"The Hebraic and Hellenic traditions"

"We cannot comprehend our Western cultural legacy, unless we acknowledge the interaction of the Hebraic and Hellenic traditions," says the Centre of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham: www.nottingham.ac.uk/cotp/

Quite so, but we may and must go further: that "the Hebraic and Hellenic traditions" *themselves* cannot be comprehended without reference to the interaction between them; and that "reasoning is not fully separable from faith and hope, nor conceptual reflection from revelatory disclosure" precisely because the ostensibly competing rational and empirical methods at the root of Modern Western thought themselves derive from (indeed, belong within) the Augustinian illuminist tradition, with all that that entails, which is how and why "The reverse also holds, in either case".

In that vein:

1. The deconstruction of the Greeks as the "first philosophers" (a notion disclaimed by the Greeks themselves, and invented by those originators of all wholesome doctrine, the German-speakers of the "long nineteenth century") is quietly underway in the byways of academe, especially among African-Americans, whose interest in Egypt (a debt fully acknowledged by the Greeks: for example, Plato's Republic is about an idealised version of Egypt) is of necessity at least as much an interest in the Semitic as in the "black" as now understood.

Furthermore, the Egyptologist Jan Assmann has argued for seeing the theological and philosophical thought of Ancient Egypt, and by extension of other parts of pre-Hellenistic Antiquity, as dealing fairly subtly and sophisticatedly with metaphysical matters of high order, in particular by arguing that by the time of the New Kingdom, Egyptian thought had flowered into a high pantheism, expressed in the notion of "the one who makes himself into millions" (which the Greeks were later to rehash as 'hen to pan') as a description of the unity of reality as one before creation, and many as and after creation, the one god Amun understood as having transformed himself into the plurality of all existence, "a world full of gods", the one and the many.

If this sort of metaphysical subtlety is seen as the background of the Egyptian-educated Moses, then a highly metaphysical reading of the 'ehyeh asher ehyeh' ("I am that am") at the Burning Bush, disclosing a monotheism beyond all pantheisms, Egytian or modern, does not seem so absurd after all, although of course such a deity also comes with the usual (but essential) "divine council" baggage and associated "mythology" together with temple, priesthood and liturgy.

2. But were not the Hebrews set apart from the otherwise more or less single and indivisible Semitic people? Not at all. The post-Exilic Deuteronomistic Historian (Joshua, Judges, I&II Samuel, and I&II Kings) wanted them to have been; but his whole point is that they never were, hence the Exile, the last event that he records, so that his work cannot have been written prior to it. Likewise, the Prophets go on, and on, and on about intermarriage, so there really must have been a great deal of it going on, which much of the Old Testament simply presupposes as a fact of life. The Egyptian hieroglyph for Israel denotes a people, never a place; and it seems fair, not least in terms of the OT itself, to see that people as a sort of permeable social class or subculture, however it might prefer to define itself aspirationally and by reference to its distant past. Both Biblical Theology and contemporary politics must come to terms with this, which is both the Old Testament's own and all other evidence's presentation of the matter.

There were no Jews until at least after the Exile, and we must remember the extent to which Judaism has defined itself against Christianity, not least with regard to the Canon. It is a very strong case for the early date of Old Testament books, notably Daniel (which modern 'criticism' would date very late indeed), that the early rabbis, at a time very close indeed to that of their alleged composition, did not exclude such works from the Jewish Canon; and just read Daniel, and tell me that it and so much Greek thought are not fundamentally part of the same metatradition (the late dating of Daniel ruins this realisation, but I suspect that such is one of the motives behind that dating, for the sorts of reasons that I have already given). To the early rabbis (as to the Apostles and the Fathers), it must have seemed profoundly Hellenistic, at least mutatis mutandis; to say the least, they didn't seem to mind.

Judaism has seldom, if ever within anything like its mainstream, been hostile to Greek thought in intellectual terms: Rabbinism and Kabbalah are both shot through with it; and the more Orthodox a Jew is, the more faithful he is to the former, as the Hasidim are to the latter as well. We must be mindful that Hellenism was a very conducive environment to the Jews: the Jewish quarters of many Eastern Mediterranean cities were highly prosperous, cultured and civic-minded, while Jews often simply lived in the most prosperous, cultured and civic-minded part of town. A far cry from some put-upon collection of ghetto-dwellers.

Jews have not ordinarily been persecuted (although they certainly have been at particular times and in particular places), poor, or confined to ghettos. But it suits certain Jewish and Gentile interests to see them that way, and to have them revel in their plight, rather than admit that the Semitic philosophical influence on the West and the world begins, not with German-Jewish atheists in the nineteenth century, nor with Spinoza, nor even with the influence of Maimonides and of Islamic writers on Mediaeval Europe, but with the influence on the ostensible founders of Western thought of that which has its most abiding monument in and as the Old Testament, so that two streams of the same river met in the profound Hellenisation of the Levant (to which the two most abiding monuments are the Septuagint and the New Testament), and flowed out as Christianity.

