THE FAITH
of a HERETIC
OTHER BOOKS BY
WALTER KAUFMANN
Nietzsche
Critique of Religion and Philosophy
From Shakespeare to Existentialism
TRANSLATOR AND EDITOR
The Portable Nietzsche
Judaism and Christianity: Essays by Leo Baeck
Goethe's Faust
EDITOR
Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre
Philosophic Classics: Thales to St. Thomas
Philosophic Classics: Bacon to Kant
THE FAITH
of a HERETIC
Walter Ka,ufrnariri
DOUBL.EDAY <b- COMPANY, INC.
Garden City, New York,
1961
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 61-9523
Copyright 1960, 1961 by Walter Kaufmann
Copyright 1959 by McGraw Hill Company, Inc.
AH Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
To my uncles
WALTER SELIGSOHN
who volunteered in 1914 and was shot off his horse on the
Russian front in 1915
JULIUS SELIGSOHN
and
FRANZ KAUFMANN
both Oberleutnant, Iron Cross, First Class, 1914-18,
one a devout Jew,
one a devout convert to Christianity,
one killed in a Nazi concentration camp in 1942,
one shot by the Secret Police in 1944,
both for gallantly helping others
in obedience to conscience, defiant
JEREMIAH: They have healed the wound of my people lightly,
saying, "Peace, peace," when there is no peace.
KANT: All the interest of my reason (speculative as well as prac-
tical) comes together in the following three questions:
1. What can I know?
2. What ought I to do?
3. What may I hope?
Critique of Pure Reason
WHITMAN: Piety and conformity to them that like,
Peace, obesity, allegiance, to them that like . . .
I am he who walks the States with a barb'd tongue,
questioning every one I meet,
Who are you that wanted only to be told what
you knew before?
Who are you that wanted only a book to join you
in your nonsense?
By Blue Ontario's Shore
NIETZSCHE: Is it really so difficult simply to accept . . . what is
considered truth in the circle of one's relatives and of many good
men, and what, moreover, really comforts and elevates man? Is that
more difficult than to strike new paths, fighting the habitual, experi-
encing the insecurity of independence and the frequent wavering of
8 The Faith of a Heretic
one's feelings and even one's conscience, proceeding often without
any consolation. . . . Here the ways of men part: if you wish to
strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be
a devotee of truth, then inquire.
Letter, 1865
TOLSTOY: I do not believe my faith to be the one indubitable
truth for all time, but I see no other that is plainer, clearer, or
answers better to all the demands of my reason and my heart; should
I find such a one I shall at once accept it. ... But I can no more
return to that from which with such suffering I have escaped, than
a flying bird can re-enter the egg shell from which it has emerged.
"He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will pro-
ceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and
end in loving himself (his own peace) better than all," said Coleridge.
Reply to Edict of Excommunication
WITTGENSTEIN: What is the use of studying philosophy if ...
(See 10)
SARTRE: If a writer has chosen to be silent . . . (See 16)
PREFACE
Of faith and morals, one cannot speak honestly for long with-
out hurting feelings. Therefore, most people speak dishonestly of
the most important subjects. Many recent philosophers prefer not to
speak of them at all. But in some situations honesty is incompatible
with silence. It is in mine right now.
This book is continuous with my previous efforts, but goes beyond
them. More than before, criticism is subordinated to a constructive
attempt. But affirmations that entail no negations are empty. Those
who loudly say Yes, but No under their breath only, or No only to
what their audience negates anyway or what it does not hurt to
deny, are false prophets that cry "peace, peace," when there is no
peace.
This volume wants to be read as a whole, as books, unlike maga-
zines, are generally meant to be read. It is divided into consecu-
tively numbered sections to facilitate cross references and indexing.
It is petty to worry about whether something is still referred to on
the next page, or the page after that; by having sections to refer to,
that problem is solved. The sections are not meant to be read out of
context. Many a theme introduced early in the book is developed
and varied later, and obviously much is left unsaid in the later chap-
ters because it has been said earlier. Many sections may make sense
in isolation; but their sense in context is often more judicious.
Whether it is judicious enough, there is only one way of finding out.
November 30, 1960 W.K.
9
CONTENTS
I Prologue 15
II The Quest for Honesty 29
III Philosophy and Revolution 53
IV Commitment 79
V Against Theology 103
VI Suffering and the Bible 149
VII The Old Testament 183
VIII Jesus vis-&-vis Paul, Luther, and Schweitzer 219
IX Organized Religion 261
X Morality 291
XI Freud and the Tragic Virtues 343
XII Death 367
XIII Trilogue on Heaven, Love, and Peace 391
XIV Epilogue 411
Bibliographical Index 424
Acknowledgments 432
THE FAITH
of a HERETIC
Heresy is a set of opinions "at variance with established or
generally received principles." In this sense, heresy is the price of
all originality and innovation.
In theology, any "opinion that is contrary to the fundamental doc-
trine or creed of any particular church" is heretical. From the point
of view of the churches to which we do not belong and none of
us can belong to the lot we are all heretics. But more narrowly
speaking, a heretic is one who deviates from the fundamental doc-
trine of his own church, or of the church with which he was pre-
viously connected. So understood, not everybody is a heretic.
In law, finally still according to Webster's Universal Unabridged
Dictionary heresy is "an offense against Christianity consisting in r
a denial of some of its essential doctrines, publicly avowed, and
obstinately maintained." What keeps most men in "Christian" coun-
tries from being heretics in this sense is that they do not publicly
avow their disbelief: it is in better taste to be casual about lost be-
liefs, and a note of wistfulness generally ensures forgiveness. Obsti-
nacy is rare. Millions do not even know that they deny essential
Christian doctrines: they have never bothered to find out what the
essential doctrines are. In extenuation they may plead that the eva-
15
16 The Faith of a Heretic
siveness and the multiplicity of churches create a difficulty; but to
be deterred by this when one's eternal destiny is said to be at stake
bespeaks a glaring lack of seriousness. Perhaps Tennyson had this in
mind when he wrote in In Memoriam
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
I should rather not speak of "more faith" or 'less." There are dif-
ferent kinds of faith, and nothing is further from my mind than
appropriating the word "faith" only for what is good. Neither would
I redefine heresy, as Milton did in his Areopagttica: "A man may be
a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his
pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other
reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds be-
comes his heresy." Of the man accused by Milton I approve as little
as he did, but I should not call him a heretic. Rather, his faith is
that of most of the orthodox. Calvin, for example, said expressly in
his Institutes of the Christian Religion (III 2.11) that "the knowledge
of faith consists more in certainty than in comprehension." Still, such
blind faith is not the only land of faith there is.
Some writers reserve the word "faith" for what they dislike.
Nietzsche said in The Antichrist: "'Faith' means not wanting to
know what is true" (635).* That fits much religious faith as well as
some people's faith in their wives, husbands, or political parties.
Sartre, too, has suggested that faith involves bad faith: "To believe
is to know that one [merely] believes, and to know that one [merely]
believes is no longer [really] to believe" (69). My parenthetical addi-
tions are meant to bring out what, I believe, he means. I know that
I merely believe that this is what he means; I am not absolutely cer-
tain that my interpretation is correct; but I really believe that it
is right. Thus Sartre's clever formulation, like so many clever
things he says, applies to certain cases only, no less than Nietzsche's
epigram, and not to all faith.
* Numbers in parentheses refer to pages; the editions cited are listed in
the Bibliography at the end of this volume.
Prologue 17
Faith means intense, usually confident, belief that is not based on
evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable per-
son.** Many people assume that an intense belief must be held with
a closed mind that it necessarily involves no longer "wanting to
know what is true" and that any willingness to look with an open
mind at further evidence or at objections shows that one's faith is
lacking in intensity and therefore not worthy of the name. Thus
many a believer plays into the hands of critics like Milton and
Nietzsche.
The use of "faith" in the title of this book depends on the assump-
tion that a man who cares intensely may have sufficient interest to
concern himself with issues, facts, and arguments that have a vital
bearing on what he believes. In sum, there are at least two types of
faith, though possibly many more: the faith of the true believer and
the faith of a heretic.
Why should one present the faith of a heretic in a book? This is
not one of those things which "one" either should or should not do;
it involves a deeply personal decision. It is fashionable to apply to
experts, to ask for proofs, and to suppose that a crucial choice is
either right or not, like an angle. But one cannot prove that one
ought to have written a certain book, painted this picture, or written
that piece of music. In some cases, it would make more sense to say:
I had to.
Such constraint does not attenuate responsibility. On the contrary,
the decision cannot be charged to a general rule or to anything out-
side oneself. Neither is it arbitrary. To be quite candid, one has to
say: this is why I did it, and my reasons seem good to me; if you
have any doubts, consider what you would have done in my situa-
** This conception of faith is defended in detail in my Critique of Religion
and Philosophy, 36: "Knowledge, belief, and faith." Citing one's previous
work like this is admittedly an evil but a lesser one. Lengthy repetitions
would be worse; and if one refrains from both one seems utterly arbitrary,
as if one considered argument beneath one's dignity.
18 The Faith of a Heretic
tion. Perhaps that wifl lead you to reconsider your own life and
decisions.
I was brought up a Lutheran. When I found that I could not
believe in the Trinity, and especially not that Jesus was God, I
decided to become a Jew. I was only eleven, and my parents felt
that I was too young to make such a far-reaching choice. I persisted,
and the matter was discussed for months. During that time, Hitler
came to power; and now I was told that in view of the persecution
my decision might entail I should certainly wait until I was older. I
insisted that one could not change one's mind for a reason like that.
I did not realize until a little later that all of my grandparents had
been Jewish; and none of us knew that this, and not one's own reli-
gion, would determine the Nazis' classification.
Later I learned that my grandmother, Julie Kaufmann, had urged
her sons to become Christians after her father's death. She did not
believe in Judaism and persuaded herself that Christianity was the
natural continuation of the Jewish religion and, in Heine's words,
the entrance ticket to European civilization. She passionately
wanted her children to be respectable, even at the price of con-
formity. But she herself remained unconverted and was a heretic's
heretic who loved to ignore, lampoon, or defy convention. I loved
her dearly. My father's father had died long before I was born.
My mother's father, Arnold Seligsohn, would have liked to be-
come a professor of history. In those days, however, no Jew could
become a German professor unless he submitted to baptism, as
many did. He would not consider such a step, became a lawyer, and
eventually an outstanding authority on patent law. After my conver-
sion, we went to the synagogue together for many years, sitting and
standing next to each other. In German "liberal" synagogues, men
and women were separated, and my mother sat in a different section
Friday nights and in the balcony on holidays. When I was small, she
had very rarely attended services. As I learned more about Judaism,
I became more and more orthodox; first my brother and then my
father became Jewish, too; and eventually my brother and I often
went to orthodox services.
There are heretics from resentment and iconoclasts who attack
Prologue 19
from outside what they never loved. There are also heretics from
love who feel grateful to many with whom in the end they cannot
agree. Need I add how beautiful Christmas Eve in our house used
to be before we gave up celebrating it? The ceilings were high, the
tree enormous, the candles real, the occasion full of warmth and
love. We even had an Advent wreath suspended from a chandelier
and lit one candle on the first Advent Sunday, two on the second,
three on the third, and four on the Sunday before Christmas. Later,
when we celebrated Hanukkah, the sumptuous Christmas tables be-
came a matter of the past, but there were presents each of the eight
nights and, infinitely more important, our religious intensity increased
with every year.
The editors of a popular magazine once asked me to introduce an
article autobiographically. I related my conversion as briefly as pos-
sible; and it was said: he discusses the world's great religions after
having tried two himself. Or: tried out. Why not: tried on?
Whether I ever knew Judaism or Christianity, or both, from the
inside might possibly be relevant to this book; but if I merely said I
did, you might still doubt my word or think that I deceived myself.
To prove my point, I should have to cite what I wrote as a boy:
letters, poems, prayers. To show something important in this way
about religion, heresy, or how a human being develops would be
worth-while. But that could not be done in passing. It would take a
whole book an autobiography. I have no wish to write that. I only
want to give some idea at the outset in what spirit The Faith of a
Heretic was written.
Ideally, that should not be necessary. The book should speak for
itself. And to say that it was not written in a captious spirit would
be futile. But we are all in danger of forgetting that writers with
whom we disagree are human beings like ourselves and not merely
authors. A writer who is sharply critical of some positions runs the
risk of being more widely applauded or resented than understood.
This book was not written to comfort those who might find my
views congenial, nor to shock and offend those whose ideas I ques-
tion. The ideal reader would engage in a common quest with me;
he would be willing to reconsider his views and some of his basic
20 The Faith of a Heretic
decisions in the course of this quest. To that end it might help if we
had some common ground in the beginning not a common plat-
form but some recognition of our common humanity. It might seem
that any reader would take that for granted; but when a writer
touches qn questions of faith, most readers would rather erect a
protective barrier by labeling him as if he were the incarnation of a
position.
This book is part of a quest that began before I found fault with
many notions that are considered in these pages; and I criticize
them not because they do not agree with my current results, but
because I encountered them in the course of my quest and found
them wanting. It is for that reason that I am asking the reader to
go back briefly, for a few Prologue pages to a time when I did
not yet hold my present views. None of the biographical events
matters for its own sake. The point is to show how the quest for
honesty might begin how it did begin in one man's life. Many
a reader must have had similar experiences, similar qualms. The
whole point here is to recall these and to establish some common
ground of perplexity and concern.
I was seventeen when I entered Williams College in February
1939. 1 had just arrived in the United States, and my parefets were
still in Germany. My father had been released from a concentration
camp after some hideous weeks, on condition that he leave the
country; but he had no visa yet. In March Hitler took Czecho-
slovakia, and war seemed imminent. A month later, my parents
reached London, where they were to spend the war years; but many
others I loved were still in Germany, threatened with extermination.
That summer I read Stone's Lust for Life, a novel based on Van
Gogh's life. He decided to live with the miners, to descend into
the pits with them and share their miseries. Then he met Zola, who
told him that all this was senseless and no help whatever to the
miners. Zola had written a novel, Germinal, depicting their wretch-
edness, though he did not jhare it; and this book had helped them
far more than Van Gogh's decision to suffer as they did. There had
been strikes, the public conscience had been sensitized, and things
were being done. I read Germinal. It might be all right to continue
Prologue 21
college if that would enable me to do some service that I could not
do without an education.
This does not explain the choice of philosophy. But who could
give a compelling reason for that? I have no regrets about it. If
there had been a religion major, I should probably have chosen that;
and I took courses in comparative religion, philosophy of religion,
and psychology of religion. I had no clear notion how philosophy
might enable me to contribute anything, but I loved it. Unexpect-
edly, I won a scholarship to do graduate work in philosophy. It was
the spring of 1941. Hitler had not yet attacked Russia, and the
United States had not yet entered the war. Should I try to volun-
teer or accept the scholarship? My teachers thought the choice was
obvious. I did not, but I went to Harvard, determined to finish as
quickly as possible. By the fall of 1942, 1 had almost all the require-
ments out of the way, but my attempt to finish my thesis in three
months failed.
Returning from military service in Germany, in 1946, I felt little
desire to go back to the classroom. But in September I returned to
Harvard, and in April 1947 1 submitted a dissertation on "Nietzsche's
Theory of Values." It was a resented requirement, but I could not
help pouring my heart into it. By the end of the month, I was ap-
pointed an instructor at Princeton. Soon I rewrote my thesis entirely
and added a great deal more to make a book of it. Before long,
friendly scholars urged me to follow it up with a similar book on
Hegel.
Had I survived to write monographs on Nietzsche first, then on
Hegel, and perhaps eventually on Kant? A scholar's life is not neces-
sarily dull. One can train oneself to find excitement in questions of
exegesis. In fact, it is far easier to learn to love a life like that than
to enjoy the kind of work most men do. Enjoyment was not the is-
sue; conscience was. There is a haunting passage in William James,
in quite a different context, that comes closer to the point, provided
only it is read as a challenge not to others but to oneself:
"If the generations of mankind suffered and laid down their lives;
if prophets confessed and martyrs sang in the fire ... for no other
end than that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity
22 The Faith of a Heretic
should succeed, and protract . . . their contented and inoffensive
lives, why, at such a rate . . . better ring down the curtain before
the last act of the play, so that a business that began so importantly
may be saved from so singularly flat a winding up."
I do not mean to disparage scholarship or painstaking work of a
highly technical nature. I should like to think that I myself have
made some contributions of that sort, and I hope to make more.
Certainly I respect some men who write monographs on other
philosophers; but for me right now this would not do. This is a per-
sonal matter, and that is the reason for giving a personal account of it.
I was confronted not with a drab life but with the question
whether I had become a traitor. Writing on Hegel and translating
Nietzsche and Goethe did not help unless it helped to make me
a better writer and added to my armory. In 1958 I finally published
a book of a different kind, Critique of Religion and Philosophy, and
a year later another volume, on which I had been working during
the same years, From Shakespeare to Existentialism. Critical dis-
cussion of the work of others became a point of departure for at-
tempts to develop my own views. Criticism predominated, but
scholarship had become engaged.
Soon after my Critique appeared, I was asked to write an article
for a projected series on religion. There were to be a Protestant, a
Catholic, a Jew and I was to represent a critical, rationalist point
of view. It was a ticklish assignment, and the magazine was not a
scholarly journal, but one could hardly say: congratulations, gentle-
men, on your decision to present this point of view along with more
popular attitudes, but if you don't mind, ask someone else. I stipu-
lated that I must be under no pressure to pull my punches, and that
the editors must not rewrite my essay. They did not change a word,
but thanked me for The Faith of an Agnostic." I preferred "The
Faith of an Infidel." That would not do: it would look as if, along
with two Christians and a Jew, a Muslim had been included. The
editors proposed "The Faith of a Pagan." I did not think I was a
pagan and, after same further thought, hit on "The Faith of a
Heretic."
This book is no mere expansion of that article. It is an altogether
Prologue 23
new book and deals at length with many questions not even touched
in the article. But the title had struck a sensitive nerve. I had not
done justice to it. Could one develop the faith of a heretic in less
than seven pages in a popular magazine? Perhaps not even in a
book, but it is worth a try.
There is another, less personal way of approaching this book. "I
divide men," said Tolstoy, "into two lots. They are freethinkers, or
they are not-freethinkers. I am not speaking of ... the agnostic
English Freethinkers, but I am using the word in its simplest mean-
ing. Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds with-
out prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash
with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is
not common, but it is essential for right thinking; where it is absent,
discussion is apt to become worse than useless. A man may be a
Catholic, a Frenchman, or a capitalist, and yet be freethinker; but
if he put his Catholicism, his patriotism, or his interest, above his
reason, and will not give the latter free play where those subjects
are touched, he is not a freethinker. His mind is in bondage" (xvi).
It is always tempting to divide men into two lots: Greeks and
barbarians, Muslims and infidels, those who believe in God and
those who don't. But who does not fear to understand things that
threaten his beliefs? Of course, one is not consciously afraid; but
everybody who is honest with himself finds that often he does not
try very hard to understand what clashes with his deep convictions.
It is therefore popular to say something like this: we are all slaves
of prejudice; this bondage is part of the human condition. Every
man has his own commitment, and none of these is capable of
rational proof. Man is irrational; there are no freethinkers only
shallow people who think they are rational.
Such rhetoric sounds profound and fits the fashions of the day. It
carries overtones of existentialism and psychoanalysis, original sin
and democracy: we are all equal, depraved, irrational, and commit-
24 The Faith of a Heretic
ted, whether we know it or not Modesty is so much easier than
honesty because it is compatible with sloth.
None of us can say that his thinking is entirely free; therefore, it
would be better not to distinguish freethinkers and not-freethinkers.
But all of us sometimes make some efforts to break the bondage of
the mind; only some are more obstinate than others. Too many give
up too soon. Why not encourage such efforts? And what better way
is there than publicly presenting a fairly obstinate attempt not a
shining example of freethinking, but the faith of a heretic?
Listing articles of faith, of course, would not do. Articles of faith
are meant for groups of people: they are begotten by the need for
ritual and mothered by the need for compromise. They reduce the
believer to exegesis unless he denies one of the articles and be-
comes a heretic. A heretic wants no articles of faith. The point of
this book is not to amuse the reader by making an exhibition of my
faith, but to make him feel throughout that sua res agitur, that his
case is at stake.
For the same reason it would not do to present a system. As soon
as it is granted that the premises are not really certain, not based on
evidence sufficient to compel assent from every reasonable person,
and hence merely a matter of faith, it becomes simple for the reader
to avoid concern. Worse, it would give the impression that the
author's mind is closed on fundamentals, and that he proposes to
solve life's problems by seeing what follows from his presupposi-
tions. Nothing could be further from the truth.
What I want to communicate is not a faith that happens to be
heresy today, although tomorrow it might be acclaimed as orthodox.
I naturally hope that some of my suggestions may be accepted
widely in time, but I should not want to win agreement without
capturing in prose the struggle against bondage.
The starting point is not a set of premises that I refuse to question.
This book is based not on the all-too-widespread will to believe, but
on the will to be honest. This is not a presupposition like any other;
for, in Tolstoy's words, "where it is absent, discussion is apt to be-
come worse than useless." Indeed, there is no need to say "apt to
Prologue 25
become"; where the will to be honest is lacking, discussion is
wholly pointless.
This is of considerable importance. Sooner or later, when some
cherished belief or position begins to appear endangered, many
people ask: why is honesty so important? They suddenly talk as if
somebody else were committed to honesty much as they themselves
are committed to something else. But the will to honesty is no man's
prerogative. It is not a starting point that you can repudiate at will.
Every book and every discussion presuppose the will to be honest.
The man who repudiates honesty repudiates discussion. There is no
point in dialogue with a man who does not acknowledge this
standard.
In effect, this is generally recognized. Nobody says that he is not
at all committed to honesty. Nobody entirely lacks the will to be
honest; but most people settle for rather a small share of it. They
favor honesty within limits, though they do not explicate these
limits or reflect on them. This question, whether we should set limits
to honesty and, if so, what limits, deserves discussion. And this
theme, like the other motifs sounded in this Prologue, except the
autobiographical note, will be developed in the following chapters.
One more motif should be introduced here to avoid misunder-
standing, though it, too, requires further exploration later on. It is
widely held that honesty requires scrupulousness and an effort to
be rational so far so good and that it follows that one must try
to be scientific and impersonal. This popular inference deserves a
name: the pedantic fallacy.
The ostentatious use of jargon is mistaken for objectivity; preten-
sion is confounded with precision, and elaborate complexity with
carefulness. A lack of ardor passes for a token that one is not
arbitrary. Yet neither a lack of passion nor the anxious dissimulation
of every personal element is either required or sufficient for intel-
lectual honesty.
26 The Faith of a Heretic
An attempt to do justice to our own experience, to the feelings
and the judgments tutored by our reading and reflection and dis-
cussions for that matter, even by despair and sleepless nights
can be scrupulous; it need not be. But it is not pedantry that makes
the difference. Rather, the single most important factor is a sus-
tained willingness to consider informed objections.
Some philosophic works seem closer to literature than to science.
This has been noted by a few men who depreciate logic and favor
a blend of intuition and associative thinking. They, too, are guilty
of the pedantic fallacy: they also assume a close connection between
pedantry and responsible thinking, but renounce both.
A philosopher can fight men's fear "to understand things that
clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs." He can try to
make men more sensitive to other points of view, and to show how
an outlook that is widely slandered and misunderstood looks and
feels from inside To that extent, his efforts may resemble literature.
What distinguishes philosophy is the sustained attempt to explore
ramifications, objections, and alternatives.
A novelist or dramatist may occasionally examine an argument,
too; he does not have to, and if he does a lot of this, the result is
usually bad literature. For a philosopher, on the other hand, an
opinion should never be more than a starting point. But the study
and evaluation of ramifications and objections and alternatives need
not be tedious, trivial, or pedantic.
To probe the weaknesses of many popular assumptions, to de-
velop alternatives, and to make one's fellow men more thoughtful is
a contribution worth attempting. Obviously, this does not preclude
specific contributions to the discussion of such topics as morality,
commitment, or theology.
The word "faith" may suggest something diametrically opposed
to the spirit of philosophy. The world abounds in strong faiths that
prize conformity above honesty, and we are often told that we can
never hope to meet such faiths successfully unless we develop a
comparable faith on which all of us can enthusiastically occur. We
must stop, more and more men say, being so critical. Dissenters
should at least have the grace to keep quiet. Criticism is negative,
Prologue 27
and we need positive thinking; heresy creates division, and we need
uniformity; honesty is fine, of course, but within limits rather
drastic limits.
My faith is not that land of faith. Far from viewing philosophy
or heresy with suspicion, I believe that the enemies of critical rea-
son are, whether consciously or not, foes of humanity.
For centuries heretics have been persecuted by men of strong
faiths who hated non-conformity and heresy and criticism while
making obeisances to honesty within limits. In our time, millions
have been murdered in cold blood by the foes of non-conformity
and heresy and criticism, who paid lip service to honesty within
limits.
I have less excuse than many others for ignoring all this. If even I
do not speak up, who will? And if not now, when?
THE QUEST
FOR HONESTY
Philosophy is commonly considered a chaos of abstruse ideas.
Even authors of histories of philosophy and professors who teach
the subject outline the gradual accumulation of fantastic systems.
Another, very different, perspective seems much more illuminating:
one may view the history of philosophy as a history of heresy.
Almost invariably, histories of philosophy begin with the so-called
pre-Socratics Greeks of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., whose
writings are lost except for occasional quotations that are found in
later writers. Thales, who is said to have predicted an eclipse that
occurred in 585 B.C., is generally called the first philosopher. From
him an unbroken line of thinkers leads to Socrates, Plato, and
Aristotle. What these men have in common, and what distinguishes
them from the sages of the Upanishads in India, some of whom lived
a century or more before the time of Thales, is a truly stunning lack
of reverence for the past. The pre-Socratics shared the Indian sages'
and the Hebrew prophets' scorn for the opinions of the common
people of their day; but they did not counter these opinions by re-
ferring to the scriptures or traditions of the past. Far from reading
their own views into, or out of, the inspired poetry of Homer,
29
30 The Faith of a Heretic
Hesiod, or some other ancient writer, they included the teachings
of these poets in their cutting strictures.
"Homer and Hesiod ascribed to the gods whatever is infamy and
reproach among men: theft and adultery and deceiving each other."
"Mortals suppose that the gods are born and have clothes and voices
and shapes like their own." "But if oxen, horses, and lions had hands
or could paint with their hands and fashion works as men do, the
horses would paint horselike images of gods, and the oxen oxlike
ones, and each would fashion bodies like their own." The Ethi-
opians consider the gods flat-nosed and black; the Thracians, blue-
eyed and red-haired." "Not from the beginning have the gods re-
vealed all things to mortals, but by long seeking men find what
is better."
These are some quotations from the writings of Xenophanes.
Heraclitus, a generation later, was no less outspoken: "The con-
secrations of the mysteries, as practiced among men, are unholy."
"Being a polymath does not teach understanding: else Hesiod would
have had it and Pythagoras; also Xenophanes and Hekataeos."
"Homer deserves to be thrown out of the contests and whipped;
and Archilochus, too." "The most popular teacher is Hesiod. Of him
people think he knew most he that did not even know day and
night: they are one." "Corpses should be thrown away more than
dung." "To God everything is beautiful and good and just; but men
have posited this as unjust and this as just." "Sane thinking is the
greatest perfection, and wisdom consists in saying the truth. . . ."
"All men are granted what is needed for knowing oneself and sane
thinking."
Clearly, these men were heretics. They not only opposed the
common sense of their time and some of the most revered names of
the past but they did not presume to speak in the name of the Lord
or to interpret correctly a previously misunderstood tradition. They
pitted their own thinking against the religion and the poetry they
knew. And by breaking with the exegetic mode of thought and
every other form of appeal to authority, they initiated philosophy.
One of the pre-Socratics, Anaxagoras, came to Athens. His prede-
cessors had lived in Asia Minor and in southern Italy, and Emped-
The Quest far Honesty 31
ocles, a contemporary philosopher, lived in Sicily. Anaxagoras
arrived in Athens when the city was at the peak of her power,
culturally no less than politically, during the so-called Periclean
Age. Pericles became his friend; but soon Anaxagoras was tried for
heresy and had to leave the city. For he taught that the sun and
moon were made of earth and stone instead of being gods.
A generation later, Socrates, the first great philosopher to have
been born in Athens, was tried also in Athens for impiety and
corrupting the youth, and was put to death in 399 B.C. Moderns
often think of Aristotle as a great conservative, but toward the end
of his life he fled from Athens to avoid a similar trial, and himself
said that he left "lest the Athenians should sin twice against philoso-
phy."
Medieval philosophy was of a different mold, though not quite
so homogeneous and conservative as many moderns think. Even
St. Thomas Aquinas ventured a few propositions which the Bishop
of Paris and the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was a Dominican
like Aquinas himself, censured in 1277; but when Thomas was
sainted, the censures were withdrawn as far as they affected him.
Eckhart, the great German mystic, taught a good deal that the
church found unacceptable and, after formal inquiry, condemned
as heresy. But, in general, the history of medieval philosophy was
not a history of heresy. Indeed, medieval philosophy was so different
from both Greek and modern philosophy that it is somewhat mis-
leading to call it by the same name. And if philosophy were defined
as a search for truth that involves following arguments and evi-
dence, without recourse to authority, wherever they may lead, fre-
quently arriving at unforeseen conclusions, then medieval philos-
ophy would not deserve the name at all. But the definition of
philosophy that has just been suggested is partial at best.
In all ages, philosophy contains two different tendencies: one is
heretical, iconoclastic, critical; the other is apologetic and conserva-
tive. The first has been illustrated from Xenophanes and Heraclitus;
the second has been summed up beautifully by a nineteenth-century
British philosopher, F. H. Bradley, when he said that "metaphysics
is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct." It is
32 The Faith of a Heretic
not clear why he said "metaphysics": ethics, aesthetics, and philos-
ophy of religion, theory of knowledge and political philosophy
might well be described in the same words. The tendency to ration-
alize preconceived conclusions has been prominent in all fields of
philosophy, and it is astounding how often the reasons really have
been bad.
There is no reason to suppose that Xenophanes and Heraclitus
were completely free of this addiction; and in the writings of the
first philosopher most of whose works have survived intact, the
dialogues of Plato, both tendencies are certainly prominent. If one
might call him a heretic for all that, it would be because he does not
appeal to authority and relies on his own thinking instead.
In keeping with this last point, the teachings of the Buddha and
his contemporary, Vaddhamana the Jina, who differed from the
sages of the Upanishads by not recognizing the authority of the
ancient Vedas and by refusing to present their doctrines as inter-
pretations of the ancient texts, are known in India as "great here-
sies." That neither of these founders of two great religions became
the fountainhead of a philosophy in the Western, or Greek, sense is
due to the fact that their own teachings were accepted as authorita-
tive by their followers, as those of the pre-Socratics were not.
In medieval philosophy, apologetics triumphed over criticism. In
modern philosophy, critical thinking re-emerges. Both tendencies
are prominent in the great modern thinkers. But as we examine
their progression we discover that their rationalizations have prov-
ed less enduring than their criticism. And instead of seeing the
history of philosophy as an accumulation of fantastic systems, one
may view it as the gradual analysis of, and liberation from, one
illusion after another, a stripping away of fantasies, a slow destruc-
tion of once hallowed truths that are found to be errors.
Descartes is generally singled out as the first modern philosopher
not because he, like his medieval predecessors, tried to prove that
God exists and that the human soul is immortal, but because he re-
solved to doubt everything. He made a fresh start and decided to
rely solely on his reason, instead of citing Scripture to his purpose or,
as Aquinas had done also, Aristotle. When Francis Bacon rather
The Quest for Honesty 33
than Descartes is called the first modern philosopher the two were
contemporaries, and nothing important is at stake the point is
substantially the same: he, too, refused allegiance to ancient authori-
ties and tried to teach men to seek truth by relying on their reason
and on observation.
Spinoza was quite literally a heretic and expelled by the syna-
gogue of Amsterdam. He expressly denied the authority of Scripture
in matters of truth; he rejected the God of Judaism and Christianity,
though he used the term "God" for what he believed in; and he
repudiated the belief that the world is governed by a purpose.
Berkeley is remembered as a great philosopher not because he was
a bishop and believed in God but because he argued most ingeni-
ously that the belief in matter in untenable and that there is no
material substance. Hume, another generation later, criticized the
notion of spiritual substance, too, and questioned many other com-
monplaces, including the axiom that every event has a cause.
Kant, yet a little later, smashed the foundations not only of so-
called rational cosmology and rational psychology but also of natural
theology. He showed that all proofs of God's existence are fallacious.
(The neo-Thomists do not accept his demonstration and consider
Descartes, and the development he initiated, a disaster. ) That Kant
later claimed that God's existence and the immortality of the soul
were postulates of the practical reason is not considered one of his
great contributions to philosophy but, at least by most philosophers,
a bit of backsliding. In the next generation, Fichte lost his professor-
ship at Jena on a charge of atheism, though he later became the first
Rektor of the newly founded university of Berlin.
During the Victorian Era, John Stuart Mill declared, in his
Examination of Sir William Hamilton: "Whatever power such a
being may have over me, there is one thing which he shall not do:
he shall not compel me to worship him. I will call no being good,
who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-
creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so
calling him, to hell I will go." Later, in his posthumously published
Three Essays on Religion, Mill affirmed his belief in a benevolent
god, but denied his omnipotence. A generation later, William James
34 The Faith of a Heretic
proclaimed his faith in "a finite god" in A Pluralistic Universe.
Meanwhile, Nietzsche had carried heresy to new heights. During
World War II, Bertrand Russell was declared by an American court
to be unfit to teach at the City College of New York because of his
heretical views. A little later, he became a member of the House
of Lords in England, though a British court had sent him to prison
during World War I; and yet a little later he received the Nobel
Prize for literature.
All these men also rationalized many preconceived opinions, but
generally it was the critical part of their work that proved to have
lasting importance. Philosophers have rarely given good reasons for
what was believed previously. Much more often, their denials, their
heresies, their exposures of long unquestioned doctrines continue
to be taught
6
It may be objected that if this is true it is terrible; that if so mijch
philosophy is heresy it ought not to be taught. But what is the point
of a liberal education?
If the point were simply to give information, we should not re-
quire universities. There would be no need for faculties and class-
rooms. Lectures for the whole United States, if not for the English-
speaking world, could be mimeographed once and for all and sold
for a minute fraction of the price of a college education. To provide
a touch of drama, some lectures could be tape-recorded no doubt,
often more effectively by actors rather than the scholars who pre-
pared them. Occasionally, a good student could recite and record a
lecture much more clearly and quickly than a professor who might
have a strong accent, a speech defect, or simply be old or tired. And
the exceptional blend of ham and egghead might appear on tele-
vision. No physical plant would be needed for the humanities and
social sciences. Even the devices mentioned so far might well be
dispensable: libraries might prove sufficient if they featured reading
The Quest for Honesty 35
In sum: if universities and colleges were meant primarily to fur-
nish information, they would be dated by the printing press and
some more recent technical advances. Professors and students who,
often at considerable inconvenience to themselves and to each other,
come together in the classroom would be wasting time. Surely, most
students and professors do waste an enormous quantity of time and
effort; but at his best a teacher transmits something more than
information: the student discovers the techniques and joys of critical
dunking.
To this end, narrow specialization must be discouraged, and
students have to be prevented from attaching themselves closely
to a single teacher, in the manner still traditional at German univer-
sities, in spite of Mephisto's forthright mockery in Goethe's Faust:
Here, too, it would be best you heard
One only and staked all upon your master's word.
Yes, stick to words at any rate;
There never was a surer gate
Into the temple, Certainty.
It would, of course, be silly for a teacher to lean over backward
to make sure that no information leaks out to his students. But he
might do well to ask himself what could be got as well, if not much
better, by consulting books, and what is better learned through
personal encounter with a teacher.
The classroom situation lends itself much better than most books
to stimulating and maintaining real interest in a variety of different
views. Most people tend to restrict their reading to congenial views
and like to be confirmed in what they believe anyway. Exposure to
different teachers, encountered in the flesh, and to other students,
preferably from different backgrounds, can compel the student to
consider many different views, taking them seriously. This should
wean him from bigotry and blind naivetA He should also learn
that no man has authority, except provisionally: all opinions are
36 The Fotth of a Heretic
subject to critical examination, though some may prevail even after
acid tests.
Is such pervasive mistrust of authorities arrogant? On the con-
trary: through die painful discovery that even very great men have
been guilty of egregious errors, we learn^that the chances are that
we ourselves, even when very confident that we are right, may over-
estimate our case. Constant contact with minds greater than our
own is humbling; constant reminders of their shortcomings, doubly
so. Moreover, it is difficult to recognize one's own mistakes. They
are much more easily recognized when one encounters them in
someone else's prose. Dissatisfied with oneself, one becomes a seeker.
Difficulty becomes a challenge and delight; critical thinking, a way
of life.
In an education so conceived, philosophy should play a central
role. The fragmentary epigrams of Heraclitus and Xenophanes may
sound arrogant, and it is not likely that either of them excelled in
humility. But exposure to both of them and to other thinkers be-
sides may help to develop qualities which these men lacked. In the
generation after these two men, the Greek philosophers began to
back up their views with sustained attempts at argument; and soon
apodictic criticism, in itself a wholesome departure from obsequious
respect for reputations and traditions, gave way to dialogue and the
attempt to progress together.
The social importance of the kind of education here described
should not be underestimated. The aim of a liberal education is not
to turn out ideal dinner guests who can talk with assurance about
practically everything, but people who will not be taken in by men
who speak about all things with an air of finality. The goal is not to
train future authorities, but men who are not cowed by those who
claim to be authorities. The alternative to gullibility, is not lack of
respect for competence but the ability to find out who is competent
and who is not
Attitudes toward authority carry over into politics, and a people
who suspect political authoritarianism and who cherish their own
freedom can ill afford to tolerate authoritarianism in their education.
Nor is the only alternative to indiscriminate docility a no less un-
The Quest for Honesty 37
discriminating relativism. A liberal education should teach men to
turn a variety of information and opinion to advantage instead of
either picking one view arbitrarily or choosing resignation in the
face of an embarrassment of riches.
Ever since the days of ancient Athens, there have been a multi-
tude of men who have looked askance upon philosophy because it
is not pious, positive, and patriotic. Socrates and Plato compared
the philosopher to a physician. One might add that one of the func-
tions of philosophy is to inoculate men against bigotry, inhumanity,
and propaganda by teaching them to think carefully, conscientious-
ly, and critically.
Commonly, people think of philosophy as a quest, however ill
advised, for truth. John Dewey called it the quest for certainty. But
it is more illuminating to say that, at its best, philosophy is the quest
for honesty.
What is honesty?
Some men readily persuade themselves that they have said what
in fact they did not say, or that they never made a statement that
in fact they made, or that you said something you never said. Such
lack of scruple is extremely widespread and easy to cultivate. Many
children and politicians are masters of the art of telling falsehoods
with sincerity.
There are cases when it is doubtful whether we should call a
man honest. This epithet, like most interesting words, does not
have sharp edges. It is possible to be mistaken yet honest. But when
we clearly ought to know better, when ordinary care would have led
us to discover that our belief was wrong, then we certainly did not
come up to any high standard of honesty.
There are degrees of honesty no less than of courage or humility.
As one speaks of greater courage and more humility, one might
well speak of greater, or more, honesty. There is a sense in which
it is an insult to question any man's honesty; there is another sense
38 The Faith of a Heretic
in which calling Lincoln "Honest Abe" is a supreme compliment.
The man who, charged with some falsehood, retorts imperiously,
"Are you calling me a liar?" shows gross insensitivity to elementary
distinctions. One who knowingly and maliciously tells a falsehood
is a liar. The man who knowingly tells a falsehood, motivated by
kindness, however ill advised, would not usually be called a liar. Nor
would a man who utters a falsehood unthinking, absent-mind-
edly. Certainly not a man who thinks he is telling the truth, though
he is in a position to know that it is not the truth: he is irresponsible
and shows little regard for honesty, but we should not call him a
liar. It is a vicious but common fallacy to suppose that all who are
not liars are honest.
The quest for honesty is not like a search for a jewel that may end
happily with the sudden attainment of what is wanted. It is rather
like the quest for excellence, a prolonged struggle.
One need not hesitate to say that Shakespeare was an excellent
poet, far more excellent than Joyce Kilmer, although it makes no
sense to say that he was perfectly, completely, or fully excellent.
Elijah was a courageous man, much more courageous than St. Peter,
although it makes no sense to say that he was perfectly, completely,
or fully courageous. And it makes sense to say that Lincoln was an
honest man, and that Joe McCarthy was not, without claiming that
anyone ought to be called perfectly, completely, or fully honest.
There are enormous differences of degree, and these merit emphasis.
Judged by extremely high standards, perhaps every historian is
lacking in objectivity. It does not follow that honesty is a chimera,
not worth striving for. There are staggering differences between
historians: some are thoroughly biased and lack any profound re-
spect for evidence, while others fight steadfastly against any bias
they may have. The difference in attitude is easily illustrated by
divergent reactions to criticism: some men are impervious to cri-
ticism while others welcome it.
Some speakers welcome criticism but are impervious to it; after
lectures, they ask for questions, but never answer any, offering ir-
relevant homilies instead. Those who welcome queries but are un-
The Quest far Honesty 39
able to understand them, or who ask for criticism but never get the
point of any objection, lack the kind of imagination that is an in-
dispensable ingredient of any high degree of honesty. The unusually
honest man is his own severest critic. He has the imagination to see
his own ideas from many different points of view.
Instead of asking whether you are honest or a liar, ask how you
might become more honest The answer: by raising your standards
and by cultivating the habits of honesty developing a keen intel-
lectual conscience. And what does that involve? Intellectual imagin-
ation, carefulness, conscientiousness, scrupulousnessmaking one's
beliefs and statements matters of conscience. The man who lacks
such habits may be honest but not very. He has low standards of
honesty.
It is useful to distinguish physical and moral courage. Old-fash-
ioned German education emphasized the latter insufficiently: one
was trained to risk one's life in battle, but not to buck authority,
pitting integrity against power. One might similarly distinguish
physical and moral honesty, though these terms do not matter: the
former concerns audible or visible statements only; the latter, a tri-
umph over self-deception. Again, there are people who possess the
physical variety but lack the moral: they make no false statements,
but they are not honest with themselves.
The man who lacks courage, even if "only" moral courage, is
afraid of getting hurt. His friends may prefer to call him prudent.
A man who does not want to know the truth and deceives himself
may also be called prudent by some, but he lacks honesty, even if
"only" moral honesty. He probably also lacks courage and is afraid
of being hurt. And the man who lacks moral courage is usually
deficient in honesty, subordinating his regard for truth to his interest
in popularity. Moral courage and moral honesty are twins, but they
are not inseparable, and the trained eye can tell them apart. One
may be wonderfully honest with oneself and know that one lacks the
moral courage to speak out boldly. And another man may have
moral courage but may yet be lax in matters of beliefs. Moral hon-
esty is even rarer than moral courage.
40 The Faith of a Heretic
8
There are few things about which people are less honest than
their attitude toward honesty. Everybody claims to favor it and to
consider it important, and an open accusation of dishonesty is a
heinous, actionable insult. Yet our public life is permeated by a
staggering tolerance for quite deliberate dishonesty.
In advertising, people put up with constant, willful, scientifically
studied misrepresentations, without objecting seriously to being
duped systematically. At most, sophisticated people joke about it.
In politics, an avowal of agnosticism would ruin a man's career,
at least in the United States, while a record of repeated and pre-
meditated falsehoods about facts, calumny about rival candidates,
and broken promises is not considered any bar to the highest offices
the people can bestow. Nor is it only during a political campaign
that candidates are, as it were, allowed to lie. After election, too,
both President and legislators are expected every now and then to
deny quite calmly, in cold blood, reports that shortly after are found
and acknowledged to be true. This, too, is considered a sort of fam-
ily joke. But when the Russians question the good faith of American
statesmen and assume that they are apt to be flagrantly dishonest,
most Americans refuse to credit that such doubts could be ingen-
uous. To be sure, the Western statesmen often mean precisely what
they say at points where Soviet statesmen question their sincerity;
but can the Russians tell when our statesmen do and do not tell
the truth?
Russian suspicion is, no doubt, increased by the awareness of the
Soviet statesmen that they themselves would not hesitate, and do
not hesitate, and have not hesitated in the past, to lie. Compared to
the manners of some other countries, even American advertising
and politics are relatively innocent. The cultivated virtuosity of
bland deceitfulness that flourishes in Cairo's bazaars and propaganda
broadcasts, and in its daily news reports as well, has no real parallel
in most Western countries. But even here the lack of standards in
The Quest for Honesty 41
the West is striking: the lies of the bazaars are shrugged off as a
laughing matter, and the mendaciousness of Cairo's radio and press
is widely ignored as unimportant. When the reports from Egypt dif-
fer from those issued by another government whose standard*,
though not lily white, are still as different from Cairo's as day is
from night, one supposes simply that the truth lies somewhere in-
between. One does not get excited about truthfulness; and even the
brazen dishonesty of dictators agitates exceedingly few people, un-
less animosity has first been aroused by other matters which are
considered more important. Honesty is not something one makes a
point of: a gentleman treats others as if they were honest, even
when he knows enough to realize that they are not.
Religion is as privileged a field as politics and advertising. It is
widely held to call for tact, not truthfulness. It is considered per-
fectly all right for men of the cloth to make a business of pretending
they believe what really they do not believe; to give the impression,
speaking from the pulpit, that they are convinced of things that,
talking to philosophers, they are quick to disown; and to feign com-
plete assurance about matters that, in private, trouble them and
cause them endless doubts. One does not even demand that a
preacher should at least be honest with himself and know precisely
what he does believe and what he does not, what he means and
what he does not mean, what he knows for certain and what he
considers probable or merely possible. One does not make such
strict demands on him or on oneself.
Advertisers, politicians, and men of the cloth have no monopoly
on laxity regarding honesty; they are merely favored groups. Oc-
casionally, a philosopher and a historian are granted the same spe-
cial privileges. Extreme cases come to our notice but are really
mere symptoms of our laxity with ourselves.
Perhaps the single best example of the common lack of high
standards in questions of honesty is our tendency to think in labels.
Terms like existentialism, pragmatism, and empiricism, liberalism
and conservatism are, more often than not, so many excuses for not
considering individual ideas on their merits and for not exposing
oneself to the bite of thought For less educated people, words like
42 The Faith of a Heretic
Jew and Catholic, Democrat, Republican, and Communist do much
the same job. These labels have some uses that are perfectly legiti-
mate, but frequently they function as an aid to thoughtlessness and
permit people to appear to think when they are merely talking.
The practice of seizing on a label instead of considering a
man's ideas is common, if often unconscious. The labels, theist, athe-
ist, and agnostic, provide an especially important example. One
supposes that the theist believes God exists, while the atheist denies
that God exists, and the agnostic, in the absence of sufficient evi-
dence, suspends judgment. It is further supposed that theists agree
about the facts of the matter. One rarely stops to think about what
these facts are supposed to be, except, of course, to say that theists
think that God exists. But what does this assertion mean?
To many millions it means that there is someone high up in the
sky who looks like an old man with a long beard; but millions of
other theists are quite sure that this is not a fact at all but a crude
superstition, though a harmless one. They believe that God has no
body at all and is a spirit. Asked whether they believe in spirits,
most of them would probably say: No, but God is an exception.
Some people have a pretty clear conception of God, but all such
clear conceptions, provided only they amount to more than the mere
substitution of an equally vague synonym for God, are invariably
rejected by the vast majority of other theists. And millions of
theists have no clear idea whatsoever about what it means to say
that God exists, but feel very sure that it is impious and terrible to
say that he does not exist.
Late in 1960, the U. S. Supreme Court agreed to rule on the con-
stitutionality of a requirement in Maryland that officeholders profess
belief in God. The Maryland Court of Appeals had ruled against a
professed atheist who wanted to be commissioned as a notary pub-
lic, for, the court had said, a person who does not believe in God is
The Quest for Honesty 43
"incompetent to hold office, to give testimony, or serve as a juror."*
In 1958, the Gallup Poll asked a sample of the American electorate:
"If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for Pres-
ident, and he happened to be a Catholic [or a Jew, Negro, atheist,
or woman], would you vote for him [or her]?" Result: 25% said that
they would vote against a Catholic; 28% against a Jew; 43%
against a woman; 53% against a Negro; and 75% against an
atheist.**
This horror of atheism is related to the notion that morality de-
pends on religion. This idea will be considered later (Chapters
VIII-X). What concerns us here is the contrast of "theism" and
"atheism." On examination, it turns out that what theists agree on
is a formulation, not a state of affairs; and this formulation, to cite
the admirably candid words of St Paul about himself, means "all
things to all men."
Seeing how some philosophers and theologians have employed
the word "God," it is evident that no man, believe he ever so little,
would be unable to say in all sincerity that he believes that God
exists: all he would require would be the addition, if he should be
pressed, which is exceedingly unlikely, that he has his own concep-
tion of God. He need not fear that anybody would be at all likely
to press him further; but if anybody did, the public would side with
the man who refused to discuss such a personal matter.
The doubter, in other words, need not fear public censure if only
he is agreeable to using the word "God" for something that he does
believe; and he need not even specify what that might be. What
matters is agreement to such formulas as "God exists" or "I believe
in God." But the man who refuses to employ such formulations, or
who, worse, insists on saying that he does not believe God exists,
* U. S. News and World Report, November 21, 1960, p. 16. Bishop James
A. Pike says in "The Right to be an Atheist" (Coronet, April 1961): 'In
Maryland, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Arkansas, in order to hold public
office a man must believe in the being of God. In many places, testimony of
a witness in court may be impeached if it can be shown that he is an atheist."
