basis of ideals which significantly transcend the simple material self-interest of the worshipping community. This is moreover a form of solidarity which at least potentially transcends the given bonds of kinship loyalty – Abram, indeed, recognizes the priestly authority of Melchizedek even though he comes from quite a different ethnic group. True priesthood is the outworking of a certain aspiration both to have, and to deserve, moral authority in this sense: authority as a challenger of material self-interest and ethnic complacency. Sometimes it may perhaps also be mixed with coercive power – Melchizedek was a ‘priest-king’. But priesthood in itself involves a solidarity building quite different from that of conventional kingship; one not based on any quest for coercive power. And in affirming what I would call the ‘Melchizedekian’, or ‘primordial-priestly’, vocation of all intellectuals I am talking about what Jesus represents, for the writer of Hebrews: the way in which the meaning of Melchizedekian priest-kingship is transfigured by being identified with Jesus. For of course the ‘kingship’ of Jesus is one of pure moral authority; no one could have less coercive power than he whose hands are nailed to a cross.


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This is priest-kingship as a form of prophethood. Biblical tradition, in fact, conceives of two basic intellectual vocations: that of the priest and that of the prophet. Whereas a priest represents the people before God, a prophet, conversely, represents God before the people. And so a prophet defines the goals for which it is the priest’s task to develop and implement an appropriate strategy. But, in a broad sense, all prophets are also priests, first. A prophet is just an inspired priest. And a good priest is essentially someone who works to extend the sway of pure moral authority. Which, by its very nature, tends to challenge the pursuit of coercive power. IV

Why theology? There are, of course, many possible levels of answer to this general question. The church functionary, to begin with, has a very simple answer: we need theology in order to train good preachers, catechists, liturgists, church policy makers. Others then, more polemically minded, may also see the need for theology in essentially partisan terms. These may answer that we need good Catholic theology, to uphold the Catholic cause; good Evangelical theology, to uphold the Evangelical cause; or good Orthodox theology, to uphold the Orthodox cause. They may argue that we need theology in order to purge church life of fundamentalism; or, perhaps, in order to purge it of the corrupting influence of secular liberalism. Some will see it as the basic task of theology to recall the church to a proper solidarity with the poor. Or to a proper witness for peace. And others, again, may see theology primarily in apologetic terms, as a matter of the church learning to appropriate the fresh insights of the latest scientific modernity. All of these responses, however, start from a certain presupposition of faith. In each case, theology is framed as an activity of Christian intellectuals seeking to develop a better, in the straightforward sense of more articulate, expression of their given Christian faith. My project here is different, in that I am – in this context – writing as a Christian intellectual primarily concerned to develop a better understanding of intellectuality, as a vocation in itself. Thus, I am concerned first of all with intellectuality, in itself, and only then with the specifically Christian character of Christian intellectuality. Why theology? To be sure, as I am a Christian, what I chiefly mean by ‘theology’ is Christian theology. And yet I want to give an answer addressed not just to other Christians, but, at any rate in the first instance, to all intellectuals, both Christian and non-Christian alike. Nor, moreover, is this an exercise in specifically Christian apologetics. It is an argument addressed to all, and it is an argument tracing a way into Christian theology; nevertheless, my primary concern is not with the justification of Christian faith as such. But, rather, I want to explore the basic rationale for that whole type of thinking which theology


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exemplifies, inasmuch as it is the particular Christian version. Let us call this ‘priestly thinking’, in general. In a sense my argument converges, for instance, with George Marsden’s critique of what he calls the secularist ‘homogenization’ of university culture in the USA. Marsden indeed has traced the history of this process in some detail: the way in which the ‘pace-setting’ American universities, all of them originally Protestant religious foundations, first, in the nineteenth century, turned away from any overtly sectarian identity, and then, in the twentieth century, more and more sought to secularize themselves entirely.1 Although he writes as ‘a fairly traditional Protestant of the Reformed theological heritage’, Marsden’s work is not a lament for some supposed lost golden age of Protestant cultural hegemony. But, rather, he is pleading for a new cultural pluralism; not that there should be any sell out by the universities to the forces of religious bigotry – God forbid! – but just that there should be a bit more space allowed to confessionally framed thought of every variety. And so he deplores any discrimination against overtly confessional higher educational institutions, whether with regard to state or federal funding, or in any other way; he advocates the inclusion, within otherwise secular universities, of confessionally identified research institutes or affiliated colleges, as in the UK or Canada; he urges that scholars, in every area of the humanities, be freely allowed, even encouraged, quite openly to relate their scholarly work to their religious faith; he would like to see university departments of theology flourishing everywhere. Amen, I instinctively say. But, again, why? Marsden, for his part, develops a very American argument. By contrast, I want to attempt an answer which, in the most systematic way, goes right back to universal first principles. That is to say: one which begins, not from any particular presupposition either of faith or of given cultural identity, but quite simply from what all truly thoughtful thinking presupposes, just by virtue of its thoughtfulness. Thus, what does it mean to be truly thoughtful? What, in the most general terms, does it lead one to value, and look for? First and foremost, surely, it means that one values, and looks for, good conversation. A social environment in which all voices can be heard, and receive serious attention. A world in which the most diverse types of people are drawn conversationally close together, without having to submit to any predetermined consensus; so bringing to bear, on questions of moral and metaphysical truth, the most diverse experiences of life. An ethos absolutely focused on the moral preconditions for good listening. In a word: ‘Honesty’. 1

George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).


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I write ‘Honesty’ here with a capital ‘H’ so as to draw attention to the particular sense of the word that I intend.2 In common parlance, it is true, the word ‘honesty’, as applied to intellectual matters, is often used as a straightforward synonym for ‘sincerity’, truly meaning what you say, or ‘frankness’, truly saying all that you might have in mind. But what I mean by ‘Honesty’ crucially transcends these other concepts, inasmuch as it signifies a patient openness to what other people have to say, and especially those others most different from oneself, with the most challengingly other perceptions of reality. Why, and in what sense, theology? Essentially, my answer is: because, and in the sense that, theology is the Christian form of what I have called ‘priestly thinking’. By which I mean precisely the science of the sacralization of Honesty. In order that Honesty shall flourish, I would argue, it needs to be rendered sacred; or, rather, recognized as already being the very essence of the truly sacred. Strategies are required to promote that recognition, among every category of the population. And the proper, urgently necessary vocation of Christian theology is none other than to be a devising of such strategies, in the context of church life. V

Or, to put it another way, by ‘priesthood’, in the primordial sense, I simply mean a fundamental commitment, on the part of intellectuals, to the building of the most truly catholic sort of community, in the original sense of that word, ‘catholic’: that is to say, a community with a real will to Honest inclusivity, which therefore draws together, into the most genuinely open and engaging sort of conversation, people of every different level of intellectual attainment. But the building of catholicism, in this sense, obviously requires the assent of all involved. It is equally obstructed both by the general strength of militant anti-intellectual sentiment at large in the world and by the reluctance of intellectuals themselves. The militant anti-intellectualism of the present day may be said to come in two main forms: vulgar nihilist and fundamentalist. I am talking here not just about a perhaps quite justifiable contempt for the pretensions of intellectual elitism, but about a basic refusal to accord any sacred authority to the open-minded pursuit of Truth, and a complete lack of respect, therefore, for intellectuality as a commitment to that ideal. The vulgar nihilist is one for whom nothing at all is sacred, and every claim to authority, as distinct from popularity, simply requires to be debunked; the fundamentalist, by contrast, attributes sacred authority to a form of closed-mindedness. These two naturally loathe one another. And yet, at the same time, they are really twin phenomena. For both alike belong to the world of 2

I have previously developed this usage, in systematic fashion, in Faith in Honesty: The Essential Nature of Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).


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mass communications: what I am calling ‘vulgar nihilism’ is everything akin to the element of sniggering in any negative propaganda; fundamentalism is religion fundamentally adapted, or rather corrupted, to meet the requirements of propaganda effectiveness. And both thrive on their opposition to one another, each is the only opponent the other really understands, they need one another. In that sense, I think one may very well regard them as being, so to speak, the twin heads of one and the same apocalyptic beast – set over against ‘Honesty’ with a capital ‘H’, one might perhaps call it ‘Glamour’ with a capital ‘G’. For this is what cultural leadership is here reduced to: on the one hand the glamour of ‘celebrities’, on the other hand the glamour of great showman-evangelists. How, in the most general terms, are truly Honest relationships to be fostered between intellectuals and the salt of the earth? The power of Glamour largely depends upon the operation of the mass media and the assembly of ecstatic crowds. Honesty, by contrast, requires face-to-face encounter, in the context of enterprises with the potential, at least, to be equally owned by participants of every kind. And, preferably, not just the face-to-face encounters of the classroom, in which conversation is essentially framed as a business of enabling people, if they choose, to move out of one world, the world of the masses, and towards the other, the world of the intellectuals. But, rather, what is needed is a context for the cultivation of a real reciprocity of mutual respect between the two worlds. The need, as I would see it, is for intellectuals to think of themselves, and to be popularly accepted as, in the deepest sense, representatives of a catholic community. And note: this is quite a different sort of representativeness from that of the party politician, or the demagogue, within liberal democracy. Thus, while it is no doubt true that, in present circumstances, liberal democracy is the least bad form of government, nevertheless, the interaction it generates, between those in the role of representatives and those who are represented, is in fact precisely the opposite of what I would envisage as the true ‘primordial-priestly’ ideal. For the priestly-minded intellectual is the representative of a catholic community, in relation to the sacred. But the intellectual as democratic politician is, either formally or informally, the representative of a certain constituency, interest group, or set of interest groups, in relation to secular government. Here we have the intellectual as spokesperson for the aggressive self-assertion of a particular locality, a particular ethnic, economic or confessional group, primarily in criticism of the larger society; whereas, the primary role of the priestly intellectual, in the sense I intend, is on the contrary to be an articulater of communal selfcriticism. As far as I can see, the one and only sort of community capable of being truly catholic, at the deepest level, is that which is built upon a basis of shared non-fundamentalist liturgy. No other sort of enterprise is so well suited, in principle, to set up the sort of relationships required.


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But the trouble is, the negotiations involved in organizing and holding together such a community are hard work, and modern secularism is a moral code which gives intellectuals absolute license to shirk it. So they withdraw into academia, and look down on the anti-intellectual world of Glamour with the merest snobbish disdain. And how then is true thoughtfulness to gain serious moral authority in the world at large? Can this present generation adjust its collective behaviour to avert the worst risks of global warming? Can we develop long-term effective ways of politically managing the dangers created by the new technology of mass destruction? Are we up to the task of properly managing the application of our new emergent knowledge of biology? Surely not, unless the power of the beast, Glamour – the sheer moral inertia of the prevailing world order – is, after all, overcome. As things now stand, the very survival of our civilization appears to depend upon the leadership of intellectuals with something altogether more than just expertise. Namely: real, earned moral authority. There are, with regard to such problems, urgent tasks of thoughtful leadership for which I am afraid that an over-secularized intellectual class will never be well enough equipped. Tasks that it cannot properly tackle, just because it lacks the necessary connections. VI

Once upon a time all intellectuals were priests, as a simple matter of course. And the ideal, I want to argue, must surely be that, one day, all intellectuals will once again see themselves as priests; albeit in quite a different sense. Once, all intellectuals were priests. Then, however, there appeared a new class of intellectuals who claimed, in some way, to have found a higher calling than priesthood. It happened in ancient India; in ancient Greece; and, again, in Western Europe during the later Middle Ages. Thus consider, first, ancient India in the period following the Aryan conquest, the culture reflected in the literature of the Vedas. This was, of all ancient societies, the one in which the most purely priestly form of priesthood attained, it seems, its highest ever status. Here everyone was supposed to belong to one of four classes. First, there were the Sudras: the great mass of those who were ruled. That was the category to which most, if not all, of the non-Aryan population belonged. Secondly, there were the Vaisyas, that is, the agriculturalists and traders. The head of a Vaisya household might be the ruler of a great many servants; yet this was a form of rule still strictly confined to economic society. Thirdly, there were the Kshatriyas, the warrior class. It was from the Kshatriyas that the rulers of political society were drawn: kings, princes, great aristocrats, the potential commanders of armies. And fourthly, there were the Brahmans, the priests. The Brahmans’ primary field of operation was that of civil society, in the sense that they were, in principle, the wielders not of coercive economic or political power,


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but rather of sheer civilization-building moral authority. And the hierarchical logic according to which the rank ordering was Sudra, Vaisya, Kshatriya, Brahman is quite straightforward: for it was the Brahmans’ role to represent the people before the highest rulers of all, the gods; and to represent those highest rulers. The Sudras simply laboured, while the other classes organized. The Vaisyas organized for their society’s self-enrichment; the Kshatriyas, for their society’s self-assertion; the Brahmans, for their society’s spiritual self-cultivation. But then there gradually arose, within the Brahman class, a new group of thinkers: the circles which eventually produced, and circulated, the literature of the Upanishads. In Western terms, I think one might call them ‘philosophers’. This is of course a Greek term; and it is true, the Upanishads, which appear to span a period roughly contemporary with the flowering of ancient Greek philosophy, represent a very different style of thought from anything Greek. Yet, what other term do we have to designate their basic turn away from the older priestly ethos? Unlike the Vedas, the literature of the Upanishads no longer directly belongs to the priestly culture of public liturgy, but, rather, seeks to articulate the special wisdom of an elite of forest-dwelling contemplatives, who have largely, or perhaps entirely, withdrawn from public liturgical responsibilities. The early Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, indeed, explicitly contrasts the public liturgical ‘way of the fathers’ with the higher, contemplative/ philosophic ‘way of the gods’. Only the latter, we are told, can lead to what is most desirable: final release from the cycle of rebirth; within which the followers of the former way inevitably remain trapped. Once upon a time all intellectuals were priests. Ancient Greece differed entirely from ancient India in its lack of a large-scale separate priestly caste. In Greece civic officials performed priestly roles as part of their civic office. The whole ethos of citizenship was priestly; in everything one did as a citizen, one was representing one’s city in the sight of the gods. And, lacking a separate priestly caste, the Greeks never produced anything remotely analogous to the literary heritage of the Vedas. Instead, we have the work of the great poets: Homer, Hesiod, Pindar; and the dramatists, Aeschylus and Sophocles. No actual liturgical texts; but poetic visions serving to articulate the old spirit of civic priesthood. Then, however, came the philosophers. Among them, perhaps the most militant of all in this regard, Socrates. Who, as Plato portrays him in the Republic, directly attacks these poets, as religious teachers; not just once but, very significantly, twice over, both in Book III and, right at the end, also in Book X; so important did this polemic seem to Plato. I will return, below, to some of the more specific issues raised by Socrates’ trial, and condemnation to death, for ‘impiety’. But, however one may interpret this, it is at any rate quite clear that for Socrates – guided, as he was, by his essentially private sacred daimo¯nion – the ideal philosophic way of life represented the polar opposite to traditional Greek priestliness.

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Once upon a time all intellectuals were priests. Abutting my garden in the village where I used to live and where I began writing this book was a little Saxon church. When that church was first built, all the intellectuals in the land were, as a matter of course, Christian clergy, trained to regard priestliness as the highest of all vocations. But then people began to read the Greek philosophers again. In the thirteenth century, in the new University of Paris, certain thinkers appeared, young teachers in the Faculty of Arts, ordained men themselves, who, however, started to revive the old claims of philosophy, to represent a higher way: the so-called ‘Averroists’. The church authorities condemned them. But, seen in retrospect, this condemnation now looks very much like King Canute, stood on the beach and ordering back the waves of the incoming tide. To begin with, all intellectuals were priests – then came philosophy. It originated as a great negation of that original condition. Yet, now I think we need a rather large-scale world-historical ‘negation of the negation’. For consider the contrasting problematics of both roles, philosopher and priest, as general types. The great weakness of philosophy conceived in sheer antithesis to priestliness – militant philosophic elitism, in that sense – is, I think, its sheer inability to engage at all effectively with the politics of Glamour. For effective resistance must surely be popular resistance. Thus, militant philosophy is a form of intellectuality which breaks away from the priestly concern with catholic community. And yet the point is: in this it is essentially collusive with the politics of Glamour; both as vulgar nihilism and as fundamentalism. Catholic community is a coming together of people, potentially, from all different classes, bonded together ideally by the very deepest level of open conversation, in pursuit of a shared vision of the sacred. Nihilism sets itself against this by refusing to allow any reverence for the sacred. Fundamentalism rules it out by expelling the intellectuals, as a class, from the sacred community, or compelling them to apostatize from their intellectuality. Militant philosophy withdraws from catholic community in the opposite direction, yet it is no less of a withdrawal. From the point of view of such community, it is just another attack. No doubt the antagonism of militant philosophy towards traditional priesthood has very often been justified; as priests of every sort – across the spectrum, from ancient Brahminism to modern Christianity – have all too often merely sought to sacralize the existing order, as it is. Or, sanctimoniously, to flatter the devout of their own sect. What kind of intellectuals does the world, at large, need? I think it needs the very freest sort of free spirits, completely free of such corruption. But I also think that the truest sort of free-spiritedness is, in fact, the hardest sort. Again, by ‘priesthood’ here I mean the will of intellectuals, in the fullest possible sense, both to own and be owned by a truly catholic confessional community. (By ‘confessional’ I simply mean whatever belongs to imaginatively rich, well-organized traditions of moral



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authority, of any sort.) It is indeed much easier to be free-spirited as an inwardly isolated, unattached individual, opting for historic innocence; and much easier, also, as an elitist, only interested in promoting the selfinterest of one’s own privileged class. But true priesthood, as I would understand it, is none other than the very purest antithesis to both of these attitudes. The ultimate ideal, I think, would be a truly free-spirited priesthood: the most catholic confessional communities ready to affirm the most free-spirited thinkers; and free-spirited thinkers ready to represent such communities. But it is clear that free-spirited priestliness is a much more difficult ideal to establish than free-spirited unpriestly philosophy, which does not aim at such reciprocal owning. It is an ideal which takes some time to get established. In fact, I think the time it takes is nothing less than all the time of human spiritual history, in the true sense! For I would argue that precisely this is the implicit final goal towards which we ought to see that whole history, at the deepest level, as striving: the development of a culture capable of recognizing, promoting and being moulded by the most free-spirited rational priestliness. In order that the true priesthood of all thinkers should become conceivable, as an ideal, first it was necessary that the authority of the older forms of priesthood should be sufficiently dissolved. The work of militant philosophy initiated that process. And the rising tide of vulgar nihilism, especially in contemporary Europe, is right now completing it. But can we really rest content with this, as the prospective end of the story? Philosophy serves as a shortcut to free-spiritedness, inasmuch as it does away with at any rate the more immediate pressures to self-censorship under which any form of priesthood tends to labour. Priestly thinking – since it is, formally, a thinking on behalf of a community – may be presumed to endorse all the normal prejudices of that community, unless it explicitly challenges them. Pure philosophy by contrast, with its professed aim to get straight at the transcultural reality of ‘Nature’, or the transculturally valid truth of Platonic ‘Ideas’, is officially committed to only one prejudice: a prejudice against prejudice. And the sort of free-spiritedness thereby attained clearly is a major aspect of the ultimate ideal. But it is only one aspect. For the ultimate ideal is surely Truth for all. ‘Truth for all’: that is to say, the ideal recipe, put into practice, for the genuine cultivation of corporate conscience; facilitating the attainment of the most radical corporate Honesty – the open acknowledgement, and owning, of difficult reality, or the very things that people are most tempted to ignore and to dissimulate – at every level of society, and on the part of every constituent group within it. But how to attain this? Philosophy, as a militant, purely self-sufficient, elitist enterprise, can never do the job that is required here. Its immediate conversational circle is too confined. And hence, it seems to me that militant philosophy in this sense, philosophy as the sheer antithesis to


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INTRODUCTION

priestly thinking, can never, after all, be more than a temporary expedient. It is at best a one-sided corrective; a transitional phenomenon. The ultimate truth of philosophy surely lies in the philosophers’ learning, systematically, to mistrust the intrinsic one-sidedness of their own prejudice against prejudice. And so to reappropriate their own priestly vocation. VII

Really, my basic question is just: what does it mean, in the most radical sense, to be truly Honest? Not least, it must surely mean being liberated from any sort of corporate conceit. For us ordained clergy, radical Honesty must mean being liberated from our corporate conceit as clergy. For us members of confessional religious communities, it must mean being liberated from the corporate conceit bound up with that membership. For us intellectuals, it must mean being liberated from our corporate conceit in being intellectuals. Certainly, I have no doubt about the basic rightness of Martin Luther’s attempted retrieval of the teaching of 1 Peter, 2:4–5, 9, where the whole church is spoken of as a ‘priesthood’; and his development of this New Testament notion of the ‘priesthood of all believers’, into a great counterblast against the pretensions of the old clerical elite.3 Indeed, the innovation I am proposing is, in a sense, nothing more than one step further in the same direction: just as institutional priesthood should be transparent to the priesthood of all believers, so, too, I am arguing that the priesthood of all believers should be transparent to the priesthood of all authentically critical thinkers. Why? For the simple reason that it is not only the corporate conceit of the institutionalized priestly elite which is theologically problematic; but, no less, the corporate conceit of the whole church community.

3

But do we – does any form of church tradition, apart from the Quakers – really take this principle of the priesthood of all believers seriously? If we did, it would surely be registered in some quite explicit liturgical form. Yet I do not think that this has ever properly been developed. In the Church of England the obvious candidate for such a role would be the rite of confirmation. However, confirmation has traditionally been understood as a rite, essentially, for the licensing of those baptized as infants, once they have grown up, to receive communion. And, because we are often a bit embarrassed about excluding children from communion, there is considerable pressure to keep lowering the age at which it is possible to be confirmed. But then, of course, it is quite impossible for confirmation training pitched at a level appropriate for young adolescents effectively to convey the true adult seriousness of Christian faith. Surely, we need to accept baptism as the sole necessary precondition for communion. (As indeed some parishes already do.) In which case, confirmation might very well acquire a much richer significance: no longer regarded merely as the deferred second half of baptism, in this sense; but, now, as a rite altogether more closely related to ordination.



INTRODUCTION

13

Against the corporate conceit of the clergy, as distinct from the laity: a recognition of the priesthood of all believers. Against the corporate conceit of the church as a whole: a recognition of the priesthood of all thinkers. But then, also, against the corporate conceit of the intelligentsia in general: a recognition, precisely, of the priesthood of all thinkers. I am thinking, here, of the way in which my role as an ordained priest continually chafes against my impatient vanity as an intellectual. Ultimately, in fact, this is what I most value about the role. Thus, what I value is the creative interaction in which my thinking is, as a result, continually involved, between two quite different basic species of conversation. First: the conversations that I have with other intellectuals; or, within my own head, with the writers (most of them no longer living) who have most influenced me, intellectually. And then: the conversations that I have with my neighbours; not least, in connection with christenings, weddings, funerals, yet also more generally; conversations occasioned by the great moments of truth in people’s lives; and, so far as possible, aiming towards some fresh sense of what our shared experience, that is, the experience common to both intellectual and non-intellectual alike, most deeply means. These two species of conversation converge, for an ordained priest, most concretely in the actual craft of liturgy. They converge in liturgy, as a strategy for the binding together of intellectuals and the salt of the earth, into a single community of equals; a single conversation process, between conversations. But what liturgy in this way dramatically enacts is a convergence – a basic sort of priestly-mindedness – potentially present in the thinking of any intellectual. Thus, a good priest, in the primordial sense, is quite simply definable as one who approaches both conversation species, alike, with a really open-minded readiness to learn. In the context of the conversation of intellectual with intellectual, as such, it is a question of responding to the truth of the philosophic tradition, in its character as a fundamental challenge to the mere inertia of custom, or sanctified prejudice. In the context of conversation between intellectuals and the salt of the earth, it is a question of responding to the challenge inherent in the experience of the latter; the challenge of their elementary human claim to be heard – as that claim confronts the stupid cleverness of the ‘philosophic’ snob. By ‘primordial priesthood’, then, I simply mean the very utmost openness to both of these two challenges at once. Preparation for priesthood, as a spiritual discipline for intellectuals, is I think at the deepest level a matter of rooting out everything that belongs to an intellectual’s mere conceit in being an intellectual; the conceit that cuts them off from others. The good priest is, in this sense, one who is intelligent enough not to be too clever. Those who are ordained into institutional priesthood are uniquely exposed to this imperative. But it is nevertheless an imperative which, in principle, applies to all intellectuals, without exception.


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VIII

Melchizedek, who blesses Abram as a stranger, stands for a primal possibility of authentic priesthood, already there, prior to any particular, culture-specific moment of revelation. The spirit he represents is possible within any sort of faith context. But for me, as an Anglican priest, the prime vehicle for such a challenge to narrow philosophic elitism must be Christian theology. Therefore I write as an advocate of theology, directed to that end. Let us be quite clear, though, just what type of theology this is. And let me try to express the point as starkly as possible. Take the elementary choice: either the highest practical goal of theistic religion is to be defined as God meeting our already-given needs, chiefly for emotional comfort and reassurance – or else, on the contrary, as us learning to meet God’s need, for the most radical, perhaps quite uncomfortable and unreassuring, Honesty. What does true thoughtfulness require? Plainly, the latter rather than the former. And, again: either the cause of theological truth is essentially to be understood as identical with the promptings of the corporate conceit of the confessional priestly elite, and of the wider ‘orthodox’ community they represent – or else as challenging such conceit, for Honesty’s sake. It is clear, the more thoughtful approach is the acceptance of a challenge, here, to any sort of corporate conceit. What are we to call ritual practices whose primary rationale is simply to meet our already-given emotional needs, rather than to try and reshape our will, according to God’s need? I would suggest that this is one possible definition of ‘superstition’, broadly conceived. And what are we to call a thinking which, in effect, identifies religious truth with a form of corporate conceit? Perhaps, ‘sacred ideology’. Very well then, in that case I think we need to distinguish, as decisively as possible, between theology as the thinking through of true faith and theology as a mere cover for residual superstition, or belief in sacred ideology. But further: it is not just that the arrival of God’s grace within a human soul involves all sorts of things, as defined by church orthodoxy; oh, and also a deeper Honesty, in the sense that points beyond superstition and ideology. No! Far rather, I would argue, the truth of God, for us, simply is the impulse to such Honesty, opening us up to difficult reality in general, and all that follows from that. The truth of faith is a form of what I would call pure ‘truth-as-Honesty’: a quality of conversational receptivity, which both superstition and ideology, in their different ways, immediately inhibit, by serving incompatible desires. For, of course, true conversational receptivity means being open to what other people have to say, even when this is very far from comfortable and reassuring, and even if it be directly injurious to one’s own conceit. Faith (I would argue) is nothing other than the sacralizing of such receptivity; as our love for God depends upon our



INTRODUCTION

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love, in that sense, for our neighbours. And the most basic pervasive error of all too much theology is just its abstraction of faith from this enterprise. To the extent that this error prevails the truth of faith comes to be misconceived, to all intents and purposes, as a mere quality of testimony, or pedagogy; or, in other words, a form of theological ‘correctness’. Truth-as-correctness differs from truth-as-Honesty in that it is that sort of truth which remains valid quite independently of who is speaking, or to whom. It is, in that sense, purely abstract truth – truth abstracted from conversational context. There are two aspects of theological ‘correctness’: first, the objective correctness of right belief, and then the subjective correctness of an ideal sincerity and frankness, in the holding of right belief. Which is all well and good, so far as it goes. But if theology is understood as a form of the science of the sacralization of Honesty – not just sincerity or frankness, but Honesty – then it follows that in theological matters correctness is not yet Truth. Correctness, with regard to God, only becomes Truth to the extent that, as well as being correct, it also effectively serves the cause of Honesty. Or, to put it another way: theology is the thinking through of faith – but true faith, from this point of view, is not an opinion, or an hypothesis. Opinions or hypotheses are what may either be correct or incorrect. The essential truth of true faith, however, is simply the registering of a challenge, to recognize the proper claims of Honesty. Of course, this registering will always tend, also, to get entangled with all sorts of secondary attendant opinions; the various metaphysical, moral and historiographical opinions which go to shape our particular confessional identities. Without shared opinions, after all, no actual, concrete form of catholic community life would be possible. And yet everything, it seems to me, nevertheless depends upon our seeing beyond that necessary entanglement, to grasp the essentially transconfessional nature of true faith, considered in itself. By the ‘science of the sacralization of Honesty’ I mean, precisely, the most fundamental thinking through of the primordial-priestly vocation of the intellectual classes as a whole. And so I actually want to argue that the traditional problematics of philosophy also need to be subsumed into it; which, in the Christian world, means the systematic subsumption of philosophy into the larger context of true theology. That is the argument I want to outline in what follows. However, I am by no means talking about a subsumption of philosophy into theology the way theology is conventionally (mis-)understood, as a mere exposition of sacred correctness, or the upholding of a set of opinions. Granted, not every instance of theology (mis-)understood in this way necessarily represents a cover for residual superstition or belief in sacred ideology. But the point is: such thinking, even at its least superstitious or ideological, still obscures the underlying issue here. For the impulses expressed in superstition and ideology may perfectly well hide behind a great show of (what I also am happy to accept as) right belief; and may, moreover, be perfectly sincere and frank in so doing.


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Only, these are impulses which nevertheless essentially preclude what I would call ‘Honesty’. IX

This work is a study of the proper ‘primordial-priestly’ vocation of all intellectuals, as such; which I want to try and help rescue from various forms of philosophic reduction. And it is also a polemic against what I would see as the still all too pervasive ideologization, in particular, of Christian theology by the church. Both descriptions apply – inasmuch as it seems to me that theology true to its essential task would indeed be, not least, theology opening out towards much more direct reflection on universal, ‘primordial-priestly’ themes. Thus: what is the specific quality of ‘primordial-priestly’ vocation? One possible formulation would be that it is the vocation to render explicit – for all, both intellectuals and the salt of the earth alike – what all vocation, implicitly, is. And so, by way of a beginning in this: how might one then actually define ‘vocation’, in general? A ‘vocation’ is, I think, precisely the impulse to the most radical truth-as-Honesty – as a theologian I would say, the grace of God, the true God, the God only known in and through Honesty – laying hold of one. Or it is what springs from the experience of being shaken by that impulse. As a theologian I would say, shaken by the call of God. Basically, I would suggest, one might define a ‘vocation’ as the practical outcome of being shaken, out of the ordinary, prevailing dishonesties of one’s given social circle, into thought. That is to say, it is a commitment to spontaneous nonconformist judgement, in direct response to first-hand experience; a quality not of talent, but of pure will. The sort of virtue it involves is not that which belongs to any innate gifts one might have, of charm, or to any class-related acquired gifts, of smoothness or cool – but, on the contrary, that which is bound up with a fundamental mistrust of the inevitable temptations to vanity associated with such gifts. And it is therefore also quite independent of any gift of articulacy. In sharp contrast to the mere exercise of cleverness in the framing and justification of one’s ideas, a true vocation is just a genuinely chastened opening up of the sheer will to Honesty. To be sure, such thoughtfulness may appear in all manner of other forms, besides Christian faith. And yet here, I think, we have the great business of Christian theology: simply, to try and convert the church’s faith into an unambiguous medium for its demands. Nothing, though, is quite as slippery as religious language; slithering as it does between this and the rival impulses of superstition and ideology. Take, for example, the elementary affirmation of faith that our world is God’s creation. What does that mean? For believers in superstition it means the recognition of a great mysterious ‘power’ behind all things, which we (it is supposed) may somehow learn to coax and to cajole, for



INTRODUCTION

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our material benefit; for devotees of sacred ideology it means the ultimate vindication of their own cultural values, as these have been pre-emptively identified with the will of the Creator. Yet the real truth of the dogma, surely, has nothing whatever to do with either of those sorts of meaning. Instead, it lies precisely in the ultimate endorsement of ‘primordialpriestly’ vocation, here. Thus, that God created the world means: God is the source of whatever that has true meaning, and gives true meaning to our lives. But if the truth of God, for us, is rightly understood to be the impulse to Honesty, then faith in God as our Creator is, in the end, none other than a basic recognition that our lives derive all of their real meaning, simply, from that impulse. And that it is therefore sacred; requiring the most effective popular communication. Or take faith’s affirmation of ‘eternal life’. For believers in superstition this is, essentially, a doctrine of consolation: perpetuating a reflex of denial, in bereavement; a basic refusal to acknowledge the reality of death. And for devotees of sacred ideology it becomes a fingerwagging doctrine, all about rewards and punishments, of a sort metaphysically supposed to outbid all others; to enforce one’s own community’s prevailing norms. But, again, the actual truth of the dogma surely lies, far rather, in its ‘primordial-priestly’ significance. Its truth lies in its encoding of a primal question, the universal test for all vocation: suppose that we are truly serious in facing up to our mortality – what, then, can still give valid meaning to our lives, beyond despair? When a saint, a truly Honest person, recites the Christian creed, the creed is pure Truth; when a devout psychopath says exactly the same words, they become untrue. When I recite the creed, I know I have not yet managed to make it true, in me, but I am saying that I want to. True Christian theology is the study of that making-true. The God of the Bible is partly a ‘God’ of superstition; partly a ‘God’ of sacred ideology; and partly the God beyond ‘God’, the real and entirely good God, the God of Honesty. Indeed, it is this very ambiguity which gives Bible-based liturgy its special aesthetic power: its potential capacity to hook straight into every level of theologically unrefined emotion, with regard to God. And yet I am going in the end to argue that we need new liturgy, differing from what we already have, above all, in its explicit highlighting of the proper distinctions here; liturgy with a real quality of inner dialectic, designed to unravel what scripture has thus mixed together. Belief in superstition, sacred ideology, pure Honesty: each alike may be accommodated into basic Christian orthodoxy, with equal frankness and sincerity. And, in so far as theology is in the first instance understood to be a struggle against heresy and outright unbelief, it is only natural that theologians should want to play a peacemaking role between these various modes of being orthodox; crying ‘peace, peace’ where there is no peace. What leads us astray is our ecclesiastical anxiety to preserve, so far as possible, a united front against the hostile world. This anxiety leads us to prefer doctrine presented purely


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INTRODUCTION

and simply in itself; abstracted from any question as to its latent motivation, or practical effects. In other words, we opt for superficiality. Because it is only on the surface that we can be united, all of us ‘true believers’, together. But, again, it seems to me that everything, properly, depends upon our learning to unlearn such superficiality. For all theology by definition belongs to a project of solidarity building, in sympathetic conversation with confessional tradition; but not always necessarily a project of solidarity building on the simple basis of confessional loyalty alone. To varying degrees the solidarity in question may, I think often just as validly, be transconfessional: to specific scientific enterprises or political causes, impinging on religion. And indeed I would argue that the best theology of all is that which most explicitly seeks to serve the universal solidarity of the shaken, as such. An alliance, that is to say, embracing all comers. The solidarity of those shaken – out of complacency, out of inertia, out of numb despair – into a serious pursuit of true Honesty. Solidarity conceived strictly on the basis of that shared shakenness, and without any further limitation whatsoever. I am advocating, most fundamentally, the solidarity of the shaken; the (anti-)politics of Honesty. And then ‘primordial priesthood’ – as the expression of the solidarity of the shaken, by intellectuals, in religious terms. That is to say: the intellectual appropriation of such solidarity into a given religious tradition, its investment with the given power of religious imagery. Of whatever sort can do the job. X

One thing more here, by way of preamble. I write as a priest of the Church of England – but how does the ideal of the primordial ‘priesthood of all thinkers’, in principle, actually impact upon the institutional priesthood of us Christian clergy? I think it neither vindicates nor invalidates it, but simply sets it in its proper context. This ideal does not implicitly vindicate church priesthood. I have no interest in arguing competitively for Christianity, as against other religious traditions. That Christianity developed a church priesthood, whereas the other Abrahamic faith traditions, Rabbinic Judaism and Islam, by contrast did not, is not because Christianity is any more intrinsically attuned to the ideal requirements of the priesthood of all thinkers. But rather, the origins of Christian priesthood belong to the early evolution of the church as an organism primarily adapted for the dual purposes of engaging in cosmopolitan evangelism and, at the same time, surviving persecution. Thus, a persecuted community needs above all to preserve its unity; and Christian priests have always been people with a special responsibility for helping meet that need. Right from the outset, the most vital bond of Christian unity – reinforcing, and giving practical shape to church-members’ common faith – was their shared participation



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19

in priest-led public liturgy. And this was also the origin of Christian theology. For again – what exactly is Christian theology? Ideally a Christian-confessional contribution to the science of the sacralization of Honesty, it originates as a discipline for systematically intensifying the imaginative resonance of public liturgy. The Christian church needed to maximize the intensity of its public liturgy just in order to hold together, survive and grow. Compare the inner world of Rabbinic Judaism. Jewish communities also had to face an often hostile social environment. But of course they had another principle of unity, the simple fact of their shared ethnic identity. The Jewish community of the diaspora never developed any real equivalent to Christian priesthood, or therefore to Christian theology, basically because they did not need to. They never needed to invest their public liturgy with such overwhelming significance as the Christians did, because they were content to continue relying on the bonds of family, clan and race, mediated by domestic ritual and law, instead. Or compare Islam. Again, unlike Christians, Muslims are not primarily united by their shared participation in public liturgy. For the early Muslims seldom had to huddle together, as the early Christians did, as a vulnerable, endangered minority; they spread their cosmopolitan faith by conquest, and this has resulted in quite different ingrained habits of thought and practice. The conquerors imposed Islamic law, and created a space for the unhindered observance of Islamic custom. Islamic unity, in the earliest formative period of the tradition, was therefore easy: it never depended, as Christian unity in the church’s earliest formative period absolutely did, on the mutual support of the gathered liturgical community, clustered round its priests. Christian theology emerges out of that clustering process. Islam never needed such a strategy and therefore, while Muslim tradition is rich in legal debate, mystical spirituality, philosophical speculation, it has never produced anything much directly equivalent to Christian theology. For why should it? I am a Christian theologian because I believe in the rich creative potential of public liturgy, springing up, in the way that the liturgy of the early church did, as a cosmopolitan enterprise, quite independently from any political establishment. The Christian theological heritage originally emerged as the theoretical concomitant to the practice of Christian priesthood: two aspects of the same basic strategy, for church survival and growth, in a hostile environment. And it remains a potential channel of divine revelation, I think, inasmuch as this was a struggle in many ways quite directly prefiguring the present-day struggle of Honesty against Glamour. But the absence of such a tradition in the Jewish and Islamic worlds does nothing, in principle, to hinder Jewish or Muslim intellectuals from also thinking and acting in ‘primordial-priestly’ fashion. Far from vindicating church priesthood, indeed, it might be argued that, in view of the church’s long history of ideological corruption, the ideal of the ‘priesthood of all thinkers’ actually invalidates it. However,


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INTRODUCTION

I do not think it does that either. For, after all, traditions can always evolve. And, while one may indeed be forced out of one’s given tradition, I see no Honesty in merely opting out, otherwise. The trans-institutional ideal does not, I think, invalidate church priesthood; it simply requires church priesthood to be as clear as possible a pointer beyond, towards the archetypal trans-institutional priesthood of Jesus. In the priesthood of Jesus we have the archetypal service of perfect Honesty: that is what he preached and lived; that is what he died for; that is what his resurrection symbolically vindicates. But the God of Honesty is a jealous God: jealous, in the sense that to the true theological devotee of Honesty nothing else matters, except Honesty alone. All too often in the past the Christian clergy have assumed the role of moral police, in the service of all sorts of other, more superficial requirements. But, surely, our proper calling is to be exclusive devotees of Honesty, and therefore in all other respects systematic givers of permission. That is to say: very deliberate undoers of our manipulative past; with a view to letting people, in all Honesty, be themselves. And, at the same time, it certainly does also seem to me that the ‘Melchizedekian’ ideal very much accentuates the case for having married as well as celibate clergy in the church, and for the ordination of women. With regard to this I have, in fact, a little personal story to tell. Once, in Ethiopia, I met a hermit. It was some time ago, back in the last days of the old feudal regime there. And he was a proper medieval hermit. He lived in a cave the size of a cupboard. The cave was on a hillside, a good day’s walk out across the scrubland at the edge of Addis Ababa in those days. I’d made the trek, with a couple of friends, and we were staying in the mud huts of the little monastery up above. There was said to be a leopard prowling round about, among the trees; baboons went scampering across the path as I picked my way down, hoping for a word of wisdom from the holy man. I had interpreters with me: a group of Ethiopian boys, who were also staying at the monastery. But, being young and foolish, the only question I could think of asking was: ‘Why do you live this way?’ And I have long been pondering the hermit’s answer; or, at any rate, my interpreters’ rendering of his answer. He said: ‘I chose this life because I needed to escape my family’. He needed to escape his family. In that context, I take it he was not so much complaining about the specific unpleasantness of his own family, but, rather, expressing how he saw the generic purpose of a hermit’s way of life. And I guess that the notion of escaping from one’s family had a good deal greater resonance in a society like that of rural Ethiopia back then than it does, typically, in the more ‘developed’ world of postChristendom. For what he was rejecting were the ‘family values’ of a culture of arranged marriages and sometimes intense dynastic intrigue; where disputes between families were all too often liable to degenerate



INTRODUCTION

21

into long blood feuds; and where, apart from the influence of the church, law and order for the most part depended on the despotic authority of feudal overlords. Just down the road from where I used to live are the picturesque ruins of Rievaulx Abbey. Rievaulx was a Cistercian foundation, the buildings date from the twelfth century. And they are a monument to one of the most notable surges of Christian ascetic idealism, as the spectacular rise of the Cistercian order more or less coincided with the final effective imposition of clerical celibacy. Many of the buildings there date from the period of the third abbot, the pioneering theologian of ‘spiritual friendship’, St Aelred, who ran the abbey from 1147 to 1166. Only, note Aelred’s origins: he was himself the son of a married priest. His father, his grandfather and his great grandfather had all been priests at Hexham, in Northumbria. There had long been reformers intent on upholding the ideal of clerical celibacy; not least, in order to prevent just this sort of dynastic arrangement. But it was not until Aelred’s day that they triumphed. And what did it mean? It was perhaps the most decisive single moment in the long process by which church culture slowly split itself apart from the surrounding culture of patriarchal clan loyalty. Tactically, the conflict between the two took shape as a running battle over the clergy’s demand for strict monogamy, and their rather extensive definition of incest. And underlying this, of course, on the clerical side, was all the traditional rhetoric of Christian hostility towards the desires of ‘the flesh’, invoked as an argument for the superior authority of the celibate. But let us also look beyond that: to the elemental clash between two opposing principles of solidarity here; the move being made, away from community on the simple basis of kinship, towards community on a basis of – one might, I think, very well use Aelred’s terminology – ‘spiritual friendship’. Let no one scorn the asceticism of traditional Christian spirituality who values the freedom we in post-Christendom enjoy, from the older forms of patriarchy; our liberation, as modern individuals, each to pursue our own vocation, regardless of clan tradition. Without that disciplined, frontal assault, in God’s name, those older forms, so deep-rooted in previous ideas of the sacred, could never have been overthrown. Yet, now that for us the struggle is over, the institution of clerical celibacy, which was once so crucial to the winning of it, has surely lost its purpose. Good church priesthood, I would argue, is that which most effectively points towards, reflects and affirms the pre-ecclesial, transecclesial priesthood which Jesus, our ‘high priest’, represents. And as this primordial priesthood is in principle a vocation for all thinkers, simply as such, so church priesthood surely ought to be – indeed its whole true symbolic function depends upon its being – equally open to all categories of intellectually and spiritually capable people, without any exception. The married as well as the celibate, and for the same reason women as well as men.


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XI

Enough, though, of these preliminaries! And now let us move on to the main argument of this book. In what follows I want to develop an essentially twofold argument regarding the solidarity of the shaken: one part theological, the other part pre-theological. The pre-theological part of it, first, will be framed as an immanent critique of anti-theological philosophy, considered in terms of its solidarity strategies. Here, I want to take the most sophisticated variants of such strategy, and measure them up against the ideal standard of the solidarity of the shaken. That will be the underlying theme of Part I. And then the subsequent theological argument, in Part II will be premised on a fundamental reinterpretation of authentic confessional solidarity – in the Christian context, the true solidarity of Christian with Christian – precisely, as a decisive opening up towards the solidarity of the shaken which transcends it.

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Part I Philosophy


1 The Incompleteness of Philosophy Alone

I

In short: this is an argument about the appetite for Truth, in its character as an infinitely desirable yet also infinitely demanding, never yet attained ideal. It is about about appropriate strategy for the cultivation and channelling of that general appetite. Thus, let us for a moment, so far as possible, try and set aside our given ideological commitments to this, that or the other particular scheme of supposed truth-as-correctness. And, having done so, let us ask ourselves the elementary question: how, in the most general terms, is the authentic cause of Truth as such most likely to be promoted? I am talking about the preparation of space, within our minds, both individually and corporately, for the reception of fresh insights. In other words: the ethics of learning. And of communication. What sort of educational strategies are ideally required, in order to maximize the chances of Truth prevailing? What sort of political, apolitical or anti-political strategies? Above all, what sort of strategies in relation to religion? II

In 1927 the French intellectual Julien Benda published a famous little book polemically entitled La Trahison des Clercs; the literal meaning of which is ‘The Treason of the Clerks’ (although the English version then in fact appeared in two editions, variously as The Treason of the Intellectuals in the USA, and in the UK, as The Great Betrayal1). Long after people have ceased to read the book, its quirky French title is indeed still widely remembered. In speaking of intellectuals as ‘les clercs’, Benda is adopting medieval terminology. He is evoking the memory of an age in which all intellectuals were priests. And he does so, precisely, because he wants to present 1

Julien Benda, The Great Betrayal, translated into English by Richard Aldington (London: Routledge, 1928); The Treason of the Intellectuals (New York: Morrow, 1928).


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an idea of intellectuality not just as a status or a sociological category, but as a sacred vocation. He is responding, in the first instance, to the rise of fascism. The particular clercs he is most of all concerned to criticize are those who have done most, he thinks, directly to help prepare the way for this. In the French context he therefore attacks the great early twentieth-century advocates of heroic nationalism: Maurice Barre`s, Charles Maurras, Charles Pe´guy. But it is not only such nationalism he rejects, it is in principle any sort of intellectual collusion with propaganda politics as such. And then any sort of intellectual celebration of heroic violence, essentially for its own sake. Thus, perhaps the prime example of what Benda means by a ‘traitorous’ clerc is Georges Sorel: a man who was most famously an advocate of violent anarcho-syndicalism, with its inspirational ‘myth’ of the general strike; but who also admired on the one hand Lenin and on the other hand Mussolini, any sort of political movement whatever which promised to intensify political passions, to shatter the mere mundane tedium of peaceable bourgeois existence, and so to create fresh opportunities for heroism. And behind Sorel, of course, there also stands Nietzsche – Sorel has simply transposed Nietzschean heroics into a more plebeian mode, adapted it for propaganda purposes. Benda has great respect especially for Nietzsche, as a free spirit; and to some extent, I guess, for the element of free-spiritedness in all these thinkers. But the vocation of the true clerc, for him, involves far more than such free-spiritedness. It also demands a fundamental commitment to cool rationality, carefully preserved from the seductive emotionalism intrinsic to any cult of heroics. And that is what these thinkers have basically betrayed. However, I am by no means persuaded by Benda’s exaltation of cool rationality – over against all forms of pathos – as the be all and end all of intellectual vocation. For this seems to me to be both far too sweeping a move, and also fundamentally ambiguous. It is, in the first place, far too sweeping inasmuch as it not only grounds his fierce critique of fascist heroics, and the like; a critique with which I am very much in sympathy. But it also, unfortunately, renders Benda quite unable to engage with what I would regard as the proper pathos of true Christian faith.2 What is wrong with the fascist ethos is surely not just that it is so full of pathos, as Benda would have it. But rather it is that this pathos is so manipulative. And, then, Benda’s ideal is fundamentally ambiguous. For it is quite unclear what sort of solidarity it is supposed to found. Is it the solidarity of the shaken, purely and simply as such? Or is it that very different phenomenon, a solidarity among philosophers as such? I repeat: what I mean by the ‘solidarity of the shaken’ is not confined to any one particular class. It is therefore not a solidarity only among 2

I develop this point at length in my book ‘What Is Truth?’ Towards a Theological Poetics (London: Routledge, 2001).


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philosophers. What ‘shakes’ the ‘shaken’, in the sense intended here, is the sheer imperative of Honesty; and clearly there can be no true philosophy which remains un-‘shaken’ in that sense. But I am not only talking about the solidarity of a shaken educational elite. Of course, the educational elite are always going to be the people best able actually to articulate their experience of shakenness. But, considered strictly in itself, what I mean by ‘shakenness’ is not a quality of articulacy. It is a condition of soul. It is the sheer antithesis to the mentalities of the herd, the mob, the gang; an elementary liberation from the ordinary inertia of prejudice and indifference; a simple open-heartedness towards the Other, even the temperamentally or culturally most alien. Qualities which may just as well be found among the relatively inarticulate. And very often are. The ideal strategy for Truth, I want to argue, is essentially a systematic outworking of the solidarity of the shaken. And the true vocation of intellectuals has to be understood, above all, as a ‘priestly’ contribution to that. But the whole point of this ‘priestliness’ lies in the way it preserves the absolutely basic distinction here: between the solidarity of the shaken, understood in proper catholic terms, and that altogether narrower species of ideal, the solidarity of a shaken educational elite, bound together not only by their shakenness but also by their distinctiveness as a privileged class. III

And so now let us try and open that distinction up. The first, pretheological part of my argument addresses three main topics: 1 What follows for philosophy, specifically in relation to folk religion, if the solidarity of the shaken is accorded, as I would see it, a proper pre-eminence. The prime example, in my view, of the right approach is provided by Hegel. Thus, in Hegel’s thinking we see philosophy in no way compromising its proper all-questioning freedom, and yet nevertheless fully opened up towards theology, as a process of friendly negotiation between free-spirited intellectuality and folk religion. In Chapter 2 I therefore consider the methodological first principles of Hegelian doctrine in this regard; as contrasted with the altogether more grudging attitude towards theology classically to be found in the older tradition of ‘Averroist’ philosophy. 2 What follows for philosophy, on the other hand, in a contemporary context, if one tries to stick with a solidarity among philosophers as such. The classic exponent of a strategy for truth premised not on the cultivation of the pure, catholic solidarity of the shaken, but on the cultivation


28

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of a systematic solidarity among philosophers instead, is of course Plato. (‘Averroism’ is in this sense a mode of Platonism.) And Chapters 3 and 4 are given over to a discussion of the twentieth-century ‘Platonism’ of Leo Strauss. Why Strauss? First, because of his pioneering work as the premier historian of Platonist ‘philosophic politics’. But secondly, too, because of the way in which he himself seeks to develop that tradition, in direct critical response to the twentieth-century trahison des clercs. Originally a German Jewish academic, Strauss left Germany just before the Nazis came to power. And then in 1938 he settled in the USA. In person, by all accounts, a most sweet-tempered and charming individual, by the time of his death in 1973 he had become, in Stanley Rosen’s phrase, ‘one of the most hated men in the English-speaking academic world’.3 Such was the offence of his unabashed advocacy of ‘Platonist’ intellectual elitism, to the prevailing prejudices of that world. But one does not get to be so hated unless one is also able to inspire a certain following, and Strauss has certainly done that. Indeed, even though, as a Platonist, he thinks of the true philosopher as being necessarily somewhat removed from frontline politics, quite a number of his students, and students of his students, have in recent years actually been leading Neo-Conservative policy makers in Washington.4 Strauss represents philosophy at its most inimical to theology, and I think he is therefore quite mistaken. Yet the fact is, he remains much the most formidably systematic of modern thinkers with regard to intellectual strategy; the very issue I am trying to address here, as a theologian. 3 What other strategies there might be, short of the turn I advocate back towards theology? In Chapter Five I then discuss the rather different strategic thinking of Alexandre Koje`ve. A personal friend of Strauss’s, Koje`ve nevertheless rejects Strauss’s ‘Platonism’. The basic problem with such corporate intellectual elitism, he argues, is the way it tends to turn the intellectual elite, as a group, inwards, rendering them indifferent to the problems of the wider world and cutting them off from the thought-provoking stimulus of conversational engagement with other groups. Koje`ve has no interest in religion as a possible context for reconnecting the philosophers with their neighbours. But, against Strauss, he does urge that – for this purpose – philosophers should be directly involved, to the 3

4

Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987): 107. See especially Shadia B. Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999). Drury has also written a more systematic study of Strauss’s thought: The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988). These are indeed very hostile books; perfectly illustrating the ‘hatred’ of which Rosen speaks! Another more recent, gossipy example is Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2005).


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fullest possible extent, in secular politics of the most egalitarian kind. And so how, it may be asked, are they then to preserve their integrity as philosophers, even when entangled in non-philosophic business? Koje`ve also takes that question very seriously. His (quite un-‘Platonist’) answer is, I think, delightfully idiosyncratic! However, I do not find it persuasive. Furthermore, it is not only that ‘Platonist’ elitism tends to create an inward-turned philosophic community; although that is indeed part of the problem. But, again, there is at the same time also a rather obvious risk of this community’s dedication to the pure cause of Truth being mixed with a certain element of corporate conceit. And therefore in Chapter 6, I go on to consider two further thinkers, one ancient and one modern, whose understanding of the basic requirements of Honesty leads them to give an absolute priority to the combating of that sort of corruption. The ancient thinker in question is the ferociously anti-Platonist Epicurus; the modern is Rousseau. Here we have two classic critics of philosophic corporate conceit; whose critique, however, still falls a long way short of what I would see as the actual theological ideal. Epicurus for his part represents a form of inward-turned philosophic sectarianism altogether alien to the essentially catholic spirit that is necessary to theology. Rousseau renders theology impossible by opting for a cult of sheer alienated inner solitude instead. Neither of these two positions appears to me to be at all sustainable. Nevertheless, I do find their critique of corporate conceit compelling. And the turn to theology which I advocate is not least therefore a matter of trying to find some better way to frame it.



2 Philosophy and Folk Religion: Two ‘Forms’ for a Single ‘Content’

I

In what follows, first I want to argue for a certain ideal partnership between philosophy and folk religion, as complementary enterprises, in shared resistance to a common foe. Namely: the cult of Glamour. By the cult of Glamour, here, I do not mean anything that one might at all seriously argue against. On the contrary, what I have in mind is just what is most incompatible with any form of serious argumentation, other than the very meanest point-scoring games of propaganda politics, propaganda evangelism: either, that is to say, the nihilistic worldview of people for whom, quite regardless of any argument, religious ritual appears to be a simple waste of time, or else religiosity confined to those forms of ritual which are most immediately entertaining, heartwarming, prejudice-confirming. Neither aspect, indeed, allows any scope for effective direct counterargument. Yet these are the twin energies very largely now closing down the popular space which properly belongs to true religion, in the sense of the religiously informed pursuit of Honesty. And so the basic question underlying the whole argument that follows is: what, in the end, would constitute the most promising sort of strategy for re-opening that space? II

Certainly, I do not think that mere snobbish disdain will be enough; against the crude populism of the cult of Glamour, we surely do need a proper catholic response. Thus, it seems to me, we need fresh forms of critical religion, which would ideally combine two essential characteristics. In the first place these fresh forms would be, to the greatest possible extent, transparent to the proper demands of pure Honesty. But then, secondly, they would also have a maximum capacity actually to connect with, and draw in, all manner of quite diverse people. Transparency and connectiveness: the trick is to combine these two ideals.



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Unfortunately, of course, they always tend to pull against each other. For maximum connectiveness, if that were the only criterion, would simply involve maximum ambiguity: a form of religion that was indeed ‘all things to all people’, but only by being, at heart, quite vacuous. Such religion would provide symbolic images and stories with the widest possible range of different possible interpretations, on different levels, to suit different contexts. Yet none of them would have any very serious critical force – since a more critical interpretation of the tradition would have no effective authority to set against a less critical one. Maximum transparency, meanwhile, would on the contrary be all about doing away with ambiguity: banishing any ambiguity that might serve as a shelter for dishonesty. Yet, if that were the sole principle at work, it would produce a tradition so cut and dried that it would only appeal to one very particular constituency. Religious community would shrink to a tiny alliance of the already like-minded; and would largely lose its conversational life. So the question becomes: how, in the context of struggle against the cult of Glamour, are we to negotiate between these two pulls, for and against ambiguity? III

On the one hand, there is folk religion, with its rich ambiguity; on the other hand, there is philosophy, systematically intent on combating excessive ambiguity. And then there are two basic different levels of philosophy, each involving quite a different sort of relationship to folk religion. As I have said, it seems to me that the best worked through analysis of the contrast between these two levels is, in fact, that of Hegel. In Hegel’s Jena Essays it appears as the contrast between what he calls ‘speculative’ and ‘reflective’ thinking.1 To adopt the terminology of my own argument, above: I think one might very well say that while ‘reflective philosophy’, in its pure form, is exclusively preoccupied with a quest for precise, abstracted propositional truth-as-correctness, ‘speculative philosophy’, by contrast, is concerned with the desire for perfect conversational truth-as-Honesty. ‘Reflective’ philosophy, in short, is another name for crudely antipoetic philosophy. Its mindset is very simply opposed to unphilosophic ambiguity. It regards any ambiguity as excessive; and is therefore characterized by an absolute hostility towards the doctrinal fuzziness of folk religion. This hostility may express itself in various ways. It may be in terms of a much more closely defined form of religious orthodoxy; it may be in terms of a dogmatic agnosticism; or it may be in terms of a militant anti-traditionalism. Yet in each of these cases alike the 1

Hegel, Difference between the Systems of Fichte and Schelling, and Faith and Knowledge, English translations by H.S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1976 and 1977).