3. No one disputes that the material collected in the Pentateuch is older than any Greek philosophy. And no one any longer disputes that the culture which produced that material and that collection profoundly influenced the origins and development of Greek philosophy (even if there has hitherto been an emphasis on Egypt in particular, and thus on African-ness at the expense of the Semitism that was the root of the original nineteenth-century German denials). So why not put two and two together?

It is of course perfectly correct historically to say that Christianity long predates an allegedly, but not actually, autonomous philosophical tradition which cannot escape its Christian roots, try as it might. But look at the (Very) Ancient World, and see that the Biblical Revelation's predating, anticipating, initiating and thus including Philosophy is nothing new: Descartes, the Rationalists, the Empiricists and Kant are as a New Testament to the Old Testament of the Pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato and (Neo-)Platonism, Aristotle and Aristotelianism, and the Stoics (the Epicureans, the Sceptics and the Cynics are another matter).

What does it mean to re-read the whole of Western Philosophy in these terms, recognising not only the Moderns as perverted, but still recognisable and useful, Augustinian illuminists (hence their belief in the rational and/or empirical method(s)), but also the Ancients as, if not perverted then at least corrupted, but still recognisable and useful, figures of the intellectual tradition that produced the pre-Hellenistic parts of the Old Testament? What does this mean for the study of later Old Testament material, and of the whole New Testament? What does it mean, that such is ultimately the true character of the Neoplatonism of Augustine and of the Aristotelianism that Aquinas synthesised with Augustine's Christianised Neoplatonism, i.e., of the tradition to which the founders of Modern Philosophy continued to belong, continuing (as their successors still do) to appeal to Ancients who in fact belonged to the intellectual tradition of the Old Testament?

4. I have two initial suggestions as to what part of the above might mean in practice. The first is that the Deuteronomistic History, and the haggadic parts of the Pentateuch, are older than Herodatus, and are in fact the earliest extant histories as the term is now understood (i.e., chronology plus analysis), with all that this entails for historiography. And the second is that, just as "conservatives" are challenged by the fact that the Bible, of all things, is an integral part of the roots of Western philosophy, but only if at least initially Afrocentric and related insights are taken on board, so "liberals" are equally challenged by the fact that it is the Bible, of all things, that is a standing contradiction and critique, both of the Eurocentrism of those who see philosophy as beginning with the Greeks, and of Greek misognyny when one contrasts the Greek belief that heredity was only on the male side with the Hebrew presupposition (seen in the OT purity and incest laws) of a biological relationship with both parents.

This latter difference has, in turn, profound class implications: the Greek theory was devised by members of a homosocial urban leisure class, whereas the OT writers were working farmers, not to mention husbands and fathers: it is the Bible that is on the side of the working class, reflecting its practical wisdom; and it is the Bible that is on the same side as feminism, precisely because these parts of it were written by patriarchs. (One might add that several OT books, such as Ruth and Esther, although their precise authorship is unknown, were clearly written by women, just as, say, 'Pride and Prejudice' was clearly written by a woman, even if one had never heard of Jane Austen. So women were clearly literate in Hebrew culture, just as much of the OT presupposes mass popular literacy generally.)

5. Thomism presents itself (at least to the common reader, best exemplified in English by Chesterton despite his unfortunate acceptance of the theory that it was a rupture with Augustinianism) as sanity and common sense; and its roots are three-fold, namely Aristotelianism, the Bible (and everything lying behind it), and the existing Augustinian synthesis of Platonism and Scripture. What have rightly come to be seen as Scholastic, and above all Thomist, concepts are really philosophical-theological formulations of what would have struck Biblical and other Ancient Semitic writers as common sense, just as they still strike most people as such when properly explained.

For God's Book of Scripture begins by recording the beginning of God's Book of Nature, presenting the Author of both as creating, naming and commanding: He is concerned with being, knowing and doing; with ontology, epistemology and ethics. Throughout the OT, God raises up priests, prophets and kings accordingly, corresponding to that with which each of these branches of Philosophy is concerned, until the Perfect Form of all three appears in and as the Person of Jesus Christ, Who proclaims Himself to be the (Ethical) Way, the (Epistemological) Truth and the (Ontological) Life, and Who commissions His Ecclesial Body to teach (epistemologically), to govern (ethically) and to sanctify (ontologically).

The Septuagint (LXX) translators had no problem identifying that creating, naming and commanding Author of both Books with and as the Logos of their wider Hellenistic culture, while the NT writers had no problem presenting the Perfect Priest, Prophet and King as the Incarnation of that same Logos, recognised in their own (both the LXX translators' own and the NT writers' own) Hellenism by the Semites who compiled the LXX. Is it possible that they recognised in the Hebrew concept the root of the Hellenistic concept? Or rather, is it possible that they did not do so?