** S. M. Lipset, "Some Statistics on Bigotry in Voting," Commentary,
October 1960.
44 The Faith of a Heretic
appalls his fellow citizens although he may merely reject beliefs that
they, too, regard as superstitions. To be scrupulously honest in such
matters, to go out of one's way to avoid misunderstanding, and to
refuse to use ancient terms in novel and surprising ways is widely
held to be a dreadful thing.
To be an agnostic is considered more nearly respectable, or at
least not quite so bad. But agnosticism is really a confused position.
The agnostic is supposed to be the man who finds that there is not
sufficient evidence to be sure either that God does or that God does
not exist; so he suspends judgment. But for what is there not suf-
ficient evidence? About what precisely does he suspend judgment?
Like most people, he, too, overlooks the staggering ambiguity of
that strange formulation, "God exists." Without determining first
what is meant by that, one cannot say in candor whether one be-
lieves that it is true, that it is false, or that there is lack of evidence
both ways. To say that whatever could be meant by it is false is
militant, but shows vast ignorance of the attenuated and innocuous
beliefs theologians and philosophers, preachers and laymen have
been reading into this hallowed phrase for centuries.
A man who prizes honesty above the good opinion of his fellow
men might say this: I cannot believe what most people in ancient
times believed when they affirmed their faith in God; nor can I
believe what most medieval people meant when they said "God
exists." The point is not that there is insufficient evidence which
keeps me from making up my mind, but that I very plainly do not
believe what these men believed. My disbelief is based on an analy-
sis of what they meant, of the evidence they credited, and of the
arguments they used to back up their beliefs. The same goes for
millions of modern theists. But there are men who use ancient for-
mulations of belief in order to express their own lack of belief, or at
least beliefs very different from those of, say, the evangelists men
who use old terms in new ways. Aquinas already did this when he
defined God as the pure act of being. Tillich does it today when he
defines God as being-itself . Spinoza, who was frank enough about
his many heresies, spoke of "God or Nature"; John Dewey, who did
not pretend to be a theist, said, not without irony, that if God were
The Quest for Honesty 45
defined as the active relationship between the ideal and the actual,
he, too, could say that he believed in God. Clearly, there is ample
precedent for redefining ancient terms and then affirming one's be-
lief that Cod exists. I prefer not to use the ancient labels. I should
rather find out just what I can believe and what is not believable
find it out in detail instead of glossing over some of life's most
crucial issues by escaping into hallowed formulas.
This position may seem evasive to those who are used to the
customary labels. They are apt to feel that the question "Does God
exist?" calls for a clear-cut answer: either "Yes" or "No" or '1 don't
know." Two examples may help them to see the question in a dif-
ferent light.
Suppose you were asked, "Does Aphrodite exist?" Presumably,
you would say "No." Surely, you would not say, "I don't know."
The unqualified "No" would probably be based on the assumption
that Aphrodite must be conceived anthropomorphically more or
less the way she appears in Homer's epics say, as a beautiful,
eternally young woman who lives on Mount Olympus. But in Hel-
lenistic times and in the first centuries of our era, pagan theologians
interpreted the ancient myths allegorically. They did not believe in
an anthropomorphic Aphrodite any more than you do, but they pro-
fessed belief in Aphrodite, meaning that the ancient stories could be
given profound interpretations, and that love is beautiful and de-
serves reverence. When a modern theologian says that he does not
believe in Aphrodite, he does not necessarily disagree with these
ancient theologians about any matters of fact. Rather, he declines to
use their language, their formulations. And some modern theologians
say outright that they prefer a different set of myths. What is at
issue, then, is not a question of the existence or non-existence of
some entity, as the agnostic, too, supposes when he suspends judg-
ment, pleading insufficient evidence. The issue is rather whether
one feels committed to certain formulations; and, assuming that this
commitment is not dictated by considerations of social advantage,
what is at stake is loyalty to a tradition not a question of fact.
Other examples may be taken from the Christian tradition. "Does
Satan exist?" Or: "Do angels exist?" The Catholic scientist who
46 The Faith of a Heretic
would answer both questions in the affirmative does not necessarily
believe that there are entities in which the Protestant scientist does
not believe. And the self-styled agnostic who suspends judgment
about the existence of God while asserting without hesitation that,
of course, Satan does not exist, and there are no angels, is confused:
he takes it for granted that Satan and angels have to be conceived
anthropomorphically, while God must not be considered that way.
And his reason for treating the formula "God exists" differently is
presumably that it is central in his religious tradition, while Satan
and angels are not. But the man who believes in the devil and in
angels is not necessarily superstitious; he may merely be loyal to
another religious tradition.
One need not conclude that all religious beliefs are on a par
not only with each other but also with atheism. Disagreements about
loyalties are no less serious than disagreements about facts, and not
all loyalties are on a par. "Religion and loyalty" and "Loyalty and
truth" are discussed at length in Sections 78-80 of my Critique, and
there is no need here to duplicate that discussion. What matters
in the present context, in connection with the quest for honesty,
is how easy it is to be deceived about the nature of religious be-
liefs and disbeliefs, and how labels help us to avoid any honest
account of what we believe and what we do not believe.
Anybody can reiterate ancient creeds and reinterpret them till
they no longer mean what non-believers think they mean, or what
millions of the faithful, past and present, who believed much more
than he can credit, found in them. At that point, the creed becomes
a way of saying what the infidel next door believes, too: the avowed
believer, who disdains outspoken unbelievers, often really agrees
with them, while disagreeing with the vast majority of his fellow
believers. When this happens, it does not necessarily involve any
mental acrobatics. What one is conscious of is not a strenuous intel-
lectual effort but rather a wealth of childhood associations that
evoke a sense of fellowship with others, past and present, and the
reassurance that we are far from alone. It feels fine, but is it honest?
And if one has a highly sensitive intellectual conscience, does it still
feel fine?
The Quest for Honesty 47
In his splendid book on The Greeks and the Irrational, E. R.
Dodds, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University, remarked
that "when the archaic Greek poured liquids down a feeding-tube
into the livid jaws of a mouldering corpse," he wisely refrained,
like a little girl feeding her doll, from thinking about what he was
doing (136). Surely the same consideration applies to most religious
practices: ritual, prayer, and religious affirmations generally involve
a suspension of one's critical faculties a refusal to be completely
honest with oneself.
The situation cannot be assimilated either to beholding or acting
in a play or to participation in a game. In all these cases one is will-
ing to admit, even if unfeeling interruptions are resented, that there
is some make-believe. In the case of religion, hardly anyone would
be prepared to admit this even to himself.
There are at least three ways of transcending the naivet6 with
which most men perform religious rites, say prayers, and reiterate
religious affirmations without ever stopping to reflect what they are
doing. One can recognize the element of make-believe and give up
doing all of these things. Or, having recognized the make-believe
involved, one may nevertheless continue, from a sense of reverence
for tradition, loyalty, and emotional satisfaction, to do what one
began to do as a child. Or, finally, the theologian may step in and
furnish systematic reasons for the cult and for the central affirma-
tions of his own denomination. He may be prompted by the desire
for honesty, but he mistakes articulateness and assurance, which are
easy, for honesty, which is far more difficult.
10
Religion is merely one area in which words often lure us from the
path of honesty. As mentioned before, labels quite generally threaten
to derail attempts at honest thinking.
No philosopher has done more to make us aware of this than
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). His writings bear the stamp of
his tormented personality and are not transparent at a glance. One
48 The Faith of a Heretic
is apt to come away with the impression that because he wrote
philosophy mainly for philosophers his contributions are of no con-
cern to others. He once described philosophy as a fight against "the
bewitchment of our intelligence by language," and some of his
academic followers inferred that only philosophic language consti-
tutes a menace, while those who adhere to ordinary usage are quite
safe. But this is surely wrong, unless we broaden "philosophic
usage" to include a vast amount of ordinary talk about God and
what is good and beautiful, about freedom and equality, and about
liberals and conservatives.
Wittgenstein's thought was subtle, and it would be folly to at-
tempt to summarize it in a paragraph or two. But part of his con-
tribution can be stated very simply: he did more than any philoso-
pher before him to wean us from our common tendency of thinking
in terms of labels, or rather of seizing on labels as an excuse for
terminating thought.
One of the most illuminating passages occurs in his posthumously
published Philosophical Investigations, in a discussion of games:
"Do not say: 'They must have something in common; else they
would not be called "games" ' but look whether all of them have
something in common." If we do not seize upon the label as a wel-
come opportunity to stop thinking, we are likely to discover "a com-
plicated net of similarities which overlap and intersect"; and for this
Wittgenstein suggests the name "family resemblances" ( 66 f.).
Thei great philosopher with whom he differs most obviously at
this point is Plato, who taught that all beautiful things are beautiful
by virtue of their participation in the Idea, or Form, of Beauty; that
beds are beds by virtue of their participation in the Idea, or Form,
of Bed; and, by implication, that all games participate in the Idea,
or Form, of Game. Under Plato's influence, the young philosopher
tries hard to rise beyond particulars and hopes eventually to behold
the universal. Studying religion, he looks for the common essence
of the individual religions known to him or rather those of which
he knows. Following in Plato's footsteps, he looks for the essence of
equality and justice, of democracy and knowledge, perhaps also of
The Quest for Honesty 49
theism. Wide individual differences between particular instances
are charged to imperfect participation: there is never any doubt
that there is a pure essence or Form, albeit not in this world but
beyond, in the realm of Forms.
Still it would be a grave error to suppose that only Plato and
philosophers who follow, or have followed, his example are the butt
of Wittgenstein's critique. Non-philosophers, too, talk constantly in
the same manner, and scores of protracted, futile arguments can be
illuminated and henceforth avoided by considering Wittgenstein's
conception of family resemblances and by heeding his imperatives,
which have been quoted.
People argue, for example, about whether Camus or Pascal were
existentialists. They talk as if this were a question of fact. They
assume that the so-called existentialists "must have something in
common; else they would not be called" by the same name, and
that we only have to see whether Pascal or Camus share this com-
mon quality: if they do, they are plainly existentialists. As a matter
of fact, however, there is no clearly defined set of qualities that all
the existentialists have in common. Heidegger, like Kierkegaard,
but unlike Sartre, disparages reason; but like Sartre, and unlike
Kierkegaard, he is no Christian and does not avow belief in God.
Sartre once ventured to give a definition of existentialism as the
doctrine that existence precedes essence but Heidegger and
Jaspers promptly pointed out that in that sense they were not exis-
tentialists. In sum, there is "a complicated net of similarities which
overlap and intersect." It is pointless to insist that Camus was, or
was not, an existentialist. But it may well be worth while to point
out what he had in common with some other so-called existentialists,
and what set him apart.
Is communism a religion? Is Ethical Culture? Follow the same
procedure, listing traits shared with various members of the family
as well as traits distinguishing the doubtful relative. All this does
not involve any Wittgensteinian orthodoxy. All it involves is an
analytic mind or, to use a much less fancy term, a bit of carefulness.
Is Freudianism true? We have to ask, what is Freudianism? Does
50 The Faith of a Heretic
it include Freud's later attempts to revise his early views? Or is it
rather the selection that some self-styled Freudians have made from
the master's works?
When did the Renaissance, or the Middle Ages, or "Modern
Times" begin? Again, it is not the nature of history its alleged
subjectivity that precludes a precise and definitive answer, but
rather the nature of such labels.
Ever so many arguments revolve around some undefined, vague,
or ambiguous term. Goethe's Mephistopheles said very neatly:
Just where no ideas are
The proper word is never far.
This remark, like the other quotation from Faust, earlier in this
chapter, is aimed at theology. So is Mephisto's comment in another
scene:
Men usually believe, if only they hear words,
That there must also be some sort of meaning.
Often, however, the trouble is that there is an excess of ideas and
meanings that people have not taken the trouble to sort out; and
men talk past each other because they have in mind, if only very
vaguely, different meanings. Either way, those who "stick to
words" are likely to purchase "certainty" at the price of honesty.
To bring out the connection with honesty, let us return to Witt-
genstein. His writings are extremely technical, designed largely
for philosophers and mathematicians. But in his very interesting
and moving little book, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, Norman
Malcolm tells us how a casual remark he once made in a conversa-
tion in the fall of 1939 about the British "national character" vexed
Wittgenstein; and he quotes a letter Wittgenstein wrote him five
years later: "Whenever I thought of you I couldn't help thinking of
a particular incident which seemed to me very important. You &
I were walking along the river towards the railway bridge & we
had a heated discussion in which you made a remark about 'national
The Quest for Honesty 51
character* that shocked me by its primitiveness. I then thought:
what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is
to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse
questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about
the important questions of everyday Me, if it does not make you
more conscientious. . . . You see, I know that it's difficult to think
well about 'certainty,' 'probability,' 'perception,' etc. But it is, if
possible, stall more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly
about your life & other people's lives. And the trouble is that think-
ing about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty.
And when it's nasty then it's most important" (39).
Taken in its original context, Wittgenstein's annoyance with Mal-
colm's remark is likely to seem excessive. Malcolm's point was
merely that the British would not hire a man to assassinate Hit-
ler. But one may surmise that in his childhood and youth Witt-
genstein had been subjected to a lot of silly and not altogether
innocuous chatter about what German men are like, and Austrian
women, and Poles, and Czechs, and Jews, and Russians, and
Italians, and that he had slowly come to loathe these thought-
less generalizations with their air of dogmatism and omniscience. If
this guess is right, one can understand how a fairly innocent remark
might have wounded him deeply: how he was startled and shocked
to find a man who apparently had learned a great deal from him
evidencing the same thoughtlessness as if all of Wittgenstein's
instruction had been in vain.
As a general statement, Wittgenstein's remarks about "studying
philosophy" are magnificent. If they have any fault, it is that the
kind of thinking to which Wittgenstein refers is thrilling. Indeed,
few things are more exciting. But Wittgenstein is right that it is
"often downright nasty. And when it's nasty then it's most impor-
tant." Socrates would have agreed wholeheartedly. But scarcely
any of Wittgenstein's followers do.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-99), a satirical writer whom
Wittgenstein greatly admired, once wrote a nasty aphorism: "When
a certain worthy died, one man copied his way of wearing his hat,
another his way of carrying his sword, a third the cut of his beard,
52 The Faith of a Heretic
and a fourth his walk; but not one tried to be the honest man he
was." What happened after Wittgenstein's death is somewhat differ-
ent. Many of his followers, including even pupils of his pupils, copy
the very same gestures and mannerisms; and presumably they try
to emulate his honesty, too. Some of them even say that this con-
stitutes a "revolution in philosophy": in the twentieth century,
philosophers have learned at long last to examine language critically.
There is some justice in this claim. More than ever before, philos-
ophers are exerting themselves "to think well about 'certainty,'
'probability,' 'perception,' etc. But it is, if possible, still more diffi-
cult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other
people's lives." And few of Wittgenstein's followers try to do that.
This failure is actually connected with the revolution in twentieth-
century philosophy: this revolution, though often referred to, is
generally misunderstood. We shall examine it in the next chapter.
Ill
PHILOSOPHY
AND REVOLUTION
11
When philosophers speak, as they often do, of a revolution
in philosophy, they generally refer to what is variously called ana-
lytic, linguistic, or ordinary language philosophy. They mean the
kind of philosophy that developed at the universities of Oxford and
Cambridge on the eve of the Second World War. Since the war, it
has spread to the United States and become far more influential
among professional philosophers than any other single philosophic
movement, emphatically including pragmatism and existentialism.
This new philosophy owes a great deal to Wittgenstein's later teach-
ing and his posthumously published books. It is also indebted to the
work of G. E. Moore (1873-1958), to whose chair at Cambridge
Wittgenstein succeeded. But the place where this land of philoso-
phy flourishes more than anywhere else is Oxford.
Few, if any, philosophers of this type see the history of philosophy
in the way proposed in the previous chapter, and an alternative
view that is widely shared by competent philosophers deserves our
consideration. Moreover, some profound changes really have taken
place in twentieth-century philosophy changes that I have not
taken into account so far, although they pose special problems for
the enterprise attempted in this book.
53
54 The Faith of a Heretic
Let us begin with the so-called revolution and then go on to con-
sider some of these changes. Throughout, the point will be not to
run down what others are doing; but, in Lincoln's celebrated words,
"if we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending,
we could better judge what to do, and how to do it."
This undertaking is hazardous. Our best literary and philosophic
criticism tends toward the microscopic, and reflections on entire
movements or on "whither we are tending" are often animadver-
sions. Hence, such attempts are suspect and prone to be misunder-
stood.
There are two unhelpful precedents. First, one can hide behind
statistics, la mode. That way one can have one's critical analysis
and eat one's popular acclaim, too. If the prophets came back and
used this procedure, they would be received gladly and dent no one.
Happily, this dodge is not available in philosophy.
Second: there are the examples of two ancient philosophers.
Heraclitus singled out for criticism men of the first rank, but made
a point of speaking of them disrespectfully, even abusively. Socrates,
in the Apology, insisted that he had concentrated on the greatest
reputations of his time; and apparently he did his best to ridicule
these men in public, catching them in verbal snares, not always
fairly, to deflate them and to let the audience that had gathered
laugh at them. Far more than Whistler, who coined the delightful
phrase, both philosophers were masters of "the gentle art of making
enemies." Such techniques had a point when anti-authoritarianism
took its first steps against overwhelming odds. But to illustrate the
difficulty of the quest for honesty, it will be best to concentrate
throughout this book on men whom I admire and respect
When names are mentioned, there ought not to be the least pre-
sumption that their choice is prompted by resentment or hostility.
It is widely believed that strong affection precludes basic disagree-
ments, but this popular conceit is incompatible with high standards
of honesty.
As far as the present chapter is concerned, there may not be many
basic disagreements with the major figures. I may be at odds more
Philosophy and Revolution 55
with their influence than with them; and in philosophy one should
not blame men too much for their influence, which is usually in
large measure unfortunate.
12
It is a little book of B.B.C. lectures that bears the title, and has
popularized the notion, of The Revolution in Philosophy. In his in-
troduction to that volume, Professor Gilbert Ryle of Oxford Uni-
versity makes no claim that there has been a revolution and insists
with plausible modesty that it is much too early to judge the achieve-
ments of the movement with which he is associated. But many
others have been less reticent than Ryle. And nobody could quarrel
with one of his younger Oxford colleagues, Geoffrey Warnock,
when he begins the last chapter of his account of English Philosophy
Since 1900 by saying: "Philosophy in the last fifty years has often
been said, both by its friends and its enemies, to have undergone a
'revolution/ " The question remains whether what has often been
said is also true.
At the very least, there has been a revolution in Oxford philoso-
phy since Ryle succeeded R. G. Collingwood as Waynflete Professor
of Metaphysical Philosophy. Collingwood was a highly individualis-
tic idealist, much closer to Croce and Hegel, though not to the popu-
lar misconceptions about Hegel, than to Bradley and Bosanquet and
other British idealists. Now any form of philosophic idealism, in the
technical sense of that word, is practically extinct at Oxford, and
most of the dons, and almost all who have influence, work in the
tradition of Moore and Wittgenstein, not in that of Hegel and
Bradley.
Such labels as linguistic" or "analytic" philosophy are sometimes
resented because, for the reasons given above, good philosophers
generally do not care for labels. Still, it is useful sometimes to be
able to lump many men together to stress that they have something
in common, without denying that they are thoughtful individuals,
56 The Faith of a Heretic
not members of a party. Some of these philosophers are touchy on
this point and disclaim emphatically that they belong to any school
of thought; but, for all that, their publications generally leave no
doubt, any more than their conversation, as to who belongs and who
does not, who "does philosophy" the way "one does philosophy"
and who does not. And when there is talk of a revolution in phi-
losophy, the whole point is that now "we do philosophy" quite
differently from the way it was done formerly.
Nor is this change confined to Oxford. There has been a radical
shift in the tone and temper of "English philosophy since 1900,"
allowing for a few outsiders and survivals from earlier times, and
not judging merits for the moment. This change has not greatly
affected continental European or South American philosophy, but
it is very notable in most of the leading colleges and universities in
the United States.
How should one describe the change? One could emphasize the
frequent appeal to ordinary language and the popularity of such
locutions as "wouldn't it be very odd to say . . . ?" and "doesn't this
sound rather queer?" To evaluate this strategy, one would have to
consider how it works in the hands of competent practitioners
and we should be led away from our primary concerns. But another
aspect of the so-called revolution in twentieth-century philosophy
takes us straight back to some of the central themes sounded in the
previous chaper, especially in Wittgenstein's wonderful letter.
Warnock says: "It is at any rate certain that questions of ^belief
questions of religious, moral, political, or generally 'cosmic' variety
are seldom if at all directly dealt with in contemporary philoso-
phy. Why is this so? The first part of an answer to this question can
easily be given: There is a very large number of questions, not of
that variety, which philosophers find themselves more interested in
discussing."
One might doubt whether a mere shift of interest deserves to be
called a revolution, until one realizes what most of these philosophers
are prepared to relinquish: they no longer "try to think really hon-
estly about your life & other people's lives." And they do not only
abdicate one of the noblest functions of philosophy as a matter of
Philosophy and Revolution 57
individual choice but they hail this surrender as a major advance
and discourage others from carrying the quest for honesty into less
academic questions. Since so many highly intelligent and deeply
humane people take this view, it will be well to consider their
reasons, if only briefly.
"Religious, moral, political, or generally 'cosmic' * questions are
not considered the business of philosophers because philosophers do
not seem to possess any special qualifications for dealing with them;
and if one holds a post in a university, along with natural and social
scientists, one ought to have some specialized professional compe-
tence, else one is an imposter.
What, then, is the proper function of philosophy? In an early
essay on "Systematically Misleading Expressions," Ryle argued that
the analysis of such expressions "is what philosophical analysis is,
and this is the sole and whole function of philosophy." Oddly, this
statement itself is seriously "misleading": it is a recommendation
disguised as a description. And taken at face value, as a description,
the statement is plainly false. If you look up what any good dic-
tionary says about philosophy, or if you read any good history of
philosophy, you find that the analysis of systematically misleading
expressions has plainly not been "the sole and whole function of
philosophy"; nor is it today, unless you refuse to call philosophy
what those philosophers are doing who do not confine themselves
to such analysis.
Such analyses can be of great importance, and I have nothing
against them. The analysis of theism, atheism, and agnosticism in
Section 9 could be easily assimilated to this genre, and at the end
of the next chapter I shall deal with some misleading expressions
concerning commitment. But the claim that the analysis of syste-
matically misleading expressions is, or ought to be, "the sole and
whole function of philosophy" remains arbitrary and implausible.
One can try to remove its sting by pointing out how much tradi-
tional philosophy could be presented in this form; and one could
even empty the claim of all meaning by arguing that, with some
ingenuity, everything that a philosopher might wish to do could be
forced into this mold. In his later books, The Concept of Mind and
58 The Faith of a Heretic
Dilemmas, Ryle showed sufficient scope, without repudiating his
early dictum, to have led some admirers to adopt one or the other
of these two views. In that case, however, no revolution in phil-
osophy has even been attempted. But this seems false.
Surely, Kyle's point and the point of the attempted revolution
was that philosophers should cease to occupy themselves with
empirical data because they lack any special competence to deal
with these: such data should be left to scientists or historians, while
philosophers should stick to analysis for example, of systematically
misleading expressions. But while they oppose any trespasses into
the domains of colleagues in other fields, the linguistic philosophers
themselves trespass into linguistics. If they should plead that there
is still a dearth of professional linguists, two very damning answers
are possible and mutually compatible.
First, there may be a dearth of professionals in other fields. If
philosophers are justified in trespassing on vacant lots, or vacant
regions of other men's fields, this description does not fit linguistics
only. Second: even as various other sciences have gradually broken
away from philosophy and gained autonomy psychology and so-
ciology quite recently linguistics is a field in which academic
chairs and departments are being created even now. What, then, is
to become of philosophy in another few years? Should philosophers
close up shop? Or should not philosophers rather resist the growing
trend toward specialization and trespass freely?
The best linguistic philosophers have noted things that linguists
without thorough philosophic training did not see. The moral is ob-
vious: philosophy of religion and political philosophy need not be
abandoned any more than philosophy of science or of language;
but the man who ventures into other fields should have some extra-
philosophic competence. If he does, he stands a fair chance of
making contributions that political scientists and politicians, theolo-
gians and preachers, physicists and philologists would be much less
likely to make.
Some philosophers feel that if a philosopher has such a dual com-
petence it may be all right for him to put it to use, though they
Philosophy and Revolution 59
doubt that any resulting essay could be classified as philosophy.
Moreover, they see no special reason why philosophers should
master the techniques of other subjects and labor in other fields.
Men in physics and psychology, political science and theology,
might just as well study philosophy.
So they might; but the primary question is whether the job is
important and worth doing. If it is, there is not much point in in-
sisting that somebody else could do it just as well, though admit-
tedly no more easily. Moreover, if such efforts are needed, philos-
ophers have less excuse for not undertaking them than anybody
else; for in philosophy attempts of this sort are traditional, and shy-
ing away from them involves a deliberate abandonment of this
tradition.
Some of the pre-Socratics were no mean scientists. The Sophists
were pioneering students of grammar. Aristotle was a polymath.
Descartes and Leibniz were topflight mathematicians. Spinoza's
Theological-Political Treatise made first-rate contributions to the
critical study of the Bible. Hobbes kept up with the science of his
day and also translated Thucydides and Homer. Hume was a his-
torian. Kant formulated the so-call Kant-Laplace theory of the
origin of the solar system and also wrote an essay to demonstrate the
need for a "League of Nations." Hegel was an outstanding historian.
Nietzsche, according to Freud, "had a more penetrating knowledge
of himself than any other man who ever lived or was ever likely to
live," and his "insights often agree in the most amazing manner
with the laborious results of psychoanalysis."
Perhaps Hobbes's translation of Thucydides was a mere side line,
almost a hobby? This is admittedly an extreme case, but even here
it is likely that not only Hobbes's superb prose style profited from
this effort but also his political philosophy. Such a translation is not
on a par with Spinoza's making a living by grinding lenses; it is
much closer to Spinoza's Biblical studies which were closely re-
lated to his political philosophy. Similarly, Kant's great Idea for a
Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent (1784) contains his
philosophy of history and introduces the "League of Nations" in
60 The Faith of a Heretic
that context. Confining philosophers to linguistic analyses and
discouraging them from dealing with the empirical data of other
fields would lead to an unfortunate impoverishment of philosophy,
also of humanity.
13
What at first glance may seem to be no more than a shift of in-
terest is in fact a symptom of a much more basic change. Philosophy
has become academic because almost all twentieth-century philos-
ophers write in academics, as Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz and
Locke, Bacon and Berkeley, Hobbes and Hume did not. What is
new is that philosophy has become a profession a job rather
than a vocation.
If this should seem an impressionistic distinction, the point can
be quantified, too: the most fundamental change in philosophy is
that formerly there were perhaps a dozen men engaged in it at any
one time, give or take a few, while today there are thousands.
Near the end of his book, Warnock rightly calls attention to the
philosophic journals. Indeed, until some time after 1950, most
Oxford philosophers considered it definitely not "U" to publish
books: "one" wrote for the journals and let German and American
philosophers write books. In the fifties there was a sudden change
and it became quite fashionable to write little books, like Warnock's.
He does not mention this, but he notes with entire justice: "This
new professional practice of submitting problems and arguments
to the expert criticism of fellow craftsmen led to a growing concern
with questions of technique." More controversially, he charges the
public with "a vague feeling that the total amateur ought not to be
disqualified from engaging in what was, so recently, an amateurish
pursuit."
Such remarks about amateurs are often heard. Sometimes people
in armchairs are introduced as an elegant variation. But such ploys
are easily turned round. It is surely one reason for the popularity of
the new philosophy that any bright young man can play; he needs
Philosophy and Revolution 61
no special knowledge, only a command of "IT English. Even a bad
paper on this kind of philosophy is likely to elicit an intense dis-
cussion: it breaks the ice better than two martinis. It is all good fun
once you get the hang of it, and there is room for some to show
a special flair and to excel. All this is very well; but it is ironical
when the participants look down on traditional philosophy as "an
amateurish pursuit.**
There have always been amateurs, and there are more than ever
now. But the great philosophers accepted some responsibilities that
most analytic philosophers decline. They were interested in "ques-
tions of *belief questions of religious, moral, political, or generally
'cosmic' variety"; and they tried to think "honestly about your life
and other people's lives." If Kant, Hume, and Spinoza had written
only for "fellow craftsmen," there would not have been any need to
print their works: circulating the manuscript would have done the
trick. It does not follow that their practice of addressing non-
philosophers, too, made their work less important on the contrary.
The main reason for our many philosophic journals is, of course,
that suddenly there are thousands of men professionally engaged
in the subject thousands who have to publish now and then to
gain some recognition, to win raises and promotions, and to show
themselves and fellow members of their "association" that they are
both physically and mentally alive. Quotation from a letter of
recommendation in 1960: "During the last year he has published
three times."
What used to be a rare vocation for uncommon individuals who
took a bold stand has become an industry involving legions. Natu-
rally, the whole tone and level of discussion had to change. When
there are over a thousand colleges in one country, and most of them
have departments of philosophy, many of them with a dozen or
more members, it would be ridiculous if every professional tried to
emulate Spinoza's Ethics; or if they urged millions of students in
their courses to write something like Hume's Treatise of Human
Nature, being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method
of Reasoning into Moral Subjects. But the reason why it would be
absurd is not that these books were written by amateurs, perhaps in
82 The Faith of a Heretic
armchairs; nor even that the Treatise, like some other philosophic
classics, was the work of a young man in his twenties. It would be
bizarre only because these books are so great and so bold.
The new, professional philosopher does not vie with the great
philosophers of former ages but with other men in his own age
group in the other departments of his college. He may well be
older than Berkeley and Hume were when they wrote their master-
pieces, but he would be likely to make a fool of himself if he stuck
out his neck as they did. It is far safer and much more prudent to
insist on being a professional. One publishes papers in learned
journals, often employs symbols even when they are dispensable,
and uses a jargon that stumps everybody but fellow professionals.
Perhaps the average paper now is better than the average paper
fifty years ago: that would hardly be a great compliment; and, to
be sure about it, one would have to compare thousands of papers.
Life is too short for that
No doubt, philosophers, like their colleagues, should have their
own journals. What is appalling is not the quality of most papers
but the suggestion that we should look down condescendingly on
the great "amateurs" of former times and do our best to prevent any
recurrence.
In a fine passage in Beyond Good and Evil ( 212), Nietzsche
says that, traditionally, the great philosopher has always stood "in
opposition to his today." Philosophers have been "the bad con-
science of their time." They knew "of a new greatness of man, of a
new untrodden way to his enhancement. . . . Confronted with a
world of 'modern ideas,' which would banish everybody into a cor-
ner and a 'specialty/ a philosopher if there could be any philos-
ophers today would be forced to define the greatness of man, the
concept of 'greatness/ in terms precisely of man's comprehensive-
ness and multiplicity, his wholeness in manifoldness." After some
illustrations from the sixteenth century and some remarks about
Socrates, Nietzsche continues: "Today, conversely, when only the
herd animal is honored and dispenses honors in Europe, and when
'equality of rights' could all too easily be converted into an equality
in violating rights by that I mean, into a common war on all that
Philosophy and Revolution 63
is rare, strange, or privileged, on the higher man, die higher soul,
the higher duty, the higher responsibility, and on the wealth of
creative power and mastery today the concept of 'greatness' en-
tails being noble, wanting to be by oneself, being capable of being
different, standing alone, and having to live independently. . . ."
Thus, in 1886. Wittgenstein would have fully understood.
In some ways the so-called revolution in philosophy is counter-
revolutionary: its influence leads men away from trying to stand
alone; it would banish philosophers "into a corner and a specialty ."
It teaches young philosophers not to become heretics or revolu-
tionaries because they lack any special qualifications for that. Yet
it might be part of a philosopher's task to acquire the necessary
qualifications. Of course, not everybody can do that; but to say that
what not all can do, none should even try to do, is a recipe for
mediocrity "a common war on all that is rare, strange, and
privileged."
14
Instead of speaking of a revolution in philosophy, it might be
more accurate to speak of a great crisis in philosophy. In some ways
it is comparable to the crisis in modern religion. The great progress
in the sciences has made many traditional beliefs, tenets, and as-
sumptions highly problematic, if not untenable. As a result, some
theologians have reinterpreted many old beliefs to the point
where some thoughtful people have begun to wonder what, if any,
meaning remains. The old beliefs were clear but are now given up
as false; the reinterpreted beliefs, which are said to be immune to
all scientific advances, are often highly elusive and perhaps in some
instances mere formulas devoid of any clear content.
For once, the philosophers excel the theologians in one-upmanship.
Instead of conceding that the progress of science has produced a
major crisis in philosophy because so many doctrines of traditional
philosophy have now come to appear naive or false, many philoso-
phers speak cheerfully and proudly of a revolution in philosophy.
64 The Faith of a Heretic
Yet a great heritage has been called into question, in philosophy as
well as in religion; the great names of over twenty centuries are
suddenly in danger; and it is no longer clear whether the great
classics should be taught.
The story goes that a famous contemporary philosopher was of-
fered a position at a leading university, but refused it when told
that among other things he should have to teach Plato. Allegedly
he replied: "I shall teach only the truth." The story is probably
apocryphal: one would hardly insist that a celebrated man teach a
course he would rather not teach. But this legend illustrates the
crisis. It also raises the question whether, instead of charging mod-
ern philosophers with one-upmanship, one ought not rather to con-
gratulate them on their honesty because they openly break with
tradition. But scarcely any contemporary philosophers go so far as
the positivist in this story, and the story itself is considered grotesque
and something of a joke among philosophers.
One might liken the situation in philosophy to that in the sciences
rather than to that in religion, if most philosophers did break with
tradition as much as the man in our story; if recent philosophers
towered above Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Spinoza; and if con-
temporary philosophy were as manifestly superior to previous
philosophy as modern science is to previous science. But while in
the sciences there are giants who need not fear comparison with
the greatest innovators of the past, and there are literally scores of
topflight scientists who have made revolutionary discoveries and
propounded far-reaching theories, the whole atmosphere in English-
speaking philosophy is marked by a pervasive mistrust of giants and
of far-reaching theories. Not only is scope sacrificed for frequently
unsuccessful attempts at rigor but theory, once almost synonymous
with philosophy, is widely abandoned in order to obtain agreement
about facts. If one stopped teaching Plato and the other traditional
philosophers, so little would be left that the contrast with the sci-
ences would stare us in the face. Hence, one has recourse to a
double standard.
One continues to teach Plato and, occasional jibes at amateurs
notwithstanding, generally looks up to the giants of the past. In-
Philosophy and Revolution 65
deed, in the English-speaking world a reputation in philosophy can
still be built by writing about Plato or the pre-Socratics, Hegel or
Nietzsche, but it cannot be built by writing as they did. The situa-
tion parallels that in religion, not that in the sciences. In our
seminaries and in college Departments of Religion, it is respectable
to write and dote on Kierkegaard or other, greater figures of the
more remote past; but woe unto the man who emulates them!
In philosophy it is respectable to give elaborate accounts of by-
gone theories on matters on which it would not be respectable to
theorize oneself. Similarly, an exposition of Kant's, Hegel's, or
Nietzsche's criticisms of Christianity is considered a worth-while
and useful contribution which deserves an honored place in philo-
sophic journals, even if the criticisms summarized should be un-
sound. But the very same people who are grateful for a documented
exposition of past criticisms are far from grateful for contemporary
criticisms of Christianity, even if some of the strictures should be
more judicious. To report other men's unsound criticisms is con-
sidered worthy of a philosopher; to offer sound criticisms of Chris-
tianity on one's own is not considered part of a philosopher's job.
Fleetingly, one might wonder whether the situation in philosophy
might not resemble that in history: a historian is expected to write
about Napoleon, not to emulate him. But this analogy is utterly
misleading. Napoleon himself was not a historian, and the historian
who writes about him does not suppose he was. Philosophers, on
the other hand, write about past philosophers who are considered
sufficiently great and important as philosophers to render competent
discussions of their work deserving of a place in philosophic jour-
nals, while essays in the vein in which these past philosophers
themselves wrote are conspicuously absent from the journals.
No doubt, many factors are at work here, but the most important
is the vast prestige of science. The advice which members of the
American Philosophical Association received in the mail in 1960 is
profoundly symptomatic: ". . . many research applications from
philosophers compare unfavorably with applications from scholars
in other fields. We believe this impression is due, in part, to the
fact that Foundation and University Research Committees have
66 The Faith of a Heretic
become accustomed to the appearance of precision and definiteness
in scientific projects. Philosophical investigations, in many instances,
do not have precise and narrow limits. In order to overcome this
handicap, our Committee makes a few suggestions: Design: Specify
a proposition to be verified or a well-defined area to be explored, Or
give as much definiteness to your proposal as possible by: A. Stating
the problem or group of problems on which you propose to work;
B. Outlining a plan of work, C. If you wish to collaborate with other
scholars, indicate the nature and extent of the collaboration. . . ."
Philosophers have no preference for the history of philosophy as
such. On the contrary, owing in part to the insufficient emphasis on
languages in the American secondary school system, most American
philosophers are handicapped in this field. What they want is
agreement about facts, progress in the accumulation of knowledge,
a clear-cut contribution. The history of philosophy is merely one
area in which such agreement may be obtainable. Reading the ad-
vice on research applications, one sees at a glance that research on
Spinoza's Ethics or Plato's Republic is respectable, particularly if
the applicant should stress the "precise and narrow limits" of his
project and confine himself to certain aspects of the masterpiece on
which he wants to write. But suppose that Plato or Spinoza had
applied!
"I should like to write a book of medium length, dealing with
God, man, and the world. I envisage five short parts, the first deal-
ing with God, the second with the nature and the origin of mind,
the third with the nature and the origin of the emotions. I contem-
plate no laboratory work and no collaboration in fact, strictly
speaking, no research. I propose to sit in my armchair and think. At
home. No travel contemplated. No need to go to libraries or seek
out fellow scholars. If time permits, I shall deal in the last two parts
with human bondage and the power of the emotions, and with the
power of the intellect and human liberty. I find it difficult to state
the problem or the group of problems on which I propose to work
because, frankly, there are few problems with which I don't propose
to deal. Expected result: one short book. Sincerely, B. Spinoza."
Philosophy and Revolution 67
"I want to write a dialogue, somewhat under 300 printed pages
in length. It will begin with a discussion of justice, but later on I
hope to deal with all the virtues and with other problems of im-
portance for moral philosophy. Actually, the major topic will be
political philosophy, and I am planning to develop at some length
my own conception of an ideal state. More briefly, near the end, I
shall criticize all the major forms of government now in existence. I
have done some traveling in the past and have had some contact
with philosophers and statesmen; there is no need for further travel
or consultations now. Nor do I need the resources of any library.
All I require is an armchair and some peace and quiet. In any case,
the criticism of the various forms of government will be quite brief.
I hope to devote far more space to metaphysics, theory of knowl-
edge, my ideas about education, literary criticism, and theology. I
do not mean to preclude the possibility that, as I write, some other
subjects may swim into view and cry out to be brought in, too.
What I want to write is a well organized book indeed, a beauti-
fully organized book but at this stage I am not quite ready to tell
you in what way some of these topics will be introduced: that will
become clear to me only as I write perhaps only as I rewrite, and
continue to rewrite, my book. If it should turn out in the end that
I have omitted any important problems or group of problems, I
propose to make up for that by shortly dealing with such problems
in other dialogues. Collaboration is out of the question. As for the
title, I have not decided yet; but I think I shall choose a single
word, probably some comprehensive label. Perhaps I should add
that I am not at all sure whether my philosophy admits of verbal
formulation. I rather think that it does not. What really matters is
not to arrive at assured results that can be assimilated by reading
my book but rather to strike some sparks, and probably the book
will not be fully understood by anyone except those who have spent
a few years working closely with me. Even they might not get
what matters most to me. But such is philosophy. The greatest
philosopher that ever lived my master, Socrates never even
tried to teach results. Some people say he taught a method; but
68 The Faith of a Heretic
there is no agreement among those who knew him best just what
this method was. Anyway, my master was put to death for his
teachings. Hoping for your support, Yours, Plato."
Such applications would "compare unfavorably with applications
from scholars in other fields, 19 and "Research Committees have be-
come accustomed to the appearance of precision and definiteness
in scientific projects." They would not be likely to act favorably on
such projects, while a secondary, historical study, with "precise and
narrow limits," might well be supported. The irony of the con-
temporary situation in philosophy is best brought out by adding
that the advice to America's philosophers that has been quoted
came from the "Committee to Advance Original [1] Work in Philos-
ophy."
The situation being what it is, the Research Committees are not
to be blamed. As chairman of a major one, I can vouch that no
promising young man would submit a project like the two proposed
here; and if a project did look like this, there would be every pre-
sumption that the applicant was muddleheaded, and that any num-
ber of others were more deserving. The point of this chapter is not
to accuse committees, dons, or any alleged conspiracy of sinister
powers; it is rather to see how philosophy has changed, and how
the present situation differs from that in former ages.
Some of the most brilliant and original minds now go into
physics and other sciences where boldness and disciplined imagina-
tion may achieve great triumphs. A remark attributed to David
Hilbert, the great mathematician, sounds less paradoxical now than
a few decades ago. When a student abandoned mathematics to
write novels, Hilbert commented: "It was just as well; he did not
have enough imagination to become a first-rate mathematician."
Of those who do become philosophers, many of the brightest go
into symbolic logic the one branch of philosophy that resembles
mathematics. Here precision is at home; one can compel the agree-
ment of fellow scholars, make genuine contributions, and score
advances. A large number of the best minds also go into analytic
philosophy. If one follows the lead of the young Ryle and analyzes
misleading expressions, there is hope that one can reach agreement
Philosophy and Revolution 69
and make clear-cut contributions. Others take their cue from Pro-
fessor J. L. Austin (1911-60), also of Oxford, whose skill at linguis-
tic analysis was blended with a rare sense of humor and a still more
exceptional moral authority that issued from the force of his per-
sonality and his high standards of honesty. In his classical account
of his method, in "A Plea for Excuses," he declared: "Our common
stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth
drawing, and the connexions they have found worth marking, in
the lifetimes of many generations: these surely are likely to be more
. . . sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival
of the fittest, . . . than any you or I are likely to think up in our arm-
chairs of an afternoon the most favoured alternative method" (8).
Fine distinctions in ordinary language may help to call our attention
to important differences, and Austin excelled at noting small dis-
crepancies between apparent synonyms. In fact, he so immersed
himself in work of this kind that he rarely deigned to point out
philosophic implications; and occasionally he said pointedly, per-
haps with just a touch of irony, that we are not ready for "philo-
sophical" questions.
The trouble with "religious, moral, political, or generally 'cosmic* "
questions is that one despairs of reaching agreement and is there-
fore unsure what might constitute a worth-while contribution. If
one does deal with ethics, one goes into "meta-ethics." Urmson's
Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers dis-
tinguishes "(l)MoroZ questions: for example, 'Ought I to do that?';
'Is polygamy wrong?* ... (2) Questions of fact about people's
moral opinions: for example, 'What did Mohammed (or ... what
do I myself) in fact think (or say) about the rightness or wrongness
of polygamy?* (3) Questions about the meaning of moral words (for
example, 'ought,' 'right,' 'good' 'duty'); or about the nature of the
concepts or the 'things' to which these words 'refer: for example,
'When Mohammed said that polygamy is not wrong, what was he
saying?* These three sorts of questions being quite distinct, the use
of the word 'ethics* to embrace attempts to answer all three is con-
fusing, and is avoided by the more careful modern writers. . . . We
shall distinguish between (1) morals, (2) descriptive ethics and
70 The Faith of a Heretic
(3) ethics, corresponding to the three sorts of questions listed
above." Most analytic philosophers favor "confining the word
'ethics* (used without qualification) to the third sort of question,"
though some students prefer "the more guarded terms 'the logic of
ethics/ 'metaethics,' " or various other locutions.
The same distinctions apply to the philosophy of religion, political
philosophy, and other fields. The few analytic philosophers who
have gone into these fields have dealt with The Vocabulary of
Politics, to cite the title of a book, or with "religious language."
Here again there is some hope of reaching agreement and making
a definite contribution.
The threefold distinction is certainly helpful, and the clarification
of the meaning of moral or religious words is important. The wish
to make a clear-cut contribution is legitimate and reasonable, and
there is nothing wrong with turning to these fields.
Still, it is notable that traditional philosophy did not stop with
"meta" questions. It somehow stood between the sciences and
literature. Plato required the study of mathematics as a prerequisite
for the study of philosophy, and he was immensely interested in
significant terms; but, for all that, it is doubtful that he aimed at
making a "contribution" any more than Sophocles, Shakespeare, or
Goethe did. And we still look upon the books of great philosophers
of former ages more the way we look at Sophocles', Shakespeare's,
or Goethe's works than the way a scientist looks at the classics in
his field. The writings of Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, and Kant are
philosophy in a sense in which we should not think of saying that
the works of Archimedes or Copernicus are science. The great phi-
losophers did make contributions, as was acknowledged in Chapter
II; but the primary reason for reading Plato or Kant is not to absorb
these contributions or to gain historical knowledge, though these
are, of course, perfectly legitimate secondary reasons. In philosophy,
as in literature but not in science, objectionable views and argu-
ments are no sufficient reason for not studying the works of a great
writer.
The best British analytic philosophers have retained literary
quality far more than their American cousins. It is not just that
Philosophy and Revolution 71
Ryle writes superb English, or that Austin had a highly individual
style perhaps his essay on "Pretending" is the most hilarious piece
of philosophy ever written or that Professor John Wisdom of
Cambridge also has a manner all his own. The point is rather that
one learns easily as much from their highly personal way of looking
and going at things as from any results they contribute.
One of the most important parts of any education is to learn to
understand views different from one's own and to outgrow the
narrow-mindedness and lack of intellectual imagination that cling
to us from our childhood. Dostoevsky does not condone murder, but
Crime and Punishment and his other major novels change most
readers' attitudes toward criminals, toward other human beings,
and, not least, toward themselves. Reading Plato and Spinoza also
affects our attitudes toward men whose values and beliefs are
different from our own and makes us see ourselves in a new light.
The great philosophers were for the most part heirs of Socrates,
who claimed in the Apology that he was his city's greatest benefac-
tor. He prided himself on having fulfilled "the philosopher's mission
of searching into myself and other men"; on having shown that men
who were considered wise both by themselves and by their fellow
men were really not wise; and on having made his fellow citizens
"ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honor
and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth." He
likened himself to a gadfly that did not permit the conscience of
his fellow citizens to fall asleep.
Toward the end of Plato's Symposium, Alcibiades says of Socrates:
"I have heard Pericles and other great orators, and I thought that
they spoke well, but I never had any similar feeling; my soul was
not stirred by them, nor was I angry at the thought of my own
slavish state. But this Marsyas has often brought me to such a path,
that I have felt as if I could hardly endure the life which I was lead-
ing. ... He makes me confess that I ought not to live as I do."
Spinoza and Nietzsche have a comparable impact; and while
few other great philosophers approximate the eloquence of Socrates'
Apology, almost all of them issue a similar challenge. This challenge
is not quite the same as that we encounter in great plays and novels:
72 The Faith of a Heretic
the philosophers make us ashamed of our lack of thoughtfulness,
our slovenly habits of mind, our slothful intellects. This is also true
of Wittgenstein and Wisdom, Ryle and Austin, even if they seem at
times to lean over backward to hide that unprofessional challenge
and it therefore escapes some of their students and followers.
Almost all outstanding philosophers echo Socrates' great dictum
that "the unexamined life is not worth living." Of course, the
philosophers are often wrong themselves; but some of their errors
only serve to reinforce their challenge. The program of a Descartes
or a Kant may set a student's mind afire, while their shortcomings
may reassure him that not everything worth doing has been done.
To deal well with problems that are crucial for "your life and
other people's lives" is extremely difficult; and in the light of the
best work of the analytic philosophers, much traditional philosophy
appears sadly inadequate. If most philosophers want to confine
themselves to less dramatic and more manageable problems, that
is surely sensible.
Spinoza concluded his Ethics by saying: "Everything excellent
is as difficult as it is rare." That is no reason why everybody should
renounce the quest for excellence. And even those who discount
Socrates' proud claim that "no greater good has ever happened in
the state than my service" might well admit that the Socratic gadfly
makes a contribution, too; and if that is not philosophy, what is it?
15
In a sense, every truly great philosopher has revolutionized
philosophy: that is one of the criteria of greatness in philosophy. In
our histories of philosophy we concentrate on those who left some
lasting mark, who somehow changed the course of subsequent
philosophy, as Plato did, or Aristotle, or Descartes, or Kant. After
Hegel, during the nineteenth century, the European philosophic
community ceased to exist. Toward the end of that century, Nietzsche
still exerted an enormous influence on French and German thought,
but not on the English-speaking world. There is then a sense in
Philosophy and Revolution 73
which there has not been a revolution in philosophy in general since
Kant or Hegel. At most, there have been local revolutions: possibly
pragmatism in the United States, though it is very doubtful whether
Peirce, James, or Dewey really effected any basic and enduring
change; perhaps existentialism on the European continent; and
analytic philosophy in England and in the United States. But even
insofar as analytic philosophy involves a local revolution, it has had
a counter-revolutionary aspect. It would be tempting to conclude:
what matters is not to revolutionize philosophy, but to make philos-
ophy once again revolutionary.
Yet it would be folly to suggest that all philosophers ought to be
doing the same thing. It is no cause for regret that not every philos-
opher is a self-appointed critic of the age. But it would be a shame
if everybody waited to criticize until appointed, as if one became
a gadfly by appointment.
