Eastern Christendom formed a new empire that shielded Western Europe from invasion and destruction. For one thousand years the great capital city, Constantinople, maintained unbroken study of both ancient biblical and pagan texts.
Constantinople evangelized an entire commonwealth of states that stretched from the Balkans to Russia. This fusion of Athens and Jerusalem can be seen in the buildings and the books of cities in Britain, Ethiopia, Romania, and the United States. It is no accident that the United States Supreme Court is housed in a building with biblical references carved onto it—a structure built in the classical style of Rome and Greece.
So then, how did the church deal with the massive intellectual and cultural heritage of this classical civilization? Generally speaking, there were three reactions. But Judaism itself had been influenced by Greek learning. The very Greek language that the early Christians used to communicate their message was soaked in centuries of classical thought. Trying to pry Athens and Jerusalem apart usually led to inconsistency and heresy.
It was the Greeks who set down the rules for proper reasoning. Any attempt to understand the Bible requires the application of these rules. Christians often go on for years after their conversion with a fully functioning mind but without the proper guidance on how to use it.
Faith needs reason. In truth, Athens and Jerusalem are arbitrary cities, interchangeable examples to describe this basic, universal human disagreement about the source of justice. Pick whatever cities work best for your frame of reference — Lhasa and Beijing, or Mecca and Cairo.
The point remains that one can either have faith in the ineffable or make do with the tangible. For many philosophers, Athens and Jerusalem represent the two poles of human access to Truth. Tertullian, an early Christian writing from the Roman province of Carthage, is one of the first that we know of to think about the two ancient cities together when he asked in his On The Prescription of Heretics : "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?
In the wake of Kotzias' visit to Israel, there is now a great deal of irony in the phrase "Athens and Jerusalem" — for the two cities have in a sense flipped roles. Once Athens was the incubator of human wisdom, home to Aristotle, Plato and Socrates. Athens elevated the pre-eminence of the human mind as the only way to arrive at knowledge of the good. Jerusalem, on the other hand, was the city of the biblical prophets, all outrage and fury at the Israelites' wanton abrogation of the divine covenant through their constant idol worship and general depravity.
Athens conceptualized the perfect society as a city-state ruled by a philosopher king; Jerusalem dreamed of the messianic age, when swords would be beaten into plowshares and justice would roll down like a mighty stream. Athens was a city for Athenian citizens, and so Athenians fought and died for each other and for Athens — for their own. The Israelite kingdoms also fought and died for their own, but there was a key difference: they fought for their brethren because they believed God commanded it.
Israel today exists for the love of its own; it is not ruled by the laws of the Bible. Greece, at least for a little while longer, is part of a treaty organization that attempts to obliterate the very concept of "own" — because at its foundation the European Union believed peace and prosperity for all was at hand.
What is the European Union at its core? In truth, it is a dream born more of Jerusalem than Athens. As George Friedman wrote in his book Flashpoints: The Coming Crisis in Europe , Europe is "the joy of joining men into a single brotherhood, overcoming the divisions of mere custom.
As Leo Strauss notes, Socrates did not believe that the rule of the best regime meant the cessation of war; on the contrary, the best city would inevitably go to war with other cities. The European Union, then, was not just a profoundly idealistic project.
It based itself on an unreasonable faith in the idea of a greater "Europe" that did not actually exist, one that could subsume all prior divisions. It was founded on a messianic impulse, and Greece, like the rest of the European Union, quite literally bought what the union was selling.
But this vision is not the reality. Brussels' treatment of Greece has certainly at least made it clear to the Greeks that the European Union is simply a treaty organization: nothing more, nothing less. Today, Greece stands on the precipice of that very treaty organization. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent end of the Balkan Wars in , the political geography of Greece's region changed. For over years, after winning nominal freedom from the Ottoman Empire, Greece was an important strategic ally for the United Kingdom as a bulwark against the Ottomans, then for the United States against the Soviets.
But the fall of the Soviet Union in diminished Greece's strategic value to Washington. By , after the Balkan wars concluded, Greece mattered strategically even less.
