Die Goldene Regel: Eine Einführung in die Geschichte der antiken und frühchristlichen Vulgärethik (review)

84 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Die Goldene Regel: Eine Ein]i~hrung in die Geschichte der antiken und #i~hchristlichen Vulg~rethik. By Albrecht DiMe. (GSttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1962. Pp. 135. DM. 14.80.) This volume is He]t 7 in the valuable series of Studienhe]te zur Altertumswissenscha#, edited by Bruno Snell and Hartmut Erbsc. The author, Professor of Classics at the University of Cologne, is known through his Studien zur griechischen Biographic in the GSttingen Academy of Sciences (Philol.-hist. Kl., IIl. F., Nr. 37, 1956), as editor of the Gl$ttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen from 1953-1958 and (beginning with fascicle 41 in 1964) as one of the editors of the Reallexilcon ]i~r Antilce und Christentum being produced by the Franz Joseph D51ger-Institut at the University of Bonn. The Introduction (Chap. I. pp. 5-7) is devoted to clarifying the subtitle's term Vulg~rethik, "popular ethics," by developing Plato's distinction between etlxical categories derived from speculative efforts at attaining a rational knowledge of truth on the one hand and ethical maxims simply derived from and validated by social experience on the other. The latter can also be formulated abstractly and as of general validity, e.g., in wisdom literature, in which case such maxims approach the former; and the former is a major influence on such popular ethics. Hence we have to do with a distinction only indirectly derivable from an analysis of a given historical movement but which, as a heuristic typology, serves to call attention to interrelations and useful distinctions within the total ethical spectrum. The ethics emerging from a religion based on revelation is classified as a parallel to philosophical ethics, which is the basic instance of non-popular or speculative ethics. The study of the Golden Rule is intended as a paradigmatic sample of manageable scope for investigating such relations. The author hopes to aid the historian of philosophy in understanding the presuppositions of philosophical ethics; the cla.~icist in understanding the continuity between the Ancient Near East, Classical Antiquity, and Christianity; the theologian in understanding the commensurability existing between religious, philosophical, and popular ethics; and the student in understanding the possibility of studying a non-philological problem in a philological way. Chapter II (pp. 8-12) provides an initial survey of the occurrence of the "Golden Rule" (a name apparently going back only to the sixteenth century), as well as the working hypothesis for its derivation. It occurs widely in Jewish, Christian, and classical texts, not to speak of Indian and Chinese instances. Dihle (p. 10) agrees rightly with Bultmann in opposing the convenient apologetic effort of some theologians to make a principal distinction between the negative form as a "merely shrewd maxim" and the positive form as "practical guidance for the practise of love" (so Joachim Jeremias, RGG, 3rd ed., II, 1958, pp. 1689 f.), in that both forms derive from the same principle of ethical evaluation (see below), and both forms occur in both Christian and non-Christian texts. DiMe regards the Golden Rule as a relatively late occurrence in human history. For it presupposes a rather advanced ability to form universally valid abstractions free of casuistic instances, and indeed in terms of the viewpoints of both parties involved. Yet it presupposes the quite ancient concept of retaliation to the effect that every action, good or bad, calls forth necessarily the equivalent reaction. For it is this concept that leads to evaluating, even before one acts, an action in terms of the equivalent reaction. DiMe's initial interest is in an inquiry into this cultural condition of the possibility of the emergence of the Golden Rule. Hence something more than half of the book (Chaps. III-V, pp. 13-79) is devoted to the cultural history of the concept of retaliation. This detailed investigation of the Golden Rule on the basis of the history of that presupposition is treated in Chapter IV (pp. 80-127). Chapter III investigates retaliation in law (pp. 13-30) and popular ethics (pp. 3040). The study of retaliation in law is largely confined to the issue of the shedding of blood, where the jus talionis is the prevalent point of departure. Only...