There is no single central tradition in philosophy, and men with
different interests and inclinations have no difficulty in appealing
to divergent precedents. A critic who protests his fellow philos-
ophers' growing preoccupation with agreement need not conclude
that all philosophers ought to agree. On the contrary, he should
protest against the many pressures brought to bear on young philos-
ophers to ensure that almost all of them are in agreement that "do-
ing philosophy" precludes being a gadfly.
That philosophers disagree is no cause for shame and no objec-
tion to philosophy. To the most important questions, several an-
swers are defensible; and most answers are reprehensible. Most
answers are thoughtless, conflict with relevant evidence, or involve
confusions, inconsistencies, and fallacies.
Scylla, the rock, thinks her own position the only one that is
respectable. Charybdis, the whirlpool, considers all outlooks equally
tenable. A virtuoso can triumphantly defend alternative positions.
Charybdis, her mind reeling, concludes giddily that all religions and
philosophies, all moral codes and works of art are on a par. Scylla,
with a mind of stone, resists all reasoning and insists that she alone
is right.
Petrified dogmatism and the eddies of relativism are equally
74 The Faith of a Heretic
unworthy of philosophers. They should sift the tenable from the
untenable, criticize what is false, especially when it is popular, and
develop with care plausible alternatives to what is long familiar.
Let one man champion one alternative, and his fellow another: fear
of disagreement is for a philosopher what fear of getting hurt is for
a soldier cowardice. And delight in a revolution that has brought
an end to widespread disagreement on important questions would
be uncomfortably close to rejoicing that philosophy "is in his grave;
after life's fitful fever he sleeps well."
Let some philosophers analyze misleading expressions while
others note discrepancies between synonyms; let some study the
meaning of moral terms while others become logicians and still
others write on Plato; and let a few continue to reflect on "moral
questions," in the hope that those who have given some thought to
meta-ethics and to the literature on both "morals" and meta-ethics
might be able to say something worth while about "morals." And
let some philosophers deal with religious questions, in the hope that
those who have thought about the meaning of religious terms and
studied the literature on religious terms, on diverse religious views,
and on religious questions might be able to contribute something
to the discussion of religious questions. Even if such hopes should
not be realized in the individual case, they are surely reasonable,
and the tradition is therefore worth continuing: if we fail, others
may learn from our mistakes and do better.
Similar considerations apply to form. Let some philosophers
favor the monograph, and others more artistic forms. Clearly, the
scholarly monograph is the best way of making some lands of con-
tributions; but it would be a pity if the monographic mind monop-
olized the field. Let us remember that most of the finest philosophic
classics were not monographs; for example, Plato's Symposium and
Plato's Republic, Hobbes's Leviathan and Spinoza's Ethics, Hume's
Treatise and Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hegel's
Phenomenology of the Spirit, and the whole lot of Nietzsche's books.
Each form has its dangers. They are too numerous to catalogue.
One obvious danger of the monograph is pedantry (see 4). But
pedantry will always be with us. The prophets scorned it, but some
Philosophy and Revolution 75
of the Talmudic rabbis carried it to new heights. Jesus opposed it,
but at the church councils it reached unprecedented triumphs. It
is not the shadow of science, but found in all ages: the misguided
aping of the natural sciences is merely one form of pedantry to
which Schiller's verse applies:
How he coughs and how he spits
Is quickly aped by lesser wits.
Pedantry is the mode in which the relatively uncreative can be
endlessly creative. Since creativity flags even in creative geniuses,
some of the very greatest, too, have sometimes sought security on
the crutches of pedantry including, for example, Thomas, Kant,
and Hegel.
Obviously, an aversion to pedantry is no guarantee of any worth;
and no philosopher has ever supposed that it was. Pretentious non-
pedants of little or no substance are legion.
Artistic modes of expression are likely to be merely suggestive and
needlessly inconclusive. One is apt to be treated to a brilliant display
of epigrammatic fireworks, but sometimes the writer does not stick
long enough with any point to show us what might be said for it
and what against it. Everything remains at the level of a suggestion,
and little is done to help us decide whether the suggestions are good
or bad. It is at this point that the monograph may seem to have its
strength; but actually many articles of the best analytic philosophers
are strangely inconclusive, too. No form is a panacea.
Some philosophers want to get across their experience of philos-
ophy, too that way of life in which the particular problems they
treat are merely episodes. They recall, and take seriously, Plato's
disdain, in his Seventh Letter, for "those who are not genuine
philosophers but painted over with opinions" and his insistence that
there neither was nor ever would be any written work of his con-
taining his own philosophy: "for this cannot be formulated like
other doctrines; but through continued application to the subject
itself and living with it, a spark is suddenly struck in the soul as by
leaping fire, and then grows by itself' (340 f .).
78 The Faith of a Heretic
A philosopher may try to communicate what, as he knows, can-
not be communicated to everybody. He may exert himself to strike
a spark here and there in a mind that is ready. He may hope that,
though some readers will merely browse, whether to take offense or
pleasure, others may, as it were, live with his book until the spark
leaps over.
Nor is there only one way of sticking with a point the mono-
graphic way. One may want to show how one point is related to
others, how a judgment derives part of its meaning from its rela-
tion to other judgments, how a view that is seemingly clear appears
in a different light when seen in a wider context. Microscopic work
can be of the greatest importance; but it has no monopoly on im-
portance, and not everything macroscopic is necessarily popular in
the bad sense or popular at all. The gadfly's function is hardly
a paradigm of popularity.
One can take up a single point and worry it as a dog worries a
bone, though occasionally with more fruitful results. One can also
ask oneself about the significance of a whole trend in philosophy,
and be carried hence into reflection about commitment, and then
theology, and then a non-theological approach to a theological
problem, and a non-theological appraisal of our religious heritage,
and the nature of organized religion, and morality. Such an attempt
to spell out a comprehensive position does not have to be uncritical,
merely inspirational, and unworthy of a philosopher. To be sure,
the effort is more hazardous than a painstaking and detailed analysis
of a single problem, and it is more likely to fail. But as Whitehead
remarked in Modes of Thought, "Panic of error is the death of prog-
ress" (22). As long as one is aware of the dangers and warns one's
readers, instead of wearing the mantle of omniscience, the risk is
hardly excessive: if the prose is clear, errors can be corrected.
Too many philosophers resemble Graham Greene or, rather,
try to: they strive for a competence that is always at its best pro-
fessional, craftsmanlike, even slick. Compared with Greene's fiction,
some of Camus's seems amateurish: his fiction has flaws and some-
time does not quite achieve what it seems to aim for; it is not slick
but approximate greatness.
Philosophy and Revolution 77
This point received its classic statement from a somewhat ama-
teurish poet who is in eclipse in our current period of professional-
ismin poetry, too: it is the theme of Robert Browning's long
poem, Andrea del Sarto (Called "The Faultless Painter 9 ). A few
lines at least may conclude this argument:
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a Heaven for? all is silver-grey,
Placid and perfect with my art the worse!
Then, looking at a work by Rafael (a curious choice Browning's,
not mine):
That arm is wrongly put and there again
A fault to pardon in the drawing's lines,
Its body, so to speak: its soul is right,
He means right that, a child may understand.
Still, what an arm! and I could alter it. ...
I hardly dare yet, only you to see,
Give the chalk here quick, thus the line should gol
Ay, but the soul! he's Rafael! rub it out!
16
The intellectual conscience of Socrates was superbly embodied by
J. L Austin, who also had a keen wit and a wonderful sense of
humor. G. E. Moore, whose writings are lacking in humor, stood
for the same heritage. And honesty that tries to live up to high
standards is so rare that such men as these deserve ungrudging ad-
miration. Still, it would be wrong to leave the case for Socrates'
other legacy, best symbolized by his own image of the gadfly, on
an unduly defensive note. It would be wrong, as well as deeply
un-Socratic, to ask merely that the gadfly, too, ought to be tolerated.
The anti-academic conception of philosophers as "the bad con-
science of their time" to cite Nietzsche's phrase once more was
78 The Fatih of a Heretic
taken up to some extent by Sartre and Camus, though their philo-
sophic works compare unfavorably with the writings of the best
British philosophers in intellectual conscientiousness and careful-
ness, as will be shown later in this book.
In a lecture at the Sorbonne, in 1946, at the first general meeting
of UNESCO, Sartre spoke on "The Responsibility of the Writer."
Like most of his non-fiction, the lecture is curiously uneven; and in
the next chapter, on "Commitment," I shall argue that it is a central
weakness of existentialism that it does not adequately understand
the nature of responsibility.
Sartre's reach often exceeds his grasp; but his best is magnificent,
and the following passage says powerfully what badly needs to be
said. (The curious "if" will be discussed later, in Section 92.)
"If a writer has chosen to be silent on one aspect of the world,
we have the right to ask him: Why have you spoken of this rather
than that? And since you speak in order to make a change, since
there is no other way you can speak, why do you want to change
this rather than that? Why do you want to alter the way in which
postage stamps are made rather than the way in which Jews are
treated in an anti-Semitic country? And the other way around. He
must therefore always answer the following questions: What do you
want to change? Why this rather than that?"
IV
COMMITMENT
17
Until recently, "being committed" meant being insane and
having been found out. But today it is widely felt that something
must be wrong with you if you are not committed to an institution.
Indeed, you are not supposed to wait for others to commit you; you
are expected to commit yourself.
One used to "commit" murder and armed robbery, adultery and
suicide, which were considered heinous crimes; one did not "com-
mit" good deeds and scarcely misdemeanors. "Commit" was a vicious
word until it was emancipated by Jean-Paul Sartre. To be more pre-
cise, "commitment" was rescued by those who sought an English
equivalent for Sartre's engagement. First they tried "engaging one-
self" and "engagement"; then they switched to "committing oneself"
and "commitment." Immediately, the theologians, preachers, and
evangelists took over. Always on the lookout for the newest wine to
replenish their dry old skins, they took enthusiastically to existential-
ism and commitment.
In their eminently understandable concern lest what they have to
offer us might be considered dated and anachronistic, those who
grace our pulpits often try to balance the imposing archaism of most
79
80 The Faith of a Heretic
of their utterances with some of the latest jargon. The holy tone of
many sermons, with its air of omniscience, conveys a mixture of an-
cient and modern notions, some wise and some foolish; and most
preachers lack the scholarship and thoughtf ulness required for a real
grasp of either the new or the old.
The reasons for this lack of scholarship and thoughtfulness are
manifold. Some of them are plainly connected with the kind of
training offered in theological seminaries, which will be considered
in the next chapter. Others are peculiar to the United States, where
a genuine reading knowledge of foreign languages has become a
rarity, and the seminaries, like even the best graduate schools, are
unable to remedy defects which should have been taken care of
early in the student's education.
As it is, "most clergymen . . . undertake to expound or defend the
scriptures without understanding the languages in which they are
written" to cite a profoundly thoughtful and scholarly clergyman,
Frederick C. Grant, whose Ancient Judaism and the New Testament
represents an admirable effort to fight the ignorance, the "prej-
udices," and the "misinterpretations" that are shared by "the vast
majority of the clergy in most churches" and, of course, by their
flocks.
"Unable to read their own sacred books," they are even less able
to keep up with the latest scholarship in history, philology, philos-
ophy, and other subjects that are relevant to their sermons. Many,
no doubt, lack the scholar's conscience; but even those who keenly
suffer from their lack of knowledge are generally in no position to
do much about it: the pressures of their office leave them little time
for study, and their income is for the most part inadequate for buy-
ing many books. But unfortunately scholarship is not irrelevant to
the majority of sermons.
Even so, it is widely supposed that those who spurn the Pablum
of the pulpits are of necessity an uncommitted lot. Surely, there are
many forms of commitment, and men of the cloth have no monopoly
on a term that they have appropriated from an avowedly atheistic
philosopher. Since "commitment" owes its current vogue to a philos-
Commitment 81
opher, it seems reasonable for a philosopher to take a critical look at
it and to call attention to some common errors.
This is doubly appropriate, considering that the previous chapter
dealt critically with analytic philosophy and ended with an eloquent
quotation from Sartre. It was suggested that too many English-
speaking philosophers were too exclusively academic. The idea of
commitment is close to the heart of existentialism; but it is sur-
rounded by confusions, not all of which are contributed by theolo-
gians. It will not do to spurn the academicians and espouse commit-
ment. A detailed consideration of commitment is needed. I propose
to take up several important pitfalls, one by one.
18
The first can be summed up in any one of three epigrams. With
apologies to Socrates, it might be phrased thus: the uncommitted
life is not worth living. Worse, it has been said that the only sin is
indifference a claim that indicates a staggering innocence of the
imagination. Most of us can think of other sins. Third, and worst of
all, any commitment is better than none.
All three formulations call attention to the shortcomings of luke-
warmness, timidity, and ceaseless hesitation. We are reminded of
the joys of courage and intensity. We recall Elijah risking his life to
say to his people, defying the king and his queen: "How long will
you go on limping on both legs? If the Lord is God, follow him; but
if Baal, then follow him." And the New Testament: "You are neither
cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot! So, because you are
lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my
mouth." And Nietzsche: The secret of the greatest fruitfulness and
the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to Uve dangerously T
Among the finest writers of the twentieth century some have used
their best persuasive powers to make us feel the poverty of any
uncommitted life. Martin Buber tells of a Hasidic rabbi who said
and Buber agrees: "Everybody should see which way his heart
82 The Faith of a Heretic
draws him, and then he should choose this way with all his heart."
And Hermann Hesse, in his Journey to the East (Morgenlandfahrt),
created a short novel in which a number of people who are dissatis-
fied with the emptiness of modem life men, as it happens, who
come out of his previous novels decide to go on a curious crusade.
They are not at all clear about the aim and object of their journey:
what matters to them is the break with their futile, prosy lives and
the commitment not to anything specific. We are led to feel that
the hero of the story, who loses faith, questions the journey, and
withdraws, has sinned; that unquestioning and blind obedience is a
price that must be paid for an intense commitment; and that, apart
from this, life cannot be worth-while.
Hesse left Germany before the First World War and then did not
return because he strongly disapproved of all those tendencies that
not long after culminated in the horrors of the Nazi regime Like
Buber, he is deeply sensitive. It is from men like these that the rest
of us learn, if we ever do, the meaning of humanity. Their person-
alities qualify their ideas. But if the same ideas are considered
apart from the men proposing them and accepted by men of a dif-
ferent character, we realize that these ideas badly need qualifica-
tion and without it are untenable.
Hesse's novel appeared just before the Nazis came to power and
in retrospect helps to explain Hitler's success. To be sure, Hesse did
not influence events: he was not an author cherished by the brown
shirts on the contrary. But Hesse's Journey to the East reflects a
state of mind, a mood, a yearning that was widespread at that time;
and millions of young men who shared it, without also sharing
Hesse's other qualities, found the commitment they required by
becoming Nazis.
When a man like Buber stops to "see which way his heart draws
him" before he decides to "choose this way with all his heart," the
question is presumably whether to write this book or that, whether
he should continue work on his German version of the Hebrew
Bible or give some lectures. But another man might find that his
heart draws him to the Nazi party and might choose that way with
all his heart, becoming a fanatical Elite Guard. The rabbi whom
Commitment 83
Buber quotes was thinking of different ways of serving God, but
many a heart has been drawn to serve God in strange ways.
In Europe and the Jews, Malcolm Hay, a Catholic historian, re-
minds us that "the First Crusade (1096) . . . began and ended with
a massacre. The men who took the cross/ wrote [Lord] Acton [an-
other great Catholic historian], 'after receiving communion, heartily
devoted the day to the extermination of the Jews/ They killed about
ten thousand of them. When Godfrey of Bouillon, in the summer of
1099, succeeded after a heroic assault in capturing Jerusalem, he
spent the first week slaughtering the inhabitants. The Jews were
shut up in their synagogue, which was then set on fire. 'If you want
to know what has been done with the enemy found in Jerusalem/
wrote Godfrey to the Pope, learn that in the Porch and in the
Temple of Solomon, our people had the vile blood of the Saracens
up to the knees of their horses' " (37).
Clearly, the Crusaders were a committed lot and followed the
way toward which their hearts had drawn them with uncompromis-
ing and devout intensity. Hay's book shows that the Crusaders were
emphatically no exception any more than the Inquisitors. In this
profound lack of humanity, some of the greatest saints, Luther, and
Calvin were at one.
The generation born just before and during the Second World
War has been called unsilent and beat; but on reflection these labels
do not fit, or at least do not set these young men apart. It is more
illuminating to speak of an uncommitted generation. Few indeed
are beat, and the young people after the Second World War are not
more vocal than the young men after the first. What distinguishes
them is that they are not committed to any cause. This may possibly
be regrettable, but one would have to be blind indeed to claim that
any commitment is better than none: blind to the atrocities com-
mitted by committed Christians, Communists, Nazis, and other
fanatics.
If it should be held that "bad" commitments are not really com-
mitments, we should still need criteria for telling the good from the
bad, or the commitment that is a commitment from one that is not
What is untenable is the indiscriminate claim that any commitment
84 The Fatih of a Heretic
is better than none. With the qualified assertion that a good commit-
ment is better than none, one need not quarrel; but it raises the
question how we are to tell a good commitment from a bad one,
regardless of the name we reserve for the latter.
19
The second great pitfall is to pit commitment against reason. If,
again, we want a representative who deserves our respect and in
many ways our admiration, too, the best man to consider may well
be Kierkegaard. In his Journals he confided: "The point is to find
the truth which is truth for me, to find that idea for which I am
ready to live and die" (22). With single-minded passion and sincer-
ity he looked for a commitment and found that neither reason nor
philosophy could furnish him with the idea that he needed. He con-
cluded that at least reason and philosophy should "take nothing
away and least of all should fool people out of something as if it
were nothing" (Pear and Trembling, 44). Yet precisely this is the
function of a training in philosophy: to fool people out of something
as if it were nothing.
Most teachers of philosophy, to be sure, do not have any list of
notions that they want to fool their students out of; nor are they
insidious. But any training in philosophy will fool people out of
many of their childhood beliefs incidentally, by training their crit-
ical powers and by leading them to think more carefully and more
conscientiously. Beliefs common in the child's environment and
never questioned previously fall victim to a newly learned demand
for clarity, consistency, and evidence. Racial and other prejudices,
superstitions, and the parents' firm religious and political convictions
are often outgrown.
There are many who simply ignore this. Others, who are alarmed,
may take heart from the fact that the average college graduate does
not require more than ten or twenty years to revert to many of the
notions of his childhood. Having accomplished this feat, he is likely
to condemn all that reminds him of his brief, faint-hearted glimmer-
Commitment 85
ings of wisdom as an adolescent folly. He mistakes his own adoles-
cent intimations of the outlook of the Buddha, Socrates, or Nietzsche
for the views of these men; his own short-lived and shallow atheism
for the one alternative to Christian faith as he now understands it;
and the notions of his immaturity for the quintessence of philoso-
phy, liberalism, rationalism, radicalism, or whatever else he now
disdains and thinks he knows first hand.
Though the majority of those who during their student days have
been exposed briefly to philosophy have never felt its bite and there-
fore do not take it very seriously, Kierkegaard was not one of those.
To him, philosophy appeared as a great threat, critical thinking as
insubordination, and reason as the enemy. Objections to Christian-
ity, he says, do not issue from doubt, as many people think. "Objec-
tions against Christianity come from insubordination, unwillingness
to obey, rebellion against all authority" (Journals 630). What is
wanted is blind obedience, acceptance of what seems absurd to our
reason, and belief without any chance of comprehension. "The mis-
fortune of our age in the political as well as in the religious sphere,
and in all things is disobedience, unwillingness to obey. And one
deceives oneself and others by wishing to make us imagine that it is
doubt. No, it is insubordination."
These sentences, written shortly before the revolutions of 1848,
Kierkegaard reaffirms a year later in another preface for the same
book, On Authority and Revelation. And in that book he argues
quite specifically that it is blasphemy to base obedience to words
that are presented to us as the words of God on their profundity or
beauty, or even to base our belief that they are truly words of God
on an examination of their contents. Whether the words are the
words of Scripture, the words of a contemporary apostle, or words
that are directly revealed to us, those who say, "Let us see whether
the content of the doctrine is divine, for in that case we will accept
it along with the claim that it was revealed," are mocking God. Nor
should a son obey his father because the father has greater wisdom
and experience than the boy, "which is entirely beside the point."
He should obey simply because his father is his father; and the
words of God should be obeyed because they are presented to us as
86 The Faith of a Heretic
the words of God. Those who doubt whether they truly come from
God are guilty of insubordination.
Kierkegaard was not blind to the dangers of his doctrine, and with
that wholehearted radicalism which distinguished him he faced these
dangers squarely in a little book which he himself esteemed one of
the very best of all the more than twenty books he published in a
dozen years not counting several he did not himself publish and
the many volumes of his Journals. In Fear and Trembling, Kierke-
gaard confronts the possibility that God's word might be absurd not
merely by coming into conflict with our reason but by contradicting
morals. And instead of pussyfooting by considering white lies or
some really not very serious matters, Kierkegaard has us reflect on
murder not assassination of a tyrant but premeditated murder of
one's own son. We have no right whatever to admire Abraham as
the great paragon of faith, as Christians have done ever since St.
Paul and as Kierkegaard himself does plainly with awe-struck en-
thusiasm, unless we are prepared, he says, to look up with an equal
reverence to a man who in our time is prepared to murder because
God commands him to or rather because he believes that God
commands this sacrifice.
Out of the complacency of the Victorian Era, irritated beyond
measure by the stuffy smugness of the little capital of Denmark,
Copenhagen, Kierkegaard longed for the strong faith of those dis-
tant ages when men did not shrink from translating religion into
action and did things that would have shocked Victorian Denmark.
Sadly, he described himself as a mere "knight of resignation" whom
his critical intelligence had rendered quite incapable of ever acting
with the confident assurance of the "knight of faith" who never
doubts that all the suffering he must inflict on others will be for the
best.
When Johannes Hus, the Bohemian reformer and forerunner of
Luther, was burned as a heretic at the Council of Constance in 1415,
he described the qualities Kierkegaard so wistfully extolled in just
two words. Tied to the stake, with the flames already licking at his
body, Hus beheld an ardent peasant stepping forward to contribute
Commitment 87
a small piece of wood to the burning pile; and Hus expired with the
exclamation: sancta simplicitas holy simplicity!
After the Second World War, it is obvious that the world is beset
by not a lack but a frightening excess of such simplicity. There are
only too many who are quite prepared to kill for their faith's sake,
quite confident that all the suffering they spread will prove somehow
to be worth while, even if at the moment that should seem absurd.
Kierkegaard, of course, was thinking of a sacrifice that was at
least as painful for the agent as it might be for the victim. In fact,
he improved on the motto "it hurts me more than it hurts you" by
refusing altogether to consider any suffering but the agent's. Neither
the feelings of the boy about to be sacrificed nor the probable reac-
tion of his mother when she hears of what has happened are con-
sidered relevant. The agent simply does what, but for the express
command, he never should have done and even now should hate to
do, were it not for his utter confidence that all will somehow turn
out well. He does not question how; he has no doubts; he is not
insubordinate. Little does Kierkegaard realize that of such are the
kingdoms of darkness!
What Kierkegaard sanctions in effect is fanaticism: the attitude of
those who willingly suffer everything for their unquestioned faith,
and who obediently commit atrocities for it, too. What he had in
mind, however, is not the fanatic as the popular mind pictures him,
brandishing fire and sword. In ordinary life, says Kierkegaard, we
could not tell the knight of faith from any simple tax collector. A
frightening insight! It applies not only to the peasant who evoked
Hus's final words, or to the businesslike, unsentimental, unsadistic
men whom Rubens pictured driving nails through St. Peter's hands
and feet, completely unaware of what the man might feel whom
they are crucifying upside down; it also applies to millions in
Hitler's Germany, Soviet Russia, and elsewhere. As Oscar Wilde
said: "Ordinary cruelty is simply stupidity. It is the entire want of
imagination.''
Kierkegaard saw that reason and philosophy were unable to tell
him what idea he should choose to live and die by. Hence, he de-
spised philosophy and reason. What he, like millions of others, over-
88 The Faith of a Heretic
looked is a very simple but important point: reason and philosophy
may well safeguard a man against ideas for which he might better
not live or die. Indeed, if reason and philosophy had no other func-
tion whatsoever, this alone would make them overwhelmingly im-
portant. But Kierkegaard, and by no means only he, defiantly aban-
dons reason in his eager search for a commitment, and sanctions
atrocities beyond his own imagination.
"What our age lacks is not reflection but passion," says the author
of Fear and Trembling. By reminding ourselves of his Victorian
setting and recalling that the issue for himself was at the moment
nothing more than breaking his engagement in the firm belief that
marriage would not be compatible with his true calling, we can
sympathize. For all that, it is clear that he was wrong in 1843; and
a hundred years later, if not before that, his sentence reads like a
poor joke. There is no longer any excuse for this pitfall.
Kierkegaard and the later existentialists and theologians who have
followed in his steps direct our attention to the limits of reason. But
they overlook the crucial difference between responsible and irre-
sponsible decisions. There are situations in our lives when all the
reasoning of the world cannot tell us what to do. We reason one
way and another, and we weigh the interests of all the people who
are likely to be affected by this decision or that, and we still do not
know what to do. Should we conclude then that all deliberation is
a waste of time, and always beside the point, and that it would be
just as well to throw a coin, to count our buttons, or to act on im-
pulse? The person who does that acts irresponsibly, even if by sheer
luck he should do something that turns out well. The person, on the
other hand, who does reflect on the probable effects of his decisions
on the people who are likely to be affected, who relies on reason and
on evidence, if only to eliminate some choices, acts responsibly even
if he later finds that he has done the wrong thing. (Cf. 22 and 85.)
The whole point of an education, and not only of philosophy, is
to make people more responsible. One cannot teach one's students,
nor even oneself, always to do what is best; but one can try to teach
oneself and others to become a little less impulsive and irrational
and more conscientious and responsible. Nobody favors always act-
Commitment 89
ing with an utter disregard for evidence and reason; but some peo-
ple admonish us to throw both to the winds when it comes to the
most important choices which is rather like being very careful
when walking, but shutting both eyes firmly when one drives at
high speeds; or like choosing one's dinner guests carefully, while
picking the name of one's bride-to-be out of a hat; or like playing
cards with great care but also being addicted to playing Chinese
roulette a new game that consists of pointing a revolver now in
this direction and now in that, spinning the chamber and pulling
the trigger, knowing that there is one dud in the chamber and hop-
ing for the best
The idea that a man must crucify his reason before he commits
himself is not original with Kierkegaard. There is a long Christian
tradition behind it, and Luther expressed it even more powerfully
than Kierkegaard. He called reason "the devil's bride," a "beautiful
whore," and "God's worst enemy," and said: "There is on earth
among all dangers no more dangerous thing than a richly endowed
and adroit reason." Again: "Reason must be deluded, blinded, and
destroyed," and "faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and
understanding" (XII, 1530, VIII, 2048, V, 1312; and III, 215).
If we discard our reason, mortify our understanding, and take
leave of our senses, how can we be sure that what we accept is the
word of God? The mere fact that something is presented to us as the
word of God is clearly insufficient. One has only to write an article
on matters of religion in a popular magazine to be swamped with
letters, little pamphlets, and big books that claim to offer nothing
less than God's own truth; but, alas, they are far from agreeing with
each other. Which one, then, should we accept? Perhaps one of
those that claim to have been written by celestial beings? Pray, some
people counsel, and God will reveal himself to you. The Crusaders,
after praying and receiving communion, "heartily devoted the day
to the extermination of the Jews." Luther, who prayed with un-
common passion and intensity, counseled the Germans to "set fire
to their synagogues," to "break down and destroy their houses," and
to "drive them out of the country" (XX, 2478 ff.). But perhaps it is
a mistake to pray to the God of Christendom; perhaps we should
90 The Faith of a Heretic
rather pray to Allah, or to Shiva, or possibly to some Australian god,
or to some idol? How are we to choose if evidence and reason are
thrown out of court?
This, then, is the second pitfall concerning commitment: to pit
commitment against reason and to claim that reason, because it has
its limitations, must be trampled underfoot.
20
The third common error about commitment is less radical and
dangerous than either of the first two: it does not consider just any
commitment better than none, nor does it oppose reason altogether;
but it pits commitment against philosophy, scholarship, and the
academic life.
This, too, may be illustrated from the writings of a man who
deserves respect and admiration: the Jewish existentialist, Franz
Rosenzweig. On the basis of his two-volume study of Hegel und
der Stoat, the great German historian, Friedrich Meinecke, offered
him a university lectureship, which Rosenzweig declined. Explain-
ing his decision in an interesting letter (August 30, 1920), Rosenzweig
refers to his more recent religious book, Der Stern der Erlosung
(The Star of Bedemption), which had ended with the words "into
life," and to his work as the founder of an institute of Jewish studies
in Frankfurt:
"My new book is only a book. . . . The . . . demands of the day
which are made on me in my position ... I mean, the nerve-wrack-
ing, picayune, and at the same time very necessary struggles with
people and conditions, have now become the real core of my exist-
ence. . . . The search for knowledge no longer seems to me an end
in itself It is here that my heresy against the unwritten law of
the university originates. Not every question seems to me worth
asking. . . . Now I only inquire when I find myself inquired of.
Inquired of, that is, by men rather than by scholars. . . . You will
now be able to understand what keeps me away from the university
and forces me to follow the path I have chosen. . . ."
Commitment 91
As a personal statement, explaining his own decision, Rosen-
zweig's letter is hardly debatable, though one may note that most
professors, too, do not consider every question worth asking, and
that it does not follow from that alone that one should inquire
only when presented with questions by other people. To arrive at
that conclusion, one requires an additional presupposition: that no
problems at all are left that bother us ourselves or, to approxi-
mate Rosenzwieg's formulation, that no question whatsoever seems
to me worth asking as long as I am left to myself. Having finished
his book, Rosenzweig appears to have reached a state of intellec-
tual satiety a state most other people reach without writing a
book first.
This analysis is borne out by another letter, written eight years
later (September 2, 1928), not long before his death: "With my
philosophic writings my experience resembles Schopenhauer's:
after the 'main work* everything else turns into parerga, paralipom-
ena, and a Second Part that is a commentary on the first. Or rather
since Schopenhauer's pompous and bombastic self-importance
isn't at all my style . . . everything that still comes in my case comes
as verse for special occasions."
There are personal circumstances that are not relevant to the
issue here but still worth mentioning. Shortly after the first letter,
Rosenzweig was attacked by a very rare disease and gradually be-
came paralyzed. Soon he could neither speak nor write. A special
device was constructed for him, so he could look at one letter at a
time, and his wife, following his eyes, as nobody else was able to,
would take dictation. In this state he undertook a new translation
of the Hebrew Bible, together with his close friend, Martin Buber,
and kept writing ceaselessly, essays as well as letters, without ever
letting the enormous pains involved in every single word keep him
from sprinkling everything he wrote and his conversation, too
with his abundant wit. Never satisfied with mere approximations
and all but incapable of compromise in matters of this sort, he con-
sidered every word and every phrase an issue of conscience in trans-
lating the Bible, and he retained enough vitality in conversation and
dictation to refuse, to the very last day, to deny himself a jocular re-
92 The Faith of a Heretic
mark or a nice phrase. The epic of his illness is one of the really
imposing tales of heroism in the modern world.
What is germane in the present context, however, is Rosenzweig's
implication that those who lecture at a university and write are
necessarily uncommitted, unlike politicians and administrators,
preachers and journalists. This is a popular and false idea.
If committing oneself means not being noncommittal; if it means
taking a stand, sticking one's neck out, and refusing to remain aloof
and lukewarm; then many a writer, scholar, and teacher commits
himself far more courageously and unmistakably than most theolo-
gians and administrators.
There is a wonderful sentence in Simone de Beauvoir's Les Man-
darins: "He contemplated the world from the height of an unwritten
book." To publish any book at all involves some commitment,
doubly so if the volume is, as it were, a piece of the writer and not
a piece of history or sure of the acclaim of some group.
A philosopher or playwright need not renounce his vocation and
become a journalist or politician to commit himself; and if he has
it in him to write an outstanding play or essay he would be a fool
to bury his talent, or to exchange it for what Nietzsche once called
"the wretched ephemeral babble of politics" and the papers. Con-
versely, one may hazard the guess that the man who does give up
philosophy, plays, or the novel to commit himself to journalism or
administration is in all probability unsure that he can write another
good book.
Those committed to an institution generally claim that all those
who prefer fresh air and freedom lack the courage to commit
themselves. In fact, the shoe is on the other foot. More often than
not, commitment to an institution issues from a want of courage to
stand up alone. Typically, it is an escape, a search for togetherness,
for safety in numbers. Whether one joins the Communist party or
the Catholic church, the Nazis or one of the Protestant denomina-
tions, the point may be, though it need not be, that one avoids the
risk henceforth of sticking out one's neck, except in company; one
no longer needs to take a stand from day to day, from issue to issue,
from question to question. From now on, answers need no longer be
Commitment gg
sought; they can be looked up in the catechism or sidestepped with
a firm reminder of one's institutional identity.
Of course, there are institutions to which one can commit oneself
without compromising freedom, integrity, and honesty. And one
can compromise all three without joining any institution.
Commitment to a doctrinaire position is usually a form of escape.
The classical analysis of this was furnished by Sartre in his "Portrait
of the Anti-Semite." This essay does not by any means deal with
racial prejudice only.
"The rational man seeks the truth gropingly, he knows that his
reasoning is only probable, that other considerations will arise to
make it doubtful; ... he is 'open,' he may even appear hesitant.
But there are people who are attracted by the durability of stone.
They want to be massive and impenetrable, they do not want to
change: where would change lead them? This is an original fear of
oneself and a fear of truth. And what frightens them is not the
content of truth which they do not even suspect, but the very form
of the true that thing of indefinite approximation. . . . They want
to exist all at once and right away. They do not want acquired opin-
ions, they want them to be innate; since they are afraid of reason-
ing, they want to adopt a mode of life in which reasoning and re-
search play but a subordinate role, in which one never seeks but
that which one has already found. . . . Only passion can produce
this. Nothing but a strong emotional bias can give instant certitude,
it alone can hold reasoning within limits, it alone can remain im-
pervious to experience. ... If out of courtesy he consents momen-
tarily to defend his point of view, he lends himself without giving
himself; he simply tries to project his intuitive certainty onto the
field of speech. ... If you insist too much they close up, they point
out with one superb word that the time to argue has passed. . . .
This man is afraid of any kind of solitude. ... If he has become an
anti-Semite, it is because one cannot be anti-Semitic alone. This
sentence: 'I hate the Jews/ is a sentence which is said in chorus; by
saying.it one connects oneself with a tradition and a community.
..."(274 ff.).
Similar needs may be satisfied by joining a church or the Com-
94 The Faith of a Heretic
munist party or with almost, if not entirely, equal success by
adopting some definitive position (saying, for example, "As for me,
I am an atheist") or by seeking an identity by means of certain
mannerisms or a jargon. One may escape into a jargon that allies
one with a school and shows at one blow where one stands some-
times a style will do as well or, more rarely, a man may seek
refuge in a jargon of his own. What matters is that, once this step
is taken, no more really disturbing questions can arise. The funda-
mentals are settled once and for all, and henceforth all problems are
solved by extrapolation. And one conceals one's fear of freedom,
novelty, and future choices by imputing to all those who have not
similarly sought security a lack of courage to commit themselves.
This is one of the most striking instances of those peculiar linguis-
tic habits that George Orwell ridiculed in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Just as most of Sartre's readers assume thoughtlessly that he is
criticizing anti-Semites only, Orwell's think for the most part that
he is writing only about communism or, at most, about totalitarian-
ism. Few realize how similar the conclusion of Orwell's novel is to
ever so much preaching. In the end the hero is converted and
renounces heresy:
"He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven,
his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing every-
thing, implicating everybody. ... He gazed up at the enormous
face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was
hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunder-
standing! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breastl Two
gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all
right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had
won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
21
Some who love Big Brother claim that, deep down, everybody
loves Big Brother; only some of us fail to realize it. To be more
precise: some modern theologians argue that everybody is commit-
Commitment 95
ted, whether he knows it or not. Some put the point this way: the
question is merely who our gods are, for everybody has some gods.
Others claim that all men have some ultimate concern or something
that is holy to them, and the question is only whether the object of
this concern is really ultimate or rather idolatrous. Some admit that
most men have many ultimate concerns and are really "polytheists";
others insist that true ultimacy involves monotheism, and that as
long as we are dealing with many concerns none can be really
ultimate.
All these ways of speaking are metaphorical, evocative, and ex-
ceedingly unclear. Not only frivolous people lack any ultimate con-
cern and are in an important sense uncommitted but the same is
true of millions of very serious college students who wonder what
they should do with themselves after graduation. There is nothing
to which they greatly desire to give themselves, nothing that matters
deeply to them. They are not shallow; they are not playboys; they
enjoyed many of their courses and appreciate the opportunity to
discuss their problems with sympathetic professors. They do not
say: nothing matters to me. What they do say is: no one or two
things matter more to me than anything else. These young men and
women constitute the uncommitted generation; and it seems better
to recognize this difference than to gloss it over by claiming that
everybody has his own ultimate concern.
In any case, what is an "ultimate concern"? What is mine? What
is my "God" if these theologians are right and everybody ulti-
mately has his "God"? I am not non-committal, not adrift, not hard
put to find some project to devote myself to. I feel no inclination to
pose as a cynic, saying: nothing is holy to me. But what, specifically,
is holy to me?
The fashionable assumption that what is holy to a man is what
he is ultimately concerned with is extremely dubious. When we say
that something is holy to a person, we often mean that he won't
stand for any humorous remarks about it, that the object is taboo
for him in some sense. But such a taboo does not necessarily indi-
cate any ultimate concern, perhaps only an underdeveloped sense
of humor.
96 The Faith of a Heretic
The dedications of at least some of my books, including this one,
point to deep concerns, but hardly to "gods" or to any one "ulti-
mate" concern. Some sense of responsibility to the six million Jews
killed in my lifetime, especially to some whom I loved and who
loved me, and to millions of others, Jew and Gentile, killed in our
time and in past centuries, is certainly among my deepest feelings.
Still, that is hardly my ultimate concern. Neither is this book, though
I am deeply involved in that. Nor is it at all plausible to say that
these are symbols for something more ultimate.
Perhaps I come closest to discovering my ultimate concerns when
I ask what I consider the cardinal virtues. I shall try to answer that
question in the "Morality" chapter of this book. But here, too, it is
exceedingly difficult to know just what virtues one considers most
important And if one selects several, does that make one a poly-
theist?
The point at stake here is not autobiographical. I merely want to
bring out how unhelpful and misleading many fashionable state-
ments about commitment are. And instead of confining myself to
semantic considerations, I have tried to take these statements as
seriously as possible, seeing what they might mean if one applied
them to oneself.
Much of the talk in this vein that one hears from theologians can
hardly be taken seriously. It is said that man must have a god, or
that man always worships either God or an idol, and that man can-
not find true existence in the worship of an idol. One asks oneself
whether Shakespeare, Goethe, or Van Gogh worshiped God or
hateful thought unlike our theologians, never did find "true exist-
ence." Surely, some great artists are believers, and some are not,
there is no party line among great artists in this matter; and it is
futile to argue who did, and who did not, achieve "true existence."
One question, however, is worth pressing. Who really has a single
ultimate concern? If that phrase has any definite meaning, it would
seem to imply a willingness to sacrifice all other concerns to one's
sole ultimate concern. Having only one ultimate concern might
well be the recipe for fanaticism. It is the mark of a humane person
Commitment 97
that he has several ultimate concerns that check and balance each
other.
To have many commitments might seem to be the formula of an
arid and scattered life, spread thin, lacking depth, but it is hard to
generalize about that. Goethe had a staggering number of commit-
ments and a singularly rich and fruitful life, with no lack of pas-
sion or profundity. But one can safely generalize that those who,
spurning more than one concern, insist on a single commitment
either abandon humanity for fanaticism or, more often, engage in
loose talk.
22
Others confound commitment with faith, trust, and loyalty, as if,
of these terms, the first two and the last two were the same. Faith
and commitment are not the same. I can have faith in a person
without feeling committed to that person; and I can feel committed
to a person without expecting much of him. Similarly, one can be
loyal to a man although one does not trust him entirely; and one
can trust him but not be loyal to him.
Faith, including faith in a person, always involves belief that
some propositions are true; for example, that he will do this and
not that. Faith in God, too, cannot be wholly divorced from be-
liefs. That everybody has beliefs is surely true; but the difference
that matters is not, as some theologians suppose, between belief
in and belief that, but between beliefs held rationally and respon-
sibly, and beliefs held irrationally and irresponsibly.
The distinction between responsible and irresponsible decisions
has already been explained earlier in this chapter, in connection
with Kierkegaard. Nor would it matter greatly if someone insisted
that all beliefs are irrational to some extent: as was pointed out in
the course of our contrast of honesty and sincerity ( 7), one does
not speak of perfect courage or humility, and it is not necessary to
speak of perfect honesty or rationality either to make sense of all-
98 The Faith of a Heretic
important differences of degree. Some beliefs are far more irra-
tional than others.
Commitments do not necessarily involve beliefs that anything is
the case; but they can still be more or less rational and responsible.
They are more so, if we have conscientiously considered any relevant
evidence and what can be said against them. They are irrational
and irresponsible if they are made blindly and maintained with
closed minds.
It is widely supposed that one simply has to have firm beliefs and
close one's mind to be able to act, at least in matters of importance.
This is surely false.
As children, many of us had doctors who seemed omniscient,
though in retrospect it turns out that some of our physicians knew
very little. They made a great show of taking our temperature once
or twice a day when we had chicken pox or measles, and they
wisely predicted that after so many days we should probably be
well again. We gained the impression that they had cured us. A
little later in life we began to encounter doctors who frequently
admitted that they did not know what was the matter, doctors who
frankly conceded their ignorance and acted without the benefit of
firm beliefs and sometimes, though not always, did effect cures.
They might say something like this:
There are several possibilities. I should lik&to run a series of tests
which will probably not be conclusive, but which should eliminate
some possibilities. Then we can try such and such a treatment; and
if that does not work, another.
In a more drastic case, a doctor might say: the chances are that
you do not have a malignancy; but if I watt till I can be sure of
that, it might be too late if I discovered after a while that there was
a cancer, so I suggest an operation.
It may be more comforting to have a doctor who pretends to
know what in fact he does not know; but it is part of growing up to
realize that, lacking knowledge, men must constantly act on un-
certainties. The doctor who operates need not believe firmly that he
is removing a cancer. If he is responsible he will try to act on the
Commitment 99
best guess that the time and circumstances permit, remembering all
the while that his best guess might prove to be wrong. And when
evidence turns up to show that he was wrong, or even that his
guess was not the best one possible under the circumstances, he will
face the facts. Remembering that one might be wrong, and being
willing to admit one's errors even in important matters, may be
difficult; it is certainly not impossible. It constitutes a large part of
honesty and rationality.
Some commitments may have to be honored even if one comes
to see in time that it was a mistake to undertake them in the first
place. Even in such cases, it does not follow that, being committed,
one has to believe firmly that one did the right thing. One can do
what is honorable, and be honest, too.
23
It is hazardous to generalize about existentialism because the
denotation of this label is a matter of debate. But it seems safe to
say that most of the so-called existentialists, as well as most, if not
all, of the theologians who like to call themselves existentialist, have
occupied themselves with commitment without ever seeing or say-
ing clearly what distinguishes a responsible commitment from an
irresponsible one. ( In Sartre's case, I hope to show this at the end
of the "Morality" chapter, at least as far as his celebrated lecture
"Existentialism is a Humanism" is concerned. ) While most analytic
philosophers do not philosophically examine life's most important
decisions because they think that philosophers have no special com-
petence for that, the spokesmen of commitment generally refrain
from such scrutiny because they commit one or more of the errors
analyzed here.
Let us look back once more at the pitfalls considered in this
chapter: if committing oneself means taking a stand instead of
being non-committal, few indeed will say after reflection, though
many have said thoughtlessly, sometimes in understandable exas-
100 The Faith of a Heretic
peration, that any commitment at all, no matter how horrible, is still
better than none. And if committing oneself is taken more narrowly
to mean joining a group of people dedicated to some cause, it is
doubtful whether anybody would maintain that joining any group,
however horrible, is to be preferred to going it alone.
Those who pit commitment against reason and advise us to blind
and destroy our reason before making the most crucial choice of our
life are apologists for one specific set of doctrines which, to use
Paul's word, are "foolishness" to those who have not taken leave of
reason. They say their doctrine is infallible and true, but ignore the
fact that there is no dearth whatsoever of pretenders to infallibility
and truth. They may think they chose their doctrine because it is
offered to us as infallible and true, but this is plainly no sufficient
reason: scores of other doctrines, scriptures, and apostles, sects and
parties, cranks and sages make the same claim. Those who claim to
know which of the lot is justified in making such a bold claim, those
who tell us that this faith or that is really infallible and true are
presupposing in effect, whether they realize this or not, that they
themselves happen to be infallible. Those who have no such exalted
notion of themselves have no way of deciding between dozens of
pretenders if reason is proscribed. Those who are asking us to spurn
reason are in effect counseling us to trust to luck. But luck in such
cases is unusual.
Those who pit commitment against writing and philosophy, as if
only politicians and administrators ever took a stand or stuck their
necks out, are plainly wrong about the facts. Indeed, joining an
organization often, though not always, serves the function of escap-
ing from the threat of ever again having to make up one's own
mind about matters of importance. What is most often spoken of as
commitment par excellence is really a studied refuge from commit-
ments.
Those who say that everybody is committed, or that everybody
has some ultimate concern, or that man must have a god, engage in
needlessly vague and elusive talk that blurs significant distinctions.
The fashionable juxtaposition of belief in and belief that generally
Commitment 101
overlooks that belief in involves beliefs that; and it, too, distracts
attention from the crucial difference between responsible and ir-
responsible commitments.
The point of this chapter is not to attack commitment, but to at-
tack some widespread confusions that surround the concept of com-
mitment and vitiate not only most discussions of the subject but
also the commitments which some people actually make. I am far
from opposing all forms of commitment: this book invites the reader
to commit himself to the quest for nonesty. It does not follow that
the philosopher and the theologian are two birds of a feather, and
that one commitment is as good as another, nor even that all com-
mitments have the same structure and, at least basically, the same
effects. Far from it. To show this clearly, we must consider theology
at some length.
AGAINST THEOLOGY
24
What is theology? Certainly not what Webster's New Inter-
national Dictionary says it is when giving one of its meanings as
the "critical, historical, and psychological study of religion." This
definition is introduced with the words, "More loosely"; but any
definition which would make Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, Nietzsche's Antichrist, and Freud's Future of an
Illusion exercises in theology is not only loose but absurd.
The same dictionary, which is known as "the supreme authority,"
defines a theologian as "a person well versed in theology" or a
"writer on theology." This would not only turn Gibbon, Freud, and
Nietzsche into theologians; any critic of theology, being a "writer
on theology," would himself be a theologian.
This usage has no basis in the etymology of the word nor in
judiciously spoken English, though such thoughtlessness occasionally
finds expression in the language. The Unabridged furnishes a mo-
tive for this misuse of "theology" by immediately following it up
with a quotation from the Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Many speak
of theology as a science of religion [instead of "science of God"] be-
cause they disbelieve that there is any knowledge of God to be at-
103
104 The Faith of a Heretic
tained." In other words: some people, believing that theology
involves deception and that such great theologians as Aquinas and
Calvin were impostors, prefer not to say so outright and instead ap-
propriate such words as "theologian" and "theology" for something
else which is respectable.
Some of those who say that every man has an ultimate concern,
and that man must have a god, also say that every scientist is a
hidden theologian because he is a human being. Since the Second
World War, theologians have amassed a whole arsenal of such
ploys. To use an ancient name, the stratagem is a form of tu quoque
you are doing it, too. To do justice to its kindly intent, one can
call it instead conversion by definition. And to call attention to its
occasionally crushing effect on unsuspecting victims, one may chris-
ten it the bear's hug.
All these comfortable ambiguities forestall a critical appraisal of
theology, though this is badly needed. To be sure, the early posi-
tivists rejected theology as meaningless; but they rejected so much
else as no less meaningless that theology was in good company: it
was not singled out for criticism and examined closely.
Soon, moreover, it was noted that the early positivists had used
"meaningless" in a rather unusual sense: what was "meaningless,"
as they employed that term, was really quite "meaningful" in the
usual sense of that word, so one cared even less. When it was
widely recognized that some of the positivists' prose was meaning-
less by their own standards, their initial repudiation of theology
came to be considered an amusing episode, no more.
Wittgenstein himself had taken this insight in his stride. In his
Tractatus, he had said: "Most of the propositions and questions that
have been written about philosophical matters are not false but
nonsensical" (62); also, "My propositions elucidate by leading him
that understands me to recognize them in the end as nonsensical,
after he has climbed through them on them beyond them" (188).
After the Second World War some of the heirs of the later
Wittgenstein reversed the line of his early followers and tried to
rehabilitate theology. Wittgenstein had talked of language games
and urged his students to discover the meaning of words by con-
Against Theology 105
sidering how they are actually used in various contexts; so one be-
gan to discuss the language of theology in an attempt to see how
this or that phrase functions in the discourse of the theologians. In-
effectual criticism gave way to appreciation, and philosophers came
to confirm the common notion that theology is eminently respect-
able. But is it really?
Much depends, of course, on how we define theology. Webster's
main definition is all right, but takes up fifteen lines and then is
followed by the loose one that has been discussed. The most com-
plete dictionary of the English language, the twelve-volume Oxford
English Dictionary, is brief and to the point when it defines theol-
ogy as "the study or science which treats of God, His nature & at-
tributes, & His relations with man & the universe." Further, it
defines: "Dogmatic theology, theology as authoritatively held &
taught by the church; a scientific statement of Christian dogma.
