Since the three revolutions at the end of the 18th century, industrial, American and French, ushered in the birth of the modern era, the West has dominated every aspect of world culture. To the point where any contestation of this dominance can only be attempted through the use of weapons, whether economic, political, or military, whose scientific and technological basis evolved first in Western Europe and North America.
It is easy to see the connection between the analytic thinking of the pre-Socratics and the later developments of mathematics and empirical science. But the spiritual basis of Western culture, its “Abrahamic” heritage, is, unlike its political-intellectual Greek heritage, riven by discord, as is borne out by the contrast between the two “younger brother” religions’ perennially emergent hatred of the first-born Jews, as opposed to the universal respect for and emotional indifference to the Greeks.
At this moment of the West’s civilizational crisis, it is important that we understand the connection between these two key elements of Western Culture’s success, if only to be able to evaluate the relationship of this crisis to what Oswald Spengler called the West’s Untergang.
From the standpoint of GA, as I have tried to make clear since A New Way of Thinking (Aurora, Colo.: The Davies Group, 2011), the “original sin” of philosophy is its metaphysical nature, which I define simply by reference to Plato’s myth of the cave in the Republic: the principle of metaphysics is that the language of thought is not the product of the interactions of the human community, but the result of our reflection on Ideas that preexisted their human discovery.
This understanding is parallel to our intuition with respect to the realities of nature, which are clearly understood as existing independently of human perception, and which we discover rather than invent, so that our “ideas” of them (cows, trees, planets) are the products of this discovery. Yet it misses the very core of language, which is the fact that we have “ideas” at all. Animals can be said to discover worldly realities in the same way as humans, and may be said to retain a trace in their brains that corresponds to what for us is an idea. But what is missing in this comparison is a grasp of the difference between a human word and an animal’s mental “image,” which differs from it not in its worldly referent, but in its participation as an element of the human scene of language.
In contradiction to Plato’s myth, the Ideas that appear on the walls of the cave—and in my view this applies even to the fundamental concepts of logic and mathematics—cannot be separated from the (human) scene on which we exchange them. Metaphysics, as philosophers began increasingly to note and find problematic from Descartes on, and certainly after 1848, has been increasingly experienced as a fetishization of these ideas, which is to say, as treating the existence of a word such as Being/Sein/Etre as implying some non-linguistic objective reality that it is our aim to grasp in its “essence.” Indeed Heidegger’s fame can be said to derive largely from the insistence with which he maintained in our “existential” era the mystique of a philosophical essence, a metaphysic, such that Sein or Denken (and even a sememe like Fug) were considered worthy of meditations that were never presented as focused on human experience but on a mysterious prior ground—in a word, in an unavowed mode of sacrality.
We should always refer such claims to Roy Rappaport’s insistence that language and the sacred (or “religion”) are coeval, that one cannot exist without the other. It is no accident that the mystery that we discover in Plato’s cave, and of which Heidegger may be seen as the last true believer, necessarily evokes in us a sense of embodied sacrality, or divinity—in Plato’s myth, the god who projects the idea’s shadows on the walls. Save that Plato assigns this meta-physical reality to a predefined sacred domain, whereas metaphysics focuses not on the divine source of the Ideas but on the “substance” referred to by their written/verbal signs. Thus if we would truly be anthropologists, we must reject this metaphysical ontology as a violation of Ockham’s razor, and do away with the “realm of Ideas” as something distinct from the human community and its scene of language/representation on which these ideas/concepts/signifieds are manifested.
But this being said, there is no doubt that the tension between this metaphysical Greek heritage and our Hebrew one, in which all things emanate from God, far from being a weakness, has been arguably the core of the strength of our civilization, permitting a fruitful dialectic that led to world domination. And what I would call the anthropological critique of the Greek sacralization of the Ideas does not apply to the Hebrew sacralization of the universe as a whole.
Indeed, what the Hebrew-Greek tension reveals is the relative weakness of the Greek sense of the sacred. Polytheism, which we see today as more a literary than a religious mode, was by the time of the “Greek miracle” already moving in this direction. Polytheistic systems originated through syncretism, whose point was to reconcile the gods of different social groups—the primitive form of which was the totem feast in which the tribe as a whole would partake of the totem animals of its various clans. Such Pantheons could not be maintained in a world in which written communications had become sharable among different societies. Socrates was put to death for violating the Athenians’ sense of religious propriety, in effect, for blasphemy, but it was already clear by his time, for example from the plays of Aristophanes, that the gods had become figures more literary than sacral.
In contrast, Hebrew monotheism solved the problem of the multiplication of the gods by denying multiplicity altogether: the sacred was one, for all humanity, and must be understood as embodied in One God. That many passages of the Torah use the plural Elohim rather than YHVH should not be taken as a sign of confusion or tension, but rather as proof that the plural term had already been assimilated to the singular one; the older texts were retained out of respect for their original composers rather than as a sign of hesitation between God’s plurality or singularity.
The whole point of monotheism is not choosing between many gods or one god, but realizing that the sacred, in however many different ways it may manifest itself, is essentially one thing: the sense that there are certain potentially pleasurable acts that are forbidden, are wrong not just because I feel they are, but because my human community realizes they are wrong, which is to say, are incompatible with the welfare and survival of this community.
Attributing these moral sentiments to the dictates of different gods in different branches of life is mistaking the need for different rules in different circumstances for a demonstration that these rules are the products of different legislators. Hillel’s golden rule:
That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow! That is the whole Torah; the rest is interpretation.
is the ultimate distillation of monotheism. God is not telling you mysterious truths that you could never fathom by yourself; God is conceived as telling us these things because they are the substance of the sacred that permitted us to conceive him in the first place.