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philosopher is implacably insistent on unambiguous precision, for sheer unambiguous precision’s sake, always and everywhere. ‘Speculative’ philosophy, however, is not only interested in precision, for its own sake. Of course, it values precision. But its primary interest is an altogether more general one: it is interested in the necessary conditions for the best possible sort of conversation, generally. And inasmuch as, when it comes to the large-scale conversation processes of the public realm as a whole, the best sort will, not least, be that which is the most catholic, it therefore follows that such thinking will tend to look rather more favourably on folk religion, in view of folk religion’s intrinsic catholicism. Again, the way I would express it is to say that speculative philosophy looks for religious truth, not so much in the unambiguous precision of abstracted doctrinal propositions, but far rather in the concrete appropriation of what Honesty demands. Its real enemy is not ambiguity, simply in itself, but dishonesty. And it is opposed to ambiguity only in so far as there is positive dishonesty hiding behind it. Which is not always the case. Hegel himself, in the works of his maturity, always writes as a philosopher, aiming at maximum precision. Only, the point is: his form of philosophy is not at all what I would call ‘ideologically’ self-exalting, in relation to folk religion. On the contrary – consider for example his Logic.2 Here we have a systematic meditation on the general pursuit of precise propositional truth-as-correctness. In this work Hegel is, as it were, mapping out the metaphysical territory which properly belongs to that pursuit. However, note how narrowly confined this territory is, for Hegel. It leaves out almost the entire traditional subject matter of theology. Hegel’s Logic is ‘speculative’, essentially, in its modest theological reticence. To be sure, it is all about God: it is about the pursuit of Truth, in general; and God is Truth. Hegel is no positivist, dismissing all talk of God. His Logic is a work of pure metaphysics. But, for him, the frame of this enterprise – a systematic meditation on the pursuit of precise propositional truth-as-correctness – only really allows a discussion of God ‘as He was in his eternal essence, before the creation of Nature and finite Spirit’.3 That is to say: there is no pathos-laden discussion here of God as Creator, or Redeemer; no discussion of the divine perfections as we encounter them in prayer; no discussion of the drama of salvation, or the nature of eternal life for mortals. Hegel does not consider any of these to be appropriate topics for this sort of context. The fundamental error of reflective philosophy, in general – as he sees it – is just its ultimately naive desire to subsume all these topics into its own quest for precise propositional truth-as-correctness. It has no time for the rich poetic many layeredness of folk-religious language; it simply regards such language as a botched version of itself, as 2

3

Hegel’s Science of Logic, English translation by A.V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989). And see also Hegel’s Logic (the ‘Lesser Logic’, vol. 1 of the Encyclopaedia), English translation by W. Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Hegel’s Science of Logic, Introduction, 50.




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though there were no other possible criterion for truth apart from its own. Whether this be done with positivist dismissiveness, or with metaphysical hubris, the underlying problem is the same. But Hegel, by contrast, insists on the need to defer these topics, philosophically, to quite another sort of context. As he sees it, the proper context for conversation between philosophy and theology is not the context of pure metaphysics. The encounter, therefore, does not belong in the Logic. It belongs, far rather, in the very different territory he is opening up in the Phenomenology of Spirit.4 For, whereas the Logic is a systematic meditation on the pursuit of precise propositional truthas-correctness, the Phenomenology of Spirit is a systematic meditation on the pursuit of perfect conversational truth-as-Honesty. Thus, the Logic is a study of the abstract vocabulary of systematic reflection, the categories most generally at work in the assessment of truth-as-correctness. But the Phenomenology by contrast is a study of whole mentalities, as such. It is a study of Geist – ‘Spirit’, or ‘Mind’. Or what I would call the thoughtful will-towards-Honesty. And the mentalities discussed are looked at, basically, as so many obstacles to Honesty: structures of rigid prejudice, inhibiting one’s response to fresh experience or fresh challenges to thought; closures, wilful refusals of conversation, for Geist to circumvent, and break down. In the pursuit of Honesty, however – as I have said – philosophy and folk religion are potential allies; each with their own, essentially complementary contribution to make. On the one hand: the cause of Honesty requires folk religion’s ability to speak, with engaging pathos, to the imagination of multitudes; so drawing them into serious conversation with one another; and enriching the conversations of the public realm by multiplying the different sorts of voices actively engaged in it. On the other hand, the same cause also requires philosophy’s ability to render explicit and clear much that would otherwise always remain implicit and muddled. In order that Honesty should actually, to any degree, prevail in the world, both these qualities are needed. The argument of the Phenomenology culminates in the ideal of ‘Absolute Knowing’. This is Hegel’s term for Honesty, actually prevailing. But what, exactly, is it that ‘Absolute Knowing’ knows? Not least, it is just this: the ideal complementarity of these two primal modes of Geist; folk religion’s need of philosophy, to clarify it; and philosophy’s need of folk religion, to prepare and maintain the proper social space for it. Even in its folk religious form, Hegel argues, Christian faith already potentially represents the full ‘content’ of Truth.5 And it is philosophy’s 4

5

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, English translation by A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). See, for example, ibid., para. 788, p. 479; Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (vol. 3 of the Encyclopaedia): para. 573, English translation by W. Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971): 302–3; Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Vol. III, English translation edited by Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985): 374, the end of the 1831 lecture cycle.


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task, then, to translate this into another, less ambiguous form. From philosophy’s own immediate point of view, of course, this is a higher form. But when he speaks about the ‘content’ of Truth, as distinct from its various potential forms, he is speaking trans-philosophically. Speculative philosophy is philosophy lifted up to look back on itself, as it were, from the outside: acknowledging that it is, after all, the higher form only from its own point of view, and not absolutely. It is, in other words, the sort of philosophy which is modest enough explicitly to admit the ultimate incommensurability between its own authority and that of folk religion. Hegel was indeed a theoretician of folk religion well before he became a philosopher. This was in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, when every aspect of traditional culture had been called dramatically into question. And like a good many others among his German contemporaries he had had his imagination seized by an idyllic fantasy-picture of ancient Greek folk religion. So he celebrated the cheerful exuberance of the polis, in its festivals, as representing everything he felt was missing in the rather stiff and sombre public church practice, and the privatized pietism, of his day. His early pre-philosophical writings, unpublished in his lifetime, are largely meditations on the need for radical religious reform. In one very early fragment he sets out the basic criteria for good folk religion: I Its doctrine must be grounded on universal reason. II Fancy, heart and sensibility must not thereby go empty away. III It must be so constituted that all the needs of life and the public affairs of the state are tied in with it.6 And this is an ideal which he never repudiated. Later on, when he became a philosopher, he came to focus more on the first of these three criteria. But, even so, he never wavered in his fundamental respect for the complementary importance of the other two. IV

Consider the historical relationship between philosophy and confessional faith – that is, the folk religion of biblical or qur’anic cultures – in general. In so far as the two are recognized as partners, rather than as mortal enemies, it may either be a case of thinkers presupposing a certain philosophical standpoint, and on that basis seeking to vindicate a particular type of confessional faith; or else of thinkers presupposing a certain culture of confessional faith, and in that context seeking to 6

Theologische Jugendschriften, edited by Hermann Nohl (Tu¨bingen: Mohr, 1907, reprinted 1968): 20; English translation from Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975): 55.




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justify the practice of philosophy. Hegel for his part does both: he is simultaneously a philosophical apologist for Christian faith and a Christian advocate of philosophy. The former role perhaps predominates in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, the latter in his other writings; but his work as a whole maintains a close balance between the two. This, though, is very much part of his historical uniqueness. The first of the two dynamics, the deployment of philosophical arguments to vindicate confessional faith, is in fact historically the older. One finds it already in the work of the Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, who was a contemporary of Jesus. Philo lived from around 20 BCE to 50 CE. His philosophical standpoint is the conventional so-called ‘Middle Platonism’ of his day: a general mixture of Platonist, Stoic and Neopythagorean themes. However, his originality lies in his application of this to the exegesis of the Pentateuch, in its Greek translation; which he undertakes in a great series of commentaries.7 Philo’s allegorical interpretation of scripture, as a veiled communication of philosophic truth, may be somewhat far-fetched, in detail. But note: here, for the first time in history, we have a project for alliance building between two cultural traditions simply, in the end, on the basis of what one might term the element of ‘shakenness’ at the heart of each. For Greek philosophy and the Hebrew Bible have almost nothing else in common. Yet, as contrasted with the general run of pagan folk piety, they do at least have this. The unphilosophical piety of the pagan world was, after all, very largely confined to the domain of magic, in the sense that it was concerned with appeasing the gods, or gaining their patronage, in the quest for health, material prosperity, the discomfiture of one’s enemies – and not much more. But both philosophical wisdom and biblical faith are of course about far more. In their completely different ways, they are both about a shaken, infinitely restless quest for salvation: inner spiritual transformation, radical liberation from the prevailing ways of the world. And Philo is a great pioneer of the intuition that, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, they are therefore natural allies. His own community, the community of Greek-speaking Jews in Alexandria, was destroyed in 117 CE, following the cataclysmic defeat of their revolt against Trajan, and this also put an effective end to the transmission of Philo’s thought in a Jewish context. But the early Christian apologist Justin Martyr, in mid-second-century Rome, then relaunched the Philonic project. Which was further carried forward, in Christian form, by such figures as Clement of Alexandria (died c. 215 CE) and Origen (184–254). In a sense, Thomas Aquinas also represents a later modification of the same basic approach. As indeed do all the many other philosophically minded Christian apologists, of every sort, down to this day. 7

For an introduction to Philo, see for instance the selection of his writings in the series, ‘The Classics of Western Spirituality’: Philo of Alexandria, English translation by David Winston (London: SPCK, 1981).


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These are thinkers who in effect begin from philosophy, and then on that basis argue in defence of confessional faith. The alternative approach, on the other hand, which reverses the process – presupposing a certain culture of confessional faith, and then in that context seeking to justify the practice of philosophy – first appeared as a phenomenon of Islamic culture. Thus, the great pioneer in this regard was al-Farabi, in early tenthcentury Baghdad. And he was followed most notably by the Persian, Ibn Sina (known in the Latin world as ‘Avicenna’, 980–1037) and by Ibn Rushd of Cordoba (‘Averroes’, 1126–98); and, in medieval Christendom, by the so-called ‘Latin Averroists’ of the later thirteenth century. Of the two approaches, this is the one which really tests the partnership between the two modes of thought – on which it nevertheless still, at any rate outwardly, continues to insist. Take Ibn Rushd for example; the man after whom the ‘Latin Averroists’ were named, by their enemies. Ibn Rushd represents the final culmination of the classical Arab philosophical tradition. He was known as ‘the Commentator’, with reference to the extensive commentaries he wrote, commissioned by the caliph, on the works of Aristotle, and on Plato’s Republic. At the same time, he was a leading jurist, and developed an Islamic legal argument to justify the study of philosophy, against those who would prohibit it.8 And he also wrote a polemical response, more specifically, to al-Ghazali’s theological attack on philosophy.9 Ibn Rushd always insisted on his adherence to Islamic orthodoxy. Yet, when one considers his actual metaphysical doctrine, it appears to contradict that orthodoxy in at least two rather obvious ways. First, like Ibn Sina and others before him, he denies that God is really a free agent. And second – here unlike Ibn Sina, but introducing yet further complications of his own – he ascribes eternal life only to the collective soul of the human species as a whole, not to individuals.10 So he presents us with an elementary conundrum. The orthodoxy he quite clearly affirms, in one context, he no less clearly appears to deny, in another. In the Christian university debates of the later thirteenth century ‘Averroism’ therefore came to be described as a doctrine of ‘double truth’. This formula has often been dismissed by more recent scholars, with some scorn. And certainly Ibn Rushd did not teach that there is one truth for folk religion and another quite different truth for philosophy, in the crass sense that, once one has said that, nothing more needs to be said, no further debate between the two is needed. Well, of course not! One has only to consider his own involvement in debate with 8

9

10

See George F. Hourani, ed., Averroes on the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy, (London: Luzac, 1976). Al-Ghazali’s work had been entitled Destruction of the Philosophers; Ibn Rushd’s is entitled Destruction of the Destruction. It is available in English translation by S. Van den Bergh, Averroes’ Tahafut al-tahafut (London: Luzac, 1954). For a detailed discussion, see Oliver Leaman, Averroes and His Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).




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al-Ghazali, and with the anti-philosophical jurists in general, to see this. He is not arguing against debate. No, he is arguing against censorship. There is really no need, he wants to say, for the orthodox to fear the free-spirited practice of philosophy, among those with a proper vocation for it. For, no matter how different the truth of philosophy may appear, the real truth of orthodoxy is not endangered by it. We have to learn to live and let live. Ibn Rushd himself distinguishes between three basic different types of people. Or three different levels of intellectual vocation. Those of the first type, the great majority, simply lack any interest in, or capacity for, abstract conceptual thought. All they need, for religious purposes, are pictures and stories; and it is their religious calling just to let themselves be guided by authority, without presuming to call it into question at all. Next comes the middling type: those with a moderate interest in, and capacity for, abstract argument. Such people mostly need the same sort of pictures and stories as those addressed to the first type; plus the guidance of authority. The only difference is that, for them, such guidance has to be backed up by at least some level of argument, sufficient to establish its plausibility. The third type, the tiny minority of true philosophers, demands far more. And yet the point is: wise philosophers will also be quite scrupulous in respecting the proper otherness of other, non-philosophical vocations. For themselves, they will not accept any belief the truth of which has not been fully demonstrated to them, by argument. Indeed, it is their God-given duty to question what religious authority decrees, so as to get beyond the various intellectual shortcuts inevitably involved in communicating basic truth to the unsophisticated. But they will nevertheless do nothing deliberately to weaken authority’s necessary hold over others. Wisdom itself, Ibn Rushd argues, will teach them the need for self-censorship. And, for that reason, no external censorship is required. V

One might perhaps reconstruct the underlying logic of Ibn Rushd’s metaphysics as follows. Folk religion, as he sees it, is a project for capturing the imagination of the masses, so as to inculcate the basic virtues. In order to capture people’s imaginations effectively it has got to be as vividly dramatic as possible; and it has also got to speak as directly as possible to each individual, as an individual. The requirement of vivid drama leads necessarily, in theistic folk religion, to a picture of God responding to events, deliberating and coming to decisions like a human being; swayed by love, anger, repentance, all the human passions writ large. And the requirement of direct address to each individual as such leads necessarily to something like the conventional picture of post-mortem divine judgement, in which the ultimate moral worth of each individual life is separately assessed.


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But both these pictures are profoundly ambiguous. They may well help to promote real virtue; and they do so, he thinks, in the only way that is really likely to work with most people. Yet, at the same time, folk-religious picture thinking always threatens to curtail the process of philosophic reflection. The picture of God deliberating and making decisions like a human being is liable to supplant the proper philosophic quest to understand the inner-worldly necessary interconnnectedness of events. And the conventional qur’anic picture of the Last Judgement, in which each individual enters eternity alone, tends to close down a proper philosophic meditation on the complex interconnectedness of all human destinies. Most people, he thinks, need these ambiguous doctrines to teach them virtue. But philosophers do not. Philosophers are uniquely able to learn virtue along other, more purely rational lines. And, therefore, as a philosopher speaking to other philosophers, he develops an alternative metaphysical picture, which, in principle, opens up the quest for ever-more detailed factual explanations of worldly phenomena, without limit. To his anti-philosophical theologian critics Ibn Rushd in effect replies, ‘I do not deny that folk-religious teaching may also be true, so far as it goes’. To what extent is this to be understood as mere veiled sarcasm, or self-protective dissimulation? Or to what extent is it already, in fact, a remote anticipation of the Hegelian ‘two forms/one content’ doctrine? There is no way we can be certain. But, at all events, from my own neo-Hegelian point of view I would say that Ibn Rushd’s basic error is in fact his lack of a notion of Geist, in the Hegelian sense. Thus, what is the actual value he sees in folk religion? It is hard to escape the suspicion that he only really values it as a means for pacifying the masses, a contribution to basic law and order. Compare Hegel’s approach. As I have said, Hegel sees folk religion precisely as a prime medium for the revelatory truth of Geist, Spirit, the ever-restless impulse towards perfect Honesty. Hegel values folk religion, in other words, not just for its contribution to law and order, but also for its capacity to facilitate, celebrate and inspire the very deepest sort of conversational generosity – love, forgiveness, the dissolution of hostile prejudices – not least, among philosophers themselves, inasmuch as philosophers also have poetic souls. And his ‘two forms/one content’ doctrine therefore implies a much richer degree of mutual respect between philosophically minded intellectuals and the devout salt of the earth than Ibn Rushd ever appears to envisage. Because that is what Honesty demands. The basic difference is that, whereas Hegel’s thought about Geist is framed essentially as a contribution to what I have called the science of the sacralization of Honesty, Ibn Rushd’s metaphysical thought is framed far rather as a contribution to the science of the sacralization of Curiosity. Again, this is my phrase, not his. But I mean the sort of enlightened curiosity which might be said to constitute the special virtue of scholars, scientists, philosophers as such. In other words,




39

the systematic pursuit of truth-as-correctness. And the point is: when, in the role of philosopher, Ibn Rushd worships God he is, to all intents and purposes, simply affirming the sacred value of an infinite Curiosity. He is not interested in the way that traditional folk-religious picture thinking, with its tales of providential divine intervention in history and the final divine judgement of each individual alone, may, at its best, serve to dramatize the imperatives of true Honesty in general. But his God is the First Cause, made manifest in all fresh, correct understanding of the rules governing the natural world, which Curiosity probes. And divine judgement, as he conceives it, is none other than a perfect observer knowledge of the ultimate interlocking unity of all human destinies, understood simply as a challenge to Curiosity. Nothing more. Curiosity, though, is a much narrower ideal than Honesty. Honesty, to be sure, includes Curiosity. Yet it also includes, alongside it, all the other things that make for good conversation. Curiosity is the special virtue of the learned, in the sense that they are the best equipped to pursue it; but Honesty is a virtue which also, in the most radical fashion, decisively breaks down the conversation-inhibiting social barriers between the learned and the unlearned. On the one hand there is the science of the sacralization of Honesty; which in relation to Christian folk religion becomes theology. And on the other hand there is the science of the sacralization of Curiosity. That is to say: metaphysics. What Hegel calls ‘Spirit’ is the impulse to pure Honesty, and in the Phenomenology of Spirit he studies this in essentially trans-metaphysical terms; philosophically opening the way towards true theology. Thus, instead of developing his own metaphysical world-picture here, Hegel seeks, precisely, to develop a thinking beyond picture thinking. That is to say, he tries to get beyond the mere surface clash of competing metaphysical world-pictures, to what is religiously far more fundamental: the criteria for assessing an authentic will to truth. So he sets out to get straight to the heart of the matter; dispelling the ambiguity of folkreligious doctrine through a direct enquiry into the various competing motives potentially at work in it; measuring those motives against the standards of perfect Honesty. But Ibn Rushd, by contrast, is an entirely metaphysical philosopher. As an exclusive advocate of Curiosity, the special virtue of philosophers as such, he polarizes the partner relationship between philosophy and folk religion; for he counters the richly ambiguous metaphysical world-picture of qur’anic folk religion with an alternative metaphysical world-picture, derived from his reading of Aristotle, which is much less ambiguous in its affirmation of Curiosity, although also much less imaginatively and emotionally engaging than the qur’anic picture. This is just what Hegel, for his part, calls ‘reflective’ philosophy; the sort of thing from which, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, he is escaping. I think that Hegel is right, and that the sort of approach developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit represents a much more promising basis for


40


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conversation between philosophy and folk religion than any sort of metaphysical polarization ever could. And yet the great virtue of ‘Averroism’ nevertheless remains its completely intransigent refusal ever merely to collude with theological bigotry. In the year 1270 Bishop E´tienne Tempier of Paris issued his first official condemnation of Christian ‘Averroism’. And then in 1277 he followed it up with a much more compendious document, again primarily directed against ‘Averroism’, although covering the whole range of pagan thought and even denouncing certain Aristotelian propositions upheld by Thomas Aquinas. (As well as others, for good measure, representing the fashionable new conventions of ‘courtly love’!) The ‘Latin Averroists’ of the day were a little group of young priests, employed in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Paris; whose most notable leaders were Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia. They were by no means rigid adherents of Ibn Rushd’s doctrine, for they also drew on Ibn Sina, and their primary philosophic loyalty was to Aristotle. But they certainly had a great respect for Ibn Rushd, as ‘the Commentator’; and they do appear to have been driven by much the same motives as he was. The condemnation was perhaps inevitable in the circumstances. But, still, it seems to me to have been one of the great calamities of Christian intellectual history. For it represented such a major refusal of conversational openness, on the church’s part, at such a crucial moment, when philosophy was being revived as a serious partner to theology in the new university context. There were several treatises written by contemporary theologians against the Averroists: by Albert the Great, Giles of Rome, Raymond Lull and above all by Aquinas himself, whose De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas actually appeared in the same year as Tempier’s original decree. What, though, do Aquinas’s arguments ultimately amount to? A bit of indignation; some terminological quibbles; a crude appeal to common sense, essentially missing the point. He was, as a matter of self-protective strategy, anxious to distance his own use of Aristotle from that of these hotheads. In a sense, however, I think that the one truly effective response from the orthodox standpoint was Dante’s, a generation later, in the Divine Comedy. For Dante imagines the ‘Averroist’ leader, Siger of Brabant in paradise, among the holiest of holy thinkers; now reconciled with his great adversary, Aquinas. His presence there, as an individuated soul, is of course itself a direct refutation of ‘Averroist’ doctrine. But the point is: Dante answers him by honouring him. In the sharpest possible contrast to the theologians, he meets Siger’s anti-poetic challenge with what one can only call exemplary poetic magnanimity.11

11

Dante, Paradiso, Canto X, 133–8.




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VI

Indeed, the ‘Averroists’ surely were on to something, with their doctrine of ‘double truth’; even if they themselves did not fully realize what that something was. For I go back to what I said above: the cause of Honesty, if it is to have any chance of making headway in the world, clearly requires two things. First, it requires a medium of maximum poetic power, to communicate its imperatives with maximum connectiveness. Which can only mean some form of folk religion. But then it also requires a discipline of thought, constantly at work, trying to keep folk religion transparent to Honesty; highlighting, therefore, the intrinsic, inevitable ambiguity of all folk religious phenomena. In other words: a form of philosophy, stepping back from the world-pictures of folk religion to criticize them, as it were from the outside. The Averroists’ only basic error was that they failed to see clearly enough the fundamental difference between truth-as-correctness and truth-as-Honesty. For they, in their role as philosophers, still laid claim to be developing a metaphysical world-picture of perfect logical correctness. And this ambition, necessarily, then led them into reductionism: a retreat, away from full Honesty, to simple Curiosity as the effective guiding principle of their philosophy; coupled with an affirmation of folk religion solely for its potential contribution to law and order. But it is only in so far as philosophy breaks free from such restrictive ambitions, and in religious matters learns to honour Honesty alone, that the full ambiguity of all folk religion at long last begins to be made clear, as it should be. Thus, we have to learn to recognize Honesty at work in all manner of diverse, even apparently quite incompatible, folk religious worldviews. And we have to learn to recognize just how variable the truly significant religious truth-content of any one particular proposition of faith can be; depending on who is speaking, to whom and in what exact context. For, once again, take any theological proposition: what, in the end, are the real criteria for its truth or falsehood? To the folk religious thinker, as such, the only question is whether, or how, the proposition fits correctly into their folk religious world-picture; to the ‘reflective’ philosopher, the only question is whether, or how, it fits correctly into a certain set of basic logical principles. But the deeper, ‘speculative’ question is surely, how far does it help establish a genuine channel for the communication of the imperatives of Honesty? I repeat: in the mouth of a saint – a truly Honest person – the proposition may be profoundly true in that sense, whereas in the mouth of a devout psychopath the identical words, identically interpreted in world-picture terms, will be no less profoundly false. For the actual meaning of the words, in particular the word ‘God’ wherever it occurs, is at the deeper level so entirely different in each case. The same propositions appear, but their conversational function is entirely different. And that is what counts.


3 ‘Philosophic Politics’ (I): Strauss among the ‘Moderns’ and the ‘Postmoderns’

I

In the ideal partnership I would envisage between folk religion and philosophy, it will be philosophy’s role to discern the inevitable and ineradicable ambiguities of folk religion at the level of motivation; to dig the dishonesties out; to rake the ground over. And it will at the same time be incumbent on the lovers of folk religion quite unreservedly to welcome that critique. For I think Ibn Rushd is right: in order for philosophy to do its proper religious job, it has certainly got to be far more than just an apologetic vindication of confessional faith. The true lovers of folk religion must allow it to be more than that. There is, after all, no need for them to fear philosophy in its proper critical role. But the one thing, then, we must surely also demand of philosophy, by way of return, is that it be equally critical of itself. And that is the counterbalancing concern I now want to pursue. II

As I have said, I want to pursue this concern in the form of a conversation with Leo Strauss. Thus, Strauss’s undoubted authority as a thinker lies in the systematic radicality of his thought as a critical response to la trahison des clercs, the widespread seduction of early twentiethcentury intellectuals by the movements of nascent totalitarianism; which he interprets as a summons to fundamental critique of the whole prevailing philosophic culture of post-Enlightenment modernity. But I repeat: Strauss’s is not a critique grounded, as I think it should be, in the purely classless solidarity of the shaken. On the contrary, he is essentially a strategist of what he calls ‘philosophic politics’. That is to say the practice of an enlightened solidarity among philosophers as such. Indeed he is a proponent of solidarity among philosophers, very much, at its boldest. Only, the moral he draws from the trauma of la trahison des clercs is a neo-Averroist one. Strauss is an ‘Averroist’ in the sense that, like Ibn Rushd, he sees true philosophic wisdom as entailing extensive self-censorship: a major restraint on public criticism, by


‘PHILOSOPHIC POLITICS’ (I)

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philosophers, of the sort of unthinking piety on which social stability largely depends, just the same whether this be the piety of conservative religion or, in a secularized world, the more secular piety of patriotic sentiment. Or, rather, Strauss sees himself as a modern ‘Platonist’. For, according to his interpretation, this sort of self-censorship was in fact the consistent practice of the whole classical Platonist tradition – Ibn Rushd, in terms of metaphysics the great commentator on Aristotle, was, from the Straussian point of view, in terms of intellectual strategy also the most authentic Platonist of his day. Averroism is none other than the proper application of Platonist strategy to qur’anic or biblical traditions. And, according to the Straussian diagnosis, la trahison des clercs was fundamentally due to a disastrous abandonment, by the ‘traitors’, of proper Platonist/Averroist strategy, in this sense. Thus, how is it that intellectuals have been seduced into collusion with totalitarianism? Strauss’s answer, in brief, is that they have had far too optimistic a notion of the possible benefits that might derive from applying their own new ideas in the wider public realm. And their overoptimism has then rendered them impatient for results, which they dreamed of quickly achieving by ruthless totalitarian methods. The basic lesson to be learnt from the whole sorry business, he thinks, is therefore that intellectuals, in order to be authentic philosophers, should strictly temper their ambitions, and be content to operate on several different levels at once; pursuing new ideas, as they must, with the very freest abandon, but only in their own ivory-tower domain; while at the same time, as regards the wider public realm, modestly upholding whatever old ideas are most likely to be effective in simply helping hold society together. Strauss is a Platonist, or Averroist, both in his absolute commitment to solidarity among philosophers as such, and also in his exoteric friendliness towards folk religion, for law-and-order purposes. Under the pressure of twentieth-century nightmares, however, he is not just a traditional Platonist; he is in fact a singularly pessimistic one, and therefore all the more conservative at that exoteric level. Hence indeed the veneration accorded him, as a sort of totemic sage, by so many of the leading American Neo-Conservatives today. For my part, I completely disagree with the Straussian diagnosis. For I would argue that the real problem underlying la trahison des clercs runs far deeper. I think it is a problem already very conspicuously present in the work of Plato himself. Moreover, I would actually locate it in the very aspects of Platonism which Strauss for his part most admires. Although I hesitate to align myself with Karl Popper’s notoriously anachronistic onslaught on Plato’s alleged proto-totalitarianism, nevertheless I do think that there is something quite profoundly wrong with the Platonist utopian dream of philosopher rule. It seems to me a fundamental error to identify the cause of Truth, as Plato does both in the Republic and in the Laws, with the class interests of a particular educational elite.


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PHILOSOPHY

For this can only tend towards a mixing together, in actual practice, of two things that philosophy surely ought to treat, right from the outset, as polar opposites: on the one hand, the love of Truth; on the other hand, a lust for political domination. Even if that lust is strictly confined to a utopian dream, never intended to be more than a dream, still I think it remains a corruption. And what else, in the end, is la trahison des clercs if not precisely the same improper mixture of these two opposing impulses, now carried several stages further, this time beyond dreaming? Granted, there clearly is, as Strauss insists, a major difference between Plato’s original utopian dream, which is only a dream, and the various attempts of modern ‘traitorous’ clercs to make philosopher rule an actual reality; with all the militant mixing together of philosophy with propaganda which the realization of that ambition more or less inevitably then entails. And I certainly think that he provides a major service as an interpreter of classical Platonism, in the way he helps highlight the actual pervasiveness, there, of split-level communication: one sort of truth, half-concealed within public texts, for the conversation of philosopher with philosopher; another sort of truth for the conversation of philosophers with their conservative ‘gentlemen’ allies. I am very largely persuaded by his interpretations. My only quarrel is with the moral conclusion that he draws. And so now let us consider his argument. Perhaps the best way to begin is by considering it in direct relation to la trahison des clercs, as this appears in its two basic forms: first, as Marxism; and then as what one might term the ‘Nietzsche/Heidegger tradition’. III

Strauss does not, as it happens, go in for much direct critique of Marx. He does not need to. For him, Marxism is the final culmination of a much older error; which he seeks to tackle, far rather, at its roots. There is just one key passage in his book Natural Right and History which spells out his specific verdict on Marxism. It comes in Chapter 4, entitled ‘Classic Natural Right’. Thus, ‘classic natural right’, here, is another term for Platonist philosophic politics, the teaching Strauss seeks to vindicate. According to ‘classic natural right’, as he puts it: ‘the simply best regime would be the absolute rule of the wise; [but] the practically best regime is the rule, under law, of gentlemen, or the mixed regime’.1 The ‘simply best regime’ being in actual practice impossible, what this doctrine requires, in other words, is essentially a shrewd settling for the conservative second best. For Strauss himself, a German Jew who had been driven into exile in the USA, that necessary settling for second best meant a patriotic affirmation of American democracy. Only, always in a thoroughly ironic 1

Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953): 142–3.



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Platonist mode. While, as for ‘the Marxist or crypto-Marxist’ suspicion that ‘the classics preferred the rule of the urban patriciate because they themselves belonged to the urban patriciate or were hangers-on of the urban patriciate’, his response, in this context, is crisp: We need not take issue with the contention that, in studying a political doctrine, we must consider the bias, and even the class bias, of its originator. It suffices to demand that the class to which the thinker in question belongs be correctly identified. In the common view the fact is overlooked that there is a class interest of the philosophers qua philosophers, and this oversight is ultimately due to the denial of the possibility of philosophy. Philosophers as philosophers do not go with their families. The selfish or class interest of the philosophers consists in being left alone, in being allowed to live the life of the blessed on earth by devoting themselves to investigation of the most important subjects. Now it is an experience of many centuries in greatly different natural and moral climates that there was one and only one class which was habitually sympathetic to philosophy, and not intermittently, like kings; and this was the urban patriciate. In what sense may the urban patriciate, or the ‘gentlemanly’ class, be said to ‘sympathize’ with the philosophic elite? Simply, in the sense that both classes share a strong interest in the preservation of social stability: the urban patriciate, in order to preserve their material privileges; the philosophers, both in order to preserve the structure of privilege on which their elite education depends and also so that they are not distracted, or subject to harassment, as a result of popular moral panics. By contrast, he goes on, in the world of classical Platonism the common people had no sympathy for philosophy and philosophers. As Cicero put it, philosophy was suspect to the many. Only in the nineteenth century did this state of things profoundly and manifestly change, and the change was ultimately due to a complete change in the meaning of philosophy.2 The ‘change’ in question being an entirely regrettable vulgarization! Marxism, as Strauss sees it, is, in short, symptomatic of a fundamental collapse of proper class consciousness on the part of the philosopher class. In presenting themselves as spokespeople for the class interests of the proletariat, Marxist intellectuals, who ought to be philosophers pursuing philosophic politics, have opted instead for a cause which, because of its revolutionary ambitions, immediately tends to impose a 2

Ibid., 143.


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PHILOSOPHY

strict party line, closing down the proper open-mindedness of philosophy. They are not wrong to want allies. But they have chosen the wrong allies. The right alliance, Strauss thinks, for those with a vocation to philosophy, can only be that which leaves them freest to pursue philosophy, without inhibition. And that must mean the least revolutionary sort of alliance. The quietest. Yet philosophy is, in itself, by its very nature subversive. For it calls everything into question. There is, for true philosophy, nothing too sacred to be questioned; but, on the contrary, what is sacred for philosophy is just the process of questioning, itself. That is what philosophy, as Strauss understands it, simply is. The more authentic it is, deep down, the more subversive it will therefore necessarily be. And so, for him, the real challenge for philosophic politics becomes: how best – on one level – to preserve the full subversiveness of authentic philosophy, even while nevertheless, on another level, preserving it from the contamination of excessive revolutionary impatience? In the passage cited above he deplores the ‘complete change in the meaning of philosophy’, the great lapse towards revolutionary impatience, that occurred in the nineteenth century; most momentously in the phenomenon of Marxism. But elsewhere he traces the actual origins of this change a good deal further back. For his deeper, underlying objection to Marxism is in fact one which also applies much more generally. It applies to any cultural revolutionary project in which the proper, all-questioning restlessness of philosophy is narrowed down by the hope of immediate actual worldly success, and so confined to a single, all too closely concentrated partisan polemic. It is, thus, equally an objection to the cultural revolutionary ambitions of Hobbes for instance. Or of Machiavelli. And Strauss actually develops his argument, first and foremost, with reference to those earlier thinkers.3 In the case of Marxism, the all-questioning restlessness of philosophy is narrowed down to a cultural revolutionary critique of capitalism, and advocacy of socialism; in the case of Machiavelli and Hobbes, it is narrowed down to a cultural revolutionary critique of traditional Christian piety, in its political aspect. Strauss, it would appear, is far more inclined to sympathize with this latter critical enterprise than with the former. And yet, even in the case of Machiavelli and Hobbes he still deplores the narrowing down. Notwithstanding that Machiavelli and Hobbes are such obviously different thinkers, Strauss sees them, very much, as representing two moments of a single historical development. And with good reason, 3

For Strauss’s discussion of Hobbes, see in particular his The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935; reissued with a new preface 1952, Chicago: University of Chicago Press); and Natural Right and History, 166–202. For his discussion of Machiavelli: Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958); ‘Niccolo Machiavelli’, in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).



47

I think. For although Machiavelli addresses his work, in the first instance, only to a small elite of politically active men, and does not try to justify his basic moral standpoint to a larger public, surely if he had attempted such a justification it would have involved an argument just like Hobbes’. While, conversely, had Hobbes developed an ethical code for rulers it would surely have looked quite similar to Machiavelli’s. In fact, that is not Hobbes’s primary concern. He is far more concerned to develop arguments that might appeal to the English gentry in general. And so, the gentry being largely Anglican, he also presents himself, in theological terms, as a good Anglican. Yet this is, to be sure, rather a singular form of Anglicanism! Neither thinker sees any serious value in religion, except as authoritative back up to the power of secular rulers; a straightforward supplement to legalized coercion. And what they together represent is this line followed through with the most decisive consistency. Machiavelli’s ideal is one of heroic, one might almost say Faustian, patriotism: in a letter to his friend Vettori he once wrote, ‘I love my native city more than my own soul’.4 Hobbes, with his wider intended readership in view, develops a much more prudent, essentially prudential argument. So, in a society torn apart, and driven towards civil war, by the religious passions of men for whom the City of God was in principle radically alien to the Earthly City, he urges a decisive reidentification of the City of God: equating it, instead, with the sheer peaceableness of the Earthly City, when properly governed. These are, however, in the end, the two sides of a single coin. Both thinkers are fired with a burning hope for large-scale, imminent cultural revolutionary change. And of course in the present-day world of postChristendom their cause has triumphed. True, Hobbes’s utopian goal remains unfulfilled: no one any longer seriously follows him in advocating that the secular sovereign should be accorded absolute rights of religious censorship. But, then, this is only because other less drastic remedies have already done the job for which that most drastic remedy was primarily intended. The present-day rise of hard-line salafi forms of Islam may remind us of what Hobbes was battling against, in Christianity. But, on the whole, Western polities are no longer torn apart by the particular sort of violent Ultramontane or Puritan religious-revolutionary passions that he sought to disempower; secular democracy has absorbed them, and rendered them tractable. In the Christian context, at least, the revolution for which both Hobbes and Machiavelli were striving has in fact taken place. Yet, in this very triumph Strauss sees the limitations of their common project laid bare. For, after all, post-Enlightenment history has shown that philosophy has other enemies, quite different from the old illiberalism of Christendom and its like, but no less lethal. In narrowing philosophy 4

Allan Gilbert, ed., The Letters of Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); no. 225. And cf. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973): 285–6.


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PHILOSOPHY

down to a secularizing polemic against that one particular enemy, Strauss thinks, Machiavelli and Hobbes have disastrously oversimplified matters. Strauss is an advocate of the very purest sort of solidarity among philosophers as such. So he criticizes Machiavelli’s brutal disrespect for old-fashioned Christian respectability not because he seriously admires old-fashioned Christian respectability, but rather because Machiavelli’s critique is, in Nietzschean terms, an attack on Christian slave morality only from the standpoint of a secularist master morality. And true philosophy, the way Strauss (like Nietzsche before him) sees it, decisively transcends both of these; just as it also transcends the sort of secularized slave morality which Marx, for instance, represents. As I have said, Hobbes in effect does away with the old Augustinian opposition between the City of God and the Earthly City. His ideal is, simply, perfect peace for the latter; he has no other idea of the former. Machiavelli, however, is in a sense still more opposed to Augustine. For he positively takes the side of the Earthly City, as Augustine conceives it, against the Heavenly. Thus, Augustine defines the City of God as including every sort of organization in so far as it is inspired by a genuine love for God, and a corresponding humility on the part of the organizers; and he defines the Earthly City as including every sort of organization in so far as it is inspired by a lust for political domination, wrapped up in a glorification of the mighty. But Machiavelli does not believe in humility. He thinks that the preaching of humility merely serves to soften people’s resistance to tyranny and thought control; he believes in self-assertive ‘humanity’, instead. Nor does he, really, believe in God. Belief in God may, he thinks, be salutary for the masses, to help keep them contented and law abiding. However, he is writing for rulers. Sometimes it may still be necessary, in this context, to pretend to believe what all the world believes; yet he does not put much effort into the pretence. The franker he is being, the more he speaks of the world as being under the sway not of divine providence, but of ‘fortune’. And there is no reverence in this. On the contrary – he says, Fortune is a woman and if she is to be submissive it is necessary to beat and coerce her. Experience shows that she is more often subdued by men who do this than by those who act coldly. Always, being a woman, she favours young men, because they are less circumspect and more ardent, and because they command her with greater audacity.5 Machiavelli by no means condemns the lust for political domination, in itself; only, he wants to see how it may most rationally be channelled, so as to bring maximum material benefit to the state as a whole.

5

Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter XXV; English translation by George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961): 133.



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Strauss, however, wants to affirm neither the priestly values of the Augustinian City of God, nor the warrior values of the Machiavellian Earthly City, but the philosophic-contemplative values of that third city: the city of Plato’s Republic. Which includes every sort of organization in so far as it is conducive to the spread of genuine learning, valued purely and simply for its own sake. And which is founded upon an absolute reverence for the distinctive virtues of the philosopher class. As an advocate of pure philosophy, Strauss is of course just as opposed as Machiavelli and Hobbes are to hard-line Christian dogmatism; just as wary of any invocation of divine authority merely to suppress freespirited enquiry. Indeed, he is just as unbelieving in God. For he shows no interest in any possible priestly strategies for the opening up of religion to free-spiritedness. Cheerfully elitist as he is, he treats the cultivation of free-spiritedness as a job, strictly, for philosophy alone. And he admires what he calls the special ‘charm and gracefulness’ of Machiavelli’s half-veiled blasphemies. Yet, at the same time, he also straight away goes on to add that the charm and gracefulness of these blasphemies will be ‘less strongly felt by us than their shocking character’.6 For the ‘we’ here – the community of, in a broad sense, ‘Platonist’ philosophers – will, after all, want to remain a good deal further removed from the actual tumult of worldly conflict than the blaspheming Machiavelli does. Their wisdom is, far more than his, a quality of radical detachment. Outside the tumult, they need unphilosophic allies and protectors within it who will allow them, peacefully, to get on with their philosophical contemplation. They cannot of course, as true philosophers, actually share the religious and moral views of their potential unphilosophic allies; but, even so, they will not want to antagonize such people by positively blaspheming against those views, with the sort of scornful flourish typical especially of Machiavelli. And hence Strauss begins his Thoughts on Machiavelli with an ironical defence of the naive unphilosophic verdict, the ‘old fashioned and simple opinion’, that Machiavelli is really nothing but a reprobate teacher of evil.7 He begins by upholding that unphilosophic verdict; and then, at the end of his commentary, overlays it with a properly philosophic one. Machiavelli sees himself as the Columbus of the moral world, the discoverer of a whole new continent of thought.8 But in what did his real originality consist? Whereas from the moral perspective of the unphilosophic respectable gentry it appears to consist in his teaching of evil, to the Platonist philosopher it consists far rather in his betrayal of proper philosophic 6 7 8

Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988): 41. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 9. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, I, preface to autograph manuscript; English translation by Julia Conway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997): 15.


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elitism. ‘Machiavelli’s most emphatic attack on ‘‘all writers’’ ’, Strauss remarks, ‘is directed, not against the traditional condemnation of tyranny but against the traditional contempt for the multitude’. And hence, he suggests, one might in a certain sense actually regard Machiavelli as ‘the philosopher who originated the democratic tradition’9 –! From the Platonist point of view the life of the Earthly City is the life of the cave out of which the philosophers alone have escaped. As Strauss puts it: The philosophers and the demos [i.e. the people of the cave] are separated by a gulf; their ends differ radically. . . Machiavelli’s philosophising on the other hand remains on the whole within the limits set by the city qua closed to philosophy. Accepting the ends of the demos as beyond appeal, he seeks for the best means conducive to those ends. Through his efforts philosophy becomes salutary in the sense in which the demos understands, or may understand, the salutary.10 The truth of Platonist philosophy is essentially supra-political; it is attainable only by contemplatives who have risen above the immediate cave-bound clash of merely political opinions. But ‘while the suprapolitical is everywhere and always present and effective in Machiavelli’s thought’ – for he is concerned with universal truths, extending way beyond the immediacy of his own particular context – nevertheless, ‘he analyses the political as if it were not ordered towards the suprapolitical or as if the supra-political did not exist’.11 He does not, in other words, write as a Platonist contemplative celebrating the virtues necessary for excellence in contemplation. But, instead, he substitutes for those virtues, as his very highest ideal, the cave-bound virtues of an absolute patriotism. In this sense, Strauss argues, Machiavelli’s thinking ‘entailed a deliberate lowering of the ultimate goal’. Machiavelli was concerned to make the maximum possible direct impact on the affairs of the Earthly City – so ‘the goal was lowered in order to increase the probability of its attainment’.12 And it is the same with Hobbes. Indeed, inasmuch as Hobbes is addressing his argument to an altogether wider public, he may very well be seen as pushing the inner secular-democratization of philosophy, which Machiavelli had initiated, to quite a significant extent further forward. They have ‘lowered the goal’ in the same way that their opponents, the philosophical apologists for traditional religion ‘lower the goal’: rendering philosophy the servant of another cause, not the cause of 9

10 11 12

Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 294. The passage of Machiavelli’s in question here is Discourses on Livy, I, 58. Thoughts on Machiavelli, 296. Ibid., 295. Natural Right and History, 178.



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pure philosophic contemplation itself. This is Strauss’s basic complaint. Machiavelli’s wisdom is a philosophic celebration of pure patriotism, that is patriotism emancipated from all competing religious and ethical ideals, and moreover infused with political genius. Hobbes’s wisdom is a philosophical exploration of the needs of the purely abstract individual, the individual considered in perfect abstraction from any given cultural or religious identity; it is an analysis of what such an individual would still want, politically. But Strauss’s wisdom is a philosophical celebration not of patriotism, but of true philosophy. And he is philosophically exploring the political needs not of the abstract individual, but of the true philosopher. The cause of pure philosophy is not a cause for which one can directly make propaganda. For, by definition, propaganda is addressed to the masses; and, again by definition, philosophy is beyond their ken. Machiavelli and Hobbes, however, are both philosophical apologists for a cause which may also, albeit at quite another level from their own writing, be advanced by propaganda means. Again, Strauss is by no means necessarily against philosophers making strategic alliances with movements which promote themselves by propaganda methods. But he is concerned that the absolute distinctiveness and primacy of the cause of philosophy itself should nevertheless always very clearly be remembered and signalled. For in his view the choice is simple: it is either philosophy for philosophy’s sake – or else la trahison des clercs. IV

However, the twentieth-century trahison des clercs did not only derive from philosophers, in effect, subordinating philosophy to other, less comprehensively critical causes; the broad tendency initiated by Machiavelli and Hobbes, and culminating above all in Marxism. There were also at least some ‘traitorous’ philosophers who were absolutely champions of all-questioning philosophy for philosophy’s sake, alone, yet who thought they saw an opportunity to promote that cause, in cultural-revolutionary fashion, by mobilizing certain other newly emergent energies in its service. The prime instances of this are Heidegger, in his brief yet momentous flirtation with Nazism; and Nietzsche. For how are we to understand Heidegger’s Nazism? We surely do need to acknowledge the tragic element of genuine splendour in the original dream by which he was inspired. Heidegger dreamed of a revolutionary new Germany, passionately united by nationalist sentiment; at the very heart of which would be a fierce fresh pride in being ‘ein Volk von Denker und Dichter’, ‘a people of thinkers and poets’. The masses might comprehend nothing of this high-cultural tradition, except that it was there, and was to be revered. But its being, as never before, revered would nonetheless work wonders; creating an environment in


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which thinking and poetry might flourish, with major state patronage, as never before.13 Part of the problem, perhaps, was just that Heidegger was too contemptuous of the obvious stupidity of the Nazi leadership. Nazism was so different from Marxism in particular: so completely lacking in any already established texts, of any intelligence, to supply a constraining orthodoxy. One can well understand, therefore, how he might have thought of it as providing a unique opportunity, for himself, to play the role of a philosophic Moses. A foolish misjudgement – but then did not Plato himself leap at the opportunity, when it was offered, of tutoring the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse? Heidegger goes beyond Plato in seeking to represent an elite comprising both philosophers and poets. But, otherwise, the only difference is in the scale of his enterprise: as he sought to tutor not only a tyrant, but also a whole popular movement. And compare Nietzsche. Heidegger is able to hitch philosophy onto a sublime form of national pride because of the way he seeks to think beyond ‘metaphysics’. His usage of this term, ‘metaphysics’, is indeed very complex; but at least part of what he means when he speaks of trying to thinking beyond ‘mataphysics’ is that he is committed to the cause of thinking, considered purely and simply in itself, rather than to upholding any particular onto-theological – religious, or irreligious – orthodoxy, as a restrictive framework for thinking. Thus, his thinking about thinking begins from a wholesale bracketing of ‘metaphysical’ issues concerning the correctness or incorrectness of particular religious beliefs. Which enables him, then, to propose a fundamental solidarity of thoughtful Germans, as such, embracing both Christian believers of every sort, and unbelievers of every sort. Nietzsche, of course, differs in that he does not do this. And therefore, in Heideggerian terms, Nietzsche is still very much a ‘metaphysician’; still caught up in the age-old ‘forgetfulness of being’, which ‘metaphysics’ is. In so far as the church traditionally defines its identity as the corporate upholder of a certain set of metaphysical beliefs, a solidarity project like Nietzsche’s which, as a matter of fixed principle, excludes loyal church membership cannot help but be ‘metaphysical’ itself, if only in its absolute repudiation of the church’s beliefs as being simply incorrect. Nietzsche is, in a sense, carrying forward what Machiavelli initiated. Not that Nietzsche actually has very much to say about Machiavelli. And he differs from Machiavelli in that he attacks Christian ‘slave morality’ not just as a philosophical advocate of ‘master morality’, but rather as an advocate of pure, all-questioning philosopher morality; pursuing philosophy, in the end, strictly for its own sake, and dreaming of the rule of philosophers. Yet the ‘death of God’, which he diagnoses as a nineteenth-century event, is surely nothing other in effect than, 13

See especially Heidegger’s Rectoral Address, on being appointed Rector of the University of Freiburg, in the revolutionary year of 1933: translated into English by William S. Lewis, as ‘The Self-Assertion of the German University’, in Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).



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precisely, an unprecedented historic opportunity to carry forward what Machiavelli above all began, to its proper, more than merely Machiavellian conclusion. So he systematically extends his critique of church Christianity into an all-encompassing cultural-revolutionary polemic against ‘Christian values’, even in their most secularized and anti-ecclesiastical forms. And, hence, he is led to repudiate all the great ideologies of modern mass politics: liberalism in all its variants; socialism in all its variants; nationalism in all its variants. Because none of them – he thinks – represent a proper, or decisive enough, break with ‘Christian values’. As a trans-metaphysical nationalist, Heidegger advocates a very different sort of solidarity-building project. And yet Heidegger’s eventual repudiation of his own cultural revolutionary ambitions of 1933 nevertheless essentially takes shape as a critique of Nietzsche – for the sheer fury of his cultural revolutionary ambitions. Prior to 1936, Heidegger scarcely discusses Nietzsche at all, but over the following years Nietzsche becomes a key figure for him; always from that primary point of view.14 For what else had his adventure of 1933–4 been, if not an abortive attempt to practice – even if in quite un-Nietzschean fashion – what Nietzsche, in Ecce Homo, so explosively and so crazily describes as ‘great politics’?15 Repudiating his own specific dreams of that time, Heidegger repudiates the Nietzschean dream of ‘great politics’ in general; and, with it, the whole aggressive tone of philosophic argument pre-eminently represented by Nietzsche. During the period of the Third Reich, his lectures on Nietzsche were, as he put it in 1945, his oblique ‘declaration of spiritual resistance’.16 Resistance, namely, to everything bound up with the Nazi rhetoric of struggle; inasmuch as this was the one thing the 14

15

Heidegger, Nietzsche, published in English in four volumes: I. The Will to Power as Art, translated by David Farrell Krell; II. The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, translated by David Farrell Krell; III The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, translated by Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi; IV. Nihilism, translated by Frank Capuzzi, edited by David Farrell Krell (all of them, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991). Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, ‘Why I Am a Destiny’, I; translated into English by Walter Kaufmann, with On the Genealogy of Morals (New York: Vintage, 1969): 327: For when truth enters into a fight with the lies of millennia, we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed of. The concept of politics will have merged entirely with a war of spirits; all power structures of the old society will have been exploded – all of them are based on lies: there will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth. It is only beginning with me that the earth knows great politics.

16

Heidegger, letter to the Rector of Freiburg University, 4 November, 1945. Published and translated by Richard Wolin in The Heidegger Controversy, 65. And see also his description of these lectures as his Auseinandersetzung with National Socialism, in his posthumously published interview in Der Spiegel: ‘Only a God Can Save Us’, translated by Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo, ibid.


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Nazis truly did have in common with Nietzsche, the sole element of genuine truth in their propagandists’ often-repeated claim to spiritual affinity with him. So, in particular, Heidegger turned against the Nietzschean rhetoric of a ‘revaluation of all values’. And, indeed, against such talk of ‘values’ in general. For it is not only Nietzsche. But already at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the work of Fichte – the real pioneer, Heidegger thinks, here – as well as in a whole host of other later writings, by lesser thinkers, again and again such talk is bound up with projects of aggressively politicized cultural-revolutionary struggle. One talks of ‘values’, above all, in order to define what is at stake in that sort of struggle.17 And the chastened later Heidegger also rejects Nietzsche’s notion of true wisdom as, in essence, a stripping bare of the ‘will to power’ – inasmuch as, for Nietzsche, this issues in a maximally intensified, titanic or ‘great-political’ battle of wills between, on the one hand, the selfaware, the free-spirited, and, on the other hand, the un-self-aware, the self-fooling protagonists of mere conventionality. Thus, it is not enough for Heidegger, now, that the will to power should merely come to selfawareness. No, but true wisdom, he thinks, involves precisely a still more radical emancipation from the will to power. That is to say: a fundamental ‘releasement’ – he uses the term ‘Gelassenheit’ – from that whole elementary predisposition towards struggle which is inherent in willing, as such. A discipline of pure thought, released from that predisposition. Releasement – into a spirit of the most purely thoughtful, willstilled receptivity. The whole of Heidegger’s later thought, from the mid-1930s onwards, may indeed essentially be seen as one long critical response to the foundering of his cultural-revolutionary dreams of 1933–4. But what he most certainly does not escape from in this is the impulse to immoderation behind those dreams: the disillusionment is just as immoderate as the original illusion. Having experienced the failure of this particular hope, he concludes that, in modern circumstances, all political hope, of any sort, is altogether futile. He has his own name for the prevailing principle of high-tech modernity: he calls it the Gestell.18 In talking about the Gestell he is 17

18

Heidegger is, in fact, already critical of the Fichtean heritage in this regard as early as 1919: see the lectures of that year in the Gesamtausgabe, Vols 56/57 , edited by Bernd Heimbu¨chel (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1987). And in 1935 he (famously!) signals the turn in his thinking then underway with an attack on ‘the works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism but have nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement’, all of which, he declares, ‘have been written by men fishing in the troubled waters of ‘‘values’’ and ‘‘totalities’’ ’: An Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959): 199. Then, in the following period, he turns to consider Nietzsche. In ordinary German, Gestell means ‘frame’. And Heidegger’s usage is rendered into English by William Lovitt as ‘Enframing’: Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). It is the enframing



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attempting to raise a fundamental question; namely, the question of the distinctive revelatory truth of this particular era, this specific mode of historical existence. But, he argues, the truth of the Gestell – as of any historical mode of existence – is apocalyptically manifest to the very purest Gelassenheit alone. And, as such, it is precisely a challenge to live without any of the sustaining hopes by which contemporary politics are driven. The proper challenge of the Gestell emerges, he suggests, in a perception of it as the creation of a sheer relentless ‘will to will’. That is to say: human wilfulness run berserk; the ultimate selfassertion of humanity; ‘humanism’, in the peculiarly derogatory sense he gives that term, brought to its supreme pitch of intensity and destructive folly. From which he further goes on to develop another element in his conception of ‘metaphysics’. So that, in seeking to think beyond ‘metaphysics’, what he means by that term is not only any thinking constrained within its own particular onto-theological commitments, to the point of not being able to see the possibility of other forms of truth, beyond. But it is also – I think much more dubiously – any thinking in so far as it falls short of pure Gelassenheit; therefore failing, as he sees it, adequately to challenge the underlying absurdity of this modern ‘will to will’. And then he constructs a somewhat caricatural portrait of Nietzsche: essentially conceived as the prime symbolic representative of ‘metaphysics’, so defined, reduced to its starkest possible expression. But it is not only that Heidegger is unfair in his caricature of Nietzsche – as though Nietzsche were simply a precursor of his own error in 1933! Still more significantly, the real trouble is: his critical stance towards the world of the Gestell is so absolute, so pre-emptive, that it appears to leave him quite unable to discriminate, properly, between the various different degrees of modern political corruption. Thus, take his justly notorious declaration (in a lecture delivered in Bremen on 1 December, 1949) that Agriculture is now a motorised food industry – in essence, the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of nations, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs. Only the first five German words (the first seven English words) of this sentence remain in the later version of the lecture, published by Heidegger himself.19 But it surely does help explain his infamous silence, otherwise, with regard to the Holocaust. For his understanding of the Gestell can indeed only lead him this way: towards seeing all modern

19

of a ‘challenging claim’: the ordering of contemporary life, understood in its character as a claim on our thoughtful attention; a challenge to step back, in thought, and try to grasp that ordering in its distinctive, revelatory wholeness. Ibid., 15: the 1955 version of the lecture. The translation of the original, deleted text comes from Thomas Sheehan, ‘Heidegger and the Nazis’, New York Review of Books, 16 June (1988): 41–2.