Natural theology, theology based upon reasoning from natural facts
apart from revelation." It also allows that "theology" sometimes
means "a particular theological system or theory" and that it may
be "applied to pagan or non-Christian systems." Finally, it lists
two obsolete meanings: "Rarely used for Holy Scriptures" and
"Metaphysics."
25
There are, then, two types of theology: natural and dogmatic.
Natural theology purports to tell us about God, his nature and at-
tributes, and his relations with man and the universe, on the basis
of reasoning from facts of nature, without relying on revelation. But
from the facts of nature one cannot even infer God's existence, much
less his attributes and his relations with man and the universe, still
less the qualities which theologians, as we generally use the term,
ascribe to him: omniscience and omnipotence, justice and love,
perfection and infinity.
From the facts of nature one can infer further facts of nature, but
one cannot with any certainty infer anything beyond nature, not
106 The Faith of a Heretic
even with any probability. At most, one can say that there are some
events one is not able to explain by means of any hitherto known
facts; and at such points one may possibly elect to postulate some
occult entities or forces, pending further research. Past experience
indicates that all such invocations are extremely likely to be dated
by a new advance in science. Indeed, even as one writer postulates
some unknown entity outside of nature, some scientist elsewhere
may be able to dispense with it. Moreover, even if it were permis-
sible to infer something supra-scientific from the facts of nature, it
is never really the facts of nature that determine what precisely is
invoked at that point, but some preconceived ideas mediated by
religion. At the crucial point, natural theology falls back on dog-
matic theology. It is the teachings of the theologian's religion, not
the facts of nature, that decide whether, where other explanations
fail, he should invoke one god or two, or more; a god of love, a god
of wrath, or one of each, or several of each, or one who loves some
and hates others, or perhaps a god of perfect love who permits, or
insists upon, eternal torment.
To be sure, there are those who believe that God's existence can
be proved from facts of nature, notwithstanding Kant's classical
refutations of what he considered the only three basic types of
alleged proofs. I shall not discuss these proofs here, having dealt in
detail with the five proofs of Aquinas and with Plato's argument,
Kant's "postulate," and Pascal's "wager," as well as the question
whether God's existence can be proved, in Chapter V of my Critique
of Religion and Philosophy.
Most Protestant theologians admit that God's existence cannot be
inferred from facts of nature and that knowledge of "his attributes
and his relations with man and the universe" has to be based on
faith and revelation. In sum, they repudiate natural theology. Most
Catholic theologians believe that God's existence can be inferred
from facts of nature; but they, too, base most of their alleged knowl-
edge of "his attributes and his relations with man and the universe"
on faith and revelation.
What people in the twentieth century generally mean when
speaking of theology, whether they are Catholics, Protestants, Jews,
Against Theology 107
or agnostics, is what the Oxford English Dictionary calls dogmatic
theology and defines as "theology as authoritatively held & taught
by the church." But this definition overlooks that there are many
churches, and that each has its own theology or rather many
theologies.
26
The first point to note about theology, as the term is generally
understood, is that it is denominational. Moreover, a theologian does
not merely expound the beliefs, particularly those about God, held
by his denomination; he also offers a sympathetic exegesis and, in
fact if not expressly, a defense. Neither Presbyterian missionaries
nor agnostic anthropologists who offer careful expositions of the
beliefs of the Navahos would be called Navaho theologians. To be
called a theologian, one must be committed to the beliefs about
God, or gods, of which one offers an account. By betraying a lack
of sympathy, or by evincing hostility, a writer makes clear beyond
a doubt that he is not a Navaho theologian or a Christian theologian,
even if he should be very "well versed" in Navaho or Christian
theology. A man may be well versed in theology without being a
theologian; and he may be a theologian without being well versed
in theology.
To understand theology, one has to understand commitment to
an institution. As a first example of a very educated and intelligent
writer whose books cannot be well understood unless we keep in
mind that he has committed himself to an institution, consider not
a theologian but a Communist: Georg Lukacs. Many Western
writers, including Thomas Mann and Herbert Read, have hailed
him as the most intelligent Marxist critic and historian of ideas, and
his erudition is amazing.
In From Shakespeare to Existentialism, I attempted a quick
sketch of Lukacs. In the present context only three points matter.
First: no dead writer who has not specifically been condemned
by the party is safe from being enlisted as a comrade who all but
108 The Faith of a Heretic
took the final step. Second: Lukacs adopts a peculiar language
which shows at a glance that one is reading a committed Com-
munist Third: he continually cites authority to back up what he
says. Points are proved by quoting Marx, Engels, Lenin, and, de-
pending on the party line around the time of publication, some-
times, but not always, Stalin.
Confronted with all this, two reactions are possible. One may
say: How perceptive and erudite this writer is! How liberal, really!
He almost agrees with me! Of course, he puts all his points in
rather odd ways; but, being a Communist, he is doing the best he
can. Or one can say: If he is so liberal, why does he not draw the
consequences? Why does he not come out in the open and say what
he thinks? For years he did not have to be a Communist; why,
then, did he write as he did? The answer is clear: because of his
commitment.
The parallel with many Catholic intellectuals is obvious. They,
too, assimilate to Catholic doctrine the most divergent materials and
enlist all kinds of writers as searching souls who all but took the
final step. They, too, adopt a peculiar language. And they, too, back
up their views by constantly quoting authority. And here, too, one
may exclaim: How erudite! How liberal! The man almost agrees
with me! Of course, he puts his points a little oddly; but, being a
Catholic, or a Thomist, he is doing the best he can. Or one can ask
why such writers do not draw the consequences and say freely what
they think without encumbering every utterance with such an
involved ritual.
Instead of laboring this point, let us begin with Protestant theol-
ogy. For the point suggested here is easier to see, and has been
noted much more often, in connection with Catholicism, and mil-
lions of English-speaking people would readily grant that Catholic
writers are vulnerable to such charges; but very few have noticed
that Protestant theology is in the same boat.
The choice of a peculiar language and the quoting of authority
stare us in the face; and the leading Protestant theologian in the
United States, Paul Tillich, counts the Hebrew prophets among the
greatest Protestants of all time, assures us that Marx, Freud, and
Against Theology 109
Nietzsche were the most outstanding Protestants of the last hundred
years, and considers Picasso's art deeply Protestant, too.
The point here is not merely that the same three points we have
noted among Communists and Catholic intellectuals are found
among the Protestants as well. But to prepare for our central criti-
cism, let us explore a few examples in more depth.
27
Toward the middle of the twentieth century, no Protestant theolo-
gian in Germany attracted more attention than Rudolf Bultmann.
Long known as an outstanding New Testament scholar, he pub-
lished an article in 1941 in which he urged that the New Testament
must be "demythologized" in order that its central message might
reach modern man, unencumbered by the myths of the first cen-
tury. His article was widely debated, outside Germany, too; more
and more of Bultmann's books were translated into English; and
eventually he was invited to give the Gifford Lectures in Scotland
and various other lectures in the United States.
Of the many criticisms of his call to demythologize, few, if any,
annoyed Bultmann as much as an essay by Karl Jaspers, widely
known as one of the two leading German existentialists although
he, like Martin Heidegger, repudiates this label. Jaspers' critique of
Bultmann is open to many objections, but it has the great merit of
having stung Bultmann into making a staggering admission. (The
two essays, together with Jaspers' reply to Bultmann's reply and
Bultmann's laconic response to Jaspers' second essay, are available
in English in a paperback, Myth and Christianity.) In his initial
reply, Bultmann says of Jaspers: "He is as convinced as I am that a
corpse cannot come back to life and rise from his tomb. . . . What,
then, am I to do when as a pastor, preaching or teaching, I must
explain texts . . . ? Or when, as a scientific theologian, I must give
guidance to pastors with my interpretation?"
Up to this point, Bultmann had generally referred to "the Easter
event," and students had debated just what, according to Bultmann,
110 The Faith of a Heretic
had happened at the first Easter. Now Bultmann let the cat out of
the bag, not only about one particular belief but about the nature
of theology. Here we have an excellent formulation of the dilemma
Bultmann shares with Catholic as well as Protestant theologians, and
with men like Lukacs, too.
The retort to his rhetorical questions need not be the answer he
intends. Again one might well say: If you consider false the beliefs
in terms of which the institution to which you are committed defines
itself, why don't you draw the consequences and renounce your al-
legiance to the church, the party, or St. Thomas, as the case may be?
The matter of the Easter event is no isolated instance. Here is
another illustration. In the wake of Bultmann's challenge, there was
a great deal of discussion about demythologizing hell. At the Ger-
man universities the debate raged around such questions as whether
the fire in Luke 16 is a physical fire. Surely, this is a relatively
trivial question. Even the Nazis were able to devise subtler tor-
ments and, for example, made a woman's hair turn white overnight
by falsely telling her that the screams she heard from the next room
were those of her son under torture. If there were an omnipotent
god, intent on inflicting piteous sufferings on some of his creatures,
he could certainly improve on physical fire. The serious question
which one would expect the theologians to discuss is how they
propose to reconcile eternal torment, no matter how "spiritual,"
with divine perfection. Most American Protestant theologians refuse
to consider this question: they prefer to talk about the kingdom of
God. And German theologians prefer to discuss whether the fire
is physical fire. Even when asked outright about the other problem,
most theologians manage somehow to change the subject quickly.
Bultmann, asked about eternal torture in a conversation, said that
on that subject he agreed with Lessing. He had every right to expect
that a younger colleague, no less than a student, would proceed to
the nearest library and begin reading through a set of Lessing's
works, in search of the crucial passage. After the first ten volumes,
he could safely be expected to give up. Encouraged by my Ameri-
can training, however, I asked: "And what did Lessing say?" The
great theologian hesitated, then allowed that Lessing had once
Against Theology 111
said somewhere that if even a single soul were in eternal torment
he would certainly refuse to go to heaven. It would seem, then, that
Bultmann disbelieves in any form of eternal torment, but he does
not make a point of this. In his huge Theology of the New Testa-
ment, hell and eternal damnation are simply ignored.
This refusal to let one's No be a No is one of the central charac-
teristics of theologians no less than of committed Communists. One
does not emphasize one's points of disagreement with tradition or
the scriptures; instead, one emphasizes points of agreement and
sidesteps embarrassing issues by raising questions of exegesis. As a
consequence, the agreement among committed believers is, to a
surprisingly large extent, apparent only: they proclaim their al-
legiance to the same scriptures and traditions, but the very passages
that are to one man the superlative expression of his faith are to
another a source of embarrassment and an unexampled challenge to
his exegetic skill. And two men who love the same sentence are
likely to interpret it quite differently.
One need not even run the full gamut of Christian views from
the first century to the twentieth, from Presbyterianism to Catholi-
cism and the Greek Orthodox church, from the Armenian church
to Christian Science, from superstitious peasants to scholarly pro-
fessors, to see how little agreement there is among Christians who
profess the same beliefs. Billy Graham, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold
Niebuhr are all twentieth-century American Protestants, indeed,
there are few, if any, other spokesmen of mid-century American
Protestantism who are so well known and so influential. Yet Tillich,
like Niebuhr, shares few of Graham's religious beliefs. Now com-
pare what men like Tillich and Niebuhr actually believe and dis-
believe with the beliefs of avowed fundamentalists, or of Martin
Luther and John Calvin, or of St. Augustine and St. Athanasius, or
of St. Paul and St. John the Evangelist: surely, the beliefs and dis-
beliefs of our two most celebrated Protestant theologians are much
closer to mine than they are to those of millions of their fellow
Christians, past and present. But, like Bultmann, they say No in
ways that sound like Yes.
112 The Faith of a Heretic
28
Catholic theology may seem to be more forthright, but certainly
not as forthright as most people suppose. An involuntarily amusing
editorial in the Chicago diocesan newspaper, entitled "Yes, Profes-
sor, There Is A Hell," is not unrepresentative. Taking issue with an
article that a professor had contributed to "a well-known magazine,"
the editorial made a great point of the fact that it "is by no means
the position of the Catholic Church" either "that 'the great mass of
mankind' will be tormented for all eternity" or that "only those who
are a part of the Christian communion will find salvation, whereas
'the rest of mankind [will] suffer eternal torment/ " As it happened,
the professor had not said that this was "the position of the Catholic
Church." But be that as it may, the editorial ends: "There is a hell,
professor, and the easiest way to find out is by not believing in it,
or in God."
This is a mere editorial, full of misrepresentations, and it would
be foolish to saddle the church with it. What is typical about the
editorial is the alternation of protestations of liberality with threats.
One does not usually find both so close together; but the two
strains are almost omnipresent contemporary Catholicism.
On the one hand, scholarship insists that "though a few indi-
vidual teachers of the Church may have held this, it has never
been regarded as a matter of the Church's teaching"; on the other
hand, preaching requires threats and promises. As we listen to the
preacher or the missionary, everything appears to be as clear as
could be; but under the scholar's or the critic's questioning, this sur-
face clarity gives way to endless complications and uncertainties.
St. Thomas Aquinas, who will be considered in due course, was
on the whole exceptionally clear; but the Catholic church is not
committed to his views. In his encyclical Aeterni Patois, Pope Leo
XIII, in 1879, said: "As far as man is concerned, reason can now
hardly rise higher than she rose, borne up in the flight of Thomas;
and Faith can hardly gain more helps from reason than those which
Against Theology 113
Thomas gave her." He cited many previous popes who had spoken
similarly of the saint: "Pius V acknowledged that heresies are con-
founded and exposed and scattered by his doctrine, and that by it
the whole world is daily freed from pestilent errors." And, "The
words of Blessed Urban V to the University of Toulouse seem to be
most worthy of mention: It is our will, and by the authority of
these letters we enjoin you, that you follow the doctrine of Blessed
Thomas as true. . . /" And the encyclical cites "as a crown, the
testimony of Innocent VI: 'His doctrine above all other doctrine,
with the one exception of the Holy Scriptures, has . . . such a truth
of opinions, that no one who holds it will ever be found to have
strayed from the path of truth ' "
From all this, one might conclude that the pope, speaking ex
cathedra on matters of faith and morak, and therefore infallibly,
had taught us that we shall not stray from truth if we accept St
Thomas' view that the blessed in heaven will see the punishments
of the damned so that their bliss will be that much greater. Or that
one angel can speak to another without letting other angels know
what he is saying. One might even suppose that Jiis views on scien-
tific matters are invariably true. But Leo XIII also says, in the same
long encyclical: "We, therefore, while we declare that everything
wisely said should be received with willing and glad mind, . . .
exhort all of you, Venerable Brothers, with the greatest earnestness
to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas, and to spend it as far
as you can. . . . We say the wisdom of St. Thomas; for it is not by
any means in our mind to set before this age, as a standard, those
things which have been inquired into by Scholastic Doctors with
too great subtlety; or anything taught by them with too little con-
sideration, not agreeing with the investigations of a later age; or,
lastly, anything that is not probable."
In a similar spirit, Etienne Gilson, one of the most outstanding
Thomists of the twentieth century, says at the outset of The Christian
Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas: "Personally, I do not say of
Thomas that he was right, but that he is right." But this does not
prevent him from admitting now and then in passing, without em-
phasis, that Thomas was not right.
114 The Faith of a Heretic
Moreover, many Catholic scholars have argued at length that
papal encyclicals are not necessarily infallible. Father Thomas
Pegu&s, for example, has tried to show in an article in Revue
Thomiste, which is quoted in Anne Fremantle's edition of The
Papd Encyclicals in Their Historical Context, that their authority
is not infallible but "in a sense, sovereign." While "the solemn defi-
nitions ex cathedra . . . demand an assent without reservation and
make a formal act of faith obligatory," in the case of the encyclicals
only "an internal mental assent is demanded."
There is never a lack of surface clarity; but if one is genuinely
perplexed, the apparently neat conceptual distinctions are not al-
ways very helpful, and having accused Protestant theologians of a
failure to let their No be a No, I see no reason for not bringing the
same charge against Catholic theologians.
In an essay on "How to Read the Encyclicals," in The Church
Speaks to the Modern World: The Social Teachings of Leo XZ/I,
Gilson says: "When one of us objects to the pretension avowed by
the Popes to state, with full authority, what is true and what is false,
or what is right and what is wrong, he is pitting his own personal
judgment, not against the personal judgment of another man, but
against the whole ordinary teaching of the Catholic Church. . . .
The Church alone represents the point of view of a moral and
spiritual authority free from all prejudices." Clearly, we are being
discouraged from saying No to authoritative pronouncements. That,
however, does not necessarily mean that everybody has to agree.
Where the heretic would say No, the theologian interprets.
"When it seems to us that an encyclical cannot possibly say what
it says, the first thing to do is to make a new effort to understand
what it does actually say," says Gilson. And what texts "actually"
say is often very different from what they seem to say.
In the first of the three volumes of Five Centuries of Religion,
G. G. Coulton, the great historian, relates how "the Catechism of
the Council of Trent, drawn up by a papal commission as an uner-
ring guide to priests and their flocks lays it down that unbaptized
infants, *be their parents Christian or infidel, are born to eternal
misery and perdition* (authorized translation by Professor Donovan,
Against Theology 115
Manchester, 1855, p. 167; Of Baptism, quest. XXX). For the argu-
ments by which the Roman Church of today has persuaded itself
that these words mean 'they will eternally enjoy a state of perfect
natural happiness,' I must refer my readers to my 16th Medieval
Study [i.e., Infant Perdition in the Middle Ages], or to the Catholic
Encyclopedia, s.v. Limbo" (443). The original Latin words of the
Catechism are: sempiternam miseriam et interitum.
In his monograph on Infant Perdition, Coulton, who concerns
himself only with Roman Catholic theology and not with theology
in general, offers this comment: "It is strange that theologians who
juggle thus with language should never suspect the double-edged
nature of the tools they are using. The anonymous champion of the
Catholic Truth Society thinks that, if I had been more familiar with
Catholic ways of thought, I should have seen at once that the
'eternal misery and destruction' of the Council of Trent means
eternal and perfect natural happiness. But what is to prevent a
later and more learned generation of Catholics from discovering
that the 'perfect natural happiness' of the Catholic Encyclopedia
really means eternal misery and destruction? Even in theology, it
is fatal when we can no longer trust a man's word. . . ." (29).
What Coulton takes for a special vice of the Roman Catholic
church is really of the essence of theology, as the many illustrations
from Protestant theologians in this chapter should show. If I con-
centrate more than is usually done on the Christian conception of
hell, this is because no other aspect of God's "relations with man
and the universe" is anywhere near so important for us. If there is
a possibility, perhaps even a probability, that God may consign us
or some of our fellow men to eternal misery, it is certainly the very
height of irresponsibility to sweep the relevant doctrines under the
rug. By seeing, on the other hand, how theologians deal with this
most crucial question, we stand an excellent chance of finding out
just how much knowledge is available concerning God's "relations
with man and the universe," and what methods theologians use to
obtain such knowledge.
At the end of This is Catholicism (1959), John Walsh, S.J., re-
prints an important document which he introduces thus: "All the
118 The Faith of a Heretic
principal beliefs of Catholicism are summed up in the Profession of
Faith which is made by converts on their entrance into the Catholic
Church and by all candidates for the priesthood before ordination.
It is a fitting conclusion for this book." Here a great many beliefs
are summarized succinctly in less than three pages. The final para-
graph begins: "This true Catholic faith, outside of which no one
can be saved "A few pages earlier, in the body of the book, we
are also told that "membership in the Catholic Church, the mystical
body of Christ, is the solitary means of salvation. Apart from the
Church, exclusive of it, independently of it, there exists absolutely
no possibility of attaining heaven." This is the kind of forthright,
unequivocal doctrine that at first glance seems to make it utterly un-
fair to claim that Catholic theologians, like Protestant theologians,
disregard Jesus' commandment, in the Sermon on the Mount, that
we should let our Yes be Yes, and our No, No; "anything more than
this comes from evil."
Immediately, however, Father Walsh asks: "Does this signify
that all who are not actually members of the Catholic Church will
be lost?" and in conformity with contemporary Catholic doctrine he
replies: "Certainly not." This is explained as follows: "When a
person . . . makes an act of perfect contrition, he must simulta-
neously determine, as we saw, to accomplish everything which he
judges necessary to attain salvation. Now since the Catholic Church
is, in fact, the sole means of salvation, a non-Catholic's resolve to
do everything needful to gain heaven is, objectively considered,
exactly equivalent to a resolve to belong to the Catholic Church.
The two resolves automatically merge; one coincides with the other.
A non-Catholic is unaware, certainly, of the identity of the two. . . .
He may never have heard of the Catholic Church. Or he may . . .
be quite indifferent to it. Or ... he may be quite hostile to it and
consequently would indignantly deny that his desire to please God
coalesced in any way, shape, or fashion with a desire to join
Catholicism. Such subjective misapprehensions on his part would
not alter the objective fact, however. A sincere desire for salvation
coincides necessarily with a desire to belong to the Catholic
Church. . . . Strange as it may seem, therefore, a non-Catholic who
Against Theology 117
sincerely yearns to do everything necessary for salvation (even when
he believes that one of the requisites for salvation is to condemn
Catholicism!) (John 16:2) is, all unconsciously, longing to be a
Catholic. Now this unconscious longing God recognizes as a substi-
tute for belonging ... as the equivalent of real membership." So
the doctrine "still stands: outside the Catholic Church there is no
salvation."
29
The most crucial criticism of theology ought now to be apparent:
theology depends on a double standard. One set of standards is
employed for reading and interpreting one's own tradition and its
texts; another, for the texts and traditions of all others. Here, one
is committed not only to make sense of everything but to make
everything come out superior, profound, and beautiful; there, one
is not averse to finding fault and even emphasizing all that is inferior
to one's own tradition.
Protestants are perceptive regarding the faults of Catholicism and
not inclined to make allowances for them the way they do for
Luther's faults or Calvin's, or for those of their own articles of
faith those of the Westminster Confession, for example. Catholics
can see plainly what was wrong with all of these, but approach
their saints with a very different attitude. Pressed about eternal
damnation, Protestant theologians point out that this doctrine im-
presses on us how important our choices in this life are; asked about
the latest Catholic dogma, they do not exert themselves to find a
profound meaning in it, but are quick indeed to disown it as sheer
superstition. Christians stress the references to divine wrath in the
Old Testament while ignoring or interpreting away the references
to wrath, relentless judgment, and eternal torment in the New
Testament; they point to the references to love in the New Testa-
ment, less to those in the Old; and they conclude, as if they had not
presupposed it, that the God of the Old Testament is a God of
justice, wrath, and vengeance, while the God of the New Testament
118 The Faith of a Heretic
is a God of love, forgiveness, and mercy. Moreover, one contrasts
the realities and mediocre representatives of other traditions with
the ideals and the saints of one's own.
Theology is a comprehensive, rigorous, and systematic attempt to
conceal the beam in the scriptures and traditions of one's own
denomination while minutely measuring the mote in the heritages
of one's brothers. Of course, that is not all there is to theology.
Theology is also a comprehensive, rigorous, and systematic avoid-
ance, by means of exegesis, of letting one's Yes be Yes, and one's
No, No: instead of saying No, one discusses other matters, and in a
pinch one "interprets" and converts beams into slivers, and slivers
into gold. Theology is also a continual attempt to force new wine
into old skins. The new wine is not always the best available, and
perhaps the old skins aren't either; but the whole point is to avoid
a fair comparison of skins: into one's own, one stuffs whatever looks
good, while one associates the skins of others with an inferior
vintage, going back, if necessary, a few centuries to find a really
bad year.
Theology is antithetic not only to the Sermon on the Mount but
to the most elementary standards of fairness. It involves a deliberate
blindness to most points of view other than one's own, a refusal to
see others as they see themselves and to see oneself as one appears
to others a radical insistence on applying different standards to
oneself and others.
It is, no doubt, exceedingly difficult to be completely fair, but
theology is founded on a comprehensive, rigorous, and systematic
refusal to as much as attempt to be fair. It does not merely occasion-
ally lapse into acceptance of a double standard: theology is based
on a devout commitment to a double standard.
This central flaw permeates theology and takes many forms. Let
us concentrate on two of the most important.
30
One word that sums up a great deal of theology is gerrymander-
ing. As I pointed out in my Critique ( 56), "politicians have no
Against Theology 119
monopoly on dividing districts in an unnatural and unfair way to
give one party an advantage over its opponent. Many theologians
are masters of this art."
Instead of giving many brief illustrations from a lot of theologians,
let us begin by considering the method of the man who was probably
the greatest theologian of all time, St. Thomas Aquinas. That
Aquinas carved up Aristotle, citing to his purpose what he could
make fit, meets the eye. But it is scarcely less obvious that he also
gerrymandered Scripture. The basic method of his imposing Summa
Theohgica is simple enough, though the amount of Gothic detail
is staggering.
A question is asked and first of all answered in a manner that
Aquinas considers false. This false answer is then buttressed with
a few quotations that would seem to support it. Then a quotation is
introduced which apparently conflicts with everything said so far.
A tension is created but immediately resolved by Aquinas' concise
Respondeo, or "I reply." He takes his stand with the immediately
preceding quotation, gives his reasons, and then replies, one by
one, to the objections raised before he stated his position.
In this manner, every question is answered: Whether God repro-
bates any man? Whether God can do what he does not? Whether
God can do better than what he does? Whether several angels can
be at the same time in the same place? Whether the semen in man
is produced from surplus food? There is never any hesitation, any
slight lack of self-confidence, any suspense of judgment. Thomas
knows it all and proves it all proves it in his own fashion, which
amounts to quite the boldest and the most extensive feat of gerry-
mandering ever undertaken. Proof involves, and frequently consists
in, the adducing of quotations usually from the Old or New
Testament, from Aristotle, or from pseudo-Dionysius (a fifth-
century Neoplatonist whom Aquinas and his contemporaries mistook
for a contemporary of St. Paul and the Blessed Virgin). One of the
few things all of these authoritative proof texts have in common is
that Thomas was unable to read any of them in the original. But
even if he had been a still greater scholar than he was, even if he
had been able to read Greek and Hebrew instead of occasionally
12 The Faith of a Heretic
misconceiving Biblical and Aristotelian passages, and even if he
had known that the pseudo-Dionysius had not been converted by
St. Paul himself, his method would for all that have been thoroughly
unsound.
Unlike historical and philological scholarship in the employ of
conscientious efforts at interpretation, the theologian's method is not
designed to uncover the original intent and meaning of the quoted
passages Rather, Thomas chooses what fits, and ignores 01 rein-
terprets what does not fit. Some readers fail to realize this because
at the beginning of every question he sets up a few straw men
whom he can knock down a page later with the aid of rival quotes
if necessary, from the pseudo-Dionysius. This was the greatest
theologian of them all.
To be sure, Thomas has to be seen in the context of his time if
one wants to arrive at a fair judgment of the man What appears
monstrous in the perspective of a later age is always apt to have
been commonplace when it occurred. But the whole point of the
present discussion is that Thomas' method is by no means exi cp-
tionally unsound. On the contrary, he is a splendid representative
not only of his time but of theology in general. What distinguishes
him is not that he was arbitrary. What is exceptional is rather his
unflagging patience, his attempt at comprehensive coverage, and
his clarity, which shows us at a glance what he is doing. Faithful
throughout to the same simple method, he takes up question after
question, stamping out his treatment with a stencil, as it were or,
metaphors apart, dictating relentlessly, only stopping occasionally,
we are told, to pray
On major points, the conclusions are predetermined, and Thomas
himself makes a point of this. In the Second Part of the Second
Part of the Summa Theologica, he insists that we "ought to believe
matters of faith, not because of human reasoning, but because of the
divine authority/' But he writes theology because "when a man has
a will ready to believe, he loves the truth he believes, he thinks out
and takes to heart whatever reasons he can find in support thereof *
Only when faith is primary and seeking understanding, only when
we are finding reasons for what we already believe, instead of bas-
Against Theology 121
ing our faith on reason, "human reasoning does not exclude the
merit of faith, but is a sign of greater merit" (Article 10).
On lesser points, of course, the conclusion is not always pre-
determined by tradition or authority, and Thomas has some freedom
to develop a position of his own Like most theologians, however,
he blurs this distinction, backs up controversial stands, too, with
citations of authority, and thus gives the appearance that his system
is not only singularly comprehensive and consistent but the gospel
truth In fact, the tightly woven structure is a doubtful asset if a
few key concepts are based on confusions, 01 if a few basic supposi-
tions are no longer plausible or tenable in view of some advance in
knowledge, the whale edifice may topple
Such criticisms are not heard gladly in the twentieth century,
although far more radical estimates of scholasticism were quite
common in the nineteenth F W Fanar, D D , F R S., late Fellow
of Trinity College, Cambridge, Archdeacon and Canon of West-
minster, and Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen, said of the
Scholastics in his beautifully documented History of Interpietation-
Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the
} 7 ear MDCCCLXXXV.
"Their theology is a science ... in which a congeries of doubts
is met by a concatenation of baseless assumptions The result is a
dull mythology in which abstractions are defined, not in the gracious
atmosphere of Poetry, but in the sterile desert of logical discussion.
They were enabled to unite obedience with rationalism, and the
Hierarchy successfully disguised intense intolerance under an ap-
parent permission to philosophise at will" (266) "The historic feel-
ing and the critical faculty are entirely in abeyance in their wnt-
ings. . . . The neglect of Philology by the Schoolmen was equally
fatal. Only one or two of them possessed even a smattering of
Hebrew, and the vast majority of them were no loss ignorant of
Greek They philosophised and theologised over what they assumed
to be the supernatural accuracy of largely vitiated manuscripts of a
very imperfect translation; and often with no better aid than
heterogeneous glosses from the Fathers, and those not infrequently
irom poor versions and spurious writings. And as they 'rack the
122 The Faith of a Heretic
text and so to speak drag it along by the hair,' they constantly rely
on the most grotesque etymologies. If, as Luther said, 'the science
of theology is nothing else than grammar applied to the words of
the Holy Spirit,' the Schoolmen were indeed ill-prepared" (285 ff.).
Farrar specifically includes Thomas in his strictures. Plainly, some
of these faults are much less glaring in modern theology, though
they are far from being entirely a matter of the past. For that matter,
Thomas' vast erudition, straightforward clarity, and noble simplicity
have rarely been matched. What is encountered again and again in
subsequent theologians is his bold air of omniscience and his gerry-
mandering. In twentieth-century Protestant theology, men like
Heidegger have taken the place of Aristotle (hardly an improve-
ment), and Marx (in the thirties) and Freud (in the forties) that of
the pseudo-Dionysius. The Bible, however, is gerrymandered as art-
fully as ever.
Our concern here is not with Scholasticism but with theology.
Farrar warms up to Luther as he does not to the Schoolmen, but
Luther, too, gerrymandered. How many of those who cheer Luther's
celebrated declaration that he would not recant unless refuted from
the Holy Scriptures are aware of what he wrote just a little later in
discussing his new translation of the Bible? "You have to judge cor-
rectly among all the books and discriminate which are the best. For
the Gospel of John and the Epistles of Paul, especially that to the
Romans, and the First Epistle of Peter are the real core and marrow
of all the books. . . . The Gospel of John is the sole fine and right
main Gospel, far to be preferred and elevated above the other
three. The Epistles of Peter and Paul are also far more eminent
than the three Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. . . . The
Epistle of St. James is an epistle of straw, for it has no evangelic
manner" (XIV, 105). Luther also said of John that "one might even
call him alone an evangelist" (XI, 1462), and he argued that all the
moral commandments of the Bible were "ordained solely that man
might thus realize his incapacity for good and learn to despair of
himself (XIX, 992*).
Against Theology 123
Such forthrightness is not characteristic of theology and led
Luther into open disagreement with the leading theologian of
Lutheranism: "Many have labored and toiled and sweated over the
Epistle of St. James when they compared it with St. Paul. Thus
Philip Melanchton treats of it, too, in his Apologia, but not with real
seriousness; for it is a flat contradiction, faith justifies, and faith does
not justify. If any man can rhyme that together, I will give him my
cap, and he may call me a fool" (XXII, 2077).
The reason theologians gerrymander should be obvious. They
set themselves an impossible task that cannot be solved with sound
methods: to present to us "the message" of the New Testament,
indeed of the whole Bible. But the books of the Christian Bible
were written over a period of approximately thirteen centuries by
men who did not always agree with each other. Characteristically,
Luther, without the benefit of Bible criticism, called a spade a
spade and, in effect, admitted openly that he was gerrymandering
the Bible and that a Christian teacher could not do otherwise.
Luke introduced his Gospel by remarking that others had written
lives of Jesus, but that it seemed good to him to write another ver-
sion, "that you may know the truth.** Scholars agree that he knew,
and used extensively as one of his sources, the Gospel according to
Mark. Where he differs with Mark, which is often, he evidently
differs deliberately, "that you may know the truth."
Matthew, too, knew and used Mark's Gospel, and his disagree-
ments with Mark are also manifold and obviously deliberate. In
Christian Beginnings, an exemplary study of the New Testament
in the light of modern criticism, head and shoulders above most
similar efforts, Morton Scott Enslin argues very plausibly, though
this is still a minority view, that Luke also knew and used the
Gospel according to Matthew. If so, the disagreements between
these two evangelists would also be deliberate.
In any case, the striking disagreements of the fourth Gospel with
the first three are not only a commonplace of modern scholarship
but were noted by Luther already. And that James and Paul did
not agree need not be gathered either from a careful comparison of
124 The Faith of a Heretic
both writers or from our Luther quotation: the Book of Acts in the
New Testament gives a detailed account of some of these disagree-
ments.
If Thomas gerrymandered the Bible, this was not his innovation,
nor merely a personal shortcoming. Some of the evangelists as well
as Paul had treated the Old Testament in similar fashion, and the
rabbis had preceded them.
As Farrar says, discussing the approach to Scripture which was
formalized by Hillel, the Pharisee: "It means the isolation of
phrases, the misapplication of parallel passages, the false emphasiz-
ing of accidental words, the total neglect of the context. ... It is
just as prominent, and quite as mischievous, in Hilary and Augus-
tine, in Albert and Aquinas, in Gerhard and Calovius, as in Hillel
or Ishmael" (22). TTiomas, of course, lacked whatever feeling for
the Hebrew Scriptures Hillel had, and "a large part of his method
consists in the ingenious juxtaposition of passages of which the
verbal similarity depends only upon the Vulgate [the Latin Bible].
From these imaginary identities of expression, by a method which
seems to have survived from the days of Hillel, he deduces systems
extremely ingenious but utterly without foundation" (271). "But
while the scriptural exegesis of the Schoolmen was injured by all
these causes, the worst plague-spot of it was the assumption that
every part of Scripture admitted of a multiplex intelligentia. . . .
A favourite illustration of this supposed fourfold sense was the word
'Jerusalem/ which might stand for a city, for a faithful soul, for the
Church militant, or for the Church triumphant. Another was the
word 'water/ which literally means an element; tropologically may
stand for sorrow, or wisdom, or heresies, or prosperity; allegorically
may refer to baptism, nations, or grace; anagogically to eternal hap-
piness. Thomas Aquinas tells us that 'Let there be light 9 may mean
historically an act of creation; allegorically, 'Let Christ be love';
anagogically, 'May we be led by Christ to glory', and, tropologic-
ally, 'May we be mentally illumined by Christ' " (294 f.).
From the rabbis I should like to give an example not found in
Farrar. In New Testament times, the Pharisees believed in the
resurrection of the dead, while the Sadducees did not. Far from
Against Theology 125
admitting, as almost all modern scholars do, that this belief had
developed in Judaism only after the Babylonian exile, the Pharisees
claimed that it had been taught by Moses and could also be de-
duced from all sorts of Scriptural verses in which the untrained eye
would never find any such implication. According to the Babylonian
Talmud (Sanhedrin 90b), "The Sadducees asked Rabban Gamaliel:
How can you prove that God will bring the dead back to life? He
replied: From the Torah, the Prophets, and the Scriptures [i.e., the
third division of the Hebrew Bible, comprising, e.g., Psalms, Job,
Song of Songs]. But they did not accept this. From the Torah: The
Lord said to Moses: Behold you are about to sleep with your
fathers and will rise [Deuteronomy 31:16]. They replied to him: But
perhaps we should read [as the Revised Standard Version does and
any ordinary reader would: Behold you are about to sleep with
your fathers;] then this people will rise and play the harlot after the
strange gods of the land." From the Song of Songs he cited: "Like
the best of wine that goes down smoothly for my lover and makes
the lips of the sleepers [here interpreted as the dead] murmur"
(7:9).
According to Sifre on Deuteronomy (132a), "Rabbi Simai said:
There is no passage [in the Hebrew Bible] in which the resurrection
of the dead is not hinted; only we lack the power to interpret."
According to all three Synoptic Gospels, Jesus offered a compar-
able proof to the Sadducees who questioned him: "As for the dead
being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage
about the bush, how God said to him: I am the God of Abraham,
and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob [Exodus 3:6]. He is not
God of the dead but of the living; you are quite wrong" (Mark
12:26 f.; cf. Matthew 22:31 f. and Luke 20:37 f.).
31
When the Catholic church "interprets" the meaning of "eternal
misery and perdition," or when Father Walsh explains how the
church does not contradict itself when it claims on the one hand
126 The Faith of a Heretic
that "outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation," and on the
other hand that this certainly does not mean that "all who are not
actually members of the Catholic Church will be lost," or when
Thomas uses Scripture to prove his doctrines, or when Bultmann
tells us about "the message of the New Testament" they are all
far closer in spirit and method to the rabbis of the first centuries
A.D. than they are to modern philosophy since Bacon and Descartes,
to modern science, or to the spirit of a liberal arts education. But
while hardly anybody today would think of holding up the ancient
rabbis as examples of sound method, many intellectuals since the
Second World War consider theology once again the queen of
sciences, and Thomas the prince of theologians. With the last claim
I have no quarrel, but the assumption that theology closely resem-
bles philosophy, or that liberal education can be revitalized by
bringing theologians into a great university, is based on insufficient
reflection on the nature of theology and its methods.
It was unfortunate that Paul referred to the Torah, the Five Books
of Moses, as "the Law," seeing how much there is in those five books
that is not "law"; and it is doubly unfortunate that so many readers
of the New Testament have come to think of Judaism as the religion
of "the Law." For the same reason it is misleading that occasionally
a rabbi is called "a lawyer" in the Gospels. In the context of our
present discussion, however, this last misnomer points to an impor-
tant insight. The rabbis and St. Thomas, Bultmann and Father
Walsh, and legions of other theologians are really closer to lawyers
than they are to either philosophers or scientists.
Indeed, they resemble lawyers in two ways. In the first place,
they accept books and traditions as data that it is not up to them to
criticize. They can only hope to make the best of these books and
traditions by selecting the most propitious passages and precedents;
and where the law seems to them harsh, inhuman, or dated, all they
can do is have recourse to exegesis.
Secondly, many theologians accept the morality that in many
countries governs the conduct of the counsel for the defense. In-
genuity and skillful appeals to the emotions are considered perfectly
legitimate; so are attempts to ignore all inconvenient evidence, as
Against Theology 127
long as one can get away with it, and the refusal to engage in in-
quiries that are at all likely to discredit the predetermined conclu-
sion: that the client is innocent. If all else fails, one tries to saddle
one's opponent with the burden of disproof, and as a last resort
one is content with a reasonable doubt that after all the doctrines
that one has defended might be true.
With this second model that of the counsel for the defense
I have dealt critically in the section on "Religion at the Bar"
( 34) in my Critique. At bottom, the objection to both models is
the same. In the law, special conditions obtain that are not dupli-
cated in theology, and it is only these special conditions that can
justify such behavior In the case of the first model, some of these
special conditions were still present to some extent in the first cen-
turies, and even in the time of St. Thomas: one constantly had to pit
one's skill and ingenuity, one's proof texts and interpretations,
against keen competitors. If there was not quite a war of all against
all, there were at the very least the schools of Hillel and Shammai,
or the Dominicans and the Franciscans, and it was understood that,
to prevail in argument, one had to develop a supreme forensic skill.
There was almost constant debate and a war of interpretations and
reputations.
With some exaggeration, one might liken the milieu of those
days to the jungle, and the seminaries of today to a zoo The theo-
logical animals are still addicted to some of the ancient procedures;
but they do not have to fight any more, and one is not even supposed
to tease them. They are contemplated with respect, even awe, but
they live in a world by themselves in which their ancient habits
are no longer functional but mere curiosities.
To bring out the arbitrariness of theological method, consider
how a group of students might be given the following exercise: con-
struct on the basis of the same body of scriptures half a dozen
different theologies Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Anglican,
Greek Orthodox, and Unitarian, for example. The task could be
made still more complex and fill a whole year's course: for each of
these six denominations, construct two different theologies by using
any two of the following interpretations Neoplatonic, Aristotelian,
128 The Faith of a Heretic
Kantian, romantic, liberal, or existentialist. This might make some
people aware of the utter arbitrariness of the procedures used by
theologians, for the most part without any self-consciousness. It
might also keep pious men from writing and talking as if the sole
alternative to what they had to offer was some sort of crude, in-
sensitive materialism. It would thus deprive theology of one of its
foundations: the loaded alternative.
Emphatically, theology does not closely resemble either a science
or philosophy. The model of the law is far more illuminating. So is
another model that may well be more than merely a model: literary
criticism. Outsiders often assume that theologians either have, or
claim to have, some special direct insight into the nature and attri-
butes of God In fact, the theologians deal with problems that are
posed by texts. The texts may differ with the denomination. Typi-
cally, they comprise either the Bible alone, or the Bible together
with certain formulations devised at church councils, or the Bible
along with some creeds. Other traditional statements may be in-
cluded, too. But generally the secondary material, including even
the texts hammered out at the church councils, represents attempts
to meet problems created by the primary texts, those of the Bible.
In Genesis it is said, "Is anything too hard for the Lord?" (18:14);
and Jesus says more than once that "all things are possible with
God" (e.g., Mark 10:27). He also says that not a sparrow "will fall
to the ground without your Father's will" (Matthew 10:29). Verses
like these lead to discussions of divine omniscience and omnipo-
tence, predestination and free will. The literature on damnation,
original sin, and grace took shape in the same way as the interpre-
tation of texts.
Traditional theology resembles the so-called "new" criticism: it
treats the text as an autonomous world, illuminating a word or a
passage from other words and passages in the same book. "Modern"
theology prides itself on imitating nineteenth-century literary criti-
cism, which heavily stressed history and the authors' biographies.
Not knowing who the authors were, one postulated authors not only
for the various books of the Bible but even for their alleged sources
and then tried to reconstruct the mentalities of these supposed
Against Theology 129
authors something good literary critics did not do, say, in the case
of Homer. "Post-modern" theologians follow the lead of the new
critics, who, in turn, closely resemble the old theologians.
It may seem that theologians differ sharply from literary critics
because they do not write as critics of the texts but, on the contrary,
accepts the texts as true in some important sense. Clearly, theo-
logians are not like those literary critics who are out to get the
author. Rather, they resemble that majority of good literary cntics
who are not really critics at all but rather interpreters. They are not
like men writing on controversial modern authors but like "cntics"
dealing reverently with a poet who inspires awe the Dantisti, for
example. Here we have a universe of discourse in which "true" and
"false" no longer have a place unless they should be applied to
interpretations. But even interpretations are not usually called true
or false rather, traditional or novel, profound or daring, and per-
haps heretical.
It may be objected that the theologian, unlike the writer on
Dante, believes that his statements about God and hell are true;
that they are not only good interpretations of the texts but also ac-
curate descriptions of reality. Surely, that is an important difference;
but even when this additional assumption is made explicitly, it does
not necessarily change the procedure or even the atmosphere.
Whether you said at an international congress of Dantisti, "But I
think Dante is despicable," or whether you said at a meeting of
theologians, "I think the Bible is a terrible book," the reaction would
probably be very similar in both cases: "Go to hell!" Only some
not all of the theologians would mean this literally.
The additional assumption that the text is true in some important
sense remains in the background and is rarely clarified very much.
The typical theologian believes in the truth of Scrip f ure, but not
that everything Scripture says plainly (or seems to say plainly) is
true. His respect for, and love of, the text are clearer than his con-
ception of its truth, and when he does theology, the problems posed
by the text are in the foreground, while the question of reference
beyond the text, to "reality," is more often than not out of focus and
just a little dim.
130 The Faith of a Heretic
There is, however, one crucial difference between theology and
literary criticism. It is often exceedingly difficult to give a respon-
sible account of Homer's or Sophocles' views, or of Plato's or
Heraclitus'. But the task most theologians set themselves is more
nearly comparable to an effort to interpret "the message of the
Greeks" in a single treatise: if they must offer a single message,
they simply have to gerrymander; and it stands to reason that dif-
ferent theologians will come up with different messages. If they
were determined to be fair and to employ the methods used by
conscientious historians and philologists, they would have to admit
that there is no single message; that there are many different views;
and that an honest and careful interpreter must often be unsure
even about the views of Paul, Matthew, or Luke not to speak of
Jesus. So much for gerrymandering.
32
The other major fault of theology is also understandable as the
result of a quixotic task. The theologians have a way of redefining
terms in rather odd ways and then engaging in something best
called double-speak: their utterances are designed to communicate
contradictory views to different listeners and readers.
In spite of the similarity of the terms, no insinuation is intended
that double-speak is a sort of double talk. There is some double talk
in theology, too and, for that matter, in philosophy and literary
criticism but the two are recognizably different. To show this, let
us begin with Kafka's parody of theological double talk, which he
entitled, "Of Parables [Von den Gleichnissen]":
"Many complain that the words of the sages are always also
mere parables, inapplicable in daily Me, which is all we have got.
When the sage says, 'Go beyond!' he does not mean that one should
proceed to the other side, which one might be able to bring off if
only the result were worth the effort; he means some legendary
beyond, something we do not know, something he himself cannot
Against Theology 131
designate more closely, something, then, that cannot be of any help
to us here. All these parables really only want to say that the In-
comprehensible is incomprehensible; and that we knew. But the
objects of our daily exertions are quite a different matter.
"Then someone said: 'Why do you resist? If only you followed
the parables, you yourselves would have become parables by now,
and then you would be nd of your daily exertions/
"Another said: 'I bet that this, too, is a parable/
"The first said: 'You have won/
"The second said: 'But unfortunately only in the parable/
"The first said: 'No, in reality; in the parable you have lost/ "
This wonderful sketch deals with one aspect of the theologians'
recourse to "analogy" and "symbol/* With this aspect I have tried
to deal in Chapter VI of my Critique. Poetic parables are not neces-
sarily in the least objectionable, but discourse that is ostensibly de-
signed to elucidate them scientifically, while in fact its clarity is of
the surface only, and on analysis it turns out to approximate double
talk, is quite a different matter.
In double talk, the question is whether any meaning remains;
the epithet is justified when a passage lacks any coherent meaning.
In double-speak, there is a clear meaning; but there is also a second
meaning that contradicts the first. This epithet applies when a
passage is designed to communicate one message to one group and
a contradictory message to another group.
Some instances of this have already been noted, but the rationale
of this procedure has probably been stated best by Tillich in his
Dynamics of Faith. In a little over one hundred pages, he redefines
such terms as faith and heresy, atheism and revelation It turns out
that the man who accepts the ancient beliefs of Christendom, the
Apostles' Creed, or Luther's articles of faith may well be lacking
faith, while the man who doubts all these beliefs but is sufficiently
concerned to lie awake nights worrying about it is a paragon of
faith. "Atheism, consequently, can only mean the attempt to remove
any ultimate concern to remain unconcerned about the meaning
of one's existence. Indifference toward the ultimate question is the
132 The Faith of a Heretic
only imaginable form of atheism" (45 f.). Other forms of atheism,
not at all hard to imagine, are defined out of existence; and it turns
out that millions of theists may really be atheists, while such avowed
atheists as Freud and Nietzsche aren't atheists at all.
It becomes clear that when Tillich preaches, writes, or lectures,
he is not saying what those who don't know his definitions think he
says. If a large percentage of his audience is misled and thinks he
means what he in fact does not mean, is this unintentional on
Tillich's part? Apparently not. Taken literally, Tillich considers the
Christian myths untenable; but "the natural stage of literalism is
that in which the mythical and the literal are indistinguishable," and
this is characteristic of "the primitive period of individuals and
groups. . . . This stage has a full right of its own and should not be
disturbed, either in individuals or in groups, up to the moment
when man's questioning mind breaks the natural acceptance of the
mythological versions as literal." When that point is reached, one
can "replace the unbroken by the broken myth," saying frankly that
what was so far believed literally is, so understood, absurd but
capable of reinterpretation. Yet many people "prefer the repression of
their questions to the uncertainty which appears with the breaking of
the myth. They are forced into the second stage of literalism, the con-
scious one, which is aware of the questions but represses them, half
consciously, half unconsciously. . . . This stage is still justifiable, if
the questioning power is very weak and can easily be answered. It
is unjustifiable if a mature mind is broken in its personal center by
political or psychological methods, split in his unity, and hurt in his
integrity" (52 f.).
It is clear that Tillich stands unalterably opposed not only to the
Inquisition and to any physical coercion but also to authoritarian
methods that harm people's mental health without touching their
bodies. No man must be forced to believe. But Tillich considers it
all right to let people believe things that are plainly false things
they would not believe unless the churches made them believe at an
early age, before "man's questioning mind" discovers difficulties.
And even when that point is reached, it is all right, according to the
passage cited, to put the believer's mind at ease by reconfirming him
Against Theology 133
in his false literal beliefs, "if the questioning power is very weak
and can easily be answered."
