Know Thyself, Pt. 2

Part One

It's been awhile since my last post, so I apologize in advance for any discrepancies in tone or content.

As I mentioned last time, Reinhold Niebuhr suggests that the classical and biblical worldviews are necessarily distinct but brought together on the issue of man's contingency. Man is subject to the world around him; really this is to say that he is the object of the world around him, that things happen to him beyond his control and his understanding.

The Jewish tradition differs from the Greek, of course, in its monotheism, from which most of the other differences spring. Suddenly we are presented with a singular God, rather than the capricious and contradictory pantheon of the Greeks--and while there's an argument to made that the God of the Hebrews is capricious and bloodthirsty, He enters into a covenant relationship with Noah, then Abraham, then Isaac, then Jacob, and down through the line. He seeks a relationship with mankind, and if it comes primarily through the nation of Israel, there are at least glimpses in the Hebrew Bible that He wishes to extend it to humanity as a whole. (See, for example, the Book of Jonah, my favorite part of the Hebrew Bible, in which God reveals not only His sense of humor but His concern for those outside of the fold.)

But God's covenant with the Jews does not result in freedom from contingency. It may change man's place in the universe but it certainly does not change the fact that he has one and that it is inescapable. Man's place becomes less fragile but more defined:

"Come now, and let us reason together,"
Says the Lord.
"Though your sins are as scarlet,
They will be as white as snow;
Though they are red like crimson,
They will be like wool.
If you consent and obey,
You will eat the best of the land;
But if you refuse and rebel,
You will be devoured by the sword." (Isaiah 1:18-20, NAS)

This is the message we get over and over again from the prophets: Do what God requires of you, and He will bless you; refuse to do so, and He will cripple you. There's little room in this for self-made morality or for choice as choice. If you submit, you will receive what is coming to you; if you don't--well, you'll also receive what's coming to you, although you may not like it. Either way, God sets the terms of the covenant and the penalties for breaking it.

Note that there is no theodicy in this covenant. God, as far as I can tell, does not promise understanding of the way He works. Nowhere is this more clear than the Book of Job, in which God makes a deal with the devil that he may destroy a righteous man's life. Job keeps his cool for thirty excruciating chapters, at the end of which he finally questions his lot in life. He is innocent, he claims; he has kept the Law of God; he has done what is right, even through the extreme trials he's suffered:

Have I not wept for the one whose life is hard?
Was not my soul grieved for the needy?
When I expected good, then evil came;
When I waited for light, then darkness came.
I am seething within, and cannot relax;
Days of affliction confront me . . .
Have I covered my transgressions like Adam,
By hiding my iniquity in my bosom,
Because I feared the great multitude,
And the contempt of families terrified me,
And kept silent and did not go out of doors?
Oh, that I had one to hear me!
Behold, here is my signature;
Let the Almighty answer me! (Job 30:25-27, 31:33-35)

This is not a harsh statement, exactly; Job does not curse God, as his wife tells him to. He merely asks questions, questions we've probably all asked at some point. But God doesn't explain. He gets angry (and sarcastic--I love it when God gets sarcastic):

Who is this that darkens counsel
By words without knowledge?
Now gird up your loins like a man,
And I will ask you, and you instruct Me!
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth!
Tell Me, if you have understanding,
Who set its measurements, since you know?
Or who stretched the line on it? (38:2-5)

He continues in this vein for two entire chapters, until Job collapses under the weight of his own questions. The moral is clear here--man is what he is, and he can neither understand nor question God's decisions about the operation of the universe. He can only accept it.

The New Testament extends more or less logically from the Old, but it also has the advantage of showing up after Plato and Aristotle had already set the rules for philosophy. As such, St. Paul's admonitions to the Church sometimes read like a combination of Hebrew theology and Platonic philosophy. Nowhere is that more clear than in 1 Corinthians. (I shamefully admit that I shamelessly stole this analysis from Nathan Gilmour, great or otherwise.):

Now you are Christ's body, and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church, first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, administrations, various kinds of tongues. All are not apostles, are they? All are not prophets, are they? All are not teachers, are they? All are not workers of miracles, are they? All do not have gifts of healings, do they? All do not speak with tongues, do they? All do not interpret, do they? But earnestly desire the greater gifts. (1 Corinthians 12:27-31)

The echoes of The Republic should be clear--each has his place in life and in the life of the Church, and one must act within one's place. (Paul leaves open a desire for greater gifts but leaves it at desire--you can't make those happen; they must come from God, if they come at all.) Further, that your station depends on gifts rather than merit suggests there's not a whole lot you can do about it. You are what you are, and you have to operate as such.

Christian theologians through the years have softened these hard truths, for better or for worse. This post is already getting long, so I'm not going to go through a lot of them, but I do want to address John Calvin's view on contingency, both because I'm a Presbyterian and because I'm reading through The Institutes right now. Calvin expands and explicates the Book of Job on understanding God. Calvin's God is more understandable than Job's, it is true, but the end result is essentially the same:

Our knowledge should serve first to teach us fear and reverence; secondly, with it as our guide and teacher, we should learn to seek every good from him, and, having received it, to credit it to his account. For how can the thought of God penetrate your mind without your realizing immediately that, since you are his handiwork, you have been made over and bound to his command by right of creation, that you owe your life to him?--that whatever you undertake, whatever you do, ought to be ascribed to him? (Institutes I.ii.2).