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industrially organized phenomena, whether death camps or mechanized agriculture, as ‘in essence, the same’ – inasmuch as all, alike, evoke from him one and the same essential response, the same nauseated wholesale simple turning away from political engagement. Strauss for his part regards Heidegger as ‘the only great thinker of our time’.20 And yes, Heidegger surely was a very great thinker: when one considers the quite astonishing seminal originality of his pre-political and pre-theological thought; his systematic transcendence of ‘metaphysics’ qua onto-theology; his pioneering attempt to get straight at the truth of what I would call ‘shakenness’, purely as such, in discursive terms. But, even though Strauss, it seems, also very largely shares Heidegger’s sheer distaste for late modernity, he does not at all approve the preemptive way in which Heidegger then develops that distaste, to close down the necessary space for political philosophy.21 Strauss admires Nietzsche, too. In fact, he once confided to Karl Lo¨with that ‘Nietzsche so dominated and charmed me between my 22nd and 30th years that I literally believed everything I understood of him’.22 And right at the heart of his Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy he, paradoxically enough, includes an essay entitled ‘Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil’; 17 pages, which the devoutly Nietzschean scholar Laurence Lampert actually describes, with hyperbolic enthusiasm, as ‘the most comprehensive and profound study ever published on Nietzsche’!23 Strauss inserts his homage to Nietzsche into a series of studies in Platonic political philosophy: this, Lampert suggests, is for two reasons. First, he wants to treat Nietzsche as the great modern philosophic challenger to Plato; secondly, he wants to suggest that there is perhaps rather less of a gulf between the two than Nietzsche himself supposed. And yet, as a ‘Platonist’, Strauss also attacks Nietzsche’s ‘irresponsibility’. In the closing lines of his essay ‘What is Political Philosophy?’ he 20

21 22

23

Strauss, ‘An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism’, in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, edited by Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989): 29. He goes on: ‘Heidegger made a distinction between philosophers and those for whom philosophy is identical with the history of philosophy. He made a distinction, in other words, between the thinker and the scholar. I know that I am only a scholar. But I know also that most people who call themselves philosophers are mostly, at best, scholars. The scholar is radically dependent on the work of the great thinkers, of men who faced the problems without being overpowered by any authority. The scholar is cautious and methodic, not bold. He does not become lost to our sight in, to us, inaccessible heights and mists, as the great thinkers do . . . ’ But it would perhaps be more accurate to say that Strauss himself was a thinker exoterically pretending to be no more than a scholar – of esotericism – so as to half-conceal his true radicalism! See for instance his ironical verdict in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 33–4. ‘Correspondence of Karl Lo¨with and Leo Strauss’, translated by George Elliott Tucker, Independent Journal of Philosophy / Unabha¨ngige Zeitschrift fu¨r Philosophie 5/6 (1988): 183. Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996): 2.



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even appears to endorse the later-Heideggerian caricature of Nietzsche: identifying Nietzsche, abstractly, with ‘modern man’, in his hubristic folly, ‘attempting to be absolutely sovereign, to become the master and owner of nature, to conquer chance’; and, moreover, insisting on a real link between Nietzsche’s philosophic hubris and the propaganda hubris of the Nazis.24 Lampert, however, is surely right to see this text very much as an exoteric gesture; its complete one-sidedness tactically designed to disguise the real extent of Strauss’s underlying sympathy with Nietzsche. (Elsewhere Strauss is quite clear about the basic inadequacy of the Heideggerian reading of Nietzsche.25) But, still, here is the nub of the issue: Strauss differs from Nietzsche in seeing a continued need for esotericism. He celebrates disguise, as a precaution against vulgarization; and deplores, above all, Nietzsche’s lack of it. For, as he puts it, moderation is not a virtue of thought: Plato likens philosophy to madness, the very opposite of sobriety or moderation; thought must not be moderate, but fearless, not to say shameless. But moderation is a virtue controlling the philosopher’s speech.26 Plato, he argues, is no more ‘moderate’ than Nietzsche in thought. Only, he knows about ‘moderation’ in speech; which Nietzsche does not. Lampert, for his part, seeks to uphold the Nietzschean position, against Strauss. As the madman in Thus Spake Zarathustra declares, ‘God is dead’. This means, precisely, that now we live in a world where philosophers no longer need to disguise their dissent from sacralized popular prejudice. Once they did; but those days have passed. ‘Who reads the needs of our age with greater acuteness, Strauss or Nietzsche?’ Lampert asks. ‘Do the times call for old caution or new boldness on philosophy’s behalf?’27 And he echoes Nietzsche’s cry in The Gay Science: ‘Hooray for physics!’28 The boldness of Nietzsche’s rhetoric, he argues, is perfectly appropriate for a world in which the sheer progress of modern natural science has effectively prepared people for the possibility of new truth, also, at the level of philosophy. Well yes, a Straussian might, however, reply, clearly there is a lot more that one can get away with nowadays, in the simple sense of not being 24 25

26 27 28

Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy?, 55. Cf. Lampert, 7–10. See also, for instance, the autobiographical Preface to the English translation of his 1938 book, Die Religionskritik Spinozas: Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (New York: Schocken Books, 1965); also reprinted in the essay collection, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968). After all, Strauss argues here, Nietzsche would not have fallen for the chimera that seduced Heidegger in 1933; he was simply too intransigent a philosopher. What Is Political Philosophy?, 32. Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, 168. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967): aphorism 335.


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persecuted. But that is not the point. Far rather, it is a question of ensuring that proper philosophic scepticism is not misappropriated, by crude populist mischief-makers. And the fact is, all sorts of people have laid claim to the intellectual prestige of being heirs to Nietzsche, of whom Nietzsche, as a pure philosopher, would very deeply have disapproved. Nor was it only the Nazis – there have also been plenty of sub-philosophical Nietzsche enthusiasts especially, as it happens, in the anarcho-syndicalist tradition, on the political left. (People like the martyred Catalan activist Salvador Segui, for instance.) But, of course, the Nazis were the worst: Alfred Baümler and the rest. Nietzsche’s own ferocious denunciations of German nationalism, and of popular anti-semitism, were all to no avail. What resonated, for these traitorous clercs, was the cultural-revolutionary flamboyance of his style; which they warmed to, basically, on the principle that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. To be sure, it was Nietzsche’s misfortune that, when he lost his sanity, his literary heritage fell into the hands of his proto-Nazi sister Elisabeth. But, above all, it was the self-indulgently extravagant brilliance of his writing which betrayed him, exposing him to this misappropriation. And that is what Strauss ultimately deplores. Strauss himself writes beautifully; but altogether more quietly. Deep down, he is as much an unbeliever as Nietzsche was in any sort of established religious orthodoxy, or in the prevailing political pieties of ‘gentlemanly’ conservatism. Only, the difference is all at the level of appearances: Nietzsche is both, in substance, a radical advocate of solidarity among philosophers as such – and also one who wants to appear as dramatically cultural revolutionary as possible. Strauss is a no less radical advocate of solidarity among philosophers in substance, who however is, on the contrary, determined to minimize his appearance of being cultural revolutionary. And he does so precisely in order to distance his thinking to the maximum possible extent from the sub-philosophical rhetoric of the Alfred Baümlers of this world. Because that is how he understands philosophic ‘responsibility’. V

Against Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, all alike, Strauss invokes the austere counter-example of Husserl. He celebrates Husserl’s commitment to ‘philosophy as a rigorous science’: that is to say, philosophy absolutely set apart from any sort of Weltanschauung; the philosopher’s purely contemplative, detached ‘scientific’ observation of the world, as opposed to Weltanschauung, the judgemental active engagement of philosophy with politics, art, religion.29 Unlike these other thinkers, and unlike Strauss, Husserl is no ‘philosophic politician’; he has no developed strategy for the advancement of 29

‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy’, in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy.



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philosophy, as a bid for power. But from the Straussian point of view his great virtue is that, in his exclusive devotion to ‘philosophy as a rigorous science’, he so directly highlights the distinction between these two levels of thought; which for Strauss is crucial in strategic terms. It is crucial because, as he sees it, this ought also to be the exact boundary demarcation between philosophic immoderation – which is proper only to the domain of ‘philosophy as a rigorous science’ – and the moderation of the good ‘philosophic politician’. Marx is an immoderate thinker at the level of Weltanschauung. So are Machiavelli, Hobbes and all those who follow their general lead. Nietzsche is still more immoderate at this level, in his distinctive fashion. And Heidegger, too, is an immoderate Weltanschauung philosopher, both in his brief cultural revolutionary phase and in his later turn towards extravagant quietism. But Strauss, by contrast, is a wildly immoderate enthusiast for ‘philosophy as a rigorous science’, and for the whole ethos which that discipline involves; who at the level of Weltanschauung, nevertheless, believes in the countervailing necessity of the utmost moderation. And so he presents himself as a cultural conservative. He opts, in other words, for an alliance with, in intellectual terms, the very dullest allies he can find. The least enthusiastic. The duller and the less enthusiastic, the better; in order that the philosopher should, so far as possible, not be tempted to immoderation where immoderation is inappropriate. This is a strategy systematically conceived to rescue the purest form of solidarity among philosophers as such from any entanglement, either direct or indirect, in la trahison des clercs. I want to challenge the resultant understanding of intellectual vocation. But I certainly do not want to do so from any of the various alternative points of view which Strauss himself considers and criticizes. My only objection to his critique of these other ‘traitorous’ positions is that, in a sense, it still does not go anything like far enough.



4 ‘Philosophic Politics’ (II): Strauss and the ‘Ancients’

I

Strauss advocates an alliance between (what I would call) ideologized philosophy and sub-philosophic cultural conservatism which can only be sealed by way of a thoroughgoing esotericism on the part of the former. He makes it his scholarly speciality to analyse the actual history of philosophic esotericism. But his scholarly commentaries are not just works of academic historiography – they also serve as a medium for his own esotericism. Thus at one level he writes as a ‘Platonist’ philosopher for other either actual or potential such philosophers; at another level he writes with a sub-philosophic audience in mind. What he really means is what he says in the first of these two contexts. Here, he affirms the philosophic ethos, for which the one and only unquestionable good is the enterprise of all-questioning thought, at its most articulate. The supreme solidarity ideal, from this point of view, is the solidarity of philosophers with other philosophers, as the little elite of those who are most resolute, and also most articulate, in their questioning of all. And the ideally best regime would be the one which Plato advocates in the Republic, where the philosopher class exercise absolute power over all others. However, that ideal regime is impossible: true philosophers, whose wisdom largely depends upon contemplative seclusion, would never have either the time or the appetite also to be rulers. Nor is it realistically conceivable that the other classes could ever be persuaded, anyhow, to allow it. And so, in the real world, philosophers have to ask themselves what other class they would prefer to be in power. To which, as I have said, Strauss’s ‘Platonist’ answer is: the class that, most of all, shares the philosopher class’s own vested interest in the maximization of social stability. Again, for the philosopher as such the one and only unquestionable good is the philosophic enterprise of all-questioning thought itself, at its most articulate. But this then depends upon the existence of a certain privileged space for such thought. The practice of philosophy requires both an intensive education and a good deal of leisure; philosophers are



‘PHILOSOPHIC POLITICS’ (II)

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therefore, necessarily, the products of privilege. And in order to promote what they consider the one unquestionable good, so the logic of the Straussian argument runs, the primary political interest of the philosopher class must be in preserving its necessary social preconditions. Hence, their natural allies must be those others who are most closely related to them, not only in terms of family and other pre-philosophic ties, but also by virtue of a shared interest in the defence of privilege. In broad terms: the gentry. How, though, can the philosopher avoid offending these sub-philosophic allies? From the ‘Platonist’, or mature ‘Socratic’ point of view, as Strauss puts it, ‘philosophy, or science, the highest activity of man, is the attempt to replace opinion about ‘‘all things’’ by knowledge of ‘‘all things’’; but’ – the trouble is – ‘opinion is the element of society; philosophy or science is therefore the attempt to dissolve the element in which society breathes, and thus it endangers society’.1 What the true philosopher ‘knows’ is the falsehood of all popular ‘opinion’. Yet at the same time philosophy needs social stability; and its intrinsic allergy to popular ‘opinion’ is in direct conflict with this need. For the stability that is needed can only, in actual practice, be preserved by the rule of a certain sub-philosophic ethos; governance directed, precisely, by an appropriate body of popular ‘opinion’, invested with sacred authority. As a pure philosopher, Strauss believes in calling all popular orthodoxies, without exception, relentlessly into question; with, at the very least, a certain genial contempt. At that level he is absolutely a cultural revolutionary. But as a ‘philosophic politician’, writing with a sub-philosophic audience in mind, he also believes in the exact opposite: the need to champion whatever given popular orthodoxy actually seems best equipped to stiffen the structures of social stability, for the protection of educational privilege. And so, as a citizen of the mid-twentieth-century USA, he professes to be a philosophic defender of the ‘American way of life’, at its most conservative. He affirms his loyalty with twinkling eyes, in the context of a gleeful celebration of classic philosophical esotericism. None of his truly serious readers are meant to be fooled. But it is a matter of leading by example. This, he wants to suggest, is how in principle the philosopher class always needs to present itself to the wider world. II

And here we have what he calls ‘Platonism’. Note: Strauss’s sort of ‘Platonism’ is quite different from that which is common in the Christian world. It is a Jewish Platonism – in the sense that, setting Philo aside, mainstream Rabbinic Judaism never sought to assimilate philosophy to itself the way Christian theology did. Jewish philosophers after Philo did 1

Strauss, ‘On a Forgotten Kind of Writing’, in What is Political Philosophy?, 221.


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not so much seek to justify their Jewish faith in philosophic terms, but rather, like the Muslim philosophers, sought to point towards, and justify, the practise of philosophy in Rabbinic terms. Thus, Strauss is a ‘Platonist’ in something like the way he thinks Moshe ben Maimon (‘Maimonides’) was a ‘Platonist’; or, before ben Maimon, the Islamic philosophers in general. For, as he sees it, the precarious status of philosophy in Judaism as well as in Islam was not in every respect a misfortune for philosophy. The official recognition of philosophy in the Christian world made philosophy subject to ecclesiastical supervision. [But] the precarious position of philosophy in the Islamic-Jewish world guaranteed its private character and therewith its inner freedom from supervision. The status of philosophy in the Islamic-Jewish world resembled in this respect its status in classical Greece.2 And the result, he thinks, was precisely to preserve this form of Platonism from the sort of corrupting combination with herd religion which Nietzsche so deplored in the Christian tradition. Christian apologetic theology treats Platonist philosophy – (or, later, Aristotelian philosophy, but for Strauss’s purposes Aristotelianism is really just another variant of ‘Platonism’) – essentially as a preparatory way in to faith. By contrast, however, in medieval Islamic and Jewish thought scriptural faith and philosophic reason simply confronted one another as two quite separate enterprises. Unco-opted by faith, philosophy here was compelled to defend itself purely for its own sake, and on that basis alone to try and negotiate some mode of peaceful coexistence with the other. Purely for its own sake: that is how Strauss thinks philosophy ought always to promote itself. III

Strauss is a ‘Platonist’ in much the same way that he thinks ben Maimon was one. Or in the same way that ben Maimon’s older contemporary – and before ben Maimon’s exile to Egypt, his fellow Cordoban – Ibn Rushd was. He is a ‘Platonist’ the same way that, 150 years before ben Maimon in early eleventh-century Bokhara, Ibn Sina (‘Avicenna’) had been. Or, in early tenth-century Baghdad, the great original pioneer of this tradition: al-Farabi. Indeed, as an esotericist directly discussing the history of esotericism from Plato onwards, he is, in a sense, closest of all to Farabi. For Farabi is likewise an esotericist who directly discusses what he sees as Plato’s 2

Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952): 21.




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esotericist strategy. And Strauss, basically, endorses Farabi’s Plato interpretation. So, in particular, he picks up on a remarkable passage where Farabi, commenting on Plato’s Republic, contrasts two ‘methods’, or ‘ways’: the ‘way of Socrates’ and the ‘way of Thrasymachus’, which, Farabi suggests, Plato for his part systematically sought to combine together.3 Now, Socrates of course is the central figure in all the Platonic dialogues except the Laws and the (possibly post-Platonic) Epinomis; whereas Thrasymachus is Socrates’ interlocutor for just one brief section of the Republic, in which Socrates appears on the face of it simply to refute him. The suggestion that Plato, in some sense, regarded these two ‘ways’ as of comparable significance, and complementary, is therefore – to say the least – quite a bold one! And yet, Strauss not only agrees with Farabi; he systematically develops Farabi’s hint.4 For what ‘the way of Socrates’ represents is a purely pre-political mode of thought. Here we have pure philosophy, that is, philosophy in its primary role, systematically dissolving popular ‘opinion’ of every sort. Socrates himself was not only condemned to death for the reckless daring of his general challenge to orthodox ‘opinion’. He was also lampooned, for the same, by Aristophanes in the comedy, the Clouds. And while the judicial condemnation may simply have been humourless and stupid, Aristophanes’ caricature was perhaps much more of a threat to his enduring reputation. At all events, Strauss argues, Plato’s whole project needs to be understood as a systematic recasting of Socratic wisdom, so as to preserve it from crude vulgarization; and thereby to protect society from the resultant threat of mere nihilism. And this is where the ‘way of Thrasymachus’ comes in. Not that Thrasymachus was by any means a philosopher, but he was a great demagogue. He came from the city of Chalcedon, on the Bosphorus, where Istanbul now stands; in the Phaedrus Socrates calls him ‘the hero of Chalcedon’, and describes him as ‘a terrible man for rousing the passions of a crowd, and lulling them again when roused’.5 And when he appears in the Republic, it is as a mature representative of the art of political presentation, at its most skilful. What Farabi envisages, the alliance of ‘the way of Socrates’ with ‘the way of Thrasymachus’, then, signifies the ideal political self-representation of philosophy, to the wider non-philosophic public. In Farabi’s own words: 3

4

5

Farabi, The Philosophy of Plato, section 30; English translation by Muhsin Mahdi, in Alfarabi’s Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, rev. edn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969). See especially Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952): 9–21; The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964): Chapter II; and ‘How Farabi Read Plato’s Laws’, in What Is Political Philosophy?, 134–54. Phaedrus 267 c–d.


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[Plato] explained Thrasymachus’ method and made it known that Thrasymachus was more able than Socrates to form the character of the youth and instruct the multitude; Socrates possessed only the ability to conduct a scientific investigation of justice and the virtues, and a power of love, but did not possess the ability to form the character of the youth and the multitude; and the philosopher, the prince, and the legislator ought to be able to use both methods: the Socratic method with the elect, and Thrasymachus’ method with the youth and the multitude. Now, the fact is Plato nowhere ‘explains’ anything of the sort! But this is, far rather, Farabi’s own explanation of what he takes to be the underlying strategy of Platonist wisdom, as a whole; obliquely hinted at in the Republic. Thus, in Book One of the Republic Thrasymachus is represented as engaging in fierce debate with Socrates, about the nature of dike´, ‘justice’ or ‘rightness’. Indeed, he is described at first as being like a terrifying wild beast, metaphorically springing on Socrates, as if to rend him limb from limb. This is because he assumes that, in the end, Socrates wants to uphold a notion of dike´ simply identical to that of an idealistic ‘gentleman’. (I am using Strauss’s terminology here.) In other words: he thinks that Socrates is a would-be defender of conventional ‘justice’, as an unequivocal good in itself. But he himself completely rejects such idealism; for he is a ruthless political realist. Conventional ‘justice’, he argues, is nothing but the ethos which the ruling class has imposed, because it suits its own interests. Thrasymachus is no gentleman; he does not think that ‘justice’ is good in itself. For him the highest good is the enlightened self-interest of each individual, which may involve conforming to ‘justice’, as he is using the term, or may not. It all depends on the circumstances. Socrates responds with a series of arguments; which basically involve using the word dike´ in its broader sense of ‘rightness’ in general, rather than the simple commitment to dutiful law-abidingness which Thrasymachus has in mind. Certainly, they are very far from being knock-down arguments! And yet the upshot is that Thrasymachus is silenced. Nor is that all. For he also stays. The younger men Glaucon and Adeimantus, seeing that he has by no means been seriously refuted, take up the argument on his behalf. But the ‘wild beast’ Thrasymachus is tamed. At the beginning of Book Five he briefly speaks again, as one of the friendly crowd, now, urging Socrates to continue with his argument. And then in Book Six there comes a moment when Adeimantus tries to draw him back into the debate, to contradict Socrates. But Socrates protests: ‘Now do not start a quarrel between me and Thrasymachus, when we have just become friends – not that we were ever really enemies’.6 6

Republic 498 c–d.




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What does this mean? For Strauss, as for Farabi before him, the developing relationship between Socrates and Thrasymachus is the real, hidden crux of the whole argument of the Republic.7 They were never really enemies, Socrates declares. And something in Socrates’ bantering tone has evidently enabled Thrasymachus, too, to see it. ‘According to Thrasymachus, justice is an unnecessary evil whereas according to Socrates it is a necessary evil’: this, according to Strauss, is the ‘terrible result’ of their conversation.8 That is to say, it is a result which any idealistic gentleman will regard as ‘terrible’; inasmuch as the ‘justice’ which is subverted here, as being an ‘evil’, is the gentleman’s conventional notion of justice. But after all, Thrasymachus now sees, Socrates is no more an idealistic gentleman than he is, himself. Tacitly, Socrates shares Thrasymachus’ view that the highest good is not conventional ‘justice’, in itself – which requires so much sheer self-sacrifice – but rather enlightened self-interest, ruthlessly pursued. The only ineradicable difference between them is that they have quite different notions of their own self-interest: Thrasymachus pursues the self-interest of a demagogue, Socrates pursues the self-interest of a philosopher. Whereas the demagogue is a ruthless pursuer of the pleasures of power, the Socratic philosopher is a ruthless pursuer of the pleasures of contemplative ‘wisdom’. But he is nevertheless just as ruthless, in the sense of not being bound by merely conventional inhibitions, as such. Both are in that sense, equally, political realists. Thrasymachus, Strauss suggests, has begun to see this. Only so can his taming be understood. And then, whereas Thrasymachus is talking about political ‘justice’ in the conventional sense, Socrates wants to extend the meaning of the term. For Socrates it becomes a designation, precisely, for those particular civil constraints which, from the specific point of view of his own enlightened self-interest, it is most necessary for the philosopher to affirm in public, when engaged in conversation with non-philosophers. That is to say: those moral injunctions which the philosopher needs to affirm, not absolutely, for their intrinsic truth, but far rather for shrewd strategic, alliance-building purposes; as a means to those other, higher ends which non-philosophers simply cannot appreciate. This opens up a whole area of philosophic questioning, altogether new to Thrasymachus. And so he is intrigued, and won round. He develops a new respect for Socrates; and the possibility of a friendly partnership is established. Thus, what Farabi calls ‘the way of Socrates’ is the way of pure pre-political philosophy, set free from all conventional inhibition. And 7

8

It is not for nothing, he suggests, that the Republic as a whole consists of three conversations, and that the one with Thrasymachus is the central one of the three. (The first, brief introductory conversation is with the father and son, Kephalos and Polemarchos; the third, which extends from Book Two through to Book Ten at the end, is with Plato’s own older brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus.) This centrality may be asymmetric, but Strauss nevertheless considers it to be very deliberately intended: The City and Man, 73. Ibid., 83.


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what he calls ‘the way of Thrasymachus’ is the exercise of sheer political skill, likewise set free from all conventional inhibition. But the inner argument of the Republic – as Strauss, following Farabi, interprets it – is largely about the coming together of these two, in an ideal form of ‘philosophic politics’. Which involves, precisely, a shrewd show of still upholding conventional morality, even while also pointing beyond it. Socrates is the expert on what most authentically lies beyond conventional morality; Thrasymachus is the expert on how to put on a political show. That they have become friends is not because Thrasymachus has, to any significant extent, learnt to appreciate philosophy in itself. (We have no reason to suppose he has.) But it is because of his coming to appreciate the real seriousness of Socrates’ desire that philosophy, which begins by rendering its devotees incapable of conventional politics, should nevertheless also try and cultivate its own kind of political skill. IV

An older contemporary of Farabi’s, his fellow faylasuf al-Razi, proposed a theory that Socrates had undergone a conversion, unreported by Plato. To begin with, according to this theory, not only had Socrates called established worldly custom into question, but he had done so in the most confrontational manner, as an out-and-out ascetic; thereby expressing a deep emotional revulsion against the whole prevailing ethos of the city. Yet after his conversion he had married, and relaxed. Strauss takes up Razi’s suggestion. Certainly, it would explain the otherwise rather puzzling difference between Aristophanes’ portrait of the man and that which we find in the writings of both Plato and Xenophon.9 For the ‘Socrates’ portrayed by Aristophanes would in this case be the earlier Socrates, before his conversion; whereas Plato and Xenophon were only interested in portraying the later, converted Socrates. Aristophanes’ play, the Clouds, had first been produced in 423 BCE, some 24 years prior to Socrates’ trial and death. It does indeed present him as an ascetic, a man obsessed with the things ‘above’; simply scoffing at the worship of Zeus, and urging the cult of completely new deities instead, not only ‘Clouds’ but also ‘Vortex’ and ‘Air’; and publicly unfolding the arguments of the ‘Unjust Speech’, against the ‘Just Speech’, without compunction. Here, in other words, is a man entirely guilty of the ‘crimes’ – impiety, and reckless moral scepticism – for which he was at length condemned. But the ‘Socrates’ portrayed by Plato and Xenophon has been converted: basically, in the sense that he has learnt the need for prudent concealment. It is this concealment which at first fools Thrasymachus; but which, if Strauss is right, Thrasymachus very soon sees through. And Plato is also practising it, in the way the Republic is written. That is why Socrates’ ‘terrible’ agreement with Thrasymachus is only hinted at. And Strauss 9

See Strauss, Socrates and Aristophanes (New York: Basic Books, 1966).




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further urges us to note the context, in the dialogue, of Socrates’ eventual profession of friendship for the Chalcedonian. For it comes just after he has propounded the view that philosophy, in its full extent, is a proper study only for old men; from which the impetuous young should be shielded. Thus, he has fully acknowledged the intrinsic danger it poses to the city. Which is also the reason for his post-conversion strategy of ‘safe speaking’, or esotericism. V

Aristophanes caricatures early Socratic teaching as encouraging sons to beat up their fathers. This, according to Razi’s theory, is the impulse which the mature Socrates learnt to conceal. Certainly, one cannot imagine Plato’s Socrates speaking in anything like that spirit. The serious business of debate in the Republic only gets going after the rich old patriarch Kephalos has departed, to go and offer a sacrifice to the gods. Kephalos represents the authority of devout custom, and of unphilosophic class privilege. His departure is symbolic. The mature Socrates has learnt to be courteous to such people, and to hold his tongue in their presence. So why, then, was he condemned to death? The way Plato tells the story it becomes, in effect, evidence of the peculiar corruption of Athens. For here was a city, more than any other, infused with an ethos of isonomia, ‘equality with regard to law’. One which sought, in other words, to maximize the direct participation of all its citizens in the deliberation of public affairs. Plato’s Socrates does not in fact speak of the Athenian system as ‘isonomia’. Instead, he uses the derogatory term ‘demokratria’: ‘rule by the people’ – or ‘the mob’. And his philosophic politics is first and foremost a repudiation of that ethos, for its intrinsic instability; its constant tendency to whip up political excitement and agitation; its positive glamourization, thus, of sub-philosophic ‘opinion’. The advocates of the Athenian ethos saw it as a prophylactic against tyranny. Plato’s Socrates polemically denies its actual effectiveness in this regard; albeit without offering any actual empirical evidence.10 Not that Plato himself, the would-be advisor to those tyrants, Dionysos II of Syracuse and Hermeias of Atarneus, can really be called an implacable opponent of all tyranny. And, indeed, why should he be? After all, his first priority in political terms is to find the most desirable patrons for, and defenders of, philosophy; and no one could be more desirable in that role than a converted tyrant. No one else has so much, directly, to offer. The mature Socrates may have learnt not to be openly impious; but he remains, as Plato portrays him, quite open in his contempt for Athenian isonomia/demokratia. This is vividly expressed in the Republic. The best people by nature, he here remarks, constitute a ‘small band’ of, in the first instance, isolated individuals. Thus, 10

Republic, 562–70.


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the men who have become members of this small band have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession [philosophy] is. At the same time, they have seen sufficiently the madness of the many, and that no one who minds the business of cities does anything healthy, to say it in a word, and that there is no ally with whom one could go to the aid of justice and be preserved. Rather – just like a human being who has fallen in with wild beasts and is neither willing to join them in doing injustice nor sufficient as one man to resist all the savage animals – one would perish before he has been any use to city or friends and be of no profit to himself or others. Taking all this into the calculation, he keeps quiet and minds his own business – as a man in a storm, when dust and rain are blown about by the wind, stands aside under a little wall.11 And, therefore, philosophic politics – as the uniting together of these hitherto isolated individuals – will not be a matter of philosophers contributing, in their capacity as citizens, to public debate, on an equal footing with non-philosophers. But it can only involve them laying claim to a privileged role, if not as actual rulers themselves, then at any rate as counsellors to those who rule; seeking so far as possible to build up the ‘little wall’ under which they are sheltered. The Athenians condemned their best counsellor to death. Nothing, for Plato, could more dramatically illustrate the intrinsic folly of a system which did so little to restrain the incontinence of unphilosophic ambition. Best of all, from Plato’s point of view, would be a system which, so far as possible, completely eradicated such ambition at source. And hence the strict disciplinarianism of his practical proposals, both in the Republic and in the Laws. What he is developing in these works is a systematic utopian scheme of therapy, to deal with the main threats, as he sees them, to proper social stability. The stability of civic order is threatened, above all, by the energies of incontinent private greed; by men being overconcerned with their domestic interests, as a basis for political engagement, to the detriment of larger loyalties; and by a lack of sufficient reverence for the city’s laws. Very well then, to counteract the potential disruptiveness of greed, in the Republic Socrates proposes that the ruling classes should, so far as possible, cease to have any private property at all. While in the second best, but more readily conceivable, city of the Laws there will at any rate be strict regulations, including a complete ban on any trade of land, to restrict the scope for self-enrichment. To deal with the tension between true public-spiritedness and domestic concerns, the ruling classes of the Republic will effectively be denied any private family life whatever. Also, in both regimes women will be educated like men, so that even they, the chief advocates of 11

Ibid., 496 c–d; translation by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968).




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domestic concern, will have been trained to look at things from the whole city’s point of view. And, whereas Socrates had been condemned for his alleged impiety towards the gods of a corrupted city, when it comes to the backing up of good laws Plato for his part absolutely wants to promote popular piety. Thus, in the Laws, in order to preserve the supposedly god-given sanctity of the legal system, his spokesman, the Athenian Stranger, further proposes the most stringent measures for the punishment of aggressive blasphemy: five years or more of intensive brainwashing for those blasphemers who are judged capable of redemption; life imprisonment, in total isolation, for the irredeemable. But these are utopian dreams; long-term aspirations; wild, playful fantasies. Plato’s more immediate strategy (as Strauss sees it) is to try and build appropriate alliances. If we cannot have actual philosopher rule, then let us at any rate be spared the disruptive rule of ambitious self-made men; let us have gentlemanly rulers, who were born to the role. Aristophanes, in the Clouds, portrays the young Socrates as openly parading the subversive arguments of the ‘Unjust Speech’, against the ‘Just Speech’. In terms of this debate, to be a true gentleman is to be a sincere, conventional and hence quite unphilosophical upholder of the ‘Just Speech’. The older, ‘converted’ Socrates of the Republic, on the other hand, ostensibly argues in defence of the ‘Just Speech’ against Thrasymachus, that unphilosophical scorner of gentlemanliness – not, however, because he has become a gentleman himself, but because he has become a deeper philosopher. Thrasymachus for his part can get away with his disrespectful attitude, because he lays no claim to any sort of moral authority and because his political skills are so useful to the city’s rulers. Philosophy, though, is much more of a potential threat to them, and much less useful. Perceiving now how vulnerable this makes it, Socrates sets out not only to dissemble his ongoing basic disagreements with the gentlemen, but also, so far as possible, to mobilize the unphilosophical skills of Thrasymachus, and his kind, in philosophy’s cause. According to Strauss, this is the real secret of Platonic piety. Neither Plato’s Socratic doctrine of post-mortem rewards and punishments, nor the later ‘theology’ of the Laws and Epinomis are to be taken altogether at face value. But here, on the contrary, we have the actual confluence of the ‘way of Socrates’ with the ‘way of Thrasymachus’ in his thought. To say it once more: where the intrinsic moral scepticism of philosophy is vulgarized it poses an immediate threat to the stability of society. And yet philosophers, as an elite class, want maximum social stability. Therefore they need continually to rebuild, in public, what in private they pull down. This is why, in the Republic, 414–15, Socrates speaks of the need for ‘exalted myths’, or ‘noble lies’, to persuade people, who are unable to grasp the full philosophical rationale for class distinction, nevertheless to accept it as something natural. But social stability also depends upon people regarding the rule of law, in general, as something sacred; the more sacred, the better. And are not ‘exalted myths’, or ‘noble lies’, equally required for that purpose?


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Consider the argument of the Crito: a dialogue set in Socrates’ prison cell, shortly before dawn, a little while after his condemnation to death. His friend Kriton has come to visit him, and tries to persuade him to escape. It will not be difficult. Indeed, it seems, public opinion more than half expects it. And Kriton is concerned about the impact on his own reputation if he does not do all in his power to help smuggle Socrates out. But Socrates says no. Why not? By way of an answer he conjures up a sort of poetic theophany: he imagines himself on the point of making his getaway, when the Laws of Athens suddenly appear, in the form of a divine chorus, to address him. They would surely be outraged, he argues. We brought you into the world, they would say; we reared you, and educated you; for it was only thanks to the order which we guarantee that these things were possible. So you ought to respect us even more deeply than you respect your own father. Yes, and when you had become an adult, you quite voluntarily remained within our jurisdiction. That means you sealed an implicit, solemn covenant with us. It was not we who have wronged you; but your enemies misused us, to do so. And therefore you have no right to strike out at us, as you would, by running off. Notwithstanding Socrates’ consistent hostility to the actual democratic ethos of Athenian law, he strongly commends this point of view to Kriton. And Kriton is persuaded. But is Socrates actually setting out his real reasons here for not wanting to flee? Strauss suggests not. Elsewhere Socrates speaks of all his major decisions in life being guided by the inner promptings of a special daimo¯nion, or prophetic voice. Yet that is not how he justifies his decision in the Crito, at all. Evidently, Strauss remarks, Kriton did not believe in the daimo¯nion. The argument which Socrates develops in the Crito is an argument specifically intended for Kriton’s needs; and Kriton is not a philosopher on Socrates’ own level. As Strauss puts it: The logos which convinces Socrates would not convince Kriton and vice versa. Kriton is concerned above all with what the people of Athens will say if he has not helped Socrates to escape from prison: what Socrates tells Kriton, Kriton can and will tell the people.12 Through Kriton, in other words, Socrates is addressing the unphilosophically minded general public; in particular, philosophy’s proper allies, the gentry. This is philosophy’s message to them. What is to count as sacred? For the community of true Platonist philosophers themselves, it is nothing other than their own activity. It is everything that comes to expression in the voice of the Socratic daimo¯nion: the philosophic conscience, within each individual 12

Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983): 66.




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philosopher. Or it is what stirs within the whole phenomenon of psuche´, ‘soul’ – which is surely the same, the universal principle behind each philosopher’s daimo¯nion. Within mortals, one might say, psuche´ is the latent capacity for philosophic study; it is what philosophic study, uniquely, develops. The word originally meant ‘breath’; or ‘breath of life’. Hence, for Socrates it comes to mean the true life of the mind. Or: the gift of eternal life, inasmuch as it is the appropriating of the deepest, undying meaning of things. It is the spirit of true rationality, at work both within us and, more generally, throughout the cosmos as a whole. But, once again, the sacredness of psuche´ can only ever be appreciated by the community of philosophers themselves; and in relation to the outside world they therefore become evangelists for quite another form of piety, a veneration for the rule of law, which, crypto-anarchists as they are, they do not exactly believe in, themselves.13 In the Phaedo, these two levels of the sacred are in fact directly juxtaposed. Thus: first, the primary Socratic notion of psuche´ is painstakingly distinguished from other notions, closer associated with the life of the body; that is to say, the life of unphilosophical impulse. No sooner, however, is that done than Socrates also launches into his myth, designed to reinforce the rule of law, about how the psuche´ of each individual ends up as a recipient of post-mortem rewards and punishments, corporeally imagined. This is quite clearly back-up to the sacred rule of law. For, just so, the Athenian Laws themselves, at the end of their speech in the Crito, likewise invoke the afterlife, to threaten Socrates: In that place beyond when the laws of the other world know that you have tried, so far as you could, to destroy even us their brothers, they will not receive you with a kindly welcome . . . 14 In a sense, there is a fundamental ambiguity about the myth in the Phaedo: to what extent is it to be read in a spirit of light-hearted playfulness? Or to what extent in a spirit of reverential awe? If Strauss is right, this ambiguity directly corresponds to the fact that the myth occurs in a context of conversation among philosophers which has, however, been put into a book, and is therefore always liable to come to the attention of non-philosophers. For, from the original Platonist point of view, myth is a means of persuasion directed only towards those unpersuadable by philosophic argument itself; and reverential awe, in this context, is therefore exclusively prescribed for non-philosophers. 13

14

Cf. ibid.: ‘Hobbes committed a grave exaggeration when he accused Socrates and his followers of being anarchists. The truth underlying that exaggeration is the fact that Socrates did not think that there could be an unqualified duty to obey the laws. But this did not prevent him from thinking, nay, it enabled him to think that the demand for such obedience is a wise rule of thumb as distinguished from an unqualifiedly valid law’. Crito 54 c.


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There is no need for the philosopher himself, in private, to take the notion of post-mortem judgement seriously at all. And moreover the same also goes for the whole relationship of Platonist philosophy to the priest’s domain of actual public liturgy. In itself, such philosophy is utterly alien to that domain. Pre-politically, the pure philosopher may meditate upon the divinity of what psuche´ recognizes, and appropriates, as the Form of the Good; or upon the divine creativity of the Demiurge, out of which psuche´ comes. Yet these are not deities to which one actually prays. And the only ultimate religious loyalty of such a philosopher is to the community of philosophers, itself; not, therefore, to any liturgical community. But philosophic politics requires compromise. For in every Greek city the authority of the laws was supposed to derive from their having been, originally, god-given. So it is that the Athenian Stranger, in the Laws, proposes such drastic punishments for aggressive impiety; even though he is himself perhaps in private, by conventional standards, just as much an ‘atheist’ as anyone. (At all events, his actual arguments against such ‘atheism’, in Book Ten, do seem quite ostentatiously feeble!) Here, indeed, what is being enforced is a quite new ideal form of popular religion: the official guardians of the proposed constitution, the nearest approximation to philosopher rulers in that scheme, are the members of the so-called ‘Nocturnal Council’, and when it comes to the study of the gods, we are told, these guardians will need to cultivate a twofold piety. On the one hand, they will need to venerate psuche´, as ‘the eldest of all the things that have partaken of coming into being’, the immortal ruler of all bodies;15 but, on the other hand, they will also need to venerate the divine orderliness of the operations of psuche´, especially, up in the physical heavens. And in the Epinomis, a companion piece to the Laws, which may well be Plato’s last work – or else perhaps, as Diogenes Laertius reports, the work of his immediate disciple Philip of Opus – the rationale of this proposed star-cult is further discussed. The Greeks did not traditionally worship the stars; to them, it was a foreign practice, something which belonged to Syria or Egypt. But let us adopt it, the Athenian Stranger urges in the Epinomis, and in our own Greek way improve it.16 The Nocturnal Council will be a gathering of legislators who are also astronomers: meeting under the night sky, they will seek, so far as possible, to translate the hidden orderliness of nature, as sublimely instantiated by the movement of the stars, into the ordering of their city. To worship the rationally trackable stars, as they dance ‘the fairest and most magnificent of all dances in the world’17, is to worship reason itself, the rationality of psuche´, at one remove. Philosophers, as such, will worship psuche´ direct, and unliturgically. But, as politicians, they 15 16 17

The Laws 967 d. Epinomis 987 d–e. Ibid., 982 e.




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will promote the liturgical worship of the stars as a necessary accommodation to the weakness of others, who, unlike them, need palpable objects on which to focus. In worshipping the stars, as symbols of objective reason, the general public will in principle be drawn to venerate the authority of the most rational of mortals, those expert astronomers, the guardians themselves. And so the sacred liturgy, too, will become a direct instrument of their rule. It will become an ideal public context in which to harness the unphilosophical energies of poetry, politically, to serve philosophy. Such, according to the Straussian interpretation, is the grand original strategy of Plato. Of course, one can always read Plato as a much less devious writer than Strauss suggests; it is, after all, in the nature of esotericism to permit alternative readings. But I agree with him, at any rate to the extent that, as it seems to me, his interpretation gives us a much more distinctively interesting and enduringly relevant Plato than any other. VI

Not only Plato, but Xenophon as well, and several others in the first generation of post-Socratic philosophers, wrote dialogues as, in general, a form for dramatizing the contrast between different levels of communication. Aristotle, however, the pre-eminent philosopher of the following generation, is a writer of treatises. What has happened here? When one compares Aristotle to Plato, the difference in style surely reflects a distinct lessening of political hope; leading to a diminished concern for political subtlety. With regard to the life of the city, Aristotle is an altogether more detached, more purely observational thinker. So that, where Plato is preoccupied with the strategic relationship of the philosophical community to the outside world, Aristotle by contrast is much more interested in that community’s internal affairs: its pedagogical organization; the construction of a curriculum. And the same also goes for the later Greek ‘Middle Platonists’ and ‘Neo-Platonists’, generally. But then comes the process by which philosophy gets transported into new cultural contexts. And things start to get politically interesting again. The first great transition was from Greek culture to Latin culture: the key strategist, in this case, being Cicero.18 That, though, was a relatively straightforward process, by comparison with what followed. What really re-ignites the whole issue of philosophy-as-strategy, in quite a new way, is its problematic adaptation to biblical, and qur’anic culture. Farabi, in the preface to his short summary of Plato’s Laws, tells a little story. A parable. Once upon a time – so Farabi’s story goes – there was a holy man. This man was famous for his strict ascetic way of life. Also, he was known as 18

Strauss briefly discusses Cicero in Natural Right and History, 153–6.


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one who always told the truth. But he lived in a city ruled by a tyrant, who feared the truth; and at length it came to such a pass that the tyrant ordered his arrest. The holy man went into hiding. He needed to escape the city, yet there were guards at every gate, all on the lookout for him. So what did he do? In the evening, he put on gaudy clothes and went out singing, clashing a pair of cymbals above his head; reeling around as if drunk. He came to the city gate. ‘Who goes there?’ ‘Me? I’m that holy man you’re looking for’, he answered. Drolly, teasingly. ‘Oh yes, very funny’, said the guard, and let him go. Thus, once again, the holy man had told the truth. But got away. The parable speaks of a Muslim holy man; the philosopher is not a Muslim holy man, but, like the holy man of the parable, he too sometimes speaks the truth in such a way as to disguise it from the ordinary representatives of law and order. That is how it was with Plato, Farabi is saying – and so too, by implication, with any true follower of Plato, like Farabi himself. Unlike Plato, Farabi does not write dialogues. But, instead, he writes commentaries. He uses the exoteric form of the commentary, on esoteric texts, as the medium for his own esoteric message. With special reference to Farabi’s passage on Plato’s combining of the two ‘methods’, that of Socrates and that of Thrasymachus, Strauss remarks: ‘We admire the ease with which Farabi invented Platonic speeches’.19 In dealing with esoteric texts, it is the commentator’s privilege, first, ‘inventively’ to unwrap the hidden meaning; and then in a sense to wrap it up again, this time half-concealing their own deep agreement with it under the disguise of a mere objective, antiquarian report on texts belonging, after all, to an alien, far-off world. Strauss – in the context of what may indeed very well be read as a mere objective, antiquarian report on an Islamic thinker of a thousand years ago – is implicitly commending Farabi’s work, here, as a model of such commentary in general. But the form of commentary also offers another means of esoteric communication: namely, by omission. Take for instance Farabi’s handling of the question of the soul’s immortality. We have already noted Strauss’s reading of the original Platonic doctrine, in the Phaedo and elsewhere; according to which, belief in post-mortem rewards and punishments is necessary for non-philosophers, not because it is true, but rather because it is the only way in which people incapable of philosophic insight can effectively be persuaded to respect the rule of law, as they ought. That, according to Strauss, is why Plato portrays Socrates expounding it in such elaborate poetic terms, quite clearly set apart from his sober, properly philosophic manner elsewhere: he does so in order to signal the purely exoteric significance of the doctrine. But Farabi’s situation is of course quite different from Plato’s. For in Plato’s world people were free either to affirm or not to affirm a belief in post-mortem 19

Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy?, 154.




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rewards and punishments, but in Farabi’s world by contrast such belief had become publicly obligatory. And therefore Farabi had no need to emulate Plato’s actual mythopoeic performance in this regard. Instead, he simply had to affirm the orthodox Islamic view – as, at one level, in his more exoteric texts he does. Yet, Strauss argues, he also quite clearly signals his actual adherence to a very different esoteric understanding: both in his commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and in his book on Plato. For in the first case he exploits the role of commentator to affirm the Aristotelian view, that for the philosopher there is only the happiness of this life; which is its own ‘immortal’ reward. And in the latter case he manages – very strikingly! – to discuss the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, the Gorgias and the Republic without even once so much as alluding to the Socratic doctrine of the immortality of the soul. This silence, Strauss suggests, speaks volumes. For why, after all, should an orthodox Muslim who also wished to be a Platonist philosopher omit to mention the very element in Plato’s exoteric doctrine most readily presentable as a direct anticipation of qur’anic truth? There can be only one explanation: Farabi was not in actual fact the orthodox Muslim he wished on the surface to appear. But his show of orthodoxy was, entirely, a matter of his following, for himself, the Platonically adapted ‘way of Thrasymachus’. And his silence here was meant to convey this, to the elite few, his proper audience, who would be well enough informed to notice and understand it. Tacitly, he is saying that what matters in Plato is not how Plato points towards the truth of faith but, on the contrary, how he points beyond faith, in the direction of an altogether higher realm of truth.20 At the same time, however, as good Platonists, Farabi and his followers still did believe in the political necessity of faith. And this then also led them to a decisive, albeit mythic, re-envisioning of authentic prophethood, as the ideal of the very highest human wisdom. Farabi’s successor Ibn Sina expresses the point with perhaps some considerable boldness when he remarks of Plato’s Laws that here we have the standard philosophic work on prophecy, as a general category.21 Now, of course, there is no mention of ‘prophecy’, in anything even remotely resembling the Islamic sense, in the Laws! But it is a dialogue intended, so to speak, as a prolegomenon to the work of philosophic legislation. The implication is plain: for the Platonist faylasuf, the true prophet is not only a mouthpiece for divine revelation but also, at a deeper level, a philosophic legislator. And so, for the faylasuf, Muhammad has become the symbolic ideal Platonist politician.

20 21

Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 11–15. Indeed, Strauss actually puts this remark of Ibn Sina’s at the head of his own commentary: The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975): 1.


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VII

Plato, Farabi, Strauss: here we have three quite different modes of philosophic esotericism. Plato develops his esotericism through the medium of the fictional dialogue. Esotericism requires a literary form which will allow the philosopher to express ideas without necessarily owning them; and the Platonic dialogue form does this, quite admirably. But then so does the form of the commentary. Farabi does not need to write fresh Platonic dialogues, because as a commentator he is immediately involved in a dialogue with Plato himself, and with Aristotle. While, as for Strauss: he is a commentator on commentators. So he commentates on Farabi’s commentaries on Plato and Aristotle; and then on ben Maimon, and on Spinoza, as philosophical commentators on scripture. For Plato and Farabi, discretion is imposed upon philosophy by the all too obvious danger of violent repression by anti-philosophic rulers. For Strauss, however, the danger is, far rather, that the intrinsic all-dissolving scepticism of philosophy, towards established values, will get swallowed up into the mere irresponsibility of sub-philosophic would-be cultural revolutionaries: la trahison des clercs. Strauss is an esotericist essentially for fear of being misunderstood, in that sense. All three are advocates of a strategic ‘live and let live’ relationship between condescending philosophy and ordinary folk religion. But Plato differs from his successors in that he is not content with the particular form of folk religion actually prevailing in his world; which of course for him was the folk religion of Socrates’ accusers. And so he sets out to legislate for another form, altogether more schoolmasterly moralistic, better suited to play the role of esoteric philosophy’s exoteric partner. Strauss, in particular, is altogether more conservative. At this level he just wants to affirm whatever is going to be most effective in bonding people together; and for that purpose it is precisely the most familiar forms of shared belief and practice that are most likely to be effective. So he upholds the familiar, pretty well regardless of any other criterion. For my part, I think the whole Straussian approach goes wrong here, basically because it is too lenient – not only towards the mere class prejudices of the philosopher elite themselves, but also towards the ordinary dishonesties of folk religion. What is truly desirable, in my view, is none other than the very maximum stringency of open critique, both ways. While, as for Strauss’s diagnosis of la trahison des clercs: again, compare Benda’s. What Benda blames ‘traitorous’ intellectuals for is simply their reluctance to trust in pure dispassionate reason alone; their corruption by what he calls ‘the need for pathos’, luring them towards the excitement and emotional intensity of fascist and other suchlike forms of propaganda, because of its emotional power. This though, as I have said, is in my view far too sweeping a diagnosis. The underlying problem is not pathos-infused thought as such. But, rather, la




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trahison des clercs arises from intellectuals’ indulgence in one particular species of pathos, what elsewhere I have termed the ‘pathos of glory’ – as opposed to that other species, the ‘pathos of shakenness’, which is, on the contrary, absolutely incompatible with any sort of totalitarian or oppressive impulse.22 I think the basic trouble with Benda is that he completely lacks any strategy for constructive solidarity building. In his, it seems to me, quite inhuman sheer repudiation of all ‘pathos’ he is by implication ruling out not just propaganda politics, but all popular political organization; not just propaganda religion, but all organized religion. And moreover he is doing so in the most arbitrary way – almost as if without noticing what his argument implies. How, after all, can there ever be any effective form of organized solidarity without at any rate some appeal to ‘pathos’? It seems, in fact, that Benda is really not interested in solidarity building; but only in denunciation. Strauss, by contrast, is much more discriminating. The way he sees it, la trahison des clercs arises out of that particular type of pathos-infused thought which is filled with a wild optimism about the possibility of new moral ideas impacting, in revolutionary fashion, on society at large. It is such misguided optimism which creates the problem, he thinks. Against Strauss, however, I would argue that the typical optimism of totalitarian thinkers only becomes lethal because it is mixed with something else. The real problem, in my view, surely lies in these thinkers’ quite shameless indulgence of corporate conceit. Both their own corporate conceit and that of their allies. The corrupt ‘pathos of glory’ is pathos designed to flatter such conceit; the countervailing ‘pathos of shakenness’ is pathos serving to call it in question. Underlying la trahison des clercs is an optimistic bid for power by way of flattery: the corporate conceit of intellectuals intertwining with the corporate conceit of those whose patronage or friendship might give them that power. And what the nightmare experiences of twentieth-century totalitarianism therefore have to teach us is the need for a thinking which remains resolutely resistant to any form of corporate conceit whatever. Benda’s critique is too sweeping; Strauss’s is misdirected, for the simple reason that, as a protagonist of solidarity among philosophers as such, he fails to give due priority to this aspect of the matter. For what else, after all, is Platonist philosophic politics, itself, if not precisely the corporate conceit of the philosopher class interacting with the corporate conceit of other classes? Straussian pessimism certainly precludes that interaction from turning totalitarian. But why not, altogether more radically, look to what might transcend all corporate conceit in the first place?

22

Again, this contrast is the central theme of my book ‘What Is Truth?’ Towards a Theological Poetics (London: Routledge, 2001).


5 Anti-Philosophical Philosophy (I): Koje`ve’s Critique of the ‘Cloistered Mind’

I

Authentic philosophers are those most skilled in the articulation of spiritual shakenness by way of prosaic argument; the strategy of Platonist philosophic politics is an expression of pride in that specific skill. And one elementary objection to Platonism has to do with the way in which Plato polarizes the dialectical relationship between philosophy and poetry into an outright rivalry, polemically therefore devaluing the truth-potential inherent in a poetic evocation of what I would term the ‘pathos of shakenness’, in order by contrast to exalt the greater conceptual precision of philosophical prose. Such is the critique developed perhaps most vividly by Nietzsche; also by Heidegger; and then again, in a different way, by Gilles Deleuze for instance. It is not clear how Strauss responds to this. His general warmth towards Nietzsche and Heidegger perhaps indicates that he would agree with them. Another no less basic objection, however, is that which is developed, in especially striking fashion, by Strauss’s critical friend, Alexandre Koje`ve. Strauss and Koje`ve first met in the 1920s, and became close in the early 1930s, when both were living in Paris; Strauss the German-born American student, briefly there on a Rockefeller Fellowship, and Koje`ve the young Russian emigre´. In 1954 they jointly published a book, On Tyranny: containing a study, by Strauss, of Xenophon’s philosophical dialogue, the Hiero; a review of that study, by Koje`ve; and a ‘restatement’, largely in response to Koje`ve’s review, by Strauss.1 In the course of that ‘restatement’ Strauss pays fulsome tribute to Koje`ve, whom he describes as a somewhat ‘shocking’ thinker, but also as one of ‘the very few who know how to think and who love to think’.2 And yet, Koje`ve’s critique of his whole approach is certainly quite radical. 1

2

The original was published in French. The first English translation appeared in 1964; but the definitive text is the second edition, which also includes the Strauss–Koje`ve correspondence, 1932–65: On Tyranny, edited by Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (New York: Free Press, 1991). Ibid., 185. (‘In a word’, he goes on, ‘Koje`ve is a philosopher and not an intellectual’ – for Strauss, the latter term is essentially derogatory.)


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II

So Koje`ve writes: I differ from Strauss and the ancient tradition he would like to follow, [inasmuch as it] rests on an aristocratic prejudice (perhaps characteristic of a conquering people). For I believe that the idea and the practice of the ‘intellectual elite’ involves a very serious danger which the philosopher as such should want to avoid at any cost.3 He is indeed just as much an advocate of anti-theological philosophy as Strauss; his anti-‘elitism’ is anything but priestly in character. In fact, it renders him a far more overtly irreligious thinker than Strauss is. Only the point is, here we have anti-theological philosophy tempered by a powerful impulse towards the very sort of direct activist engagement, by philosophers, within the world of modern mass democracy, that Strauss deplores. Transpolitically, as we shall see, Koje`ve is actually a hyper-elitist: he thinks of himself, and of his friends, as nothing less than atheist ‘gods’! But he nevertheless completely repudiates Strauss’s elitism at the level of politics. Indeed, he advocates direct engagement, by philosophers, in the affairs of modern mass democracy – as much as possible, ideally, compatible with the demands upon their time of study – not as contributing to some supplementary good, in addition to the good of philosophical wisdom itself, but, on the contrary, for philosophy’s own sake. Such engagement is necessary, he thinks, in order to keep philosophy alert. For the specific form of elitism he wants to criticize is the elitism of what he calls the ‘cloistered mind’. Such a mind may be highly sophisticated. However, he argues, in so far as it is ‘cloistered’ it inevitably tends also to be closed: It can [so] easily happen that only those are admitted in its midst, who accept the prejudices on which the ‘cloister’ believes in can pride itself. Now, Philosophy is, by definition, something other than [the fullness of] Wisdom: it inevitably involves ‘subjective certainties’ that are not the Truth, in other words ‘prejudices’. The philosopher’s duty is to turn away from those prejudices as quickly and as completely as possible. Now, any closed society that adopts a doctrine, any ‘elite’ selected in terms of a doctrinal teaching, tends to consolidate the prejudices entailed by that doctrine. The philosopher who shuns prejudices therefore has to try to live in the wide world (in the ‘market place’ or ‘in the street’, like Socrates) rather than in a ‘cloister’.4 3 4

Ibid., 154. Ibid., 155.


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The ‘cloistered mind’, in the sense intended here, may be the mentality of a particular philosophic sect, as such; or it may be the mentality of a pluralistic other-worldly ‘republic of letters’, prejudicially favouring an easy-going relativism. Either way, it is all too complacent. Strauss, in Koje`ve’s view, is just not critical enough of the tendency, immediately inherent in any form of philosophic other-worldliness, towards the ‘cloistered mind’. The Straussian approach to ‘philosophic politics’ fundamentally prioritizes the philosophers’ need for a calm and tranquil social environment, in which to pursue their studies. But, Koje`ve protests, philosophy does not only need calm. It also needs constant stimulus and challenge, from outside its own circle. And in modern conditions, where there is nothing any longer to prevent philosophers from plunging into public affairs, plunge in they therefore should. For Koje`ve, philosophers should have no inhibitions about seeking also to be rulers. In stark contrast to Strauss, who, prioritizing the philosopher’s need for calm, naturally stresses the purely utopian nature of Plato’s dream republic, Koje`ve for his part celebrates the notion of the philosopher ruler as an, he thinks, perfectly realistic ideal. And, moreover, he actually sought, so far as he was able, to embody it in his own life. In the years following the Second World War he occupied a senior position in the French ministry of foreign economic affairs. As to this, Stanley Rosen remarks: His political influence in the government – through his membership in the ministry and in the French legation to GATT and to the United Nations, in which he functioned as a self-taught economist of world class – was perhaps second only to that of General de Gaulle. So Koje`ve told me; and his self-assessment was confirmed for me by Raymond Aron and Andre´ Philip, the latter the head of the French legation to GATT. According to Philip, whereas the other participating nations had a specialist for each article of the international treaty on tariffs, France had Koje`ve, who was a specialist on all the articles.5 He became a politician by no means accidentally, in philosophic terms; but very much in accordance with his ongoing reflection on the ideal nature of philosophic vocation. One might perhaps compare Hannah Arendt. In The Human Condition Arendt also develops a systematic historiographical critique of Platonism, for its devaluation of the virtues of true political ‘action’. Only, the difference is that, unlike Koje`ve, she has no very clear alternative strategy for the involvement of philosophers, as such, in politics. Thus, The Human Condition is a philosophical celebration of activist political free-spiritedness; but there is little sense here of what 5

Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987): 92.