One can picture the theologian's problem as he is confronted with
a doubter: should the young man be initiated into the inner circle
of the broken myth, or is his questioning power weak and does he
belong in the second stage of literalism? It all depends on whether
he "can easily be answered." If the theologian were a bit crude, he
would throw an argument for God's existence at his questioner, or
possibly the wager of Pascal, or an appeal to miracles. If the ques-
tioner accepted that, this would be proof that his questioning power
was weak and that the second stage of literalism was just right for
him. But if the young man saw through the answer given him, then
one might pat him on the back, congratulate him on his acumen,
and let him graduate into the inner circle.
Tillich, however, does not favor the crude method of confronting
men with arguments that he himself considers bad. Instead he re-
defines the crucial terms and cultivates a land of double-speak.
Literalists thus feel reconfirmed in their beliefs and are pleased that
so erudite a man should share their faith, while the initiated realize
that Tillich finds the beliefs shared by most of the famous Christians
of the past and by millions of Christians in the present utterly un-
tenable; and some unbelievers conclude that unbelief is no reason
for renouncing Christianity. The central point was most perfectly
stated by St. Paul when he concluded his attempt to explain his
method to the Corinthians by saying succinctly: "I have become all
things to all men, that I might by all means save some" (1.9:22).
The theological virtuoso far transcends double-speak and triple-
speak to speak to each man's need. But double-speak at least is re-
quired: to seem to agree with tradition while also being up-to-date,
or, as suggested previously, to say No in such a way that those who
would resent No, or be troubled by it, hear Yes.
A rare reader will remark that any such account of Tillich is mis-
leading because Tillich says publicly in his Dynamics of Faith,
for example -that he considers the central Christian articles of
faith untenable, if they are taken literally: clearly, then, if anybody
is deceived, that is not Tillich's fault. But the reader arguing that
134 The Faith of a Heretic
way is almost certainly one of the initiated. Bright students study-
ing religion and philosophy at leading universities are generally
quite unsure where Tillich stands, and they rarely find unaided that
Tillich says what those defending him occasionally claim he says
so plainly.
The point is not that some theologians, like Shakespeare and
many others, offer more to the discerning reader than to the less
thoughtful. Rather, they say A to the one, and not-A to the other,
confirming one in his childhood beliefs while informing the other
that, of course, no thoughtful person can share such primitive
fancies. But unlike politicians who make statements in Harlem that
they contradict in Virginia, theologians cultivate the art of double-
speak.
What is unusual about Tillich's little book is that it is so short and
relatively simple and explains the rationale of methods used by
other theologians, too. Here is a brief work of some stature that
exemplifies some of the central problems theologians face and some
of the devices they employ to cope with them.
33
Some of the other charges made here can be illustrated from this
book, too, for example, gerrymandering one's own religion to make
it attractive while presenting other religions in a less favorable light.
"Every type of faith has the tendency to elevate its concrete sym-
bols to absolute validity. The criterion of the truth of faith, there-
fore, is that it implies an element of self-negation. That symbol is
most adequate which expresses not only the ultimate but also its own
lack of ultimacy Christianity expresses itself in such a symbol in
contrast to all other religions, namely, in the Cross of Christ" (97).
Jesus' death on the cross is apparently to Tillich a reminder that
Jesus was not really God if he had been, he would not have died
but a symbol of God. The crucifix "expresses not only the ultimate
but also its own lack of ultimacy/' But instead of conceding that
Christianity went further than many another religion, and especially
Against Theology 135
Judaism, in mistaking a symbol for the ultimate and a human being
for God, Tillich gives Christianity the benefit of his daring reinter-
pretation; and instead of admitting that Calvin no less than
Aquinas would have favored burning him for so heretical a piece of
exegesis, he proclaims that Christianity (with the benefit of his
interpretation) is superior "to all other religions."
Two questions present themselves. First, could Tillich be unaware
of the vast difference between his own views and those of the
Reformers, not to speak of Catholics? At times, he frankly admits
fundamental disagreements, but at other times regard for history
and facts simply evaporates, and on the next page (98) we are
told: "Doctrinal formulations did not divide the churches in the
Reformation period." As if Luther did not dispute over doctrines
first with papal representatives and later with Zwingli; and as if
the splintering of Protestantism had not been precipitated by doc-
trinal differences over the sacraments.
The second question is whether other religions, given the benefit
of equally daring exegeses, not to speak of such a thoroughgoing
disregard for inconvenient facts, might not be formidable rivals for
the faith the theologian champions. But other religions are gerry-
mandered in opposite fashion. And even Tillich, who has more
feeling for the Hebrew Bible and for Judaism than most Christian
theologians, suggests that in Judaism God "can be approached only
by those who obey the law" (65). One thinks of the Book of Jonah,
of ever so much of the Old Testament, and of dozens of famous
quotations from rabbinic literature and would be stunned if one
had never read theology before.
The last two quotations about Judaism and the churches in the
Reformation period are passing remarks, and it might seem cap-
tious to attach much weight to them. In fact, however, the point
at stake here undermines a crucial portion of Dynamics of Faith
and, indeed, Tillich's and not only his theology.
If one rejects the traditional beliefs of Christianity and claims
that "man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, be-
cause symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate" (41),
the question arises whether one is still a Christian. When we inter-
136 The Faith of a Heretic
pret Christianity symbolically, we should recall that other religions
can be interpreted symbolically, too. As we saw in the chapter on
"The Quest for Honesty," the pagan theologians of the Hellenistic
and the early Christian Era were profuse in their symbolic exegeses
of their own traditions. There would then seem to be no need to
reject possibly even no excuse for rejecting any religion as un-
true: truth might well be out of the picture.
If so, Christian theology would have finally reached the position
which in antiquity it attacked: that an educated man should not be
exclusive and intolerant in matters of religious truth; that he should
not consider his religion right and other religions wrong, and that
he should consider different religions mutually compatible. But at
that point our modern Christian theologians pull back from the
consequences of their own position to insist that, after all, Chris-
tianity is superior to "all other religions."
Tillich's attempt to substantiate this last point fails for the reasons
already indicated. But to see precisely how it fails, we must con-
sider his three short pages on "The Truth of Faith and its Criteria,"
from which we have already quoted. Tilhch answers his own ques-
tion how one can "speak of the truth of faith" by claiming that
there are two criteria, one subjective and one objective. "From the
subjective side one must say that faith is true if it adequately ex-
presses an ultimate concern."
The subjective criterion alone would lead to relativism, as Tillich
realizes. Indeed, judged "from the subjective side," the faith of Com-
munists would seem to be truer than the faith of most Lutherans and
other Protestants: "'Adequacy* of expression means the power of
expressing an ultimate concern in such a way that it creates reply,
action, communication. Symbols which are able to do this are alive "
During the Second World War, though not since the end of the
war, the Nazi faith, too, would have been truer than the Protestant
faith. "Symbols which for a certain period, or in a certain place,
expressed truth of faith for a certain group . . . have lost their truth,
and it is an open question whether dead symbols can be revived."
Subjectively, "the criterion of the truth of faith is whether or not
it is alive."
Against Theology 137
Tillich loathed Nazism from the beginning, and did not consider
it true even when it was very much alive and created "reply, action,
communication/' But to show that it was not true, or that com-
munism is not true, or that Christianity is superior to other religions,
Tillich depends entirely on his second, objective criterion. His ini-
tial formulation "faith is true if its content is the really ultimate"
is not as clear as one might wish, but as soon as Tillich discusses
this criterion he makes it clear that he wants to rule out "idolatrous"
faith, and that Protestant Christianity, too, "is open to idolatrous
distortions. . . . Every type of faith has the tendency to elevate its
concrete symbols to absolute validity." Then the three sentences
cited at the beginning of this section follow.
By the second, objective criterion, too, communism and Nazism
might well be truer than Protestantism and Catholicism. German,
Russian, and Chinese soldiers who died eagerly for their faith did
not, for the most part, mistake the swastika, or hammer and sickle,
or Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao, for "the ultimate." They did not
elevate such symbols "to absolute validity"; they realized their "lack
of ultimacy"; and they probably would have been hard put to say
what, ultimately, they were killing and dying for. Tillich's criteria
do not allow him to find even Nazism and communism untrue;
much less do they permit him to find Christianity superior to other
religions.
The Hebrew prophets, the Buddha, and Lao-tze resisted "the
tendency to elevate . . . symbols to absolute validity" much more
successfully than the New Testament writers, the church fathers, or
Luther. Indeed, Luther insisted against Zwingli that the sacramental
bread and wine were not symbols of Christ's flesh and blood but
really Christ's flesh and blood, and this doctrine became one of the
distinctive marks of Lutheranism.
Tillich does not merely gerrymander incidentally; he depends
utterly on gerrymandering and the double standard to escape from
a pervasive relativism that would relegate Christianity to being
nothing more than one of many faiths that are patently false as
usually understood but capable of impressive interpretations, if only
138 The Faith of a Heretic
one has a little ingenuity. This would scarcely be worth mentioning
if it were merely Tillich's personal predicament. It is part of the
point of this chapter that it is not.
34
Millions of Christians today believe, in effect, that in the first-
century controversy between the Jews and the early Christians the
Jews were right. Like the Jews, they believe that the early Chris-
tians were wrong when they claimed that on the third day Jesus
rose from the dead, supped with some of his disciples at Emmaus,
and said: "See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself, handle me,
and see, for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have"
(Luke 24:39). They flatly disagree, though they do not make a
point of this, with Paul's emphatic dictum, which follows upon
Paul's elaborate recital of the evidence for Jesus' resurrection: "If
Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your
faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, be-
cause we testified of God that he raised Christ. ... If Christ has not
been raised, your faith is futile" (I Corinthians 15).
The Christian who believes, in Bultmann's words, that Jesus did
not "come back to life and rise from his tomb" rejects the very
belief in terms of which Christianity defined itself vis--vis Judaism.
If he holds that this false belief is nevertheless a particularly edify-
ing symbol, and thus tries to shift religious controversies to the plain
of literary criticism, he goes against the grain of his religion and
takes the side of those whom the authors of his Scriptures and the
architects of all the major Christian churches, from the Greek and
Latin fathers down to the Reformers, fought with all their might.
This is not the only objection to this post-Christian strategem. To
an even moderately sophisticated and well-read person it should
come as no surprise that any religion at all has its hidden as well as
its obvious beauties, and that a resourceful interpreter can come up
with sapphires where there seemed to be nothing but mud. The
trouble with most such interpreters is that they overlook, and that
Against Theology 139
they lead their audiences to overlook, that other religions and
denominations can play the same game. And they allow the believer
to say Yes while evading any No.
While these faults are deeply ingrained in theology, it is by no
means impossible for a religious person to avoid them. When the
Hebrew prophets interpreted their religious heritage, they were not
conformists who discovered subtle ways in which they could agree,
or seem to agree, with the religion of their day. Nor did they show
how the cult was justifiable with a little dexterity. Far from it.
Let those who like inspiring interpretations be no less forthright
in telling us precisely where they stand on immortality, the sacra-
ments, and hell; on the virgin birth and resurrection; on the in-
carnation and the miracles; on John's theology, and Paul's, and
James'; on Augustine and Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and the various
creeds. And on: "Resist not evil." And: "Let him who would sue
you in court for your coat have your cloak, too." And: "No one
comes to the Father but through Me."
That would clearly be the end of theology. The theologians pay
a price for perpetuating a mass movement; they are not content, as
the prophets were, with a small remnant. If each spoke out boldly
and unequivocally, no mass movement would be left. It would be-
come apparent that there are almost as many different views as
preachers, that such phrases as "the message of the New Testament"
and "the Biblical view" and "the Christian answer" are hollow, and
that the temporal and spatial continuity of Christendom depends on
ambiguity.
The preacher who insists on being forthright loses at least half his
audience: at best, he has the choice which portion he would like
to keep. If he wants to have a congregation that does not consist
solely of intellectuals, he has to speak in a manner that makes
sense at what Tillich calls "the natural stage of literalism ... in
which the mythical and the literal are indistinguishable"; and he
must also keep the confidence of those who have reached "the
second stage of literalism, the conscious one, which is aware of the
questions but represses them"; nor must he antagonize those who
despise literalism.
140 The Faith of a Heretic
To understand theology, one has to recognize that pastors and
priests, as well as the theologians who train them, work in an en-
vironment that is quite different from the universities in which
philosophers and scientists pursue their work. The preacher has dis-
similar responsibilities and is subjected to different pressures. To
put it crudely, he lacks tenure and academic freedom: if he alienates
half of his congregation, he is likely to be out of a job.
Suppose he spurns economic considerations and gives little or no
thought to his own welfare; suppose he either has no family or
utterly subordinates their future and security to his conception of
his duties: he still has a responsibility to the congregation as a whole
and not just to those who share his ideas. He is not like a lecturer
who speaks once a week in an adult education program to those who
happen to be interested in his subject. Nor is it his job to dissemi-
nate information and to promote critical thinking. His audience, un-
like that of a philosophy or science professor, expects to be fortified
against the inroads of new information and critical thinking. Those
who are most traditional in their beliefs would withdraw their con-
fidence if he said clearly that he disbelieves what they believe, but
they need him most. The highly educated are more likely to turn
elsewhere when they are in trouble, especially if their religion is
extremely liberal or altogether non-theistic: they may go to doctors,
psychoanalysts, or social workers, for example. Those, on the other
hand, who take many ancient beliefs literally need their pastor.
One only has to put oneself in the preacher's place to understand
how his predicament quite naturally leads him to resort to the de-
vices we have discussed. There, but for the lack of God's grace, go I.
35
Theology, of course, is not religion; and a great deal of religion is
emphatically anti-theological. At the very least, large parts of the
Sermon on the Mount are anti-theological, not only those alluded to
earlier in this chapter. Parts of the New Testament seem to say that
what ultimately matters is our conduct and not our beliefs, and
Against Theology 141
least of all theology. But the claim that this is the message of the
New Testament, however dear to many liberals, can be backed up
only by gerrymandering.
If only implicitly, the teachings of the Hebrew prophets are much
more consistently and radically anti-theological. "I hate, I despise
your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. . . .
But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-
flowing stream." These words of Amos state one of the central
themes of the prophetic books. Isaiah says similarly: "When you
come to appear before me, who requires of you this trampling of
my courts? Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination
to me. Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct op-
pression; defend the fatherless; plead for the widow." And Micah:
"What does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love
mercy and to walk humbly with your God."
In the Prophets and in parts of the New Testament though
certainly only in parts love, justice, and humility appear to be
all that is asked of man, and questions of belief entirely peripheral,
while precise formulations about God, "his attributes, and his rela-
tions with man and the universe" are altogether out of the picture.
Perhaps the Book of Jonah goes furthest: here the wicked men of
Nineveh are forgiven everything because they are sincerely sorry;
they are pagans and they need not even be converted or acknowl-
edge any new beliefs whatever.
The Buddha brushed aside all theological and metaphysical
queries as "questions that tend not toward edification" and pro-
claimed that all we need to know to live good lives and find salva-
tion are four simple truths about suffering, its cause in human
ignorance, desire, and attachment; its cessation when detachment is
achieved; and the kind of life that leads to the cessation of desire.
Around the same time, about 500 B.C., Confucius, in China, dis-
paraged questions about the supernatural and taught men to con-
centrate on this life and their relations to other human beings.
In the Confucian Analects we are told that "the Master would not
discuss . . . supernatural beings" (VII: 20) and discouraged concern
with men's "duty to the spirits" (XI: 11). The other great sage of
142 The Faith of a Heretic
China, Lao-tze, went even further in disparaging speculations, doc-
trines, and pretensions to knowledge. With a whimsical humor he
extolled the virtues of a simple lif e.
An attack on theology, therefore, should not be taken as neces-
sarily involving an attack on religion. Religion can be, and often
has been, untheological or even anti-theological.
Whether Christianity can ever dispense with theology is another
matter. Christianity has always emphasized beliefs that must seem
foolish to the uninitiated a point already made in the oldest part
of the New Testament, the Epistles of Paul. Shorn of these beliefs,
Christianity ceases to be Christianity and becomes some kind of
Reform Judaism or Unitarianism. Christianity defined itself less as
a way of life than as a faith which, right from the beginning, in-
volved assent to various propositions. Disputes over these beliefs
and their correct interpretation led to the establishment of different
churches and denominations. Confronted with so many theologies, a
Christian faces a variety of possibilities.
First, he can try to ignore this abundance, refuse to give himself
any account of the meaning of his beliefs, and repeat the hallowed
articles of faith without caring how they are interpreted. This leaves
open the question to which church he belongs and goes. If he goes
to the nearest one, or to the one that other people of his social status
generally attend, while turning a deaf ear to his minister's interpre-
tations of Christian belief, he is likely to be a pillar of society, but
he could hardly be said to take his Christianity seriously. It was
against nominal Christians of this sort that Kierkegaard wrote his
life long. Though Kierkegaard is popular today, he is enlisted, much
against his express will, as an apologist, and people overlook the
fact that the kind of Christianity Kierkegaard attacked is precisely
the kind of "religion" whose revival in the middle of the twentieth
century we are asked to note with hope.
Secondly, a Christian can acquaint himself with more than one
Against Theology 143
theology and then choose a denomination that makes sense to him,
that he finds congenial, that says more or less in Christian terms
what he believes in any case. And if the theologians of this church
do not carve exactly what he wants out of the Gospels and Epistles,
he may attempt some small adjustments of his own.
One might suppose that this is what most Christians do; but in
fact the vast majority even of educated Christians fall into the
first class and not into this one. Few Presbyterian college students or
college graduates know what the Westminster Confession is; fewer
have read it; hardly any have compared it with the basic documents
of other denominations.
The present critique of theology would be grossly misleading if
it gave the reader the impression that theology is generally very
much more than window dressing. Theology moves no mountains;
it rarely moves people: it is something most people put up with,
something they do not take seriously, something good manners re-
quire one to respect and not to think about.
How little people think about theology, how much it is a mere
epiphenomenon of organized religion, has been shown in some de-
tail by Richard Niebuhr in The Social Sources of Denominational^
ism. As long as Protestant denominations have existed, social status
rather than theology seems to have decided in most cases to what
church a family belonged and "doctrines and practice change
with the mutations of social structure, not vice versa" (21). This
analysis by a man who is often called a theologian is influenced by
Marxism the book first appeared in 1929 and gives a picture
that is just a little too extreme in emphasizing economic factors
while reducing ideologies to ineffective superstructures. But what
matters in the present context is not the precise percentage of un-
thinking Christians who, while they resent all critical reflections on
theology, cannot be bothered to inform themselves about beliefs
that they claim to think may seriously affect our posthumous careers.
Statistics offer a welcome escape from self-reflection.
In the end, a Christian may choose to reject theology for some
of the reasons given here, and for others besides. But in that case
he gives up Christianity, though in some laudatory senses of the
144 The Faith of a Heretic
word he may be a better Christian than some theologians. In that
way, many Buddhists, Jews, Confucianists, and atheists are ako
better Christians than most Christians.
After all, Christianity is inescapably a theological religion, and
those who give up the ancient formulations of alleged knowledge
about "God, his nature and attributes, and his relations with man
and the universe" break with Christianity. They may still admire
Jesus, as some Jews and Hindus do, too; but they are no longer
Christians. But could one remain a Christian and retain the ancient
formulations without employing any double standard, without
gerrymandering or double-speak?
One can avoid all this by the simple expedient of refusing to
think about one's religion. But if one does that, is one a Christian?
Or one can say: I accept everything, though on the face of it a lot
of what I am accepting appears mutually contradictory which
only shows that reason is, as Luther said, "the Devil's bride" and
"God's worst enemy" (XII, 1530, VIII, 2048). Again, one refuses to
think about one's religion. But if one insists on thinking about it
without gerrymandering and double-speak, one has to say: this I
accept, this not; this I believe, this not; this I admire, this not. And
if one employs no double-standard, one will have to add: in other
scriptures and religions, too, I find things I accept, believe, and
admire, including much that compares very favorably with much in
my own tradition. Still, one may conceivably conclude, it is my own
tradition that I love best, though I really agree with no more than
a fraction of it. And if that is what one does, one may wish to be a
Christian, but one is, literally, a heretic.
37
To show what is wrong with theology in the ordinary sense of
that word (dogmatic theology), one does not require a positivistic,
Kantian, or Humean theory of knowledge. The faults of theology
can be seen with the naked eye. To show that these charges against
theology can be sustained against the best theologians, one must
Against Theology 145
consider some of these men. If I had named no names, I should be
open to the allegation that nobody, or at least no one of any stature,
had actually done what I accused theologians of doing. I have
therefore singled out a few men of acknowledged stature.
Profound disagreements are compatible with profound, albeit
only partial, admiration. But anyone with high standards of honesty
will have more than partial admiration for exceedingly few people.
Those who wish that I might have dealt at greater length with
Bultmann, Tillich, or Aquinas will find that I have dealt with some
of their other writings in my Critique, Chapters V-VIII; and that
there I have also considered some other theologians. Here I have
confined myself to what seemed necessary to support my criticisms.
So the two books should supplement each other.
The rejection of natural and dogmatic theology does not involve
any repudiation of the critical, historical, and psychological study
of religion. On the contrary, such inquiries are most valuable.
Those who want to improve their thinking about the important
questions of life and become more conscientious should surely con-
sider the divergent answers given by some of the great religions.
One need not ignore the theologians; but instead of studying
theology one should study theologies as part of the history of
religions. The committed study of a single theology or a single
philosophic system, or the views of a single scientist whose theory
differs from the theories of many other scientists is a training in
unsound method, partiality, and special pleading. Instead of being
taught how some one theory can be patched up indefinitely if only
we allow it privileges that we carefully deny to its competitors, stu-
dents should be exposed to a variety of views and led to discover
what can be said for and against each.
Moreover, theological approaches, being denominational, are not
at all propitious for determining what answers were actually given
by the great religious figures of the past, or even what questions
they asked. In few areas is it so hard to read honestly and respon-
sibly, instead of reading one's own prior convictions into the texts;
and in theology the latter tendency is institutionalized.
This is not to say that theologians have a monopoly on reading
148 The Faith of a Heretic
religious texts badly. It is exceedingly difficult to read them. Tolstoy
wrote an essay How to Read the Gospels and What is Essential in
Them and argued: "To understand any book one must choose out
the parts that are quite clear, dividing them from what is obscure
or confused. And from what is clear we must form our idea of the
drift and spirit of the whole work. Then, on the basis of what we
have understood, we may proceed to make out what is confused or
not quite intelligible. . . . That was how I read the Gospels, and
the meaning of Christ's teaching became so clear to me that it was
impossible to have any doubts about it. ... What is comprehensible
to one may seem obscure to another. But all will certainly agree in
what is most important. . . ." Sancta simplicitas! That is what
Luther thought, too. But Luther considered Paul and John most
important, and especially the doctrine of justification by faith alone;
Tolstoy, the Sermon on the Mount, and especially the command-
ment, "Resist not evil."
Such divergent responses of great human beings to texts, such
total responses to verses that set languishing hearts afire, have a
more unsettling effect on us than the neat systems of theologians.
Luther and Tolstoy openly based their religion on a few key pass-
ages; the unsoundness of their procedure is obvious; but as we read
them, and others like them, we experience the challenge of religion:
we are put on trial and stand some chance of becoming more
thoughtful and sensitive, less slothful and complacent. Theological
systems, on the other hand, lack what Luther, depreciating Melanch-
thon's system, called "real seriousness." They mute the challenge
and, albeit unwittingly, facilitate complacency.
Some people who are misleadmgly called theologians might well
agree with all this. This critique is directed, as was made plain at
the beginning of this chapter, against what the Oxford English
Dictionary calls "dogmatic theology," not against everybody who
happens to be teaching at a theological seminary or against so-
called theologians who are really philologists or historians. Ernst
Troeltsch's Social Teachings of the Christian Churches is a monu-
ment of impartial and fair-minded scholarship and not in any
proper sense of the word a theological work, although he was still a
Against Theology 147
professor of theology when he wrote it and did not formally aban-
don theology to become a professor of philosophy until a little later
(1915). Hermann L. Strack was a professor of theology at the
University of Berlin, and Paul Billerbeck was a pastor, but their
fascinating five-volume Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Tal-
mud und Midrasch is not a work of theology either. The same con-
sideration applies to Richard Niebuhr's Social Sources of Denomina-
tionalism and Morton Scott Enslin's Christian Beginnings. It would
be easy and pointless to lengthen this list.
From the claim that dogmatic theologians use unsound methods
and are unfair to rival points of view when they do theology, it does
not follow that they are unsound or unfair when they do other
things, or that they have a monopoly on the faults charged against
them. Some philosophers, past and present, are open to the same
charges. A philosopher who criticizes theology is surely under no
compulsion to defend all philosophers, and I certainly have never
come close to doing that.
If a philosopher takes the attitude that Plato and Kant must be
defended at all costs, if necessary by the most farfetched interpreta-
tions, and that their works must be read as we should not read those
of any other philosopher, this would be a personal defect; it is cer-
tainly not of the essence of philosophy. On the contrary, his ap-
proach would be patently unphilosophical. In theology, on the
other hand, such partiality, such special pleading, such a double
standard is institutionalized.
One practical conclusion remains to be drawn. Theological
seminaries create many of the problems that their products are
expected to resolve. For years the students at the seminaries are
trained to see their own denomination as they see no other one;
then they are supposed to go out as spiritual leaders, teaching peo-
ple how to love their neighbors as themselves, sitting down with
representatives of other faiths in mutual respect and understanding.
Having been trained to see Catholicism as the Catholics do not see
it, Judaism as the Jews do not experience it, and other Protestant
denominations as they do not look to their own members, the young
clergyman is expected to collaborate with priests and rabbis and to
148 The Faith of a Heretic
busy himself in the ecumenical movement, doing his best throughout
his professional career to heal breaches which, but for the training
which he and the other ministers, rabbis, and priests received,
would long have disappeared.
These criticisms of theology leave open the question how, in de-
tail, I should deal with such an ancient theological problem as that
of suffering; or how I should read the Old Testament, or the New
Testament. In the next three chapters I propose to take up these
problems in turn.
My point of view is not that of a disciple. But if a man were a
true disciple of the Buddha, of the prophets, or of Jesus, could he
fail to be against theology? Could he help becoming a heretic?
VI
SUFFERING
AND THE BIBLE
38
No other problem of theology or the philosophy of religion
has excited so sustained and wide an interest as the problem of
suffering. In spite of that, people keep saying, as if it were a well-
known truth, that you cannot prove or disprove God's existence.
This clich^ is as true as the assertion that you cannot prove or dis-
prove the existence of y. Of course, it is easy to construct a formally
valid proof that y, or God, exists or, for that matter, that they do
not exist: x said that y exists; x always spoke the truth (in fact, he
said: I am the truth), hence, y exists. Or: y is a z, no z exists; hence,
y does not exist. But whether the existence or non-existence of t/, or
God, can be proved from plausible premises depends on the mean-
ing we assign to t/, or to God. And the term "God," as we have
seen, is almost, though not quite, as elastic as the symbol "y"
One's strategy in trying to defend or to attack the claim that God
exists obviously depends on what is meant by "God." It may be
objected that it is not so difficult to isolate what might be called the
popular conception of God. The problem of suffering is of crucial
importance because it shows that the God of popular theism does
not exist.
149
150 The Faith of a Heretic
The problem of suffering is: why is there the suffering we know?
Dogmatic theology, criticized in the preceding chapter, has no
monopoly on dealing with this problem. Let us see how a philos-
opher might deal with it, after repudiating dogmatic theology and
endorsing the importance of the "critical, historical, and psycho-
logical study of religion." My approach will be part philosophical,
part historical only partially philosophic because the problem can
be illuminated greatly by being placed in historical perspective.
What matters here is not to display philosophic acumen but really
to remove some of the deeply felt perplexity that surrounds this
problem; and toward that end, we shall have to draw on history
as well as philosophy.
There are at least three easy ways of disposing of the problem
why there is suffering. If we adopt the position that everything in
the universe, or at least a great deal, is due to chance, the problem
is answered in effect. Indeed, as we reflect on this solution, it be-
comes clear that the "why" of the problem of suffering asks for a
purpose; a mere cause will not do. Immediately a second solution
comes to mind: if we say that the universe, far from being gov-
erned by chance, is subject to iron laws but not to any purpose, the
problem of suffering is again taken care of. Thirdly, even if we
assume that the world is governed by purpose, we need only add
that this purpose or, if there are several, at least one of them is
not especially intent on preventing suffering, whether it is indif-
ferent to suffering or actually rejoices in it.
All three solutions are actually encountered in well-known reli-
gions. Although the two great native religions of China, Confucian-
ism and Taoism, are far from dogmatic or even doctrinaire, and
neither of them commands assent to any set of theories, both ap-
proximate the first solution which accepts events simply as happen-
ing, without seeking either laws or purposes behind them.
The second solution, which postulates a lawful world order but
no purpose, is encountered in the two great religions which origi-
nated in India: Hinduism and Buddhism. Here an attempt is made
to explain suffering: the outcaste of traditional Hinduism is held to
deserve his wretched fate; it is a punishment for the wrongs he did
Suffering and the Bible 151
in a previous life. We are all reborn after death in accordance with
the way we behaved during our lives: we receive reward and
punishment as our souls migrate from one existence to the next. The
transmigration of souls proceeds in accordance with a fixed moral
order, but there is no purpose behind it. The scientific world view
also disposes of the problem of suffering by denying that the laws
of nature are governed by any purpose.
The third solution is familiar from polytheistic religions for
example, the Iliad and the Odyssey but present also in the Persian
religion of Zarathustra (or Zoroaster), who taught that there were
two gods, a god of light and goodness (Ormazd or Ahura-Mazda)
and a god of darkness and evil (Ahriman). Here, and in many so-
called primitive religions, too, suffering is charged to some evil
purpose.
In all three cases, and for most human beings, the problem of
suffering poses no difficult problem at all: one has a world picture in
which suffering has its place, a world picture that takes suffering
into account. To make the problem of suffering a perplexing prob-
lem, one requires very specific presuppositions, and once those are
accepted the problem becomes not only puzzling but insoluble.
For atheism and polytheism there is no special problem of suffer-
ing, nor need there be for every kind of monotheism. The problem
arises when monotheism is enriched with or impoverished by
two assumptions: that God is omnipotent and that God is just In
fact, popular theism goes beyond merely asserting God's justice and
claims that God is "good," that he is morally perfect, that he hates
suffering, that he loves man, and that he is infinitely merciful, far
transcending all human mercy, love, and perfection. Once these
assumptions are granted, the problem arises: why, then, is there all
the suffering we know? And as long as these assumptions are
granted, this question cannot be answered. For if these assumptions
were true, it would follow that there could not be all of this suffer-
ing. Conversely: since it is a fact that there is all this suffering, it
is plain that at least one of these assumptions must be false. Popular
theism is refuted by the existence of so much suffering. The theism
preached from thousands of pulpits and credited by millions of
152 The Faith of a Heretic
believers is disproved by Auschwitz and a billion lesser evils.
The use of "God" as a synonym for being-itself , or for the "pure
act of being," or for nature, or for scores of other things for which
other terms are readily available, cannot be disproved but only
questioned as pettifoggery. The assertion that God exists, if only
God is taken in some such Pickwickian sense, is false, too: not false
in the sense of being incorrect, but false in the sense of being mis-
leading and to that extent deceptive.
It is widely assumed, contrary to fact, that theism necessarily
involves the two assumptions which cannot be squared with the
existence of so much suffering, and that therefore, per impossibile,
they simply have to be squared with the existence of all this suffer-
ing, somehow. And a great deal of theology as well as a little of
philosophy the rationalizing kind of philosophy which seeks in-
genious reasons for what is believed to begin with has consisted
in attempts to reconcile the popular image of God with the abun-
dance of suffering.
39
In this perspective, much of the Old Testament appears in a new
light. In most of the Hebrew Scriptures it is simply axiomatic that
suffering comes from God. "Is a trumpet blown in a city, and the
people are not afraid? Does evil befall a city, and the Lord has not
done it?" asked Amos (3:6). About 150 years later, after the fall of
Jerusalem in 586, Jeremiah exclaimed in his Lamentations: "Is it not
from the mouth of the Most High that good and evil come?" (3:38).
And not quite fifty years later, as the Persians, who believed in two
great gods, one good and one evil, were approaching Babylonia, the
so-called Second Isaiah repudiated any such dualism: "I am the
Lord, and there is no other; besides me there is no god. ... I form
light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil; I am the
Lord who do all these things" (45:5 ff.). Evil and suffering do not
come from an evil god, Ahriman, but from the one and only God.
Suffering and the Bibk 153
In the same spirit, Job asks his wife: "Shall we receive good at the
hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?" (2:10).
It also seems to have been accepted as a fact and it surely is a
fact that children often suffer for their parents' deeds. This evi-
dently offended Jeremiah's moral sensibility, but he was less prone
than most men to retouch reality. Nothing ever kept him from tell-
ing his contemporaries how grim he considered both the present
and the imminent future. But looking into the very distant future,
he gave voice to his hopes: "And it shall come to pass that as I have
watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow,
destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to
plant, says the Lord. In those days they shall no longer say: 'The
fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on
edge.' But every one shall die for his own sin; each man who eats
sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge" (31:28 ff.). With his
grim realism, Jeremiah did not question the plain fact that those
who suffer frequently do not deserve their suffering; but he felt that
this was unjust, and he proclaimed that a time shall come when it
will not be that way any more. As for the present, he did not ques-
tion the patent injustice of history: "Our fathers sinned, and are no
more, and we bear their iniquities" (Lamentations, 5:7).
Only a few years later, possibly even at the very same time, an-
other prophet arose in the Babylonian captivity and took a further
step: Ezekiel. He marks a new point of departure.
One ought to divide the Hebrew prophets into three groups in-
stead of distinguishing the "major" from the "minor" prophets, using
the mere size of their books as the sole criterion. Nor is it sufficient
to separate the pre-exilic from the later prophets: in a crucial way,
the so-called Second Isaiah is closer to the pre-exilic Isaiah than he
is to Ezekiel, his own contemporary.
Three types of Hebrew prophets might be distinguished as fol-
lows. First, there are those who did not write books or compose
magnificent speeches. Among these, the most memorable is Elijah
in the ninth century; and the Bible also devotes a good deal of space
to his follower, Elisha. Both stand in a tradition that is easily traced
154 The Faith of a Heretic
back at least another 200 years to the time of Saul and David; and
from the time of David a notable parable, told by the prophet
Nathan, has been preserved. The Books of Samuel and Kings are
full of similar prophets, though not all were of equal stature.
The two first representatives of the second type were Amos and
Hosea, in the eighth century. They were soon followed by Micah
and Isaiah, a century later by Jeremiah, and still later by the Second
Isaiah There were others, more or less similar though not quite so
impressive. What sets the men of the second type apart is that they
spontaneously composed great poetic speeches, generally in the
name of the Lord. They did not, like some of the prophets of the
first type, induce ecstatic trances by dancing, nor did they wait to
be consulted, nor did they claim to perform miracles, nor did they
merely tell the king after special provocation what they thought of
him, with the whole emphasis falling on the contents of their re-
marks and little or none on the precise words. Whether the prophets
of this second type recorded their own words in writing or left it to
others to do, they were great literary artists as well as moralists.
The gist of their messages was generally that their people were act-
ing immorally, that such conduct was bound to lead to hideous
consequences, and that the people should mend their ways, the
consequences being inevitable unless the people should repent and
return from their wicked ways.
The first great representative of the third type is Ezekiel who,
during the Exile, turned away from reality and had visions. When
Isaiah described the Lord's call, in Chapter 6, he gave us the bare
bones of a vision, providing no more than the setting in which he
found himself addressed. Everything leads up to the words he
heard: what really mattered could not be seen. God's "train filled
the temple," and Isaiah saw some amazing creatures whom he called
seraphim; but all this merely underlines the exceptional nature of
his experience. The climax is not reached until Isaiah is addressed:
"Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then I said: Here I
am, send mel And he said: Go and say to this people: . . ." Isaiah,
Micah, Jeremiah, Hosea, and Amos were not visionaries. Their
experiences were primarily auditory: they heard God's voice, they
Suffering and the Bible 155
were inspired to say things. Only very occasionally are their mes-
sages underscored by visual detail; but even then they do not lose
themselves lovingly in elaborations; what matters is the spoken
word and not a vision. All this is different in Ezekiel who, as it were,
founded a new genre.
In the Old Testament, the next two major representatives of this
genre are Zechariah and Daniel. Outside the Old Testament, a
whole vast apocalyptic literature developed in which various au-
thors spun out their visions in minute detail, showing the influence
of Ezekiel and Daniel in a great variety of ways, not least by taking
over many of their images. While this literature was not accepted as
canonical by the Jews and deliberately excluded from the Hebrew
Bible, one apocalypse, known variously either as The Revelation of
St. John the Divine or as The Apocalypse, was included in the New
Testament; and the influence of apocalyptic literature is plain in
the Gospels and in other parts of the New Testament, too.
It is a commonplace that Jesus stands in "the prophetic tradition."
Our distinction between three types of prophets allows a certain
refinement of this client. Jesus does not go as far as Amos and
Hosea, Micah and Isaiah, and Jeremiah did in their radical criti-
cism of the cult of their religion and their exclusive insistence on
justice, mercy, and humility, though it is plain that the general
tenor of his preaching was closer to this tradition than it was to
ritualism or theology. Still, seeing that others before him had gone
so far, it is noteworthy that he went so much less far. Although
Bultmann, in his Theology of the New Testament, ascribes to Jesus
"a great protest against Jewish legalism" (10), he has to admit that
"there is not the slightest trace in Jesus' words of any polemic
against the temple cult" (16). The great prophets of the second type
had outdone each other in such polemics. And in his early book on
the Synoptic Gospels, Bultmann points out that it is highly signifi-
cant that various minor violations of the ritual law are "related of
the disciples only and not of Jesus himself; and he gives reasons
for believing that "the 'disciples' who have broken with these cus-
toms are the primitive Christian community" (23; cf. my Critique,
57).
156 The Faith of a Heretic
To be sure, the New Testament relates that Jesus healed a man
on the Sabbath, but the Pharisees would have considered this per-
missible if there had been an emergency. Since the man had been
lame all his life, most of them felt, no doubt, that Jesus might have
waited a few hours until the Sabbath was over, though a minority
might have been as liberal as he was. Clearly, this was a borderline
case which involved the interpretation of the law: the whole atmos-
phere is that of first-century Judaism, not that of the great prophets
of the second type. Like many, though by no means all, of his con-
temporaries, Jesus and the evangelists were evidently much more
deeply influenced by the Biblical stories of Elijah's miracles and
ascent to heaven and by the apocalyptic tradition than by Amos and
his successors. It is not merely such a phrase as "Son of Man" which
recalls Daniel and Ezeltiel but, more importantly, Jesus' whole at-
titude toward this world and his concern with another world: this
world ceases to be the center of attention, as it was in the tradition
that led from Amos to the Second Isaiah; this world is about to come
to an end; and even now it behooves us to concentrate much less
on this world than on another indeed, if possible, to have no
thought of this world at all and to subordinate everything to prepar-
ing for the other.
Ezekiel was the grandfather of the apocalyptic tradition a new
point of departure but not himself preoccupied either with the
end of the world or, strictly speaking, with another world. He was
a man who, literally, had visions. Some doctors have speculated that
he may have been an epileptic, and Karl Jaspers has written a paper
on this question. If Ezekiel had told his people that they would one
day return from their Babylonian exile and rebuild their temple,
they might well have laughed at him. No other people had ever
returned from this kind of exile, and the memory of the destruction
of the northern kingdom, Israel, was still fresh: Samaria had been
razed by the Assyrians, the people had been exiled, and the ten
tribes had been lost forever. But Ezekiel saw the rebuilt temple
saw it in such minute detail that he could go on and on describing
it and giving measurements. He could see even now what was to
Suffering and the Bible 157
be, and many people believed him; and later on, no doubt, some
insisted on rebuilding the temple just as he had described it.
With Ezekiel, the Ought took precedence over the Is, even to the
extent of a flat defiance of everyday realities. Expressly going be-
yond Jeremiah, Ezekiel said: "What do you mean by using this
jproverb about the land of Israel, The fathers have eaten sour
grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge? As I live, says the
Lord God, this proverb shall no more be used by you in Israel"
(18:2 f.).
It takes only one further step, and we are assured that, appear-
ances notwithstanding, God is just not merely that "in those days,"
in some distant future, things will change and God will become
just, but that even now he is just. The New Testament assures us,
climaxing a development that began in exilic Judaism: God is
perfect. He is not unjust. As the German poet, Christian Morgen-
stern, said in a very different context, in one of his many delight-
fully funny poems:
For, he argues razor-witted,
That cant be which is not permitted.
40
It is at this point that the perplexing problem of suffering is
created and at the same time rendered insoluble unless either
the traditional belief in God's boundless power or the belief in
his perfect justice and mercy is abandoned. Short of that, only
pseudo-solutions are possible. Three such pseudo-solutions were
offered in short order and later, in Christian times, a fourth as
well.
The first was inspired by the religion of Zarathustra, with
which the Jews came into contact a generation after Ezekiel. The
Second Isaiah had met the dualism of the Persians, and their be-
lief in an evil deity, with a firm denial that there is more than one
158 The Faith of a Heretic
God and with an equally unequivocal assertion that the one and
only God creates evil as well as good. But soon a new conception
arose in Israel: that of Satan.
Literally, Satan means accuser or slanderer, and he was evidently
originally conceived as a functionary at the Lord's court, the way
the prologue to the Book of Job pictures him or, to use the
language of a later age, as one of the angels. Satan never gained
any great importance in Judaism, least of all in the Hebrew Bible,
but some of the lesser minds invoked him to solve the problem
of suffering.
In the Second Book of Samuel (24), it is said that "the anger of
the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against
them, saying, Go, number Israel and Judah." David then gave
orders to number the people "that I may know the number of the
people"; and this order prevailed over the warning of Joab, his
general. "But David's heart smote him after he had numbered his
people. And David said to the Lord: I have sinned greatly in
what I have done. . . ." Even so, "the Lord sent a pestilence upon
Israel . . . and there died of the people from Dan to Beer-sheba
seventy thousand men." To understand the mind of the historian,
one needs only to recall the words of Amos: "Does evil befall a
city, and the Lord has not done it?" If a pestilence struck down
seventy thousand people, surely the Lord had sent it, and if
shortly before that David numbered the people, though he knew
that this was a great sin, surely "the anger of the Lord was kin-
dled against Israel, and he incited David."
After the Babylonian exile, when it was widely believed that
God was perfect and just, the historian of the First Book of
Chronicles, who retold this story, leaning heavily on the Second
Book of Samuel, could no longer accept this naive, pre-moralistic,
non-utopian conception of God. Why, then, did David number
the people? The later historian has recourse to a pseudo-solution
of the problem of suffering. He begins his account (21): "Satan
stood up against Israel and incited David to number Israel."
That this is no solution appears as soon as we ask why God
Suffering and the Bible 159
allowed Satan to do such a thing. The problem has merely been
pushed back, not solved.
The second pseudo-solution invokes the immortality of the soul
or an eventual resurrection of the dead. These are two very dif-
ferent ideas, though most people do not bother to distinguish
them. According to one conception, the soul lives on after death,
without a body, and retains some sort of consciousness. Accord-
ing to the other notion, we do not survive death; bat some time
in the future, possibly thousands of years hence, our bodies will
be resurrected from the dust, and we shall come back to life to
be judged. It is interesting that religious people who disdain all
disbelief in an afterlife have for the most part thought so little
about this whole question that they do not even know which of
these two claims they themselves believe. But as far as the prob-
lem of suffering is concerned, there is no important difference
between the two.
We are assured that although there is patently little or no jus-
tice in this life and the wicked flourish more often than the just,
the day of reward and retribution will come. This idea, too, seems
to have been suggested to the Jews by the Persians, and later it
was powerfully supported by Greek influence. By the time of
Jesus, most, but not all, of the Jews took it for granted. As was
mentioned in the last chapter, the Pharisees accepted it, while
the Sadducees did not. But in the Old Testament this idea is
mainly notable for its absence, and only a few traces of it are
found in occasional verses which, scholars almost unanimously
agree, are of very late origin, even later than the few references
to Satan. The dominant Old Testament view finds expression in
the 6th Psalm: "Turn, O Lord, save my life; deliver me for the
sake of thy steadfast love. For in death there is no remembrance
of thee; in Sheol who can give thee praise?" King Hezekiah's
prayer in Isaiah 38 is very similar. In this matter, Ecclesiastes is
no exception at all: "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with
your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or
wisdom in Sheol, where you are going" (9:10). It is Isaiah 26:19,
parts of Isaiah 66, and Daniel 12:2 that are exceptional.
160 The Faith of a Heretic
What matters in the present context is that no doctrine of im-
mortality or resurrection can solve the problem of suffering. Sup-
pose that Anne Frank enjoys eternal bliss in heaven: should an
omnipotent god have found it impossible to let her have eternal
bliss without first making her a victim of the Nazis and without
having her die in a concentration camp? If you treat a child un-
fairly, it may possibly forget about it if you afterward give it a
lollipop, but injustice remains injustice. Faith in immortality, like
belief in Satan, leaves unanswered the ancient questions: is God
unable to prevent suffering and thus not omnipotent? or is he
able but not willing to prevent it and thus not merciful? And is
he just?
The question remains why such conceptions as immortality,
resurrection, and Satan were accepted from other religions after
the Exile, seeing that the Jews had much earlier encountered
similar beliefs among the Egyptians and rejected them rigorously.
Indeed, the Egyptians' preoccupation with the life after death
exceeded that of the Persians and Greeks. Apparently there were
mainly two reasons.
The first, not sufficient in itself, is that the Exile marks a turn-
ing point in Jewish history. After the Jews left Egypt, in the days
of Moses, Joshua, the judges, and the kings, the people assumed
responsibility for their own affairs, took a healthy interest in this
world, and never quite lost the initiative for more than a short
spell of time. When their enemies got the better of them, they
soon rallied around a new leader who, before long, succeeded in
liberating them. There was always hope, never long deferred.
The Babylonian exile was an utterly new and thoroughly trau-
matic experience: here was a disaster from which their own power
could not possibly deliver them, not even with the aid of God.
It took another great power, the Persians, to end Babylonian
dominance and restore Jewish freedom. But post-exilic freedom
was not what freedom used to be. Persia might have been an in-
strument of God's plan; but henceforth Israel did not recover
complete control over its own affairs. One was dependent on
Persia, later on Alexander and his successors, still later on Rome.
Suffering and the Bible 161
This loss of initiative was accompanied by some loss of interest
in this world and by the growth of speculations about another,
better world, a world to come after death or at the end of his-
tory. The people of Moses, Joshua, and the judges had no reason
to hope for the end of history; the nations of the Hellenistic and
the Roman world had every reason, and the growth of other-
worldliness is not a phenomenon confined to Israel but character-
istic of the Near East following Alexander's conquests.
For all that, it is much more astonishing than most people
realize that the ancient Hebrews should have developed a religion
that was so free from the most central concerns of the religion of
Egypt. Even if not all of the people had spent some centuries in
Egypt, as the Bible claims, Egyptian influence in Palestine was
powerful, and contacts with Egypt were manifold. The reasons
suggested so far are utterly insufficient to account for the com-
plete rejection of any belief in a lif e after death. There must have
been a will as grand and granitic as the death-intoxicated art of
Egypt an uncompromising will that hammered an unprece-
dented ethos of resistance into heart and mind, creating a new
conscience. There is no prodigy of which the Hebrew Bible gives
a more elaborate, grateful, and loving account than this: Moses.
That Israel, after the Babylonian exile, succumbed to some extent
to the syncretism of that time was due in part to the lack of an-
other Moses. But that it succumbed so little and, on the whole,
withstood the tidal wave of syncretism as a rock of non-conformity
was largely due to the enduring force of Moses' heritage and the
labors of his heirs, the prophets. The Second Isaiah, for example,
may deserve much of the credit for the fact that Satan never
could gain much importance in Judaism; but it would have taken
another Moses to keep Satan, immortality, and resurrection alto-
gether out of Judaism.
Besides Satan and immortality, a third pseudo-solution remains.
It consists in asserting, in flat defiance of experience, that every-
body gets precisely what he deserves no better and no worse:
if Anne Frank suffered more than Heinrich Himmler, that proves
that she was much more wicked.
162 The Faith of a Heretic
41
The one book of the Old Testament that is given over to an ex-
tended consideration of the problem of suffering, the Book of
Job, rejects the first of these pseudo-solutions out of hand, refuses
to take up the second, and repudiates the third emphatically.
The frame story, unlike the core of the book, is in prose. Here
Satan appears, and the few words put into his mouth show a
master's touch. As Heyman Steinthal, one of the founders of
Volkerpsychologie, remarked in the first essay of Zu Bibel und
Religionsphilosophie (1890): probably nowhere in world litera-
ture before Goethe's Mephistopheles, who was deliberately mod-
eled in the image of the prologue to Job, can we find words that
are equally "Mephistophelic." After Satan has remarked that he
has been walking up and down on the earth, the Lord asks him
whether he has noticed "my servant Job, that there is none like
him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears Cod
and turns away from evil. Then Satan answered the Lord: Does
Job fear God for nothing? Have you not put a hedge around
him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have
blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased
in the land. But put forth your hand now and touch all that he
has, and he will curse you to your face. And the Lord said to
Satan: Behold, all that he has is in your power; only on him do
not put forth your hand."
Job loses everything but does not curse God. The Lord asks
Satan what he thinks of Job now, and Satan replies: "Skin for
skin. All that a man has he will give for his life. But put forth
your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will
curse you to your face. And the Lord said to Satan: Behold, he
is in your power, only spare his life." Now Job is afflicted "with
loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his
head"; he sits down in ashes, and three friends come to comfort
him. At first they cannot recognize him, then they sit on the
Suffering and the Bible 163
ground with him seven days and nights, "and no one spoke a
word, for they saw that his suffering was very great. After this
Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth" in mag-
nificent poetry.
