To understand the deeper implications of the West’s double heritage, we must defamiliarize ourselves with the facts and judgments we have long accepted as givens and attempt to reconstruct our human ontology from the ground up.
For many centuries, the sacred, whose core is simply our sense of right and wrong, was humanity’s privileged road to truth. But the double inheritance of the West is dependent on the fact that whereas the culture of the Greek polis combined the stories of numerous local divinities into a Pantheon whose inhabitants’ immortality made them potential objects of human resentment, Hebrew culture was centered on a single transcendent creator. This contrast between the Greeks’ insistence on the mimetic roots of the sacred and the Hebrews’ on the sacred’s transcendence of them generated in the West a clear distinction between sacred and profane that was no doubt the ultimate reason why it was there rather than in the less “dialectical” cultures of India or China that modernity first arose.
Greek concern with human morality expressed itself most significantly in its public esthetic culture, in contrast to which the “private” schools of Greek philosophy concerned themselves both with the polis and with the rules of thought itself, which its thinkers formalized in geometry and logic and their practical applications in architecture and warfare. Whereas in a society lacking this public-private distinction, the Hebrew intellect remained focused on understanding the interactions of their nomadic people with the established Middle Eastern civilizations, and in particular, with Egypt, into whose orbit they fell. Jerusalem, their polis, was late to be established and would never have the security or stability of Athens or Sparta. Without the luxury of using their intellects for speculation, the Hebrews sought to draw moral lessons from their historical experiences in attempting to follow the Creator’s implicit will.
As post-Darwinian biologists have often noted, Genesis attributes to the Creator decisions that can easily be converted into empirical truths about animal and human evolution. But the key event in Genesis, the “fall of man,” is focused on humanity’s moral evolution, and rather than describing it, as the days of creation were described, as bringing satisfaction to the Creator (Genesis I, 29: “and the Lord saw everything he had made, and, behold, it was very good”), the “fall” that is in fact the emergence of humanity is met by Him with anger and punishment.
This divine dissatisfaction is presented in a very different perspective from the gods’ punishments in the epics and dramas of the Greeks. Achilles and Priam are reconciled at the end of the Iliad through their shared resentment of the gods, whose immortality makes them immune to humanity’s time-bound sufferings. But the resentment in the Hebrew universe is not that of Adam and Eve, but of the Creator himself, who in a unique passage in Genesis III, 22 expresses the fear that his human creations might go on to eat of the Tree of Life and become, like him (and unnamed other gods!) immortal.
And the Lord God said: ‘Behold, the man is become as one of us [my emphasis], to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.’
This is the clearest indication in the Torah, far more revelatory than Abraham’s smashing his family idols, of the emergence of Hebrew monotheism from a background of polytheism. The “tree of life” is best understood as a reference to an earlier polytheistic world rather than to a preceding golden age.
The tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is, precisely, the bearer of the monotheistic truth of the sacred in the place of individually defined gods and rites. Having eaten of it, the humans can no longer cohabit with the Creator, for such cohabitation, as this passage shows, is fundamentally polytheistic, man being distinguished from god by the latter’s transcendent powers alone. The Creator had sought in vain to protect his new creations from the danger of acquiring this “divine” knowledge, without realizing that without it, they could not attain the stage of true humanity. Or in our terms, their prior existence in Eden could not otherwise have fulfilled its purpose as an originary hypothesis of historical human reality. Which is to say that humans are, and can only be, mortal creatures that nonetheless share their Creator’s knowledge of moral truth.
This inversion of the Greeks’ resentment of their gods’ immortality offers a revelatory point of contrast. In the Greek universe, the gods’ ontological superiority displays them as more powerful, more perfect versions of ourselves—and thus resented as successful rivals. Whereas this unique expression of divine (and collective) resentment appears in the Bible only in the Creator himself, and only as a trace of an earlier, now-transcended polytheistic era of sacred/human competition.
And whereas in Greek culture, our shared resentment of the gods’ immortality permits the reconciliation of human enemies, as in the Iliad’s terminal scene of Hector’s burial, the Hebrew narrative depicts the Creator as making a couple of false starts even after the expulsion from Eden. The first culminates in the Flood that eliminates the corrupted descendants of Cain who had mixed with the pious children of Seth, and restarts the human race from the seed of the righteous Noah, to whom the Creator promises in Genesis IX, 11 never again to destroy the human world; the second ends with the scattering of the monolingual society that built the Tower of Babel to rival heaven, and the birth of Abram/Abraham, whose people He promises in Genesis XII, 2 to make into “a great nation.”