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difference, if any, a philosophical formation might make to the actual form of one’s political engagement. Koje`ve, by contrast, has a much clearer doctrine in this regard. III

In On Tyranny, Strauss responds to Koje`ve’s critique with an extended account of his own philosophic ideal. The upshot of which is that what Koje`ve denounces here as the corruption of philosophy – philosophy corrupted by being mixed with the mere reactionary prejudices of a privileged elite class as such – Strauss, on the contrary, simply sees as a natural outworking of proper philosophic friendship.6 For philosophy, obviously, thrives on conversation. But it is a question of what sort of conversation really counts in this regard. Koje`ve’s argument is grounded in the supposition that the need is for a maximum exposure to conversation, about matters of serious public concern, with all different sorts and conditions of people. But Strauss responds that the only sort of conversation which ultimately counts, for the promotion of true philosophic insight, is conversation among those who are philosophically competent. That is to say: philosophers conversing among themselves, as equals and friends. And so how then is one to decide between these two positions? Strauss wants to keep philosophy, so far as possible, rigorously segregated from the sort of thinking practised by political campaigners, because he fears lest the immediate enthusiasms involved in political activism will tend to compromise the proper radicality of the true philosopher’s self-questioning. But Koje`ve, on the contrary, wants to keep philosophy, so far as possible, closely engaged in the world of political campaigning, in order to preserve it from the mentality of the ivory tower. Note, however: it is not that Koje`ve by any means ignores the danger which Strauss’s contemplative self-distancing from politics is meant to ward off. Far rather, the difference between them is the difference between two contrasting strategies of defence against that danger. For, whereas Strauss opts for a basic contemplative withdrawal from politics, to observe and comment on it from a distance, Koje`ve for his part advocates a mixture: activist political engagement – informed by the most radical irony. No outward self-distancing from the public domain, in other words – no diminution of direct conversational exposure to the political concerns of plain folk, the salt of the earth – but, nevertheless, a very considerable inner self-distancing. One finds something of the same in the work of the original pioneers of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, for instance – inasmuch as these are thinkers quite clearly self-identified as Marxists; the whole of whose work, however, is also a ceaseless game of irony, designed to assert their ultimate independence from the mindset 6

Strauss, On Tyranny, 194–203.


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of party propaganda. Adorno and Horkheimer, therefore, constantly parade their fundamental contempt for mass culture. Their writing is, very largely, a chain of highbrow allusions: nudges, winks, knowing witticisms, a constant showing off of erudition. So that it almost seems as if their being Marxists is, for them, essentially a sort of moral counterweight; the whole aim of which is just to give them license to indulge in intellectual snobbery. But Koje`ve is not like that. He is indeed, I think, far more genuinely, and delightfully, outrageous. Thus, his irony is all in his historicism: the sheer Olympian flourish of it. Koje`vian wisdom is a matter of being right in the midst of the action, politically, and yet at the same time also surveying it, as it were, from far, far away; in the very loftiest sort of modernist grand-narrative terms. The loftiness, here, is meant to preserve the philosopher’s properly philosophic detachment, against the dangers which preoccupy Strauss – even though the whole point of the story, as it tells of the progressive emergence of Truth through political action, is nevertheless to vindicate a certain sort of direct engagement in non-philosophic affairs. And the result is pure irony. Koje`ve is indeed notorious for the extravagance with which he proclaims the ‘end of History’. In a sense, all forms of grand narrative necessarily do this: every grand narrative originates as the world-historical tale of the emergence of the possibility of the narrator’s own innovatory philosophic worldview; by definition, therefore, every narrator of such a tale stands at the end of the particular ‘world history’ in question. But Koje`ve is an exceptionally bold artist in the genre. He is exceptionally bold, in that his perspective on world history is so exceptionally lofty. The greater the abstract simplicity of the grand-narrative plot, the loftier the perspective, as the concrete details of history begin to vanish in the distance, down below. And Koje`ve’s is a tale of very great abstract simplicity. For him, the end of ‘History’ is quite simply the decisive theoretic overthrow of reactionary master morality. That is to say: the final tipping point in the age-old struggle between, on the one hand, those for whom morality is, in effect, a mere glamourizing of the distinctive ethos of the ruling class as such, and, on the other hand, their critics; the tipping point, after which the eventual world-historic victory of the critics is patently assured. This moment, he thinks, arrives in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution: once the initial chaos of the Revolution has actually settled down into a potentially stable, yet still evangelistic, system of post-revolutionary rule, the regime of Napoleon. For here, at last, we have a regime explicitly deriving its claim to legitimacy from the consent of the people, in general, and from its defence of universal, classtranscendent human rights. Hence, in the Koje`vian story, Napoleon himself becomes the great symbol of a new ideal form of mastery; for the first time, a form of mastery altogether beyond reactionary master morality. And ever since that time, as he sees it, the world has in fact



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been moving inexorably towards the establishment of a ‘universal homogeneous state’, on the basis of those key principles. But the real beginning of the ‘end’, he also argues, arrived when, contemporaneously with Napoleon, for the first time a philosopher arose who, with unprecedented cogency, identified the highest Wisdom with a comprehensive understanding of world history, as a development in this direction. The great prophet of the ‘end of History’, in Koje`ve’s view, is actually Hegel. Poetically, indeed, he dates the advent of the truth with which he is preoccupied to that precise moment, in the morning of 14 October, 1806, when Hegel – then a lecturer at the University of Jena, and just putting the finishing touches to the final chapter of his masterpiece, the Phenomenology of Spirit, the chapter entitled ‘Absolute Knowing’ – heard in the distance the tremendous rumble of cannon fire, as Napoleon’s army engaged and overwhelmed the defenders of the old order at the Battle of Jena. ‘Absolute Knowing’ is Hegel’s term for the very purest philosophic free-spiritedness, fully informed by historical self-awareness; philosophy which has thereby decisively completed its modern process of emancipation from master morality. There is no explicit reference in Hegel’s own text to Napoleon. But Koje`ve is determined to underline the significance of this historic conjuncture. His writing here bristles with italics: Hegel, he argues, is the true pioneer of ‘Absolute Knowing’, above all because ‘on the one hand, he lives in Napoleon’s time, and, on the other, is the only one to understand him’. Indeed, he goes on: Absolute Knowledge became – objectively – possible because in and by Napoleon the real process of historical evolution, in the course of which man created new Worlds and transformed himself by creating them, came to its end . . . And – subjectively – absolute Knowledge became possible because a man named Hegel was able to understand the World in which he lived and to understand himself as living in and understanding this World.7 Straussian/Platonist philosophic politics is in essence the negotiation of a certain alliance between philosophy and the gentler, more civilized forms of master morality, on the grounds that, while it is certainly true that philosophy in itself involves a fundamental transcendence of simple master morality, it nevertheless needs non-philosophic protectors. And the ‘cloistered mind’, in its fundamental withdrawal from the sort of progressive activism which requires grand-narrative legitimation, understands the highest Wisdom, essentially, as an insight into the timelessness of timeless truth. That is what Strauss, as a Platonist, wants to go back to. But, against Strauss, Koje`ve refuses any such retreat 7

Koje`ve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, English translation by James H. Nichols, edited by Allan Bloom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980): 35.


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from the political struggle against master morality. And, following Hegel, he therefore believes in philosophy absolutely immersed into the study of history. IV

Koje`ve’s most famous work is his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel; a collection of texts not actually put together by himself, but by the poet and novelist Raymond Queneau, deriving from the lectures he had delivered, on the Phenomenology of Spirit, at the Ećole des Hautes E´tudes in Paris from 1933 to 1939.8 This book came out in 1947, and had a major impact on the French intellectual scene. For a while, the wonderful audacity of Koje`ve’s Hegel interpretation rendered him, as Rosen puts it, ‘the most famous and the most admired thinker in France’.9 And in the 1990s his thinking was also taken up again, this time in the USA by Francis Fukuyama.10 As I have said, Hegel’s book is a study of ‘Geist’ in the sense of the impulse to perfect open-mindedness. It traces the struggles of that impulse, at every different level of experience, from the most abstract to the most concrete. But Koje`ve’s interpretation focuses, above all, on just one strand of the argument. For him, the key passage is to be found in Chapter 4A of the Phenomenology; the section entitled by Hegel ‘Independence and Dependence of Self-consciousness: Lordship and Bondage’.11 This is, in effect, Hegel’s account of the trans-historical state of nature. And, like all such accounts, it is meant to define the fundamental criteria for attributing philosophic ‘meaning’ to history, in general. Here, then, Hegel is considering the interaction of human individuals considered in complete abstraction from any specific historical context; the interaction, one might say, which most fundamentally defines human individuals as human. At this level, open-mindedness simply means: recognizing the other individual’s point of view as being worthy of respect. And it is precisely at this point that one encounters the elementary problem of what I am calling ‘master morality’. For ‘master morality’ may very well be defined as: morality decisively prioritizing the will to be recognized, oneself, over any uncoerced readiness to recognize the other. So that, in a culture governed by pure master morality, respect will only ever be given to those people who can forcibly compel it. And the one and only thing ultimately respected is domination. Hegel’s account of the original emergence of civilized society, out of the state of nature, traces the genesis of such a culture. For herein lies 8

9 10 11

Introduction a` la Lecture de Hegel, 2nd edition (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). (The English translation contains rather less than half of the French original.) Rosen, Hermeneutics and Politics, 107. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, English translation by A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977): 111–19.



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the fundamental obstacle to true open-mindedness whose overcoming becomes, for him, the whole meaning of History. Thus, at the beginning of Hegel’s (very abstractly told) story in this particular section of the Phenomenology the world is in a state of anarchy. Every individual demands that every other should recognize their claims; either that, or the offenders must die. None, however, wants to recognize the other. Hegel is not suggesting that this is how things ever quite were; but he is constructing an initial picture of the most radical social chaos, as a concept. It is the picture of a world essentially without sympathy, in which each regards the other merely as a dangerous animal, to be subdued. A world, therefore, in which human self-respect demands absolute belligerence, issuing in a constant life-and-death struggle between its various inhabitants. What these strugglers really want, however, is not the death of the other, but to be recognized by the other. They therefore prefer to enslave rather than kill; and some are willing to be enslaved rather than die. Still, the basic desire to be recognized is very far from being satisfied even for the most powerful of slave owners. For the only sort of recognition that is ultimately satisfying is recognition by another whom one truly respects. And the problem is, the master cannot truly respect the slave; to be recognized by one’s slave provides only the most primitive sort of satisfaction. What we ideally require from other people is a perfectly uncoerced, unslavish, willingness respectfully to recognize us. We need to be with people who recognize us – in the sense of not merely wanting to coerce us into their service – yet whom we, even without coercion, are nevertheless also willing to recognize with respect. And so how, starting from a world of masters and slaves, can the necessary movement towards ever deeper mutual respect actually be accomplished? Everything, Hegel in effect argues, depends upon the development of a culture in which people are recognized not so much for being dominant; but more for the work they do. It is the slaves who labour, and who are driven, by fear of their masters, in the most profound fashion to identify themselves as labourers. In the first instance, therefore, what is needed is a fundamental transformation in the self-perception of the slaves, their systematic emancipation from the whole mentality of slavishness, to affirm the proper dignity inherent in their work. And that is how Hegel then defines the basic goal of philosophically significant History; the dialectical process of which he further analyses in the following chapters of the Phenomenology, with allusive reference to sundry aspects of pagan Greek and Roman culture, the history of Christianity, the European Enlightenment, the French Revolution. V

Koje`ve adopts this basic Hegelian approach to the construction of philosophical grand narrative, and then develops it; still in the guise of a faithful commentator, but in fact very creatively.


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Unfortunately, he shares the general prejudice, typical of the ‘Left Hegelian’ tradition, against Hegel’s Christianity. And so he presents us with a ‘Hegel’ far less open to popular Christianity than the real Hegel was. Unlike the real Hegel, who criticizes spiritually slavish Christianity as a frequent, but by no means an intrinsic corruption of the gospel, this fictional ‘Hegel’ regards all Christianity as internalized slavishness. And where the real Hegel on the contrary affirms the essential, underlying truth of the gospel, Koje`ve with characteristic ‘Left Hegelian’ insouciance brusquely dismisses this as a bit of cynical window dressing. To that extent, Koje`ve’s ‘Hegel’ is in fact a much more simple-minded thinker than the real Hegel. And therefore, it seems to me, also a much less interesting one. To all intents and purposes, Koje`ve replaces Christ with Napoleon. For him, Napoleon – as the symbol of a form of enlightened mastery, set free from the limitations of mere reactionary master morality – is virtually a messianic figure. So he argues that enlightened rule is forever on its way, simply as a matter of properly perceived personal selfinterest, towards the development of the Napoleonic ideal; what he calls the ‘universal and homogeneous state’. For what is it that rulers most deeply require, in order to be truly ‘satisfied’? Again, it is what we all most deeply want: to be, in the fullest sense, ‘recognized’. By definition, though, this desire is limitless. Thus: man wants to be effectively ‘recognized’ by all of those whom he considers capable and hence worthy of ‘recognizing’ him. To the extent that the citizens of a foreign State, animated by a ‘spirit of independence’, successfully resist the head of some given State, he must necessarily recognize their human worth. He will therefore want to extend his authority over them . . . So that in the final analysis, the head of State will be fully ‘satisfied’ only when his State encompasses the whole of mankind. But – and this is where the old reactionary form of master morality is transcended – the ruler with a truly enlightened understanding of self-interest will also want to extend his authority as far as possible within the State itself, by reducing to a minimum the number of those capable of only a servile obedience. In order to make it possible for him to be ‘satisfied’ by their authentic ‘recognition’, he will tend to ‘enfranchise’ the slaves, ‘emancipate’ the women, and reduce the authority of families over children by granting them their ‘majority’ as soon as possible, to reduce the number of criminals and of the ‘unbalanced’ of every variety, and to raise the ‘cultural’ level (which clearly depends on the economic level) of all social classes to the highest degree possible.12 12

Koje`ve, ‘Tyranny and Wisdom’, in Strauss, On Tyranny, 145–6.



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From Koje`ve’s point of view, Napoleon symbolically represents this species of true, because both universalizing and homogenizing, self-interest on the part of a ruler, at the very highest level. In the flamboyantly atheist and, at the same time, altogether nonmoralistic Koje`vian scheme of things, Napoleon is therefore an ideal antithesis to Christ; he is the very incarnation of true nihilist wisdom. For, as Koje`ve also puts it, Napoleon himself is the wholly ‘satisfied’ Man, who, in and by his definitive Satisfaction, completes the course of the historical evolution of humanity. He is the human Individual in the proper and full sense of the word; because it is through him, through this particular man, that the ‘common cause’, the truly universal cause, is realized; and because this particular man is recognized, in his very particularity, by all men, universally.13 The one thing Napoleon lacks, Koje`ve argues, is philosophically articulate ‘Self-Consciousness’. And that, he suggests, is then what Hegel supplies. But this is not how Hegel himself saw things! It is true that, in the German political context, Hegel approved of a good many of the modernizing tendencies for which Napoleon stood, and which for example, in 1807, began to be introduced into the newly created French client kingdom of Westphalia: religious liberty and civil equality for all; open courts and trial by jury; the abolition of old aristocratic and guild privileges; an end to serfdom; generous state patronage of scholarship. Yet the fact is, there is no way that Hegel himself would have wanted to make anything like the extravagant claims which Koje`ve makes on his behalf, as a philosophic champion of the Napoleonic cause. The real Hegel could scarcely have regarded Napoleon as a quasi-messianic figure in the sense that Koje`ve suggests, for the simple reason that, even though Koje`ve cannot believe it, the real Hegel really was a Christian. He said he was. And, at some length, he also said why. Nor is there any reason, other than sheer prejudice, to doubt that he meant it. VI

Does it actually matter that Koje`ve’s fictional ‘Hegel’ is so different from the real Hegel? In one sense, no. For Koje`ve is not primarily just a Hegel scholar. He is a Hegel scholar very much as a means to other ends. First and foremost, he is a philosophic legislator, intent on developing his own distinctive vision of the proper vocation of intellectuals. As such, what he is essentially advocating is a paradoxical mix of maximum actual engagement in public affairs – for the sake of the stimulus this brings – with a maximum inner self-distancing from such engagement, 13

Koje`ve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 69.


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to enable a detached reflectiveness upon it. Engagement in public affairs naturally tends to ensnare one in the passions of partisan polemic, with the obvious risk of a narrow-minded closure to other perspectives. And yet the whole point of the Koje`vian grand narrative is to generate an ironical inner self-distancing from such narrow-mindedness. This, indeed, is surely why he proclaims the ‘end of History’. To Koje`ve, true wisdom is equally antithetical both to the ‘cloistered mind’ and to fanaticism. But to say that History, in the most significant sense of the word, has ‘ended’ is basically to say that, besides being ugly, fanaticism is also futile. And that therefore one need not, as an upholder of true freedom, be at all fanatical, oneself, in one’s opposition to its fanatical opponents. There is nothing of real historic substance to be gained from fanaticism, of any sort, because, in the long run, everything that, at the deepest level, truly matters is already settled. Koje`ve develops his argument against fanaticism with the very utmost gleeful facetiousness. And nowhere more so than in the justly famous footnote he added to the second edition of the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, revising his previous argument. At the time of delivering the original lectures he had seen the ‘end of History’ as a process begun around the period of the Napoleonic empire, but still significantly underway. Subsequently however, he tells us – to be precise, in 1948 – he had come to realize that his original formulation understated the actual finality of what had already been accomplished: Observing what was taking place around me and reflecting on what had taken place in the world since the Battle of Jena, I understood that Hegel [i.e. his fictional ‘Hegel’!] was right to see in this battle the end of History properly so-called. In and by this battle the vanguard of humanity virtually attained the limit and the aim, that is, the end, of Man’s historical evolution. What has happened since then was but an extension in space of the universal revolutionary force actualized in France by Robespierre-Napoleon. From the authentically historical point of view, the two world wars with their retinue of large and small revolutions had only the effect of bringing the backward civilizations of the peripheral provinces into line with the most advanced (real or virtual) European historical positions. If the sovietization of Russia and the communization of China are anything more than or different from the democratization of imperial Germany (by way of Hitlerism) or the accession of Togoland to independence, nay, the self-determination of the Papuans, it is only because the Sino-Soviet actualization of Robespierrian Bonapartism obliges post-Napoleonic Europe to speed up the elimination of the numerous more or less anachronistic sequels to its pre-revolutionary past.14 14

Ibid., 160.



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As for the passions of the Cold War: he breezily mocks the fanaticism on both sides by remarking that, from the point of view of true philosophy, one might even in a certain sense say that ‘the United States has already attained the final stage of Marxist ‘‘communism’’ ’.15 For it is perhaps as close to a society liberated from the old-fashioned forms of class-consciousness with which Marx is preoccupied as it is practically feasible to be. No one has ever been more seriously facetious, as a matter of principle, than Koje`ve was. Nor could he have been more altogether ambivalent in his response to the ‘end of History’. Fanaticism of course excludes ambivalence. But Koje`ve at the same time both affirmed the ultimate desirability of the ‘end of History’ and, equally, also lamented it. So, in the same footnote that I have just cited, he delivers a quite startlingly melancholy comment on the democratic future he envisages. The ‘end of History’ is, he suggests, the initiation of a process whereby the old sort of intellectual elitism – the sort nostalgically represented by Strauss for instance – is being rendered progressively redundant. In the mass society now emerging it will quite simply have no future. The highintellectual culture of that society will no longer involve any great impassioned struggles of religion or ideology. But instead it will tend, more and more, to approximate the model of what he here calls ‘Japanese snobbery’: the mere idle pursuit of refinement for refinement’s sake. The future is ‘Japanese’, for Koje`ve, in the sense that, of all previous cultures, pre-modern Japan is the one which in this regard most nearly anticipates it: the world of the Noh Theatre, the tea ceremony and suchlike; a culture of high refinement, largely devoid, however, of serious intellectual passion.16 The ‘end of History’, in this sense, does away with everything that is truly heroic in the life of the intellectual elite. To that extent, Koje`ve in effect concedes that Strauss’s nostalgia is justified: the advent of historic Truth means that, hereafter, intellectual ambition necessarily tends to degenerate into the most futile sort of effete pretentiousness. Mere snobbery supplants the genuine love of wisdom. Great art, great politics – and therefore great philosophy also – must tend, in this brave new world, to cease. From a purely philosophic point of view, he concedes, the prospect is entirely undesirable. And yet Koje`ve’s standpoint nevertheless still allows him ironically to welcome this prospect. How, then, to describe this higher-than-philosophic standpoint that he adopts? 15 16

Ibid., 161. Ibid., 161–2: it was, Koje`ve tells us, following a voyage made to Japan in 1959 that he came to see this. ‘There I was able to observe a Society that is one of a kind, because it alone has for almost three centuries experienced life at the ‘‘end of History’’ – that is, in the absence of all civil or external war (following the liquidation of feudalism by the roturier Hideyoshi and the artificial isolation of the country conceived and realized by his noble successor Yiyeasu) . . . ’.


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He himself inclined to describe it as ‘godlike’. In July 1968, shortly before his death, a Parisian literary periodical published an interview with him in which he, ruminatively, put it like this: It is true that philosophical discourse, like History, is closed. That idea irritates. Which is perhaps why the sages – those who succeed the philosophers and of whom Hegel is the first – are so rare, not to say nonexistent. It is true that you may not adhere to wisdom unless you are able to believe in your divinity. Well, people with a healthy esprit are very rare. To be divine: what does that mean? It might be Stoic wisdom or even play. Who plays? The gods: they have no need to react, and so they play. They are the do-nothing gods . . . I am a donothing . . . Yes, I am a do-nothing and I like to play. . . at this moment, for example.17 And Rosen, who quotes this, also recalls Koje`ve once remarking to him, ‘I tell my secretary that I am a god – but she laughs’.18 VII

Koje`ve and Strauss are equally irreligious thinkers. But what Strauss believes in concealing, Koje`ve believes in flaunting. Seriously facetious, he repudiates faith in God by calling himself a god, and calling his friends gods. In one sense, as I have said, I do not think it much matters that Koje`ve’s ‘Hegel’ is so different from the real Hegel. But then in another sense I think that perhaps, after all, it does matter. For here we see Koje`ve coming up against a form of Christian theology, infused with what he himself recognizes to be the very purest philosophic free-spiritedness. And how does he respond? He refuses to believe that it can be seriously meant. So absolute is his prejudice against theology, he sees no need to take it seriously, even in this case. He does not argue against Hegel’s theology; nor does he even begin to try and understand it, as theology, on its own terms. But, rather, he is, as the saying goes, in complete denial here. Nor, indeed, could anything more vividly demonstrate the ultimate sheer arbitrariness of his own atheism. How then are we mere ordinary mortals to respond to such ‘godlikeness’? When Koje`ve told his secretary that he was a god, she laughed.

17 18

In the fully realized post-historical world, as he envisages it, there will in fact be two basic intellectual types: on the one hand, the straightforward functionaries of democratic utilitarianism, the ‘American’ type, who have more or less surrendered their properly human individuality to serve the herd. These he calls ‘American animals’. And on the other hand, the ‘Japanese snobs’. (Of the two, the ‘snobs’ are the higher type – for they at least are still human.) La Quinzaine Litte´raire, no. 53: 19. Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics, 106.



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I take it that she laughed with indulgent affection. Yet, all the same, she laughed. And what else, in the end, can we do but share in that secretarial laughter? Koje`vian facetiousness is meant as a prophylactic against political fanaticism; an alternative to Platonist other-worldliness in that regard. But might not a certain sort of prayer – I mean here the sort of prayer which is a true opening up towards divine agape´ – actually do the same job, of inwardly lifting us above the immediacy of our struggles, just as well? Or even, perhaps, better?



6 Anti-Philosophical Philosophy (II): Epicurus, Rousseau

I

So, to recapitulate: the great weakness, in my view, of Platonist philosophic politics, premissed as it is on the supreme value of a solidarity strictly among philosophers, is its lack of any adequate safeguards against the danger that the highest wisdom may come to be confused with the mere corporate conceit of a privileged class. Koje`ve for his part repudiates this. Only the point is, it is not exactly the element of conceit, as such, that he seeks to transcend here. But it is its corporateness. Which he sees as cliqueishness. Koje`ve’s repudiation of Platonist solidarity among philosophers is basically a repudiation of any sort of quest for an ideal solidarity strategy, in the full sense. Playfully, he proclaims himself to be a pagan ‘god’. Above all, surely, this is because pagan gods represent the most glorious moral self-sufficiency; they are too playful to pledge themselves to anything as moralistic as solidarity. He believes in politics, for the mental stimulus it provides, and so of course he is an alliance builder. But solidarity, in the full sense, is something altogether more than just a matter of being allied with others. Only some alliances have the sort of moral intensity that belongs, properly speaking, to solidarity. Koje`ve’s morality on the other hand is radically individualistic. And his approach to politics is altogether one of ‘god’-like playfulness. I have wanted to discuss Koje`ve’s doctrine not only because of its historical significance – the fact is, he exercised quite a major degree of influence over mid-twentieth-century French philosophy. But also because of its charm. His stance is perhaps a little arrogant. But this is his way of not being moralistic. The moralistic moralist speaks on behalf of a whole group, or the God of a whole group, and to that extent is obliged, at least, to appear self-effacing. In the most ostentatious way possible, however, Koje`ve teasingly distances himself here from any such show of selfeffacement. Therein lies the charm. His thought is intended as the very purest possible antithesis to any sort of moralized contempt, or hatred, on the part of one group against others.



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Yet still it seems to me, he overshoots the mark. For, after all, not every form of serious concern for solidarity implies a moralization of contempt or hatred. Only those forms do which are infused precisely with corporate conceit. And so now let us turn to consider those other anti-philosophical philosophers for whom the cause of Truth is first and foremost a wrestling with the temptations of conceit. In the classical world: the Cynics and the Epicureans. Or, in the modern world: Rousseau, for instance. II

It might at first sight seem somewhat perverse to link Epicurus, in particular, with Rousseau. For what everyone knows about Epicurus is that he was a hedonist. And Rousseau, rather emphatically, was not. Indeed, Rousseau himself certainly regarded the spread of Epicurean hedonism very much as a symptom of moral decline in the ancient world.1 However, let us look a little closer. Epicurean hedonism is a radically depoliticizing doctrine: a fundamental refusal to draw any ethical conclusions from a direct appeal to the public good; insisting instead on the proper absolute primacy, for each individual, of their own private good, as determined by the strictly private criterion of ‘pleasure’. This is intended as a decisive remedy against the corruption of political rhetoric into mere manipulativeness; that is, the invocation of finesounding political ideals by a ruling class whose only real concern is with promoting its own narrow class interests. But it is a drastic remedy, which comes at an obvious price. For, the more one insists on only ever using overtly hedonist arguments, the more restricted, at the same time, one is in developing an effective solidarity rhetoric for anti-manipulative political purposes. One can scarcely build political solidarity on the basis of an appeal to that essentially private criterion, ‘pleasure’. And this is why Rousseau rejects it. For he is urgently preoccupied, precisely, with the development of an anti-manipulative solidarity rhetoric: defining the virtue of the good citizen, as such, in terms of a disinterested devotion to the dictates of the ‘general will’. Epicurus and Rousseau thus differ profoundly in their opposing estimations of the true relationship between the public and the private. And yet, let us also note what they share. I want to consider these two very different examples together here, precisely so as to get straight at the underlying element of protest nevertheless at work in both cases alike.

1

See for instance his reference to Epicurus in the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. In Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, English translation by G.D.H. Cole (London: Everyman, 1973): 12.


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III

The point is: they both define the highest wisdom as being something which is completely independent of any particular gift of philosophic articulacy. For Epicurus, the prime criterion for wisdom is what he calls ‘ataraxy’. By which, in effect, he basically means a quality of the very purest non-manipulative unmanipulatedness. This is what mattered to him – not philosophic articulacy. So he established a sort of school, called the ‘Garden’, which did not primarily seek to promote intellectual sophistication, as such. The Garden was not a philosophical school, in that sense. It did not provide much, if any, real training in dialectic. Nor do Epicurus’s own writings contain any very demanding argumentation.2 There is nothing equivalent to Plato’s Socratic dialogues in the Epicurean tradition; and no equivalent to the Aristotelian curriculum, either. But, instead, Epicurean doctrine is essentially just a collection of dogmas, and associated epigrams, to be accepted and appropriated. Indeed, one might well say that what the Garden provided was not in the first instance a discipline of the intellect at all. It was simply a discipline of the will: a matter of taking to heart, and putting into practice, a certain given set of principles. This way of putting the matter is admittedly anachronistic, in that the full-blown theoretical concept of ‘the will’, involved in the contrast here, was only later developed, within Christian theology. But never mind – the formulation is nevertheless quite apt for the actual practice of Epicureanism. The prime virtue of the Epicurean educator was parre´sia: ‘straight talking’; fierce, confrontational truth telling. Which was also the Cynic ideal. Except that, whereas the Cynics tended to be far more individualistic – often, indeed, quite flamboyantly so – the Epicureans were interested in straight talking as the governing principle of a whole community. Thus, they aimed to create a form of community life in which friends were constantly encouraged to talk straight to one another. And so to support one another – in a sustained struggle against addiction, of every sort. It was a question of therapy, for addiction. In the broadest sense. That is to say: not only physical addiction, but also psychological addiction. Addiction not only to particular substances, but also to such things as: being attended to; being liked; being flattered; being comforted; taking pride in one’s social status and one’s possessions; or yearning to rise in the world, always comparing oneself with others. Everything, in short, that renders one needy, and therefore liable to manipulation by those who are able to play upon that neediness; or that inclines one to try and manipulate others, so as to make them serve one’s needs. Everything that tends to lock one into an economy of manipulation, in whatever way. 2

See Essential Epicurus: Letters, Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings and Fragments, English translation by Eugene O’Connor (Prometheus Books, 1993).




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Epicurean ataraxy is the serenity of perfect release from all addiction; Epicurean hedonism is the affirmation that such serenity is, in reality, the supreme ‘pleasure’. From the Epicurean point of view, one might say, there are in the end two basic sorts of potential motive for human action: either neediness or ‘pleasure’. The truest ‘pleasure’ is that which most freely draws us. The less neediness, the truer the ‘pleasure’. And, therefore, the greater wisdom. Compare the wisdom of Platonist philosophy. Of course, that also includes serenity. But Platonist wisdom, at the same time, absolutely requires a particular sort of educational sophistication. It is this sophistication which then becomes the basis for the utopian Platonist dream of philosopher rule and the various actual strategies of Platonist ‘philosophic politics’, in defence of the privileged class interests bound up with it. Epicurus, for his part, completely repudiates such politics. For he altogether rejects any sort of class interest. Thus, as Diogenes Laertius put it: ‘The reason Epicurus kept out of public life was his exceptional concern for equality’.3 The community of the Garden, whose only membership requirement was basic literacy, was intended as an ideal embodiment of classlessness in practice. This is shown, for instance, by the well-known presence of so many women among the residents, and among the attenders at his lectures; a unique and certainly remarkable feature of the school. And hence, too, the possibility of Epicurean evangelism among non-Greeks. Like Christianity, Epicureanism eventually acquired some aristocratic followers; but, also like Christianity, it originally emerged out of a general ethos of plebeian rebelliousness. It was a missionary movement, aiming to recruit the alienated. Therefore, Epicurus is deliberately coarse. ‘I spit on beauty’, he once said, ‘and upon those who, pointlessly, respect it when it offers no pleasure’.4 What he surely means here is ‘beauty’ as defined by the distinctive tastes of a refined elite; very much including the supreme beauty of the Platonist ‘Idea of the Good’. He spits on beauty in the sense that he spits on any invocation of ‘the beautiful’ to justify what he sees as a mere expression of corporate conceit. IV

Rousseau, as I have said, has a very different attitude towards civic loyalties. Epicurus for his part repudiates all such loyalties, because of the way he sees them being manipulatively co-opted by particular elite class interests. Rousseau does not. Instead, he sets out to redefine civic virtue, with a view to rescuing it, so far as possible, from the corrupting influence of particular class interests. 3

4

Diogenes Laertius, Life of Epicurus, 10; in Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, English translation by R.D. Hicks (London: Heinemann, 1925). H. Usener, Epicurea (Leipzig: Teubner, 1887): 512.


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But, like Epicurus, Rousseau also therefore identifies the highest, or most urgently desirable, form of wisdom with virtues quite independent of philosophic articulacy. Thus, for him, the highest wisdom is essentially identical with the most generous predisposition to compassion. Philosopher ideology comes in various forms; but its defining characteristic is just the sheer directness with which, in every case, it identifies the highest wisdom with a certain quality of educational sophistication, and hence a certain commitment to class privilege. Epicurus and Rousseau, however, both look for wisdom precisely in a release from sophistication, an inner return to ‘nature’; they are sophisticates who, sophisticatedly, lament their sophistication, as something that, inevitably, tends to cut one off from ‘nature’. The pursuit of Epicurean ‘pleasure’ involves a systematic stripping away of the desires bound up with sophistication. So the ideal Epicurean sage no longer has any desires other than those which are innate; those which the adult shares with the infant. Jesus’ saying in Matthew 18:3, ‘Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’ is closely akin to this notion of wisdom; which one also finds in the Cynic and Stoic traditions.5 And Rousseau, as a latter-day Stoic, shares it too. Only, whereas the Epicureans sought to build a community of friends, drawn together in a common withdrawal from the world, Rousseau by contrast celebrates compassion as a virtue which goes beyond friendship, in that it also serves to unite us with strangers. If Rousseau is right, the highest moral wisdom need not involve philosophy at all. Or rather, true philosophy is needed only by those who have already been corrupted by false philosophy; as a means of trying to undo the damage. Indeed, what he calls the ‘state of nature’, the prime source of authentic moral integrity, is none other than the hypothetical condition of not having been corrupted by any use of reason whatsoever. As he puts it: Throwing aside . . . all those scientific books which teach us to see men only as they have made themselves, and contemplating the first and most simple operations of the human soul, I think I can perceive in it two principles prior to reason, one of them deeply interesting us in our own welfare and preservation, and the other exciting a natural repugnance at seeing any other sensible being, and particularly any of our own species, suffer pain or death. It is from the agreement and combination which the understanding is in a position to establish between these two principles, without its being necessary to introduce that of [an equiprimordial 5

See for example Jacques Brunschwig, ‘The Cradle Argument in Epicureanism and Stoicism’, in Malcolm Schofield and Gisela Striker, eds, The Norms of Nature: Studies in Hellenistic Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).




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ratiocinative] sociability, that all the rules of natural right appear to me to be derived – rules which our reason is afterwards obliged to establish on other foundations, when by its successive developments it has been led to suppress nature itself. In proceeding thus, we shall not be obliged to make man a philosopher before he is a man. His duties towards others are not dictated to him only by the later lessons of wisdom; and, so long as he does not resist the internal impulse of compassion, he will never hurt any other man, nor even any sentient being, except on those lawful occasions on which his own preservation is concerned and he is obliged to give himself the preference.6 The ‘natural’ human being is shaped by the needs of self-preservation and the demands of compassion. But, Rousseau thinks, all the trouble comes from the addition, to these two primary impulses, of a third: the impulse of amour-propre, or conceit; as people start to compare themselves with one another, and compete for prestige. This is where reason starts to impinge upon morality. Moral reasoning, as he sees it, actually begins as a quest for ‘moral’ reasons to justify the reasoner’s amourpropre. V

When Rousseau speaks of amour-propre he is talking about conceit as a mainspring of civilization, a great civilizing energy, constantly mixing itself with the ideals of civilization, in order to conceal itself, justify itself, pass itself off as something more creditable than it really is. And here he is, in fact, heir to a rather older tradition of French moral philosophy. For the civilizational dynamism of amour-propre is of course also a central theme of La Rochefoucauld, for instance, almost a century earlier. ‘For the most part, our virtues are no more than vices in disguise’. So runs the little epigraph which La Rochefoucauld set at the head of the fourth edition of his Maximes, first published in 1675. And he uses amour-propre as a general name for the vanity disguised in false virtue; the impulse behind any, and every, attempt to disguise one’s real motives. Ten years earlier, La Rochefoucauld had actually begun his first edition with a lengthy reflection on the protean complexity of amour-propre, in this sense: it is described here as a principle of infinite cunning, at work in the very deepest recesses of the unconscious mind; utterly fickle and arbitrary in its particular attachments, yet for ever pretending to be the 6

Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality; in The Social Contract and Discourses, English translation by G.D.H. Cole (London: J.M. Dent, 3rd edition, 1993): Preface and 46–7.


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opposite; manifest in all manner of quite contradictory forms; hidden, potentially, even within the most sincere idealism; ‘the spiritual equivalent of the sea, with the turbulent flow of its thoughts, and its unending movement, closely resembling the flux and reflux of the waves’.7 Rousseau is a man of very different moral temperament from La Rochefoucauld; but still, when he speaks of amour-propre it is clear that he, too, is working with much the same basic concept. In the original Avis au lecteur of the 1665 edition, La Rochefoucauld sought to justify his intellectual project to the devout, on the grounds that he was simply summarizing a view of human nature already to be found in the writings of ‘several Fathers of the church’.8 Not that he appears to have been at all devout, himself. He makes no reference, in the Maximes, to the dynamics of Christian salvation, and it is very doubtful whether he really believed in such salvation. Nevertheless, he claims to be probing at the self-deceptions intrinsic to what the Fathers call human fallenness. Again, the classic text here is St Augustine’s City of God. The basic difference between the ‘City of God’, in Augustine’s scheme, and the ‘Earthly City’ is that, while the former consists of everything organizational that springs from an authentic love of God, the latter is every form of organization shaped by other, incompatible loves; hence it is a construct of the lust for political domination, or the lust, at least, for glory. The lust for glory may give rise to splendid virtues. Augustine cannot deny that the pagan world has produced much that is admirable, much that might put Christians to shame. But at the same time he initiates a pioneering hermeneutics of suspicion: the inner motivation for pagan virtue, he argues, is all wrong, for it is not properly disinterested.9 And it is this hermeneutics of suspicion which La Rochefoucauld then develops. La Rochefoucauld’s originality lies in the way he secularizes the Augustinian scheme. He has no interest in Augustine’s contrast between the Earthly City and the Heavenly; he has eyes only for the Earthly. Nor does he follow Augustine in seeing the deceptive lust for glory as a typically pagan phenomenon. He draws no distinction here between pagan and Christian; but, far rather, he professes to be describing human nature in the most general, ahistoric terms. Amour-propre is La Rochefoucauld’s term for what Augustine thinks of as the typically pagan lust for glory; reconceived in this way. And what he opposes to it is not piety, but honneˆtete´. 7

8

9

La Rochefoucauld, Maximes (Nancy: Bordas, 1966): no. S. 563: 152–6. Cf. the English translation by Constantine Fitzgibbon (London: Millington, 1974). And the study by Henry C. Clark, La Rochefoucauld and the Language of Unmasking in Seventeenth-century France (Gene`ve: Librairie Droz, 1994). Maximes, 47. And see also the contemporary Discours sur les ‘Maximes’ by Henri de Besse´; originally published as part of the first edition: 181–7. De Besse´ develops the same argument, yet more forcefully. Augustine, City of God; English translation by Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972): Book V, Chapters 12–20.




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Prior to La Rochefoucauld, when people spoke of an honneˆte homme they meant someone well born, cultivated, distinguished; a gentleman, in that sense; a true man of the world. But La Rochefoucauld, as a great aristocrat of the old sort, belonged to a class whose power in general was in steep decline. In his youth he had engaged in all manner of Parisian intrigue, ultimately, however, to little or no avail; then he had been a rebel in the wars of the Fronde, and had seen his ancestral house burnt to the ground. Disillusioned, he looked around at those who had been more successful than himself – and refused to envy them. The true honneˆte homme, he wants to argue, is not one whose amour-propre is fed and puffed out by worldly success, but precisely one who on the contrary sees through the deceptions of amour-propre. For La Rochefoucauld, in other words, honneˆtete´ is an essentially sardonic virtue. It is a sombre wisdom; a quiet, non-confrontational quality of inner self-detachment from the struggles of the world; a form of world-weary resignation. Maximes: 202 sums it up: False honneˆtes hommes are people who conceal their faults, both from others and from themselves; true honneˆtes hommes are people who both recognize and confess their faults. Or, in the even simpler definition of Maximes: 203: for La Rochefoucauld, ‘The true honneˆte homme is an individual without pretension’. He himself actually hailed Epicurus as a great model of such honneˆtete´.10 And his whole work is dedicated to that elementary negation. But then along comes Rousseau. Who, albeit without direct reference to La Rochefoucauld, nevertheless adopts very much the same ideal; only in quite another manner. For Rousseau has none of La Rochefoucauld’s spirit of resignation. La Rochefoucauld believes in speaking softly; such was his temperament. Why did he remove the extended reflection on amour-propre with which the first edition of the Maximes had begun? One can only suppose that its cumulative effect, as a whole series of observations juxtaposed, rendered it in the end too rhetorical, too ardent in tone, for his developing taste; he preferred the epigrammatic form of little separate maxims just because it is so much quieter. But Rousseau, by contrast, is a clamorous writer, plebeian, up-thrusting, gesticulatory. Rousseau wants to be ardent; he is forever aiming at a maximum intensity of moral pathos. La Rochefoucauld, in the little pen portrait he once made of himself, confesses to being excessively reserved.11 Rousseau’s Confessions are intended as an ardent enactment, and demonstration, of honneˆtete´ so far as possible without any reserve whatever. Nor is Rousseau content simply to unmask amour-propre, as La Rochefoucauld does. His E´mile is the sketch of a utopian educational regime – and his Social Contract is the sketch of a utopian political 10 11

See the report of the chevalier de Me´re´: Maximes, 174. Maximes, 18.


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regime – both of which are essentially designed to minimize the damage which amour-propre can do. Rousseau is a cultural revolutionary inasmuch as he wants, by every means possible, to see the potential stimuli, both to individual and to corporate amour-propre, systematically minimized. Augustine, one might say, is a critic of paganism, as a religious culture, for its lack of any serious critique of amour-propre. La Rochefoucauld, on the other hand, is an unmasker of amour-propre not only in one cultural form, but also as a universal feature of human nature, to be encountered in every sort of cultural context alike. Rousseau follows him in this. But La Rochefoucauld remains a great aristocrat; what he is developing is a new kind of aristocratic ethos, an aristocratic pride in sardonic frankness. Rousseau differs in that he wants not only to be tough on amour-propre, but also on the causes of amour-propre, in the sense of the whole system of class distinction which fosters it. And whereas La Rochefoucauld appears to value honneˆtete´ purely for its own sake, Rousseau values it essentially as an ally to compassion. Which he also seeks, so far as possible, to politicize. VI

‘The honneˆte homme is an athlete who loves to wrestle stark naked’: this is Rousseau’s Spartan image for the debates of true philosophy.12 And what else do the cast-off garments here represent, if not the prejudices of corporate amour-propre? Rousseau’s is a wisdom decisively premised on a quite un-Platonist renunciation of corporate amour-propre in any form – even including the amour-propre of those who are otherwise the most articulately free-spirited, the philosophers. And in this he is, I think, absolutely at one with Epicurus. Both in their different ways represent a fundamental challenge to philosopher ideology. Yet this is a challenge which Strauss never really confronts. Thus, he simply ignores Epicurus’s radical turning away from Plato, as such. In his study of Natural Right and History he places his discussion of Epicurus, anachronistically, before his discussion of Socrates. And the implication is clear: for him, what Epicurus represents is just a more naive form of philosophy. Instead of considering Epicurus as a posterior critic of Platonist ‘philosophic politics’, Strauss treats him as a representative of philosophy before the development of Platonism; that is, as a sort of throwback. And so, in discussing Epicurus’s hedonism, he focuses on the way that this confronts ‘the primeval equation of the good with the ancestral’. Prior to philosophy, with its invocation of ‘nature’, all moral reasoning, he argues, had been based on the authority of ‘the ancestral’. But the most immediately obvious way of challenging that authority is by appeal to the value of pleasure. Therefore, ‘orientation by pleasure becomes the first substitute for the orientation by 12

A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences; in The Social Contract and Discourses, 6.


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the ancestral’.13 This was the first such substitute, philosophy at its most naive; which Platonism then supercedes, with its strategically altogether more sophisticated orientation by the ‘Idea of the Good’, or ‘natural right’. So the Straussian story goes. Now, in actual fact, Epicurus was not born until some 57 years after the death of Socrates, five years after the death of Plato. And the relative naivety of his thought, as contrasted with that of Platonism, is, surely, a very deliberate, polemically framed ‘no’ to Platonist sophistication. Against Strauss, I think it needs to be insisted that this is no mere continuation of pre-Socratic hedonism. It is very much a negation of the Socratic/Platonist negation of that earlier doctrine; basically, because of what Epicurus sees as the intrinsic conceit of Platonism. Only, the anachronism of the Straussian account effectively allows him to ignore the real critique here. Nor, incidentally, does Koje`ve show any interest in Epicurus as a critic of Platonism. For Koje`ve, Epicurus is essentially just a symbol for philosophy at its most withdrawn from political engagement. But then he also criticizes Strauss, and the Platonist tradition as a whole, for not being more directly engaged in politics. And this actually leads him to use the term ‘Epicureanism’ in a way which, to a true Epicurean, must in fact seem quite bizarrely perverse! For he treats it as a straightforward synonym for the ‘cloistered mind’; in other words, as a general name for all forms of philosophy in so far as they are withdrawn from direct engagement in politics. ‘At first sight’, he writes, the philosopher will devote ‘all of his time’ to the quest for Wisdom, that being his supreme value and goal. He will therefore renounce not only ‘vulgar pleasures’, but also all action properly so-called, including that of governing, either directly or indirectly. Such was, at all events, the attitude taken by the ‘Epicurean’ philosophers. And it is this ‘Epicurean’ attitude that has inspired the popular image of the philosophical life. According to this image, the philosopher lives ‘outside the world’: he retires into himself, isolates himself from other men, and has no interest in public life.14 Because historic Epicureanism is (along with the more individualistic parallel phenomenon of Cynicism) the most extreme example of such withdrawal, Koje`ve goes on to use the term ‘Epicurean’ as an all-encompassing designation for everything, in the history of philosophy, which falls short of his own polar-opposite ideal. He presents us, in effect, with a starkly polarized choice: either ‘Hegelianism’, in the broad sense of philosophy fully plunged into politics, or else ‘Epicureanism’. And so he also appears to charge Strauss with being an ‘Epicurean’. He 13 14

Strauss, Natural Right and History, 109. Koje`ve, ‘Tyranny and Wisdom’, in Strauss, On Tyranny, 150.


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speaks of ‘Epicureanism’ as if it were a category which included Platonism – Epicurus himself would certainly have been amazed!15 Nothing indeed could more clearly indicate Koje`ve’s complete indifference to the actual historic reality of Epicureanism. Or his fundamental non-recognition of the distinctive challenge it represents, both to Platonism and by the same token also to his own position, inasmuch as he still fails to question the philosopher-ideological exaltation of philosophic articulacy, as a necessary part of wisdom. And, moreover, it is the same with Strauss’s interpretation of Rousseau. He does, it is true, discuss Rousseau at some length, above all in Natural Right and History.16 But, again, not as a critic of philosopher ideology. Rather, Rousseau is portrayed in Strauss’s account as a transitional figure in the history of the modern fall of philosophy; a link in the chain, between Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke on the one hand, and the Jacobins and Marxists, on the other. Strauss is interested in Rousseau not as a radical critic of corporate conceit but, altogether more superficially I think, as a philosophic ‘modernist’ instead. The context for Strauss is his general critique of the modern tradition: Rousseau appears here, essentially, as yet another who has cheapened philosophy by misallying it to a much larger cultural-revolutionary project, with all the compromises which that must entail. Yet it seems to me that this criticism really misses the target in Rousseau’s case. For what is most interesting about Rousseau is, I think, precisely the sense in which he is too radical a thinker to be classed with Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke, or with the Jacobins and Marxists, as being a cultural revolutionary like them. In his utter abhorrence of corporate amour-propre Rousseau, surely, has a radical sense of the sheer otherness of true intellectual Honesty from the ways of the world which fundamentally differentiates him from these other much more worldly moderns. And so he confronts the contrasting radicalism of the Platonist tradition on quite a different level. This is why I am interested in him. But Strauss seems not to see it. So, for example, consider Strauss’s essay on ‘The Three Waves of Modernity’.17 The first of these ‘waves’ begins with Machiavelli, and flows on, above all, into the work of Hobbes and Locke. The third begins with Nietzsche. But in between comes the second ‘wave’, which for Strauss begins with Rousseau, before flowing on into the French Revolution, and then into the various streams of militant socialism. The first ‘wave’ is the upsurge of a cultural revolutionary project involving philosophic intellectuals in alliance with one particular section of the unphilosophic ruling establishment, that section which is committed to 15

16 17

See for example ibid., 154, where he – weirdly! – speaks of the Epicurean ‘recalling his Socratic origins’; and then of ‘the aristocratic [Epicurean] ‘‘garden’’ ’ . . . Strauss, Natural Right and History, 252–94. First published in What Is Political Philosophy? (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1959). Also reprinted in the volume of his writings edited by Hilal Gildin, An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1989).


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secularization, against the rest. The second ‘wave’ differs, in that it is the work of cultural revolutionary philosophic intellectuals intent on a wholesale overthrow of the current ruling establishment; aiming therefore at much more populist alliances, to that end. The third ‘wave’ begins as a great recoil against the moral compromises which this entails. Rousseau figures here very much as the thinker whom the Jacobins venerated. This is the aspect of Rousseau that, for his particular grandnarrative purposes, Strauss emphasizes; far more than what differentiates Rousseau from the Jacobins, which to me appears altogether more significant. The Jacobins venerated Rousseau, basically, because he appeared to have the same enemies as they. By the time he came to write his Confessions Rousseau saw himself as confronting two main groups of enemies: on the one hand the Jesuits, representing (he thought) church Christianity at its most corrupt; and on the other hand Diderot, Voltaire, d’Holbach and their followers, the popularizers of the first-wave Enlightenment project. He actually describes these as two parties ‘more like raging wolves, ready to tear one another to pieces in their rage, than like Christians and philosophers anxious to enlighten each other’; and, he tells us, he conceived his novel La Nouvelle Heloise, not least, as a bid to help make peace between them, by portraying a devout heroine and a philosophically minded hero in the most sympathetic possible terms.18 But, he laments, the more he thrust himself forward, the more both sides conspired to persecute him. The Jesuits disliked him, not only as having once been a literary associate of Diderot and the rest, but ‘because my opinions were even more hostile to their principles and influence than my colleagues’ unbelief’; and, likewise, the philosophes were in the end even more enraged with him than with their clerical opponents. In fact, he actually indulges a paranoid fantasy, that both sides were somehow conspiring together to persecute him.19 The Jacobins had the same enemies. But at the same time Rousseau also differs radically from his later, highly political Jacobin admirers by virtue of his basic anti-political identification of wisdom with solitude. Rousseau exalts solitude inasmuch as it seems to him a necessary precondition for full emancipation from corporate conceit. I do not think that Strauss really does justice to the true critical logic of this, any more than the Jacobins ever did. Indeed, there is I think a certain sense in which Rousseau stands opposed to both Jacobinism and Straussian Platonism for the same reason. And yet Strauss, tending as he does to accept the Jacobin claim to Rousseau as their prophet, evades the real challenge which Rousseau represents. To be sure, he notes the profoundly un-‘philosophic’ nature of Rousseau’s ‘reveries of a solitary rambler’. But observe the highly prejudicial way in which he discusses this. First of all, he formulates the basic contrast as follows: 18

19

Rousseau, Confessions; English translation by J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953): IX, 405–6. Ibid., XI, 523–4.


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By ‘solitary contemplation’ [Rousseau] does not understand philosophy or the culmination of philosophy. Solitary contemplation, as he understands it, is altogether different from, not to say hostile to, thinking or observation.20 This is a prejudicial formulation in the sense that Rousseau is surely not hostile to thinking, as such; all that he actually rejects is what he considers to be the philosophers’ overvaluation of their own particular mode of articulacy. Which is quite another matter. And then Strauss also remarks, One must contrast the dreamlike character of Rousseau’s solitary contemplation with the wakefulness of philosophic contemplation.21 What Rousseau’s solitary rambler aspires to, he argues, is not so much ‘wisdom’ in the classic philosophic sense, as ‘sensitivity’. It is what is also celebrated in the later Romantic ideal of ‘art’: truth as a quality of feeling. Instead of properly philosophic wisdom, Rousseau looks to solitude for an authentic ‘feeling of existence’; that is to say, a feeling of ‘godlike self-sufficiency and impassibility’. For it is in giving himself completely to this feeling that civilized man completes the return to the primitive state of nature on the level of humanity.22 And the trouble, Strauss thinks, is that the resultant ideal inevitably ‘lacks clarity and definiteness’.23 Rousseau has no clear, definite strategy for solidarity building. Rejecting classic philosophic politics, with its very clear and definite understanding of who it is with whom one needs to try and build solidarity, and how, he provides no practical alternative. Rousseau’s invocation of the state of nature is little more than a dreamy gesture. What he evokes is a generalized dream of freedom from society, which, however, is not really a freedom for anything at all specific. ‘Every freedom’, Strauss comments, which is freedom for something, every freedom which is justified by reference to something higher than the individual or than man as mere man, necessarily restricts freedom or, which is the same thing, establishes a tenable distinction between freedom and license.24 20 21 22 23 24

Strauss, Natural Right and History, 291–2. Ibid., 293. Ibid., 292. Ibid., 293. Ibid., 294.


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But the implication is clear: the way Strauss sees it, what Rousseau actually opposes to philosophic politics is, in effect, little more than a dreamy apologia for license. He celebrates solitude for no other reason than that it allows one to draw closer to the condition of being able to do whatever one chooses. Once again, though, this is surely quite unfair. Rousseau’s anti-political celebration of solitude is no mere apologia for license; far rather, it reflects his basic aspiration to radical release from corporate amourpropre. The solitude he celebrates is the spiritual condition of no longer feeling any real sense of participation in the competitive aspirations of one’s own particular group or class. He could therefore never have approved of the Jacobins. They might have many of the same enemies as he; but their revolutionary project immediately led to the formation of a leadership elite, which like any other such elite was always bound to develop its own form of corporate amour-propre, and to demand a fierce loyalty on that basis. The inner freedom of the Rousseauan solitary rambler is precisely a freedom from any such loyalty demand. And that is also why Rousseau stands opposed to the old Platonist ideal of philosopher solidarity, which Strauss upholds. Rousseau celebrates inner spiritual solitude as the simplest, most direct means of liberating one from the temptations of corporate amour-propre of every sort. Strauss, however, seeing Rousseau only as an apologist for license – and moreover then associating Rousseau’s doctrine with the later licentiousness of Jacobin violence – seems not to see this at all. And so, even though he discusses Rousseau at some length, he never actually responds to the real challenge Rousseau poses to his own position. But, on the contrary, he systematically evades it. VII

Certainly I would agree that there is something very problematic about Rousseau’s cult of solitude. But not for the reason that Strauss suggests. The real problem, I think, is simply Rousseau’s failure to devise any proper solidarity strategy for actual, organized resistance, here and now, to the politics of corporate amour-propre. He dreams of an ideal form of political solidarity, purged of such amour-propre: the solidarity of true citizens, united in devotion to the ‘general will’. And yet he has no immediate strategy for promoting this – other than the writing of books. The element of paranoia in his personality effectively prevented him from going any further. Rousseau’s was an extravagantly one-sided wisdom, such as was able to flourish in proximity to paranoia; for it was the wisdom inherent in a hypersensitive extreme mistrust of manipulation. Strauss, I think, fails to do justice to the real challenge in this. But yes, it is true that Rousseau’s solidarity ideal remains, essentially, a dream. Compare Epicurus. Unlike Rousseau, Epicurus does have a practical strategy for organizing against manipulation. Only, as I have said, it is not a strategy of political solidarity; his is a strategy of pure other-worldly


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sectarianism. Koje`ve is quite wrong to treat Epicurus as nothing more than a classic apologist for the ‘cloistered mind’. But there can be no denying the ‘cloistered’ nature of the Epicurean ‘Garden’; or that it is, as Koje`ve argues, highly problematic. Epicurean sectarianism is not, in principle, a form of corporate amour-propre, in that it is not a claim to special privilege or honour, either in the sight of the wider world or of Heaven. It is indeed the exact opposite: a corporate quest for ‘pleasure’, decisively identified with release from the cravings of amour-propre. And yet that does not remove the problem. For true Honesty surely demands much more. Not only release from amour-propre – but also a maximum openness of spirit, a generous readiness to engage, conversationally, with all comers. But the fact is, the Epicurean community did not encourage such openness; the Epicureans were so sure they already had all the answers that really mattered, they saw no need to engage in open conversation with outsiders. And so they set out to construct for themselves, so far as possible, an essentially self-enclosed world all of their own. Rousseau does not do this. He opts instead for conversational openness – and then, quite unlike Epicurus, projects that option into the utopian fantasy of an ideal neo-Spartan republic, full of purely nonfactional, public-spirited citizens. But the problem in his case is that he does not provide us with any actual prescription for a transitional form of organization, on the way towards that ideal. VIII

When it comes to religion, for Epicurus, the basic requirement that no one should ever either seek to manipulate others or allow themselves to be manipulated, means two things. First, it means an absolute refusal to collude, at any level, with superstition, in view of the way in which the threats and promises of superstition may be used for manipulative purposes. But, second, it also means a radical mistrust of any form of religion tending to promote, and glorify, self-sacrifice as such. So Epicurus completely rejects both the conventional cult of patriotic selfsacrifice, to be found at the heart of Ancient Greek civil religion, and the Platonist philosophic divinization of ‘Justice’, as a principle likewise demanding self-sacrifical dedication.25 The gods, as Epicurus envisages them, make no demands. Their faces are averted. They are entirely indifferent to earthly affairs – that is their 25

‘Justice’, he declares, ‘never was an entity in itself’: Leading Doctrine 33, in George K. Strodach, The Philosophy of Epicurus (Northwestern University Press, 1963): 199–200. That is to say, it is not to be regarded, in poetic terms, as an ‘entity’ like the gods. The proper basis of political life, in other words, is not a transcendent ideal such as can only be appreciated by the wise, and which they should then strive cunningly to enforce in the name of some God. But, rather, ‘the justice that seeks nature’s goal is a utilitarian pledge of men not to harm each other or be harmed’ (Leading Doctrine


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glory. And therefore they do not judge us, they do not represent Justice, there is no ‘last judgement’ to fear. At the heart of Epicurus’s gospel lies this two-fold message of tranquillizing reassurance: that the gods do not need to be appeased, and that our souls are mortal. This is not to say that Epicureanism is by any means irreligious. Epicurus indeed positively encouraged his followers to ‘sacrifice piously and properly. . . untroubled about popular opinions in respect of the things that are highest and holiest’.26 He himself claimed in one of his letters to have taken part ‘in all the festivals’ of Athens.27 Even though he does not value these festivals for their civil role, they may still be a real source of private pleasure. Indeed, he suggests, the true sage will actually experience a ‘keener delight’ in worship than other people.28 But why keener? It is because this is a delight unmixed with any sort of anxiety. The divinity of the Epicurean gods lies, essentially, in their being symbols of inner freedom. So, as Epicurus sees it, the blessed and indestructible being of the divine has no concerns of its own, nor does it make troubles for others. It is not affected by feelings of anger or benevolence, because these are found where there is lack of strength.29 Devoid of the slightest trace of vulnerable amour-propre the gods are thus altogether impervious both to provocation and to seduction alike; they are the least manipulatable and least manipulative beings imaginable. That is their strength. They are perfect models both of ataraxy and, between themselves, of private friendship, the whole Epicurean ideal.30 Epicureanism, in short, sets out to render religion safe by removing from it absolutely all its usual pathos; in that sense, disempowering it. But thereby, I think, it unfortunately also removes all its power for good.