From this point, at the beginning of the third chapter, through
the first half of the last chapter (42), great poetic speeches alter-
nate. First, Job's alternate with those of his three friends, several
times over; then a fourth friend joins in a later interpolation,
according to the scholars and then God himself delivers his
reply to Job, speaking out of the whirlwind. In the last half of
the last chapter, the prose narrative is resumed.
Throughout, it does not occur to anybody even to try to solve
the problem of suffering by pointing to Satan. God's omnipo-
tence is never questioned, and all concerned apparently realize
that no reference to Satan can explain Job's suffering without in
effect denying either God's justice or his omnipotence. Job's
friends refuse to question either of these. All four of them take
the same stand: it being certain that God is both almighty and
just, the only conclusion possible is that Job deserves his suffer-
ing. Since he is suffering, he must have sinned.
Job refuses to accept their reasoning. He never questions either
God's existence or his omnipotence; but God's justice, mercy,
and goodness he not only questions but denies outright. This is
a highly unusual approach to the problem: almost all Christian
theologians and philosophers who have dealt with the problem
of suffering have clung to God's moral perfection while in effect,
though hardly ever admittedly, they have denied his omnipo-
tence.
In the Old Testament there is no exact equivalent of "omnipo-
tence," though shadday is generally translated as Almighty. It
is a numinous term which stresses mysterious and unbounded
power, not a cerebral concept. The play on words in Isaiah 13:6
and Joel 1:15 shows that in Biblical times the word was asso-
ciated with shod, devastation. Nowhere else in the Bible does
shadday appear so constantly as the name of God as in the Book
of Job. But the claim that God's omnipotence is not questioned
164 The Faith of a Heretic
in the book does not rest merely on the use of a word. Rather,
the point is that it does not occur to anybody that God might
simply be unable to prevent Job's suffering.
Job's denial of God's goodness takes many forms. In Chapter 3,
in powerful verse, he curses the day when he was born; then the
first friend replies; and Job's response surpasses even his previous
speech, reaching a climax in Chapter 7: "I will not restrain my
mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain
in the bitterness of my soul. . . . When I say, 'My bed will com-
fort me, my couch will ease my complaint,' then thou dost scare
me with dreams and terrify me with visions, so that I would
choose strangling and death rather than my bones. I loathe my
life; I would not live for ever. ... If I sin, what do I do to thee,
watcher of men? Why hast thou made me thy mark? . . . Why dost
thou not pardon my transgression and take away my iniquity?"
Job does not say that he has done evil but insists that, even if he
had, this would not justify God's treatment of him. If a child has
done wrong, a loving father has no excuse for tormenting him
cruelly without respite. Centuries in advance, Job replies to genera-
tions of philosophers and theologians.
The second friend speaks, and Job in his reply says: "I am
blameless; I regard not myself; I loathe my life. It is all one;
therefore I say, he destroys both the blameless and the wicked.
When disaster brings sudden death, he mocks at the calamity
of the innocent. The earth is given into the hand of the wicked;
he covers the faces of its judges if it is not he, who then is it?"
(9:21 ff.). Job, like the early prophets, has no patience with the
Utopian religion that divorces God from reality and uses the name
of God as a synonym for moral perfection. He echoes Amos'
"Does evil befall a city, and the Lord has not done it?" The inno-
cent suffer and the wicked flourish, and Job insists that God is
responsible: "If it is not he, who then is it?"
To be sure, occasionally one may detect something of poetic
justice in history, but Job asks (21:17): "How often is it?" And
two verses later: "You say, 'God stores up their iniquity for their
sons.' . . . What do they care for their houses after them?"
Suffering and the Bible 165
Later (29), Job gives an account of his righteousness: "I was
eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame"; and two chapters later
he offers a famous "negative confession" in which he lists the
things he did not do; and in both cases we may well marvel at
the exalted standards that find expression here. To take offense
at Job's conviction of his own righteousness and to suppose that
for that he after all deserved his afflictions is surely to miss the
point of the book and to side with his friends: Job is not pre-
sented to us as a historic figure but as a character who is, as we
are assured at the outset in the words of the Lord, "blameless";
and the Lord adds that "there is none like him on the earth."
Nor does the Lord, when he finally speaks from the whirlwind,
accuse Job of any sin. The point is clearly that even if there were
a human being who had never done any wrong at all and who
was "eyes to the blind and feet to the lame," there would not be
any reason at all to suppose that he would be less likely than
others to come down with some dreadful disease or to suffer
unspeakable torments.
Indeed, that is the point of the Lord's great speech. Far from
insisting that there is some hidden justice in the world after all,
or from claiming that everything is really rational if only we
look at it intelligently, God goes out of his way to point out
how utterly weird ever so many things are. He says in effect:
the problem of suffering is no isolated problem; it fits a pattern;
the world is not so rational as Job's comforters suppose; it is un-
canny. God does not claim to be good and Job in his final reply
does not change his mind on this point: he reaffirms that God
can do all things. And then the Lord says in the prose conclu-
sion that Job's friends have aroused his anger, "for you have not
spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has; . . . and my
servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not
to deal with you according to your folly; for you have not spoken
of me what is right as my servant Job has."
The last words of the book seem offensive at first. "The Lord
restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends;
and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before." Also,
166 The Faith of a Heretic
Job again had seven sons and three daughters, even as he had
had seven sons and three daughters at the beginning, before all
ten had been killed early in the book. But, after all, the book
does not say or imply that this vindicates God's mercy or justice,
or that Job felt that his second set of ten children was fair com-
pensation for the first. There is no need to charge this strange
conclusion either to an insensitive editor who had missed the
point of all that went before or to an old folk tale. Probably it
did come from a folk tale, but the author knew what he was
doing in retaining this conclusion. It underlines the weirdness
of the ways of this world, which is nothing less than grotesque.
42
Nietzsche remarked in The Dawn ( 84) how Christian scholars
and preachers had spread "the art of reading badly." The usual
treatment of the Book of Job furnishes a fine example of that.
Again and again one reads and hears that in the end Job is given
twice as many children as he had in the beginning, and his forth-
right denial of the justice of God, which the Lord himself ac-
cepts as "right" in the end, is simply ignored. Worst of all, it is
accepted as a commonplace that the ethic of the Old Testament
is an ethic of prudence and rewards, as if the point were that
it pays to be good. Clearly, it is the whole point of the Book of
Job that this is not so, but Protestant scholars and preachers
have often claimed that Job's friends represent the ethic of the
Old Testament. This is rather like claiming that the sinners in
Dante's Inferno represent the Christian virtues. If it should be
countered that large numbers of Jews in Old Testament times
were probably like the friends of Job rather than like Job him-
self or the author of the book, it is equally probable that most
Christians in the age of faith resembled the sinners in Dante's
hell rather than the poet or the saints in his heaven.
Still, it might be objected that the authors of most of the other
books of the Old Testament are closer to Job's friends than to
Suffering and the Bible 167
the author of the Book of Job. But this is simply not so. This
common claim involves a thorough misunderstanding of the ethic
of the Old Testament. Not even the moralistic historians who
considered it essential to grade the behavior of the kings of Israel
and Judah inferred, like the friends of Job, that success proved
virtue; failure, sin. Omri, one of the most powerful kings, who
would certainly have been glorified in the annals of any other na-
tion, and who died in splendor and peace, was said to have done
"more evil than all who were before him" (I Kings 16); but of
Josiah, who suffered a disastrous defeat at Megiddo and was
slain in battle, it was said that "he did what was right in the
eyes of the Lord, and walked in all the way of David"
(II Kings 22).
To be sure, we encounter perennial appeals to the consequences
of moral and immoral conduct, but in the overwhelming ma-
jority of cases it is the nation that stands to profit or to suffer,
not the individual. The dominant ethic of the Old Testament
does not invite comparison with the ethic of the Roman church
but rather with the ethic of ancient republican Rome: the in-
dividual is expected to subordinate his own pleasure and profit
to the interests of the commonwealth; it is presupposed that
ethical conduct involves such unselfishness. Even as the ancient
Roman did his stint and risked his life when called upon, and
then, if he survived, returned to the anonymity of private life
without even expecting fame, the ancient Hebrew, too, is called
upon to do what will benefit the people as a whole, if only in
the long run, and to refrain from doing what will hurt the people,
even if only after his death.
In this respect, too, Jesus does not stand in the prophetic tra-
dition: in the Gospels this ancient appeal to selflessness is no
longer encountered; it is presupposed that every soul is con-
cerned with how he may enter the kingdom of heaven; and pru-
dence has come to mean enlightened selfishness.
This is not the way the New Testament is usually read; and
such an important matter cannot be settled in passing. We shall
return to this question in Chapter VIII.
168 The Faith of a Heretic
Between the age of the prophets and the time of Jesus, the
whole climate of thought had changed about as much as it had
in Rome between the time of the first Brutus and the age of
Caesar Augustus. Concern with oneself and the other world was
common indeed, though by no means universal and Jesus and
the evangelists were not as independent of their age as Moses
and some of the prophets had been of theirs. The author of the
Book of Job had been more independent, too.
The author of Job had been at one with the prophetic ethic
in his radical opposition to the vulgar ethic of his day, and of
all times, and in his radical opposition to syncretism. In an age
in which the ancient sense of solidarity was crumbling and the
individual experienced his sufferings in that utter solitude which
is now once again the mark of modernity, the author of Job re-
fused all the comforts that go with the assurance that God is
perfectly merciful and just the promises that being moral pays
either in this life or the next and, with a radicalism that has
parallels in Amos and the other prophets of his type, but scarcely
in the Gospels, claimed that God was neither just nor the em-
bodiment of mercy or perfection.
43
Later theological attempts to solve the problem never advanced
beyond the Book of Job. The theologians always insisted on God's
justice, goodness, and perfection, like Job's friends, and gener-
ally had recourse to one or another of the three pseudo-solutions
which we have considered or to a fourth.
The fourth spurious solution, which is one of the prime glories
of Christian theology, claims in effect that suffering is a neces-
sary adjunct of free will. God created man with free will, which
was part of God's goodness since a creature with free will is
better than one without it. (Why, in that case, he first made so
many creatures without it, we are not usually told.) Man then
misused his free will, disobeyed God, as God knew he would do,
Suffering and the Bible 169
and ate of the fruit of the one tree in Paradise whose fruit he
was not supposed to eat. This made suffering inevitable. (We
are not told why.) The uncanny lack of logic in this supposed
solution is generally covered up with a phrase, original sin.
How old this doctrine is is arguable. Some of the motifs are
encountered in pre-Christian times, not only in Judaism but also
in Greek thought. But in its familiar form it is a specifically Chris-
tian dogma. Augustine thought that he found it in Paul's Epistle
to the Romans 5:12: "Therefore, as sin came into the world
through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to
all men eph ho pantes hamarton" What was the meaning of
these four Greek words? The last two clearly mean "all have
sinned"; but what does eph ho mean? Augustine did not read
Greek but Latin, and wrote Latin, too, and took it to mean "in
whom" (in quo), while the King James Bible and the Revised
Standard Version translate "in that" or "because" (eo quod). As
George Foot Moore puts it: "For . . . 'for that all have sinned,'
the Latin version has in quo omnes peccaverunt 'in whom (sc.
Adam) all sinned/ If the translator had rendered eo quod, it is
possible that the Western church might have been as little af-
flicted with original sin as the Greeks or the Orientals" (II, 198).
The doctrine of original sin claims that all men sinned in Adam;
but whether they did or whether it is merely a fact that all men
sin does not basically affect the problem of suffering. In either
case, the following questions must be pressed.
First: if God knew that man would abuse his free will and
that this would entail cancer and Auschwitz, why then did he
give man free will? Second and this question, though surely
obvious, scarcely ever gets asked is there really any connec-
tion at all between ever so much suffering and free wilP Isn't
the introduction of free will at this point a red herring? To show
this, it will be best give a vivid example Here is one from the
beginning of Nathanael West's short novel, Miss Lonelyhearts:
"Dear Miss Lonelyhearts
"I am 16 years old now and I don't know what to do and would
170 The Faith of a Heretic
appreciate it if you could tell me what to do. When I was a little
girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids on the block
makeing fun of me, but now I would like to have boy friends
like the other girls and go out on Saturday nites, but no boy
will take me because I was born without a nose although I am
a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me
pretty clothes.
"I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in
the middle of my face that scares people even myself so I cant
blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves
me, but she crys terrible when she looks at me.
"What did I do to deserve such a terrible bad fate? Even if
I did do some bad things I didnt do any before I was a year old
and I was born this way. I asked Papa and he says he doesnt
know, but that maybe I did something in the other world be-
fore I was born or that maybe I was being punished for his
sins. I dont believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought
I commit suicide?
"Sincerely yours,
"Desparate."
Far from solving the problem by invoking original sin, Augus-
tine and most of the Christian theologians who came after him
merely aggravated the problem. If such suffering as is described
in this letter and in the New York Times annual pre-Christmas
survey of "The Hundred Neediest Cases," and in any number of
other easily accessible places, is the inevitable consequence of
Adam's sin or if this is the price God had to pay for endow-
ing man with free will then it makes no sense to call him om-
nipotent. And if he was willing to pay this price for his own
greater glory, as some Christian theologians have suggested, or
for the greater beauty of the cosmos, because shadows are needed
to set off highlights, as some Christian philosophers have argued,
what sense does it make to attribute moral perfection to him?
At this point, those who press this fourth pseudo-solution in-
variably begin to use words irresponsibly. Sooner or later we
Suffering and the Bible 171
are told that when such attributes as omnipotence, mercy, justice,
and love are ascribed to God they do not mean what they mean
applied to men. John Stuart Mill's fine response to this has been
cited in Chapter II ( 5). In a less rhetorical vein, it may be said
that at this point the theologians and philosophers simply re-
peat ancient formulas in defiance of all sense. One might as well
claim that God is purple with yellow dots, or circular, or every
inch a woman provided only that these terms are not used in
their customary senses. These, of course, are not ancient formu-
las, hence, it is not likely that anybody in his right mind would
seriously say such things. But the point is that when anybody
has recourse to such means, argument fails. It is as if you pointed
out to someone that eleven times eleven were not equal to one
hundred and he said: it is, too though of course not if you
use the terms the way one usually does.
To be sure, one need not remain speechless. One can ask for
the admission that, as long as we use the terms in the only way
in which they have ever been given any precise meaning, God
is either not omnipotent or not perfectly just, loving, and merci-
ful. Some people, when it comes to that, retort: How do you
know that we use the words right? Perhaps the way in which
we ordinarily use these terms is wrong. This might be called
pseudo-solution number five.
To this, two replies are possible. The first is philosophically in-
teresting but may not persuade many who are sincerely per-
plexed. When we use English, or Greek, or Hebrew words in
conformity with their generally accepted meanings and fully
obeying the genius and the rules of the language, it makes no
sense to say that perhaps their "real" meaning is quite different.
It does make sense to suggest that a particular term has an addi-
tional technical sense, but, if that is the case, one should admit
that, as long as it is used in its ordinary, non-technical sense,
God is, say, unjust, or cruel, or lacking in power.
The second reply interprets the question differently. What the
questioner means may well be that our ordinary conceptions of
love, justice, and mercy stand in need of revision; that our ideals
172 The Faith of a Heretic
are perverted. If so, we should presumably model ourselves on
God's "justice" and "love." But this is precisely what former ages
did. Children who disobeyed and adults who broke some minor
law or regulation were punished in ways that strike us as in-
humanly cruel. Those who do not like reading history will find
examples enough in Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo.
This last point, which is surely of very great importance, can
be put differently by recalling once more Job's wonderful words:
"If I sin, . . . why dost thou not pardon my transgression and take
away my iniquity?" The attempt to solve the problem of suf-
fering by postulating original sin depends on the belief that
cruelty is justified when it is retributive: indeed, that morality
demands retribution. Although Job denied this, most theologians
have clung to it tenaciously, and to this day the majority of
Christian theologians champion the retributive function of pun-
ishment and the death penalty. At this point, some liberal Prot-
estants who invoke the fifth pseudo-solution are less consistent
than more traditional theologians and ministers: they fight as
unjust and unloving what they consider compatible with perfect
justice and love. But, as we have seen, the traditional theologians
did not solve the problem either, and their conceptions of love
and justice are inhuman especially if one considers that Job
and Jonah were part of their Bible.
Indeed, Augustine and his successors aggravated the problem
of suffering in yet another way, instead of approaching a solu-
tion: by accepting as true Jesus' references in the Gospels to hell
and eternal torment, and by bettering the instruction. Accord-
ing to Augustine and many of his successors, all men deserve
eternal torture, but God in his infinite mercy saves a very few.
Nobody is treated worse than he deserves, but a few are treated
better than they deserve, salvation being due not to merit but
solely to grace. In the face of these beliefs, Augustine and le-
gions after him assert God's perfect justice, mercy, and goodness.
And to save men from eternal torment, it came to be considered
just and merciful to torture heretics, or those suspected of some
heresy, for a few days.
Suffering and the Bible 173
44
The major modern philosophers who have tackled the prob-
lem of suffering have contributed little indeed. Generally they
have implicitly, but not admittedly, denied God's omnipotence.
Three may be considered very briefly.
Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) claimed that reason was strong in
discovering fallacies but weak in attempting to reach positive
knowledge; and even his critics grant that this was true of his
own reason. He excelled in pointing up all kinds of contradic-
tions in the Christian faith; he insisted that Christian doctrine
goes against reason; and he said that only for that reason was it
meritorious to accept it on faith.
The German philosopher Leibniz (1646-1716) sought to an-
swer the Frenchman in a book he dedicated to the first Queen
of Prussia. He called it Theodicy (a justification of God, or a vin-
dication of God's justice) and composed it in French. He wrote
philosophy either in French or in Latin, never in German. Ernst
Cassirer, a famous twentieth-century philosopher and historian
of ideas, says in his work on Leibniz and he is surely right
that the book might just as well have been called "Logodicy"
(a vindication of reason). Leibniz denies that reason contradicts
faith, and to that extent he rehabilitates reason. God's will, he
says, is subject to his wisdom, and his wisdom knows the eternal
verities. God did not make the eternal verities; he did not decide
that things should be subject to certain unalterable rules; he could
not help evil. Evil is not something positive but a lack, a priva-
tion, a deficiency, an aspect of finitude. But forces are neces-
sarily finite, and a world without evil would be a world without
forces and hence nothing at all, which would be the greatest
of evils. Our world, on the contrary, is the best of all possible
worlds. A world must consist of things finite, and perfect finite
things would be like square circles, a contradiction in terms.
On the popular level, Voltaire answered Leibniz when writing
174 The Faith of a Heretic
Candide. On the philosophic level, one may reply that, whatever
else is odd about Leibniz' solution, he certainly denies God's
omnipotence, for if God is unable to prevent the suffering of girls
born without noses, of childbed fever, cancer, and millions of spe-
cific instances of suffering, without every time incurring a still
greater evil, then he is clearly not omnipotent.
The claim that suffering is somehow logically necessary poses
a special problem for the Christian conception of heaven, assum-
ing that in heaven there is no suffering. If God could create a
heaven without suffering, why not an earth without suffering
or why not just heaven and no earth at all? Or would a heaven
without any earth, and without any hell or purgatory, really be
inferior to the world we have? Would the blessed in heaven be
unable to appreciate their bliss if they could not observe the tor-
ments of the damned? If so, they do not deserve their bliss. But
if they could, why then is suffering necessary?
Even if we do not enter into speculations about a world with-
out any suffering at all, no adequate theological or metaphysical
justification can be offered for the presence in the world of as
much suffering as there is. Let us say, for example, that Dostoev-
sky's suffering bore fruit in his great novels which, in turn, make
many readers more humane and better. An omnipotent God could
have presented us with Dostoevsky's novels simply by saying "Let
there be The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The
Idiot, The Possessed'; or, for that matter, he might have created
us more humane and better.
Two separate points are involved. First, having to use means
to achieve ends is one of the features that distinguishes limited
power from omnipotence. The original model of omnipotence is
surely found in Genesis I: "God said: Let there be light. And
there was light." Plato's demiurge, in the Timaeus, not being om-
nipotent, made the world by imposing Forms, as eternal as he
was himself, on an equally eternal receptacle: he made the best
world he was able to make under the circumstances; but his
power was limited, and what imperfections there are in the world
must be charged to the material with which he had to work.
Suffering and the Bible 175
Clearly, Leibniz' God is closer to Plato's demiurge than to the
God of Genesis.
Second: the uneconomic use of unpleasant means to achieve
doubtful ends with frequent failures clearly points to limited power
rather than omnipotence. Whatever results can be shown to have
been attained with the aid of suffering generally seem to have
been obtainable with less suffering; and more often than not, what
suffering there is does not appear to be instrumental in the
achievement of any good.
If it should be objected that nothing could prevent an omnipo-
tent God from choosing not to avail himself of his omnipotence,
from using means to achieve ends though he did not have to, and
even using these means uneconomically and often unsucessfully,
this would amount to an indictment of God's mercy and justice.
In any case, this is not Leibniz's view; for Leibniz insists that
this is the best of all possible worlds.
45
Among recent treatments of the problem of suffering, Josiah
Royce's essay on 'The Problem of Job" is of special interest.
Royce, William James's younger colleague at Harvard around
1900, was the chief exponent of American philosophical idealism
and tried to blend religion and philosophy. He clearly saw the
faults of many previous solutions. He admitted that one could
bypass the whole problem by declining to believe that the world
is governed by a purpose. He rejected the suggestion that evil
is an insignificant and inevitable incident of a plan that subjects
men to some law, that suffering is a kind of discipline, a needful
warning, or "the dirt of the natural order, whose value is that,
when you wash it off, you thereby learn the charm of the bath of
evolution. . . . This explanation of one evil presupposes another,
and a still unexplained and greater evil"; namely, "why I was
created so far from my goal."
What must be shown, Royce says, is "not a physical but a logi-
176 The Faith of a Heretic
cal necessity." Those who assert that free will requires the possi-
bility of evil claim a logical necessity, but it is empirically false
that men are always responsible for their own suffering. And if
we revise the position and say that "the innocent may suffer for
the guilty," then it appears that God does not "protect the inno-
cent'', and so "Job's cry is once more in place." If the position
is revised again to say that men do suffer only for their own sins,
but often for sins committed in a previous life, Royce counters,
perhaps under James's influence, with a piagmatic argument:
this suggestion would discourage men's impulse to help their
fellows, the claim that "no harm can come to the righteous" im-
plies "this cynical consequence."
After these inadequate solutions have been shown up, there
remains idealism. "Job's problem is, upon Job's presuppositions,
simply and absolutely insoluble." Like practically everybody else,
Royce, conditioned by centuries of Utopian piety, does not see
Job's emphatic denial of God's justice and, in flat defiance of the
text, assumes that Job presupposes God's moral perfection. Royce
would deny another presupposition of the problem, namely, "that
God is a being other than this world." In other words, he rejects
theism for some form of pantheism. But with the typical assur-
ance of an idealist philosopher, not one whit less bold than Hegel
and legions of theologians, he assures us that his doctrine is noth-
ing less than "the immortal soul of the doctrine of the divine atone-
ment." He exhorts us: "Your sufferings are God's sufferings." That
is the real meaning of incarnation and crucifixion: God did not
remain a being apart from the world. This is, after all, as Leibniz
already said, "the best possible world": if God could do any bet-
ter, there would not be any suffering. (After all, it hurts him as
much as, if not more than, you.) "We ourselves exist as fragments
of the absolute life," and whatever any man suffers anywhere is
part of God's sufferings.
False idealism sees evil as a mere illusion, "a mirage of the
human point of view," due merely to our limited perspective,
but "if the evil were but the error, the error would still be the
evil." True idealism asserts that God really suffers, too, that this
Suffering and the Bible 177
suffering is necessary because the good which consists in the over-
coming of evil is greater than that which consists in the absence
of evil. "The existence of evil, then, is not only consistent with
the perfection of the universe, but is necessary for the very exis-
tence of that perfection."
Royce does not only deny God's omnipotence, nor does he
merely reject traditional Christianity while boldly claiming that
he gives the most truthful and faithful interpretation of what it
really means. He also claims that the suffering of the girl born
without a nose is justified because the discovery by some future
doctors of some way to avert such mishaps makes for a better
world than we should have had if there never had been any such
mishaps in the first place. That is what the girl should have been
told; also, that it hurt God as much as her.
46
"What," to quote Ecclesiastes, is "the conclusion of the whole
matter"? There is, first of all, a Biblical notion not yet mentioned
that of vicarious suffering, beautifully expressed in Isaiah 53:
"He is despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and
acquainted with grief. . . . Surely he has borne our griefs and
carried our sorrows. . . . He was wounded for our transgressions,
he was bruised for our iniquities. . . . The Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all." Christians have seen in these words a
prophecy of Christ; Jews have applied the words to their own
people, in an effort to give their own perennial sufferings some
meaning. The search for a purpose behind suffering is not a mere
matter of metaphysical speculation, nor a frivolous pastime of
theologians. Man can stand superhuman suffering if only he does
not lack the conviction that it serves some purpose. Even less
severe pain, on the other hand, may seem unbearable, or simply
not worth enduring, if it is not redeemed by any meaning.
It does not follow that the meaning must be given from above;
that life and suffering must come neatly labeled; that nothing is
178 The Faith of a Heretic
worth while if the world is not governed by a purpose. On the
contrary, the lack of any cosmic purpose may be experienced as
liberating, as if a great weight had been lifted from us. Life ceases
to be so oppressive: we are free to give our own lives meaning
and purpose, free to redeem our suffering by making something
of it. The great artist is the man who most obviously succeeds
in turning his pains to advantage, in letting suffering deepen his
understanding and sensibility, in growing through his pains. The
same is true of some religious figures and of men like Lincoln
and Freud. It is small comfort to tell the girl born without a nose:
make the most of that! She may lack the strength, the talent, the
vitality. But the plain fact is that not all suffering serves a pur-
pose, that most of it remains utterly senseless; and that if there
is to be any meaning to it, it is we who must give it.
The sufferer who cannot give any meaning to his suffering
may inspire someone else, possibly without even knowing it, per-
haps after death. But most suffering remains unredeemed by any
purpose, albeit a challenge to humanity.
There is one more verse in Job that should be quoted. At the
end of the first chapter, when he has lost all his possessions and
then his children as well, he says: "Naked I came from my moth-
er's womb, and naked shall I return; the Lord gave, and the Lord
has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord." Without claim-
ing that the following remarks represent or distill "the immortal
soul" of his words, one can find more meaning in them, or find
them more suggestive, than meets the eye at first glance.
Job's forthright indictment of the injustice of this world is
surely right. The ways of the world are weird and much more
unpredictable than either scientists or theologians generally make
things look. Job personifies the inscrutable, merciless, uncanny in
a god who is all-powerful but not just. One may question whether,
at least today, this use of the name of God is justified whether
it does not invite needless misunderstanding. Of course, the au-
thor of the book no less than its hero is intent on the continuity
of this conception with the God of the prophets; and the God
of the Book of Job is addressed and replies. What is said to him
Suffering and the Bible 179
and by him amounts to a radical repudiation of popular theism;
but when the book was written, another, older tradition was still
available, could still be appealed to, was still understood. Today
this older tradition seems buried. One can no longer count on its
being remembered when one speaks of God. One can at most
try to dig it up again like an archaeologist or, speaking without
metaphors, like an historian. This chapter represents an attempt
in this direction; so does the next
In the chapter on "The Quest for Honesty," reasons were given
for not using the name of God. Soon after the Book of Job was
written, the Jews stopped using what was then considered God's
name and said "Lord" instead. But their piety still permitted
them to speak of "God" and the "Lord." Our new piety no longer
permits that. As I have explained elsewhere,* "honesty is the
new piety."
The reason for speaking of piety in this context is that there
is something impious about the arrogance of Job's friends and
their many successors who talk as if they knew what in fact
they do not know. In a sense, Job is more pious; and so are those
who admit, in Rilke's words, "that we are not very reliably at
home in the interpreted world"; those who are open to new ex-
periences without insisting on fitting them into some precon-
ceived scheme. But perhaps it would be clearer and better to
say that Job and his friends stand for two different kinds of im-
piety. Instead of speaking of "infidel piety," as I did in my
Critique ( 66), it might be better to say: Honesty is the new
impiety.
It is not important that some heretics and infidels should be
called pious. What needs to be said is rather that heresy may be
prompted by humility and honesty, as it was in Job's case.
Job's cry is possible in the mouth of an unbeliever; and what
Job hears out of the whirlwind could be heard by an infidel, too.
The infidel's attitude would hardly be identical with that of the
Biblical Job; but it might well be closer to Job's attitude than
From Shakespeare to Existentialism, 226 ff., 232, 243.
180 The Faith of a Heretic
the piety of Augustine and Aquinas, Bayle and Leibniz, Boyce
and most believers.
Those who believe in God because their experience of life and
the facts of nature prove his existence must have led sheltered
lives and closed their hearts to the voice of their brothers' blood.
"Behold the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to com-
fort them! On the side of the oppressors there was power, and
there was no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead who
are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still
alive; but better than both is he who has not yet been, and has
not seen the evil deeds done under the sun." Whether Ecclesi-
astes, who "saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the
sun," retained any faith in God is a moot point, but Jeremiah
and Job and the psalmists who speak in a similar vein did. Pagan
piety rose to similar heights of despair and created tragedies.
The deepest difference between religions is not that between
polytheism and monotheism. To which camp would one assign
Sophocles? Even the difference between theism and atheism is
not nearly so profound as that between those who feel and those
who do not feel their brothers' torments. The Buddha, like the
prophets and the Greek tragedians, did, though he did not be-
lieve in any deity. There is no inkling of such piety in the cal-
lous religiousness of those who note the regularities of nature,
find some proof in that of the existence of a God or gods, and
practice magic, rites, or pray to ensure rain, success, or speedy
passage into heaven.
Natural theology is a form of heathenism, represented in th
Bible by the friends of Job. The only theism worthy of our re-
spect believes in God not because of the way the world is made
but in spite of that. The only theism that is no less profound
than the Buddha's atheism is that represented in the Bible by
Job and Jeremiah.
Their piety is a cry in the night, born of suffering so intense
that they cannot contain it and must shriek, speak, accuse, and
argue with God not about him for there is no other human
being who would understand, and the prose of dialogue could
Suffering and the Bible 181
not be faithful to the poetry of anguish. In time, theologians come
to wrench some useful phrases out of Latin versions of a Hebrew
outcry, blind with tears, and try to win some argument about a
point of dogma. Scribes, who preceded them, carved phrases out
of context, too, and used them in their arguments about the law.
But for all that, Jewish piety has been a ceaseless cry in the
night, rarely unaware of "all the oppressions that are practiced
under the sun," a faith in spite of, not a heathenish, complacent
faith because.
The profound detachment of Job's words at the end of the first
chapter is certainly possible for an infidel: not being wedded
to the things of this world, being able to let them go and yet
not repudiating them in the first place like the great Christian
ascetics and the Buddha and his followers. In the form of an
anthropomorphic faith, these words express one of the most ad-
mirable attitudes possible for man: to be able to give up what
life takes away, without being unable to enjoy what life gives
us in the first place; to remember that we came naked from the
womb and shall return naked; to accept what life gives us as if
it were God's own gift, full of wonders beyond price, and to be
able to part with everything. To try to fashion something from
suffering, to relish our triumphs, and to endure defeats without
resentment: all that is compatible with the faith of a heretic.
VII
THE OLD
TESTAMENT
47
Until the nineteenth century, it was customary to consider
the Old Testament as if it did not have any historical or literary
background: it was studied as the revelation of God, as an absolute
beginning, completely self-sufficient. In the eighteenth century, the
sustained criticism of the Enlightenment led to a gradual decrease
in respect for the Hebrew Scriptures, and interest in them dimin-
ished, too. But it was only after the publication of Darwin's Origin
of Species, in 1859, that an altogether new approach to the Old
Testament was widely accepted: an evolutionary approach that
first broke down the unquestioned barrier between the Bible and
its background, and eventually all but drowned the Bible in its
background until no distinctive feature at all was perceived any
more.
A hundred years after the concept of evolution first gained wide
currency, it has become easy to recognize the foolishness of some of
the excesses perpetrated in its name. Some of these excesses actually
antedate Darwin, but spread like wildfire as soon as they could
feed on his ideas.
As far as any background is concerned, the crucial point that
183
184 The Faith of a Heretic
should never be forgotten in the history of ideas can be put into a
single sentence: one may have been influenced profoundly by others
and yet be strikingly original and even revolutionary.
What makes the study of history fascinating is, among other
things, the perception of discontinuity in the context of continuity.
The historically ignorant believe in absolute novelty; those with a
smattering of history are apt to believe in no novelty at all: they are
blinded by the discovery of similarities. Beyond that, however, lies
the discovery of small, but sometimes crucial, differences.
Ancient Israel was deeply influenced by two older civilizations
probably the two oldest civilizations on the earth, excepting that of
the so-called Cro-Magnon men who perished 20,000 years ago,
leaving superb drawings of animals on the walls of some caves in
southern France and northern Spain. The first two civilizations that
seem to be continuous with subsequent cultures are probably those
of Egypt and Mesopotamia, which can be traced back approxi-
mately to 4000 B.C.
The Old Testament emphasizes the relation of Israel to both cul-
tures. It places the Garden of Eden near, if not in, Mesopotamia, it
speaks of the Tower of Babel; and it relates that Abraham, the an-
cestor of Israel, was born and brought up in Ur of the Chaldeans.
After leaving his native Mesopotamia, Abraham is said to have
traveled widely in what later became the land of Israel, and he is
also said to have visited Egypt. His grandson, Jacob, who was
named Israel after his nocturnal struggle with an angel whom he
defied, saying, "I will not let you go unless you bless me," is said
to have migrated to Egypt with his children and his children's chil-
dren. And the Bible relates that the children of Israel remained in
Egypt for several generations before Moses, a Hebrew versed in the
wisdom of Egypt, led them out of the land of slavery into the
desert of Sinai where he gave them laws and precepts that set them
apart from all the nations of the world. That was probably in the
thirteenth century B.C., and the name of Israel is encountered for
the first time, as far as present records go in an Egyptian inscrip-
tion of the thirteenth century in which Mernephta, who was prob-
The Old Testament 185
ably the Pharoah of the Exodus, boasts of having destroyed Israel
forever.
In the next generation the Hebrews began their conquest of the
promised land where they were to live almost 700 years, midway
between Egypt and Mesopotamia. After that period of time, Nebu-
chadnezzar, king of Babylonia, sacked Jerusalem and led a large
portion of the Jews into the so-called Babylonian exile, from which
they were liberated by the Persians in 538 B.C. At that time, many
of them returned to Israel and rebuilt their temple in Jerusalem
which was eventually destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70.
That ancient Israel was deeply influenced by Egypt and the
various Mesopotamian cultures, from the Sumerians down to the
Babylonians and Assyrians, should therefore have been taken for
granted long before archaeological discoveries and detailed com-
parisons left no doubt about it. But in fact it had not been taken for
granted during the many centuries in which the approach to Scrip-
ture was theological and supernaturalistic rather than naturalistic
and historical. The discovery of the historical background of ancient
Israel was therefore accompanied by a militant sense of opposition
to what had previously been believed, and as often happens in
such cases it was pushed to utterly absurd extremes: it became
the fashion to deny all originality to the Old Testament. This view
is easily as fantastic as the assumption of earlier times that there
was no connection at all between the Hebrew Scriptures and the
cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia.
48
The civilization of ancient Egypt is not only as old but also
easily as remarkable as any the world has seen. If we date its ap-
proximate beginning around 4000 B.C., we find that it endured for
about 4000 years. The gigantic step pyramid at Saqqara, the world's
first large stone structure, whose originality, verve, and power are
still fascinating to behold, and the slightly later, still vaster pyramids
186 The Faith of a Heretic
at Giza were as old when the Parthenon and the other temples on
the Acropolis in Athens were built as the Parthenon is today; but in
Egypt magnificent temples were still built centuries after the com-
pletion of the Parthenon. Admirable paintings and sculptures were
produced in Egypt over a period of more than 3000 years.
If we compare Egypt with Israel, what strikes us first of all is the
great difference: in many ways, ancient Israel might well be under-
stood as the diametric opposite of ancient Egypt. In Egypt, sculp-
ture and painting flourished, in Israel, both were expressly prohibited
according to tradition, by Moses himself. In Egypt, man's concern
with the life after death was as intense as it ever was anywhere: the
pyramids were tombs; the finest paintings and many of the most
remarkable sculptures were found in the tombs in the Valley of the
Kings, across the Nile from Luxor and Karnak, hundreds of miles
upstream from Giza and Saqqara; and the treasures found in the
tomb of Tutankhamen, a relatively insignificant king, give us some
idea of the contents of other tombs which were robbed thousands of
years ago. In ancient Israel, we find no concern with the afterlife
whatsoever: for Moses, death is the end; and it is only in the very
latest passages of the Old Testament, in Hellenistic times, that we
find a few intimations of immortality. In Egypt, we find a profusion
of gods, many of them half human, half animal; in Israel, we find
none of all that: Moses expressly repudiates all belief in many gods.
These three differences are not only obvious: they far outweigh
any similarities. For all that, there are continuities. First, we find in
Egypt, albeit restricted to a special class, a love of learning and
respect for wisdom. Here the difference in similarity was expressed
in a single imperative by Moses: "You shall be unto me a kingdom
of priests." And again: "You shall be holy." Not one class but all.
Every man is called upon to make something of himself. Perhaps
this was the most revolutionary idea of world history. In the coun-
tries to which the Old Testament has spoken either directly or by
way of Luther's revival of the call for "the priesthood of all be-
lievers," this idea may appear to be a commonplace; elsewhere
for example, in Egypt, not only in Moses* time but also in Luther's
The Old Testament 187
and ours one can appreciate the revolutionary impact of these
words.
Secondly, we find in Egyptian architecture and sculpture an em-
bodiment of the sublime that has never been surpassed. In parts of
the Old Testament this sublimity has been transmuted into prose
and poetry. This point does not depend on any ambiguity of "sub-
lime." The similarity is genuine and deep and could be circum-
scribed in other words. Perhaps nowhere else in the ancient world,
and nowhere at all except under the influence of the Hebrew Bible,
do we encounter such a fusion of austere simplicity and over-
whelming power. (The King James Bible and the Douay Version,
with their more ornate and baroque flair for magnificence and
rhetoric, are misleading in this respect. )
There remains one similarity which, since its relatively recent
discovery, has attracted far more attention than any other: in the
fourteenth century B.C., perhaps a hundred years before the Exodus,
there was a monotheistic Pharaoh in the eighteenth dynasty in
Egypt, Ikhnaton. After ascending to the throne as Amenophis IV,
he renounced and forbade the worship of Amon and the other gods,
changed his name to Ikhnaton, insisted that only Aton should be
worshiped, and moved the capital to what today is known as Tel-
el-Amarna the place where some remarkable sculptures and re-
liefs and a fine hymn to Aton were unearthed by Ludwig Borchardt
around 1900, almost 3300 years later. The notion that the He-
brews might have acquired their monotheism from the heretical
Pharaoh was too intriguing not to have been taken up by at least a
few writers, of whom Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis and
himself a Jew, is by far the best known. He was not deterred by the
established fact that Ikhnaton's innovations barely survived his
early death and were ruthlessly suppressed long before the end of
the fourteenth century: indeed, the very name of Aton was
scratched out on all accessible works of the period. Freud specu-
lated that, for this very reason, a surviving adherent of the Aton
cult might have found himself forced to leave Egypt and, if he
wanted adherents, to turn to another people. Freud himself thought
188 The Faith of a Heretic
of his work on this subject, Moses and Monotheism, as perhaps no
more than "a historical novel"; and the details of his argument do
not stand up. But the possibility of an influence certainly remains.
There is also the possibility that Ikhnaton derived his monotheism
from the Hebrews whose presence in Egypt at that time is claimed
by the Bible and admitted by Freud and most scholars. But no such
influence, one way or the other, is demonstrable.
Again the difference in similarity should not be overlooked.
Ikhnaton's monotheism consists of a quantitative reduction of tradi-
tional polytheism: of the many traditional gods he recognizes only
one, Aton, the sun. It is the sun that awakens all life and that alone
deserves worship. In the Five Books of Moses, any worship of the
sun is scorned. The word used for the sun, shemesh, is written just
like the word for servant, shamash (the vowels not being written);
and in the creation story in Genesis the sun is created together
with the moon to serve man as an instrument that makes possible
the calculation of days, months, and years.
Hebrew monotheism cannot be understood as a quantitative re-
duction of any traditional polytheism or as an exclusive declaration
of loyalty to one of the established gods: all the established gods of
the nations are set aside, and the whole lot of them is considered
beneath comparison with God, who not only does not happen to be
identified with the sun but who is not at all an object in this world.
No object in this world deserves worship: not the sun and moon and
stars, which Plato, many centuries later, still considered divine; not
the Pharaoh nor any other human being; nor any animal. Only God
who is utterly unlike anything in the world. Man alone, according
to the First Book of Moses, is made in God's image and breathes his
spirit. And that means every man and every woman, not just some
king, emperor, or hero, or one family or people only.
On reflection, all this appears so different from the religion of
Ikhnaton that no likelihood at all remains that Hebrew monotheism
was derived from the worship of Aton. Moreover, it is "debatable"
as Professor John Wilson has noted in his preface to Ikhnaton's
famous hymn to Aton in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the
Old Testament whether the Amarna religion can really be "called
The Old Testament 189
monotheistic." For only the Pharaoh and his family worshiped Aton,
while the courtiers worshiped Ikhnaton himself. Incidentally, "the
great majority of Egyptians was ignorant of or hostile to the new
faith" (369).
Finally, few Pharaohs, if any, were so possessed with the desire
to make images of the things in this world, from reliefs of the disk
of the sun to the beautiful birds and flowers found on the floor of
the Pharaoh's palace and the magnificent sculptured likenesses of
the Pharaoh and his family and the men at his court, which now
grace the museums of Cairo and Berlin.
Our archaeological discoveries in Egypt leave the originality of
the religion of Moses as stunning as it ever seemed. The experience
of Egypt may have awakened the Hebrews to a haunting sense of
the sublime, to dissatisfaction with the ephemeral, to respect for
learning and to a lasting revulsion against any concern with the
afterlife, against polytheism, and against idolatry and any form at
all of sculpture.
We must leave open the possibility that faith in the God of
Abraham antedated the sojourn in Egypt. What the Bible claims,
and what we have no good reason to doubt, is that the Hebrew
religion was hammered out in response to the experience of Egypt
not by way of accepting the religion of Egypt but rather as an
enduring reply to it.
49
Several generations before the Hebrews went to Egypt, Abraham
is said to have come from Mesopotamia, and around 1900 it was
fashionable in some quarters to juxtapose Bibel and Babel to cite
the title of an essay of that time and to deny the originality of the
Bible. One of the motifs in the birth story of Moses is encountered
earlier in a story about a Mesopotamian king, Sargon; and the
story of Noah and the flood bears some marked similarities to the
far earlier Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh. Such literary influences
are undeniable, but, if one stops to think about them, of rather
190 The Faith of a Heretic
limited importance. Nobody would think of denying the originality
of Shakespeare, Goethe, or Sophocles on similar grounds. What
matters is how such motifs are utilized.
Far more interesting is the question whether the so-called Law of
Moses was significantly influenced by the Code of Hammurabi.
Hammurabi was a king of Babylonia, probably from 1728-1686 B.C.
He may be the man referred to in Genesis 14 as "Amraphel, king of
Shinar." His law code was discovered in the winter of 1901-2 in the
course of excavations at Susa (the Shushan of Esther and Daniel) in
southern Persia, where an Elamite raider had taken the diorite stela
about the twelfth century B.C. The stela, topped by a bas-relief
showing Hammurabi with the sun god Shamash, was found by
French archaeologists who took it to the Louvre in Paris.
The code is not the earliest code of laws known to us, but in its
preservation and comprehensiveness it has no equal of comparable
antiquity, save only the Law of Moses, which is younger. Ham-
murabi's laws are framed by a poetic prologue and epilogue and
deal with the following matters: accusations, witnesses, and judges;
theft and robbery; a military feudal system; field, garden, and
house; tradesmen and female wine sellers; articles left with another
person for safekeeping; family relationships; injuries; ships; rents;
and slaves. In this central portion there are no digressions, and the
arrangement is far more systematic than in the comparable sections
of the Five Books of Moses. This, added to the many parallels in
detail, led early scholars to underestimate the striking originality of
the Mosaic legislation. Confronted with such an unusually signifi-
cant and unexpected discovery, these scholars could scarcely have
been expected to react differently; and the tremendous influence of
the Code of Hammurabi on the Law of Moses cannot be doubted.
Indeed, Hammurabi and his successors succeeded in extending the
influence of Babylonia as far as Palestine, and the cultural hegem-
ony of Babylonia outlasted its political dominion. It would there-
fore be tedious to catalogue parallels or, for that matter, minor
differences. Are there any major differences? Do we find any
radically new point of departure in the Mosaic legislation?
The two central principles of Hammurabi's code are, first, ius
The Old Testament 191
talionis (the conception that justice in criminal cases consists in
precise retaliation) and, secondly, that the law is a respecter of per-
sons and that different standards must be applied to people of dif-
ferent social status. Both of these principles are anathema to most
contemporary penologists, and retaliation is widely considered all but
synonymous with the Law of Moses. The arguments of T. H. Green,
Bernard Bosanquet, and other apologists for ius talionis notwith-
standing, both of these principles have a common presupposition:
they distinguish insufficiently between human beings and material
objects. And the crucial difference between the Code of Hammurabi
and the Law of Moses is that in the latter the unique worth of man
as such is proclaimed and implicit for the first time in human
history.
The Code of Hammurabi recognizes three classes of people: an
aristocracy, commoners, and slaves. Accordingly, it generally pro-
vides three kinds of punishment, depending, for example, on whether
an injury has been inflicted on a member of the aristocracy, a com-
moner, or a slave. The slave is considered less as a human being
than as a piece of property; and so are the sons and daughters even
of a noble. The way in which the principle of retaliation is applied
suggests that the body of the noble himself, too, is considered as
essentially a material object.
Here are a few illustrations, accompanied in each case by a con-
trast with the Law of Moses. The man who has destroyed an eye or
broken a bone of another man's slave has to pay one half his value:
he merely has to compensate the owner for the damage done to his
property. In the same vein, there is no penalty whatsoever for
destroying an eye or breaking a bone of one's own slave. This should
be compared with Exodus 21:20 and 21:26 ff., where the man who
as much as breaks a tooth of his own slave must let him go free for
his tooth. In the Law of Moses, the slave is first of all a human being
and has to be treated as such.
According to the Code of Hammurabi, if a man either helps a
fugitive slave "escape through the city gate" or harbors him in his
house "and has not brought him forth at the summons of the police,
that householder shall be put to death" (15 ff.). Compare this with
192 The Faith of a Heretic
Deuteronomy 23:15 f.: "You shall not give up to his master a slave
who has escaped from his master to you; he shall dwell with you,
in your midst, in the place which he shall choose within one of your
towns, where it pleases him best; you shall not oppress him."
In the Law of Moses, being a slave is an accidental condition.
This is further emphasized by constant reminders that the children
of Israel had been slaves in Egypt themselves and should therefore
know how it feels to be a slave. On the Sabbath the slave, too,
should rest, and every Sabbath thus becomes a celebration of the
brotherhood and equality of men.
The contrast in this respect between Hammurabi and Moses is
most neatly illustrated by Hammurabi's last law (282): "If a male
slave has said to his master, 'You are not my master,' his master
shall prove him to be his slave and cut off his ear." In Exodus 21 we
find a faint but, no doubt, deliberate echo of this law an echo that
seems designed to bring out the deep difference between the two
legislations: "When you buy a Hebrew servant, he shall serve six
years, and in the seventh he shall go out free, for nothing. . . . But
if the servant plainly says, '. . . . I will not go out free' ... his master
shall bore his ear through with an awl; and he shall serve him
for life."
Hammurabi considers a man's children, too, not as human beings
in their own right but as his property. If a man strikes the daughter
of another man, "if that woman has died, they shall put his daughter
to death" (210). A man's daughter may thus be put to death merely
to impose a severe fine on the father. The fine becomes less severe
if the woman killed in the first instance was the daughter of a com-
moner (one-half mina of silver); and if she was a slave, the fine is
still lower (one-third mina).
Similarly, if a man builds a house for another man, and he builds
it badly and the house collapses if it causes the death of the
owner, the builder is to be put to death, but "if it has caused the
death of a son of the owner of the house, they shall put the son of
that builder to death" (229 ff.).
To such provisions there is no parallel in the Law of Moses,
which insists, with striking originality, that there is only one God
The Old Testament 193
and that all men alike are made in his image and therefore alto-
gether incommensurable with things or money.
The law of talion, to be sure, appears in the Law of Moses, too,
but in an almost polemical manner. The Mosaic phrase, "an eye for
an eye," might be said to conceal a revaluation of Hammurabi's
values. Consider the three Old Testament passages in which the
phrase occurs, and the first two will make plain the new spirit, while
the third brings out an interesting continuity.
The first occurrence of "life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth"
is in Exodus 21, where it is immediately followed by the provision
already cited: "If he knocks out his servant's or his maid's tooth,
he shall let them go free for the tooth's sake." This provision shows
immediately what is amply borne out by the entire Law of Moses,
that the principle of retaliation was never applied mechanically and
in accordance with the letter of the phrase. Rather, the emphasis
was on the spirit, to wit, that an injury is an injury and that the law
is no respecter of persons. Or, to put it positively, the words of the
ancient, pre-Mosaic law of talion are employed to announce the
new principle of equality before the law.