The foregoing suggests that the greatness of Western civilization has lain in its superior grasp of the distinction between the spiritual-human and natural worlds: the latter, to be understood through empirical openness to our observations and the cultivation of the tools, logical and mathematical, for dealing with them, without naïve presuppositions of analogies with human behavior and thought; and the former, to be understood as the domain of the sacred, which we must understand in the perspective of the One God, that is, of the moral identity of every human being, his duty, as figuratively embodied in his conscience or soul, to insure the flourishing of the human community.
Hillel’s golden rule says nothing about rank, it is simply reciprocal, and gives each individual credit for understanding in what sense we can apply to our fellows our sense of sacred rightness, the judgment of our conscience that we apply to ourselves. It is significant that this is a Jewish and not a Christian document. Not that Christians are blind to the reciprocity that underlies it, but they differ from Jews insofar as they stand as witnesses of what they judge to be God’s necessary incarnation as the Son in order to save the world from its sinfulness. Could Hillel’s morality have sufficed, the One God would presumably not have needed the Trinity. And this is the substance of Christianity’s claim of supersession.
The success of Christianity was certainly a historical demonstration that Judaism, however universal its ethic—can an ethic be expressed more minimally than in Hillel’s rule?—having emerged as a “tribal” religion in a polytheistic world, was not suitable for transmitting the monotheistic credo to the “pagans” that surrounded them. Although no religion is in principle more universalist than Hillel’s, the mechanisms of the sacred are of necessity communal, and that his affirmation that in principle every human is capable of ruling himself through this universal intuition coexisted with a religious practice that in its traditional form was and is dominated by obedience to hundreds of mitzvot (rules/blessings)—613 in the official count—is a sign of the unsuitability of Judaism for transmitting the simple basis of its understanding of the sacred to the pagan multitudes.
Yet the survival of the Jews as Jews, in spite of endless efforts to convert and/or annihilate them, has remained an essential catalyst of Western history, and arguably in its absence the birth of modernity would have been inconceivable. The very persistence of the Jews, whose “remnant” refused to follow the path of conversion to Christianity (leaving for the moment Islam out of the equation, given its failed efforts to conquer the West that ended, hardly coincidentally, just at the moment of the rise of modernity in the 17th century), was a scandal to the Christians, but also a demonstration that, however much the Jews needed their 613 mitzvot as a bulwark against the religions of the goyim, the complexity of their customs did not contradict the ultimate simplicity of their Hillelian credo.
The Jewish idea of the mitzvot, in a word, is not that obedience to them is the heart of the law. On the contrary, their purpose is to make us aware that the sacred, the One God, is always with us, that in our household and similar activities, we should never forget what is in fact Hillel’s rule, not seeing it as a constraint but as a “second nature,” and the 613 commandments, each in itself not arduous or difficult, but requiring a constant awareness of the sacred, are meant to make its obedience easier, so that it become a second nature, as obedience to the commandments is to the Orthodox Jew.
Christianity respects the “Golden Rule,” but at the same time as it liberates its believers from the mitzvot and from the 300-odd pages of the Shulchan Aruch, the Orthodox “rulebook” that spells out the details of Orthodox obedience, it obliges its believers to express faith in the Trinity, with its three-person God, Incarnation, and Resurrection. Whereas the Hebrew Shema, the credo that every Jew is to pronounce when facing death: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is One; One is our God, Great is our Lord, and his Name is One,” asserts nothing but the single truth of monotheism: the uniqueness of the sacred.
In sum, where the Jewish credo is truly minimal, the Christian adds the element of trinitarian identification in the place of the “behaviorist” mitzvot. Outwardly, this is certainly more “modern”; no one in the modern world looks more out of place than an Orthodox Jew with beard, payyes (sideburns), covered head, and tzitzit or ceremonial tassels, worn at all times “as a reminder to think of God.” The Christian internalization of faith—what led Matt Schneider to point out to me that if the Jewish God cares for humanity, Jesus loves us—is indeed more modern, but it gains this modernity by a conflation of moral truth with love the necessity of whose complication of monotheistic unity in effect creates a more complex anthropology—one that assimilates the sacred to the structure of the human family in contrast to the simple dichotomy of God and man.
No doubt it is Christianity, not Judaism, that gave birth to modernity, however well the latter has adapted to it. But without contesting Christianity’s historical role, we must see it as a moment in a history begun by the Hebrews, in which their role of “older brother” cannot be denied. Sadly, in contrast to John Paul II’s fraternal gesture, Pope Francis’ recent urging of inquiry into “Gaza genocide allegations”— https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/17/pope-francis-urges-inquiry-into-gaza-genocide-allegations—is symptomatic of Western civilization’s renewed oikophobia.
One may describe antisemitism as simply the affirmation of the necessity of supersession; that Judaism, like ancient polytheism, is no longer a viable option in the modern world and survives only through the “stubbornness” or “stiff-necked” nature of the Jews. But that this intolerance contrasts sharply with our benevolence toward the beliefs and customs of more “elementary” cultures reflects a fact that antisemitism seeks to deny; that Judaism belongs to the same family as Christianity, that its elder-brother status cannot be denied without—as does Islam—denying the sacred nature of the Torah and the rest of the Old Testament, and ultimately denying the discoverable facts of Hebraic history.
And in effect, Christianity’s insistence on the continuing interpenetration of the sacred and profane worlds, beginning with the Annunciation and extending into the present with the requirement of “miracles” for granting the status of sainthood, involves a far greater exception than Judaism to the “Greek” empiricism of natural science. Such practices demonstrate that, for the vast majority of its sects, the “absurdity” of Christianity cannot be dismissed but must be affirmed, as the Resurrection and the other New-Testament miracles are affirmed. Affirmed, we must say, as a demonstration of the ultimate truth of the quasi-Tertullian credo quia absurdum.
To be continued…