26 27 28 29 30

31). It is a minimal agreement to live together in peace, nothing more. For this to work, no invocation of the divine is necessary; but only that each individual, quite regardless of their degree of spiritual advancement, should find it in their own selfinterest, rationally considered, to obey the laws. H. Usener, Epicurea (Leipzig: Teubner, 1887): 387. Ibid., 169. Diogenes Laertius, 10.120. Leading Doctrine 1; Strodach, 196. One might well wonder how Epicurus thinks he knows that these gods exist. Since they do not intervene in the world there can, by definition, be no empirical evidence for them. He is said to have attached some significance to their accidental appearance, as objects of contemplation, in people’s dreams (Sextus Empiricus, in Usener, 353; and cf. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, V, 1161–93). But does everything we dream of also ‘exist’ outside our dreams? No doubt, if pressed, the Epicurean theologian would have to rely on something like the Anselmian ontological argument. This is actually easier for the Epicurean than for the Christian, in that the great difficulty with the ontological argument in Christian thought may be said to lie in the question, to what extent the word ‘exist’ is being used in the same sense in this context as in the context of the ‘existence’ of a divine providence, evidenced by the


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Rousseau does not go so far. Indeed, his republican ideal, as sketched out in the Social Contract, includes a form of civil religion with, he insists, all the necessary pathos to inspire martyrdom, where that is what the good citizen’s patriotic duty requires. Yet Rousseau nevertheless also remains hypersensitive to the risk of religion being corrupted into a mere sacralization of corporate amour-propre. One might object: what about the danger, then, that this civil religion of his might end up sacralizing the corporate amour-propre of whole polities? But that appeared far less of a threat in his day than it is for us: such very generalized amour-propre only really becomes a problem in the context of mass democracy, where voters start to bond nationalistically, under the banner of their nation state; not a phenomenon which Rousseau himself had witnessed. For him, the truly problematic forms of corporate amour-propre were those deriving from the competition, within polities, between rival social classes or cultural and religious factions. The civil religion he advocates is intended as a utopian remedy against that whole species of competition. And moreover this is the sole form of impassioned organized religious loyalty he wants to allow. In view of the risk inherent in any form of confessionalism, that it may become corrupted by its own brand of corporate amour-propre, Rousseau for his part advocates a radically individualistic detachment from all forms of confessional faith. Only, what he sets in its place is nothing more than a dream ideal. What I am looking for is an ideal actual strategy for Truth; not just a dream, but a strategy. The proper strategy, surely, for promoting the sort of moral ideal Rousseau has in mind would have been to develop it into a new sort of organized movement for religious reform. And that would basically have required an appropriate theology. Of course he was, quite rightly, dead set against theology in the sense of mere confessional ideology, redolent of the church’s corporate amour-propre. But I repeat, I mean theology in the true sense, as a form of the science of the sacralization of Honesty. That is to say: a systematic grappling with the heritage of scripture and church tradition, seeking so far as possible to construct, order of the created world and by miracles? That problem obviously does not arise for Epicurean theology. The Epicurean gods are not supposed to ‘exist’ in the same way as the Christian God is supposed to. Notwithstanding the fact that Epicurus is a materialist, a far closer analogy to their peculiar mode of ‘existence’ is arguably that of Platonic Ideas. As ideal projections from temporal experience into the eternal, they are Epicurus’s equivalent to the Platonic ‘Idea of the Good’, or of ‘Justice’. They differ from any Idea in that they have to be envisaged as materially embodied plural beings, because – unlike ‘Justice’ which is primarily the property of a whole social or cosmic order as such – ataraxy and Epicurean friendship are in essence qualities internal to individual beings, determining their relationships to one another as individuals. But Epicurean gods are supposed to ‘exist’, perhaps, in much the same idiosyncratic sense of that word as applies to Platonic Ideas, considered in their otherness from the actual phenomena which reflect them. They ‘exist’ as that than which nothing greater can be conceived; which for Epicurus is the perfect fullness of ‘natural’ pleasure, altogether transcending civilization and its discontents.


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out of that given material, a radically Honest tradition of authority, in which the inner truth of the gospel is set free from its ideological trappings. Rousseau, however, does not attempt this. He does not even begin to grapple, at all seriously, with theological tradition. Instead, he gives us ‘the confession of faith of the Savoyard vicar’.31 The Savoyard vicar is Rousseau’s ideal model portrait of an intellectual who has found his true vocation. A priest! But in a most uncomfortable relationship to his own church. This vicar is equally scornful both of philosopher ideology and of confessional church ideology. ‘I am no philosopher’, he immediately declares, ‘nor do I desire to be one’.32 He repudiates the ‘jargon of metaphysics’, as a worthless game.33 And he asks, If the philosophers were in a position to declare the truth, which of them would care to do so? Every one of them knows that his own system rests on no surer foundations than the rest, but he maintains it because it is his own. There is not one of them who, if he chanced to discover the difference between truth and falsehood, would not prefer his own lie to the truth which another had discovered. Where is the philosopher who would not deceive the whole world for his own glory? If he can rise above the crowd, what more does he want?34 But then he also attacks the ideologists of the church: ‘Where can you find theologians who pride themselves on their honesty?’, he asks.35 Against the pretensions of dishonest theology, he invokes what he calls ‘natural religion’: Behold the spectacle of nature; listen to the inner voice. Has not God spoken it all to our eyes, to our conscience, to our reason? What more can man tell us? [The church-ideologists’] revelations do but degrade God, by investing him with passions like our own. Far from throwing light upon the ideas of the Supreme Being . . . they add absurd contradictions, they make man proud, intolerant and cruel; instead of bringing peace upon earth, they bring fire and sword.36 Here, in short, is a priest paradigmatically set free from the exploitative lust for domination and all its tricks. 31

32 33 34 35 36

Rousseau, E´mile, English translation by Barbara Foxley (London: J.M. Dent (Everyman), 1993): 267–332. Ibid., 274. Ibid., 283. Ibid., 276–7. Ibid., 318. Ibid., 310.


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He is a fictional character; but is largely based, Rousseau tells us in his Confessions, on a Savoyard priest, one M. Gaime, whom Rousseau had met during his adolescence in Turin.37 Fictionally, Rousseau conjoins this encounter with his earlier, humiliating experience as an inmate, in the same city, of a hospice for converts to Roman Catholicism. Having run away, at the age of 16, from his home in Calvinist Geneva, Rousseau had ended up in the hospice as a place that would provide for his keep. And he describes it as an institution run in the most completely manipulative fashion. The vicar, although himself a Roman Catholic, appears as one who helps a young man trapped in this situation to escape. His integrity shines out all the more against the background of the hospice, as an extreme embodiment of the opposite. However, it seems to me, the trouble is that the Savoyard vicar, having repudiated corrupt, church-ideological theology, does not then go on to develop any real community-building alternative. In the Social Contract Rousseau sketches a vague utopian dream of true civil religion; in the Savoyard vicar’s ‘profession of faith’ he supplements this with a radically individualistic ideal of ‘natural’ religion. But he provides nothing whatsoever in between. So he does not even begin to try and reconsider the proper organization of the church. The Savoyard vicar has no aspiration to any sort of major public leadership role. In his earlier career as a priest, he confesses, he has disgraced himself by conducting an affair with a married woman, which he was too honest to deny. Whereupon, he was dismissed. He dreams of being restored to parish ministry, perhaps in some poor district up in the remote mountains; but recognizes that this is unlikely. Even though his private understanding of true faith is so thoroughly at odds with the prevailing ideology of the church institution as a whole, he assures us that, if he could indeed be a parish priest again, his aim would simply be to fulfil all his given public duties with the very utmost conscientiousness. This modesty is clearly designed by Rousseau to win our sympathy for the vicar. But, unfortunately, it also allows him to evade a whole range of issues, which it seems he just does not want to address. For, since the vicar is a dissident only in private, he does not have to confront the sort of questions, both practical and theoretical, that immediately face any would-be church reformer. And, then, what – in positive terms – will the vicar actually preach? We know how he understands the dictates of ‘natural religion’. It involves none of the dogmas of distinctively Christian faith, as such, on the basis of which the institutional life of the church is built; but is a drastically simplified creed. As a conscientious Catholic priest, however, his first duty is to interpret the authoritative tradition of his church. And how will he, in actual practice, link the one to the other? In the ‘profession of faith’ which Rousseau gives us, ‘natural religion’ is consistently exalted in antithesis to church tradition; yet no Christian priest can 37

Rousseau, Confessions, English translation by J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953): 92–3.


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proceed in such a one-sided way. For to do so would immediately be to invite the objection: what, in that case, are you doing as a Christian priest to begin with? The Savoyard vicar still wants to be a priest. But why? Rousseau does not tell us; he only tells us why the vicar does not want to be a philosopher. How, in short, will the Savoyard vicar reconcile the generous humanity of his ‘profession of faith’ with the traditional sacred authority vested in the liturgical forms he continues to observe? Again – and to this extent Strauss is right – there is no real strategy here. Merely a reverie.


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7 Beyond Metaphysics: ‘The Science of the Sacralization of Honesty, in Theist, Catholic Form’

I

At its heart, the argument I am developing has to do with the question of how we should conceive of the sacred. What is, properly, sacred? In view of the all too obvious corruptions of so much religion should we perhaps opt for a form of intellectualized nihilism? Koje`ve, for example, represents a variant of the most highly intellectualized, not at all ‘vulgar’, nihilist strategy. So, for Koje`ve, as a matter of principle, nothing is sacred. What is interesting about Koje`ve’s particular version of nihilism is the paradoxical way he develops it as a parasitic outgrowth from the not at all nihilist thinking of Hegel. But the contrast with real Hegelianism does rather tend, I think, to highlight the essential weakness of Koje`ve’s reworking of it. Thus Hegel’s whole concern, in confronting corrupted notions of the sacred, is to develop philosophical strategies for promoting other, better notions of the sacred. And so he is for ever opening up new lines of potential conversation between philosophy and folk religion. Nihilism, however, does the exact opposite. It systematically closes such conversation down. This may relieve the nihilist philosopher of a certain burden of thinking, but what else does it achieve? How indeed can anything that closes down conversation, prevents it from even getting underway, be philosophically desirable? Koje`ve himself quite rightly in my view deplores the way in which the cloisteredness of the ‘cloistered mind’, its sheer withdrawal from the world of civic activism, serves to close down certain sorts of conversation. And so why does not the same principle equally apply to his own attitude towards religion? Nihilism, even at its least vulgar, seems to me altogether too impatient a strategy. But then I am also unpersuaded by the sort of classical antithesis to it broadly advocated, against Koje`ve, by Strauss. For what Strauss calls traditional ‘Platonist philosophic politics’ is a strategic thinking essentially based upon an absolute sacralization of scholarly and philosophic Curiosity. Here, in other words, we have the outworking of an intense love, specifically, for truth-as-correctness. That is to say,


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it is a metaphysical enterprise. It is a campaign for metaphysical openmindedness; locked in perpetual conflict with any sort of crude metaphysical dogmatism, that would stifle Curiosity with precipitate claims to have already attained all that is really needed by way of truth-ascorrectness. But again I come back to the elementary distinction between truth-as-correctness and that other, quite different mode of truth: truth-as-Honesty. For what interests me is just the way in which the demands of the former species of truth – in Hegelian terms, the primary concern of ‘reflective’ philosophy – are properly qualified by those of the latter, the primary concern of ‘speculative’ thought. Honesty with a capital ‘H’: I defined it above as a patient openness to what other people have to say, especially those others most different from oneself, with the most challengingly other perceptions of reality. Understood in this sense, Honesty is the sum of all the virtues ideally required for truthful conversation, as such. I repeat: truth-as-correctness is truth inherent in abstracted propositions considered by themselves; but truth-as-Honesty is the sheer will to truth, at work in whole concrete processes of communication as such, on whatever scale, from the most intimate to the most public. Truth-as-correctness requires scholarly expertise and the philosophic gift of logical articulacy, the more the better. Truth-as-Honesty is a possibility equally open to all, quite regardless of education or intellect. And, not least, it stands radically opposed to any sort of corporate conceit. II

I am advocating a self-understanding of theology decisively set free from any admixture of metaphysics; theology strictly understood, in transmetaphysical terms, as a science of the sacralization of Honesty. Platonist philosophic politics is metaphysical thinking with a strategic orientation towards an ideal solidarity among philosophers: those who share both a shaken love of truth and a high degree of educated articulacy. But true theology, understood as a form of the science of the sacralization of Honesty, is, by contrast, thinking with a strategic orientation towards the solidarity of the shaken, purely and simply as such. The solidarity of the shaken, however, is the most difficult form of solidarity ever actually to organize. Therefore it only ever begins to appear, here and there, in combination with other forms of solidarity. And, as a result, the science of the sacralization of Honesty comes in all kinds of different variations. True theology is that science in theistic and catholic form. There are also non-theist forms: Buddhist, Vedantist, Confucian. Nor does such thinking always appear as a catholic enterprise, building large-scale solidarity structures around the practise of public liturgy. Epicureanism for example is a variant of the science of the sacralization of Honesty in an essentially sectarian context; Cynicism and Stoicism are essentially


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individualistic variants, as is the doctrine of Rousseau. And public liturgy, in itself, plays a somewhat less pivotal role in Rabbinic Judaism or Islam than it does in Christianity. But where a religious tradition is both theist and catholic – as is generally the case in Christian tradition – there we have theology. True theology, as I would understand it, is thus essentially a thinking through of the solidarity of the shaken in so far as it is combined with the sort of confessional solidarity most typical of Christianity. Its whole proper vocation is to try and ensure that the latter sort of solidarity serve always as a vehicle, not a rival, to the former. And now, in Part II, I want to try and go on to explore some of the implications of this, with reference to the actual history of Christian tradition. III

As in Part I, here too three main themes immediately suggest themselves: 1 The science of the sacralization of Honesty, considered as the vocation of the Christian ‘clerisy’. I am concerned with strategy for the sacralization of Honesty. Sacralization is what priests undertake: this is a project which demands the cultivation, among intellectuals, of a certain sort of priestly-mindedness. But Honesty is a universally valid ideal, unconfined by any confessional distinctions, and the priestly-mindedness in question therefore needs to be essentially trans-confessional. The nearest (even if still quite remote) approach to such a conception in Christian theological tradition is in fact, I think, Coleridge’s early nineteenth-century notion of ‘the clerisy’. And so in Chapter 8 I take a brief look at that. 2 Traditional Christian theology in its role as prophylaxis against the corporate conceit of the intelligentsia. I want to affirm theology as a discipline which by no means rejects philosophy, but which appropriates philosophic insight into a context which, in the most decisive way possible, sets it apart from the temptations of philosopher ideology. In Chapter 9 I therefore consider how this has traditionally been done. The crucial thing here is the sense in which theology is a form of sacramentally rooted thought. For what is a sacrament? It is an authoritative rendering present of God, to a whole community, not in the first instance through ideas, but, prior to all intellectual interpretation, through the sheer givenness of ritual action and imagery. And so it is just that level of our corporate encounter with God which gives no advantage to the more intelligent or the better educated.


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In Western Christendom there is a history of struggle over the status of the church’s sacraments dating back to the eleventh century, and then climaxing in the great crisis of the Reformation. Ultimately, I think, what is at stake here is the whole relationship between the better educated and the less well educated within the church. By contrast, in the Byzantine East the same underlying problems are worked through in quite a different way: there is no such struggle there over sacramental theology. Instead, culminating in the fourteenth century the equivalent struggle is over monastic spirituality, and the possibility of actually ‘seeing’ God in contemplation. On the surface, these may appear to be two quite different debates. Deep down, though, I think the same sort of thing is happening in both cases. And that is what I want to look at. 3 The capacity of Christian theology, also, to articulate an effective critique of confessional corporate conceit. As a testimony to the demands of pure Honesty, Christian theology is called to resist all forms of ideology. In the first place, it has to resist the sort of corporate conceit that comes to expression in philosopher ideology. But, at the same time, it also has to resist the sort that comes to expression in church ideology. And this is the topic of Chapter 10. The Hebrew prophets bear witness to a God notable for his rage. In the first instance, this rage expresses the blazing demands of Honesty, bursting through to religious expression with unprecedented emotional intensity. The prophets are shaken by the demands of Honesty, and they represent that shakenness, in poetic terms, as a quivering response to divine rage. But they are not yet exactly advocates for the solidarity of the shaken, purely and simply as such. Far rather, from Hosea onwards, their shakenness informs the solidarity of a revolutionary movement, aiming at governmental power, with a very particular cultural programme. And in the process their testimony to shakenness is mixed, often indissolubly, with the ideological self-righteousness of that movement. So too, Christian faith in the Incarnation is, at its deepest level of truth, a strategy for promoting the cause of Honesty, by putting a symbol of perfect Honesty right at the very heart of the church’s public liturgy. But again it is ambiguous. The essential truth of the Incarnation, in principle, requires incorporation into a community life fundamentally oriented towards the solidarity of the shaken. The church, however, has not yet developed such a form of community life. Instead, it remains largely governed by its own ideological self-interest, which as a matter of course prioritizes the solidarity of orthodox Christian with orthodox Christian. And then the uniqueness of Christ is apprehended not as an affirmation of the unique authority properly belonging to Honesty, but instead as symbolic justification of the ideologically minded church’s claim to unique authority for itself. How, I want to ask, are we to disentangle what has been tangled together here?


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In the light of this question I return to Hegel, as the thinker from our past most likely to assist us in finding an answer; along with the twentieth-century assistance, especially, of Rene´ Girard. Hegel and Girard represent very different approaches to christology, neither of which in my view is complete in itself. Yet I nevertheless want to argue that these two approaches are complementary; and that, taken together, they very precisely highlight the core ambiguities of traditional Christian faith.


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8 Coleridge’s Notion of the ‘Clerisy’

I

Once upon a time all intellectuals were priests, intent on the sacralization of the particular laws and ethical norms of their people’s culture. Then came philosophy. This has happened several times, in various contexts, and I am using the term ‘philosophy’ to cover a multitude of different phenomena. But in each case I mean another, in itself essentially unpriestly sort of thinking: a campaign to liberate intellectual life from the constraints of that older priestly role; the deliberate construction, and defence, of an intellectual domain beyond the traditional censorship control of non-intellectual authorities. Hopefully, however, one day all intellectuals will once again come to recognize their calling as priests. To be sure, it will be a very different form of priesthood from any of the original forms. The work of philosophy has been absolutely necessary, in countering the old monopoly of the original forms, to help clear out the necessary space for it. And yet it seems to me that this is only the beginning of the long-term transformation that is required. Thus, one day, let us hope, the whole meaning of ‘priesthood’ – also as conventionally applied to the clergy of religious institutions – will be changed. A new form of priesthood will emerge, explicitly dedicated to the sacralization of pure Honesty alone. And this will come to be acknowledged, universally, as the basic proper framework for every sort of intellectual calling. What I mean is something like what Julien Benda meant when he spoke of the universal vocation of les clercs, which fascist intellectuals had betrayed – except that Benda had no notion of developing this theologically. Or more exactly, as I have said, I mean what Coleridge means when he talks of what he calls ‘the clerisy’. II

As a priest of the Church of England I have a particular interest in Coleridge’s sketch of this theme, inasmuch as it actually arises out of


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his reflections on the distinctive calling of the Church of England, to which he also belonged. The immediate occasion for his treatise On the Constitution of the Church and State was the political debate over Catholic emancipation. The full title of the work is in fact On the Constitution of the Church and State, according to the Idea of each; with aids towards a right judgement of the late Catholic Bill. In question here is the Bill passed in 1829, abolishing the traditional second-class status of Roman Catholics within the British constitution, and allowing Catholics to enter Parliament. Coleridge’s work appeared the following year. Given the ‘safeguards’ incorporated into the Bill, he cautiously approved it; but also recognized the fundamental challenge which this development represented to Anglican identity. For the Church of England had of course been founded to be the sole religious institution of the British establishment. With Catholic emancipation, that obviously became much less clear-cut. And so now Anglicans were compelled to ask afresh what other real purpose an autonomous national church, like ours, might have. What is the Church of England for? Coleridge answers this question with a bold argument about the true ‘Idea of the state’. By which he means something like: what the state, any state, is ideally meant to be, understood as a contribution to the human quest for moral truth in general. Thus he presents us with the ‘Idea’ of the state as an entity morally constituted, above all, by the dialectical interplay of three primary ‘estates’. Each of these ‘estates’ is a category of people sharing a certain sort of privilege, correlated with a certain sort of special responsibility, to represent a particular aspect of moral truth.1 The first estate is that of the aristocracy: the ‘land-owners or possessors of fixed property, [in Elizabethan terms] consisting of the two classes of the Barons and the Franklins’. This first estate, he argues, is there to represent the principle of ‘permanency’: that is, to be actively involved in public debate, for ever moderating the impatience of other classes, and urging caution. Set over against them, the second estate is that of the bourgeoisie: ‘the merchants, the manufacturers, free artizans, and the distributive class’. Their collective calling, by contrast, is to represent ‘progressiveness, and personal freedom’. And then there is the third estate, constituted not so much by privilege of wealth, but rather by privilege of education.2 Their distinctive calling is to lift the natural interplay between the other two estates up to the very highest possible level of thoughtfulness. As the other two estates are charged with representing the principles of ‘permanency’ and ‘progressiveness’, so the third 1

2

For what follows see especially Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, edited by John Barrell (London: J.M. Dent, 1972): 33–4. This is clearly not to be confused with the scheme operating in pre-revolutionary France, where the three estates of the Estates General were, first, the clergy; second, the nobility; and third, all other classes.


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estate is charged with representing the principle of ‘cultivation’. And this third estate is the ‘clerisy’. Again, compare the ancient varna theory of Vedic Hinduism: the tripartite division of privileged society into Kshatriyas, Vaisyas and Brahmans. In effect, Coleridge is simply transferring the same basic logic into the context of modern class distinction. He does not himself refer back to the Vedic theory, but the analogy is nevertheless very striking. Nor is he the only thinker of his day to speak in such terms, for one also finds much the same, for instance, in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Hegel, for his part, speaks of three privileged social classes: the ‘substantial’, the ‘formal’ and the ‘universal’.3 And, although he does not fully spell it out, the implicit logic of Hegel’s terminology is clear enough: the ‘substantial’ class (Coleridge’s ‘first estate’) is called ‘substantial’ because its particular moral function is to care for the underlying, substantive continuity of conservative tradition; the ‘formal’ class (Coleridge’s ‘second estate’) is called ‘formal’ because its particular moral function is to be continually pressing for reform, the reforming of institutions to fit new situations; the ‘universal’ class (Coleridge’s ‘third estate’) is called ‘universal’ because its particular moral function is to mediate, reflectively, between the particular interests of the other two classes as, together, they both contribute, in complementary fashion, to the universal interests of the larger whole.4 For Hegel too, in other words, it all comes down to the dialectical interaction between the representatives of permanency, progressiveness and cultivation. Yet what I think is most interestingly distinctive about Coleridge’s version of this doctrine is the way he links the calling of, in Hegel’s terminology, the ‘universal class’ to biblical precedent. Thus, he refers here to the institution of the Levitical priesthood. The Levites were a tribe, membership was by birth; this tribal aspect of the matter Coleridge, as a Christian thinker, naturally considers to have been a ‘deviation’ from the true Idea of the clerisy.5 But only take away the tribalism of the Levitical order, and there you have it: the universal class as a national priesthood, simply representing the nation, as a whole, before God. For Coleridge, the justification of the Church of England lies essentially in its approximation to that ideal model. Not that he is solely concerned with justifying the already established order of the Church of England. On the contrary, his argument is in fact a plea for major reform: he is a pioneering advocate, in this work, of 3

4

5

Hegel, Philosophy of Right, English translation by T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952): paragraphs 202–7. In Hegel’s ideal constitution there will be a two-chamber legislature, the upper house of which – whose members belong by right of birth, and so remain ‘independent of favour, whether from the executive or the mob’ – essentially represents the ‘substantial’ class; while the elected lower house essentially represents the ‘formal’. Ibid., paragraphs 301–14. The third class fills the civil service. Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, 28–9.


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large-scale state funding for education and pastoral care. He coins a special term, the ‘Nationalty’, to designate the proper cost of training and maintaining the clerisy. But, he argues, there is nothing like adequate provision for this. The funds have been diverted; the Nationalty, as he puts it, has very largely been ‘alienated’. If only, he remarks, Henry VIII, at the same time as liberating the Church of England from the hegemony of Rome, had also effectively remedied that ‘alienation’, how glorious, and all of a piece, his achievement would then have been!6 But it did not happen. What Coleridge is sketching is indeed a utopian dream. And the actual forms of mass state-funded education which we now take for granted can scarcely, I think, be said to meet his rather demanding ethical criteria. In the terms of his argument, present-day state-funded education is for the most part, surely, a furtherance not so much of true ‘cultivation’, but far rather of that altogether more dubious phenomenon, mere ‘civilization’. For what he is advocating is not just the sort of education driven by the intrinsic logic of capitalism; what one might call bourgeois education, designed first and foremost to provide an appropriately skilled workforce. But it is the education required by the clerisy, in order truly to be the clerisy. That is to say: it is, precisely, an education in what I am calling ‘primordial priesthood’. ‘A nation’, Coleridge remarks, ‘can never be a too cultivated, but may easily become an over-civilized race’.7 No previous age had ever been more ‘civilized’, in this sense, set over against ‘cultivation’, than his own. As he himself writes: My eye at this moment rests on a volume newly read by me, containing a well-written history of the Inventions, Discoveries, Public Improvements, Docks, Rail-ways, Canals, & c. . . . in England and Scotland. I closed it under the strongest impressions of awe, and admiration akin to wonder. We live, I exclaimed, under the dynasty of the understanding: and this is its golden age.8 He defines the ‘understanding’, here, as ‘the faculty of means to medial ends’. And ‘civilization’, for him, is the triumph of the ‘understanding’. ‘But’ – he at once goes on – ‘the ultimate ends? Where shall I seek for information concerning these?’ ‘Cultivation’ differs from ‘civilization’, very simply, in that it is the study of what serves the ‘ultimate’ ends of life.

6 7

8

Ibid., 41–2. Ibid., 38. (Note, however, that he does not always maintain this distinction - elsewhere he also speaks of ‘civilization’, in effect, as a synonym for ‘cultivation’.) Ibid., 46.


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This is what, as he sees it, the parish clergy, above all, are called to transmit to the public at large. And he waxes lyrical over the role of the parish clergy: That the maxims of a pure morality, and those sublime truths of the divine unity and attributes, which a Plato found hard to learn, and more difficult to reveal; that these should have become the almost hereditary property of childhood and poverty, of the hovel and the workshop; that even to the unlettered they sound as common place . . . that in the remotest villages there is a nucleus, round which the capabilities of the place may crystallize and brighten; a model sufficiently superior to excite, yet sufficiently near to encourage and facilitate, imitation; this unobtrusive, continuous agency of a Protestant Church establishment, this it is, which the patriot, and the philanthropist, who would fain unite the love of peace with the faith in the progressive amelioration of mankind, cannot estimate at too high a price – ‘It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the previous onyx, or the sapphire. No mention shall be made of coral or of pearls: for the price of wisdom is above rubies’.9 The clerisy also includes university academics and schoolteachers as direct proper beneficiaries of the Nationalty, but the parish clergy remain at the heart of it. And what above all sets the tone here is a certain sort of theology; in the sense that, among the members of the clerisy, it is above all the theologians who are charged to reflect upon, and to articulate, the corporate vocation of the whole class. Nothing so decisively marks the radical otherness of our current intellectual culture from the Coleridgean ideal as the sheer marginality, now, of theology. Coleridge does not write, in the conventional sense of the term, as a theologian himself. But he celebrates theology, or ‘divinity’ as he calls it. On the one hand, the sort of theology he has in mind has a largely civilreligious slant to it; it is an educational expression of the shaping and informing spirit, which educing, i.e. eliciting, the latent man in all the natives of the soil, trains them up to citizens of the country, free subjects of the realm.10 On the other hand, he values theology in its character as a discipline for the dissemination, through the ‘fundamental truths’ of popular religion, of the true spirit of philosophic open-mindedness; inasmuch as it is

9 10

Ibid., 60. Quoting Job 28:16, 18. Ibid., 37.


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only by the vital warmth diffused by these truths throughout the MANY, and by the guiding light from the philosophy. . . possessed by the FEW, [that] either the community or its rulers [can] fully comprehend, or rightly appreciate, the permanent distinction, and the occasional contrast, between cultivation and civilization.11 For him, in short, theology is precisely the prime discipline of the ‘cultivated’ mind; in essence, the systematic devising of strategies for ‘cultivation’. III

There are, one might say, two basic different species of possible argument in justification of an established church order like that of the Church of England. The first of these two arguments is represented, in its purest and most radical form, by Hobbes. Coleridge represents the other. For Hobbes the basic criterion for good religion is very straightforward. He may differ from the classic tradition of philosophic politics in strategic terms, but, like Plato – and like all the other ‘Platonist’ thinkers whom Strauss celebrates – he too sees good religion, essentially, as a contribution to benign law and order. Religion is there, in Hobbes’s view, simply in order to help soften the necessary coercion of the state; that is, to promote the elementary decencies of civilized life by sacralizing them. His whole concern with regard to religion is to criticize socially divisive fanaticism; he is a philosopher driven above all by his sense of horror at the various competing forms of aggressive religious intolerance that gave rise to the English Civil War. But, the argument runs, consider the matter in organizational terms. What, at this level, actually tends to give rise to bad religion, so defined? It is the formation of religious organizations with their own distinctive political self-interest, decisively set apart from that of the state as a secular self-determining whole, and hence always tending to be in conflict with it. Therefore, Hobbes is a pure liberal theocrat. He is a pure theological liberal, in the sense that his God is interested in just one thing, preventing war; and is prepared to countenance more or less anything that is sustainably compatible with that one supreme good. But he is also a pure theocrat, radically opposed to any separation between church and state, because of the potential for anarchic religious fanaticism which he sees as being the immediate consequence of any such separation. It is true, the Church of England has never in actual practice been either as liberal or as theocratic as Hobbes prescribed. In his ideal church, so as to minimize the risk of conflict, the sovereign would ex officio be recognized as, in the very fullest sense, a priest; equally 11

Ibid., 37–8.


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the supreme figure in both the lay and the clerical hierarchy. The Church of England, of course, goes no further than making the sovereign its ‘supreme governor’ – there is a major symbolic difference here. Nor has the general tone of Hobbes’s argument ever found much favour with Anglican theologians. He is too much the philosopher, too abrasively rationalistic, altogether too revolutionary; and there has always been a certain doubt, perhaps justified, as to his real sincerity as a man of religion. Yet the fact, nonetheless, remains: the organization of the Church of England does at any rate come closer to the Hobbesian ideal than any actually existing alternative. Hobbes’s argument, then, is a vindication of the Church of England on the basis of its supposed contribution to benign law and order. Coleridge, however, goes further, inasmuch as he has a much more expansive notion of good religion. His criterion is not just religion’s contribution to benign law and order; but, as I have said, what he values above all is ‘cultivation’. Mediating as it does between the complementary principles of ‘permanency’ and ‘progressiveness’, one might perhaps further define ‘cultivation’, in the Coleridgean sense, as a general term for everything involved, both educationally and organizationally, in helping create an ideal environment for Honest public conversation. Benign law and order is indeed one basic precondition for good public conversation; as giving rise to a general sense of security, and so rendering people less immediately self-defensive in their thinking, better able to listen to one another with proper attentiveness. But it is by no means the only precondition. The quality of public conversation also depends, in other ways, upon the quality of the intellectual class charged with facilitating it. In order to be good, it surely requires, so far as possible, a high-minded, non-factional intellectual class, in the friendliest possible contact with all other classes. In other words: a ‘clerisy’, with the very clearest sense of itself as such. But, Coleridge argues, the Church of England is in fact especially well fitted to represent this ideal. Of course, all churches are committed to high-mindedness. The Church of England, however, differs from other churches in the degree to which it is also structurally designed to minimize the risk of a factional mentality. Since the immediate occasion for Coleridge’s book was Catholic emancipation, he is especially interested here in contrasting Anglicanism with Roman Catholicism. And, in particular, he attacks the role of the papacy. Unlike Hobbes, as I have said, he is not only concerned with the maintenance of law and order; yet he is no less fiercely opposed than Hobbes is to any form of church governance tending to make the church a direct institutional rival to the secular government. The Coleridgean ideal by no means excludes the possibility that Christians may sometimes be called on, as Christians, to resist the operations of a corrupt secular regime. What troubles him, though, is the way in which a spirit of sacralized factionalism, such as he thinks the institution of the papacy inevitably tends to produce, detracts


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from the church’s proper work of ‘cultivation’. For, to the extent that this spirit prevails, it sets the ordained clergy apart from other educators, in that it renders them mere indoctrinators. Indoctrination closes genuine public conversation down. True ‘cultivation’ opens public conversation up. And to this end: the clergyman is with his parishioners and among them; he is neither in the cloistered cell, nor in the wilderness, but a neighbour and family-man, whose education and rank admit him to the mansion of the rich landholder, while his duties make him the frequent visitor of the farmhouse and the cottage.12 Therefore the Anglican clergy are ideally equipped, at least in principle, to represent the interests of the poor, speaking up for the less articulate so that their otherwise all too easily neglected concerns may also, as far as possible, be brought into the general scope of public conversation. Coleridge distinguishes between two basic, complementary forms of ‘church’: on the one hand, the Christian Church, as such; on the other hand, the ‘National Church’. As the Christian Church is a community built up by the work of the ordained clergy, so the ‘National Church’, the way Coleridge uses the term, comprises all forms of community life built up by the work of the clerisy as a whole. Every sophisticated human culture requires its ‘National Church’, in this sense; it need not be Christian. Coleridge himself refers to the religious communities both of ancient Israel and of the pagan Druids, as forms of ‘National Church’.13 And by the same logic one might surely also speak of Islamic forms of ‘National Church’; Buddhist ones; Hindu religious culture as the primary ‘National Church’ of India; and so forth. For Coleridge, however, the Church of England represents a unique approximation to the proper marriage of a National Church to Christianity. A marriage which, in his view, serves fundamentally to benefit both parties. One may indeed very well object to the resultant argument in its specific character as an apologia for the Church of England. No doubt the rather idyllic picture Coleridge paints of the Anglican clergy hobnobbing with the labouring classes did represent quite a widespread reality. But, at the same time, why – one has to ask – was Methodism, in that world, so spectacularly flourishing, as a secession from the Church of England? Plainly, it was at least in part due to a very widespread perception of the Church of England being, in actual practice, first and foremost the church of the gentry, or of servile deference to the gentry. Judged as a work of confessional apologetics, I think one has to concede that Coleridge’s argument is very largely vitiated by his complete failure to address this basic issue! 12 13

Ibid., 60. Ibid., 45.


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And yet, what nevertheless still intrigues me is that other aspect of his work, which transcends confessional apologetics; the largely implicit utopian vision here. It is no mere coincidence that this particular utopian dream is developed in a context of Anglican apologetics. But what counts in the end, I think, is not the apologetics. It is the dream. The abiding challenge of Coleridge’s thought lies in the sheer radicalism with which he confronts the primordial ideologization of Christian faith by aggressive church-institutional conceit, as represented, in his world, most overtly by militant Ultramontane Roman Catholicism, or by Protestant sectarianism. It is true that the Church of England, at the same time as being designed to minimize the scope for this particular species of conceit, has all too often simply replaced it with collusion in another no less deleterious species, the conceit of the secular ruling class as such, whereas what is wanted is a fundamental liberation from corporate conceit of every variety. However, let us set aside the not very convincing confessional apologetics here. I still think that there is a vital element of truth in the underlying principle of Coleridge’s critique. IV

Coleridge dreams of an ideal marriage between what he thinks of as two basic forms of ‘church’: the Christian Church as such and the National Church as such. The Latin for ‘church’ is ecclesia, originally derived from the Greek ekkalein, ‘to call [someone] out’; for the Christian Church is the community of those who have been ‘called out of’ the secular world. But he also coins the new term enclesia, suggestive, on the contrary, of being ‘called into’ that world. And here is another way of expressing the difference in calling between the two forms of church. So, for him, the Christian Church as such is an ecclesia, but the National Church is an enclesia. The Christian Church is called out of the secular world, in the sense of breaking free from its dominant prejudices. Yet the National Church is the community of those called back into that world, in the sense of being drawn together by a loyal concern, simply, for the good of their nation as a whole.14 Let us pick up this idea, and look at it a little further. What do these two contrasting forms of ‘church’ each bring to the ideal marriage between them? The National Church, or enclesia – first – brings a fundamental detachment from issues of ideological truth-as-correctness. For it is a community held together, in the first instance, not by a shared orthodoxy, but instead by a shared language and a shared sense of history, simply. And its defining goal is not the imposition of one particular set of supposedly correct ideas. Far rather, it is the promotion of ‘cultivation’: better, more ‘cultivated’, conversation between the protagonists of competing ideas. 14

Ibid., 35.


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The Christian Church, or ecclesia – on the other hand – brings its cosmopolitanism, its constitutive conversational openness towards other secular communities, way beyond the isolating limitations of nationality. This cosmopolitanism does depend upon the bonding of an orthodoxy, in order to replace the bonds of national culture. Only, for Coleridge, the whole point of the marriage here is to liberate Christian cosmopolitanism from any ideological hardening of this orthodoxy into a mere conversation inhibiter. He goes on to specify what he calls four essential ‘characters’ of the true Christian Church, as distinct from a National Church; that is, four basic organizational requirements, in order for a church to be authentically Christian.15 Thus: 1 The first of these ‘characters’ is that a true Christian Church can never constitute the government of a territory, as in the case of the Papal State or the medieval prince-bishoprics. And neither can it claim to be an estate of the realm, in the sense of being a proper recipient of state patronage on the basis of its Christian orthodoxy. A true National Church like the Church of England, as he sees it, is properly an estate of the realm. But the point is, this is not by virtue of its Christian orthodoxy. Although the Church of England is at the same time both enclesia and ecclesia, its being established as a privileged estate of the realm is justifiable, he evidently thinks, only in so far as it manages to keep these two roles separate, and use its privileges strictly only for enclesiastical, not ecclesiastical purposes. For the state has no business privileging any sort of religious orthodoxy, for orthodoxy’s sake. The state’s proper business in collaborating with a church is never to help proselytize; it is only to enlist the church’s aid in promoting education and pastoral care. And, for its own part, a true ecclesia will never want to use state power for purposes of mere indoctrination. 2 At the same time, however – while a true ecclesia will never, as ecclesia, intrude upon what rightly belongs only to an enclesia – it will nonetheless, so far as possible, always hold itself open to the complementarity of the enclesiastic principle. So it cannot want to be ‘a secret community’; it will by no means shrink away from, and devalue, the public domain. 3 The true ecclesia will not have ‘any visible head or sovereign’; neither a sovereign Pope, nor any more sectarian equivalent. For Coleridge knows of no such sovereignty that is not immediately associated with factional church ideology. 4 It ‘is neither Anglican, Gallican, nor Roman, neither Latin nor Greek’.16 Its prime virtue is its absolutely cosmopolitan catholicity.

15 16

Ibid., 97–111, ‘Idea of the Christian Church’. Ibid., 106.


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For Coleridge, the Christian-confessional life of the ecclesia is to be married to the civil-religious life of an enclesia, precisely so as to liberate this cosmopolitanism from its traditional over-institutionalization. Certainly, these are two very different ideal modes of religious life. And yet, they are marriageable – just by virtue of the basic sense in which both are forms of church. Both are, equally, church: that is, a communal bonding of intellectuals with the salt of the earth, conceived by the former in a genuine spirit of ‘priestliness’. As an upholder of enclesia Coleridge is fiercely opposed to church-ideological conceit. But as one who still very much wants enclesia married to ecclesia he is at the same time also no less fundamentally opposed to intellectual-elitist conceit.


9 Sacramentally Rooted Thought

I

The actual word theologia, ‘theology’, was in fact first coined by Plato.1 And the earliest systematic treatise in theology of which we know was the Antiquitates de rerum humanarum et divinarum by M.T. Varro, a pagan Platonist of the first century BCE.2 Nevertheless, it seems to me that true theology is the ultimate nemesis of Platonism; as of all overweening philosophy. Thus, I have argued, true theology is not metaphysics. It is a contribution to the sacralizing of plain Honesty, not of sophisticated Curiosity. Ideally, indeed, it is a deployment of the very greatest intellectual sophistication – in order, however, to celebrate an order of truth the actual appropriation of which remains completely independent of intellectual sophistication. I am talking about theology as one particular form of the science of the sacralization of Honesty. A theistic form of that science. But also, note, a catholic one. By which I mean: not individualistic, but community building. And yet not sectarian, either; not community building on the basis of a sheer hostility to the surrounding world. A catholic community is, on the contrary, one which is consistently opened up to the surrounding world, in neighbourly sympathy and pastoral concern. It is, in that sense, soft round the edges. But it is held together by the distinctive activity at its core. Catholic community is community absolutely centred in public liturgy. And, I want to argue, the more sacramental this liturgy, the better. The proper calling of theology surely transcends that of philosophy, above all, by virtue of true theology’s fundamental rootedness in the sacramental.

1 2

Plato, Republic 379 a 5–6. See Burkhart Cardauns, M. Terentius Varro: Antiquitates Rerum Divinarum, Fragmente und Kommentar (Wiesbaden: Abhandl. Akad. Mainz, Geistes- und Sozialwiss. Klasse, 1976).


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II

The point is this: the ‘sacramental’ element in liturgy is just that aspect of it which contributes to the sacralization of Honesty, and therefore primarily addresses not so much the intellect as the will. Any liturgical practice, I think, may be said to be ‘sacramental’ in so far as it is valued by those who participate in it not only for its educational aspects, addressing the intellect, but also for its sheer aura, as an impetus to willing. No sacrament, of course, is without its overlay of intellectual interpretation, to render it educational. But its actual sacramentality is on another level. One does not need to understand a sacrament in order to be touched by it, at the level of its primary truthfulness or grace. The interpretation aims only at a secondary level. What above all distinguishes theology from philosophy, it seems to me, is its rootedness in a sacramentally understood practice of liturgy. Sometimes outsiders see things more clearly than insiders. And nowhere have I seen the basic principle of sacramentality more directly or better set out than in the essay, ‘Theory of the Sacraments’, by Simone Weil.3 This essay is one of Weil’s last works. She wrote it in late 1942 or early 1943. In London, exiled and sick, she was at the time attending mass almost daily. But she was never a communicant. Born into a Jewish although secularized family, and therefore unbaptized as a child, she had pondered the prospect of baptism and, for reasons extensively set out in other writings of those years, decided against it. She did so as a conscientious objector to the church’s traditional persecutory intolerance of ‘heresy’, and its, in her view, disastrously competitive attitude to other religious cultures. Nothing, as she saw it, could be further from the original free-spiritedness of Jesus himself. And so she abstained from the sacraments as a way of registering her personal protest against the church’s betrayal of that free-spiritedness. But she is nevertheless anxious to insist, this abstention is in no way intended to express any intellectualist repudiation of sacramentality in itself. Quite to the contrary! And her essay on the ‘Theory of the Sacraments’ is essentially her way of making that point. The argument opens with a general observation: Human nature is so arranged that a desire of the soul has no reality within the soul until it has passed through the body by means of actions, movements and attitudes. Until then it is like a ghost. It has no effect on the soul. A ‘desire of the soul’ is the opposite of a ‘desire of the flesh’, confined to carnal need. And yet the problem is, in order to have a real – a

3

Simone Weil, Gateway to God, English translation by David Raper (Glasgow: Collins, 1974): 65–72.


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more than ghostly – ‘effect’, it nevertheless has to be enfleshed, made carnal habit. What is a ‘desire of the soul’? It seems to me, one might say that every such desire is essentially some modification of the fundamental desire for Honesty. Weil herself calls this ‘the desire for absolute good’. Such desire may surge up occasionally, unbidden – that is how in the first place one knows it, and can recognize it. But how are we to give it, as Weil says, ‘reality’; how turn it from a fleeting impulse into a ‘real’ act of will? The desire for absolute good is by nature infinite, it always aims at more than one can specify. That is to say, its true object is forever intangible. Yet the subjective impulse has to be given objective embodiment, so that we may continue, regularly, to be confronted by reminders of the objective demand to which it is a response. The intangible object has to be rendered tangible. For catholic Christians the eucharist is a divinely established and therefore supremely authoritative convention, perfectly designed to serve this purpose. So Weil writes: If you believe that contact with the [eucharistically consecrated] piece of bread is contact with God, in that case in the contact with bread the desire for contact with God, which was only an impulse, passes the test of reality. And hence Because of this same fact, and because in these matters desiring is the one precondition for receiving, there is a real contact with God.4 All that is required, in other words, for a real ‘contact with God’ to be achieved is that one invest sufficient faith in the sacrament. For what, after all, is ‘contact with God’? Properly understood, it is nothing other than the making ‘real’ of the desire for absolute good. ‘In these matters desiring is the one precondition of receiving’ – because to ‘desire contact with God’ is simply to desire that quality of desire. It is to desire a desire for absolute good which ‘passes the test of reality’. Which is just what the sacrament, in so far as one invests sufficient real faith in it, immediately supplies. But what then, for this purpose, constitutes real faith? For faith here to be real, Weil argues, it has to satisfy two elementary conditions: First, the object of desire must be none other than the unique, pure, perfect, complete, absolute and, for us, inconceivable good. Plenty of people apply the word God as a courtesy title to some conception that they have fabricated or that their social milieu has provided. There are many conceptions of 4

Ibid., 66–7.


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this kind. They more or less resemble the true God, but the soul can think them without actually looking outside the world at all. In that case thought, though apparently occupied with God, remains in this world, and belief, according to the world’s own canons, produces illusion and not truth . . . The second condition is that the belief in a certain identity between the piece of bread and God should have penetrated one’s whole being to the point of infecting, not the intelligence, which has no place at this stage, but all the other parts of the soul, imagination, sensitivity, almost the flesh itself. When these two conditions exist, and when the approaching contact with the bread is about to subject desire to the test of reality, something really happens in the soul.5 A sacrament is properly an evocation of the desire for absolute good, that is, for Honesty. Nothing else, nothing less. But this is an orientation towards maximum receptivity, in the sense of sheer sympathetic openness to the otherness of the Other, wherever encountered. And sacramental faith is in the first instance a condition of, as Weil puts it, ‘imagination, sensitivity, almost the flesh itself’ inasmuch as these are the channels through which the soul is most immediately receptive. This has nothing to do with the ‘intelligence’. By the ‘intelligence’ I think she means whatever belongs to the soul’s self-positing productivity. Which, with regard to what one may receive from the Other, reviews and interprets its implications – after it has been received.6 Again, a sacrament is not an argument. It is not primarily addressed to the intelligence, or intellect, in this sense; far rather, it is addressed to the will, which by contrast determines the original extent of our receptivity, already well before any process of intellectual review and interpretation. It is, to begin with, a simple bid to silence the clamour of our everyday wilfulness, all the mental noise that distracts us, hinders us from receiving what God, through our neighbours, has to offer us. And the prime indicator of authentic sacramental ‘contact’ is not, therefore, any new intellectual grasp of things; but a sheer heightened discontent with the ordinary banality of life. Where such contact is made, the sacrament serves as a point of focus for all the latent conflict within the soul, intensifying that conflict and so driving it towards the resolution that it needs. Thus, in Weil’s words, ‘all that is mediocre in the soul revolts at the sacrament’.7 At this point, as in numerous other places in her writings, I am reminded especially of the 5 6

7

Ibid., 67–8. Of course, ‘imagination’ can also refer to a mode of productivity, where for instance one is speaking about the creative imagination of an artist. The term is, in this regard, ambiguous. Where, however, she speaks of ‘imagination, sensitivity almost the flesh itself’ I take it that Weil is talking not about that, but about the purely receptive element of imagination involved in trying to see the world as it appears through other people’s eyes. Gateway to God, 68.



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great fifteenth-century mystic Catherine of Genoa. There is, so far as I am aware, no indication that Weil had actually read Catherine’s work, and yet the underlying similarities are quite striking. For Catherine, too, is above all concerned to get beyond any questions about the intellectual content of faith, in order to consider its mode of operation, in terms of the will. She for her part does so by discussing the notion of Purgatory.8 Traditionally, Purgatory is conceived as a place of refining fire; this fire, Catherine argues, represents an infinitely intensified apprehension of and love for God, resulting in an infinitely intensified anguish at one’s own continuing imperfection and cut-offness from God. The image of which as a postmortem state, however, she further suggests, is an ideal distillation of the universal proper work of faith, already in our mortal life. Weil does not speak of Purgatory, but she nevertheless describes communion as ‘a journey through fire, which burns and destroys a fragment of the soul’s impurities’. And again: The more real the desire for God, and consequently contact with God through the sacrament, the more violent will be the upheaval of the mediocre part of the soul; an upheaval that is comparable to the recoiling of a living body when it is about to be pushed into fire.9 Sacramentality in general, one might perhaps say, is a strategy for, so far as possible, deliberately drawing down the fire of Purgatory upon earth. The ‘mediocre part of the soul’ recoils from the sacrament, in boredom or in irritation. But what is faith, here? It need not involve any particular structure of articulate belief. All it essentially involves is a basic refusal to go along with that all too natural recoil. It is just a matter of staying put. ‘When’, Weil writes, the soul has once crossed a threshold through a real contact with pure good – of which internal tumult before the sacrament is perhaps a sure sign – nothing further is asked of it except motionless attention. Note: Motionless attention does not mean absence of external activity. External activity, as long as it is rigorously imposed by human obligations and particular commandments of God, is one part of this stillness of soul.10 8

9 10

Catherine of Genoa, Purgation and Purgatory/The Spiritual Dialogue, English translation by Serge Hughes (London: SPCK, 1979). (Purgation and Purgatory is a new title for what was traditionally known as the Treatise on Purgatory; adopted, however, because the work is really nothing like a treatise, but is far rather a lyrical meditation. Which is here laid out in verse form.) Gateway to God, 69. Ibid., 70.


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But she simply means an inner motionlessness of stilled receptivity. Or, to put it in New Testament Greek: hypomone´. Which is, she remarks, an ‘infinitely more beautiful’ term than the Latin-derived ‘patience’, in that it is – much more precisely – the virtue of ‘a person who waits without moving, in spite of all the blows from those who try to make him move’.11 (As for instance in Luke 8.15, defining the authenticity of authentic disciples: karpophorousin en hypomone´, ‘they will bring forth fruit in hypomone´’.) III

A ‘sacrament’, one might say, is any public ritual in so far as it is understood to be efficacious as a channel of divine grace, already, quite independently of its contribution to the education of the intellect. For educational purposes it is of course desirable that a sacrament should be rendered as beautiful and as academically stimulating as possible. But its efficacy as a sacrament in no way depends upon this. It depends neither on the artistic beauty nor on the academic brilliance brought to the sacrament’s performance, but rather on the prior acknowledged holiness of what is being performed, considered purely and simply in itself. Sacramentality is a direct encounter with heavenly perfection. No matter how beautiful the drama of the sacramental rite, its beauty will never be perfect; no matter how academically brilliant the preaching involved, it will never be perfect in that regard either. And therefore the actual encounter with heavenly perfection can only occur at another, more primordial level. It requires that we invest our faith in the sacrament, purely and simply, as a sacred convention established, from on high, for such encounter. What ultimately counts above all is not the educational quality of the performance; but rather, it is the sheer sacredness of the underlying convention, the general pattern which each particular performance repeats. Weil’s primary concern is with the ‘real presence’ of God in the Christian eucharist. As she puts it in another of her essays: The virtue of the dogma of the real presence lies in its very absurdity. Except for the infinitely touching symbolism of food, there is nothing in the morsel of bread which can be associated with our thought of God. Thus the conventional character of the divine presence is evident. Christ can only be present in such an object by convention. For this very reason he can be perfectly present in it. God can only be present in secret here below. His presence in the eucharist is truly secret since no part of our thought can reach the secret. Thus it is total.12 11 12

Ibid., 71. (The etymology of the word suggests ‘waiting-under’.) ‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God’; in Weil, Waiting on God, English translation by Emma Craufurd (London: Collins, 1959): 141.



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Nevertheless, it is clear that the basic principle here is by no means confined to Christianity. She herself also insists that it may equally apply in other religious contexts; citing, for instance, the Buddhist practice of reciting the name of the Buddha. ‘For’, of course, ‘a name is a convention too’.13 As for the other forms of Abrahamic religion: in the Jewish and Islamic traditions the absolutely central sacramental act, equivalent to the Christian eucharist, is none other than the ritual recitation of holy scripture. This indeed is why there has always been so much resistance in the Islamic world to the translation of the Qur’an; an attitude to holy scripture so very different from the mainstream Christian approach to the Bible. For the primary, properly sacramental grace of the Qur’an inheres not so much in the meaning of its words, which can be translated, but rather in their sound; inasmuch as this is the actual sound of God speaking aloud, God’s own voice echoed in the voice of the reciter, God speaking Arabic. By way of qur’anic recitation – whether it be in the muezzin’s brief but regularly reiterated call to prayer, the enthusiastic chant which goes with the rhythmic swaying of a Sufi dhikr, or the more extended intoning of the sacred texts by a sheikh – Allah is directly and wonderfully encountered in the conventions of a particular language, a particular poetic style. And, mutatis mutandis, it is much the same with the ritual reading of the Torah in Rabbinic Judaism too. The Kabbalist tradition especially, from the twelfth century CE onwards, has sacramentalized such reading in sometimes quite startling ways. Thus here, in the first place, we find the focus of meditative attention quite decisively shifted away from the immediate meaning inherent in the actual words of the text, to be fixed instead on the individual letters of the Hebrew alphabet, out of which the words are formed; each letter, in itself, being regarded as a separate channel of divine energy. And then, underneath the surface meaning of the words, the letters are, at the deepest level, understood to spell out a scrambled sequence of still to be discovered divine names. Or else the text of the Torah in its entirety is declared to be, essentially, the one true name of God. For the Kabbalist, as Gershom Scholem puts it, the Torah is . . . a mystical unity, whose primary purpose is not to convey a specific meaning, but rather to express the immensity of God’s power, which is concentrated in his ‘Name’.14

13 14

Ibid., 142. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, English translation by Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken Books, 1965): 40.