This interpretation is corroborated by the second Biblical pas-
sage in which the phrase occurs, in Leviticus 24, where the ancient
formula is followed by this declaration: "You shall have one law
for the stranger and for the native; for I am the Lord your God."
The third passage, finally, in Deuteronomy 19, echoes and expands
a similar law in the Code of Hammurabi: "If a malicious witness
rises against any man to speak evil of him . . . the judges shall in-
quire diligently, and if the witness . . . has accused his brother
falsely, then you shall do to him as he had meant to do to his
brother; so you shall purge the evil from your midst. And the rest
shall hear, and fear, and shall never again commit any such evil
in your midst. Your eye shall not pity: it shall be life for life, eye
for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot." In Ham-
murabi's similar law, there is no reference to the intention of the
witness: the man who accuses another of murder and then cannot
prove his charge is put to death.
It is customary today to decry "an eye for an eye" as the epitome
194 The Faith of a Heretic
of legal barbarism. But to arrive at a judicious evaluation one should
compare this last application of the ancient principle with, say, pub-
lic morality in the United States of America during the decade after
the Second World War: does it manifest higher moral standards
when a United States senator who advised one of his colleagues
to accuse as many people as possible to increase his chances of
making at least some of his accusations stick was widely admired
for his exemplary honesty and integrity?*
It is a popular myth that the principle of talion was, as it were,
left behind by Jesus' counsel that one should love one's enemies. In
fact, the passage in which Jesus repudiates the ancient maxim, "an
eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth" is the one in which he pro-
ceeds: "But I say to you, resist not evil: . . . and if any one would
sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well."
Where he rejects talion, he rejects the courts altogether; but where
he speaks of the divine judgment, he returns to talion again and
again; for example, to cite the Sermon on the Mount once more:
* So serious a charge should not be left at the level of insinuation. In his
"Letter from Washington" in The New Yorker of April 22, 1950, Richard
Rovere wrote, in part: "These things have been accompanied by a sophisti-
cated callousness and mischief-making that is probably most strikingly sym-
bolized by Senator Robert A. Taft's advice to Senator McCarthy, given
several weeks ago, to go on making his accusations, in the hope that 'if one
case doesn't work out, another one may.' The temper of the period can be
gauged not only by the fact that this remark has received almost no censure
in the press and none at all in Congress but also by the fact that Senator
Taft, who has always enjoyed a formidable and by no means undeserved
reputation for fairness and probity, found it possible to make it in the first
place."
A fuller treatment may be found in William S. White's The Taft Story,
in the chapter on "The Sad, Worst Period." White's political orientation is
very different from Rovere's, and his biography is informed by an enormous
sympathy for Taft His evaluation of Taft's attitude toward McCarthy, how-
ever, is well summed up by the chapter heading. (See especially 84-86,
193, and 219 f.)
Since Taft is the only senator in American history to have been honored
with a huge public monument in Washington, D.C., comparable to those
erected in honor of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, this little footnote
memorial seems appropriate not as a posthumous indictment but as an
invitation to reflect on different standards of public morality. For the monu-
ment does not honor his very dubious judgment his isolationism during
the early part of the Second World War or his assurance right after the
war that, if only the OPA were abolished, prices would come down but his
supposedly exemplary integrity.
The Old Testament 195
Tor with the judgment you judge, you will be judged; and the
measure you give will be the measure you get" ( Matthew 5 and 7 ) .
Elsewhere the New Testament goes far beyond both Moses and
Hammurabi by holding out eternal punishment for calling a man
a fool or for not accepting the teachings of Jesus' apostles.
Until quite recently, the idea of retaliation was all but insepara-
ble from the Western sense of justice. Jesus' counsel to love one's
enemies is on an entirely different plane: it is a maxim for personal
relations, on a level with the Mosaic injunction, "If you meet your
enemy's ox or his ass going astray, you shall bring it back to him"
(Exodus 23:4; cf. also verse 5 and many similar passages). In per-
sonal relations Hammurabi did not advocate retaliation either, and
in their law courts Christian countries have not distinguished them-
selves from non-Christian countries by renouncing the principle,
"life for life," or the underlying conception of retaliation.
It is only in recent times that modern penologists have moved
away from the whole conception of retaliation to advocate a penal
system based on the primacy of reform. And it is instructive that
so many Christian writers have opposed this recent development,
which is associated mainly with stubbornly un-Christian thinkers
like Jeremy Bentham and George Bernard Shaw, who emphasized
the inefficiency of retaliation; with Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
Zarathustra says, in his discourse "On the Tarantulas," "that man
be delivered from revenge, that is for me the bridge to the highest
hopes"; and with Albert Camus, who tried to show in his "Reflections
on the Guillotine" that "capital punishment . . . has always been a
religious punishment" and is irreconcilable with humanism. A gen-
eration earlier, Shaw had pointed out in his Preface to Major Bar-
bara that "the only editor in England who renounces punishment
as radically wrong, also repudiates Christianity."
Pope Pius XII put the matter very clearly in 1953, in a manner
that also shows its relevance to the discussion of retribution in
Section 43. He took issue with those "modern theories" which "fail
to consider expiation of the crime committed ... as the most im-
portant function of the punishment." Against them he cited Matthew
16:27 and Romans 2:6 and 13:4, concluding: "The function of
196 The Faith of a Heretic
protection disappears completely in the after-life. The Omnipotent
and All-Knowing Creator can always prevent the repetition of a
crime by the interior moral conversion of the delinquent. But the
supreme Judge, in His last Judgment, applies uniquely the prin-
cipal of retribution. This, then, must be of great importance" (117 f .).
To return to Hammurabi, the most striking parallel to the Law
of Moses is not to be found in his legislation but in the prologue
and epilogue where Hammurabi declares that he is giving his laws
"in order that the strong might not oppress the weak, and that jus-
tice might be dealt the orphan and the widow."
50
The conceptions of God and of man in the Old Testament differ
sharply from those current in Egypt and Mesopotamia: they are
distinctive, novel, and original, and they have exerted a decisive
influence on Western thought
What distinguishes the God of the Old Testament from the gods
of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Rigoeda, the Iliad, and the Edda
is not by any means adequately suggested by the one word "mono-
theism." The difference is not merely quantitative: the gods of
Homer are far more similar to human beings than they are to the
God of the Old Testament. Unlike the gods of polytheism, and un-
like the god Aton of Pharaoh Ikhnaton, the God of ancient Israel
is altogether separate from the world which he made, and he did
not make it in human fashion, either after a fight with rival gods,
demons, or dragons, or after a struggle with recalcitrant material,
but in a manner as unique as he is himself by saying, "Let there
be." He is not an object among objects but the sovereign subject
who engages in the pure unimpeded activity of speech.
He cannot be seen he cannot be made the passive object of
vision but he speaks to man, actively. It is not possible to make
an image of him: one cannot make an image of one who is essen-
tially not an object. Nor does anything in nature represent or re-
The Old Testament 197
semble him, unless it were man who is made in his image and who
breathes his spirit.
This relation of God to man is of the essence of the religion of
the Old Testament. This religion is not metaphysical, not specu-
lative, not mythical: it does not concern itself with the nature of
God as he may be, as it were, in himself; it does not speculate about
his activities before the creation of the world or, quite generally,
insofar as they do not affect man; it does not relate myths about his
private life. The religion of the Old Testament is concerned with
God only as a Thou, only as related to man, only as addressing man
and as addressable by man. His deeds are a subject of concern and
related only insofar as they constitute an address to man. Of other
deeds, nothing is said: God is not an object of interest, study, or
entertainment.
The conception of this God and his relation to man leads to a
revolutionary new conception of man. Neither man in general nor
any kind or race of men is a brother or cousin of the apes that so
closely resemble him, or of any other animal or object in nature:
having been created in the image of a God who transcends nature,
and breathing his spirit, man is raised out of nature and endowed
with a supra-natural dignity.
This dignity is not restricted to one man, one family, or one peo-
ple, but a quality of man as such: for all men are descended from
a single couple from Adam and Eve and, again, after the flood,
from Noah and his wife. Thus all men are brothers.
Two of the three great ideas of the French Revolution are readily
traced back to the Old Testament: equality and fraternity. What of
the third idea: liberty? At least implicitly, this idea, too, is central
in the Old Testament. Having been created in the image of God, no
man is merely an object or should be treated merely as an object;
every man has a supra-natural dignity; all men are brothers. It
would seem to follow that no man should treat another man as a
slave and deprive him of his liberty.
Logic is the weak side of history, and it sometimes takes centuries
before apparently obvious implications are realized. American his-
198 The Faith of a Heretic
tory furnishes a ready example with its noble declaration, in 1776:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain un-
alienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness." When these words were proclaimed to the world
and their Biblical inspiration meets the eye their author was a
slaveholder, and the country on whose behalf he was speaking was
one of the few civilized countries left in which slavery was still
legal. It is a long and arduous road indeed that leads from pride in
such a principle to its full realization, effectively guaranteed by law.
That the implications of the Biblical conception of man regarding
slavery were grasped at least to some extent even in Old Testament
times is plain from the passages cited by way of contrast with the
Code of Hammurabi. Since there is no Hebrew word for "slave"
other than ewed, which means "servant," it is not an easy thing to
say whether some form of slavery persisted through most of the
time covered by the Old Testament or not. In theory at least, the
institution of the Sabbath, on which the slave, or servant, was to
rest, too, and the Sabbath year, in which any Hebrew slave was to
go free (unless he wanted so badly to remain a slave that he sub-
jected himself to the previously mentioned ceremony of having one
ear pierced), and the institution of the Jubilee, every fiftieth year,
in which non-Hebrew slaves, too, may have been meant to go free,
would seem to have gone far toward abolishing slavery. That in-
humanity nevertheless found frequent expression is obvious, but no
other sacred scripture contains books that speak out against social
injustice as eloquently, unequivocally, and sensitively as the books
of Moses and some of the prophets.
In the religion of the Old Testament a keen social conscience is
central. This is one of the distinctive features that set the Old
Testament apart, quite radically, from the New Testament and the
Koran, from the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita, from the Tao-
Teh-Ching and the Dhammapada. And in the Old Testament this
social conscience is by no means unrelated to the belief in God:
rather, it is the most significant implication of this belief.
In the third Book of Moses, Chapter 19, we read: "You shall not
The Old Testament 199
hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason with your
neighbor, lest you bear sin because of him. You shall not take
vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your people,
but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord." And
again: "When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall
not do him wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to
you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself;
for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your
God."
Malachi, the prophet, cries out: "Have we not all one father?
Has not one God created us? Why then are we faithless to one
another?" (2:10). And Job says: "If I have rejected the right of my
manservant or my maidservant, when they contended with me;
what then shall I do when God rises up? When he makes inquiry,
what shall I answer him? Did not he who made me in the womb
make him? And did not one fashion us in the womb?" (31:13-15).
51
One of the most important points about God and man in the Old
Testament involves the person of Moses. The so-called "higher
critics" of the Old Testament, who dominated the field for almost a
century, beginning in the early second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, claimed that monotheism had developed very slowly and that
it did not attain full purity until the time of the prophets.
This whole question is very involved, and one cannot do justice
to it in passing. What needs to be shown is that the presuppositions
of the "higher criticism" are untenable, that it contains a crucial
self-contradiction, and that its methods are extremely unsound. Hav-
ing tried to show this in detail in Chapter X of my Critique, I can
refer interested readers to that book, and come to the point at issue
in the present context.
There is ample evidence in the Old Testament and its authors
actually make a point of the fact that the superstitions and even
the idols of neighboring nations often gained a foothold in ancient
200 The Faith of a Heretic
Israel. No claim whatever is made that all the people from the time
of Moses on were pure and dedicated monotheists or that their
behavior came up to the highest moral standards. On the contrary,
the Old Testament records Moses' epic struggle with his stiff-necked
people; and Judges, Kings, and the books of the prophets relate the
sequel, which is essentially similar. It took time before the whole
people rose, even in theory, to the height of Moses* vision; and, of
course, the people never became a nation of Moseses.
Two things, however, are extremely striking. First, in spite of
occasional appearances of idolatry, beginning with the golden calf,
the theory that objects in this world are gods and merit worship
never seems to have gained ground. One gets the impression that
some of the people sometimes fell into the habits of the nations
among whom they lived and thoughtlessly adopted their practices.
What the prophets attack is this unthinking, stupid inconsistency,
never a rival creed, and least of all any belief that the traditional
religion of Israel either contains or is indifferent to such ideas as,
say, that the sun and moon are gods. This fact suggests most strongly
that the monotheism of Israel was not derived from that of Ikhnaton,
and that it was not arrived at gradually by way of a slow process
of exclusion.
The second point is even more striking. In India, the Jina and
the Buddha, founders of two new religions in the sixth century B.C.,
came to be worshiped later by their followers. In China, Confucius
and Lao-tze came to be deified. To the non-Christian, Jesus seems
to represent a parallel case. In Greece, the heroes of the past were
held to have been sired by a god or to have been born of goddesses,
and the dividing line between gods and men became fluid. In
Egypt, the Pharaoh was considered divine.
In Israel, no man was ever worshiped or accorded even semi-
divine status. This is one of the most extraordinary facts about the
religion of the Old Testament and by far the most important reason
for the Jews' refusal to accept Christianity and the New Testament.
It is extraordinary that the prophets never had to raise their voices
against any cult of Moses or the patriarchs. One explanation, theo-
retically possible but incompatible with the evidence, would be that
The Old Testament 201
Moses never lived and was merely the fiction of a later age. But
not one of the prophets makes the slightest claim to be an innovator:
all remind the people of what they have long known and rebuke
them for unthinkingly betraying standards and ideas long accepted.
And there is no first prophet: before Amos came Elisha and Elijah
and Micaiah and whole groups of prophets Kings is full of them
and, before them, Nathan; and, before him, Samuel; and so
forth. Yet there is not the slightest evidence that any one of them
was the creator of the religion of ancient Israel or even a man who
radically changed it. Everything points back at least to the time of
Moses.
Why, then, was Moses never deified or worshiped unlike Lao-
tze, Confucius, and the Buddha and the Jina, and the Pharaohs
of Egypt? The most obvious explanation is that he himself im-
pressed his people with the firm idea that no human being is divine
in any sense in which the rest of mankind isn't.
Being a stiff-necked and critical people, they may have been
quite willing to believe that he was not a god, that no Jew is a god,
and certainly no Gentile. But it seems clear that Moses himself was
unequivocal on this point as, indeed, the Buddha was, too and
that Moses, unlike the Buddha, succeeded in imprinting it forever
in the minds of his followers.
It could not have been hard for a man in his position to suggest to
at least some of his most ardent followers that he himself was in
some sense divine and without flaw. On the contrary, the image he
created of himself was that of a human being, wearing himself out
in the service of God and Israel, trying against all odds to wed his
people to his God, modest, patient, hard to anger, magnificent in his
wrath, but completely unresentful, capable of the deepest suffering,
the quintessence of devotion human to the core.
He went away to die alone, lest any man should know his grave
to worship there or attach any value to his mortal body. Having seen
Egypt, he knew better than the Buddha how prone men are to such
superstitions. Going off to die alone, he might have left his people
with the image of a mystery, with the idea of some supernatural
transfiguration, with the thought that he did not die but went up to
200 The Faith of a Heretic
Israel. No claim whatever is made that all the people from the time
of Moses on were pure and dedicated monotheists or that their
behavior came up to the highest moral standards. On the contrary,
the Old Testament records Moses' epic struggle with his stiff-necked
people; and Judges, Kings, and the books of the prophets relate the
sequel, which is essentially similar. It took time before the whole
people rose, even in theory, to the height of Moses' vision; and, of
course, the people never became a nation of Moseses.
Two things, however, are extremely striking. First, in spite of
occasional appearances of idolatry, beginning with the golden calf,
the theory that objects in this world are gods and merit worship
never seems to have gained ground. One gets the impression that
some of the people sometimes fell into the habits of the nations
among whom they lived and thoughtlessly adopted their practices.
What the prophets attack is this unthinking, stupid inconsistency,
never a rival creed, and least of all any belief that the traditional
religion of Israel either contains or is indifferent to such ideas as,
say, that the sun and moon are gods. This fact suggests most strongly
that the monotheism of Israel was not derived from that of Ikhnaton,
and that it was not arrived at gradually by way of a slow process
of exclusion.
The second point is even more striking. In India, the Jina and
the Buddha, founders of two new religions in the sixth century B.C.,
came to be worshiped later by their followers. In China, Confucius
and Lao-tze came to be deified. To the non-Christian, Jesus seems
to represent a parallel case. In Greece, the heroes of the past were
held to have been sired by a god or to have been born of goddesses,
and the dividing line between gods and men became fluid. In
Egypt, the Pharaoh was considered divine.
In Israel, no man was ever worshiped or accorded even semi-
divine status. This is one of the most extraordinary facts about the
religion of the Old Testament and by far the most important reason
for the Jews' refusal to accept Christianity and the New Testament.
It is extraordinary that the prophets never had to raise their voices
against any cult of Moses or the patriarchs. One explanation, theo-
retically possible but incompatible with the evidence, would be that
The Old Testament 201
Moses never lived and was merely the fiction of a later age. But
not one of the prophets makes the slightest claim to be an innovator:
all remind the people of what they have long known and rebuke
them for unthinkingly betraying standards and ideas long accepted.
And there is no first prophet: before Amos came Elisha and Elijah
and Micaiah and whole groups of prophets Kings is full of them
and, before them, Nathan; and, before him, Samuel; and so
forth. Yet there is not the slightest evidence that any one of them
was the creator of the religion of ancient Israel or even a man who
radically changed it. Everything points back at least to the time of
Moses.
Why, then, was Moses never deified or worshiped unlike Lao-
tze, Confucius, and the Buddha and the Jina, and the Pharaohs
of Egypt? The most obvious explanation is that he himself im-
pressed his people with the firm idea that no human being is divine
in any sense in which the rest of mankind isn't.
Being a stiff-necked and critical people, they may have been
quite willing to believe that he was not a god, that no Jew is a god,
and certainly no Gentile. But it seems clear that Moses himself was
unequivocal on this point as, indeed, the Buddha was, too and
that Moses, unlike the Buddha, succeeded in imprinting it forever
in the minds of his followers.
It could not have been hard for a man in his position to suggest to
at least some of his most ardent followers that he himself was in
some sense divine and without flaw. On the contrary, the image he
created of himself was that of a human being, wearing himself out
in the service of God and Israel, trying against all odds to wed his
people to his God, modest, patient, hard to anger, magnificent in his
wrath, but completely unresentf ul, capable of the deepest suffering,
the quintessence of devotion human to the core.
He went away to die alone, lest any man should know his grave
to worship there or attach any value to his mortal body. Having seen
Egypt, he knew better than the Buddha how prone men are to such
superstitions. Going off to die alone, he might have left his people
with the image of a mystery, with the idea of some supernatural
transfiguration, with the thought that he did not die but went up to
202 The Faith of a Heretic
heaven with the notion that he was immortal and divine. He
might have created the suspicion that, when his mission was accom-
plished, he returned to heaven. Instead he created an enduring
image of humanity: he left his people with the thought that, being
human and imperfect, he was not allowed to enter the promised
land, but that he went up on the mountain to see it before he died.
The Jews have been so faithful to his spirit that they have not
only never worshiped him but, alas, have never pitted him against
the other great men of the world by way of asking who compared
with Moses. To be sure, after relating the story of his death, they
added: "There has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses."
But they have not confronted the world with this man to stake out
a claim for him. One speaks of Jesus, the Buddha, and Socrates,
perhaps also of Francis of Assisi, but one does not ask: Does not
Moses belong with them? Was he perhaps, man for man, simply as
a human being, more attractive, greater, more humane?
What the Jews have presented to the world has not been Moses or
any individual, but their ideas about God and man. It is a measure
of Moses* greatness that one cannot but imagine that he would have
approved wholeheartedly. It would have broken his heart if he had
thought that his followers would build temples to him, make images
of him, or elevate him into heaven. That he has never been deified
is one of the most significant facts about the ideas of God and man
in the Old Testament.
The troublesome question remains how the elaborate ritual law
of the last four Books of Moses is related to Moses. Traditional
Judaism has assumed, as have Jesus, Paul, and traditional Chris-
tianity, that these laws were given by Moses. Goethe even suggested
that the Ten Commandments did not derive from Moses, while a
more ritualistic set of ten commandments, which he found in
Exodus 34, did. Many of the "higher critics" agreed with Goethe:
the admission that a sublime morality was taught by Moses in the
thirteenth century B.C. would have been fatal to their evolutionary
construction of the Old Testament. The morality they admired they
ascribed to the great pre-exilic prophets, whom we shall consider
The Old Testament 203
shortly. The detailed ritual law they assigned to the post-exilic
period; for, in brief, it does not seem at all plausible to assign it
to the years in the desesrt, long before there was any real state, not
to speak of a settled agricultural community, which seems to be
presupposed by these laws. Moreover, neither the historical nor the
prophetic books of the Old Testament seem to presuppose all of
this legislation.
The reasons for dissociating Moses from the highly intricate ritual
law are to my mind almost conclusive and establish an overwhelm-
ing probability. The reasons, on the other hand, for not ascribing to
him the Ten Commandments or the moral principles traditionally
associated with him strike me as utterly implausible, indeed, one is
generally not confronted with any reasons at all, but merely with
the presupposition that sublime moral ideas must be late. This as-
sumption is surely false. Quite typically, we encounter a supreme
moral challenge at the beginning of a new religion; and, more often
than not, this is later subjected to compromise and dilution rather
than improvement. Confucius and Lao-tze, the Buddha and Jesus
furnish examples in this vein. If it should be objected that none of
them stand at the beginning of a new civilization and that all four
of them draw on past developments, the same consideration applies
to Moses.
For all that, the problem remains whether Moses really tried to
impress a high morality on his people. So far, it has merely been
suggested that he well might have; that this cannot be ruled out
a priori; and that, if he did, there would be many parallels in the
history of religion. The question we must ask now can be expressed
in Job's words: "If it is not he, who then is it?" Somebody must have
originated this morality. The Bible critics answer: the prophets.
We are asked in effect to believe that, in the eighth century, Amos
and Hosea, independent of each other and without the least aware-
ness of their originality in fact, emphatically disclaiming any
originality came up all at once with the same moral demands.
These were echoed almost immediately by Isaiah and Micah who,
rather oddly, also seemed to think that their people had long been
204 The Faith of a Heretic
told what they were reminding them of, and that it was truly shame-
ful and inexcusable that Israel should have forgotten, or rathe*
failed to live up to, these ancient standards.
The point here is not merely that the prophets must have known
better whether their moral standards were original with them than
any "higher critic" could. After the Exile, the practice of ascribing
books to ancient authors to heighten the prestige of the works be-
came common; and there are excellent reasons for considering
Proverbs, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Daniel cases in point. It
might therefore be asked whether the prophets might not have
employed the same ruse, pretending that ideas original with them
were ancient. There are at least two good answers to this.
The first of these may sound subjective and intuitive to anyone
who has not read the great pre-exilic prophets, but it may well be
conclusive for anyone who has: the indignation of these men is in-
separable from their unquestioning conviction that Israel has be-
trayed, violated, broken the faith with norms known since the
Exodus from Egypt. The second answer has already been given:
the whole phenomenon of pre-exilic prophecy, of the almost simul-
taneous appearance, independently of each other, of men appealing
to the same standards of morality, can hardly be explained if we are
to suppose that these standards were original with them. It can be
explained by considering Moses one of humanity's greatest teachers.
That this does not deprive the prophets of their glory will be seen
as soon as we come to consider them in detail. ( Cf . also my Critique,
90: "Religion and Progress.")
At this point it will suffice to cite a single passage from Jeremiah:
"I did not speak to your fathers, and I did not command them on
the day that I led them out of the land of Egypt, about burnt offer-
ings and sacrifices. But this is what I commanded them: Listen to
my voice, and I shall be God for you, and you shall be a people
for me; and walk in all the way that I command you, that it may
be well with you. . . . From the day that your fathers came out of
the land of Egypt to this day, I sent to you all my servants the
prophets, day upon day; yet they did not listen to me, or incline
their ear, but stiffened their neck" (7:22 ff. ).
The Old Testament 205
52
It is widely supposed that the conception of the chosen people
is diametrically at odds with the humanistic strain in the Old
Testament, and what has so far been pointed out is often alto-
gether ignored or at the very least held to represent a relatively
minor motif. It has become fashionable to ignore whatever in
the New Testament may seem unedifying, especially the many
passages on hell and eternal torment, while emphasizing out of
all proportion whatever in the Old Testament is questionable from
a moral point of view.
Plainly, the Old Testament, written over a period of a thousand
years and containing history and poetry as well as proverbs and
laws and stories, is not in its entirety a book of moral instruction.
It contains, for example the Book of Joshua, which relates the
conquest of Palestine and ascribes to God the command to slaugh-
ter "both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses,
with the edge of the sword." But to find the spirit of the religion
of the Old Testament in Joshua is like finding the distinctive
genius of America in the men who slaughtered the Indians. Many
nations have their Joshuas, and the chance to make a unique
contribution to humanity has often been bought with the sword:
the genius of a people shows itself in what is done later to realize
this costly opportunity. Survival in this wicked world may be
a crime that has to be redeemed by subsequent achievements.
In the Old Testament itself, the idea of the chosen people is
not offered by way of justifying lower moral standards, as if it
were claimed that, being chosen, one need not live up to stand-
ards intended only for the mass of men. On the contrary, the con-
ception of the chosen people is inseparably linked with the twin
ideas of a task and of an especially demanding law.
In two definitive passages, Amos, the first prophet to compose
poetic speeches that were committed to writing, proclaims: "You
only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I
206 The Faith of a Heretic
will punish you for all your iniquities" (3:2). And: "Are you not
like the Ethiopians to me, O people of Israel? says the Lord. Did
I not bring up Israel from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines
from Crete, and the Syrians from Kir? Behold, the eyes of the
Lord God are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from
the surface of the ground; except that I will not utterly destroy
the house of Jacob, says the Lord" (9:7-8). Not utterly; for, as
Isaiah puts it a little later when he names his son Shear- jashub:
a remnant shall return that is the meaning of the name. What
matters is not the glory of the people: most of them, almost gen-
eration after generation, shall be destroyed. What matters is the
task: maintaining and spreading what has been revealed to them,
namely, the belief in God and the morality that goes with it. And
that is why a remnant shall return, lest the flame be extinguished
entirely.
This theme runs through the books of the ancient Hebrew
prophets and, beyond that, through most of the Old Testament.
The original structure of the Hebrew Bible has been deliberately
changed in the Christian version of it, which ends with the proph-
ets. The Hebrew Bible has three parts. The first consists of the
Five Books of Moses. The second part is the Prophets, divided,
in turn, into two parts: the first part is historical and comprises
the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings; the second and
central part consists of the prophets proper that is, of Isaiah,
Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve. Some of the Twelve are easily
as impressive as Ezekiel, but their books are far shorter than those
of the Big Three. The last part comprises the so-called Scriptures:
Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ec-
clesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles. The
Hebrew Bible ends with the end of the Babylonian exile, when
a remnant returned to Jerusalem; and the last words are the words
of Cyrus, King of Persia: "The Lord, the God of heaven, has
given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me
to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever
is among you of all his people, may the Lord his God be with
him. Let him go up."
The Old Testament 207
Christianity had no use for this conclusion when it put together
its canon, over a hundred years after the destruction of the sec-
ond temple in A. D. 70 a destruction it had come to view as a
definitive punishment for the Jews' alleged rejection of Jesus. So
they defied chronology and put the prophets at the end of the
Old Testament. In this manner, the prophets ceased to appear
as the central portion of the Hebrew Scriptures and became the
transition from the Old to the New; and instead of the last sen-
tence of the Hebrew Bible, which pronounced a blessing and a
promise, one got this conclusion: "Lest I come and smite the
land with a curse."
The supra-nationalistic, cosmopolitan, humanistic motif runs
through the Hebrew Bible from the creation to the words of the
King of Persia who, in the Hebrew view, is an instrument of God.
The culmination of this motif may be found in the vision of the
messianic kingdom, which will be considered shortly. But it is
also noteworthy that two whole books of the Old Testament are
given over all but completely to this motif: Ruth and Jonah.
The point of the Book of Ruth cannot be fully grasped if it is
forgotten that she is a Moabitess, and that the feeling of ancient
Israel about Moab is epitomized in the story in Genesis which
relates that Moab was born to one of Lot's daughters after she
had made her father drunk and spent the night with him. The
point of the Book of Ruth is that Ruth, the Moabitess, became the
great-grandmother of King David, the national hero. If there were
any racist-minded jingoists in ancient Israel, this book must have
shocked them rather more than the claim that George Washing-
ton or Robert E. Lee had a Negro great-grandmother would
shock a D.A.R. in Georgia. Immediately, the question arises what
special merits and resulting dispensation made it possible for
Ruth to become a member of the chosen people. But the answer
is that the conception of the chosen people is not racial but
spiritual. No dispensation was needed, no ritual, no baptism. Ruth
simply said to the mother of her deceased Hebrew husband:
"Where you go, I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge; your
208 The Faith of a Heretic
people shall be my people, and your God my God; where you die,
I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me
and more also if even death parts me from you." These un-
prompted words were sufficient. No more is said. No further prob-
lem is even acknowledged.
In the Book of Jonah we are confronted not with a woman
from Moab but with Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrians, who
destroyed Samaria and the kingdom of Israel, who led the ten
northern tribes into an exile from which they were never to re-
turn, and who came within a hair's breadth of capturing Jerusalem
and destroying the southern kingdom, too. How the design of
the Assyrian king was frustrated unexpectedly is the theme of one
of Byron's Hebrew Melodies, The Destruction of Sennacherib."
In the Bible, Jonah is sent to Nineveh to prophesy its imminent
destruction as a punishment for its wickedness. He refuses, flees
on a ship, is brought back in the belly of a great fish, and finally
goes and utters his prophecy. Then the people of Nineveh repent,
and God forgives them. They do not become Jews. They are not
circumcised or baptized. They simply repent. That is enough.
God decides not to destroy Nineveh. Jonah, displeased, protests
that this is what he foresaw in the first place: "I knew that thou
art a gracious God and merciful." That is why Jonah fled. Why
now must he bear the humiliation of having been forced to make
a prophecy and then to see it refuted by the event? "It is better
for me to die than to live." But God replies, after a short humor-
ous episode: "Should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which
there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who
do not know their right hand from their left, and also much
cattle?" Joshua is not unique: the lore of the nations abounds in
men more or less like him. But in what other book of sacred
scriptures do we find a book like Jonah?
It might be supposed that, if the foregoing analysis is right, the
Jews would surely have endeavored to make proselytes, convert-
ing others to their own religion. And they did. An odd reference
to this well-established fact is found in one of Jesus' most extreme
The Old Testament 209
denunciations of the Pharisees, in the Gospel according to Mat-
thew: "You traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte"
(23:15). Soon after Jesus' time, the Romans, provoked by the
Jews' refusal to accept their pagan rule, first destroyed Jerusalem
and then, when the Jews rebelled rather than accept the presence
of an image of the emperor as god in the place of their former
temple, the Romans, among other things, put an end to any
further missionary activities by the Jews. Later the Christian
church of Rome continued this ban, and again and again sur-
passed in ferocity anything the Romans had done by way of
persecuting the remnant of Jewry. Still later, Luther urged the
German princes to burn all synagogues and to drive all Jews out
of the country. Gradually, the Jews became resigned, as Chris-
tians came to be under Hitler, to the ethos of standing fast,
clinging to their religion without surrendering on any point of
substance and, of course, without making proselytes.
This ethos was beautifully formulated by the Lutheran pastor
Niemoller in a sermon delivered less than two weeks before the
Nazis arrested him. He chose as his text the words of Jesus: "You
are the salt of the earth." And he told his listeners, who, defying
all threats by the government, crowded his church to hear him,
that it was their task to keep themselves pure, lest the salt lose
its savor: in their present situation this advice made no sense
whatsoever; but that should not concern them, that was God's
concern. Their task was to hold out, and someday God might find
some use for his salt.
To reproach the Jews for not making more proselytes is like
reproaching Niemoller for not making more proselytes in those
days before his arrest. When it was feasible, the Jews made pros-
elytes in the Roman empire, among the Cazars in the Crimea,
and elsewhere. But it is harder to persuade men to submit to cir-
cumcision than it is to baptize them; it is harder to convert to the
law than to trust in grace; and those who demand works will al-
ways make fewer converts than those who stress faith and the
remission of sins.
210 The Faith of a Heretic
53
The influence of Old Testament ideas concerning the state has
been second only to that of the ancient Hebrew conceptions of
God and man. The three main points can be made briefly. They
concern the origin of the state, the value of the state, and the
vision of an ideal society.
Regarding the origin of the state, the first thing to note is that,
according to the Old Testament, the state has an origin within
history and is not the natural condition of man. The Hebrew
Bible believes in the priority of the individual. This point is made
twice: first, in Genesis where we find man in Paradise, without
any state; then again in the Book of Judges in which we encounter
this refrain, which also concludes the book: "In those days there
was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own
eyes."
The condition portrayed in the doubtless very early Book of
Judges is one of attenuated anarchy. Only under foreign attack,
or when foreign oppression becomes too severe, do the tribes rally
now and then under a charismatic leader who, after his military
triumphs, enjoys such prestige that the people come to him to
arbitrate what differences may arise between them. Such men,
and occasionally also women, like Deborah, are called judges and
fill the otherwise vacant spot of a ruler until they die. Then the
people relapse into their former state, approximating anarchy,
until their enemies get the better of them and another leader rises
and eventually becomes their judge.
Against this background, we find highly explicit doubts about
the value of the state in the Old Testament. In the Book of Judges
itself we encounter a fable whose prime intent is clearly anti-
monarchical, and this point was not lost on such close students of
the Old Testament as Cromwell and Milton. But in the twelfth
century B.C., to which this fable takes us back, there were no re-
Tfo Old Testament 211
publics, and the issue revolves around the people's desire to form
a state 'like all the nations/'
Abimelech, one of the sons of Jerubbaal, one of the judges,
went out after his father's death and said to the people of
Shechem: "Which is better for you, that all seventy of the sons
of Jerubbaal rule over you, or that one rule over you?" And
eventually "he slew his brothers the sons of Jerubbaal, seventy
men, upon one stone; but Jotham, the youngest son of Jerubbaal,
was left; for he hid himself."
Jerubbaal had not confined himself to a single wife, any more
than Jacob, or David, or Moses, who married a second, Ethiopian
Wife and his brother and sister, Aron and Miriam, were severely
punished by God for reproaching him. But that aspect of the Old
Testament has had scarcely any influence on the history of Europe
and America except, of course, for the early Mormons while
the following fable has had more influence.
Jotham came out of hiding and told the people of Shechem his
memorable fable: "The trees once went forth to anoint a king
over them; and they said to the olive tree, 'Reign over us/ But
the olive tree said to them, 'Shall I leave my fatness, by which
gods and men are honored, and go to sway over the trees?* And
the trees said to the fig tree, 'Come you, and reign over us/ But
the fig tree said to them, 'Shall I leave my sweetness and my good
fruit, and go to sway over the trees?' And the trees said to the
vine, 'Come you, and reign over us/ But the vine said to them,
'Shall I leave my wine which cheers God and men, and go to
sway over the trees?' Then all the trees said to the bramble, 'Come
you, and reign over us/ And the bramble said to the trees, 'If in
good faith you are anointing me king over you, then come and
take refuge in my shade; but if not, let fire come out of the bramble
and devour the cedars of Lebanon/"
Jotham ran away and was heard from no more, but his fable,
in Judges 9, has reverberated through history. (Abimelech was
killed in a battle, three years later, when he tried to take a tower
"and a certain woman threw an upper millstone upon Abimelech's
212 The Faith of a Heretic
head, and crushed his skull. Then he called hastily to the young
man his armor-bearer, and said to him: Draw your sword and
kill me, lest men say of me, 'A woman killed him.' And his young
man thrust him through, and he died/')
The point of the fable is clearly that nobody but an unproduc-
tive parasite would wish to be king in the first place, and that any
people is better off without a king than with such a tyrant. This
view is almost as far removed as possible from any belief in the
divine right of kings. But the First Book of Samuel goes even
further.
Samuel was a judge for a long time, and when he became old
he made his sons judges. But his sons accepted bribes and per-
verted justice. Then the elders of Israel assembled and said to
Samuel: "Behold, you are old, and your sons do not walk in your
ways; now appoint for us a king to govern us like all the nations."
In its context, this request seems understandable enough, though
it is hardly surprising that it displeased Samuel, and that "Samuel
prayed to the Lord." It is the following lines that go beyond even
Jotham's fable: "And the Lord said to Samuel, 'Listen to the
voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not
rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over
them.'"
Here and not only in this passage the earlier, pre-monarchic
condition of Israel is idealized: it was not anarchy but the king-
ship of God. The institution of human kings, on the other hand,
and the establishment of a state after the model of "all the na-
tions," is considered as a betrayal of God.
God's answer to Samuel continues: "According to all the deeds
which they have done from the day I brought them up out of
Egypt even to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so
they are also doing to you. Now then, listen to their voice; only,
you shall solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the
king who shall reign over them." The Bible relates further that
Samuel told the people what God had told him, and that he of-
fered them this picture of human kingship:
The Old Testament 213
These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you:
he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots, and to
be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will ap-
point for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of
fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and
to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots.
He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and
bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and
olive orchards and give them to his servants. He will take the
tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers
and to his servants. He will take your menservants and maid-
servants, and the best of your young men, and your asses, and put
them to his work. He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you
yourselves will be his servants."
The fable of Jotham and Chapter 8 of First Samuel are extreme,
and the rest of the Old Testament does not deny all value what-
soever to the state or to kingship. But the Old Testament con-
sistently denies any claim of the supremacy of the state in human
affairs or of the superiority of kings as such. Above the state and
king and any government there is a higher moral law by which
states, kings, governments, and any laws that they enact are to be
judged. The influence of this idea can hardly be overestimated.
54
The quintessence of this higher law was condensed into a clas-
sical sentence by the prophet Micah, in the eighth century B.C.:
"He has told you, o man, what is good and what the Lord requires
of you: only to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with
your God." (6:8). Amos and Hosea had made much the same
points, insisting passionately on their social implications.
Unlike most representatives of religion in other civilizations,
the prophets were not concerned about religious ritual. Their de-
mands and their social criticism were moral. Indeed, the concern
214 The Faith of a Heretic
about ritual was one of the things they persistently denounced in
the name of the overriding importance of social justice. Micah
introduces his bold summary of what God demands with four
rhetorical questions: "With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him
with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be
pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of
oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my
body for the sin of my soul?" And then, as a bold antithesis, he
proclaims the words cited above. What is wanted is not any ritual
at all, but justice, mercy, and humility.
Amos, a little earlier, had been, if possible, still more explicit:
"I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn
assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and
cereal offerings, I will not accept them, and the peace offerings
of your fatted beasts I will not look upon. Take away from me the
noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an
everflowing stream" (5:21 ff.).
In the name of him "who made the Pleiades and Orion, and
turns deep darkness into the morning, and darkens the day into
night, who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out
upon the surface of the earth, the Lord is his name," Amos de-
nounces those who "trample upon the poor and take from him
exactions of wheat" and those "who afflict the righteous, who take
a bribe, and turn aside the needy" (5:8 ff.).
Isaiah, Micah's great contemporary, cries out:
"What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?
says the Lord;
I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams
and the fat of fed beasts;
I do not delight in the blood of bulls,
or of lambs, or of he-goats.
When you come to appear before me,
The Old Testament 215
who requires of you this trampling of my courts?
Bring no more vain offerings;
incense is an abomination to me. . . .
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
abolish oppression;
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow" (Chapter 1).
The kings, too, are judged by the same standards, and no man,
however admired, is exempt from judgment by the standards of
this higher law. Indeed, the Old Testament goes out of its way to
emphasize that the greatest national heroes had their faults. Jacob,
who was renamed Israel and, according to tradition, gave his
name to his children and children's children, is no exception; nor
is Moses; nor David; nor Solomon. The Hebrew Bible excells in
its unforgettable portrayals of human greatness, but it never fails
to stop this side of idolatry.
A hundred years before Amos, Elijah applied the same stand-
ards to King Ahab, and about 1000 B.C. the prophet Nathan applied
them to David, after the king had asked Joab, his general, to place
Uriah, the Hittite, in an exposed place where he might get killed,
so the king would be free to marry Uriah's beautiful wife,
Bathsheba.
The law that asserted against the norms current in the ancient
world, "You shall have one law for the stranger and for the
native; for I am the Lord your God" (Leviticus 24:22), would not
brook any exception on behalf of kings or nobles. And it tells us a
great deal about ancient Israel that the Law of Moses should
include the injunction: "You shall not be partial to the poor or
defer to the great" (Leviticus 19:15; cf. Exodus 23:3). The first
part of that law would not have occurred to many legislators.
216 The Faith of a Heretic
55
We are ready for the Old Testament conception of an ideal
society. Much of what should be said about this has by now been
said: both in the Five Books of Moses and in the Prophets we
constantly encounter the vision of a society in which the poor,
the orphan, the widow, and the stranger are treated with special
consideration; a society in which justice rolls down like water,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream; a society based on
justice, mercy, and humility. It is perhaps more often recognized
that this ideal permeates the prophetic books than it is admitted,
as it ought to be, that the Five Books of Moses are inspired by the
same vision and seek to implement it with a wealth of detailed
legislation.
What the prophets add is the great vision of the messianic king-
dom which is found in both Isaiah 2 and Micah 4:
"It shall come to pass in the latter days
that the mountain of the house of the Lord
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and shall be raised up above the hills;
and all the nations shall flow to it,
and many peoples shall come, and say:
Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and we may walk in his paths.
For out of Zion shall go forth the Torah,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations
and shall decide for many peoples;
and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more."
The Old Testament 217
In Micah, two further verses follow:
"But they shall sit every man
under his vine and under his fig tree,
and none shall make them afraid;
for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.
For all the peoples walk
each in the name of its god,
but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God
for ever and ever.**
What distinguishes this conception from myths of a golden
age among the Greeks and among other people is that the proph-
ets stress the abolition of war and the establishment of a peaceful
international community and that they envisage this in the
future and not, as other nations who spoke of golden ages, in the
distant past. On paper these differences may seem small, the more
so because the vision of the prophets has become a commonplace
in the twentieth century. It is hard to do justice to the originality
of men who, in the eighth century B.C., untutored by the horrors
of two world wars with poison gas and atom bombs, and without
the frightening prospect of still more fearful weapons of destruc-
tion, insisted that war is evil and must some day be abolished,
and that all peoples must learn to dwell together in peace.
In retrospect we may say that they merely spelled out explicitly
what was implicit in the Old Testament conception of God and
man. There is nothing wrong with putting it that way, provided
we remember how long it has taken the mass of men to perceive
the very same implication.
56
One implication of almost everything that has been quoted here
from the Old Testament, and quite especially of the command-
ments, "You shall be holy" (Leviticus 19:2) and "You shall be to
218 The Faith of a Heretic
me a kingdom of priests" (Exodus 19:6), is that man is called
upon to raise his stature; that no man is a mere machine or in-
strument We are called upon to be more than animals; we are
summoned to freedom whether it makes us happy or not.
Aldous Huxley created a deliberately nightmarish Utopia in
Brave New World (1932). His point was that we are on the best
way toward creating a society of happy imbeciles, and that we
might yet achieve a society in which everybody would be happy
at a slightly subhuman level. Would anything be wrong with
that? Many of us hope and think that, human nature being what
it is, freedom and the fullest possible development of man's cre-
ative powers, in a society based on justice, mercy, and humility,
would promote the greatest possible happiness. This faith is ob-
viously influenced by the Old Testament. But suppose that it were
possible to ensure the greatest possible happiness of the greatest
possible number either by having recourse to a few injustices or
by reducing man's creative powers, whether by drugs that re-
duced men to blissful imbecility or by operations that reduced
their intelligence. What then?
Those of us who feel that happiness, however important, is not
the ultimate consideration and that it would be an impermissible
betrayal to sell our birthright for a mess of bliss are probably
haunted by the challenge of the Hebrew Bible. Here a voice was
raised that has aroused a large portion of mankind, albeit a dis-
tinct minority, from their pre-Israelitic slumber.
vm
JESUS VIS-A-VIS PAUL,
LUTHER, AND SCHWEITZER
57
The problem of happiness is scarcely considered in the
Old Testament. Man is destined to be free. Whether liberty will
make him happy is somehow beside the point. What matters is
God's will, God's challenge.
In the New Testament, each man's overruling concern with his
eternal happiness his salvation is central and defines the
whole milieu. A similar concern had earlier found expression in
Buddhism, also in the Orphic religion that probably influenced
Plato's later thought. The change in the climate of opinion in
the Near East between the age of the prophets and the time of
Jesus has been noted above ( 39-40). Nation upon nation had
lost its independence and its cultural initiative. Otherworldliness
had spread, and millions had come to accept this world with
resignation, hoping for the next. The era that, reeling from climax
to climax, had witnessed Genesis and Deuteronomy, Hebrew
prophecy and Attic tragedy, Greek temples and Thucydides, was
long since drowned in Alexander's conquests and unprecedented
syncretism. All kinds of mystery religions merged their dreams
219
220 The Faith of a Heretic
of supernatural salvation. Large masses of people felt that in this
world nothing was left to live for.
Jesus did not have to persuade his listeners that they ought
to be concerned about salvation, any more than the Buddha did.
They came to hear him because he was offering a way. Con-
versely, when most men do not worry about salvation, Jesus'
message is not easily made relevant to them.
According to the Gospels, Jesus' conception of salvation was
radically otherwordly, and opposed to any this-worldly messianic
hopes not only to chauvinistic dream of glory but also to swords
beaten into plowshares and liberty and justice for all. The "king-
dom is not of this world" (John 18:36). The perspective of the
prophets is reversed. They, too, had taught humility and love,
but not this preoccupation with oneself. The accent had been on
the neighbor and the stranger, the orphan, the widow, and the
poor. Social injustice cried out to be rectified and was no less
real because it meant a lack of love and a corruption of the heart.
Man was told to love others and to treat them justly for their
sake, not for his own, to escape damnation. To the Jesus of the
Gospels, social injustice as such is of no concern. Heaven and
hell-fire have been moved into the center.
But does not Jesus give a central place to the commandment
"Love your neighbor as yourself? It has often been said that
this is the essential difference between the New Testament and
the Old. Yet this commandment is taken from the Law of Moses,
and the New Testament itself designates this as the ground that
Jesus and the Pharisees had in common. Consider what may well
be the most famous parable in the Gospels the Good Samaritan
(Luke 10). "Behold a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, say-
ing: Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? He said to
him: What is written in the Law? How do you read? And he
answered: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all
your mind; and your neighbor as yourself. And he said to him:
You have answered right; do this, and you will live." Nor is there
Jesus t>te-<i-0te Paul, Luther, and Schweitzer 221
any disagreement about the point of the parable. Having related
the different conduct of priest, Levite, and Samaritan, Jesus asks
his interrogator: "Which of these three, do you think, proved
neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers? He said: The
one who showed mercy on him."
One may doubt the authenticity of this parable. If Jesus had
really told it, why should three of the evangelists have omitted
it entirely? But if Jesus never told it, it would be easy to under-
stand why, in time, it should have been attributed to him. This
consideration is certainly not conclusive; and what matters here
is that, in telling the story, the third Gospel underlines the fact
that, in questions of this sort, Jesus did not differ with the Phari-
sees; certainly they did not uphold the conduct of the priest and
the Levite in the parable.
"Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal lif 6?" The concern
with the life to come was by then characteristic of much Jewish
thinking. But the Jesus of the Gospels went much further in his
otherwordliness than the Pharisees did, not to speak of the Sad-
ducees. Salvation became with him the central motive for loving
one's neighbor.
Consider the rich man who, according to Luke (18:18 ff.), asked
Jesus the identical question. To him, Jesus cites five of the Ten
Commandments before adding: "One thing you still lack. Sell
all you have and distribute it to the poor, and you will have
treasure in heaven; and come, follow me." It is no longer the
poor that require love and justice; it is the giver who is to accum-
ulate treasure in heaven. The social order, with which Moses and
the prophets were centrally concerned, counts for nothing; the
life to come is everything. If what truly matters is treasure in
heaven, what do the poor gain from what they are given?
If, to gain salvation, we must give up all property and follow Jesus,
then either salvation requires the complete disintegration of the
social order, or salvation is denied to the vast majority of men
and restricted to a few. The Jesus of the Gospels was clearly pre-
pared to accept both consequences: he was willing to counte-
222 The Faith of a Heretic
nance the disappearance of any social framework and resigned
to see only a few saved.
To begin with the last point, Jesus, according to B1 three Syn-
optic Gospels, actually reassured his disciples: "If any one will
not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from
your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly, I say to you,
it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of
Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town" (Matthew 10:14 f.;
cf. 11:24; Mark 6:11; Luke 10:10 ff.). Far from being an isolated
dictum, the prospect of damnation is one of the central motifs
of the Gospels.
Returning once more to the story of the rich man: at the end,
those who heard Jesus' words ask him, understandably: "Then
who can be saved? But he said: What is impossible with men
is possible with God." Here it is suggested that salvation is a gift
of divine grace. Inequality is instituted by God: some are chosen,
others rejected.