One might add that "He saw that it was good", and that "Behold, it was very good." Beauty discloses being, truth and goodness: the really identical categories of being (i.e., of being created by God), of being true and of being good are in turn really identical with being beautiful. What could be more Platonic or more Thomist, not to mention more sane or more commonsensical? And what could be more Biblical, when one looks at the very first chapter of the Bible?

6. What does all of this mean that the other Indo-European centre of Ancient Philosophy, recognisable as such in far more than only linguistic terms, in India? A recognition of the Greek and Indian traditions' common Semitic roots would be very revelatory in all sorts of ways, and not least would assist in realising the aspiration in 'Fides et Ratio' that non-Western thought become the handmaid of Theology without in any way compromising the Church's initial and providential Graeco-Roman inculturation.

Modern Western philosophers, examining the thought of India, have concentrated on those thinkers who view the impersonal Brahman as the ultimate reality and who conceive of Nirvana accordingly, both because such thinkers have come from "elite" backgrounds comparable to their own, and because those equally "elite" figures who have nevertheless given philosophical articulation to the vastly more popular theistic traditions (with all that theism entails for the definition of one's ultimate destiny) have, in so doing, reminded them far too much of Christianity in general, and of Catholicism in particular. Venerating the (unpopular) Deists of Early Modernity, such Westerners have deliberately chosen the (unpopular) "Deists of the East", thus misunderstanding India no less than they misunderstand the West.

For example, I am not sure that people believe much in Nirvana at a popular level (although they might still use the word), at least if they are confronted with an alternative. In the very syncretistic world of Northern India, for example, followers of the Sant tradition, whence came Sikhism, basically seem to replace Brahman with Allah as understood by the popular Sufi teachers, and Nirvana with the Qu'ranic Paradise thus understood, while still seeing the latter as the place of escape from samsara and karma. But then, who could believe (as most Hindus do) in a personal Vishnu, Shiva or Mother-Goddess, seldom or never thinking about any mysterious impersonality beyond it all, and yet believe in Nivana rather than in a state of being with the deity, most obviously presented as the place where the deity lives? "Hinduism" is an invention of British colonial administration, and most "Hindus" are no more (or, I suppose, less) Vedantic philosophers seeking after Brahman and Nirvana than most Westerners, never mind "Christians", are adherents of comparble schools of thought in Western academe.

7. Meanwhile, although Islam later took on some features of Greek thought (although one must be wary of the idea that such things were ever "lost" in the West), but is of course largely a Semitic reaction against the threefold Christian recapitulation, as can also be said of "Judaism as we know it", which specifically defined its Biblical canon so as to exclude works deemed likely to lead people into Christianity. And the Christianity with which both Muhammed and the early rabbis were familiar was one in which the Semitic influence was uppermost: Syriac, Aramaic, Coptic.

This has never gone away: such communities still exist in the Middle East, and also in India (where such communities' Christianity is Semitic in the way that Russian Christianity is Greek, or German Christianity is Latin), as well as in diaspora. Variously, they use the Latin, Byzantine, East Syrian and West Syrian Liturgies. And variously, across all these liturgical categories but the first, they are in or out of the Roman Communion, which therefore has a particular obligation to give practical effect to the reality of itself as containing all these Semitic and Semitic-derived expressions of Christianity, as well as the Greek and Latin traditions.

Arab Christians are an integral part of the Arab people (they actually founded the pan-Arab movement, and remain among its stalwarts), and even call the Triune God "Allah". (Similarly, Indian Christians of Syrian and Mesopotamian missionary origin, not to say very probable Apostolic foundation, have been an integral part of Indian society for a very long time.) Given the strong similarity among the spoken forms of the Semitic languages, it seems fair to suppose (although I might be wrong about this) that the Arabic spoken in the cafes or the bazaars of Damascus, Jerusalem or Cairo is really a form of Syriac, Aramaic or Coptic.

All in all, there seems nothing to fear from a "rediscovery" of the Ancient Semites as philosophers who influenced the Greeks (and thus influenced Christianity definitively not once, but twice), but rather very much to gain.

Incidentally, those who have attained the canonical degree of STD have been, as I understand it, examined in three modern and three ancient languages. Presumably, while the former must vary enormously, the latter are almost (if almost) always Latin, Greek and Hebrew (itself potentially a key to learning Syriac, Aramaic, Coptic or Arabic at some speed)? Given this fact, and given the existence of large Arabic-speaking (as well as liturgically and historically Syriac, Coptic and Aramaic) Catholic communities, one would have expected a far greater appreciation of the Semitic corner of the triangle than Catholic thought has tended to manifest. The contemporary urgency of correcting this defect can hardly be over-stated.