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And so, in general, discursive exegesis gives way to sheer invocatory naming. The Kabbalists claim to discern a hidden, mystical level of truth in the Torah. So do Sufis in the Qur’an, and Christian mystics in the Christian Bible. In that sense, they are, all of them, esotericists. Note, though, the fundamental difference between such mystical esotericism and the sort of philosophic esotericism celebrated by Leo Strauss. The latter, as we have seen, is a matter of deliberate, prudent strategy for the selfpreservation of an intellectual elite, supposedly justified by their privileged access to truth-as-correctness. But mystical esotericism is in fact the exact opposite. It is quite simply an acknowledgement of the primordial hiddenness of God; a hiddenness essentially deriving from the intrinsic difficulty of truth-as-Honesty. Mystical esotericism is grounded in sacramentality. For sacramentality is nothing other than the pre-discursive sacralizing of perfect Honesty; a corporate honouring of the wisdom of the saints, precisely, in all its otherness from the wisdom of philosophers. IV

‘This bread is my body’, says Jesus. ‘This wine is my blood’. He does not say, ‘Understand, this bread is a commemorative symbol, or sign, of my body’. Or: ‘Understand, this wine represents my blood’. Eucharistic communion does not depend, for its authenticity, on any intellectual process of understanding: articulately recognizing symbols, interpreting representations; helping them, as it were, to speak. No, God is already absolutely there in the egalitarian sheer muteness of these things. This bread, this wine. In relation to truth-as-correctness everything depends upon intellectual ability and education; that is what I mean by ‘truth-as-correctness’. But in relation to truth-as-Honesty we are all equal. And therefore sacramental liturgy is a great symbolic leveller. To participate in the sacramental recitation of the Qur’an, or of the Torah, all that is required, by way of ability, is that one has ears and eyes; and all that is required, by way of ability, to participate in the sacrament of the eucharist is a capacity to eat and drink. From the most sophisticated to the most simple-minded, at this point we are all of us symbolically set on one and the same level, face to face with the infinite imperatives of Honesty, intuitively apprehended. Or, again, to say the same thing another way: when we celebrate the eucharist God is symbolically present to us not only in the ideas that the ritual conjures up, but in the very substance of the sacramental elements. The Catholic dogma of ‘transubstantiation’ originates as medieval scholastic theology’s quintessential gesture of theoretical homage to the essentially trans-theoretical nature of sacramental grace. The concept originally emerges out of the eleventh-century controversy stirred up by the intellectualist scepticism, in this regard, of Berengarius of Tours. It is



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meant to reaffirm what Berengarius, on Aristotelian philosophic grounds, had denied.15 And it was formally incorporated into official Catholic dogma at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. John Wycliffe, however, revived Berengarius’s philosophic argument in the fourteenth century. And Martin Luther of course, along with all the other Protestant Reformers following him, rejected the term ‘transubstantiation’ as being unbiblical. It is roundly condemned, for example, in Article 28 of the 39 foundational ‘Articles of Religion’ in the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer. Indeed, the Reformers’ hostility to this particular term also becomes representative of their whole critique of Catholic sacramentalism in general. To speak of ‘transubstantiation’, they suggest, belongs to a quite false understanding of ordained ministry, overexalting the authority of the priest as celebrant of the eucharist and thereby distracting attention away from the proper criteria for ministerial authority, which are, above all, biblical scholarship and effectiveness in preaching. The Council of Trent, responding to the Protestant attack in 1551, famously reaffirmed ‘transubstantiation’. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, with the rise of the ecumenical movement, some Roman Catholic theologians have sought to soften the conflict here, not by repudiating the scholastic / Tridentine term, but nevertheless by suggesting other alternatives, unburdened by any history of polemic usage, with which to supplement, and perhaps eventually more or less to supercede it. Thus, rather than always insisting on ‘transubstantiation’, the suggestion has been that it would perhaps be better to speak in this context of ‘transsignification’, ‘transfunctionalization’ or ‘transfinalization’.16 As a Church of England priest I must say that one can only be grateful for the eirenic impulse behind this Roman Catholic suggestion. And yet it seems to me, it really would be much better if we, on the Protestant side, could now give way instead. I think the concession needs to come, far rather, from our side. For ‘transubstantiation’, surely, still does say something more than any of these other proposed terms. And I would, myself, absolutely want to affirm that extra something. It is after all little more than stating the obvious to say that, for the faithful, the eucharistic elements of bread and wine have a different ‘significance’ from other bread and wine; a different ‘function’; a different ‘finality’, or ultimate purpose. But, unlike any of the alternatives, ‘transubstantiation’ serves to highlight the crucial distinction between 15

16

Berengarius denied the logical possibility of a sacramental transformation in ‘substance’ unaccompanied by a transformation in ‘accidents’. His doctrine, however, was attacked by Lanfranc and others, and was initially condemned at the Synod of Vercelli in 1050. See for example Edward Schillebeeckx, The Eucharist, translated by N.D. Smith (London: Sheed & Ward, 1968). (Originally published in Dutch in 1967.) These terms were first systematically advocated in the 1950s by J. de Baciochi; and then by the Dutch theologians P. Schoonenberg and L. Smits.


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two different levels of the transformation in question. To speak of ‘transsignification’, ‘transfunctionalization’ or ‘transfinalization’ is, by contrast, to retreat into fundamental ambiguity: these terms may equally well refer either to a transformation at the level of ‘ideas’, that is, the level at which the more truly intellectual one is, the better; or to a transformation at the level of ‘substance’, as opposed to ‘ideas’; the level where all that is called for is goodwill, no matter how inarticulate. ‘Transubstantiation’, however, points explicitly to that second level alone. It is only the second level which ultimately counts for salvation, as opposed to intellectual enlightenment. And, again, for an intellectual believer, as such, the whole point of faith is surely that it means putting the quest for salvation above the quest for prestige on the basis of one’s intellectuality. In the sacramental recitation of the Qur’an, or of the Torah – I think one might say – the words are effectively transubstantiated into the living voice of God, summoning the listeners to an ever more decisive subordination of all else to salvation. And so too in the eucharist, the elements of bread and wine are transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ, with the same basic end in view. V

The Reformation was a great protest against corporate conceit. Yet it was also a great upsurge of corporate conceit in another form. Against the corporate conceit of the unreformed clergy, as such, the Reformers mobilized the corporate conceit of the literate classes, as such. This latter form of corporate conceit was much less narrowly elitist than that which comes to expression in Platonist philosophic politics; but what I am calling ‘corporate conceit’ may just as well corrupt groups of any size. In the sixteenth century the two categories of the literate classes and the clergy still very largely overlapped with one another. Yet they had nonetheless become distinct enough to clash, with unprecedented ferocity. And the clash quite naturally took shape as a struggle over the sacraments. For it was not only that the corporate conceit of the unreformed clergy, as such, tended to ideologize the sacraments, reducing them to the level of mere legitimation rituals for the reinforcement of the celebrants’ authority. At the same time, the corporate conceit of the literate classes immediately involved a no less ideological tendency to roll back the very principle of sacramentality. Early Protestantism was a movement with many leaders, operating in many different localities, and their inevitable rivalries issued, not least, in bitter disputes over the proper formulation of eucharistic doctrine. Fine theological distinctions, in this regard, became crude tokens of embattled ideological identity. Zwingli and Oecolampadius, in Zurich, represented the most hard-line position. It would be an oversimplification to say that they sought to desacramentalize the eucharist



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altogether.17 But the whole emphasis of their polemic was on the function of the eucharist as a memorial of salvation history, and hence as a teaching opportunity, rather than as a sacrament in the sense that I am using the term. Martin Luther recoiled from this, anxious to reaffirm the sacramental ‘real presence’ of Christ in the sheer ritual enactment of the eucharist. Martin Bucer of Strasbourg, most notably, then set out to try and mediate between these two positions. And John Calvin further developed Bucer’s mediating line. Even so, all were agreed, the Lutherans no less decisively than the others, not only in their theoretical repudiation of ‘transubstantiation’, but also, above all, in rejecting any sort of practice involving prayer before the reserved eucharistic elements. What, though, is the real offence of such prayer? True, the reservation of the eucharistic elements is not a biblically sanctioned practice. However, the Reformation churches did not, could not, in every detail confine themselves to the practices of the New Testament period. The prime objection in this case would, in fact, simply seem to be that prayer before the reserved elements involves a sacramental encounter with Christ altogether detached from any accompanying intellectual process. In the actual celebration of the eucharist its sacramentality is straight away mixed with educational interpretation, as communicated through prayers, readings, sermons. But, by contrast, prayer before the reserved elements is an experience of sacramentality more or less neat. Simone Weil – who, since she had not been baptized, never in fact received communion – speaks of eucharistic sacramental grace as something essentially appropriated by way of inner ‘motionless attention’, or ‘watchful stillness’. Nothing more directly enacts this, in outward terms, than silent prayer before the reserved elements. Here is the intrinsic muteness of sacramental presence, as it were, in a process of distillation. The Reformers, however, denounced both the theory of transubstantiation and the practice of reservation deriving from it as being ‘superstitious’. The formulation in the Book of Common Prayer (Article 28), for instance, is trenchant: Transubstantiation . . . cannot be proved by holy Writ; but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions . . . What ‘superstitions’? The immediate answer given is: the unbiblical practices of reserving, carrying about, lifting up and worshipping the elements. 17

Nor would any of their contemporaries have described them this way. On the contrary, for it is perhaps worth noting that in the sixteenth century the terms ‘sacramentarian’ and ‘sacramentary’ actually had the exact opposite meaning to what they now have. To be a ‘sacramentarian’ or ‘sacramentary’, then, was precisely to be a follower of Zwingli and Oecolampadius!


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In the Introduction, above, I ventured my own definition of ‘superstition’: I defined it there, in very broad terms, as a category including any sort of ritual practice whose primary rationale is to meet our alreadygiven emotional needs, rather than to try and reshape our will, according to God’s needs.18 That is to say, I proposed that we think of ‘superstition’, essentially, as an expression of disordered willing. But is this, in fact, what the Reformers meant? Or did they, perhaps, merely mean: any sort of ritual practice with a particular appeal to the less educated, as such? In other words: not so much a matter of disordered willing, as of deficient intellect? My suspicion, at any rate, is that these two very different notions were actually somewhat muddled together in their minds. Considered as an expression of disordered willing, superstition may I think be said to come in three basic forms. It may, first, be a simple impulse of neurotic anxiety. This is the relatively harmless impulse that leads to the use of magic charms, to attract good luck or ward off bad luck. Second, it may perhaps represent a certain flight from moral responsibility. Here, for example, we surely have the basic attraction of astrology: if the course of my life is determined by the stars, or other such forces, then to that extent I am not to blame for what goes morally wrong in it. And then, third, there is the kind of superstition which serves as a channel for cruelty. Beliefs in devil possession, or in witchcraft, clearly serve this purpose. But to which of these three forms of superstition is the doctrine of transubstantiation, or the practice of prayer before the reserved elements, supposed to be especially linked? Of course it is true that one can find plenty of instances of superstition, in each of these forms, loosely coexisting with that doctrine and practice. Traditional Protestant polemic, however, suggests far more: it regards the whole rationale of both as being ‘superstitious’ in essence. And I can only conclude that those who argue that way are using the term ‘superstitious’ in a completely different sense from me. For my part, I can see no reason at all why churches with a ‘high’ view of sacramentality should be any more superstitious, in the sense that superstition is an expression of disordered willing, than churches with a ‘lower’ view. What superstition in this sense thrives on is far rather, surely, just evangelistic impatience, as churches collude with people’s neurotic anxieties, their will to irresponsibility and their taste for cruelty, the more readily to gain converts and devotees. A high view of sacramentality represents a decisive liberation of faith from the corporate conceit of the better educated as such. And when the Reformers contemptuously denounced such a view as being ‘superstitious’, this, it seems to me, was at bottom nothing other than a great upsurge in that sort of conceit; no longer confined now to a little philosophic elite, but associated with the much more general spread of Bible-reading bourgeois literacy in that period. The original Protestant 18

See p. 14.



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rolling back of the principle of sacramentality was thus, I think, very much a direct symbolic expression of specifically bourgeois faith in God. Or faith in the God of the bourgeoisie, as distinct from the God of the peasantry. And so what shall we say of those later evolving movements within the Protestant world which, on the contrary, chiefly appeal to, and help empower, the non-bourgeois, the poor, even the wretched of the earth? I mean: the whole revivalist tradition, and especially nowadays Pentecostalism. As regards the relationship between the educated and the less educated, it is as though, after the Reformation had disturbed the old Catholic balance, post-Catholicism rocked first one way, then the other. To begin with it produced a form of church life for ever polemically reinforcing, by sacralizing, the prestige of the educated bourgeoisie, inasmuch as they are better able than others to read, and intellectually to appropriate, the teaching of the Bible; in which participation by the poor and less well educated was only allowed on condition of their being properly deferential. But then it went on to produce the exact opposite: a form of church life hemmed in by fundamentalist dogma, deliberately designed to exclude intellectuals. Granted, the older revivalist churches of the Methodist and allied traditions were never anything like as fundamentalist in spirit as present-day Pentecostalism tends to be. And as time has passed, their original revivalist enthusiasm having somewhat subsided, they have generally become quite hospitable to intellectuals. Yet that development is just what, at the beginning of the twentieth century, prompted the Pentecostalist reaction; which was, it seems, very largely driven by a sense that the inclusion of the better educated could only result in a certain exclusion of the less educated, the inevitable loss of something vital which the fervour of the original revivalist upsurge had once provided them.19 How, in general, can church communities restore the balance lost here; hold the loyalty of people at all different levels of sophistication, providing all sorts with their own most appropriate modes of devotional self-expression and discipline; draw the most varied different classes together, in mutual charity, to learn from one another’s contrasting experiences of the world? The Church of England, as a whole denomination, tries to do it essentially by being a confederation of local churches, belonging to a wide range of different traditions. But the 19

One might also compare the politically much more subversive seventeenth-century anti-intellectualism of the ‘Digger’ leader, Gerrard Winstanley for instance: The Scriptures of the Bible were written by the experimental hand of shepherds, husbandmen, fishermen and such inferior men of the world. And the university learned ones have got these men’s writings, and flourishes their plain language over with their dark interpretation and glosses, as if it were too hard for ordinary men now to understand them; and thereby they deceive the simple and makes a prey of the poor, and cozens them of the earth, and of the tenth of their labours [through the imposition of tithes].


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Roman Catholic Church tries by tying its corporate identity to a high form of sacramentalism; which in effect is designed to permit sophisticated interpretation, without at all over-aggressively imposing it. And this, I think, surely is the better way. In so far as this tradition has at times been disfigured by the corporate conceit of the clergy as such, no doubt the Protestant critique does serve as a providential corrective. But, having said that, it seems clear to me that the time has now come for us Protestants finally to back down and acknowledge the real wisdom of Roman Catholic sacramentalism, in its basic role as a strategy for overcoming the stresses of educational difference. VI

If we are to understand the great Western debates over the status of eucharistic symbolism, I am suggesting, we need to recognize that, underneath the surface discussion of biblical texts, originally Aristotelian concepts, and the details of liturgical practice, all the time there is a certain kind of intra-ecclesiastical class struggle underway. Yet this underlying class struggle may equally appear in other manifestations as well. The controversies occasioned by the rise of Protestant and Pentecostal revivalism are indeed one example. But elsewhere I have also argued that the early evolution of trinitarian dogma is partly affected by the same general kind of tension.20 And because those men’s writings are taking with the world, therefore these learned ones shuts out the true penmen in whom the Spirit dwells, and saith now such mechanics must not meddle with spiritual things. And so by covetous policy, in opposition to the righteous spirit, they engross other men’s experimental spiritual teachings to themselves, as if it were their own by university or school learning succession. Pope-like. Nay, just the Pope. And by their blackness of darkness in their school learning, they have drawn a veil over the truth. And light by them is hid from the world; for the plain truth is, this imaginary ministry is neither better nor worse, but plain unmasked Judas. And the snappish bitter profession that cries it up, is the unmasked murdering scribes and Pharisees. The one betrays Christ, the spirit of righteousness, with a kiss, pretending a great deal of love to the spirit, by preaching and praying to a God without, they know not where nor what he is. The other kills him and will not suffer him to appear in the world; for these snappish professors call everything blasphemy unless they approve of it, still tying the spirit to themselves; saying, ‘Lo, here is Christ in this man, and lo, there is Christ in that man.’ But Christ is the light of life spread abroad, and he is now rising in husbandmen, shepherds, fishermen . . .

20

Fire in the Bush (1650), Chapter IV; in Winstanley, The Law of Freedom and Other Writings, edited by Christopher Hill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973): 246–7. For polemical purposes, the better to annoy the Protestant-establishment intellectuals he is attacking, Winstanley links them here to the Pope, whom they so hated. But what he really has in mind is just the pervasive intellectualism of the original Reformation tradition. Faith in Honesty: The Essential Nature of Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005): 57–60.



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And now let us also consider the eastern Orthodox context. In the theology of medieval Byzantium one actually finds the struggle being fought out in quite a different way again. For the Orthodox world has never produced a Zwingli or an Oecolampadius, a Wycliffe, a Berengarius of Tours.21 But instead the nearest Byzantine equivalents, as polemical advocates of intellectualist ideology, are the fourteenthcentury theologians Barlaam of Calabria, Gregory Akyndinos and Nicephorus Gregoras; the three leading opponents, each in turn, of the redoubtable Gregory Palamas. Unlike the Westerners, the anti-Palamites do not seek to advance their intellectualist cause primarily in the area of eucharistic theology. Instead, what is at stake in their struggle with Palamas is the understanding of contemplative prayer; and in particular the Hesychastic spirituality then prevalent among the monks of Mount Athos, which they sought to criticize, and Palamas to defend. Thus, Hesychasm is first a set of practices, and secondly a claim made on behalf of those practices. Hesychastic practice includes a strict asceticism, regular mantra-like repetition of the Jesus Prayer and, as in yoga, the use of certain bodily postures and breathing techniques to still the mind. Fundamentally at issue in the controversy, however, was the Hesychasts’ claim that these practices, quite independently from any sort of intellectual study, lead direct to the very highest form of true wisdom. Barlaam of Calabria, initiating the attack, not only poured scorn on Hesychastic practice; he also focused on one key aspect of Hesychastic rhetoric, especially. The Hesychasts liked to speak of the wisdom towards which they aspired as a form of ‘seeing’, a transformed perception of reality as a whole, bathed in the light of eternity. And as a poetic symbol of this they liked, crucially, to invoke the New Testament story of the Transfiguration (Mark 9:2–8; Matthew 17:1–8; Luke 9:28–36). For there we are told how, on the summit of a high mountain, the apostles Peter, James and John saw Jesus with his face shining ‘like the sun’ and his garments shining ‘intensely white, as no fuller on earth could bleach them’. According to the Hesychastic reading, that shining which Peter, James and John saw – that light streaming out through the veiled, incarnate visibility of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity – was none other than an unveiled visible manifestation of the Trinity as a whole. A still imperfect manifestation, to be sure; for, as it says in John 1:18, and again in 1 John 4:12, ‘no one has ever seen God’. Yet nonetheless as near perfect a one as any human being could ever receive. 21

There are traces of some incidental dispute over eucharistic theology in the context of the great eighth- to ninth-century Byzantine controversy over icons: it seems the iconoclasts – as well as attacking the popular veneration of holy images – also held a somewhat lower view of sacramentality than their iconodule opponents. But no iconoclast literature survives. And with the eventual triumph of the iconodules the issue, in the East, was effectively settled.


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And the way these monks understood it, moreover, this was precisely a representation of their own ideal. Their whole discipline was, for them, a process of replicating the apostles’ mountain-top encounter with the Trinity. This analogy with the Transfiguration served, above all, symbolically to encapsulate the basic independence of Hesychastic wisdom from any sort of intellectual sophistication. For the apostles, of course, were no intellectuals; while the sheer dramatic immediacy of the vision described here also sets it decisively apart from any more philosophic form of contemplation. And Barlaam therefore completely denied the validity of such a reading. The light of the Transfiguration, he insisted, was not, as the Hesychasts in general and Gregory Palamas their leading spokesman in particular supposed, the very purest possible manifestation of God as Holy Trinity in visible form; the Hesychasts were placing a burden on this story which it really could not bear. What the apostles saw, he argued, was not the uncreated light of eternity. But, on the contrary, it was no more than special meteorological effect; a creaturely phenomenon, only quite indirectly adverting to the still hidden divine presence; a symbolic invitation, simply, to engage in erudite, philosophically informed reflection on the work of God in Christ. The controversy actually unfolded as follows. Barlaam was himself a monk, from the residual Greek population of southern Italy; but around the year 1330 he had settled in Constantinople, under the patronage of the great statesman, and future Emperor, John Cantacuzene, to dedicate himself to philosophic theology.22 Around 1337 he became aware of the writings of Gregory Palamas, then living as a hermit on Mount Athos, and, to begin with, entered into correspondence with him. But the dialogue (fostered by the scholarly Bulgarian monk Gregory Akindynos, who knew them both) foundered. In 1341 Palamas, jointly with other Athonite monks, compiled a treatise, the Hagioritic Tome, not naming Barlaam but nevertheless clearly attacking him, and Barlaam straight away responded in kind, with his work Against the Messalians. On 10 June of that year a one-day church council was held, at Barlaam’s insistence but with Palamas also in attendance, in the basilica of Hagia Sophia, to thrash the issue out, and in the event Barlaam found himself defeated; whereupon he retired from the scene. However, this turned out to be only the beginning of a decade-long struggle. Matters were complicated by the outbreak of civil war, in the autumn of the same year, between the followers of John Cantacuzene and those of Patriarch John Calecas. In the changed political situation, Palamas, having incurred the hostility of the Patriarch, immediately came under renewed attack, this time led, in theological terms, by Gregory Akindynos; and spent four years in prison. In 1347 he was 22

Besides theology, Barlaam also wrote treatises on logic and astronomy; was a renowned orator; and at one point a friend of Petrarch, whom he tried to teach Greek.



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restored to favour with the court, and was consecrated Archbishop of Thessalonika. Yet even then the attacks continued – until at length there came a final showdown, in a church council spanning the months May to August 1351, during which it was the turn of Nicephorus Gregoras (not only a theologian but also, as it happens, a prolific writer on all manner of other subjects23) to lead the anti-Palamites. It was only then that Palamas, at last, decisively prevailed. Barlaam, Akindynos, Gregoras, each in turn had sought to represent the Hesychasts of their day as ‘Messalians’. This was an allusion back to another controversy of almost a thousand years earlier. ‘Messalian’ is a Syriac term, meaning ‘those who pray’. It first became the name for a Christian heresy in the later fourth century; a time when bishops throughout the eastern Mediterranean, anxious to reinforce their authority, were beginning to address the problem, as they saw it, of itinerant, unregulated mendicant ascetics.24 The evidence suggests that such characters – both laymen and women pursuing a lifestyle not unlike that of the pre-Christian Cynic tradition, only now in a Christian context – had in fact already become quite common, especially in Syria and Egypt, some hundred years or more before this. They depended on the charitable support of well-to-do urban Christians; money which was thus diverted away from the upkeep of official, episcopally controlled church life. And eventually the bishops had had enough. How, though, was the often very considerable popular prestige of such ascetics to be undermined? The means chosen was an accusation of heresy. ‘Messalianism’ was defined, and condemned, at church councils first in Antioch and Side, and then at Ephesus in 431; and the diligent heresy-hunter Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis in Cyprus, traced its supposed emergence as a movement back to the 350s.25 Not even Epiphanius, on the other hand, pretended to be able to identify any particular ‘Messalian’ leaders. Nor, although there is talk of some ‘Messalian’ literature, does any clear trace of it survive. The notion of ‘Messalianism’ as a doctrinally coherent, newly emergent movement 23

24

25

Gregoras is most famous for his work as a historian: his Roman Histories are in fact one of the two main sources, along with the Histories of Emperor John Cantacuzene, for our knowledge of fourteenth-century Byzantine politics. Earlier, in 1333, he had been the Orthodox Church’s chief negotiator in the ecumenical discussions initiated by Pope John XXII. And he had also notably clashed with Barlaam, over other issues. The Greek name for the ‘Messalians’ is the ‘Euchites’; and there were also a number of other names used, at different times and places. For a full historic account, see Columba Stewart, Working the Earth of the Heart: the Messalian Controversy in History, Texts and Language to AD 431 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Daniel Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks: Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Epiphanius, Panarion/Adversus Haereses, 80. The persecution continued well into the fifth century, in various parts of Asia Minor, and as far afield as Armenia.


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seems in short to have been something of a fiction, imposed upon a perhaps somewhat caricatural portrait of what was really quite a well-established, but amorphous sub-culture. Here however, as the anti-Palamites saw it, was a vitally important precedent for the condemnation of unscholarly ascetics making excessive claims for themselves. The basic charge against the ‘Messalians’ was that not only were they quite outside any sort of official church jurisdiction, but they also depreciated the value of the church’s sacraments in general, considering salvation to be a simple matter of living the way they did. This clearly did not apply to the fourteenth-century Hesychasts; who were, on the contrary, well-regulated monks, absolutely respectful of the church’s sacraments. However, the ‘Messalians’ had further been accused of making fanciful claims about visions: speaking of ecstatic experiences in which the hidden reality of the spirit world was opened up to them, so that they saw devils at work, and God, conferring on them special powers of exorcism. Hence, for the anti-Palamites, ‘Messalianism’ became a general term for any sort of exaggerated claim to have ‘seen’ God. The Hesychasts’ attempt to appropriate the story of the Transfiguration was, they argued, a prime example of ‘Messalianism’, in this sense, revived. Palamas for his part responded to that charge with indignation. And one may well sympathize. For ‘Messalianism’ had originally been condemned as a movement of agitated antinomianism involving wild visionary claims, with people claiming to have seen God, not metaphorically, but in the most literal physical sense, to all intents and purposes contradicting John 1:18, 1 John 4:12. Yet the chief immediate authoritative source for fourteenth-century Hesychastic thinking was the late tenth/early eleventh-century writing of Simeon ‘the New Theologian’, whose notion of seeing the divine Light is quite clearly metaphorical: I have often seen the Light [says Simeon]. Sometimes it has appeared to me within myself, when my soul possessed peace and silence, sometimes it has appeared only at a distance, and at times it was even hidden completely. Then I experienced great affliction, believing that I would never see it again. But from the moment when I began to shed tears, when I bore witness to a complete detachment from everything, and to an absolute humility and obedience, the Light appeared once again, like the sun which dissipates the thickness of the clouds and reveals itself little by little, bringing joy. Therefore thou, Unspeakable, Invisible, Untouchable One, moving all things, revealing thyself and hiding thyself at every hour, thou hast disappeared and appeared before me day and night. Slowly thou hast dissipated the cloud which covered me, thou hast opened my spiritual hearing, thou hast purified the pupil of the eye of my spirit. Finally having formed me according to thy will, thou hast revealed thyself to my shining soul,



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becoming invisible to me once more. And suddenly thou didst appear as another sun, O ineffable divine condescension.26 There is no reference here to turbulent ecstatic experience, of the ‘Messalian’ kind. But, far rather, Simeon is talking about the whole tone of a quiet, disciplined contemplative life at its most tranquil. What everything, though, really turned on was the interpretation of Dionysius the Mystic. That is to say: the late fifth- or early sixth-century, probably Syrian author, whose real name remains unknown but who – since he presented his works as being by Dionysius the Areopagite, the early Athenian convert to Christianity and associate of St Paul referred to in Acts 17:34 – is also often called the ‘Pseudo-Dionysius’, and who in the fourteenth century was still universally supposed actually to have been that original Dionysius.27 The quality of these writings is such that they would no doubt have been influential even without that supposition. But the misidentification conferred on them an authority not far short of the New Testament’s itself. And these were texts quite unlike anything in the New Testament, in their philosophic quality. Barlaam indeed largely made his reputation as a commentator on the work of Dionysius. Akindynos and Gregoras, also, both appear to have drawn heavily on it. And Palamas was therefore driven to respond in kind. The debate between them largely revolves around a fundamental ambiguity here. Thus the whole of Dionysius’s thought is, in essence, a meditation on the need for an infinite restlessness of spiritual yearning towards God. He pioneers a rhetoric of systematic negativity: the ascent of the mind to God is, he famously argues, first and foremost a way of negation; it is always truer to speak of God in negations than in affirmations. This theme is briefly set out in his Mystical Theology. In his treatise on Divine Names he develops it in relation to the ‘highest’, in the sense of the most abstract, philosophic terminology for God. And he also speaks of another lost treatise, called Symbolical Theology, in which (apparently) he surveyed the more poetic language of the Bible on the same basis. Moreover, he backs up his rhetoric of negativity with what one might call a supplementary rhetoric of distance: true, positive knowledge of God is impossible to mortals, it is what only the angels enjoy; between us and God, marking the distance, is a vast hierarchy of angels. And in his treatise on The Celestial Hierarchy he sets out to systematize the biblical references to angels, describing their hierarchical order in terms which mirror, at another level of being, the theological ascent of the human mind.

26

27

Simeon, Sermon 90. Translation by Asheleigh Moorhouse from the English version of Vladimir Lossky, The Vision of God (London: The Faith Press, 1963): 118–19. See P.E. Rorem, ed., Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1987).


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What exactly, though, is it that Dionysius’s way of negation negates? He himself speaks of the impossibility, for earth-bound mortals, of any adequate conceptual knowledge of God. But what then of the nonconceptual, intuitive ‘knowledge’ of God claimed by the Hesychasts? To the anti-Palamites it was clear that this must be still more impossible! So they invoked the authority of Dionysius against their opponents. Dionysius had indeed interpreted the story of the Transfiguration as a symbolic foretaste of the vision of Light enjoyed by sanctified souls in eternity, in so far as those souls have come to participate in the wisdom of the angels.28 But, the anti-Palamites insisted, it could only be described that way in a really very loose metaphorical sense. For the one and only true knowledge of God ever available to us still earthbound mortals is a philosophically prepared knowledge of our unknowing. This is how they interpreted what Dionysius calls the ‘divine’ or ‘supersensible Darkness’. And they repudiated Hesychastic talk about visions of Light, as a mere shrinking back from the actual reality of that Darkness. According to Palamas’s reading of Dionysius, on the other hand, what the divine Darkness swallows up is every sort of supposed positive knowledge of God in specifically philosophic, conceptual terms. But not the non-conceptual, intuitive sort of ‘knowledge’ pre-eminently attained through Hesychastic prayer. To enter this Darkness is none other than to begin to look beyond philosophy. What Dionysius finally intends in clearing away the old knowledge claims of philosophy – Palamas argues – is to make space for a whole other species of knowledge claim. Or to put it another way: how do we earth-bound mortals actually draw closest to participating in the heavenly knowledge of the angels? Both sides of course affirm the vital importance of prayer in this regard; as Dionysius also does, along with the whole patristic tradition. But it is a question of the kind of prayer involved. For the anti-Palamites, Dionysius’s teaching is that prayer only leads to real knowledge, properly speaking, in so far as it is framed by a philosophically sophisticated meditation on how little we really can know. By contrast, however, Palamas understands Dionysius to be arguing essentially against the false privileging, in the Platonist tradition, not just of excessive philosophical knowledge claims, but of philosophical sophistication itself. For him, the whole point is that the core truth of faith – the truth which ultimately matters – is to be identified with a certain quality of prayerfulness quite independent of such sophistication. Both sides define wisdom as a perfection of ‘intellect’; again as Dionysius, with the whole tradition, also does. Only, they mean different things by this. The antiPalamites, when they speak of ‘intellect’, mean the capacity to study and reflect. But Palamas, in effect, simply means the capacity to persist in prayerful stillness. 28

The Divine Names, I: 4.



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And then right at the heart of Dionysius’s doctrine is an elementary distinction, which he derived from the fourth-century Cappadocians St Basil and St Gregory of Nyssa, between the ‘essence’ and the ‘energies’ of God. (Dionysius in fact speaks interchangeably of energeiai, proodoi, dynameis, ekphanseis: ‘energies’, ‘processes’, ‘powers’, ‘manifestations’.) The ‘essence’ is the fullness of God, the ‘energies’ are how God appears, at work within creation; fully God, but not the full fullness. To ponder the ‘essence’ of God is at once to be plunged into the depths of the divine Darkness. Of this ‘essence’, in its distinctness from the ‘energies’, all we can say is that we know nothing of it. But true theology is the articulation of an infinite restlessness of spiritual yearning, towards God; and therefore we cannot simply be plunged into darkness, for that would produce mere torpor. The divine ‘energies’ must also come to stimulate us, prompt us, inspire us. The divine ‘energies’ are God, momentarily at least, unveiled, to stimulate, prompt, inspire; they are, one might say, the necessary shafts of Light which alone reveal the true extent of the encompassing Darkness. But how? Palamas answers that they operate, paradigmatically, in the way represented by the story of the Transfiguration. Set back, so to speak, from the main drama of the gospel story, this is the prime gospel symbol for the actual unveiling of gospel truth as a whole. For what, exactly, was that light which the apostles on the mountain top saw, shining from Jesus? It was, he suggests, nothing less than the whole outpouring of the divine ‘energies’, to humankind. In arguing this way, it is true, Palamas was going significantly beyond what Dionysius himself says. Dionysius’s discussion of the ‘essence’/ ‘energies’ distinction is altogether more abstract.29 And there was nothing at all obviously perverse in the opposing interpretation of Barlaam, Akindynos and Gregoras; for whom the revelation of the divine ‘energies’ is primarily accomplished in and through the learnedness of learned men like themselves. Yet, equally, there was nothing in Dionysius to preclude Palamas’s doctrine, either. Dionysius is clearly very much influenced by the pagan Neo-Platonist tradition, and in particular by the work of Proclus (411–85). In places he repeats Proclus word for word; and the structure of his arguments, not least his fondness for conceptual triads of triads, is also reminiscent of Proclus’s style. Indeed, this closeness to Proclus is one of the main factors for modern scholarship in determining his probable date. But Neo-Platonism, in general, is Platonism very largely without the philosophic politics. Here we have philosophy so entirely focused on affirming a sheer infinite restlessness of spiritual yearning – as it were, yearning for yearning’s sake – that it is in fact already, by its very nature, quite ready to flip over from the very purest old-style intellectual elitism to the most radical opposite. Or, for that matter, back again. It simply leaves the issue wide open. 29

See especially ibid., Chapter II.


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The ambiguity in Dionysius’ doctrine, highlighted by the Byzantine controversies of the fourteenth century, is thus not altogether peculiar to him; it is at least to some extent a feature of the whole Neo-Platonist tradition, pagan as well as Christian. Has he himself actually made the flip-over? Critical opinion remains divided.30 But Gregory Palamas, still working in the intellectual world established by Dionysius, sets out to show how it is, at any rate, possible. VII

So, whereas in the West the struggle is over the degree to which the proper holiness of the church’s primary sacramental rite, the eucharist, inheres in its simple enactment, or in its educated reception, in the East it is over the whole sacramentally framed prayer discipline of monks: to what extent that framing is sufficient, in itself, to open up the very highest forms of salvific wisdom. Or to what extent the actual appropriation of the highest wisdom also, as a matter of necessity, requires philosophic training. Look beyond the immediate presenting issues, though, and in each case alike, I think, the real underlying issue is the same. These are, both of them, struggles over the essential nature of true theology. Theology, in the sense that I am using the term, is a science with a singularly paradoxical calling. I call it a ‘science’ inasmuch as it is a systematic pursuit of truth-as-correctness. Yet this is the theistic, and catholic, form of the science of the sacralization of Honesty. That is to say, it is a pursuit of truth-as-correctness – which is a quality of propositions and theories – in the service of that very different phenomenon, truth-as-Honesty, which by contrast is a quality of conversational receptivity. The pursuit of truth-as-correctness ideally requires as much education as possible; truth-as-Honesty is equally attainable by people at every different level of education. For education, in itself, may just as well contribute to the sophisticated self-defence of dishonesty as to its overcoming. But the question is: will the servant, here, be content to remain a servant? Theology is called to serve the cause of Honesty, which is the pure antithesis to any form of corporate conceit. In so far as any 30

Modern advocates of Dionysius as a truly Christian thinker include Hans Urs von Balthasar, in The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 2, English translation edited by John Riches (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1984): 144–210; Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Orthodox Church, English translation by Asheleigh Moorhouse (Cambridge: J. Clarke, 1957); Andrew Louth, Denys the Areopagite (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1989). (Protestant thinking, however, from Martin Luther to Anders Nygren, has tended to be much more hostile; Luther urged his followers to avoid Dionysius ‘like the plague’. It is unclear to what extent he understood Dionysius as the Palamites did, or the anti-Palamites. But either way it appears to be a case of ‘whoever is not clearly for us is against us’.)



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academic discipline has a moral aspect, however, the corporate conceit of the intelligentsia inevitably lies in wait to infect it. The only difference with theology – as, indeed, with the science of the sacralization of Honesty in all its various other forms as well – is that this is a science peculiarly vulnerable to such infection. For theology has nothing of real value to contribute that can survive it. To the extent that theology is infected by this disease, it is ruined altogether. The classic Western doctrine of transubstantiation represents one sort of prophylactic strategy against the danger. Gregory Palamas’s polemical defence of Hesychasm, another. And truly to grasp the fundamental complementarity of these two strategies is, I would argue, straight away to recognize the necessary truth of what unites them.


10 ‘The Conflict’: From Amos to Hegel, and Girard

I

So much, then, for the problems posed by the resurgence, within church life, of the corporate conceit of the intelligentsia. But what of the corporate conceit of the church itself, as a whole? Surely, this represents a no less fundamental theological problem. Against the corporate conceit of the intelligentsia I have been arguing for an ideal notion of the priesthood of all thinkers; inasmuch as there is no other role for an intellectual, in principle, more intimately and thought-provokingly exposed to the very deepest spiritual concerns of the salt of the earth than that of a priest. Yet, this ideal – this leap of faith, to recognize, over and above the traditional notion of the priesthood of all believers, a priesthood of all thinkers – is at the same time just as much opposed to the corporate conceit of the church. And does Christian theology, in fact, really have the resources for such a leap? Consider for example the fundamental scepticism, here, of Karl Jaspers. Of all twentieth-century philosophical repudiaters of Christian faith none has been more ostensibly reluctant, and regretful, a repudiater than Jaspers; none more insistently courteous towards the thoughtworld of theology which he nevertheless finds himself obliged to reject. Jaspers’ show of open-mindedness towards theology is indeed precisely meant to signal that his critique is by no means driven by any sort of elitist corporate conceit, or philosophic snobbery, but that on the contrary it derives from a consistent self-distancing from corporate conceit in every form. It is meant to signal that this, and this alone, is the real reason for his ultimate repudiation of theology; that it is simply due to the way in which, as he sees it, theological tradition as a whole has always been so inextricably entangled in its own churchy form of corporate conceit, and consequent closed-mindedness. So Jaspers elaborates what he calls his own ‘philosophical faith’.1 And the essence of such ‘faith’ consists in one’s coming to recognize the true 1

For what follows, see in particular Karl Jaspers, Philosophical Faith and Revelation, German text first published in 1962, English translation by E.B. Ashton (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).


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nature of all religious and metaphysical concepts as, in his terminology, ‘ciphers’. Jaspers’ notion of ‘ciphers’ is I think really a very useful one. The term, in effect, designates any religious or metaphysical concept in so far as it functions as a genuine vehicle for the proper demands of infinite Curiosity or Honesty, and is therefore purged of any role in the self-assertion of corporate conceit. His argument as a whole fundamentally counterposes ‘philosophical faith’ to ‘faith in revelation’. And the typical error of ‘faith in revelation’, for him, is none other than a failure to acknowledge the proper cipher nature of ciphers. Jaspers is perhaps not much read these days. However, he remains a significant figure, inasmuch as he is a major forerunner of the whole ‘Sea of Faith’ tendency in contemporary British theology. The ‘Sea of Faith’ movement is campaigning for just the sort of ultimate reconciliation between ‘faith in revelation’ and ‘philosophical faith’ of which Jaspers was the pioneering advocate. But this ‘reconciliation’ is, I think, really a complete surrender of the former to the latter. And, against Jaspers, I want to argue that there is in fact a fundamental ambiguity to his doctrine. Thus, on the one hand, he develops a critique of ideologized religion. On the other hand, he argues against the very notion of authoritative ‘revelation’. Yet, in presenting his critique of ideologized religion as an argument against ‘faith in revelation’, he is, it seems to me, actually eliding two very different levels of thought, which ought to be kept quite distinct. At one level, he is basically saying the same as Meister Eckhart for instance; where Eckhart cries out, ‘I pray God to rid me of ‘‘God’’’.2 To recognize any cipher as a cipher is to comprehend it as a sign pointing decisively beyond itself; at best, not merely a self-sufficient item of truth-as-correctness, but a pointer towards infinite truth-as-Curiosity and, still more, truth-as-Honesty. So too, Eckhart famously distinguishes between deus and deitas, ‘God’ and the ‘Godhead’: Godhead and God are as different as heaven and earth . . . God too comes to be and passes away.3 ‘God’, in this formulation, is the cipher; the ‘Godhead’ is that which transcends all ciphers, and towards which they point, the summons above all to pure Honesty. The ‘Godhead’ is unthinkable by us Christians other than as ‘God’. They are two aspects – the hidden aspect and the apparent – of the same. ‘God’ is the outflowing of the ‘Godhead’ into time and space; into stories, imagery, abstract concepts. The ‘Godhead’ is the truth of ‘God’, which can only be apprehended by way of the

2

3

Meister Eckhart, Sermon: ‘Blessed are the poor!’ in Meister Eckhart, translated by Raymond B. Blakney (New York: Harper & Row, 1941): 231. Jaspers is enthusiastic about Eckhart: Philosophical Faith and Revelation, 144, 268–70. Meister Eckhart, Sermon: ‘Creatures seek God through me’; Blakney, 225.


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most radical discipline of negation, as prescribed by Dionysius. They are the same, and yet ‘as different as heaven and earth’: Eckhart’s doctrine provides a classic paradigm of what Jaspers, I think, most helpfully means when he speaks of recognizing ciphers as ciphers. But Jaspers is not only restating Eckhartian doctrine. He also argues on quite another level, in a way that is much more Kantian than Eckhartian; somewhat along the lines of Kant’s polemical advocacy of ‘religion within the limits of pure reason alone’, against any real form of religious belonging. Which is clearly quite another matter. Eckhart was no advocate of not-belonging! But, as I have said, Jaspers in effect muddles the two levels of argument together. And I must say I find the Kantian element in his cipher doctrine very much less compelling than the Eckhartian. For it seems to me that the cause of Honesty, in the context of confessional religion, has two basic moments, only one of which Jaspers’ Kantianism allows him to see. There are two moments to Honesty here, inasmuch as it has to confront not only corporate conceit, but also individualistic conceit. Against the corporate conceit of particular confessional groups, the Christian church and others, I certainly agree with Jaspers that one needs to affirm an essential pluriformity of the highest wisdom, potentially at least in all sorts of very different confessional traditions: Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Parsi, Greek-philosophical, Chinese and so forth; all the various traditions, in short, stemming from what he calls the ‘Axial Period’ of world history, the eighth to fifth centuries BCE, in which the demands of Honesty first began to be understood as sacred. Yet equally, I would argue, each confessional tradition needs to be allowed real moral authority – in resistance to the false pluralism of mere intellectual license. There can be no true Honesty in an ‘everything goes’ religious culture, where individuals are permitted, lazily, each one alone, to withdraw into the mere idiosyncrasy of their own personal opinions, as a private affair, altogether beyond any very serious challenge; so slipping free from the often irksome, but nevertheless fundamentally salutary constraints of true catholic conversation. As a Kantian, Jaspers rather confusingly, I think, equates the proper recognition of historic revelation as an unfolding of ciphers with a complete denial of revelation as something ‘real’.4 But if revelation is said not to be ‘real’, what real authority can it claim – for any purpose whatsoever? If it is not ‘real’, then it cannot provide the authoritative basis for a catholic community. Without the authority that stems from a sense of responding to ‘real’ revelation, religious communities of every kind are reduced to functioning as something like clubs, or affinity groups, people who share the same hobby, nothing more demanding than that. ‘I hear the argument’, he regretfully writes, ‘that no theologian can join us in transforming revelation into a cipher – that if one did, he 4

See for example Philosophical Faith and Revelation, 92, 108, 125–6, 163, 323, 340.



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would be destroying the fundament of his belief and of his thinking’.5 Well, yes – if one puts it that way – certainly no true theologian could conceive of such a project: revelation is not something one sets out to ‘transform’. For the theologian it is, by definition, something one submits to. It is that by which one’s whole thinking is framed; the authoritative framework holding together the conversations of a catholic community, designed to give shape to that community’s corporate Honesty. This does not mean one cannot recognize it as a cipher, since a cipher is what it really always has been. Only, what theology aims at is always the recognition of revelation, not its transformation – because one is, absolutely, dealing with something real. It is both a cipher and real. I see no necessary contradiction in this at all. And then Jaspers also departs fundamentally from the sort of selfaware cipher thinking represented by Meister Eckhart, in his complete repudiation of the Christian dogma of the Incarnation. He upholds what he calls the ‘Protestant principle’; but holds that Protestantism is incomplete, until this dogma is finally abandoned. For, as he puts it, To Catholics, their Holy Church is the mystical body of Christ, his divine presence . . . [But] the Protestant churches, by abolishing the sacrament of holy orders, have put an end to this kind of divine presence, and if embodiment thus disappears in fact, if it lies only in the past and remains only as a word, the character of this God-manhood has changed completely. . . With the sacrament of holy orders discarded, the Church is no longer holy, and its profanation must eventually make Christ’s own God-manhood unworthy of belief.6 We need, he argues, to get back to the human Jesus: As a man, Jesus is a cipher of being human. It says that a man who lives and thinks as he did, a man who is true without any restriction, must die at the hands of men, because human reality is too untruthful to bear him.7 But the truth of this cipher is simply incompatible with the ‘Christ cipher’. One thing is vital to the future of biblical faith: to make the human Jesus and his faith prevail. As the Christ cipher threatens to become absolute, our full strength can go into that effort only if we dispense with Christ.8 5 6 7 8

Ibid., 341. Ibid., 345. Ibid., 338. Ibid.


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He repudiates the ‘Christ cipher’ basically because he sees it as, in essence, transforming the memory of Jesus into a mere theme of church ideology; twisting the original gospel around, to suit the purposes of ecclesiastical corporate conceit. In short, he regards it as a cipher which, by its very nature, is incapable of properly functioning the way that ciphers ought to function. Of course, one can scarcely deny that the dogma very often has been distorted that way. Yet that is scarcely the whole story. Far rather, the whole history of biblical and ecclesiastical religion is pervaded by a basic conflict between authentic cipher thinking and its opposite, the corruption of ciphers into what one might perhaps term ideological emblems; that is, symbols that are little more, in actual practice, than mere intellectual badges of group membership. And what is really required, it seems to me, is not so much Jaspers’ all too easy withdrawal from that conflict into ‘philosophical faith’, but a systematic working through of the conflict, to try and disentangle, so far as possible, all the resultant ambiguities. II

For ease of reference, let us simply call this elementary conflict between cipher thinking and emblem thinking ‘the Conflict’, with a capital ‘C’. And, by way of a response to the challenge Jaspers represents, let us begin by going right back to the very beginning of the Conflict, in this sense: the actual moment at which Hebrew religious tradition, for the first time, begins to be truly distinctive, as contrasted with the sacred practices of the surrounding peoples. Consider the prophet Amos. We are talking here about a period almost 800 years before the birth of Christ: the superscription to Amos dates the prophet’s activity to the reign of King Jeroboam II of the northern kingdom of Israel, who ruled from c.786–746 BCE. Amos was not only the first of the writing prophets. There is a sense in which he was the very first Hebrew thinker – the first of whom we have any clear historic, not merely legendary record – to suggest that the worship of YHWH ought to be quite different in nature from the worship of other gods. Indeed, I think it is vital, if we are to try and grasp the true underlying theological structure of pre-Christian biblical revelation, that we should properly appreciate both the radical originality of Amos and the importance of the way in which his prophetic message differs from those that came afterwards. We do not know how much of the rest of Hebrew scripture was already in existence by Amos’s day. At most, it was only some elements to be found in a few of the books, which have subsequently undergone extensive editing. And it may well be that very little was already written. Amos himself refers to the memory of the exodus from Egypt, and the associated belief in YHWH’s special covenant with his chosen people.



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But we should by no means assume that anything like the fully developed array of legends that we now have in the Pentateuch yet existed. And, simply in itself, the idea of a god playing the role of patron to a particular ethnic group was scarcely unusual. (Indeed, compare Amos 9:7–8.) What is unusual is what Amos, in his way, and the tradition that came after him, in other ways, progressively did to that idea. Generally speaking, it would seem that in the early eighth century the peoples of Israel and Judah worshipped their national god YHWH very much as the neighbouring peoples worshipped theirs. It is true that YHWH was from the beginning quite a distinctive god, inasmuch as he was not mythologically related to any of the other gods of that world. Yet, despite the legends about Moses, there is no compelling, properly historical evidence to suggest that anyone at that time had ever felt it was wrong for ordinary worshippers of YHWH to worship other gods as well. Of course, the prophet Elijah was celebrated for the struggle he had once waged against the prophets of the Canaanite god Baal – but this had been a struggle strictly about the cultic practices of the royal court. There is no indication that it had had anything to do with the practices of the ordinary people. And neither is there any indication that anyone had ever suggested the sacrificial cult of YHWH should have any other basic function than that which all such sacrificial cults, of whatever god, always had had: namely, to celebrate and reinforce social harmony; to bond people together in the service of their divine patrons – and perhaps at the same time also magically to cajole certain material blessings from on high. But then came Amos. Who, seemingly, for the first time represented something very different. Here was a prophet who, unlike any other we know of before, saw the true worship of YHWH, essentially, as a cultivation – not just of social harmony, and the material benefits of magic – but of pure Honesty. He himself speaks of mishpat and tsedaqah; usually translated as ‘justice’ and ‘righteousness’: Let mishpat roll down like waters, and tsedaqah like an everflowing stream. (Amos 5:24) But what does he mean? Certainly, he does not mean ‘justice’ in the conventional sense of that which is upheld by the forces of law and order; or ‘righteousness’ in the conventional sense of loyal conformity to established moral custom. He is not just calling for greater social harmony, here, as a good in itself. On the contrary, this verse follows immediately upon others in which YHWH, quite startlingly, rejects his people’s conventional, social harmony-promoting worship of him. Nor, however, does Amos demand any specific institutional reform. But far rather, it seems, by mishpat and tsedaqah he means a certain basic attitude of mind. The book opens with a series of oracles – against


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Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon and Moab – in each case denouncing war crimes. It then continues with a savage indictment of the ruling classes of Judah and Israel, for their oppression of the poor. Here, in short, for the first time ever we encounter a God who very simply, above all else, and even to a quite anarchic degree, abhors that elementary sort of closure to the Other which helps render possible both these two species of evil. Now, it may well be that the book of Amos has itself undergone a certain amount of editing, down the centuries, before reaching its present form. That was what generally happened to such texts. And most commentators are agreed that, at the very least, the concluding oracles of promised restoration (9:11–15) look like a later addition; they are so very markedly in contrast to the unremitting menace of all that comes before. Nonetheless, there is quite good reason to suppose that by far the greater part of the text does come direct from Amos himself. For, in the first place, it is a text full of predicted catastrophes, said to be imminent, which in the event did not materialize. And what later writer, with the wisdom of hindsight, would have wanted to adopt the persona of a prophet so demonstrably mistaken about what was to come? The God of Amos does not only threaten disaster, he quite explicitly predicts it as something quite certain to come (7:1–9). Israel, he warns, will shortly be invaded. The sanctuaries will be destroyed. Many will be sent into exile. It is true that somewhat later on all these things did happen: first of all in c.733, when the Assyrians under Tiglath-Pileser III annexed a large area of northern Israel; and then again, when the northern kingdom was finally extinguished, in 722. But there is still a rather embarrassing gap between the prophecy and these events – even if Amos’s career belongs to the very last period of King Jeroboam’s long reign, say around the year 750. (And he may well have appeared a good deal earlier.) Moreover, Amos quite explicitly predicted that Jeroboam himself would die by the sword; also, that the high priest Amaziah would be exiled along with many others, his wife reduced to prostitution, his children killed, his land seized (7:10–17). We are not told what happened to Amaziah, but we surely would have been told if any such unlikely disasters had in fact occurred to him and his family. And we do know that Jeroboam for his part reached a ripe old age, before dying in peace. ‘Indeed, I am raising up against you a nation, O house of Israel’ – God, through Amos, declares – ‘and they shall oppress you from Lebohamath to the Wadi Arabah’ (6:14), that is from the northernmost tip of the traditional area of Hebrew settlement to the southernmost. But in 2 Kings 14:25–7 we are informed that the exact opposite happened: Jeroboam, even though ‘he did what was evil in YHWH’s sight’, was nonetheless quite a successful military leader; as the historian puts it, he actually ‘restored the border of Israel from Lebohamath to the Wadi Arabah’. This use of the self-same geographical phrase is very likely a direct polemical allusion to Amos’s prophecy. Amos is not named, but the historian does refer here to the opposing



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prophecy of Jonah, son of Amittai, which was thus fulfilled, and goes on to comment that YHWH ‘had not said that he would blot out the name of Israel from under heaven’. As it turned out, in other words, Jonah was right and Amos was wrong. This was remembered. And then, secondly, Amos’s message differs markedly from that of the other prophets. Hosea, in the later eighth century, represents YHWH as being primarily concerned with the principle later projected back to the time of Moses as the first of the ten commandments: ‘you shall have no other gods besides me’. Which then becomes a leading theme in all the other prophetic writings that followed. But (with the fleeting exceptions of 2:4 and 5:26) this is not the theme of Amos. If the text were to any large extent the work of a later period than that suggested in the superscription, there surely would have been far more of that. The primary concern of Amos’s God is with the altogether different need for mishpat and tsedaqah. And this drives him to a punitive fury which is, on first encounter, profoundly unattractive to the modern liberal mind: Hear this word that YHWH has spoken against you, O people of Israel, against the whole family that I brought up out of the land of Egypt: You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you . . . (3:1–2) Note: what Amos represents is not the punitive theology of what Nietzsche calls ‘herd morality’. There is, for him, no righteous ‘us’ counterposed to the wicked ‘them’. No doubt the prophet had his immediate followers; otherwise his words would scarcely have been preserved. Yet these followers do not figure in the prophecy itself. Set aside the late additional closing verses and, apart from one brief reference to a possible ‘remnant of Joseph’ in 5:15, the prophecy allows no hope. It therefore shows no interest in any possible hope-bearing chosen community of the righteous. The book of Amos is a bitter onslaught on the corporate conceit of a nation – but an onslaught which is preserved, so to speak by virtue of despair, from any sort of oppositional corporate conceit. It is an explosive testimony to the demands of pure Honesty, as against corporate conceit in any form whatever. That the God of Honesty bursts onto the scene in this text as a furious, punitive God is basically because of the constraints of the given literary form within which the prophet is working. It is the nature of Hebrew prophetic oracles to convey either promises of divine reward or threats of divine punishment. The form originally derives from, and properly belongs to, a culture in which the sacred is not a medium for Honesty at all – but, at the level of politics, a mere adjunct to governmental power


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and nothing more. As such, it is intrinsically manipulative. Prior to Amos, the traditional oracular rhetoric of divine punitiveness had been largely about helping secure people’s obedience to their rulers. What is new with Amos, however, is the way in which he turns that rhetoric to such a different purpose. A rhetoric that had hitherto served to reinforce the authority claims of the privileged in general, or perhaps to uphold the claims of one particular group of the privileged against others, is now deployed, purely and simply, to criticize the dishonesty of the privileged in general. Notwithstanding the fact that his actual predictions so signally failed to come true, the oracles of Amos were preserved and treasured. Why? The only possible reason is that his underlying sense of what God demands was so original. So unforgettably inspiring. There is no reason to suppose that Israelite society in Amos’s day was at all unusually corrupt. Why should it have been? Amos’s vision is probably not, in that sense, a reactive one. But his wild poetic fury represents the upsurge of a whole new set of critical standards. Before Amos, all the evidence is that the relationship between YHWH and his worshippers had tended to be a straightforward bartering of favours for flattery; just as in all other sacred cults. Here, though, YHWH quite suddenly appears as a God unlike any other, in the elementary sense that he refuses to be manipulated by flattery. Thus, he declares to his loyal people, I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let mishpat roll down like waters, and tsedaqah like an ever-flowing stream. (5:21–24) This is not a rejection of the actual institution of sacrifice. Although it is an implicit rejection of that institution’s underlying logic, Amos is not recommending any alternative form of liturgy. Only, the simple message is: no more bartering of favours for flattery. The superscription of the book dates the prophet’s vision to ‘two years before the earthquake’; but these verses are themselves the epicentre of the spiritual earthquake with which the history of biblical revelation, in the full sense, actually began. No more bartering of favours for flattery. And out of the rumble of the earthquake, then, there emerges another awe-inspiring sound:



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YHWH roars from Zion, and utters his voice from Jerusalem; the pastures of the shepherds wither, and the top of Carmel is dried up. (1:2) ‘Shepherds’ is of course a common Hebrew metaphor for rulers; and the mountain top, likewise, suggests rulership, in this case within the northern kingdom, set over against YHWH’s primary dwelling place in Jerusalem. (These lines are perhaps the work of a southern editor.) The prophecy as a whole, though, is the lion’s roar: addressing those in the ruling class who are guilty of cruelty, it presents them with a terrible sequence of images, framed as oracular threats of divine punishment, in which they are shown themselves now subjected to cruelty. Thus it invites them, imaginatively, to put themselves in something like their victims’ place; and, hence, to ponder for themselves the true demands of Honesty.9 Travelling back towards the headwaters of the Western intellectual tradition, we come at length upon two great pioneer championings of Honesty: on the one hand, the vision of Plato’s Socrates; on the other hand, that of Amos. The former speaks of dikaiosune´, the latter speaks of mishpat. But both terms are conventionally translated into English as ‘justice’. And so how do these two approaches compare? It might seem that they are incomparable, they are so different in every respect. Yet, let us consider them precisely in their one shared capacity, as pioneer championings of Honesty. From this point of view, there are indeed certain very obvious disadvantages to the poetic form of the prophetic oracle, as compared to philosophic prose. It detracts from the simple truth criterion of Honesty, in itself, by also making supplementary claims to predictive accuracy. (With regard to which, as I have said, Amos conspicuously fails!) And furthermore, by framing critique in terms of punitive divine rage, it allows for no easy conversational comeback. These are, I think it has to be conceded, very serious drawbacks. Only, at the same time let us also note this: the crucial fact is, Amos really does represent a testimony to the demands of pure Honesty quite uncorrupted by the sort of intellectual class ideology with which, by contrast, Plato’s testimony is confused. III

There is, to be sure, one other major difference between Amos and Plato. Unlike Plato, Amos appears to have no realistic political strategy for the 9

I have also discussed Amos as a poet classically exemplifying what I call the ‘pathos of shakenness’, in ‘What Is Truth?’ Towards a Theological Poetics (London: Routledge, 2001).