Indifference to the social order is expressed in Jesus' next
words: "Truly, I say to you, there is no man who has left house
or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the
kingdom of God, who will not receive manifold more in this time,
and in the world to come eternal life." If one wants a briefer formu-
lation for this rigorous indifference to the social and political
realm, there is the famous "Render to Caesar what is Caesar's"
(Matthew 22:21; Mark 12:17; Luke 20:25).
This phrase should be understood in its historic context. The
question is one of subordination or resistance to a foreign op-
pressora perennial issue. And the answer is: oppression is
unimportant; "render to God what is God's"; the social sphere is
not God's and merits no concern.
Jesus' association with the publicans illustrates this point, too.
The publicans, who collected taxes for the Roman conquerors,
were the quislings of their day. To Jesus, this was utterly irrele-
vant. The one thing needful was salvation.
Only an age in which salvation had all but lost meaning could
Jesus vis-d-vis Paul, Luther, and Schweitzer 223
misconstrue Jesus' moral teachings the way liberal Protestantism
did. The morality of the Sermon on the Mount, too, is centered
not in the neighbor but in salvation. Each of the nine Beatitudes
in the beginning announces a reward, and they conclude with
the promise: "Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in
heaven." In the Sermon itself, promises and threats alternate con-
tinually: "shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven"; "will
never enter the kingdom of heaven"; "judgment"; "hell fire";
"your whole body should be cast into hell"; "if you love those
who love you, what reward have you?"; "will reward you"; "have
their reward"; "will reward you"; "your heavenly Father also will
forgive you"; "neither will your Father forgive your trespasses";
"they have their reward"; "will reward you"; and more in the
same vein.
The point is clearly stated both in the middle and at the end.
"Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth
and rust consume, and where thieves break in and steal, but lay
up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor
rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal." At
the conclusion, those who do as told are called "wise," and those
who do not are called "foolish." Actually, phronimos might be
translated as "prudent" and moros as "moronic."
Moses and the prophets had also often referred to the future,
though categorical demands were more characteristic of their
style and pathos. But the future they envisaged was a social fu-
ture, for Micah and Isaiah it even involved the whole of humanity.
The Jesus of the Gospels appeals to each man's self-interest.
This may strike some modern readers as paradoxical because
liberal Protestantism has persuaded millions that the essence of
Christianity is altruism and self-sacrifice. But our analysis may
help to explain why so many people take it for granted that mo-
rality depends on the belief in God and immortality. It is not un-
common to hear people admit that if they lost their belief in a
life after death, no reason would remain for them to be moral.
In fact, they cannot see why anyone lacking this belief should
224 The Faith of a Heretic
be moral; and this accounts in large measure for the widespread
horror of atheism.
In the Gospels, one is to lose oneself only to find oneself. Sac-
rifices are demanded, but only of what moth and rust consume.
We are taught to give up what is of no account. In what truly
matters, we are expected to see to our own interest The "reward"
is always my reward. Really sacrificing oneself for the sake of
others, for the chance, uncertain as such matters are in this world,
that our neighbor or society might benefit or foregoing one's
own salvation for the salvation of others, as Mahayana Buddhism
says its saints do the Gospels do not ask of man.
There are, therefore, no grounds for differing with the formu-
lations of by far the best, most comprehensive, and most careful
study of "The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches" -
that of Ernst Troeltsch. He does not overstate the case when he
calls Jesus' moral teachings, as recorded in the Gospels, "unlim-
ited and unconditional individualism"; when he remarks that "of
an ideal for humanity there is no thought"; or when he claims
that "any program of social renovation is lacking" (39, 41, 48).
The relation of the Gospels to the prophets has often been
presented in a false light by those lacking either Troeltsch's
scrupulous scholarship or his forthright honesty. The claim that
the great innovation of the Gospels lies in a reputed distillation
of the older moral teachings is practically a clich. It is none-
theless false, bars any real understanding of the history of social
thought in the past 2000 years, and leads to countless further
errors in historical interpretation. As we have seen, there is a
crass discontinuity, best summarized in the word otherwordliness.
Much has been made of the Golden Rule; and when it was
found that Hillel, the Pharisee, an older contemporary of Jesus,
had condensed the morality of Moses and the prophets into the
so-called negative formulation of the Golden Rule, which is also
encountered, 500 years earlier, in Confucius, Protestant theolo-
gians were quick to call this the Silver Rule and to claim that
Jesus vis-ti-vis Paul, Luther, and Schweitzer 225
Jesus' formula was far superior.* In reply to that, three things
need to be said.
First, the negative version can be put into practice while the
positive version cannot; and anyone who tried to live up to Jesus'
rule would become an insufferable nuisance.
Second: no such formula should be overestimated in any case;
try, for example, to derive a sexual ethic from Jesus' rule. This
example also illustrates the first point.
Finally, there are the wonderful words with which Thomas
Hobbes concluded Part III of his Leviathan: "It is not the bare
Words, but the Scope of the writer that giveth the true light, by
which any writing is to bee interpreted; and they that insist upon
single Texts, without considering the main Designe, can derive
no thing from them cleerly; but rather by casting atomes of Scrip-
ture, as dust before mens eyes, make every thing more obscure
than it is; an ordinary artifice of those that seek not the truth,
but their own advantage."
When we consider the main design, it appears that the Gospels
reject all concern with social justice and reduce morality to a
prudent concern for one's own salvation; indeed, that morality
itself becomes equivocal. No agreement can be had on where
Jesus stood on moral questions not only on pacifism, the courts,
and other concrete issues: most of his formulations do not seem
to have been meant literally. Parable and hyperbole define his style.
Specific contents are disparaged.
Superficially, of course, a very different view suggests itself.
The Pharisees had tried to build what they themselves called "a
* "Once a pagan went to Shammal and said: Accept me as a proselyte,
on condition that you teach me the whole Law [Torah] while I stand on one
leg. Shammai pushed him away with a measure that he had in his hand. He
went to Hillel who accepted him as a proselyte. Hillel said to him: What
you don't like, don't do to others; that is the whole Law; the rest is com-
mentary; go and learn!" (Talmud Babli, Sabbath 31a). Hillel died about
A.D. 10. Other similar formulations, some of them earlier, are listed in
Strack's and Billerbeck's Kommentar, I, 460. That in the Letter of Aristeas,
which is much earlier, combines the positive and negative forms, but I find
Hillel's pithy four-part formulation superlative.
226 The Faith of a Heretic
fence around the Law" for example, by demanding that the ob-
servation of the Sabbath should begin a little before sunset, to
guard against trespasses. It might seem that Jesus, in the Sermon
on the Mount, was similarly erecting a fence around morality.
For he introduces his most extreme demands: 'Till heaven and
earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law
until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least
of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least
in the kingdom of heaven. . . . Unless your righteousness exceeds
that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the king-
dom of heaven." Then Jesus goes on to say that it is not enough
not to kill: "Whoever says, TTou fool!' shall be liable to hell fire."
It is not sufficient not to commit adultery, nor the omission
of any reference to the Tenth Commandment is surprising
not to covet one's neighbor's wife, but "every one who looks at
a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in
his heart If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and
throw it away." (We shall return to this saying later in this
chapter).
On reflection, the old morality is not protected but under-
mined, not extended but dissolved; and no new morality is put
in its place. Where murder is not considered importantly differ-
ent from calling a man a fool, nor adultery from a lustful look,
the very basis of morality is denied: the crucial distinction be-
tween impulse and action. If one is unfortunate enough to have
the impulse, no reason is left for not acting on it.
Again, it might well be asked: "Then who can be saved? But
he said: What is impossible with men is possible with God." At
this point one can understand Luther's suggestion that the moral
commandments in the Bible were "ordained solely that man might
thus realize his incapacity for good and learn to despair of him-
self (see 31 above).
Jesus' few remarks about the Jewish ceremonial laws have to
be placed in this context. He speaks not as a reform Jew or a
liberal Protestant; he does not, like the prophets, unequivocally
reject specific rituals to insist instead on social justice; rather,
Jesus vis-ti-vis Paid, Luther, and Schweitzer 227
he depreciates rules and commandments as such, moral as well
as ceremonial. What ultimately matters is the other world.
As was shown in Chapter VI, it is not only in time that the
Gospels are closer to Ezekiel and Daniel than to the pre-exilic
prophets. Jesus and the evangelists lived in an age in which apoca-
lypses flourished, and the atmosphere was apocalyptic. In the
oldest Gospel, Mark's, "he said to diem: Truly, I say to you, there
are some standing here who will not taste death before they see
the kingdom of God come with power" (9:1; cf. 13:30; Matthew
10:23). The end is at hand, and Jesus himself is understood in
the Gospels as an intrusion of the other world into this world.
It was not morality or ceremonial law that became the central
issue between Jesus and the Pharisees, but the person of Jesus.
Almost all scholars agree that the Sermon on the Mount is not
a sermon Jesus delivered in that form, but Matthew's compila-
tion of some of the most striking dicta. (Luke constructed all
kinds of situations to frame some of the same dicta.) It is doubly
revealing that Matthew should have said, right after the end of the
Sermon: "The people were astonished at his teaching" why?
"for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as their
scribes." Moral questions could be argued; one was used to dif-
ferent opinions. Matters of ceremonial law were debated too
much, if anything, with a vast variety of views. It was Jesus'
conception of his own person that caused astonishment; and if
he said half the things about himself that the Gospels relate, it
must have seemed the most shocking blasphemy to the Phari-
sees. The three Synoptics agree that the scribes condemned Jesus
not for being too liberal but for blasphemy for what he said
about himself. They relate that he not only called himself the
Messiah, or to use the familiar Greek translation of that term
the Christ, but that he went on to say, alluding to Daniel: "You
will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power, and
coming with the clouds of heaven."* Then, they say, the high
* For the history of this conception, see Baeck, "The Son of Man" in Judaism
and Christianity, translated with an introduction by Walter Kaufmann.
228 The Faith of a Heretic
priest tore his mantle, said, "You have heard his blasphemy,"
and they condemned him.
Whether this is how it actually happened, we have no way
of knowing for sure; but this is the Christian story, as related
in the Gospels. It was only in recent times, when salvation had
ceased to be meaningful for large numbers of liberal Protestants,
that men who did not believe any more in "the Son of Man sit-
ting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of
heaven" began to see Jesus as primarily a moral teacher. The
apocalyptic tradition suggested by these words, derived from
Daniel and Ezekiel, seemed dated. Neither the Catholic church
nor the Greek Orthodox church, nor the overwhelming majority
of Protestant denominations have ever accepted this liberal view;
but it is still popular with a large public that knows what it likes
without knowing what it likes.
Let us return once more to the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Asked, "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus retorts,
"What is written in the law?" and receives the reply: "You shall
love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your
soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and
your neighbor as yourself." Although Luke has Jesus agree with
this, this is not the teaching of the Gospels. On occasion we are
given the impression, noted at the beginning of this chapter, that
this constituted an area of agreement between Jesus and the
Pharisees. But the fourth Gospel denounces this idea constantly:
"Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter
the kingdom of God" (3:5). "He who does not believe is con-
demned already, because he has not believed in the name of the
only Son of God" (3:18). "He who does not honor the Son does
not honor the Father who sent him" (5:23). "He who believes
has eternal life" (6:47). "I am the living bread which came down
from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever"
(6:51). "No one comes to the Father, but by me" (14:6).
This list could easily be lengthened. In the other Gospels these
themes are not nearly so prominent; but, according to Matthew,
Jesus said: "Every one who acknowledges me before men, I also
Jesus vis-d-vis Paul, Luther, and Schweitzer 229
will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven; but who
ever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father
who is in heaven" (10:32 f.). Luke 12:8 f. agrees almost literally,
and there is a parallel passage in Mark (8:38).
It is exceedingly doubtful that Jesus himself said all these
things, especially those ascribed to him in the Gospel according
to John. Enslin remarks, in The Literature of the Christian Move-
ment, that the Jesus of the fourth Gospel is really not very at-
tractive, and that if it were not for the other three Gospels and
the fact that most readers create for themselves "a conflate/' the
Jesus of St. John would lose most of his charm. Surely, the same
consideration applies to all four Gospels. Most Christians gerry-
mander the Gospels and carve an idealized self-portrait out of
the texts: Pierre van Paassen's Jesus is a socialist, Fosdick's a
liberal, while the ethic of Reinhold Niebuhr's Jesus agrees, not
surprisingly, with Niebuhr's own.*
The problem these men confront is not of their making. The
Jesus of the Gospels confronts the serious Christian less as a chal-
lenge than as a stumbling block, to use Paul's word. It should
be fruitful to consider how three of the most eminent and earnest
Christians of all time have sought to solve this problem three
men of very different background and temperament, one in the
first century, one in the sixteenth, and one in the twentieth: Paul,
Luther, and Schweitzer.
58
Those who see Jesus as essentially a moral teacher often see
Paul as the real Judas. Clearly, Paul's letters bear the stamp of
his personality; and since they were written earlier than any of
our Gospels, they may well have influenced the Gospels, espe-
cially that according to John.
Jesus had spoken Aramaic, to Jews; Paul wrote Greek, to Gen-
tiles. Jesus had grown up in Nazareth and taught in Galilee and
* For Niebuhr, see my Critique, 68.
230 The Faith of a Heretic
Jerusalem; Paul grew up in a town where Hellenism flourished,
and he traveled widely in the Hellenistic world and became a
Roman citizen. Jesus had spoken elusively and, according to the
Gospels, did not mind puzzling his listeners; Paul preached a
doctrine and tried to back it up with arguments which, to be sure,
have to be understood in their contemporary climate of opinion.
Paul had not known Jesus, had not listened to his stories, had
not heard his commandments. Jesus appeared to him as the Lord
had appeared to the ancient prophets. Paul knew that such an
appearance meant a call to go and bear witness of the Lord's
revelation; but the Lord now is "Jesus Christ our Lord." Is this
a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth?
To justify an affirmative reply, one must reject as apocryphal
all the manifold indications in the Gospels that Jesus did not con-
sider himself an ordinary human being. Yet we have already
tried to show that this seems to have been the crucial issue be-
tween Jesus and the Sadducees and Pharisees; and presumably
it was this, too, that led to the ironic inscription on the cross:
King of the Jews. It is the unequivocal centrality of this idea in
Paul that is new, also the doctrinal formulations. With this fur-
ther development, Christianity as a separate religion was born.
What else was Jesus' legacy? If individual salvation counts for
everything and is conceived as otherworldly; if action is deprived
of its significance and the distinction between deed and impulse
is dissolved, what remains but faith in the person around whom
the lines were drawn, faith that he was the Messiah, the Christ?
Now one could wait for the kingdom to come with power, and
meanwhile recall his life and his stories and sayings; or one could
accept in all seriousness, with all its implications, as Paul did,
the idea that the Messiah had come, and that this must be the
clue to salvation.
At this point Paul transformed Jesus' preaching and assimi-
lated the crucified and resurrected Savior to the mystery religions
that were prevalent throughout the Roman world. The pagan
sacraments found their way into the new religion. Around A. D.
200, when it was still obvious to many educated people where
Jesus vis-d-vis Paul, Luther, and Schweitzer 231
the sacraments had come from, Tertullian said boldly that Satan
had counterfeited the Christian sacraments in advance. In our
time, Toynbee, once again aware of scores of borrowings from
Hellenistic folklore in our Gospels, concludes that God chose to
reveal himself in folklore (A Study of History, Vol. VI, Annex).
Understandably, many Protestants feel that these Hellenistic
elements were merely features of the age that are dispensable to-
day, and that we must go back to original pre-Hellenic, pre-
Pauline Christianity. Toynbee, in An Historians Approach to
Religion, asks in this vein: "In what sense did Christians, in those
very early days before the statement of Christian beliefs began
to be Hellenized, mean that Jesus was the Son of God, that He
rose from the dead, that He ascended into heaven?" It is widely
felt that this is the right question. In fact, however, these "very
early days" are a figment of the imagination, and the question
is unfair to Paul.
Even some of the later books of the Old Testament are by no
means pre-Hellenistic; Jewish literature of the period between
the Testaments ( the Apocrypha, for example ) shows strong Hellen-
istic influence; and die hopes, beliefs, and expectations of the
Jews of Jesus' time owed a great deal to Hellenistic thought
Some recent studies have tried to show how deeply Jewish Paul
was, notably, W. D. Davies' Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some
Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology. And the literature about
the Dead Sea scrolls has made it a commonplace that Hellenistic
elements which, it was previously supposed, Paul might have
introduced into Christianity were well established in at least
some Jewish circles in the time of Jesus. Some people put this
last point rather oddly, saying: These things, which we consid-
ered Hellenistic, were really Jewish. It would be more accurate
to say that the Judaism of Jesus' time was no longer pre-
Hellenistic.
Still, some circles had resisted syncretism more than others,
and one need only read the Book of Acts in the New Testament
to see that the Jerusalem group, dominated by Peter and James,
was inclined to resist more than Paul was. But how could one
232 The Faith of a Heretic
possibly go back to the religion of this group? They lived in the
expectation that they would soon see Jesus return "sitting at the
right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven."
They believed that Jesus had assured them that some of them
would "not taste death before they [would] see the kingdom of
God come with power." Meanwhile, they were willing to preach
and make converts, but few Jews were converted, and practi-
cally no Gentiles. Was Jesus' legacy, then, a hope that proved vain?
A Jew might say so; a heretic might; but Paul, far from wishing
to betray his Lord, refused to see it that way. Never having heard
the preaching of Jesus, he felt free to develop a new teaching
about Jesus; and he transformed a message of parables and hy-
perboles into a theological religion. What he said was clearly
different from what Jesus had said; but Jesus' teaching had been
so utterly elusive that neither Peter nor James, the brother of
Jesus, 4 nor the other disciples who had listened to him day after
day were able to point to anything clear or definite to combat
Paul. That they wanted to fight Paul's new doctrines, the Book
of Acts makes very clear; but the truly extraordinary fact is that
these men, whose authority seemed clearly established because
they had known Jesus and heard his teaching, had to capitulate
to the strong convictions of Paul himself a recent convert, dis-
credited by his anti-Christian past because they could not pit
any notion of Jesus' legacy against his.
I can see no good reasons for supposing that this was their
fault. Indeed, it is not at all uncommon for a teacher to exert
a strange and strong fascination on his students by the force
of his personality, his way of speaking, gestures, metaphors, in-
tensity although they cannot say just what he taught them. It
is hardly reasonable in such cases to insist: But he must have
taught them something indeed, something of crucial signifi-
cance that we, by painstaking reflection, should be able to re-
cover. It is even less reasonable to assume this when the whole
* See, e.g., Galatians 1:19, 2:11 ff.; Harper's Bible Dictionary (1959 ed.),
301, "James the brother of Jesus"; and Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics,
VIII, 661, "The Position of lames the Lord's Brother at Jerusalem."
Jesus vis-ti-vis Paul, Luther, and Schweitzer 233
climate was thoroughly authoritarian, when the master was sur-
rounded by an air of mystery and constant reports of miracles
that could not possibly be questioned, and when there were oc-
sional suggestions that everything would become clear soon
when the world would end. The four evangelists agree in ascrib-
ing to Jesus evasive and equivocal answers to plain questions;
some of the parables are so ambiguous that different evangelists
interpret them differently; and it was evidently unthinkable for
a disciple to ask searching questions and persist.
Paul did not villainously overturn the purest teaching that the
world had ever heard: he filled a vacuum. Had it not been for
him, there would not have been far-flung churches that required
Gospels, cherished, and preserved them; there would have been
no large-scale conversion of Gentiles; there would have been no
Christianity, only a short-lived Jewish sect.
What is ironical, though there are parallels, is that Jesus' dis-
satisfaction with all formulas and rules should have given way
within one generation to an attempt, not yet concluded, to define
the most precise dogmas. It is doubly ironical because, according
to the Gospels, Jesus constantly inveighed against hypocrisy: in-
deed, the Gospels have made Pharisee and hypocrite synonymous.
Yet the hypocrisy possible within a legalism that prominently
emphasizes love and justice is as a mote compared to the beam
of the hypocrisy made possible where dogma and sacraments
have become central. If "he who eats me will live because of me"
(John 6:57), why worry about loving one's enemies?
According to Micah, God demands "only to do justice, to love
mercy, and to walk humbly with your God"; according to John,
"This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has
sent" (6:29). Since the Reformation, in spite of the Reformers
who pitted their doctrine of justification by faith alone against
the Catholic doctrine of justification by faith and works, the pro-
phetic ethic has been so widely accepted, however far one falls
short of it, that the contrast of these two quotations may strike
some readers as almost black and white. But those who study
the Documents of the Christian Church, selected and edited by
234 The Faith of a Heretic
Henry Bettenson for the Oxford University Press, will find that
neither the church councils nor the Reformers would have been
likely to question this juxtaposition. The body of Bettenson's book
happily belies the misleading singular in the title; but one finds
that the documents of the various Christian churches agree in
rejecting the supremacy of Micah's imperatives, that there is
scarcely a reference to love, justice, mercy, or humility, and that
what mattered most throughout was right belief about Christ and
the sacraments. To this day, it is dogma that keeps the churches
apart different beliefs, creeds, and sacraments not morality,
not the Sermon on the Mount. Only one motif from the Sermon
on the Mount was echoed constantly: the threat of hell. As dogma
upon dogma was carefully defined, in an effort to determine
what precisely one had to believe in order to be saved, the re-
frain was always: if anyone believes otherwise, "let him be anath-
ema" let him be damned, let him go to hell!
The Rule of Saint Francis represents a notable exception. With-
out taking issue with the doctrines and dogmas of the Catholic
church, and while fully subordinating his judgment to the church's,
he tried to create an island of love in an unloving world. He lived
to see corruption and hatred in his order, and soon after his death
the Franciscans came to vie with the Dominicans in implement-
ing the Inquisition.
For Paul, as for Jesus, social justice and political arrangements
seemed irrelevant. He accepted the prevailing order, sometimes
with contempt because it was merely secular, sometimes with re-
spect because it was ordained by God.
Jesus' "render to Caesar what is Caesar's" is elaborated in Paul's
fateful Letter to the Romans: "The powers that be are ordained
by God. Whoever therefore resists these powers, resists the ordi-
nance of God; and whoever resists shall incur damnation" (13:1 f.),
That had not been the view of Elijah and the pre-exilic prophets.
But now moral courage before royal thrones and despots gives
way to resignation and submission not from lack of courage
(neither Paul nor Luther, who echoed Paul's injunctions, was
timid), but because this world has ceased to matter.
Jesus vis-ti-vis Paul, Luther, and Schweitzer 235
The ancient notion of the equality and brotherhood of men is
reinterpreted in a purely otherworldly sense; even coupled with
a Platonizing, anti-egalitarian, organic metaphor: "As the body is
one and has many members, and all the members of the body,
though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For by one Spirit
we were all baptized into one body Jews or Greeks, slaves or
free and all were made to drink of one Spirit. . . . Now you are
the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has
appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third
teachers, then workers of miracles. . . . Are all apostles? Are all
prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles?" (I Corin-
thians 12). The foundation is laid for an elaborate hierarchy and
for radical inequalities even within the church, while in the so-
cial order outside it inequality and injustice are accepted as fated.
"Every one should remain in the state in which he was called.
Were you a slave when called? Never mind" (I Corinthians 7). If
you can become a free man, fine; if not, it does not really matter.*
In the same spirit, Paul says in the same chapter: "But because
of fornication, each man should have his own wife, and each woman
her own husband. ... To the unmarried and the widows I say that
it is well for them to remain single as I do. But if they cannot exer-
cise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than
to burn." Later, in the same chapter, Paul explains: "I want you to
be free from care. The unmarried man cares for the things of the
Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man cares about
the things of this world, how to please his wife." It is the impor-
tance of the social order, it is this whole world that is rejected
here. Paul, like Plato, believes that marriage would distract the
elite from that other world on which they should concentrate.
At least by implication, Paul, too, introduces the conception of
an elite. Henceforth, there are, as it were, first- and second-class
Christians. "He who marries his betrothed does well; and he
who refrains from marriage will do better."
* The New English Bible offers a footnote to verse 21: "Or but even if a
chance of liberty should come, choose rather to make good use of your
servitude." Contrast Exodus 21, discussed in 49 above.
236 The Faith of a Heretic
For Paul, the otherworldly equality in Christ has a vivid mean-
ing that was soon to be lost. His advice seems to hinge on his
conviction that the end is^at hand: "I think that in view of the
present distress it is well for a person to remain as he is. ... I
mean, brethren, the appointed time has grown very short; those
who have wives shall be as though they had none, and those who
mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice
as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though
they had nothing, and those who deal with the world as though
they had no dealings with it. For the form of this world is passing
away."
Equality has its place only as this world passes away and all
distinctions are lost. Equality is not the final triumph of love and
justice, presented to man as a challenge and a task; it is what re-
mains after the diversity of the phenomenal world drops away.
But this event is for Paul not so distant that it is almost void of
meaning; on the contrary, "the appointed time has grown very
short"
In this context, the preceding chapter is readily understood,
too: To have lawsuits at all with one another is defeat for you.
Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded?"
This is a significant variation on the theme, "I want you to be free
from care." One should not become involved in this world and
take it seriously. The end of this world is at hand, and the other
world alone matters.
Even in the other world, however, inequality appears, as it
does in the Gospels. Men are not equal even in the eyes of God.
Not only are there first- and second-class Christians; not only are
some called to be free and some to be slaves; there are the elect
and the damned. Once convinced of a truth, Paul, like the rabbis,
looks to Scripture, to the Old Testament, to find it there. "When
Rebecca had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac,
though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good
or bad, in order that God's purpose of election might continue, not
because of works but because of his call, she was told, The elder
will serve the younger'" (Romans 9). The story is found in Gene-
Jesus vis-d-vte Paul, Luther, and Schweitzer 237
sis, as is the story of the Garden of Eden; but the doctrines Paul
derives from them are alien to the mainstream of Old Testament
religion and opposed to the very core of Hebrew prophecy.
The prophets do not predict disaster; they threaten disasters
that are bound to happen if the people persist in their ways, but
the hope is always that they will not persist in their ways and
thus avoid the disaster. Jonah, annoyed that his prophecy will
remain unfulfilled, tells God that this was why he fled in the
first place to avoid making the prophecy: "Is not this what I said
when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee
to Tarshish; for I knew that thou art a gracious God and merci-
ful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and repent-
est of evil." But part of the point of the Book of Jonah is clearly
that the prophet who has led men to repentance, who has made
them change their ways to avoid imminent disaster, has done his
job and should be glad when his prophecies are not fulfilled.
Paul from Tarshish is the great anti-Jonah. Lake the Phari-
sees and millions of rabbis, ministers, and theologians ever since,
he finds verses to corroborate his doctrines. Since the Old Testa-
ment is a collection of history and poetry, laws and wisdom, folk-
lore and traditions, verses can always be found for every situa-
tion. But there is no want of central ideas, of great currents that
flow through this great garden and water it no want of back-
bone. And it is one of these central conceptions and the very
backbone of Hebrew prophecy that Paul ignores: the idea of
t'shuvah, return, repentance.
Paul's whole argument for the impossibility of finding salva-
tion under "the Law" and for the necessity of Christ's redemp-
tive death depends on this. If, as the rabbis were still teaching
in Paul's day, God could at any time freely forgive repentant
sinners, Paul's theology collapsed and, in his own words, "then
Christ died in vain" (Galatians 2:21). If God could forgive the
men of Nineveh simply because they repented of their wicked
ways, though they had not been converted, circumcised, or bap-
tized and this is the teaching of the Book of Jonah, which is
also implicit in many other books of the Old Testament then
238 The Faith of a Heretic
Paul's doctrines, which have become the very core of Christianity,
lose their point and plausibility and come to look bizarre.
Consider the Christian story the way it looks to an outsider.
God causes a virgin, betrothed to Joseph, to conceive his own
son, and this son had to be betrayed, crucified, and resurrected
in order that those, and only those, might be saved who should
both believe this story and be baptized and eat and drink on
regular occasions what they themselves believe to be the flesh
and blood of this son (or, in some denominations, merely the
symbols of his flesh and blood); meanwhile, all, or most, of the
rest of mankind suffer some kind of eternal torment, and accord-
ing to many Christian creeds and teachers they were actually
predestined for damnation by God from the very beginning.
Paul did not contribute all the elements of this story not, for
example, the virgin birth, of which most scholars find no trace
in his letters. But he did contribute the central ideas of Christ's
redemptive death and justification by faith. Protestants and Cath-
olics may argue whether Paul taught justification by faith alone
or justification by faith and works; it is plain and undisputed
that he did not allow for justification by works alone. It is no
longer enough "only to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk
humbly with your God."
In a long note on Paul, in the third volume of his classical work
on Judaism, George Foot Moore declared himself utterly unable
to understand how a Jew of Paul's background could ignore such
a central idea as that of repentance and forgiveness. But the his-
tory of religions abounds in parallels. The great religious leaders
of humanity have generally been richer in passion than in jus-
tice or fairness; their standards of honesty have been far from ex-
emplary; and with an occasionally magnificent one-sidedness,
they have been so obsessed by some features of the positions
they opposed that they thoroughly misunderstood and misrepre-
sented the religion they denounced. If they deserve blame for
this, how much more blameworthy are those who use them as
historical authorities, turning to Luther for a portrait of Catholi-
Jesus vis-b-vis Paul, Luther, and Schweitzer 239
tism, or to the New Testament to be informed about Judaism!
When Paul turned his back on the old notion of forgiveness
for the repentant sinner and embraced the doctrine of predestina-
tion, he gave up the idea of the equality and fraternity of all men.
To cite Troeltsch once more: "The idea of predestination breaks
the nerve of the idea of absolute and abstract equality"; and
henceforth "inequalities are accepted into the basic sociological
scheme of the value of personality" (64, 66).
I am rejecting two cliches: that of the Judaeo-Christian tradi-
tion as well as the claim that Western civilization is a synthesis
of Greek and Christian elements. Against the former, I stress the
discontinuity between Jesus and the pre-exilic prophets: one
might as well speak of the Judaeo-Islamic tradition or of the
Greco-Christian tradition. Against the latter, I point to the fact
that Christianity itself was a child of Greek and Hebrew par-
ents; that the Gospels are a product of Jewish Hellenism; and
that Paul, though he claimed to have sat at the feet of Gamaliel,
was in important respects closer to Plato and to Gnosticism than
to Micah or Jonah.
Paul's decisions have occasionally been explained as highly
expedient. When the Jews did not accept the Gospel, the new
teaching could survive only by turning to the Gentiles, by abro-
gating circumcision and the dietary laws, which stood in the way
of mass conversions, and by emphasizing faith and preaching
obedience to the powers that be. But expediency in this case did
not involve any compromise of principle or any sacrifice of Paul's
convictions. His innovations make sense in the context of his pro-
found otherworldliness: this was the meeting ground of the Gos-
pel and the mysteries, of Jesus and Gnosticism. Jesus, who had
stood in the apocalyptic tradition, was readily assimilated to Hel-
lenistic ideas about salvation. Twelve centuries before St. Thomas
wrought the so-called medieval synthesis, Paul fashioned an im-
pressive synthesis of two great heritages. He even found a place
for that curious equation of virtue, happiness, and knowledge
which we find in Plato: but by knowledge Paul meant the knowl-
240 The Faith of a Heretic
edge of faith; by happiness, salvation; and his virtues were not
the virtues of Plato.
Paul was not the first to attempt such a synthesis: Philo of
Alexandria had fused Plato and the Hebrew Scriptures in an in-
tricate philosophy at least a generation earlier. Nor was Paul's
synthesis entirely deliberate: it grew out of the Hellenistic Juda-
ism of that age. But its historic effect has been staggering. No
doubt, it would have astonished and distressed Paul himself.
From his letters one gathers that he placed the primary em-
phasis on faith when he made converts, and that he was shocked
when the new congregations took him by his word and did not
live up to the moral standards that he had simply taken for
granted. In his letters he frequently gives expression to his exas-
peration. It was therefore in a sense in keeping with Paul's spirit
that the new church should have made the Old Testament part
of its canon, along with the New. Paul, like the other early Chris-
tians who had been raised as Jews, lived in the Hebrew Scrip-
tures, constantly citing them, understanding contemporary events
in terms of them, and looking to them for guidance and truth.
One cannot read the Gospels or Epistles without being aware of
this. The Old Testament was the authors' canon, and much of
what they said was meant to be understood against the back-
ground of the Hebrew Scriptures or their Greek translation, the
Septuagint. This was so plain that those who later canonized
their works retained what they then called the Old Testament
to distinguish it from the New Testament.
Eventually, the message of the prophets came to life again.
For over a thousand years it slept quietly in the midst of Chris-
tendom. Then, early in the sixteenth century, their voice was sud-
denly heard again, and a new era began. It is customary to date
the Modern Age from 1453, when the Turks took Constantinople;
or from 1492, when Columbus discovered America, or from the
day in 1517 when young Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses on
the cathedral door in Wittenberg. But if a striking symbol is
wanted, one could also reckon the end of the Middle Ages from
the day when Michelangelo placed above the pope's most holy
Jesus vis-d-vis Paul, Luther, and Schweitzer 241
altar in Rome, the capital of Nero and the Inquisition, not the
Mother of God, nor the Christ, nor the expulsion from Paradise,
but Jonah.
59
Human history cannot boast of a more vivid, valiant, and vindic-
tive character than Luther. He performed three apparently un-
related feats, each of which would have sufficed to make him one of
the outstanding figures of all time: he smashed the unity of Western
Christendom, he translated the Bible and put it into every house-
hold that his influence could reach; and he developed a new
Weltanschauung.
With nothing to begin with but passion and the power of his
language, this simple monk dealt the papacy a blow compared to
which the drawn-out efforts of generations of German emperors
with huge armies and vast resources seem as nothing: he surpassed
the very imagination of the supple scheming of Henry IV and the
refined hatred of Frederick II.
Then he put his genius at the disposal of the Bible and, translat-
ing it, created a new language: modern German. Though he found
God's revelation above all in Paul, particularly in the Letters to the
Romans and Galatians, his heart caught fire as he read the Hebrew
Scriptures; and, far more than the King James Version almost a
century later, he communicated much of their austere simplicity,
laconic majesty, and the immediacy of the experience with which
so much of the original is still alive. Though it was the New Testa-
ment and really only a very small part of this that became the
center of his new religion, he not only left the Old Testament in the
Protestant Bible, he helped it to a popularity it had never before had
in the Western world.
Finally, the reformer and translator fashioned a new religious and
political world view, based on the Bible and his break with Rome.
It, too, bears the distinctive stamp of his unique personality. Luther
thought he was offering a return to Paul. He felt that he was fight-
242 The Faith of a Heretic
ing corruption and re-establishing the ancient and pure doctrine.
Yet his message was a reflection and projection of his own genius,
not the Gospel according to Paul but a characteristically Lutheran
piety.
A sincere Christian could scarcely differ more from the mild and
milk-faced Jesus of Hofman's popular paintings than Luther did.
Not even Calvin outdoes him in this respect. Fanatical from begin-
ning to end, as monk, Reformer, and politician, Luther did what-
ever he did with all his heart, all his soul, and all his power: fiery,
fierce, with the force of a bull rhinoceros but thoroughly devoted
to Christianity, which was the one constant in his life. Monk or
married, preaching rebellion or obedience, it was Christianity that
he had at heart. And moderation was not for him. Even apart from
his doctrinal differences with the followers of Aquinas, Aristotelian-
ism with its subtleties, its praise of wisdom and philosophy, was
antithetical to Luther's vision of Christianity: radical through and
through, and opposed alike to wisdom, reason, and subtlety.
He was thirty-three when he nailed his 95 Theses to the cathedral
door in Wittenberg. Before this, he had tried to gain salvation
through works. For salvation was still central for him as it had been
for Jesus' and Paul's original audience. "Works" had not meant to
Luther middle-class decency or a respectable regard for convention.
Being a Christian meant something extraordinary, extreme, exalted.
Works led to no conclusion; there is no end to works, no final salva-
tion. Striving for salvation through works is like struggling against
quicksand.
Luther believed in the devil and in hell, as Jesus and Paul had
done. A life devoted to the quest for salvation through works be-
came intolerable for him: one could never cease without perishing.
And cease one must, if only sometimes. There are moments of
weariness, discouragement, temptation, disgust Not only moments.
Hamlet's famous advice to his mother, how continence breeds more
continence and virtue makes virtue ever easier, is surely one of those
half-truths which owe their popularity to wishful thinking, as does
much glib talk about sublimation. Luther knew through the torture
of his own experience how continence bred the half -crazed desire for
Jesus vis-bois Paul, Luther, and Schweitzer 243
incontinence, and virtue like a cancer could corrode the soul with
the obsession to do evil. There is a peace of mind born of transgres-
sion which is sweeter than that of good conscience: the peace that
attends virtue is a guarded joy, dependent on past triumphs and
continued perseverance; relative to these, not absolute not ex-
traordinary, extreme, exalted. But still finding oneself in and after
evil, knowing all the joy of sin and feeling that sin is not the great
power virtue thinks it, not the menace against which we must at all
times be on our guard, but a foe to whom one can concede a battle
and survive this sense of peace which comes of saturation and the
new experience of a deadness to desire is indeed a peace surpassing
unreflective understanding. Hence, not only must salvation through
works be abandoned but a place must be found for sin. It is hardly
an exaggeration to say that for Luther the Gospel, the glad tidings,
was that one could sin and yet be saved, and that sin need not even
be rationed.
Paul and Luther notwithstanding, salvation through works never
was the doctrine of the Jews or the Catholics. The Old Testament
was, for the most part, not at all concerned with individual salva-
tion in another world or Me; and the Pharisees who did believe in
immortality never failed to supplement their teaching of the Law
with the prophetic doctrine of repentance and forgiveness. They
did not believe that salvation required unexceptional fulfillment of
all laws, moral and ceremonial, or that they, and only they, could
point to perfect records and hence were entitled to salvation while
the rest of mankind was less fortunate. Nor did the Catholic church,
prior to Luther, teach that only the perfect ascetic could win re-
demption while the rest of mankind would be damned. Paul and
Luther passionately, but erroneously, projected their own frantic
efforts on two great religions within which they had failed to realize
their self-imposed conception of salvation.
At no time had the church accepted Jesus' hyperbolic counsels.
How could it? How could an institution which expects to outlast
centuries take as its motto, "Take no thought for the morrow"? How
could it reach men with the teaching, "Whoever then relaxes one of
the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be
244 The Faith of a Heretic
called least in the kingdom of heaven 9 ? How could it discipline
men if it accepted the command, "Resist not evil"? How could it
possibly accept the Sermon on the Mount and its eloquent conclu-
sion: "Every one who hears these words of mine and does not do
them will be like a foolish man who built his house upon the sand;
and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat
against that house, and it fell; and great was the fall of it'? Organ-
ized Christianity could be defined as the ever renewed effort to get
around these sayings without repudiating Jesus. This is what the
Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox church, Luther and
Calvin, Earth and Schweitzer have in common.
Luther and the church against which he rebelled agreed that
there must be some dispensation from the stern demands of Jesus,
and that sin must not be considered a bar to salvation.
Their difference? A joke may crystallize it A hostess offers a
guest some canapes. Says die guest: Thank you. I have already
had three." Says the hostess: "Had three? You've had five; but who
counts?" What enraged Luther was that the church counted.
Lutheran children are often brought up on Luther's protests
against the sale of indulgences and are appalled to learn how freely
people sinned with the assurance that a small formality would soon
restore them to their former state of grace or even how a man
planning a robbery might obtain indulgence in advance. They are
less likely to t>e told how Luther, on the Wartburg, wrote his friend
Melanchthon on August 1, 1521: "If you are a preacher of grace, do
not preach a fictitious, but a true, grace; and if the grace is true,
carry a true, and not a fictitious sin. God does not work salvation for
fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin vigorously [esto peccator et
pecca forttier]; but even more vigorously believe and delight in
Christ who is victor over sin, death, and the world." And later on
in the same letter he writes: "It is sufficient that we recognize
through the wealth of God's glory, the lamb who bears the sin of
the world; from this, sin does not sever us, even if thousands, thou-
sands of times in one day we should fornicate or murder."
Luther and the church agreed on the compatibility of sin and
salvation; but Luther insisted on justification by faith alone, sola
Jesus vis-d-vis Paul, Luther, and Schweitzer 245
fide. Not by works and not through any mediator other than Christ.
Works are by their nature inconclusive: even if one should persist
in works, all one's accomplishments are dwarfed by what one
might have done. If salvation involves, as both Jesus and Paul
taught, an assurance even now, a conviction, a triumphant sense of
ultimate redemption, it cannot be found in works. But faith is ulti-
mate; faith is conclusive; faith is final. A verse in the Book of
Habakkuk (2:4.), cited in the first chapter of Paul's Letter to the
Romans, becomes the cornerstone of Luther's religion: "The just
shall live by faith."
Faith for Luther is not merely assent to certain propositions,
though this is a necessary element of faith: it is a liberating experi-
ence which suffuses a whole life with bliss. Care is dead, also worry
about sin. One is saved in spite of being a wretched and incorrigible
sinner. It is like knowing that one is loved loved unconditionally
with all one's faults. And the Catholic church would still keep count
of faults and impose penances or sell indulgences! As if the glad
tidings were not that our sins no longer matter.
What is wrong with the indulgences is not that they make sin
compatible with ultimate salvation, but that they are incompatible
with the glad tidings of salvation by faith alone. What is wrong
with all the preaching of pleasing God by works is that the Gospel
can be understood only when we have experienced the impossibility
of pleasing God by works. What is wrong with the church's as-
sumption of the role of mediator between God and man, wrong
with the hierarchy and faith in intervention by the saints, is once
again that all this stands opposed to the glad tidings. Christ loves
us! That means that his love need not be earned by works. In fact,
we brazenly exclude ourselves from the redeeming power of his
love if we insist that we deserve it or must, by some future works,
still earn it.
The glad tidings that Christ loves us permeate Luther's prose;
and more than 400 years later we can still experience their intoxicat-
ing power. But if, instead of trying to re-experience Luther's faith,
we step back to look at it with some detachment, we find that
Luther's version of Christianity falls within our previous definition:
246 The Faith of a Heretic
it gets around die Sermon on the Mount without repudiating Jesus.
With the radical power of his language, Luther himself expressed
this again and again. The law is fulfilled not insofar as we satisfy
it, but insofar as we are forgiven for not being able to do anything"
(XII, 377*). The hearts that are filled with God's bliss do not ful-
fill the Ten Commandments; but Christ has brought about such a
violent salvation that he deprives the Ten Commandments, too, of
all their claims" (VII, 1516*). And in a letter to his young friend
Jerome Weller: "You must believe that this temptation of yours is
of the devil, who vexes you so because you believe in Christ. You
see how contented and happy he permits the worst enemies of the
gospel to be. Just think of Eck, Zwingli, and others. It is necessary
for all of us who are Christians to have the devil as an adversary
and enemy; as Saint Peter says, *Your adversary, the devil, walks
about* [I Peter 5:8]. . . . Whenever the devil pesters you with these
thoughts, at once seek out the company of men, drink more, joke and
jest, or engage in some other form of merriment. Sometimes it is
necessary to drink a little more, play, jest, or even commit some sin
in defiance and contempt of the devil in order not to give him an
opportunity to make us scrupulous about trifles. We shall be over-
come if we worry too much about falling into some sin. So, if the
devil should say, *Do not drink,' you should reply to him, 'On this
very account, because you forbid it, I shall drink, and what is more,
I shall drink a generous amount/ Thus one must always do the op-
posite of that which Satan prohibits. What do you think is my rea-
son for drinking wine undiluted, talking freely, and eating more
often, if it is not to torment and vex the devil who made up his mind
to torment and vex me? . . . When the devil attacks and torments
us, we must completely set aside the Ten Commandments. When
the devil throws our sins up to us and declares that we deserve
death and hell, we ought to speak thus: 1 admit that I deserve
death and hell. What of it? Does this mean that I shall be sentenced
to eternal damnation? By no means. For I know One who suffered
and made satisfaction in my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, the
Son of God. Where he is, there I shall be also' " (July [?], 1530).
Jesus vis-b-vis Paul, Luther, and Schweitzer 247
Many will say, no doubt: Luther was terrible, but the Sermon on
the Mount shows Jesus to have been the greatest moral teacher of
all time. This facile view lacks that impassioned seriousness which
commands respect for Luther. It is fashionable to pay lip service to
the Sermon on the Mount even if one works for, or constantly
patronizes, million-dollar industries that involve systematic efforts
to increase the frequency of lustful looks. Luther had tried with all
his might to eradicate all lustful thoughts from his tormented mind:
as a monk he had denied himself food and sleep, scourged himself,
prayed, done penance all to no avail.
He was not the kind of man that practices law while avowing
belief in Jesus' ethic; not one to extol the Sermon on the Mount as
the best rule of conduct, while making elaborate plans for the future;
not one to hail Jesus as a moral genius while thinking nothing of
calling another man a fool. When he arrived at the conclusion that
one could not live by Jesus' moral teachings, he said so outright.
A number of conclusions are open to us at this point. We can
say that Hillel, the Pharisee, was a greater moral genius when he
said a generation earlier: "Do not judge your neighbor till you have
seen yourself in his position" (Mishnah Avoth, 2:5). For this is an
attainable ideal, not moral utopianism; and as one approximates it,
one becomes a better man. Or one could become a Buddhist. Or,
convinced of the futility of good works and the liberating force of
sin, one might adopt a pagan ethic depriving "even the Ten Com-
mandments of all their justice." But Luther had the unshakable
conviction that the Bible was the word of God, that all religious and
all moral truth was to be found in it, and that Christ was the Truth
if not in one sense, then in another.
The problem here, unlike the solution, was not a function of
Luther's personality or outlook. As long as we do not realize this,
we cannot hope to understand either Luther or Christianity. The
same problem confronts everybody who takes Christianity seriously.
This is perhaps best shown by considering a man whose Christianity
is in some ways antithetical to Luther's: Albert Schweitzer.
248 The Faith of a Heretic
60
Schweitzer, organist, Bach scholar, and New Testament scholar,
who at thirty turned his back on his manifold achievements to prac-
tice medicine among the natives in Central Africa, is to many minds
the one true Christian of our time the one outstanding personality
whose scholarly and thorough study of the Gospels led him to realize
their ethic in his life. This view depends on ignorance of Schweitzer's
writings. For Schweitzer, like Luther, takes the Sermon on the
Mount too seriously to claim that he accepts it. Like Luther, he
repudiates it without repudiating Jesus.
His study of the texts and his definitive work on outstanding
previous interpretations led him to the conclusion that Jesus' moral
teachings must be understood as a mere "interim ethic" designed
and appropriate only for the interim, which Jesus firmly believed
to be quite brief, before the kingdom of God would come with
power. Schweitzer's result implies not only that Jesus' ethic is in-
applicable today but that it has never been applicable and that
Jesus' most central conviction was wrong.
With this, one might expect Schweitzer to give up Christianity
unless he accepts traditional Christian solutions of this problem. He
does neither. He disagrees with the early Christians and the
medieval church, and repudiates Luther's belief that he was return-
ing to the ancient teaching and yet Schweitzer considers himself
a Christian and a Protestant.
Let us concentrate on two major issues: otherworldliness and re-
mission of sins. Far from denying the essential otherworldliness of
Jesus' outlook, Schweitzer has used his vast scholarship to establish
its importance against the entrenched preconceptions of liberal
Protestants. Jesus' otherworldliness is, to Schweitzer's mind insep-
arable from Jesus' firm conviction that this world was about to come
to an end. When this expectation was not realized, belief in the
beginning of the kingdom did not all at once evaporate, but the
event was moved into the future; and as generation after generation
Jesus vis-&-vis Paul, Luther, and Schweitzer 249
passed, it was gradually projected into an infinite distance. As this
happened, otherworldliness changed its character.
Paul, according to Schweitzer, had retained the belief in the im-
pending end of this world, even after most other Christians had
become resigned to the vague prospect of an indefinite future. Paul
believed that the kingdom had come with Christ's death and resur-
rection, and that this would soon become manifest through a trans-
formation of the natural world. But Paul was wrong, and the in-
definite postponement of the expectation of the kingdom became
universal.
In the perspective of this infinitely distant hope, the Christian
negation of this world acquired a new and, Schweitzer feels, un-
fortunate importance. Originally, the negation had been almost
void of content: this world was depreciated as something that was
about to pass away, and one concentrated on the other world be-
cause it was about to be the only one. But now this world is negated
even though it is assumed to have duration; and though Schweitzer
himself does not sharpen the contrast in this manner it is the
affirmation that is almost void of content now: an essentially posi-
tive outlook is converted into a primarily negative one.
The triumphant conviction that the kingdom was about to come
or had come, as Paul believed is gone beyond recall; and the
conviction that the affairs of this world do not matter any more is
no longer a mere corollary, but broadens out into pervasive resigna-
tion. In Schweitzer's words: "By their negation of this world as well
as by the conception that the kingdom will eventually come all by
itself, the believers are sentenced not to undertake anything to im-
prove the present. Because Christianity must pursue this course, it
cannot be to the Greco-Roman world in which it appears what it
ought to have been to it. The ethical energies contained in Chris-
tianity cannot regenerate the world empire and its peoples. Chris-
tianity triumphs over paganism: it becomes the state religion. But
in accordance with its nature, it must leave the world empire to its
fate."
Thus Schweitzer stands opposed to Christian otherworldliness,
both in its hopeful, eschatological form, which he associates with
250 The Faith of a Heretic
Jesus and Paul and considers Inseparable from clearly erroneous be-
liefs, and in its subsequent negativistic form which he considers a
moral disaster. Judged by his moral standards, which are shared by
millions who do not care to press the point, Christianity did not do
what it ought to have done; and Schweitzer has the rare honesty to
insi