But that was also the year Germany joined the European Monetary Union. Two years later, when it followed suit, Greece became one of many potential markets for German exports. Without the economic support of a great power patron, relegated to the bottom of the food chain in Europe, handicapped by a geography that restricts centralization or agricultural production, Greece turned to the promise of peace and prosperity that the European Union purported to offer.
Suddenly, Greece had access to credit lent at interest rates normally reserved for far wealthier states. Greece responded as most would when suddenly offered a line of credit. It took advantage, propping up a large public sector, maintaining high pension payments and financing the Olympic Games in God promised Abraham that He would spare Sodom if ten righteous men could be found in it, and Abraham was satisfied with this promise; He did not promise that He would spare the city if nine righteous men were found in it; would those nine be destroyed together with the wicked?
And even if all Sodomites were wicked and hence justly destroyed, did their infants who were destroyed with them deserve their destruction?
The apparent contradiction between the command to sacrifice Isaac and the divine promise to the descendants of Isaac is disposed of by the consideration that nothing is too wondrous for the Lord.
The preservation of Isaac is as wondrous as his birth. These two wonders illustrate more clearly than anything else the origin of the holy nation. The God Who created heaven and earth, Who is the only God, Whose only image is man, Who forbade man to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Who made a covenant with mankind after the flood and thereafter a convenant with Abraham which became His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—what kind of God is He? Or, to speak more reverently and more adequately, what is His name?
The biblical God is a mysterious God: He comes in a thick cloud Ex. The rest of the chosen people knows His word—apart from the Ten Commandments Deut. For almost all purposes the word of God as revealed to His prophets and especially to Moses became the source of knowledge of good and evil, the true tree of knowledge which is at the same time the tree of life.
They are all the works of known authors. This does not mean that they are, or present themselves as being, merely human. Hesiod sings what the Muses, the daughters of Zeus who is the father of gods and men, taught him or commanded him to sing. Parmenides transmits the teaching of a goddess, and so does Empedocles. Yet these men composed their books; their songs or speeches are books. The Bible, on the other hand, is not a book.
The most one could say is that it is a collection of books. The author of a book, in the strict sense of the term, excludes everything that is not necessary, that does not fulfill a function necessary to the purpose his book is meant to fulfill. The compilers of the Bible as a whole and of the Torah in particular seem to have followed an entirely different rule. Confronted with a variety of preexisting holy speeches, which as such had to be treated with the utmost respect, they excluded only what could not by any stretch of the imagination be rendered compatible with the fundamental and authoritative teaching; their very piety, aroused and fostered by the pre-existing holy speeches, led them to make such changes in those holy speeches as they did make.
Their work may then abound in contradictions and repetitions that no one ever intended as such, whereas in a book in the strict sense there is nothing that is not intended by the author. Far from having been created by a god, earth and heaven are the ancestors of the immortal gods.
More precisely, according to Hesiod everything that is has come to be. First there arose Chaos, Gaia Earth , and Eros. Gaia gave birth first to Ouranos Heaven and then, mating with Ouranos, she brought forth Kronos and his brothers and sisters.
Ouranos hated his children and did not wish them to come to life. At the wish and advice of Gaia, Kronos deprived his father of his generative power and thus unintentionally brought about the emergence of Aphrodite; Kronos became the king of the gods. Given his ancestors it is not surprising that while he is the father of men and belongs to the gods who are the givers of good things, he is far from being kind to men.
The Muses give sweet and gentle eloquence and understanding to the kings whom they wish to honor. Through the Muses there are singers on earth, just as through Zeus there are kings. While kingship and song may go together, there is a profound difference between the two—a difference that, guided by Hesiod, one may compare to that between the hawk and the nightingale.
Hesiod speaks of the creation or making of men not in the Theogony but in his Works and Days , i. The right life for man is the just life, the life devoted to working, especially to tilling the soil. Work thus understood is a blessing ordained by Zeus who blesses the just and crushes the proud: often even a whole city is destroyed for the deeds of a single bad man.
