Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham

Notes

185 Notes Introduction 1. In the century that saw the most intense theological and philosophic commentary on the Bible, the overwhelming emphasis was on this portion of the book of Genesis. See Williams, The Common Expositor, chap. 1. See also the remarks of Westermann, Genesis 1–11, ix and 1. 2. ‘‘Ut homines humanis sensibus et humanis rationcinationibus’’ (St. Augustine The City of God against the Pagans [henceforth cited as City of God] 18.41 beg.; cf. 18.37 beg.). See also Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (henceforth cited as Institutes), 2.2.3, commenting on Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods 3.88: ‘‘There you have in sum the conviction of the philosophers, namely, that the reason which is in the human understanding su≈ces to conduct us well and to show us what is good to do.’’ For Calvin’s explicit criticism of Socrates on account of this, see 1.5.13; for the grave existential implications of this criticism, see esp. 1.10.3 and 1.14.10. The great political theologian John Milton—chief theorist and state paper writer of Cromwell’s regime—presents in his Paradise Lost Socratic dialectic as the preoccupation of the most rational of Satan’s fallen angels as they confront their own eternal damnation: ‘‘Of good and evil much they argu’d then, / Of happiness and final misery, / Passion and Apathy, and glory and shame, / Vain wisdom all, and false Philosophy: / Yet with a pleasing sorcery could charm / Pain for a while or anguish, and excite / Fallacious hope, or arm th’ obdured breast / With stubborn patience as with triple steel’’ (2.555– 69; see also 10.830). According to Milton’s Paradise Regained, Satan’s temptation of Christ culminated in an attempt to impress the latter with the wisdom of Socrates and the wise proponents of the virtuous contemplative life exemplified by Socrates. See the dialogue between Satan and Christ at 4.235√. and esp. 309– 11, where Christ exclaims, of Socrates and all those who follow in his wake, ‘‘Alas! What can they teach, and not mislead, / Ignorant of themselves, of God much more, / And how the World began, and how Man fell, / Degraded by himself, on grace depending?’’ See also Milton’s Christian Doctrine, 1.13 beg.: ‘‘I assume that no one thinks you should look for truth among philosophers and schoolmen rather than the Bible!’’ And see Martin Luther’s Lectures on Genesis (henceforth cited as LG, with references to volume and page of the Weimar Kritische Gesamtausgabe as Werke), 43:94 and 240, 241. Notes to Pages 2–5 186 3. See, e.g., Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 4.18.7–10. 4. Xenophon Apology of Socrates to the Jury 4–9. See, in a similar vein, Cicero ’s interpretation of his own personal religious experience as reported in On Divination 1.58–59. 5. Aristotle On Prophecy in Sleep 462b21–22, 463b15, and 464a21–22. Contrast Maimonides Guide of the Perplexed (henceforth cited as Guide) 2.36. See also Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics (henceforth cited as Ethics) 1179a22–32 and the pronouncement of Apollonius of Tyana (the greatest pagan saint or prophet of whom we have extensive hagiographic records, born ca. a.d. 172) to the king of India: ‘‘The gods’ first providential care is for those who philosophize with virtue; and secondly for those who are sinless and are reputed never to have committed any injustice. They grant to those who philosophize the sound understanding of the di√erence between the divine and the human things; but to those who are otherwise decent in their lives they grant a su≈ciency, so that these latter will not become unjust through at some time being in want of the necessities’’ (in the account of Flavius Philostratus Things Pertaining to Apollonius of Tyana 2.39; see also 3.18 end). 6. The Incoherence of the Incoherence, as quoted and translated in Kogan, Averro ës and the Metaphysics of Causation, 222. Cf. Aristotle Metaphysics 1047b31– 48a24 and esp. 1048a13–14. 7. A comment such as that of Gerhard May (Creatio ex Nihilo, 4 n. 10: ‘‘For Plutarch,’’ the true being or ‘‘ƒ ontvw ƒ on is God—for Plato it is the Ideas: Phaedr. 247e; Repub. 10 597d; Tim. 27d–28a’’) drastically oversimplifies. In the context of the very passage May cites here from the Republic (597b√.), Plato has Socrates suggesting that the Ideas are made by God. But above all, such a characterization ignores...