The Same River Twice?

A particularly good In Our Time this morning, on Heraclitus of Ephesus, and including his remarkable aphorism, “The Kingdom belongs to a child”, so reminiscent, as a contributor pointed out, of Saint Mark’s Gospel.

“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. 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; 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, first, the Greeks as the “first philosophers” was a notion disclaimed by the Greeks themselves, and invented by those originators of all wholesome doctrine, the German-speakers of the long nineteenth century. The counteraction of it 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, he argues 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, many as and after creation. The one god Amun was 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, Egyptian 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.

But, secondly, 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, 1&2 Samuel, and 1&2 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 Old Testament 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. 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 did not 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 parts 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), or 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 Medieval 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. 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 they flowed out as one, as Christianity.

Thirdly, no one disputes that the material collected in the Pentateuch is older than any Greek philosophy. And no one who is not a professional racist 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 Platonism (including Neoplatonism), Aristotle and Aristotelianism, and the Stoics, whereas the Epicureans, the Sceptics and the Cynics are another matter, a sort of Pseudopigrapha.

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, 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?

Fourthly, 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 Herodotus, 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 misogyny when one contrasts the Greek belief that heredity was only on the male side with the Hebrew presupposition, seen in the 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 Hebrew 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 Old Testament books, such as Ruth and Esther, although their precise authorship is unknown, were clearly written by women, just as, say, Pride and Prejudice would clearly have been 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 Old Testament presupposes mass popular literacy generally.

Fifthly, 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 in Aristotelianism, in the Bible and everything lying behind it, and in 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 Old Testament, 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 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 New Testament writers had no problem presenting the Perfect Priest, Prophet and King as the Incarnation of that same Logos, recognised in both the Septuagint translators’ own and the New Testament writers’ own Hellenism by the Semites who compiled the Septuagint. 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?

Sixthly, 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 of Blessed John Paul the Great in Fides et Ratio that non-Western thought become the handmaid of theology without in any way compromising the Church’s initial and providential Greco-Roman inculturation. 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, although they may still use the word, I am not sure that people believe much in Nirvana at a popular level, 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 Qur’anic 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 less Vedantic philosophers seeking after Brahman and Nirvana than most Westerners, never mind Christians, are adherents of comparable schools of thought in Western academe.

And seventhly, meanwhile, although Islam later took on some features of the Greek thought that was never in fact lost in the West, it is of course largely a Semitic reaction against the threefold Christian recapitulation, as can also be said of Judaism, which specifically defined its Biblical canon so as to exclude works deemed likely to lead people into Christianity. And the Christianity with which both Muhammad and the early rabbis were familiar was one in which the Semitic influence was uppermost.

This has never gone away: such communities still exist in the Middle East and its Diaspora, and also in and from India, where such communities’ Christianity is Semitic in the way that Russian Christianity is Greek, or German Christianity is Latin. 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 they remain among its stalwarts. They 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.

All in all, there seems nothing to fear from a “rediscovery” of the Ancient Semites as philosophers who influenced the Greeks, and who thus influenced Christianity definitively not once, but twice. Rather, there is very much to gain. Incidentally, those who have attained the canonical Doctorate of Sacred Theology, 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? 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 deficiency can hardly be overstated.