Be this as it may, Zeus did not deprive men of the fire that Prometheus had stolen for them; he punished them by sending them Pandora and her box, that was filled with countless evils like hard labor. The evils with which human life is beset cannot be traced to human sin. Hesiod conveys the same message by his story of the five races of men which came into being successively.
The first of these, the golden race, was made by the gods while Kronos was still ruling in heaven. These men lived without toil or grief; they had all good things in abundance because the earth by itself gave them abundant fruit.
Yet the men made by father Zeus lack this bliss. He creates the impression that human life becomes ever more miserable as one race of men succeeds another: there is no divine promise, supported by the fulfillment of earlier divine promises, that permits one to trust and to hope. The most striking difference between the poet Hesiod and the philosophers Parmenides and Empedocles is that according to the philosophers, not everything has come into being: that which truly is, has not come into being and does not perish.
This does not necessarily mean that what exists always is a god or gods. For if Empedocles calls one of the eternal four elements Zeus, this Zeus has hardly anything in common with what Hesiod, or the people generally, understood by Zeus. At any rate, according to both philosophers, the gods as ordinarily understood have come into being, just like heaven and earth, and will therefore perish again.
At the time when the opposition between Jerusalem and Athens reached the level of what one may call its classical struggle, in the 12th and 13th centuries, philosophy was represented by Aristotle. The Aristotelian god, like the biblical God, is a thinking being, but in opposition to the biblical God he is only a thinking being, pure thought: pure thought that thinks itself and only itself. Only by thinking himself and nothing but himself does he rule the world.
He surely does not rule by giving orders and laws. Hence he is not a creator-god: the world is as eternal as god. Man is not his image: man is much lower in rank than other parts of the world. For Aristotle it is almost a blasphemy to ascribe justice to his god; he is above justice as well as injustice.
It has often been said that the philosopher who comes closest to the Bible is Plato. This was said not least during the classical struggle between Jerusalem and Athens in the Middle Ages. Plato teaches, just as the Bible does, that heaven and earth were created or made by an invisible God whom he calls the Father, who is eternal, who is good, and hence whose creation is good. The coming-into-being and the preservation of the world that he has created depend on the will of its maker.
What Plato himself calls theology consists of two teachings: 1 God is good and hence in no way the cause of evil; 2 God is simple and hence unchangeable. The Platonic teaching on creation does not claim to be more than a likely tale. The Platonic God is a creator also of gods, of visible living beings, i. The Platonic God does not create the world by his word; he creates it after having looked to the eternal ideas which therefore are higher than he.
As for the thematic discussion of providence in the Laws , it may suffice here to say that it occurs within the context of the discussion of penal law. In his likely tale of how God created the visible whole, Plato makes a distinction between two kinds of gods, the visible cosmic gods and the traditional gods—between the gods who revolve manifestly, i.
The least one would have to say is that according to Plato the cosmic gods are of much higher rank than the traditional gods, the Greek gods. Inasmuch as the cosmic gods are accessible to man as man—to his observations and calculations—whereas the Greek gods are accessible only to the Greeks through Greek tradition, one may, in comic exaggeration, ascribe the worship of the cosmic gods to barbarians. This ascription is made in a manner and with an intention altogether non-comic in the Bible: Israel is forbidden to worship the sun and the moon and the stars which the Lord has allotted to the other peoples everywhere under heaven.
It goes without saying that according to the Bible the God Who manifests Himself as far as He wills, Who is not universally worshipped as such, is the only true God. The Platonic statement taken in conjunction with the biblical statement brings out the fundamental opposition of Athens at its peak to Jerusalem: the opposition of the God or gods of the philosophers to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the opposition of reason and revelation.
The truth is the synthesis of the teachings of Plato and the prophets. What we owe to Plato is the insight that the truth is in the first place the truth of science but that science must be supplemented, overarched, by the idea of the good which to Cohen means, not God, but rational, scientific ethics.
The ethical truth must not only be compatible with the scientific truth; the ethical truth needs the scientific truth. The prophets are very much concerned with knowledge: with the knowledge of God. But this knowledge, as the prophets understood it, has no connection whatever with scientific knowledge; it is knowledge only in a metaphorical sense.