Calvin thus collapses knowledge about God into submission to Him; in the end, knowledge and submission become the same thing, since knowledge without submission gets corrupted due to human stupidity--which "is caused not only by vain curiosity but by an inordinate desire to know more than is fitting" (I.iv.1). True knowledge, true wisdom, and true submission are thus all the same thing, all bound up in what Calvin calls piety. To know anything requires a recognition of one's place in the universe and a submission to it.

Next time: Where it all went wrong, at least in America.

Know Thyself, Pt. 1

This post is to a large extent informed by multiple conversations with the Great Nathan Gilmour, who consistently expands and corrects my understanding of Plato (and everything else).

As time and my academic career have progressed, I've moved further and further away from the poststructuralism that I embraced in the late years of my undergraduate education, a philosophy that I think is ultimately nihilistic. My Great Books project has instead made me into a humanist (although I'm a humanist heavily informed by Existentialism, a philosophy that is at its base considerably less nihilistic, despite the nihilism of some of its practitioners). I believe in literature and in its power to change both the individual and society. I believe the canon has something to teach us, despite its much-criticized exclusion of women and racial minorities; and I sometimes wonder what critical and cultural theorists think the purpose of literature is.

The most important lesson we can learn from the humanities, as best I can tell, involves man's contingency, our position somewhere other than the center of the universe. This is the great lesson of the Greeks, of course, particularly the playwrights. It goes without saying that terrible things happen to tragic heroes, things beyond human control, things inflicted upon us by the capricious gods who stand in for a cold and uncaring natural world. Sometimes, as is the case in Oedipus Rex, these things happen as a sort of punishment. But often they happen for no real reason. Such is the case in many or most of Euripides' plays. Heracles kills his family even though he is a national hero, and he does so because Zeus cheated on Hera. Hippolytus may have strayed from the Golden Mean in terms of abstinence, but he probably doesn't deserve to die; he dies because of the actions of his stepmother, and there's no bringing him back from the dead.

Where the playwrights are negative, Plato is more positive. His Republic is a detailed breakdown of how society should work (although he recognizes that it's never actually going to work that way). The Republic is built upon a very detailed system of social strata. Famously, everyone's talents and abilities will be clearly delineated sometime in early childhood, and every citizen will be assigned a particular role, be it Guardian or Gold or Silver or whatnot. The important thing here is not which group you're put in; it's your ability to accept your lot in life:

We said that if any child of a Guardian is a poor specimen, it must be degraded to the other classes, while any child in the other classes who is worth it must be promoted to the rank of Guardian. By this it was implied that all the other citizens ought individually to devote their full energy to the one particular job for which they are naturally suited. In that way the integrity and unity both of the individual and the state will be preserved. (423d)

Plato is often misunderstood. He is a tyrant, it is true, and his Republic is essentially a caste system with little (but not zero) chance for advancement. But he posits such a system not merely out of nationalism. The State is probably more important than the individual, but The Republic's caste system is meant to benefit the individual as well. When a citizen submits to his role in the State, he makes himself whole somehow. And his role is not arbitrarily assigned. It is based on his talents and abilities--it is presumably decided based on what will be best for both the individual and the State.

Aristotle suggests something similar in On Rhetoric. Happiness--which does not carry the modern connotation of emotional fulfillment, but rather the Good or the True--is to a large extent dependent upon contingencies. He makes a list of the components of happiness:

good birth, numerous friendships, worthy friendships, wealth, good children, numerous children, a good old age, as well as the virtues of the body (such as health, beauty, strength, physical stature, athletic prowess), reputation, honor, good luck, virtue. (I.v.4, 1360b)

Some of these components, it is true, are in our control; but many of them are not. If happiness is at least partially and perhaps largely out of our hands, we must recognize this fact. And recognition of one's relatively helplessness is submission to it.

In his wonderful The Nature and Destiny of Man, Reinhold Niebuhr sets forth two guiding philosophies of the Western world: the Christian and the Classical. He suggests that they are at least partially incompatible but they were merged in the Medieval Church and in the secular and religious Renaissance. The point of this merger is the mutual recognition of

The obvious fact . . . that man is a child of nature, subject to its vicissitudes, compelled by its necessities, driven by its impulses, and confined within the brevity of the years which nature permits its aried organic form, allowing them some, but too much latitude. The other less obvious fact is that man is a spirit who stands outside of nature, life, himself, his reason and the world.

Even man's transcendence, however, involves contingency to some extent because it involves alienation, the essential characteristic of man and one that sets him apart from God, the world, other men, and himself. What could better demonstrate man's subjugation to his fate?

In the second post of this series, I will examine the biblical attitude toward man's position in the universe; in the third, I will examine where we went wrong. Stay tuned.