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promotion of truth, as he sees it. For he is a prophet of pure Honesty in a mode of sheer despair, and his despair simply precludes any proper strategy. I want to respond to the sort of challenge posed, for example, by Jaspers; who, basically, doubts the possibility of any effective broad strategy for the promotion of Honesty framed by biblical (or, for that matter, qur’anic) faith in revelation. And here is the problem: the history of biblical revelation, as something truly distinctive, begins, in the prophecy of Amos, with a wonderfully powerful pure testimony to Honesty, albeit in a very restrictive literary form; but this purity also seems to depend upon an absence of strategy. In the most general terms, effective long-term political strategy requires a campaigning community inspired by clearly focused hopes – plus a vivid sense of history to set those hopes in context, a set of stories telling the members of that community who they collectively are, and why their hopes are realistic. Not so very long after Amos, Hosea appeared on the scene; a very different sort of writing prophet, inasmuch as he does represent such a strategy. Yet, the legacy of Hosea only serves to illustrate the same essential problem, as it were from the other side. Hosea famously begins by taking the prophet’s own troubled marriage to Gomer, daughter of Diblaim, as an analogy for YHWH’s relationship to Israel (1:2–8; 3). This prophecy shows YHWH raging against his people’s worship of other gods like an obsessively jealous husband, fluctuating between love and hate, tormented by his wife’s ‘adultery’. Far more than Amos, Hosea represents YHWH’s rage as a form of demented divine egoism. Here, for the first time, we are confronted by the God who later, in Exodus 34:14, actually adopts ‘Jealous’ for a name: You shall worship no other god, because YHWH, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God. Hosea’s God rants like an abusive husband: he is going to strip his wife naked in public, starve her, wall her in, slaughter her children, give her a miscarrying womb and dry breasts. Or, more sneakily, he is going to be a moth in her wardrobe, a mould spreading through her larder (5:12). And so forth. In short, she is going to be sorry. The difference between Amos and Hosea is partly this contrast in rhetoric: that whereas in Amos we just hear YHWH roaring, implacably, in Hosea he also displays his hurt, his raw wounded pride. But partly, also, it is that, unlike Amos – who, in calling for mishpat and tsedaqah, presents us with a very general, and in itself boundless moral demand – Hosea is actually demanding something quite specific. Did Amos have a political programme? If he did, he does not tell us what it is. In Hosea’s case, though, we immediately have at least the kernel of a programme. He wants the worship of other gods not only to be abandoned by the court, but to be universally prohibited in any form, and



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their shrines destroyed. It is not clear whether anyone before him had ever made this demand. However, it certainly does make excellent sense as a way of providing what Amos fails to provide: a credible actual strategy for those in Israel who, following Amos, now wanted to insist on YHWH’s radical otherness from all other gods. Hosea appears to have been a key figure in the original launching of what one may call the ‘YHWH alone movement’; to which all the subsequent writing prophets belonged, as active campaigning members, along with all the successive editors of the ‘Mosaic’ law and the history books of the Hebrew Bible. That the historical importance of his role in this regard is not acknowledged in any of these other writings is to some extent perhaps due to his having been a prophet of the northern kingdom of Israel, whereas in the following century, after Israel’s extinction by the Assyrians, the movement came to be predominantly Jerusalemcentred. And I guess it is also due to the movement’s propaganda need to represent itself as originating way back in pre-history; so that what seems, as a matter of historic fact, to have been Hosea’s role was attributed, in legendary terms, to Moses instead. But there then ensued a truly epic struggle – continuing within the Jewish world for almost six centuries – before the ‘YHWH alone-ist’ cause at length decisively prevailed. The cause seems to have had at least some early success, under the leadership of the prophet Isaiah, in the reign of King Hezekiah of Judah (715–686); although the evidence for this comes from much later, and is perhaps not altogether reliable. A radical ‘YHWH alone-ist’ group certainly did seize power in Jerusalem during the reign of King Josiah, and with his patronage: the revolution is said (2 Chronicles 34:3) to have begun in 627, and then climaxed in 621, when a text, generally supposed to have been the core of the present book of Deuteronomy, was ‘discovered’ in the temple, to serve as the regime’s God-given manifesto. That the movement had seized power in Jerusalem, however, clearly did not mean that it had yet gained anything like universal support. How else, indeed, are we to understand the crucial addition to ‘YHWH alone-ism’, at this point, of the demand that, henceforth, public sacrifice to YHWH should be confined to Jerusalem alone (Deuteronomy 12:13–14, 2 Kings 23:8)? The radical ‘YHWH alone-ists’ controlled the Jerusalem temple, they were perhaps much less confident of controlling any of the other shrines. And after Josiah’s death in battle against the Egyptians at Megiddo in 609, their opponents immediately threw them out again. Later, after the Babylonian conquest and the destruction of David’s temple, the ‘YHWH aloneists’ were evidently very active among the exiles; and, under Persian rule, Zerubbabel, the governor who at length supervised the rebuilding of the temple (520–515), was a ‘YHWH alone-ist’. Yet it was not until the days of Ezra and Nehemiah (c. 460–430) that the movement finally regained control of the temple for good. Ezra and Nehemiah represented a newly ambitious form of ‘YHWH alone-ism’, attempting as they did to prohibit all intermarriage with the worshippers of other gods.


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The evidence is that they also failed; and syncretistic practices continued to flourish, if only now at the level of domestic life, right down to the period of the Maccabean Revolt (from 167 onwards), and the blazing renewal of patriotic ‘YHWH alone-ism’ which that crisis provoked. The greater part of the Hebrew Bible originates as campaign literature, out of this 600-year struggle, which in effect begins as an attempt to give strategic shape to the strategically inchoate new insight of Amos.10 At all events, the ‘YHWH alone-ists’ adopted the book of Amos, copied, edited and preserved it, as if it were one of their own texts. And yet ‘YHWH alone’ is such an intrinsically ambiguous rallying cry! Is it ‘YHWH alone’ because YHWH alone is the God of radical mishpat and tsedaqah, as Amos understood those ideals; the God of pure Honesty? Or is this just the slogan of a uniquely embittered and fanatical form of pious corporate conceit? The movement’s basic demand, in itself, could so easily be either. The imperatives of Honesty are always potentially there. But consider for example the doctrine of the ‘ban’ in Deuteronomy 20:15–18: holy war, on YHWH’s behalf, understood as divinely commanded genocide, involving the absolute annihilation of all who resist, along with their whole cultural legacy. Note, this ‘law’ envisages ‘YHWH alone-ism’ as the ideology of a conquering army, which prior to the Maccabean Revolt it never was; and, as such, it no doubt originates far more as a metaphor for the demands of radical ‘YHWH alone-ism’ than as a law, properly speaking. The legends of its actual application in the days of the Israelite conquest of Palestine (Joshua 6–12) may well not have any real historic substance. Again, they look very much like back-projected metaphors. Nevertheless, what are we to say of the ideology which these metaphors are meant to reinforce? There no longer seems to be any connection to Honesty here at all. (And note also the chronicler’s gleeful celebration of Judas Maccabeus’s savagery towards Gentile cities, in 1 Maccabees 5.) Amos, for his part, had not only represented YHWH as a God who abominated 10

This is largely true of all the non-apocryphal Hebrew scriptures apart from Genesis, Ruth, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs and Jonah. The book of Psalms derives from the highly ‘YHWH alone-ist’ milieu of the Levites; and Genesis fits comfortably enough with the ensuing ‘YHWH alone-ist’ narratives. But the other texts here belong to quite a different context, the (it may well be) not very ‘YHWH alone-ist’ world of the landed gentry; they are included in the canon only by virtue of not directly engaging with the issue either way. The ‘YHWH alone-ist’ campaign literature, meanwhile, is cross-hatched with all sorts of other, subordinate polemical concerns, reflecting the differing priorities of, and tensions between, prophets, Levites and the Jerusalem priesthood; or between hard-line separatists and more moderate assimilationists. Yet there remains one social group whose voice, or voices, we simply never do hear in the Hebrew scriptures, except as reported by their opponents. And that is the popular majority: all those ordinary, non-aristocrat syncretistic YHWH worshippers who, probably throughout the period, still continued, in fact, to make up the great bulk of the population.



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foreigner-on-foreigner cruelty in war (Amos 1:3–2:3). But he had also mocked the people of Israel for their complacent celebration of King Jeroboam’s military success, in the most scathing terms: 6:12–14. So the problem remains: how to find an effective strategy, beyond Amos’s own despairing rage, to implement the break-through vision of Honesty which he represents, without unnecessarily compromising it? I am tracing here the course of the Conflict, the basic clash between cipher thinking and emblem thinking, which runs right through biblical and ecclesiastical revelation history. And this is its first phase. IV

The second phase then begins with the abandonment of the literary form of the prophetic oracle, and its replacement by the surreal dream visions of apocalyptic literature. There were in fact two great upsurges of such writing: the first in the aftermath of the Maccabean Revolt, and like the Revolt a response to the crisis of 167 BCE, when the Seleucid emperor Antiochus Epiphanes attempted to install the cult of Zeus in the Jerusalem temple; the second a response to the catastrophe of 70 CE, when the Romans destroyed the temple. Like ‘YHWH alone-ism’ – and unlike Amos – apocalypticism represents a form of defiant, yet confident hope. This literature, however, presupposes the triumph of ‘YHWH aloneism’: it belongs to a culture in which it seems there was, at last, no longer any need to campaign against popular syncretism. Thus, the primary enemy here is not, as before, an obstinately deep-rooted popular resistance, from below, to ‘YHWH alone-ism’; far rather, it is the overweening pride of pagan worldly empire, violently imposing itself from above. Apocalyptic thinking represents a form of hope expressly identified, in the most decisive fashion, with struggle against the glamour of exploitative domination. In a sense, it is true, the critique of such glamour had always been implicit in ‘YHWH alone-ism’, inasmuch as the unique prestige of YHWH, for the ‘YHWH alone-ists’, was so very obviously not supposed to be dependent on the military or political power of his, in those terms, rather insignificant people. But apocalypticism draws out this implicit critique, and renders it systematically explicit. So, by contrast to prophecy, it steps altogether further back, to survey world history in general as a whole sequence of different empires; a sequence now urgently moving towards its melodramatic end, in which God’s rule will supplant all else. It gives a new prominence to the promise of a coming messiah, as the earthly agent of that rule. It transports us as never before, imaginatively, right into the midst of YHWH’s celestial court, to show us how completely that court surpasses every earthly rival. It surrounds us with the vast hosts of YHWH’s angelic courtiers; confronts us with their demonic counterparts. It introduces us to the eternal instruments of YHWH’s justice: heaven and hell.


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Apocalypticism is still a deeply ambiguous phenomenon; ambiguous in much the same way as ‘YHWH alone-ism’ is. But, then, into this world there steps Jesus of Nazareth. Who is like a sort of second Amos, in the quite unambiguous nature of his witness to pure Honesty, as he polemically unveils the ambiguities, above all, of Pharisaism – with the one basic difference that, in this case, the sheer raging despair of the original Amos has melted away, miraculously transformed into ultimate serenity. In its dramatization of the conflict between Honesty and the pride of earthly power, the story of Amos’s confrontation with the high priest Amaziah prefigures the gospel story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. From a Christian point of view, it is, as it were, a very rough first biblical sketch for that culminating work. Amos, the outsider from the south who has come north to Bethel, prefigures Jesus the outsider from the north who has come south to Jerusalem; the non-professional, non-dynastic but directly God-appointed prophet. And Amaziah prefigures the Sanhedrin who condemned Jesus. As regards the tone of the exchange, however, there could scarcely be a greater contrast. Thus: Amaziah the priest of Bethel sent to Jeroboam king of Israel saying, ‘Amos has conspired against you in the midst of the house of Israel; the land is not able to bear all his words. For thus Amos has said, Jeroboam shall die by the sword, and Israel must go into exile, away from his land.’ And Amaziah said to Amos, ‘O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, and eat bread there, and prophesy there; but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.’ Then Amos answered Amaziah, ‘I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees, and YHWH took me from following the flock, and YHWH said to me, ‘‘Go prophesy to my people Israel.’’’ Now therefore hear the word of YHWH. You say, ‘Do not prophesy against Israel, and do not preach against the house of Isaac.’ Therefore thus says YHWH: ‘Your wife shall be a harlot in the city, and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword, and your land shall be parceled out by line; you yourself shall die in an unclean land,



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and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land.’ (Amos 7:10–17) Amos represents uncompromising Honesty still trapped within unforgiving enmity; Jesus represents uncompromising Honesty transfigured by a love which encompasses even the enemy. And hence he is not only a second Amos, but is nothing less than the second Adam. Or: the paradigmatic symbol of Honesty finally triumphant, rising above the very terms of the struggle envisaged by its enemies. God raises to life one whom Roman imperial power had condemned to death. Again, the cosmic struggles of the older apocalyptic tradition prefigure this moment of revelation, and so prepare the way for it. But the sheer agapeic openness of Jesus himself also transforms that tradition. V

In a sense, though, the same syndrome then recurs, as in the case of Amos. What the old ‘YHWH alone-ists’ did, in trying to translate Amos’s epochal discovery of YHWH’s true uniqueness into a realistic community-building strategy, the new ‘Jesus alone-ists’ also tried to do for what Jesus embodies. Unfortunately, with all too similar ambiguity. And so the Conflict, at this point, enters a third phase: after its prophetic and apocalyptic phases, a christological one. For the trouble is, the very conditions that originally made it possible for the first Christians to experience the resurrection of the crucified, and properly to understand it in terms of divine incarnation, also made it impossible for them actually to hold fast to the real truth of that experience, as a definitive revelation of pure Honesty. Only a community of people willing, or even eager, to make martyrs of themselves could ever have made the extraordinary, apocalyptic leap of imagination demanded by the original proclamation of the Christian gospel, that complete up-ending of all establishment values in the Roman Empire. No other sort of community could have recognized God incarnate precisely in the figure of a crucified dissident. This absolute reversal of the whole pre-existing Roman-imperial symbolism of the cross required people absolutely ready to take the brutal consequences. And yet – how was such a community to survive and grow? A truly Honest community will, of course, never want to close down free-spirited internal debate. It will not have leaders who respond to awkward challenges the way Amaziah did to Amos, or the Sanhedrin to Jesus, but on the contrary it will pride itself on the most robust possible openness. A persecuted community, however, in order to survive needs at all costs to remain united. And, in so far as its identity is founded on shared doctrine, it simply cannot afford to risk such openness. Likewise, an Honest community is one which does not want to boast. But a


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persecuted community, especially an evangelistic one, in order to keep up its morale under pressure is more or less driven to boast. And moreover: Jesus’s testimony surpasses that of Amos above all in his insistence on ‘loving’ both friends and enemies alike – yet how can a persecuted community, of ordinary mortals, not feel bitter towards its persecutors? Indeed, persecuted communities are surely sustained in their resistance precisely by their bitterness: the more intense the bitterness, the greater their determination not to surrender. The demands of Honesty are, in these ways, quite directly opposed to the dictates of survival under the sort of pressure the early church had to sustain. And to that extent, I think, the early church was only able to survive at all by, right from the beginning, betraying gospel truth. Christianity as a whole, I think, has to be regarded as a gigantic gamble on God’s part; a gamble which we participants ought openly to acknowledge is by no means yet an altogether obvious or guaranteed success. The ultimate prize is the opening up of the possibility of public liturgy uniquely focused on the universal demands of pure Honesty, dramatized in the most vivid way. But, in the nature of things, this possibility could only ever emerge out of a community history which began with an experience of being persecuted. And the concomitant risks derive from the way in which a community originally designed to survive persecution, while at the same time evangelizing the whole world, is then, when times change, so ideally adapted also to serve the exact opposite purpose, as a ‘Christian’ establishment’s own agency of persecution. Again, I do not think this happened by accident. In retrospect, it seems clear to me that, if Christianity were to prosper, at any rate some such development was pretty well inevitable. Compare Rabbinic Judaism. Inasmuch as Jesus stands for a fundamental refusal to be seduced by the charms and promises of earthly power, the simple fact is, the group which throughout the history of post-Constantinian European Christendom most consistently stood in his place was not a Christian church at all. But, by virtue of their basic option against aggressive universal evangelism, and their resulting constant minority status, one would surely have to say it was the Jews. Or compare Islam. Here is a mass-evangelistic form of religion which, in sharp contrast to Christianity, did not begin with any at all extended experience of being persecuted. Therefore the Islamic umma did not need, and never developed anything equivalent to the traditional disciplinary role of Christian priesthood. Of course there have always been doctrinal conflicts within the umma, occasionally spilling over into violence – and, indeed, quite an exceptionally heightened degree of internal tension right now. Yet, there has never been anything like the sheer horror of ‘heresy’ which has, up to now, tended to typify mainstream Christianity; nothing directly comparable to the Christian record of excommunications, inquisitions, sectarian holy wars. Again, the early church could not afford to be tolerant of divergent doctrine: the Christians who wanted to be tolerant, the guru-following Gnostics, just did not have the necessary unity to



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survive, long term. But the umma, for its part, never had to adapt to the same sort of pressures. And so all the doctrinally divergent Islamic communities have continued to make the annual hajj together, in what is by Christian standards a quite remarkably peaceful way. To use Jaspers’ terminology, the early church converted its memories of Jesus into the ‘Christ cipher’ so as to put them right at the heart of a fresh liturgical tradition; one in which God is approached, strictly, only by way of those memories, or by way of other memories placed in direct creative juxtaposition with them. Again – a cipher may I think be said to be, by definition, a pointer towards the true demands of Honesty. Ideally, all Christian worship, as such, is in essence a prayerful commemoration, and reappropriation of Jesus’s transformative renewal of Amos’s original insight. That is what it means for the Christ cipher to do its proper revelatory job. Only, every cipher always risks degeneration into a mere emblem. Which in this case means degeneration into a mere vindication of corporate conceit on the part of the church, as a type of religious community primordially shaped by the pressing requirements of sheer survival and growth, under persecution. Christian emblem worship may indeed be perfectly orthodox; and moreover quite fervently sincere. But the difference between orthodox cipher-mediated worship and orthodox emblem worship is the difference between a radically Honest orthodoxy – an orthodoxy always radically open to the radical otherness of the radically Other, both human and divine – and an orthodoxy which is no more than orthodox and sincere. Jaspers rejects ‘faith in revelation’ because, it seems, he sees no way of escaping the immediate ambiguity of the church’s orthodoxy in this regard. However, I am rather more hopeful. VI

I well remember how I first came to be interested in questions of theology. It was in Penzance, the Morrab Garden Library, that very pleasant institution, one warm summer’s day. I was an adolescent, wondering about the truth of things, and about proper ambition. On holiday, in my mother’s country, happy. (Ever since, the study of theology has for me had associations of holiday and a happy sense of belonging. What else, indeed, is true theology, at its best, but a constant cycle of exuberant returns to one’s origins?) Upstairs, in a deserted room, I picked a book out almost at random, and sat down at a large half-open casement window to read it. Outside: the palm trees and other sub-tropical vegetation of the garden, stirring in the pentecostal breeze; with Mount’s Bay beyond; and the seagulls, of course, wheeling about and crying their obscure prophetic cries. While in my hands I held a rather scruffy copy of St Anselm’s classic book, Cur Deus Homo, Why God [became] Man.11 11

Anselm, Why God Became Man and the Virgin Conception and Original Sin, translated by J.M. Coleran (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1969).


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Why a God-man? Here it was: the truly core question of specifically Christian theology. Anselm wrote the book in 1098, some five years after he had been consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury. But he was caught up in the struggles of the Gregorian Reform, had quarrelled with the king, and as an exile had returned to Italy. Released from his day-to-day administrative duties, he was (delightfully) free to write again. Why was it necessary for the salvation of humanity that God should have become incarnate in human form? Would not a simple heavenly decree of pardon have sufficed? What is it about human fallenness that requires this particular sort of remedy, and no other? No one before Anselm had ever taken up these questions with anything like the systematic thoroughness he attempts. And his argument is certainly elegant. It is a purely mythic argument. What Anselm wants to expose is the innermost logical structure of the traditional myth; the sheer abstract perfection of its basic plot, underlying all its various embellishments of supplementary narrative detail. Earlier theologians had suggested that Christ’s atoning death was necessary as a sort of ransom paid to the Devil: when Adam and Eve fell, according to this theory, the Devil gained proprietary rights over humanity as a whole; but God then tricked the Devil by sending his sinless Son to die on humanity’s behalf, thereby paying the necessary purchase price. Anselm rejects this theory on the grounds that, as a matter of principle, the Devil can never be supposed to have any rights. Christ’s death is necessary, he argues, not to meet the demands of the Devil, but solely in order to satisfy the inescapable needs of divine justice. For we have to understand the proper gravity of sin. In medieval law the gravity of any offence was largely determined by the status of the one offended against: it was far worse to injure a lord than to injure a serf. But even the slightest sin represents an offence against the infinite majesty of God. Which means that it is infinitely grave. Nor can God simply forgive, without requiring restitution in the form of appropriate punishment. Human beings, it is true, are enjoined to forgive the sins of others out of sheer mercy – this is right for us human beings, inasmuch as it expresses a proper recognition that we are not the final judges. But God is the final judge, and for God to forgive unconditionally would be to set aside the needs of justice. It would be unworthy of God, because it would be unjust. This is against God’s nature: a God who acted unjustly would not be God. God’s honour is the infinite honour of perfect justice; all sin – any sin – is an infinitely grave offence against that honour, requiring the payment of a correspondingly infinite penalty. But finite human beings, just by virtue of their finitude, can never pay such a penalty. Only an infinite being can: only God. And to that end, therefore, God must become representatively incarnate, in order to suffer our due punishment for us, paying an infinitely momentous penalty for an infinitely grave offence. QED.



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As, sitting at the window, I read this, all sorts of questions started surging into my mind. First, there was the question that must at once occur to any historically minded present-day reader: what on earth has this myth really got to do with the actual, historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth? It is a story all on a level with that of Adam and Eve. What has it got to do with first-century Palestine? Why then? Or with the symbolism of crucifixion? Why that way? Or with Jesus’s own preaching? And yet I was also romantically predisposed to find truth in medieval texts. (I had read Evelyn Underhill on the literature of medieval mysticism, and was already pursuing my own researches in that area.) I was quite ready to accept that a myth might be true – even perhaps profoundly true – in its own, entirely self-enclosed myth way. Very well. But then, taking Anselm’s myth on its own terms, I was also troubled (as indeed many others have been) by the element of divine punitiveness here. Again, this was no doubt an entirely natural response for someone like myself: the product of a liberal education in the 1960s. Of course, the whole point of the myth is that the punitive requirements of divine justice are lovingly deflected. Yet, there they are. At least the old theory of the Devil’s ransom puts the punitiveness elsewhere, in the Devil, not in God. Anselm’s version of the myth is altogether more disturbingly austere. On the other hand, as he rightly insists, divine punitiveness is in principle quite different from the punitiveness of fallen humanity. As I understand it, the point here is as follows. No matter how necessary certain forms of judicial punishment may be for the survival of society, nevertheless human punitiveness is intrinsically a symptom of the Fall; for it can scarcely help but be mixed, at least a little, with impulses deriving from the lust for exploitative domination. Not so, however, with God! On the contrary. God is an ‘almighty’ judge. Properly understood, this surely means two things: first, that by definition divine judicial authority lacks nothing, has nothing to lust for, is perfectly free of the lust for exploitative domination; and, second, that excessive, fallen human punitiveness is excessive and fallen to the precise extent it seeks to usurp what belongs to God alone. ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord’ (Romans 12:19). Anselm’s God is no bully God. But, rather, he is sublimely and self-sacrificially just, in this sense. That is all. And so – what of my misgivings? Were they, perhaps, nothing more than a little wriggle of sentimentality? Might there not, after all, be more to this doctrine than I wanted to acknowledge? In the end, I must confess, I still remain unconvinced by Anselm’s argument. Yet, what a great thinker he is! In order that theological error may be overcome, it must first be made explicit, in its very strongest logical form. And herein, I think, lies the true greatness of Anselm’s achievement in Cur Deus Homo: that he does this for an absolutely fundamental, all-pervasive, and still to this day very widespread traditional error. Thus, what is really wrong with the Anselmian argument? In the end, I think it is just that he remains so altogether blind to the elementary distinction between what I have called


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cipher-mediated Christian worship and Christian emblem worship; Christ-as-cipher and Christ-as-emblem. I think he has much too limited a sense of the revelatoriness of divine revelation. For what does divine revelation, according to Anselm, actually reveal? It reveals, as it were, a quantitative truth about sin: the immeasureableness, the infinite gravity or weight of sin, which only God can ever bear on our behalf. But it does nothing whatsoever to challenge our conventional qualitative understanding of sin; or, therefore, to confront the difference between a cipher-mediated and an emblematic understanding of salvation. Anselm, in other words, argues very much as though it were simply self-evident what constitutes sin. Or as though the proper deepening of our faith will not in any way challenge our given sense of what counts as sin – but only intensify it. He, in effect, identifies the deepening of faith with an ever more intense sincerity: as, in affirming our repentance, we truly begin to grasp our sin’s infinite seriousness; and, in giving thanks to God for the offer of salvation, we truly begin to grasp how great a sacrifice this has involved. So that, in both instances, we more and more truly mean what we say. However, I repeat: it seems to me that the proper deepening of faith involves far more than just an intensified sincerity, truly meaning what we say. In essence, it is a turning towards Honesty, truly being open to what others have to say; and especially those others who are most different to ourselves, in temperament, in social and cultural formation, in life experience. Where is the affirmation of such openness in the Anselmian myth? Of course, it is right there in the gospel record of Jesus’s teaching: in his notorious openness to fallen women, quisling tax collectors, heretical Samaritans, the despised poor; and in his proclamation of the basileia tou theou, the ‘kingdom of God’, as something entirely overriding the ordinary closed-mindedness of conventional piety. By the basileia tou theou Jesus means precisely the triumph of Honesty, understood as the essence of God’s will. But the myth effectively occludes this aspect of the historicity of Jesus, gives it no necessary role in salvation. So too, the Roman institution of crucifixion was intended by the Romans themselves as the most dramatically violent symbolic self-assertion of earthly empire against dissident individuals, in general. The story of Good Friday thus represents the most dramatically violent symbolic confrontation between the pretensions of earthly empire and the countervailing challenge of Honesty; and the resurrection of the crucified dissident represents the most dramatic symbolic vindication of divine non-violence, for Honesty’s sake, over against earthly violence. Yet Anselm makes nothing of all this. The underlying logic of his myth requires only that the incarnate God should, somehow, die on our behalf; in the end it scarcely matters how. So that, in the myth, all the original politics of Easter have effectively been vapourized. Cur Deus homo: why a God-man? Anselm’s question turns the gospel, so to speak, inside out, to examine its logical structure. He is asking what the



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basic problem is which requires this specific solution. Only, the trouble lies in the way he understands the solution, to begin with: as an offer of salvation requiring, by way of response, faith merely in the sense of metaphysical correctness plus sincerity. There is no explicit demand for Honesty here, as something more than sincerity. And therefore, since it is that additional demand which basically differentiates cipher from emblem, there is no explicit recognition of the cipher nature of the Christ cipher. VII

However, let us go back to Anselm’s question, and reformulate it. What exactly is the problem that the Christ cipher, the ‘Deus homo cipher’, as such, is designed to address? It belongs to a celebration of Honesty. But, then, that is true of all authentic religion. As I have said, the Christian strategy for the celebration of Honesty seems to me to be, by its very nature, a very slippery one, due to its combination of evangelistic ambition with a cult of martyrdom. Nonetheless, these circumstances do also make possible a quite uniquely rich articulation of the demands of Honesty in, I think, two basic regards: . First, the gospel story is uniquely powerful in the way it symbolizes Honesty’s need of the free-spirited conscientious dissident, as such; and, . second, it is also uniquely direct in the way it highlights Honesty’s absolute resistance to the dynamics of scapegoating. Why a God-man? A proper answer to Anselm’s question would surely need to probe at the theological transformativeness of the Christ cipher from both of these angles. Thus, I think it would need to go something like the following. (a) Christ as representative free spirit

The twofoldness of these two angles corresponds to the elementary distinction between what one might call active dishonesty and passive dishonesty. By ‘active’ dishonesty I mean dishonesty mixed with cruelty; by ‘passive’ dishonesty, a mere thoughtlessness. Passive dishonesty is drifting with the crowd, it is what comes of not having the necessary self-confidence to call things in question, it is the sheer opposite to free-spiritedness. The classic philosophical way into christology as a pure affirmation of free-spiritedness, as such, is that of Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Spirit. And his term for passive dishonesty is ‘Unhappy Consciousness’. As I have remarked above, what Hegel calls Geist (‘Spirit’ or ‘Mind’) is basically what I would call the impulse of Honesty, at every level of its operations.12 In the Phenomenology Hegel traces its course, all the way 12

See above pp. 33, 38–9.


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towards its culmination in ‘Absolute Knowing’. People often recoil from this notion of ‘Absolute Knowing’, automatically confusing it with a claim to definitive metaphysical knowledge. Kierkegaard for instance systematically caricatures Hegel as nothing more than a metaphysical ‘thinker of objectivity’, in the sense that ‘objectivity’ is propositional truth-as-correctness, as distinct from either Honesty or sincerity. (And Jaspers, for his part, is an anti-Hegelian who admires Kierkegaard.) But there is nothing in the actual Hegelian text to justify such a reading. On the contrary: Absolute Knowing is precisely what lies beyond the rival correctnesses of folk religion and metaphysical philosophy, as the latent truth of both alike. And compare Lessing’s parable of God’s two gifts. Lessing writes, As regards truth, it is not the supposed or actual having of it that confers merit; but the honest pains one takes to get on its track. For it is the exercise of seeking out the truth, not the possessing of it, which develops those strengths on which one’s ongoing self-fulfilment basically depends. Possession makes one placid, idle and complacent – If God held all truth shut up in his right hand, but in his left held the unalloyed, ever restless drive to truth, only with the proviso that I would be forever going wrong, and if he then said, ‘Choose!’ I would in all humility fall upon his left, and answer, ‘Father, give me this! The pure truth is for you alone’.13 Kierkegaard, ironically, invokes Lessing – indeed he invokes this very parable of Lessing’s – against the Hegelian ‘system’, as he sees it.14 But the plain fact is, there could not be a more absolute misunderstanding of Hegel! For, again, what does ‘Absolute Knowing’, in the Hegelian sense, know? It knows, absolutely, what it means, and why it is best, to opt for the gift in God’s left hand. For that is the option which the whole of the Phenomenology is, systematically, opening up and exploring. The Phenomenology is a study of Geist in terms of the obstacles it has to overcome, at every different level of abstraction and generality. Or: all the various different sorts of motive that lead me, in actual practice, to decline the gift in God’s left hand. One obviously quite elementary such motive is the fear of inner conflict, deriving from my self-identification with repressive prejudices. And this is the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’: inhibiting Curiosity and closing down Honest conversation as soon as 13

14

Eine Duplik (1778); in G.E. Lessing, Werke, Vol. 8 (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1979): 32–3. My translation. S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, English translation by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941): Book II, Chapter 2.



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ever any of the ‘unchangeable’ certainties to which I most of all cling, in order to be the me I think I am, are in any way challenged. Thus, the Unhappy Consciousness is passive dishonesty as an absolutely universal phenomenon, to be found in all sorts of different cultural forms; its struggles with itself sometimes quite explicitly articulated, sometimes not. Although – be it noted – it is by no means necessarily any more intense a phenomenon, in itself, where its struggles are explicitly articulated than where they are not. But what makes Hegel’s discussion of the phenomenon especially interesting is the way he associates it above all with the Christian gospel, as, in his view, the most explicit possible articulation of those struggles in religious terms.15 Throughout the Phenomenology he is discussing phenomena of great generality by way of veiled illustrative allusions. These illustrative allusions are veiled because they constantly threaten to become more than just illustrative allusions, and the veiling is meant so far as possible to prevent this. That is what makes his argument, throughout the book, so difficult: he is determined to keep the generality of the general phenomena he is discussing in the forefront, and the specificity of the illustrative allusions so far as possible in the background. For otherwise the argument will fall apart into a loose series of not very obviously related essays. Yet, this procedure reverses the natural tendency of our thinking to put what is specific in the foreground and what is general in the background. And so commentators are forever tempted to say that what he is ‘really’ talking about in each passage are the specific examples illustratively alluded to. In the case of the initial passage on the Unhappy Consciousness what Hegel is really talking about is an absolutely universal phenomenon. However, he illustrates this universal phenomenon with a whole series of veiled allusive references to its particular manifestations within Christian culture, because of the way its dialectic is rendered, not necessarily any more intense, but nevertheless, he thinks, uniquely articulate there. Which produces a very odd text: a sketch for a quite un-Anselmian answer to the old Anselmian question, why a God-man? without, in fact, any overt reference either to Christ or to God! The point, I think, is this. The Unhappy Consciousness is ‘unhappy’ not necessarily in the subjective sense of being miserable, but rather in the objective sense of being unfortunate. And its essential misfortune consists in its being a divided state of mind. Hegel himself describes it as an internalized master/slave relationship. One might also call it the conflict between two aspects of the self: the censor aspect and the censored. Or super-ego and ego. The first aspect is what, within me, identifies with the prevailing norms of my social environment; the second aspect is what, within me, is impelled to question those norms. But to the extent that I am in the grip of the Unhappy Consciousness the 15

For what follows see Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, IV B, VII C; English translation by A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977): 126–38, 453–78.


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first aspect is master, the second aspect is slave. The slave aspect is allowed no rights: for it, in any way, to question the master aspect is immediately regarded as sin. As Hegel expresses it, the master aspect thus becomes the ‘Unchangeable’, standing over against the ‘Changeable’, the slave aspect, as an ‘alien being’, with no real negotiation possible between them. Of course, we cannot be socialized at all without absorbing prejudices. But the Unhappy Consciousness is quite simply that state of mind in which healthy prejudice has been corrupted into the Unchangeable: a sheer blockage against any form of Honest learning. Right from the outset, biblical monotheism has a profoundly ambivalent relationship to the Unhappy Consciousness: on the one hand, as the inspiration of free-spirited prophecy, challenging it; on the other hand, as a form of sacred ideology, reinforcing it. But where it reinforces the Unhappy Consciousness biblical monotheism also serves, in a uniquely powerful way, to poeticize its dialectic. Here God is idolatrously pictured, by those in its grip, as a straightforward projection of the Unchangeable, the fantasy of a tyrannical Lord God domineering over humanity, at the last judgement, exactly as the master aspect of the divided self domineers over the slave aspect. Indeed, a corrupted monotheism – in that it disallows us any choice between gods – is obviously much more effective than a corrupted polytheism in symbolizing the essential inescapability of this internalized servitude, at its worst. This is not an argument against biblical monotheism, as such. On the contrary, indeed! The actual blockage, against Honesty, may no doubt be equally prevalent, and equally severe, in other types of culture, polytheistic or non-theistic. Yet in order for the blockage to be explicitly confronted, Hegel is suggesting, it surely does help to have it poeticized in this way. It is also necessary for the objective unhappiness of the condition to be subjectively recognized. And (digressing for a moment from Hegel) one might add that in Hebrew scripture this is what the book of Job, above all, does. Thus, Job shows us two sorts of unhappiness merging together: both the subjective unhappiness of loss and the underlying objective unhappiness of the Unhappy Consciousness; as Job, in complaining of his loss, also confronts a tyrannical Lord God who is understood fundamentally to reject such complaints, and who backs up that rejection very much in the role of the Unchangeable, projected. The argument of Job, so to speak, takes the objective unhappiness of the Unhappy Consciousness and infuses it with the subjective unhappiness of loss, the better to show its true character as something lamentable in itself. But, Job mysteriously cries, ‘I know that my redeemer lives’ (19:25). He affirms his defiant faith in a divine reality that transcends the Unhappy Consciousness. And that is then what the Christian gospel is essentially designed to reveal. The theology of the Unhappy Consciousness polarizes the relationship between God and humanity, after the model of the polarization between the two aspects of the internally divided self. Christian faith, however, is faith in God incarnate: that is to say, its symbolic rationale is precisely to dissolve that polarization.



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Christ represents God refusing the idolatrous worship of the Unhappy Consciousness; God, so to speak, coming down out of the illusion of heaven which that Consciousness has constructed; refusing to be the mere projection of the Unchangeable, but entering into, and in the strongest possible way identifying with, the despised world of the Changeable. And so he also represents humanity liberated from the mental slavery of the Unhappy Consciousness: the individualistic, questioning aspect of the self no longer cast off from the devout, convention-respecting aspect as an ‘alien being’, but the two aspects dramatically atoned; with the former aspect not only permitted, but in the very strongest possible terms actually encouraged, as imitatio Christi, freely to negotiate with the latter. Why a God-man? Hegel’s answer is: in order to try and help overcome the Unhappy Consciousness. There could not be a greater contrast to the Anselmian answer, which systematically obscures the difference between the theology of the Unhappy Consciousness and the theology of its overcoming. And, unlike Anselm’s answer, Hegel’s also quite directly connects with the actual teaching, and the political fate, of the historic Jesus of Nazareth. For what else is the basileia tou theou which Jesus proclaimed, if not the overthrow of the theologically projected Unhappy Consciousness, theologically hardened mere prejudice of every sort? What else was it which brought him to his death, if not his radical emancipation from that whole mentality? And what else, therefore, does the symbol of his resurrection affirm? Yet the Unhappy Consciousness is wonderfully resilient. Having the symbolic means to articulate its overcoming is one thing; actually overcoming it is quite another. And Hegel’s initial account of the phenomenon is full of allusions, above all, to its reappearance also in Christian form. In general, nothing is as slippery as theological truth. It does not have the fixity of straightforward truth-as-correctness, the gift of God’s right hand. What the gospel provides us is not the final truth of Geist, but rather a context within which its struggles have been sharpened. Why a God-man? The Unhappy Consciousness, one might say, is essentially a radical devaluation of free-spirited individuality; and from the Hegelian point of view, the truth of the Incarnation lies in its absolute symbolic overcoming of that devaluation. But then everything depends upon the dogma being understood, first and foremost, as a symbolic counter-affirmation of all free-spirited individuality. That is to say: a universal truth about individuality in general, as represented for the purposes of revelation by this one particular individual. The trouble is, though, that the resurgent Unhappy Consciousness all too easily evades the universal truth here by isolating the particular individuality of Christ from that of other individuals; as if the more he is isolated, the more he is honoured. So it understands him as the representative, not really of free-spirited individuality at all – but, on the contrary, of the human species as a lump, ‘humanity’ in the abstract. The Anselmian myth, for instance, completely dissociates Christ’s saving


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role from his free-spiritedness. For Anselm this saving role is, in essence, the role of a sacrificial representative of humanity; not an exemplary representative. What counts for the purposes of the myth is not, as for Hegel, that the gospel shows us God revealed in and through the concrete practice of free-spirited human individuality; it is not Jesus’s exemplary representative likeness to other free spirits. But from the Anselmian point of view everything depends upon Jesus’s supposed absolute ontological unlikeness to all other human individuals, in that he alone, it is mythically asserted, is capable of bearing an infinite load of guilt on the whole human species’ behalf. For Anselm nothing else matters; with the result that, in the Anselmian interpretation, the Unhappy Consciousness is completely let off the hook. (b) Christ as representative scapegoat

Yet that is not all. For, as I have said, the truth of the Christ cipher surely points towards a twofold liberation: not only from the essentially passive (in the sense of merely inhibited, unthinking, non-dissident) dishonesty of the Unhappy Consciousness, but also from the altogether more active dishonesty involved in the practice of scapegoating. It celebrates Jesus both ways: as representative free spirit and as representative scapegoat. And here it seems to me that there is a fundamental complementarity between the Hegelian argument and the argument, especially, of Rene´ Girard.16 The two are complementary in that, just as Hegel systematically rethinks the true Honesty logic of the Incarnation in terms of its symbolic relation to passive dishonesty, so Girard systematically rethinks it in terms of its symbolic relation to active dishonesty. Indeed, he sets the gospel into the context of a basic anthropological theory, about the origins of ‘religion’, the whole purpose of which is to highlight this relationship. Thus: how did ‘religion’ begin? If Girard is right, its typical beginning was precisely as a form of dishonest mystification. (I have a theological quibble, by the way, about Girard’s hostile usage of the actual term ‘religion’; the same quibble as in the case of Barth, or Bonhoeffer for instance. It seems to me, we ought to reserve the term ‘religion’ for what Christianity most valuably has in common with other sacred traditions – after all, we have an urgent need for some such term, and what other better one is there? Hence, I would prefer to call what Girard is talking about ‘pre-religion’, and only speak of 16

See especially the following works by Girard: Je vois Satan tomber comme l’ećlair (Paris: Grasset, 1999); Le bouc e´missaire (Paris: Grasset, 1982); Des choses cacheés depuis la fondation du monde (Paris: Grasset, 1978). English translations: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (New York: Orbis, 2001); The Scapegoat (London: Athlone, 1986); Things Hidden from the Foundation of the World (London: Athlone, 1987).



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‘religion’ with regard to that which eventually transcends it. But this is no more than a quibble.) Way back in pre-history, Girard suggests, our ancestors made a momentous discovery. They discovered the wonderful power of what one might call the ‘Scapegoat Mechanism’, for uniting society into a coherent moral whole. The story he is telling – this story about the origins of (pre-)religion – is really a story about the origins of civilization altogether. For him, the two are indivisible. It is a story which operates on the same level as theories about the original ‘Social Contract’. Only, it differs from any traditional version of Social Contract theory inasmuch as what he imagines is not a primal peace conference – but, rather, a primal murder. Civilization requires a moral community, a group of people bound together not only by clan loyalty, since civilization cannot be confined to the scale of a single clan, but who nevertheless have a strong sense of togetherness, as a basis for law and order. The most natural form of moral community, however – so Girard suggests – is that which derives from a shared participation in aggressive violence. In other words: community in the form of a gang. This is the most natural, in the sense of being the easiest way to generate the sort of collectivist sentiment on which civilization depends. And so he pictures the very earliest beginning of civilized life as the coalescence of a gang, in the glorious exhilaration of attacking and killing a victim. It will have happened many different times, in many different ways – but always, he suggests, with the same basic pattern. Previously the people involved in this violence had been quite an incoherent group of neighbours, riven with rivalries. But now all of their aggression towards one another is deflected, turned against the murdered scapegoat, who therefore, as it were, comes to bear all the sins of the community. They are very grateful for the unity thereby achieved; in retrospect it appears to them to be something sacred. So, again, it is only natural for them to think of the victim as being god-given. The murder was not only beneficial, it also appears as a moment of sacred revelation; and the memory therefore begins to accrue all manner of dream-like elaboration, it soon becomes mythic. Indeed, as they seek to justify the violence, and to disguise its arbitrariness, the murderers may well begin to think of their victim, himself or herself, as an actual manifestation of the god. When Christian faith presents us with the spectacle of a sacrificial victim who is God incarnate, but also the bearer of all our sins, this, Girard argues, is thus a direct throwback to the very earliest origins of sacred myth. And yet, at the same time, everything is now different. For the Christian gospel does not just repeat the logic of those origins. On the contrary, the gospel decisively overthrows that logic – emphatically insisting on the absolute innocence of the victim, the absolute folly of the scapegoaters, and the absolute need to refound civilization, no longer on scapegoating, but on quite another basis.


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The central practice of early (pre-)religion is ritual sacrifice. Which, as Girard understands it, originates everywhere as a myth-laden ceremonial re-enactment of some primal murder; an attempt – in the form of human sacrifice most directly, but also indirectly in animal sacrifice, by association – as it were to reconjure the benefits of that original act of civilizing violence. But the truth of the gospel, he argues, lies in an absolute symbolic reversal of such mythic reconjuring. How are we to characterize Girard’s argument? Although he is a polemically pro-Christian writer, he is not, strictly speaking, a theologian. There are indeed, these days, already quite a number of Girardian theologians, but Girard himself writes as a speculative anthropologist. That is to say, he does not begin from the theologian’s essentially strategic concern with the demands of faith, as a mode of Honesty; but frames his argument, far rather, as a detached observational hypothesis, aiming at anthropological truth-as-correctness. Considered as a pre-theological explanation for the very earliest emergence of ideas of the sacred, it has to be conceded that his theory is quite unproveable; the hypothesis has to do with goings-on so very far back in the dark recesses of pre-history. It surely does give us an, in psychological terms, much more plausible model for the typical origins of civilization than traditional Social Contract theory. And, as Girard demonstrates, it does also fit what evidence there is; in that, if one looks at what we know of early or ‘primitive’ sacrificial practice and mythology with this suggestion in mind, then one can indeed find plenty of echoes of the hypothesized primal event, just as one would expect. Yet, in the nature of things, the evidence can never be more than circumstantial. Nor is his the only explanatory model that works at that level. Walter Burkert for instance, in debate with Girard, has suggested an alternative origin for ritual sacrifice, as a development out of early hunting practices; and Jonathan Z. Smith has (playfully) suggested a theory tracing it back to the early domestication of animals.17 There can, after all, be no disproving these alternatives. And it is at least arguable, therefore, that Girard’s theory is better seen, not so much the way Girard himself presents it, as free-standing anthropology, but rather, quite frankly, as an offshoot of theology. In any case, that is what interests me here: the basic grounding for theology which he provides, with his systematic account of the difference between biblical faith, in general, and the older forms of what one might perhaps term ‘civilizational superstition’. This grounding, although it is certainly reinforced by the Girardian theory of origins, does not in the end depend upon it. But it is simply the development of a systematic hermeneutic, focused on the perennial problematics of ‘violence and the sacred’. The central story of the Christian gospel shows us a righteous individual who is cast out and scapegoated by a violent crowd – but nothing, Girard insists, is more 17

See Walter Burkert, Rene´ Girard and Jonathan Z. Smith, Violent Origins, edited by Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).



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distinctively typical of the Hebrew scriptural tradition, right from the outset, than that general pattern. When the high priest Amaziah confronts Amos, one may well I think presume that he does so at the head of a violent crowd, or at any rate with a violent crowd somewhere in the background. For the whole of Amos’s testimony is such a defiant provocation of crowd violence. And after Amos the prophets also, time and again, repeat that defiant provocation. In Jeremiah the prophetic testimony is interrupted by psalms of lament, as the solitary prophet, pressed into the role of scapegoat-victim, energetically protests against it.18 Many other such protests are to be found in the book of Psalms. The book of Job, again, represents the same theme, at length. Job is no prophet; yet he too is a solitary individual surrounded by a hostile crowd, represented by his false ‘comforters’, and he too protests.19 And then, most striking of all, in the fourth of the mysterious ‘suffering servant’ poems of Isaiah (52:13–53:12) we find the figure of the unjustly victimized scapegoat already, perhaps some five centuries before Christ, invested with messianic pathos.20 There is nothing, Girard argues, at all like any of this anywhere in the pagan literature of the same period. Indeed, he even pursues the comparison into the domain of folk tale. He compares the Joseph story in Genesis with the Greek myth of Oedipus. Both tales begin with the expulsion of a child from his family; in both the hero survives, grows up to become a great decipherer of riddles and, by virtue of this ability, eventually rises to a position of great political power. They are to that extent quite directly comparable. But the moral of the Joseph story is the exact opposite to that of the Oedipus story. Joseph, at the beginning of his story, is the innocent victim of his brothers’ jealousy. Oedipus by contrast is not innocent: the terrible prophecy that he will end up killing his father and marrying his mother is indeed fated to come true; his parents therefore have every reason to expel him. Joseph is innocent, again, when accused by Potiphar’s wife and thrown into prison; but in the Greek myth the Thebans are again right to expel Oedipus, when they discover that his guilt is the cause of the plague by which they are afflicted. Oedipus’s guilt causes plague, Joseph is the mastermind who provides a remedy for famine. The Greek myth shows us justified victimization, the Hebrew story does the opposite: it reads like a polemical commentary, if not on the actual myth of Oedipus, then on other myths of the same general kind. And all the more so in view of the story’s conclusion, where Joseph, meeting his brothers once more, only now incognito, tests them; tempts them as it were to repeat their rejection of 18 19

20

Jeremiah 11:18—12:4; 15:1–21; 17:14–18; 18:18–23; 20:7–18. See Girard’s study: Job: The Victim of his People, English translation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). The third of these ‘songs’, 50:4–9, is also the lament of a scapegoat-victim, although not messianic; the first two, 42:1–4 and 49:1–6, describe a somewhat messianic figure, but without the affliction.


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him by abandoning Benjamin; then reveals himself and, Judah having ensured that they pass the test, is reconciled to them. Here, Girard suggests, is a folk tale which is all about the overcoming of the Scapegoat Mechanism, in a way that no pagan folk tale ever is. The gospel, as Girard interprets it, essentially takes this distinctive feature of the Hebrew religious tradition in general, and translates it into the most decisively apocalyptic form imaginable. God becomes incarnate, the better to confront Satan in all his works. And what is ‘Satan’? In effect, Girard argues, the gospel story actually defines Satan, essentially, as a symbol for the Scapegoat Mechanism. Jesus enters into the domain of Satan: he becomes a scapegoat. But then he is raised to life. This means: the Scapegoat Mechanism is not just symbolically repudiated, but its overthrow is revealed to be the truth, above all, by which we are to be saved. Why a God-man? Hegel’s answer is that the Incarnation represents the most decisive possible symbolic overthrow of the Unhappy Consciousness. Girard’s answer is that it represents the most decisive possible symbolic overthrow of the Scapegoat Mechanism, personified by Satan. These are, I think, complementary answers; one focused on the problematics of passive dishonesty, the other focused on the problematics of active dishonesty. In both cases the dogma is fundamentally understood as representing the struggle of Honesty, at its most radical. Both interpretations, in other words, recognize the true cipher nature of the Christ cipher; both are, in effect, polemically embattled against the emblematicizing effects of mere ecclesiastical corporate conceit. Both alike are systematic recipes for separating out the two blended-together basic aspects of traditional Christian orthodoxy, distinguishing its real truth from its church-ideological distortion. For, just as in the case of the Unhappy Consciousness, so too in the case of the Scapegoat Mechanism what the gospel has in principle overthrown immediately comes back. Satan, so to speak, takes cover behind ecclesiastical corporate conceit; mingles himself with that conceit; infects the sincerity of even the most sincere believers; remythologizes his own overthrow, setting another ‘Satan’ in his place; and so walks free. Everything grows confused. What makes Good Friday ‘good’? The truth is, it is good inasmuch as it represents the overthrow of the Scapegoat Mechanism, but now the rival – indeed the quite opposite! – idea develops that it is good because Jesus died precisely in compliance with the Scapegoat Mechanism, understood as sacred necessity on a global scale. In which case, redemption is interpreted, not as release from the specific sinfulness of the Scapegoat Mechanism, but, on the contrary, as a release from – what? Again, the answer is: sin in the abstract. That is, not the sort of sin definitively represented by the scapegoating crowd as such; but the sin of Adam, misunderstood in the same vague way that the scapegoating crowd itself, unthinkingly, misunderstands sin. We are back here to what I consider to be the great weakness of the Anselmian theory. Anselm’s work represents the most sophisticated and thoughtful refinement of this



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general type of misunderstanding; but the misunderstanding, itself, is virtually as old as what it has distorted. Thus, almost from the beginning the historic reality of gospel revelation has been more or less swallowed up into a fresh sacrificial myth. (One can already observe this happening, to some extent, in the Epistle to the Hebrews.) And then Christian faith has tended to degenerate, in actual practice, into a mere baptizing of the very sort of civilizational superstition that it is ideally meant to overcome. Only – now at last our culture has evolved to the point where we can recognize this process for what it is. So the scene is set for theology to make a major advance. The Conflict is entering yet another new phase. VIII

I have myself come rather late to Girard; having begun my theological apprenticeship as a student of Hegel. They are of course very different thinkers, and certainly Girard, for his part, does not appear to regard Hegel as an ally. The one actual text of Hegel’s to which he alludes is that section of the Phenomenology of Spirit which Koje`ve singled out for special attention: the passage on ‘Lordship and Bondage’. In this text (as discussed above21) Hegel’s concern is with the universal human need to be properly ‘recognized’ by others, and he wants to develop an argument against master morality, in general. For the particular purposes of that argument he treats the phenomenon of rivalry between competing individuals as a simple datum. Girard, however, has quite a different take on the matter: he is interested in the whole question of how society subdues the disruptiveness of rivalry. Scapegoating is one method of subduing rivalry; true Christian faith, he wants to argue, represents another, infinitely better one. Whereas the first method deflects rivalry – taking the aggression of rivals towards one another and turning it away, directing it against another, shared hate object – the second, by contrast, is altogether more radical, in that it involves unlearning rivalry. And in order to give an account of this unlearning, Girard cannot, as Hegel for his purposes does, simply take the fact of rivalry as a datum; he has obviously got to discuss how it is learnt, in the first place. So: how do we learn to be rivals? It is, he argues, the all too natural outgrowth of the whole way we learn what is desirable; the way our desires are shaped – always to a far greater extent than we are naturally inclined to acknowledge – not so much by spontaneous instinct as by ‘mimesis’. As Jean-Michel Oughourlian puts it: Girard differs from Hegel in that his concern, at this level, is not only with the desire for ‘recognition’, which is a ‘desire for the other’s desire’; but, altogether more broadly, with ‘desire according to the other’s desire’.22 What interests him is the way we unconsciously construct 21 22

See pp. 84–5. Girard, Things Hidden from the Foundation of the World, 320.


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ourselves by imitating others; so that everything, he wants to insist, depends upon what it is that we are imitating. Rivalry derives from our imitating, and adopting as our own, the egoistic desires of others. But the promise of salvation inheres in our, first, unmasking this process of false self-creation. And then turning away towards the opposite: namely, the imitation of Christ. Still, this difference in emphasis does not mean that Girard’s argument contradicts Hegel’s. It would only contradict Hegel’s if it were an implicit defence of master morality; or if Hegel’s were an implicit defence of scapegoating. Neither of which is even remotely the case. But rather, in Hegelian terms, one might perhaps say that Girard’s work suggests two highly desirable supplements to the argument of the Phenomenology: one, on the dialectic of mimesis, to be inserted at the beginning of Hegel’s Chapter IV, before the discussion of ‘Lordship and Bondage’; the other, on the dialectic of ritual sacrifice, to be inserted at the beginning of Chapter VII, as a fresh way into the whole Hegelian philosophy of religion. Of course, these supplements would also tend to transform quite a lot else in the Hegelian argument as a whole. However, I do not think that they would in any very fundamental way invalidate any of it. The other great contrast between the two of them, on the other hand, is simply that Hegel is so very much more (at any rate what I would call) a theologian. Again, Girard is an anthropological apologist for Christian faith; but lacks the basic interest in actual solidarity-building strategy, as such, which lies at the true heart of theology. His vindication of faith is certainly not a justification for the given practice of any particular already-established church institution. And yet he does not tell us, either, what shape a proper church-reforming movement might take.23 To my mind, the most interesting translation of Girardian themes into theological strategy that I have yet encountered is that of James Alison; for whom the main source of authentic gospel hope in contemporary church life is the emergent solidarity of those struggling to heal the church from its traditional persecutory prejudice, in particular, against gay people.24 The relevance of Girardian themes to this struggle is plain enough. And I agree: in general, if the gospel is in our day to be liberated from church ideology, this will indeed be thanks, above all, to the collision between 23

This is also for instance John Milbank’s criticism: Girard does not, in fact, really present us with a theology of two cities, but instead with a story of one city, and its final rejection by a unique individual. This means that while his metanarrative does, indeed, have politically critical implications, these are too undiscriminating, because every culture is automatically sacrificial and ‘bad’. At the same time, criticism cannot really be used to promote an alternative practice taking a collective, political form. Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990): 395.

24

Alison’s main work on Girard is The Joy of Being Wrong (New York: Crossroad, 1998); which is a general attempt to rethink the dogma of original sin. For his application of this to the politics of gay liberation, in the Roman Catholic context, see in particular Faith beyond Resentment (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2001).



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church tradition and the work of new movements like the campaign for gay liberation. It is above all this new collision which now determines the context for the old Conflict between cipher and emblem thinking. However, let us also consider Hegel as a theological strategist. IX

There are in fact two basic reasons why I think Hegel remains an important figure for the future of Christian theology. One is his pioneering christology, especially as related, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, to the concept of the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’. The other is his quite exceptional, exemplary commitment to the virtues of the good intellectual peace-negotiator, in relation to the very deepest sources of cultural conflict. Hegel is of course, in his own distinctive sense of the term, the most ‘philosophic’ of Christian thinkers. But what exactly does he mean by ‘philosophy’? In effect, I think one might say, he essentially means any form of thinking in so far as it is permeated by the virtues of the good peace-negotiator. In his earliest writings, unpublished during his own lifetime, he adopts the role of a would-be religious reformer; but is not yet a philosopher. His turn to philosophy is a modification of his religious-reforming impulse. It represents a whole new commitment to the requirements of patient peace-negotiation, especially between traditional religion and its philosophic critics. Thus, consider the thread of argument, in the Phenomenology, linking together the notions of the ‘Spiritual Animal Kingdom’ and ‘die Sache selbst’, on the one hand, to the twin figures of the ‘Beautiful Soul’ and the ‘Hard Heart’, on the other hand.25 These two passages in particular are all about the need for peace-negotiative patience. For here Hegel is describing two levels of real, but nevertheless deficient Honesty; deficient, precisely, in that it is marred by a persistent un-negotiative rigidity. In the first case, he implicitly associates such rigidity with a failure to recognize the truth of what Christian theology knows as original sin. And in the second, he relates it to the problematics of forgiveness. The deficient Honesty of what Hegel calls the ‘Spiritual Animal Kingdom’ consists in one’s simply not caring what other people think of one. Why this curious term: the ‘Spiritual Animal Kingdom’? It is surely meant to make us think of original sin, the Fall of Adam and Eve. ‘Paradise is a park, where only brutes, not human beings, can remain’, as he puts it in a later lecture.26 The most elementary moral difference of human beings from other animals is surely just that we criticize one another; and are therefore immediately entangled in amour propre, the whole dynamics of individual and corporate conceit. This is the Fall. But 25 26

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit: (a) Chapter V C a; (b) Chapter VI C c. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, English translation by J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956): 321.