Thus only once humanity had ceased to seek in a unique and universally comprehensible human language a final potential source of rivalry with the Creator could its history proper begin its course.
The reconciliation of human enemies against the gods that we found in the Iliad was effectively the reductio ad absurdum of polytheism. Once we see the gods as our rivals, sacrality is no longer transcendent and we can no longer conceive its distillation into a simple affirmation of human moral symmetry. Rather than telling humans to forget their differences because they suffer the ultimate injustice of mortality, they are to accept these differences on the basis of their equality, their brotherhood as creatures none of whom is a priori superior to any other. Generative anthropology realizes this in the scene of the originary hypothesis: the experience of deferring/renouncing attempts at individual appropriation of the object of common desire in favor of its common designation as a prelude to its symmetrical sharing is the inaugural act of the human community.
Thus the assertion in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” is nothing else than the political embodiment of Hillel’s golden rule. What makes us human, and at the same time, worthy of our fellowship with the Creator, is our need to exercise conscious judgment in carrying out this rule, in contrast to the Pavlovian inhibitions that keep the peace throughout the rest of the animal kingdom.
This reduction of the sacred to a single precept has no parallel in the natural world; it is experienced as a revelation, not an empirical discovery. And the naturalness with which we attribute the moral law to the Creator has for its primitive model our common intuition that, although each individual must make his own decisions about right and wrong, we can in principle agree on the essential features of “what we would not want to have done to us” that would rupture the communal union.
The Epistemology of Resentment
This fundamental principle of human reciprocity has been greatly weakened since the onset of modernity with the French Revolution. It has increasingly given way to the epistemology of resentment: the idea that we should rather understand the Golden Rule as imposed on us from without, as the colonial powers imposed their values on their colonies—that our intuition of the sacred, of the One God who guides us all, is a delusion imposed by the powerful on the powerless to deter them from demanding their rightful share of worldly goods. For indeed, what the symmetry of the golden rule cannot help us with is the asymmetric distribution of the advantages attached to the “surplus value” accumulated in societies beyond the subsistence level. Where indeed is the symmetry between a noble and a peasant, a factory worker and the factory owner?
If the medieval peasant revolts were visceral reactions to poverty and hunger, that of the sans-culottes was an ideologically motivated rejection of the caste privileges of nobles and clergy—unfortunately foregrounded by Louis XVI’s ill-considered decision to convene the Etats-Généraux in 1789, at which the contrast between the privileges of the Church and the nobility and the status of the Tiers-Etat gave the epistemology of resentment its originary impetus.
Today the distant heirs of the sans-culottes carry Palestinian flags, identifying with the “oppressed” victims of the Jews, which is to say, rejecting the golden rule’s a priori assertion of fundamental human symmetry as a ruse designed to permit the oppressors to dominate their victims, and accepting in its place a moral epistemology that consecrates the inner twinge of resentment as a guarantee of moral truth.
Nor can the epochal question this raises be resolved by John Rawls’ ingenious fiction of an “original position” of universal equality (see the discussion of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice in Chronicle 322). Clearly the resentment at the base of today’s Islamic Jihadism reveals far more explicitly than that of the sans-culottes the dependency of the sacred in the Abrahamic world on what can only be called the Hebrews’ ontological anteriority. Whence Mahmoud Abbas’ historically absurd insistence on the originary existence of the Al-Aqsa Mosque with respect to the Hebrew temples that in fact preceded it by many centuries.
Thus, from the Palestinian perspective, in his generous gesture of leaving the Muslim Waqf in charge of the Temple Mount after the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli general Moshe Dayan was merely acting in accordance with sacred truth.
Might history have followed a different course had he grasped the religious significance of his gesture? For ontological resentment cannot be resolved by means of the Rawlsian calculus. And thus we are now once more (re)discovering, to our regretful surprise, that the resentment at the root of antisemitism lies on a far deeper level than that inspired by differences of worldly success.