It is perhaps with a view to this fact that Cohen speaks once of the divine Plato but never of the divine prophets. Why then can he not leave matters at Platonic philosophy?
What is the fundamental defect of Platonic philosophy that is remedied by the prophets and only by the prophets? According to Plato, the cessation of evil requires the rule of the philosophers, of the men who possess the highest kind of human knowledge, i. But this kind of knowledge like, to some extent, all scientific knowledge, is, according to Plato, the preserve of a small minority: of the men who possess a certain nature and certain gifts that most men lack.
Plato presupposes that there is an unchangeable human nature and, as a consequence, a fundamental structure of the good human society which is unchangeable. This leads him to assert or to assume that there will be wars as long as there will be human beings, that there ought to be a class of warriors and that the class ought to be higher in rank and honor than the class of producers and exchangers.
Cohen brought out very well the antagonism between Plato and the prophets. Nevertheless we cannot leave matters at his view of that antagonism. The worst things experienced by Cohen were the Dreyfus scandal and the pogroms instigated by Tsarist Russia: he did not experience Communist Russia and Hitler Germany.
More disillusioned than he regarding modern culture, we wonder whether the two separate ingredients of modern culture, of the modern synthesis, are not more solid than the synthesis itself. Catastrophes and horrors of a magnitude hitherto unknown, which we have seen and through which we have lived, were better provided for, or made intelligible, by both Plato and the prophets than by the modern belief in progress.
Since we are less certain than Cohen was that the modern synthesis is superior to its pre-modern ingredients, and since the two ingredients are in fundamental opposition to each other, we are ultimately confronted by a problem rather than by a solution. More particularly, Cohen understood Plato in the light of the opposition between Plato and Aristotle—an opposition that he understood in turn in the light of the opposition between Kant and Hegel.
We, however, are more impressed than Cohen was by the kinship between Plato and Aristotle on the one hand and the kinship between Kant and Hegel on the other. In other words, the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns seems to us to be more fundamental than either the quarrel between Plato and Aristotle or that between Kant and Hegel.
We, moreover, prefer to speak of Socrates and the prophets rather than of Plato and the prophets, and for the following reasons. We are no longer as sure as Cohen was that we can draw a clear line between Socrates and Plato. The clear distinction between Socrates and Plato is based not only on tradition, but on the results of modern historical criticism; yet these results are in the decisive respect hypothetical.
The decisive fact for us is that Plato points, as it were, away from himself to Socrates. If we wish to understand Plato, we must take him seriously; we must take seriously in particular his deference to Socrates. Socrates, as presented by Plato, had a mission; Plato did not claim to have a mission.
It is in the first place this fact—the fact that Socrates had a mission—that induces us to consider, not Plato and the prophets, but Socrates and the prophets. I cannot speak in my own words of the mission of the prophets. Let me, however, remind the reader of some prophetic utterances of singular force and grandeur.
Isaiah In the year that King Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple.
Above it stood the seraphim: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts: the whole world is full of his glory.
Then I said, Woe is me! Then flew one of the seraphim unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged. Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me. Isaiah, it seems, volunteered for his mission.
Could he not have remained silent? Could he refuse to volunteer? Of this compulsion we hear in different ways from Amos and Jeremiah. The lion hath roared, who will not fear?
The Lord God hath spoken; who will not prophesy? Jeremiah Then the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee and before thou camest out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.
Then said I, Ah, Lord God! But the Lord said unto me, Say not, I am a child; for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak. Then the Lord put forth his hand, and touched my mouth. And the Lord said unto me, Behold I have put my words in thy mouth.
See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant. To be sure, the claim to have been sent by God was raised also by men who were not truly prophets but prophets of falsehood, false prophets.
Many or most hearers were therefore uncertain as to which kinds of claimants to prophecy were to be trusted or believed. According to the Bible, the false prophets simply lied in saying that they were sent by God. The false prophets tell the people what the people like to hear; hence they are much more popular than the true prophets.
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