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it is also, Hegel wants to argue – O felix culpa! – a primary precondition for true moral wisdom, in so far as we can find ways of negotiating a properly cooperative relationship with our critics. The Spiritual Animal Kingdom, on the other hand, is the domain of those who see only the corruption resulting from the Fall, not the opportunity. And who therefore opt, so far as possible, to live as if unfallen. Adam and Eve fell when they ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But the Spiritual Animal Kingdom is, as it were, a domain beyond good and evil; that is, beyond any objective standards of judgement. So Hegel is talking here about people to whom morality is, in effect, nothing but a matter of holding fast to subjective authenticity.27 For such people, it does not matter what others may think – but everything depends upon one’s remaining, in every situation, absolutely focused on doing one’s ‘own thing’; in German, ‘die Sache selbst’.28 The ‘thing’ in question may indeed be anything that serves to give meaning to one’s life: it may involve taking a bold personal stand or, from the sidelines, supporting some given moral cause; being creative, pursuing scholarship, or becoming a connoisseur, in any field; engaging in a particular hobby, perhaps; or simply enjoying what one has. The possibilities are endless. Only, as Frank Sinatra sings, what these people want above all else is, in the end, to be able to claim, ‘I did it my way’. There is a degree of thoughtfulness in this attitude. In the preceding sections Hegel has been considering the mindset of those who live according to abstract rules, quite apart from any pursuit of selfknowledge: first, amoral pleasure-seekers; then, moral sentimentalists driven by mere gut instinct; then, devotees of purely conventional 27

28

The whole passage on the Spiritual Animal Kingdom is one of the most opaque in the whole of this notoriously opaque book. But a primary theme is how, in this context, all the different aspects of any action cohere, for the purposes of moral judgement. The point is, it makes no sense, here, ever to split things up and ask: is the guiding end, or purpose, of this action objectively appropriate to the original nature of the one acting? Or are the means adopted objectively appropriate to such a purpose, as chosen by such a one? Or are the actual results an objectively appropriate, fair outcome of the use of such means, to such an end, by such a one? The Spiritual Animal Kingdom provides one with no standpoint from which to make any such judgements regarding what is objectively appropriate. It allows no judgement except that of the agent: is this, as a whole, truly my thing? Everything is appropriate, just so long as I can own it, as me expressing myself. Nothing, in other words, counts except the subjective owning of the action in all its aspects. Thus, the wisdom of this Kingdom is one of sheer resistance to moralized manipulation. Informally present, to one degree or another, in all sorts of culture, it perhaps comes nearest to pure expression in the culture of Epicureanism; or, at its most sophisticated, in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze for instance. Translators have found this a difficult term. Baillie, in his version of the Phenomenology, variously renders it as ‘the fact of the matter’, ‘the fact itself’, ‘the actual fact’, ‘the bare fact’, ‘the main concern’, ‘the objectified intent’, ‘the real intent’, ‘the matter at hand’. But ‘fact’, especially, seems a very odd choice, given that we are dealing with something chosen, a project of the will. Miller renders it as ‘the heart of the matter’, ‘the matter in hand’, ‘the cause’, one’s ‘own affair’.



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morality. The worldview of the Spiritual Animal Kingdom certainly represents a major advance over any of those positions, inasmuch as, in order to do one’s ‘own thing’, one does at any rate have to cultivate some degree of critical self-knowledge. The citizens of this ‘kingdom’ are people with a real sense of having an individual calling; thoughtfully allowing that others may have other callings.29 And yet the trouble is: they are interested in self-expression alone, still to the exclusion of any very serious negotiation with others, on the basis of those others’ different callings. Such people may of course collaborate with others. But, not only are they not serious about negotiation with those who are opposed to them, they are also less than altogether serious about negotiating true solidarity with their allies. For what matters to them, first and foremost, is always the ‘own’-ness of their ‘own thing’, as individuals. And so they can never seriously acknowledge, or assume a real share in, any sort of corporate responsibility; whether for good or ill. They seek to live as if unfallen: collaborating perhaps with others, but only superficially, for

29

Hegel introduces the term in a paragraph which begins with ‘the vanishing of the vanishing’ (Miller, para. 409, pp. 254–6). The ‘vanishing’ which vanishes is the ‘vanishing’ of one’s own action into its contingent consequences. In the Spiritual Animal Kingdom, however, what ultimately counts is that which is truly the individual’s own. So the contingent consequences, as such, cease to matter. In that sense, they vanish; along with everything in the cause of the action which is merely reactive. And what then remains is die Sache selbst: that, in the deed, which is indeed purely spontaneous, all one’s own. The overall title of this section of the Phenomenology is ‘Individuality which Takes Itself to be Real In and For Itself’. In the forms of thinking considered immediately before this – abstract rules of life which fail to recognize that each individual has his or her own distinctive moral calling – self-knowledge has in effect been separated from the knowledge of the Good. On the one hand, there has been that of which one is ‘certain’, one’s own immediate experience. On the other hand, there has been one’s sense of what is morally ‘true’. But the supposed knowledge of that ‘truth’ is quite separate from the ‘certainty’ of self-consciousness. What Hegel calls ‘the Category’, that is to say, the operation of Reason in articulating universal moral truth, has been set over against the particularity of each individual’s own first-hand experience of life, as something essentially alien to it. And the notion of ‘reality’, therefore, has appeared to have two quite distinct meanings, which remain unrelated: (a) what is ‘real’ for the individual; and (b) what is supposed to be ‘real’ in itself. But now, in the acknowledgement that every individual has his or her own distinctive moral calling, these oppositions are resolved: true knowledge of the Good is actually identified with true self-knowledge. Each is now seen to depend on the other, as two aspects of the same, and so, in that sense, the two ‘realities’ have come to be recognized as one. Universality is ‘interfused’ with individuality; the ideal reality of the End, with the immediate reality of present experience; objective moral truth, with subjective certainty; ‘being-in-itself’, with ‘being-for-self’. And self-consciousness ‘has for its object the pure Category itself, or it is the Category which has become aware of itself’ (Miller, 236). Again and again, here, we have the elementary dualism of the Unhappy Consciousness being overcome. The Spiritual Animal Kingdom is a first overcoming of the Unhappy Consciousness. But it is that overcoming at its most primitive – precisely because it is most resistant to refinement through negotiation.


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particular purposes, while still remaining, deep down, quite uninvolved in any sort of shared moral life. Clinging to a false sense of innocence, they have not come to grips with the actual moral truth underlying the traditional dogma of the Fall. But, in fact, we are all fallen: this means that we all need, at the very deepest level, both to be forgiven and to forgive. We need to be forgiven, and to forgive others, just for being other – to the extent that the otherness of the Other straight away implies some criticism of us. So Hegel’s argument runs. The mindset of the Spiritual Animal Kingdom is a commitment to ignoring the critical viewpoint of the Other. Which clearly is better than just surrendering oneself to the conventional expectations of the Other within one’s own group, and being consumed with mere resentment against the critical Other who is an outsider; the dynamics of amour propre. The truth, though, lies not in ignoring the Other’s criticism. What is required is, on the contrary, none other than that we should forgive it, instead. People may be right to criticize us, or they may be wrong; but either way – in order that Honesty should flourish – we have to forgive them. For the general purposes of Geist, the pursuit of Truth as a quality of conversation, we surely do have to be as generous as possible: both in allowing others the right to criticize us, and in trying openly to respond. And this, then, is the theme of the other passage, on the ‘Beautiful Soul’ and the ‘Hard Heart’: two figures which represent the basic shortcoming of the Spiritual Animal Kingdom raised to the very highest possible pitch of moral intensity. For whereas the Spiritual Animal Kingdom consists of people not caring what others think of them, the Beautiful Soul and the Hard Heart are, by contrast, types which positively demand respect. The Beautiful Soul and the Hard Heart demand respect on the basis of their impassioned moral sincerity. They are, to be sure, genuinely sincere. But the problem remains: this demand for respect is all too defensive. These types still refuse to engage with people’s critical judgement of them. They have not yet learnt to forgive criticism – or, therefore, at the deepest level to negotiate. The Beautiful Soul says in effect, ‘It is enough that I am sincere; all I know is that the way I am following represents the most sublimely demanding moral truth for me; do not judge me, and I will not judge you’; a formula of sheer withdrawal from the actual cut and thrust of politics, at any level.30 And the Hard Heart is likewise sincere enough; but, unlike the Beautiful Soul, fiercely judgemental – in order pre-emptively to devalue the counter-judgement of the Other. 30

Hegel in fact introduces the Beautiful Soul as a recurrence of the Unhappy Consciousness, in a new form: Miller, para. 658, pp. 399–400. For here we have the Unhappy Consciousness as an inhibition, not so much of fresh, free-spirited reflection on one’s own experience, but rather of any public action in accordance with such reflection.



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The chapter of the Phenomenology which concludes with the ‘breaking’ of the Hard Heart begins with quite a different form of conflict: that which is exemplified for Hegel, above all, by Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone. King Creon orders that the traitor Polyneices, killed in battle, should remain unburied, as a mark of shame; Antigone, as Polyneices’ sister, disobeys; Creon, discovering this, cannot forgive her. As king, he represents human law, the ethos of the state, which Polyneices has attacked. Antigone, however, as Hegel puts it, represents divine law; the ethos, first and foremost, of family loyalty. The tragedy thus consists in the clash of two distinct whole traditions of ancient ethical custom. But in the chapter that follows Hegel surveys all the various conflicts in society by which the old authority of ethical custom, both secular and sacred, can be, and in the actual history of Europe has been, progressively called into question. And the basic difference between the unforgiving Creon, at the beginning of the chapter, and the unforgiving figure of the Hard Heart at the end is that, whereas the former is the king of Thebes, the latter is a modern, conscientious free spirit, a citizen (at least to begin with) of the Spiritual Animal Kingdom, encountering another such. The Hard Heart is one who feels challenged by the action of an Other, as that action expresses an attitude either explicitly or implicitly critical of the Hard Heart’s own moral values and sense of duty; and whose defensive/aggressive reflex is at once to accuse the Other of ‘hypocrisy’.31 It makes no difference whether the Other claims to be acting in accordance with conventional duty, or frankly admits to be acting as a conscientious nonconformist. In either case, the Hard Heart expresses bitter suspicion as to the Other’s actual motives. The Other, so the Hard Heart, insists, is essentially insincere. And from the point of view of the Hard Heart that is really the worst thing one can be. The Hard Heart may well be largely justified in these suspicions; and by raising such issues of concealed motivation is indeed approaching the threshold of true moral wisdom. But, Hegel argues, no matter how justified such suspicion of the Other is, still there is something intrinsically hypocritical about the standpoint of the Hard Heart, too. (In a sense, this whole passage is a philosophic commentary on the teaching

31

The Spiritual Animal Kingdom represents an initial overcoming of the Unhappy Consciousness, inasmuch as the latter is a straightforward inhibition of fresh reflection on one’s own experience. But the free-spiritedness to think for oneself by no means guarantees the free-spiritedness also to act accordingly. And the Beautiful Soul is a variant of the Unhappy Consciousness, obstinately recurring after that initial overcoming. It is a variant in which the inhibitive principle, the ‘Unchangeable’, has become the imperative: ‘Never actually do anything that might initiate moral conflict with others’. The Hard Heart, inasmuch as he or she is concerned to defend a certain set of supposedly universal values, is initially referred to as the ‘universal consciousness’. Then, as the ‘judging consciousness’. Meanwhile the Other, as viewed by the Hard Heart, becomes the ‘evil consciousness’ or the ‘wicked one’.


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of Jesus in Matthew 7:1–5: the Hard Heart is the one who sees the speck in the Other’s eye, and ignores the log in his or her own.) For, as I have said, the Hard Heart criticizes the Other, not least, in order to discredit the Other, as a critic. This is criticism, presented as pure concern for the Good, but in actual fact designed to avert, or disempower, reciprocal criticism. And the hypocrisy of that ploy becomes quite clear when, as the relationship develops, the Other makes the first move towards reconciliation. So the Other confesses: ‘You say I am evil. And yes, in your terms no doubt I am – I grant you the right to say it, and I will take your criticisms seriously. Only, please grant me an equal right to differ!’ Yet the Hard Heart refuses. At this point Hegel turns back to the Beautiful Soul: at least the nonjudgemental Beautiful Soul is not guilty of the hypocrisy of the Hard Heart. However, the proper alternative to such hypocrisy cannot be the sheer wild solitariness of the Beautiful Soul. No, in the end everything depends upon the eventual breaking of the Hard Heart. Note: not every angry moralist is a case of the Hard Heart. Take Amos, for example. Amos was not angry with an Other whose otherness in any very serious way challenged him. On the contrary, he was angry with a people who, as he saw it, did not know how to be serious; knew no serious challenge; and therefore did not see that they had anything seriously to confess. But the mark of the Hard Heart is just a basic reluctance to reciprocate serious confession for serious confession. It is a refusal to negotiate peace, at the most serious level, where peace negotiation is seriously offered – a refusal, as I would put it, to respond to the shakenness of the shaken Other in the proper spirit of the solidarity of the shaken. What I am calling the ‘solidarity of the shaken’ Hegel for his part calls ‘Absolute Geist’. The Hard Heart finally breaks – and at that precise moment Absolute Geist emerges onto the scene. Or, to say the same thing in pentecostal terms: Absolute Geist comes down from heaven.32 It is essentially with the breaking of the Hard Heart, in the church, that the inner truth of the Christian gospel begins to become apparent. But what Absolute Geist reveals is not only the truth of Christianity; it is, as Hegel sees it, the innermost existential truth of all religion. Which is why the argument of the Phenomenology then immediately turns to the general history of religion, as called to be the imaginative evocation of that spirit.

32

As Hegel himself puts it (Miller, para. 671, p. 409; but my translation): The reconciling ‘Yes’, in which the two ‘I’s let go of their existence in opposition to one another, is the existence of the ‘I’ which, having expanded into a duality, yet remains undivided, still the same, quite certain of itself, even while encountering itself reflected in the most external and opposite form: it is God revealed in and through the self-knowledge of those who, in the very purest sense, know themselves.



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We have come a long way from Amos! The God of Amos can see no immediate possibility of Honest negotiation, and is therefore reduced to raging. But what Hegel calls Absolute Geist is an absolutely negotiative Honesty. With his radical insistence on the theological problematics of the Unhappy Consciousness, Hegel is indeed fundamentally affirming the sort of sheer free-spiritedness one finds in the prophetic tradition pioneered by Amos. But, as a believer also in negotiative patience, he is, at the same time, no less committed to the philosophic practice of forgiveness. And so it is that he turns to the ‘philosophy of history’. He turns to the philosophy of history, essentially, as a discipline of forgiveness. True, he may sometimes argue against other philosophers with some asperity; and in the Phenomenology he is at times quite satirical, when portraying general types, or abstract possibilities. But in relation to the actual institutions of the wider world he never just wants to denounce, in the way that a prophet like Amos does. On the contrary, he is always anxious, so far as possible, to qualify his political or theological ‘no’ with an accompanying ‘yes’. Especially when dealing with those two skittish beasts, the church and the state, he wants to be a horsewhisperer: to speak with the most gentle, coaxing voice; to be as forgivingly affirmative as he can, while still preserving his absolute, final orientation towards perfect Honesty. And what is the special skill of the philosophic horsewhisperer? It is a skill in telling serious stories of progress towards Truth. That is to say: stories which say both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to the present state of affairs; which are truly generous to the people of the present, even as they point towards the possibility of better times to come; which seek, in the most coherent way, to inform both forgiveness and critique, as two equally necessary aspects of the same. Hegel’s theme, as a philosopher of history, is the progress of Absolute Geist; its gradual emergence, in history, to ever greater articulacy and effectiveness, both politically and theologically. This is his philosophic ‘grand narrative’. And he is perhaps the greatest artist in that genre there has ever been. But in order to understand this grand narrative one has to recognize how it has arisen: as a systematic enactment of the Hard Heart’s breaking. It is an argument for forgiveness, not of the actual will-to-dishonesty in itself, but of those who, with the best will in the world, cannot yet realize all that is required in order that Truth may prevail. For it is, above all, a meditation on how long and complex a historic labour has been needed to bring about the present opportunities that exist, for fresh insight; and how long and complex a process it always has been, and always must be, for such opportunities, once they have appeared, to be realized. Certainly, Hegel is no mere defender of the status quo. He is by no means simply identifying Truth with historic success, in the servile manner of the Unhappy Consciousness.


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On the contrary: this is a narrative of Absolute Geist, the pure will to Honesty; which is, first and foremost, an implacable calling away from any such servility. Only, it is, in Hegel’s sense of the term, a properly philosophic release from the Unhappy Consciousness: that is to say, a celebration of freedom infused with real generosity towards the not yet quite free. It is the systematic outworking of that combination; an argument for the most free-spirited patience, the most patient free-spiritedness. What Hegel calls ‘philosophy’ stands opposed to the Hard Heart equally in traditional religious form and in the form of militant irreligion. For him, in his context, this meant an affirmation of liberal Christian secularism. Against the sort of Hard-Hearted Enlightenment thinking that lay behind the French Revolution he upholds an enlightened Lutheranism in the tradition of Lessing. Yet, at the same time, he is also quite bitterly opposed to Schleiermacher’s strategy for defending faith against its ‘cultured despisers’, in effect, by appeal to the all too simple criterion of deeply felt sincerity alone. For what is Schleiermacher advocating? Essentially, it is none other than an impassioned holding fast to the sheer ownness of one’s own ‘religious experience’. And what else is this, after all, if not a theology for the Spiritual Animal Kingdom? The trouble is, Schleiermacher’s approach provides no real theological basis for challenging the ‘religious experience’ either of the devout Beautiful Soul, or of the devout Hard Heart. From the Hegelian point of view, Schleiermacher is a much too undiscriminating defender of faith. But Hegel’s misgivings about the actual theology of Schleiermacher and his colleagues in the Theology Faculty at Berlin University did not signify any more general repudiation of theology, in itself. As it relates to religion, true philosophy, for him, simply is true theology.33 However much he exalts ‘philosophy’, in other words, he is still no advocate of Straussian/Platonist philosophic politics; he by no means advocates philosophy as something simply antithetical to priestliness. Thus, take for example the conclusion to his 1821 manuscript of Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion – the ‘discordant note’, as he puts it, on which this first cycle of these lectures ends.34 Here, not long after his appointment as professor in Berlin, he is reflecting on how much one might hope to achieve, in such a position, by way of actual influence in the world. And just for one revealing moment he forgets the strategic need to be a horsewhisperer; he lets his frustrations show through. For everything in this regard depends upon there being a receptive church culture, to disseminate the practical implications of true philosophic free-spiritedness to the general public. But, he laments, that does not exist. The church remains permeated by the Unhappy Consciousness; dishonestly preferring mere conventional 33

34

Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, English translation edited by Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984–7): Vol. I, 84; Vol. III, 347. Ibid., 158–62.



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edification, and flattery of the powerful, to genuine thoughtfulness. So ‘the gospel is not preached to the poor, who are the ones closest to infinite anguish . . . the teaching of love in infinite anguish is abandoned in favour of enjoyment, love without anguish . . . the salt has lost its savour’. And the outcome is that philosophy is condemned to isolation. It ‘forms an isolated order of priests – a sanctuary – who [in order to survive without realistic hope] are untroubled about how it goes with the world’. These ‘priests’ have withdrawn lest they be contaminated. Whereas Strauss celebrates what he sees as the always necessary ivorytower other-worldliness of philosophy, in itself, Hegel, on the contrary, here laments it. But absolutely not in Koje`ve’s way! A philosopher, according to Hegel’s understanding, is indeed essentially someone with a calling to be a priest. And an ‘isolated’ priesthood is, at once, a priesthood that is thwarted, incomplete, in pressing need of further historic development. ‘Such are the crises which have befallen the Christian West in the last half century’ – wrote Emil Fackenheim in the 1960s – ‘it may safely be said that, were he alive today, so realistic a philosopher as Hegel would not be a Hegelian’.35 Well, yes. But in what sense, exactly? I do not think that there is anything about later nineteenth- or twentieth-century history that would compel him to abandon his basic grand-narrative approach. The ‘postmodernist’ repudiation of grand narrative, as a genre, is very largely, it seems to me, a gross over-generalization of disillusionment with one particular such narrative, the Marxist one. From an Hegelian point of view, however, what the history of Marxism demonstrates is not so much the wholesale unwisdom of grand narrative as such, but far rather, surely, the fundamental wisdom of Hegel’s own horsewhispering grand-narrative strategy, which Marx for his part so emphatically rejected. Does not the corruptibility of Marxist and other forms of totalitarian grand narrative inhere, above all, in their Hard Hearted glorification of revolutionary violence? But the trouble with the postmodernist reaction against grand narrative in general is that it actually militates against a proper critical focus on that, in particular. With its effective advocacy of the principle, ‘each to their own’, postmodernism simply retreats towards new versions of the Spiritual Animal Kingdom. Instead of a serious turning away from violence, it represents a mere weakening of the will to truly serious solidarity on a cosmopolitan scale. No, there is nothing in post-Hegelian history that invalidates his general project of developing a grand-narrative account of the progress of Absolute Geist towards articulacy. Only, for anyone taking up that project today there are I think two main factors that must make for quite different results from Hegel’s own. In the first place: the nightmare of totalitarian genocide, even though it does not invalidate grand narrative 35

Emil L. Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967): 224.


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as such, clearly does transform the context. Hegelian grand narrative is not an account of progress in the crude Panglossian sense that, in the long run, everything in the world is supposed to be getting better. The progress in question is, strictly, a progress towards philosophic and religious articulacy; and, in this regard, the political catastrophes of the twentieth century may well be said to represent a sort of ‘negative revelation’. That is to say: a revelation of the true demands of Absolute Geist, perfect Honesty, precisely through the experience of their total occlusion. Yet how is one to do proper justice to the revelatoriness of such revelation? ‘After Auschwitz’, as Adorno put it, ‘there is no word tinged from on high, not even a theological one, that has any right unless it underwent a transformation’.36 And we are confronted here by political phenomena in relation to which, it is plain, no horsewhispering strategy, of the Hegelian kind, is any longer feasible. Totalitarian ideologues are not interested in serious conversation with anyone outside their movement; even the most skilled horsewhisperer. Nor could anything more vividly highlight the elementary one-sidedness of the Hegelian approach – in the sense, discussed above, that he focuses so entirely on the problematics of passive, rather than active, dishonesty – than this nightmare. Critics have often questioned whether, in general, Hegel takes the cruder realities of human evil seriously enough. Maybe they are right, he does not. And then there is the whole question of la trahison des clercs: once again, how was it actually possible for intellectuals to collude as they did in helping prepare such horrors? And how far back does the mischief go? There was, indeed, no lack of intellectual treason in Hegel’s world, but it was not yet unveiled, anything like the way we have seen it, in the light of its ultimate potential implications. At the same time though, secondly, I also think we now have good reason to be quite a lot more optimistic than Hegel, in his day, possibly could be about the prospects for a proper reintegration of the ‘isolated priesthood’ of true philosophers back into a genuinely catholic moral community. And here I come back to what I said above about the contemporary reshaping of the Conflict: we can be more optimistic, I think, above all because of the development, in the main from the 1960s onwards, of a whole new species of political, or ‘anti-political’, secular organization. I mean, in general, what I am inclined to call the new ‘public conscience movements’ of our day: agencies that are ‘anti-political’ in the sense that they are not directly interested in seeking any actual share for themselves in state power, and so remain essentially independent from political parties, but which aim, simply, to change the behaviour of those in power by working on public opinion, and thereby transforming the moral context for politics. The founding of Amnesty International in 1961, for instance, is a key symbolic date, marking the 36

Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, English translation by E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973): 367.



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onset of the current global proliferation of such movements, in every shape and size. When Hegel speaks of the true philosophers of his day as an ‘isolated priesthood’ he is talking about the moral community of those thinking people who are effectively dedicated to Absolute Geist, perfect Honesty, and hence to the solidarity of the shaken, as the true essence of the sacred. Such thinkers form a ‘priesthood’ inasmuch as this is, in principle, an ideal requiring the most catholic possible nurturing. In his day, on the other hand, it remained a lamentably ‘isolated’ priesthood, due to the lack of adequate institutional vehicles for such nurture. But, it seems to me, the present-day proliferation of public conscience movements changes everything in this regard. For these are, to a quite unprecedented extent, organizations directly dedicated to campaigning for Honesty: speaking up for the otherwise unheard; opening up questions which those in power would much rather not have to face; confronting the corporate conceit of the privileged from every angle. They are set free from the constraints of tactical political realism under which any form of party politics has to labour; by virtue of their constitutive self-restraint, they can be much more Honest than party-affiliated organizations. And they are secular agencies, in the most positive sense of that term: looking beyond any particular mode of confessional truth-as-correctness, to focus instead on truth-as-Honesty in itself, as an essentially trans-confessional ideal. These movements are not always all that catholic themselves, their membership largely consists of intellectuals. Yet their influence is steadily at work on the catholic community of the church. Indeed, almost everything most creative in contemporary theology originates, in one way or another, as a response to that fresh challenge; which surely is the chief new contribution of our age to the general cause of what Coleridge called ‘cultivation’. XI

And so to summarize: the Conflict I have been tracing, between cipher thinking and emblem thinking, begins as an implicit tension within the YHWH alone-ist movement in ancient Israel, between the implacable testimony to pure Honesty, deriving from Amos, which that movement partly transmits, and the countervailing pressures of revolutionary political realism with which it had come to be overlaid. The same Conflict was then transposed from prophetic to apocalyptic thinking – before, for the first time, being rendered vividly explicit in Jesus’s polemic against the ideologizing of the very movement to which he himself was closest, that of the Pharisees.37 After which, however, it 37

Us, the Pharisees. For all theological purposes, of course, the rule is very simple: in order to properly to understand what Jesus is critically saying – as, also, to understand what Amos and other prophets like him are critically saying – we always have to read it as addressed to ourselves, and no one else.


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again went underground in the church’s christology, inasmuch as this was not only a programme for the liturgical transmission of the Honesty Jesus himself stands for, but all too often also, at the same time, its betrayal. Hegel represents one pioneering, at least partial, bid systematically to think the Conflict through in christological terms. And Girard represents another. But now, I want to argue – thanks above all to the fresh challenge of the new public conscience movements – we actually have a more propitious context than ever before for these vital clarifications finally to be appropriated, as they must be, by the church, both in theory and in practice. A quite new opportunity is opening up for the church to be liberated from its own institutional heritage of corporate conceit, and so converted to gospel truth.


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11 What is an Intellectual?/Why Theology?

I

What is an intellectual: how exactly are we to define the moral vocation inherent in the privileges that derive from a good education and a receptive mind? An initial answer to that elementary question might paint the picture of a good professional. Or a real connoisseur. But, then, how are we more critically to relate true intellectuality to the affairs of the non-intellectual world; that is, to the politics of mindlessness; in the present-day context, the whole cultural hegemony of mindless Glamour? It seems to me that there are three basic possible options: the choice is between (a) various forms of militant intellectual elitism, (b) a perhaps justifiable ‘sophistry’, or (c) priestliness. So, to recapitulate: . The first option, for militant elitism, involves intellectuals organizing with a view to themselves, as an elite group, either becoming rulers, or else directly influencing the rulers of the world. Platonist philosophic politics in the Straussian sense is one model of this; the Enlightenment secularism of groups like the Parisian philosophes is another; revolutionary vanguard-party socialism is a third. And then there are dreamers like Nietzsche or Heidegger. . The second option, for sophistry, involves intellectuals who are altogether less clubbable in their specific capacity as intellectuals. This may not always exclude political involvement. But the intellectuality of the politically engaged sophist is not, in the way it is with the militant intellectual elitist, the inspirational basis for their political engagement. Rather, it is simply a principle of inner self-distancing from that engagement, even as the engagement continues. The ‘sophists’ of Socrates’ day would be one example of this, hence my borrowing here of that term for the category as a whole. But the three very different thinkers I have discussed above as ‘anti-philosophical philosophers’ – Epicurus, Rousseau and Koje`ve – may also be called ‘sophists’ in this broad sense. And most ‘postmodernist’ thinking may also be said to belong to the same category.


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. The third option, however, for priestliness, involves intellectuals, so far as possible, completely immersing themselves in the life of a catholic community. When it comes to criticizing the prevailing mindlessness of the ‘world’, in other words, such thinkers do not just seek inwardly to withdraw from the world, either as a philosophic coterie or as sophist individuals. On the contrary, their thinking is none other than an intimate, loyalist critical engagement with the life of a particular moral group, which, in the fullest possible, non-sectarian sense, itself belongs to the world. But the solidarity ideal I have been trying to pursue, the solidarity of the shaken, is both, by its very nature, much too solidaristic to be appropriated in sophist fashion and also much too catholic to be appropriated in militant elitist fashion. And so if, as I would argue, the highest vocation of intellectuals is precisely to be the most articulate advocates of the solidarity of the shaken, then it must follow that the true intellectual is neither sophist nor militant philosophic elitist, but rather a sort of priest. Christian priesthood, both the priesthood of the ordained clergy and the priesthood of all believers, is meant, above all, to be a sign of the eternal priesthood of Jesus. In Psalm 110 the psalmist acclaims the informal, non-levitical priesthood of the king: You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek. And the author of the Letter to the Hebrews then applies this acclamation to Jesus, the king of kings; who is, on the other hand, not a king at all in any worldly sense, but whose informal priesthood, as the crucified, is on the contrary the most radical overthrow of all conventional worldly notions of authority. What else though is the pre-ecclesiastical high-priesthood of Jesus, for Christian theology, if not precisely a symbolic representation of the trans-ecclesiastical calling of all intellectuals to be priestly representatives of the solidarity of the shaken? ‘Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying ‘‘The time is fulfilled, and the basileia tou theou is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel’’ ’ (Mark 1:14). How are we to translate ‘basileia tou theou’? The literal meaning is ‘kingdom of God’, or ‘God’s reign’; but, by way of alternative – the better to catch the sheer paradoxicality of this ‘kingdom’ – I think one might equally call it something like ‘sacred anarchy’. Or even, quite simply: ‘Honesty’. At all events, it is announced very much as an all-transformative fresh foundation for human solidarity. And yet in Matthew 5:17–18 Jesus also declares, Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.


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He has not come to establish a new law, in the sense of a new basis for confessional solidarity; that is, the sort of solidarity binding together co-religionists as such. No, but the point is: the fresh solidarity principle here surely represents an altogether more radical challenge to the prevailing ways of the world. It is indeed none other than the pure solidarity of the shaken. The crucified dissident whom God raises at Easter is raised as a representative priestly representative of this principle. What is an intellectual? In Christian theological terms, the answer must be: one who, Christian or non-Christian, is called to be an articulate practitioner of the truth ideally represented, for us Christians, by the Christ cipher. And why theology? In the end, I think we need theology to clarify Christian priesthood; render it transparent, as it should be, to the priesthood of Christ, and hence to the priesthood of all true shaken thinkers. Or, conversely: theology is needed, it seems to me, above all in order that the truth of the solidarity of the shaken may be given the very greatest possible resonance within the whole givenness of Christian religious culture. II

What, then, does Christianity have to offer the cause of the solidarity of the shaken? First and foremost, surely, it is the authority of Christian public liturgy. The solidarity of the shaken is by nature an ephemeral and elusive phenomenon. This is its essential weakness. It flashes up here and there, in response to particular circumstances, only to fade again when those circumstances change; it arises in the context of particular campaigns, but tends to remain largely unarticulated in itself, as a larger principle transcending such particularity. The term ‘solidarity of the shaken’ itself originates from the old Czechoslovakia, the milieu of the Charter 77 dissident movement, in the latter years of the Communist regime – as the coinage of one of the founders of that movement, Jan Patocˇka. My own most vivid experience of such solidarity was in the context of the European Nuclear Disarmament project, which drew together Central European human rights campaigners, the Charter 77 people and their allies in the other Eastern bloc countries, with West European peace campaigners, in the 1980s. For here was a peculiarly thought-provoking encounter between public conscience movements; thought provoking because of the fundamental difference in their backgrounds, and therefore in their agendas. What did these very different conversation partners have in common, beyond all being Europeans? A certain largely implicit commitment to the solidarity of the shaken – and very little else. At one level the dynamics of the Cold War, and the principle that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’, actually set the two groups in natural opposition to one another; as the Westerners rather warmed to the ‘peace’ rhetoric, at least, of Communist regimes (‘When I hear the word ‘‘peace’’ ’, I remember a Polish activist once remarking, ‘I want to throw up’), and the Easterners warmed to the


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‘human rights’ rhetoric of Western regimes. Indeed, they could only come together on the basis of the pure solidarity of the shaken, as such. This, therefore, was one situation which certainly brought it, as an ideal, to light. But then, thank God, the Eastern bloc imploded. And the moment passed. If though, as I have sought to argue, this ephemeral and elusive phenomenon is the actual essence of the truly sacred, then clearly it needs somehow to be fixed. Jesus as a prophet of the solidarity of the shaken (in the apocalyptic form of the basileia tou theou) bequeathed essentially the same problem to the early church. And the early church was of course astonishingly successful in developing methods of effective solidarity fixing. Only, it was much less successful in tackling the other half of the problem: actually integrating the solidarity of the shaken into what was thereby fixed. The original sin of Christian theology is surely the church’s sheer refusal to acknowledge its, no doubt, inevitable failure in this regard, or therefore to recognize the true nature of its own primal problematics. But now, it seems to me, we are in fact being given a quite unprecedentedly favourable new chance of corporate redemption. The rise of the new public conscience movements, in general, represents a new chance. For it creates a far more favourable climate than ever before for the actual flashing up of the solidarity of the shaken, again and again these days, to confront the theological tradition, and recall it to its proper origins. Combine that with the spectacular erosion, at any rate in Europe, of old-fashioned respectability-reinforcing religion, and the result is, we are virtually being compelled to reconsider everything. The solidarity of the shaken flashes up repeatedly in the activism of public conscience movements; but still only ephemerally and elusively. What the Christian tradition has to offer, on the other hand, is two millennia’s worth of cumulative expertise in catholic solidarity fixing, by means of the authority generated, in a myriad of more or less seductive ways, by public liturgy. Very well, then: what I think we need is theology seeking to turn that expertise, quite unequivocally, to the service of the solidarity of the shaken. And moreover I think that this needs to be done with the very utmost boldness. Traditional theology has always tended to accept the liturgy of its church as a given. But it seems to me that the requirement now is for theology to assume an unabashedly legislative role in relation to liturgy. The one previous time when theology assumed such a role, other than right at the very beginning of church history, was in the period of the Reformation. Back in those days, though, the circumstances were far less favourable. The Reformers, like us, also faced an unprecedented challenge; but what was unprecedented in their context was the extremity of the church’s corruption by its own power. They were beginning, in other words, from the very lowest possible moral base. What we have to deal with is, on the contrary, an unprecedented intensity of conflict, over the demands of Honesty, within the secular world. This, in principle, surely


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gives us a great advantage. And if, therefore, we were indeed to seize our current opportunity, the results would undoubtedly be quite different. So let us, in the most systematic way we can, ask ourselves the very simple question: what would the liturgy of a truly Honest church look like? There are, I think, two basic aspects to this. On the one hand, there is the question of content; on the other hand, the question of style. (a)

The question of content

Let us consider, first, liturgy as a community’s representation of itself, and of its world, before God. What memories should it be working with? All Christian churches, as a matter of course, take the primordial memories stored in the Bible and use liturgy to hook them into the private memories of their people. Then they overlay that first layer of memory with the inspirational memories of saints, and perhaps also of national glory. But the problem is that all too often they stop there. It is the essential nature of ideologically minded churches to use the inspirational memories simply for purposes of boasting, and the private memories simply so that they may promote their own community life as God’s favoured channel of forgiveness and comfort. However, they are only able to do so, in ideological fashion, by virtue of their comprehensive neglect of a whole other species of memory: the difficult memories of corporate sin. That is, the sins of the church community itself, or of the secular communities with which it coincides. What, indeed, is the strongest single argument against the credibility of Christian faith, today? To my mind, it is the lack of any Christian liturgy, in general use, honestly addressing the ugly history of Christian anti-semitism. One surely does not have to be an uncritical supporter of contemporary Zionist politics to recognize this. The church’s relationship with its Jewish neighbours is so fundamentally integral a part of its essential identity. Until the church sets major public liturgical time aside for commemorating and lamenting this history, the gospel itself, it seems to me, will not yet be true. And, in general: wherever there is a history of racial or ethnic tension in which the church has been involved, or wherever the church has historically been caught up into the persecution of minorities – and the practice is still, in places, ongoing, or the memories are still alive – the same principle must apply. Given the crucial importance, when it comes to any church’s self-definition, of its public liturgy, a basic test of its Honesty must be whether, and to what extent, it actually uses its liturgy to work through such memories. We need to work through them: not merely to denounce, but to try and comprehend; neither covering up, nor too quickly disowning, our corporate past; struggling, always, to see things from both sides; defending the guilty against our own superior innocence, even while fully acknowledging their guilt, where that is plain; fully acknowledging the injustices done, and yet refusing ourselves


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any over-simple emotional identification with the victims, as such; responding, thus, in a way directly antithetical to any sort of possible propaganda. Elsewhere I have argued for extensive reform of the church’s calendar, the addition of a whole new category of regular observances, specifically intended to serve this purpose.1 Above all, I have advocated the establishment of an annual Christian Day of Atonement; plus other new liturgical observances of a more localized kind, designed to fit the particular historic circumstances of each individual community, in that they directly address whatever memories are in the most embarrassing way still alive for that community, both those that most of all complicate its relationships with its neighbours, and those that most of all continue to cause internal conflict. That is to say: new forms of liturgy explicitly dedicated to the promotion of better, more open conversation – truly negotiating conflict rather than suppressing it – as the community’s first priority for its communal life. For only then, it seems to me, can the primordial gospel memories themselves really begin to shine with anything like their full truth. Only to the extent that they are contextualized in such terms. (b)

The question of style

But liturgy, on the other hand, is not only a cipher-framed representation of reality. In its sacramental aspect, again, it is also an evocative presentation of the Real, which lies beyond all re-presentation: the Reality of ‘God beyond ‘‘God’’ ’; the never fully representable Reality of ourselves and our world. And nowadays, moreover, it has to confront the sheer hyper-reality of the world represented by Glamour.2 By ‘Reality’ with a capital ‘R’ I mean: in neuropsychological terms, that which it is the specialist task of the right hemisphere of the brain to 1

2

See especially Faith in Honesty (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005): Chapter 7. God and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2001): Chapter 5. ‘Hyper-reality’: this is Jean Baudrillard’s term. What I am calling ‘Glamour’ Baudrillard for his part calls ‘the principle of Evil’. (See for instance Fatal Strategies, English translation (London: Pluto Press, 1999): 7). But, as he is a pure sophist – quite closely akin, in a sense, to Koje`ve – he sets out to criticize the ‘obscenity’ of this principle in strictly aesthetic, non-moralistic terms. So his ideal is ‘seduction’. And he is a poet of fascinated nausea. His strategy, as he puts it, is to ‘fight obscenity with its own weapons’ (ibid.): as hyper-reality mirrors reality in caricature, so Baudrillard sets out to mirror hyper-reality in caricature; enticing the reader, seductively, to share in his intellectual dandyish response. He refers, with a sort of world-historic nostalgia, to the seductive charm of purely ceremonial, not yet moralized, ritual, such as that which is prescribed in the ancient Brahminic Laws of Manu (ibid., 166–7). From a theological point of view, however, the trouble is that his thinking remains so altogether trapped within the constraints of a completely indiscriminate allergy to any more moralized form than that. For – can we really be saved by nausea alone?


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apprehend. So it is what lies beyond the left-hemisphere work of representation. Beyond the describable ‘thatness’ of things, persons and situations, it is in every instance their ineffable ‘thisness’; beyond all one’s rationally mapped out notions of cultural territory – the direct intuition of one’s own life’s actual terrain; beyond the mediation of one’s conventional knowledge of law and custom – one’s simple, immediate sense of personal responsibility. In other words, it is precisely what one encounters, as it were neat, in the sheer immediacy of ‘shakenness’. But by ‘hyper-reality’ I mean representations of the world essentially designed to give pleasure by obliterating the direct challenge of the Real. This is the most systematic possible distraction from the burdens of Reality; the most entertaining, and exciting, reinforcement of unthinking moral, or amoral, unshaken conventionality. Hyper-reality was once, pre-eminently, the ambience of royal courts. As Pascal, in his Penseés, put it: Imagine any situation you like, add up all the blessings with which you could be endowed, to be a king is still the finest thing in the world; yet if you imagine one with all the advantages of his rank, but no means of diversion, left to ponder and reflect on what he is, this limp felicity will not keep him going; he is bound to start thinking of all the threats facing him, of possible revolts, finally of inescapable death and disease, with the result that if he is deprived of so-called diversion he is unhappy, indeed more unhappy than the humblest of his subjects who can enjoy sport and diversion . . . That is why men are so fond of hustle and bustle; that is why prison is such a fearful punishment; that is why the pleasures of solitude are so incomprehensible. That, in fact, is the main joy of being a king, because people are continually trying to divert him and procure him every kind of pleasure. A king is surrounded by people whose only thought is to divert him and stop him thinking about himself, because, king though he is, he becomes unhappy as soon as he thinks about himself.3 In so far as appetites are dulled by destitution or drudgery the problem does not arise; but Pascalian kings, unprotected in that way, demand instead the construction of a reality systematically designed to ward off Reality. And now – thanks to the high-tech industries of modern Glamour – what was once only to be found in royal courts has become the prevailing tone of whole democratic cultures. Advertising, soap operas, game shows, pornography, the constant churning of the news industry – all this royal entertainment for us, the masses, spectacle after spectacle thrown up in front of us, to capture and hold our attention, lest 3

Pascal, Penseés, 136; English translation by A.J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966): 67–8.


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we, in Pascal’s sense, ‘think of ourselves’. And, to match it: a political world ever more saturated with the hyper-reality of scandal and terror, the most clamorous forms of polemical diversion. Never before, surely, has there been such an urgent need for Honest liturgy as now, in the face of all this other, spurious urgency. Never before, such an urgent need: to provide a non-snobbish focus for resistance. And never before, either, such an opportunity – if we can only find, first of all, the right sort of language to use. Indeed, I have a good deal of aesthetic sympathy with those in the Roman Catholic world who lament the abandonment of the Latin mass; and with those Anglicans who mourn the shift away from the Book of Common Prayer. For at least the use of antique language kept the old liturgy well distanced from the dry prose of modern bureaucracy and academia. The language of the new liturgies has all the bureaucratic/ academic virtues: it is brisk, efficient, lucid, easily accessible. Yet when it comes to liturgy, unfortunately, these virtues of briskness, efficiency, lucidity and easy accessibility are tantamount to – glibness. The basic trouble, I think, with most official new liturgy is just that it feels so untroubled. As Catherine Madsen puts it: Both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity evolved from a catastrophic loss – the wreck of the Second Temple and of the geographical Jewish nation – and their liturgies derive not only from revelation and deliverance but from the knowledge of devastation. When Judaism in exile replaced the sacrifices of the ruined Temple with the ‘sacrifice of the heart’, when Christianity in embryo replaced both the Temple sacrifices and the martyred teacher with the symbolic sacrifice of communion, they were not only preserving memory; they were ascertaining how much they could live without. Modern liturgy has not wondered how much it can live without. The sense of loss is far from its consciousness; it has abandoned old forms with relief or maintained them by reflex. The prose of analysis interposes itself between the experience of loss and the emotions of fear and grief. But religion is being practised in a time when all securities have gradually been pared away: the centrality of religion, the authority of religion, the point of religion in the face of planetary crisis; the certainty of God’s favour, the certainty of God’s goodness, the certainty of God’s existence. It is an extraordinarily disengaged sensibility that can maintain halfhearted and vestigial forms in the face of multiple threats to human survival. Of all the ironies of the twentieth century, not the least is that in the century of Hitler and Stalin, of Freud and Einstein, of trench warfare and state-sponsored gas


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chambers, of the Bomb and chemical weapons and global warming, liturgy should become, of all things, optimistic.4 But in this regard the really striking comparison is not so much with the Latin of the Latin mass, or with the baroque English of the Book of Common Prayer. No, what is most embarrassing is, far rather, the contrast with the very oldest stratum of the tradition, the poetry of the Psalms. ‘‘To recover the full ‘dialectical’ range of liturgical language, it may be necessary’’, Madsen suggests, ‘to recover its unpleasantness’.5 She means, above all, the sort of ‘unpleasantness’ one finds so prominently in the Psalms: the bitter frustration, the rage, the bafflement, the anguish of the psalmist. For how, after all, can liturgy really connect with Reality if it excludes such ‘unpleasantness’? Granted, Honesty is more than frankness – but liturgy has to connect. And neither does Honesty have anything to do with one’s being obliged to feel the ‘right’ feelings. On the contrary, it is a pure quality not of feeling, but of will. Therefore, there is no need to pretend. Good, maximally connective liturgy surely gives us permission, and space, to present before God whatever we may feel; no matter how ‘unpleasantly’ in conflict with what we will. To put it in Hegelian terms: Honest liturgy would be liturgy which systematically undertook, not to reinforce, but to dissolve the false pleasantries and easy certainties of the ‘Unchangeable’, the inner censor-self of the Unhappy Consciousness. In this regard it would be permeated by the spirit of negative theology. Hitherto, the primary application of negative theology has always been to the domain of private contemplative prayer; now, though, I think we need to work at extending its application, straight to liturgy. I think we need new forms of liturgy, conceived with sufficient confidence explicitly to allow the expression of both inner conflict and uncertainty. So far as possible, in other words: the solidarity of the shaken in direct poetic enactment. III

Perhaps every book of theology ought to end in prayer? At all events, this one will. Thus, here by way of conclusion is a reworking of the centrepiece of traditional Christian liturgy; the whole intended purpose of which is to serve as a poetic opening-up towards the solidarity of the shaken:6 4

5

6

Catherine Madsen, ‘The Common Word: Recovering Liturgical Speech’, Crosscurrents, 52(2), 2002: 243–4. Ibid., 243. My italics. ‘Dialectical’ is here opposed to ‘rhetorical’, where ‘rhetorical’ is what is designed to please rather than to challenge; following Stanley Fish. And Madsen also speaks of ‘putting the id back in liturgy’. I am indebted to David Hart, for his very helpful critique of previous drafts. To be sure, I recognize that it may not be immediately useable in any ordinary, existing ecclesiastical context. It is intended, rather, as a poem at one remove from regular liturgy; a eucharistic meditation, if you like, on the great vision of Isaiah 6:1–8.


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CONCLUDING PRAYER OF CONSECRATION All All All

God be with you. AND ALSO WITH YOU. Lift up your hearts. WE LIFT THEM TO HEAVEN. Thanks be to God. THANKS BE, INDEED. But now – now let us stop. Let us, thankfully, stop here and reflect. Let us stop. We are stopped, God, before you. Stopped still, here and now, before you. You: whom we half-hear calling us, calling, somehow, from somewhere out there where no earthly words, or images, work any more. You: stood, hidden amongst us, wearing your crown of thorns, so serenely unfooled by our foolish flattery. You: constantly drawing us out, urgent Comforter, out, and on, along difficult paths, into unknown terrain. It is, it is, always and everywhere, our bounden duty to own


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our belonging to you, God beyond ‘God’. And to celebrate you. Because you are holy. High, lifted up. Encircled by seraphim who, so the prophet says, sang, ‘and the posts of the door moved at the voice, and the house filled with smoke . . . ’ And I, too, am obliged to confess that my lips are unclean, and that we are a people whose lips are unclean. So then, seraph, come, with your tongs and your burning coal. And come, Holy Spirit. Come, with all the necessary fire, that we may rightly re-enact that holy act when, once upon a trembling night, Jesus took bread, blessed it, and broke it, and said to those round him, ‘Take, eat; this is my body, broken for you.’ Then also took wine, blessed it, and passed it around, saying, ‘Drink; this is my blood, the new covenant-sign. Do this, in remembrance of me.’ O come, Three in One, break out of the past.

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Break through, break into our world, break into the dark. And grant that the grace of that moment illuminate this. Whatever we find, whatever we learn, whatever we know, whatever we hold to, whatever has shaped us, let it feed, all of that, let it feed into this wanting. May your presence renew every representation we make of ourselves, who we are. And, as we survey our community’s past, the territory we, the baptized, as your priests represent before you, as we follow its landmarks, keep us from boasts and evasions. With the bread of your presence here, feed us; with the wine of your presence now, save us. And so raise us, dying we pray, to prayerful life, this day, and for ever. All

AMEN

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Index

‘Absolute Knowing’ 33, 83, 175–6 Adorno, Theodor 81–2, 196 Aelred of Rievaulx 21 Aeschylus 9 Albert the Great 40 Alison, James 186 Amaziah 168–9, 183 Amos 158–70, 183, 192, 193, 197 Anselm of Canterbury 171–5, 177, 179–80, 184–5 apocalypticism 167–8, 202 Aquinas, Thomas 35, 40 Arendt, Hannah 80–1 Aristophanes 63, 66, 69 Aristotle 36, 39, 40, 43, 62, 73, 76 Augustine of Hippo 48, 49, 98, 100 ‘Averroism’ 10, 27, 28, 36, 40–1, 42–3 ‘Axial Period’ 156 Barlaam of Calabria 145–6, 147, 149 Barre`s, Maurice 26 Barth, Karl 180 Basil of Caesarea 151 Baudrillard, Jean 204 Baümler, Alfred 58 ‘Beautiful Soul’ 187, 190, 191, 192, 194 Benda, Julien 25–6, 76–7, 120 Berengarius of Tours 138–9, 145 Boethius of Dacia 40 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 180 Bucer, Martin 141

Buddhism 116, 137 Burkert, Walter 182 Calvin, Jean 141 Catherine of Genoa 134–5 catholicism 6–7, 10–11, 27, 32, 117, 129–30, 131, 156–7, 197 Church of England 47, 120–8, 143–4 Cicero 45, 73 ‘cipher’ 154–8, 171, 173–4, 175, 184, 187, 197, 201 Clement of Alexandria 35 ‘clerisy’ 117, 120, 122–8 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 117, 120–30, 197 confirmation 12 Confucianism 116 creation 16–17 crucifixion 168, 169, 174 ‘Curiosity’ 38–9, 41, 115–16, 131, 155, 176 Cynicism 94, 96, 101, 116–17 Dante 40 Deleuze, Gilles 78, 188 Diderot, Denis 103 Dionysius the Mystic 149–52, 155–6 Drury, Shadia 28 Eckhart, Meister 155–7 Elijah 159 ‘emblem’ 158, 171, 173–4, 175, 187, 197


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Epicurus 29, 93–5, 96, 99, 100–2, 105–8, 116, 188, 199 Epiphanius of Salamis 147 eternal life 17, 69, 71–2, 74–5 Ethiopian hermit 20–1 Ezra 165 Fackenheim, Emil 195 faith 14–15 Farabi 36, 62–6, 73–5, 76 Fichte, J.G. 54 folk religion 31–41, 42 Fukuyama, Francis 84 fundamentalism 6–7, 10, 30, 143 Geist 33, 38–9, 84, 175–6, 192, 193–4, 195–7 Ghazali 36–7 Giles of Rome 40 Girard, Rene´ 119, 180–7, 198 ‘Glamour’ 7–8, 10, 19, 30–1, 199, 205–6 Gnosticism 170–1 Gregory Akyndinos 145, 146–7, 149 Gregory of Nyssa 151 Gregory Palamas 146–52, 153 ‘Hard Heart’ 187, 190–2, 193, 194, 195 Hegel, G.W.F. 27, 31–4, 35, 38–40, 83–8, 90, 101, 115, 116, 119, 122, 175–80, 185–98 Heidegger, Martin 44, 51–9, 78, 199 Hesiod 9 Hesychasm 145–52, 153 Hobbes, Thomas 46–51, 59, 71, 102, 125–6 Holbach, P.H.D. Baron von 103 Homer 9 ‘Honesty’ 5–6, 7, 11, 12–18, 19–20, 27, 29, 30–3, 38–9, 41, 116–18, 131–6, 138, 152–3, 155–6, 161–3, 164, 166, 168–71, 174–8, 180, 184, 187, 193–4, 196–8, 200, 202–3, 207 Horkheimer, Max 81–2 Hosea 118, 161, 164–5 Husserl, Edmund 58–9

Ibn Rushd (‘Averroes’) 36–40, 42–3 Ibn Sina (‘Avicenna’) 36, 40, 62, 75 ‘ideology’ 14, 15–18 Incarnation 118–19, 157–8, 171–85 Isaiah 165, 183 Islam 18–19, 47, 62, 75, 117, 137–8, 170–1 Jacobins 102–5 Jaspers, Karl 154–8, 164, 171 Jeremiah 183 Jesus 3, 20, 21, 96, 157–8, 168–71, 173, 174, 179, 180, 191–2, 197–8, 200–1, 202 Job 178, 183 Josiah 165 Justin Martyr 35 Kant, Immanuel 156 Kierkegaard, Søren 176 Koje`ve, Alexandre 28–9, 78–91, 92–3, 101–2, 106, 115, 185, 195, 199 Kriton 70 Lampert, Laurence 56–8 Lessing, G.E. 176, 194 liberal democracy 7 liturgy 7, 13, 17, 18–19, 110–11, 116–17, 118, 131–2, 170–1, 202–7 Locke, John 102 Lull, Raymond 40 Luther, Martin 12, 139, 141, 152 Maccabean Revolt 166, 167 Machiavelli, Niccolo 46–51, 52–3, 59, 102 Madsen, Catherine 206–7 ‘magic’ 35 Maimon, Moshe ben (‘Maimonides’) 62, 76 Marsden, George 5 Marx, Karl/Marxism 44–6, 48, 51, 52, 58–9, 81–2, 102, 195 Maurras, Charles 26 Melchizedek 1, 3, 14, 20, 200 Messalianism 147–9 metaphysics 1, 32–3, 37–9, 41, 52–3, 55–6, 115–16


INDEX

Methodism 143 Milbank, John 186 Moses 159, 161, 165 Napoleon 82–3, 86–7 Nehemiah 165 Nicephoras Gregoras 145, 146–7, 149 Nietzsche, Friedrich 26, 44, 48, 51–9, 78, 102, 161, 199 nihilism 6–7, 10, 11, 30, 115 Oecolampadius 140, 141, 145 Origen 35 Oughourlian, Jean-Michel 185 Pascal, Blaise 205–6 Patocˇka, Jan 201 Pe´guy, Charles 26 Pentecostalism 143 Philo of Alexandria 35, 61 Pindar 9 Plato, Platonism 9, 11, 27–9, 36, 43–4, 45, 49, 50, 52, 56–7, 60–77, 80, 83, 91, 92, 94, 95, 100–1, 108, 125, 131, 140, 163, 194, 199 Popper, Karl 43 priesthood 1–21, 120, 122–4, 200–1 Proclus 151 prophecy 4, 118, 158–69 Psalms 166, 183, 207 ‘public conscience movements’ 196–7, 201–2 Rabbinic Judaism 18–19, 61–2, 117, 137–8, 170, 206 Razi 66–7 ‘reflective philosophy’ 31–3, 39–40, 41, 116 Reformation 118, 139, 140–4, 202–3 Rochefoucauld, François VI de la 97–100 Rosen, Stanley 28, 80, 90 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 29, 93, 95–100, 102–6, 108–11, 199

213

Segui, Salvador 58 Siger of Brabant 40 Simeon ‘the New Theologian’ 148–9 Sinatra, Frank 188 Smith, Jonathan Z. 182 Socrates 9, 63–71, 74–5, 163 ‘solidarity of the shaken’ 18, 22, 26–8, 42, 116–17, 118, 192, 201–2, 207 ‘sophistry’ 119 Sophocles 9, 191 Sorel, Georges 26 ‘speculative philosophy’ 31–4, 41, 116 Spinoza, Benedict de 76 ‘Spiritual Animal Kingdom’ 187–91, 195 star worship 72–3 Stoicism 96, 116–17 Strauss, Leo 28, 42–77, 78–82, 83–4, 89, 90, 100–5, 111, 115–16, 138, 194–5, 199 ‘superstition’ 14, 15–18, 141–3 Tempier, E´tienne 40 Thrasymachus 63–7, 69, 74 ‘trahison des clercs’ 25–6, 28, 42–4, 51, 59, 76–7, 196 transubstantiation 138–44, 153 ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ 175–80, 187, 189, 190–1, 193–4 Upanishads 9 Varro 131 Vedantism 116 Vedic class system 8–9, 122 ‘vocation’ 16 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de 103 Weil, Simone 132–7, 141 Winstanley, Gerrard 143–4 Wycliffe, John 139, 145 Xenophon 66, 73, 78

sacrament 117–18, 131–44, 152 Schillebeeckx, Edward 139 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 194 Scholem, Gershom 137 ‘Sea of Faith’ 155

YHWH alone-ism 164–8, 169, 197 Zerubbabel 165 Zwingli, Ulrich 140, 141, 145

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