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Introduction
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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1 Introduction This book seeks to reinvigorate the encounter between political philosophy and the Bible. I remain at the beginning in almost every sense. My focus is on that portion of Genesis that treats (with amazing compression) by far the longest period of human history, stretching from the Creation through the initial patriarchal establishment of the chosen people. It is here that the foundation is laid for everything that follows; and accordingly, this has been the portion of Scripture that has received by far the most attention from commentators.∞ In these chapters of Genesis are to be found the most basic presuppositions of a reflective life that roots itself finally in obedience to the mysterious God Who reveals Himself in the Scriptures. I provide a close reading of these chapters, animated by the concerns and questions and doubts of the philosophic enterprise as it was refounded by Socrates—and then once again refounded, with a dramatically altered but not wholly new agenda, by Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Spinoza in the early modern period. I aim to show how the meaning of the Bible, and of the way of life that it demands, and, by way of contrast, the meaning of political philosophy (and of the way of life that it defends) can be mutually illuminated when the Scripture is thus addressed and interpreted. Political philosophy in the strict sense aspires to be unqualifiedly normative rationalism: political philosophy claims to show how human beings , led by the wisest among them, can discover the fixed truth about their situation in the universe, about the good, about justice, and even about the revelations of divinity, by using reason as their ‘‘only Star and compass’’ ( John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 1.58). As St. Augustine critically observes, Socrates and the philosophers who follow in his wake seek the ‘‘attainment of happiness’’ by ‘‘relying on the human senses and human reasoning.’’≤ Or as Plato’s Socrates himself declares, in his most famous public statement about the meaning of his life (Apology of Socrates 37e–38a), Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham 2 Perhaps someone would say: ‘‘Socrates, can you not go away from us and live in quiet, remaining silent?’’ In regard to this it is most di≈cult of all to persuade some of you. For if I say that this is to disobey the god, and on account of this it is impossible to live in quiet, you will not believe me on the grounds that I am being ironically deceptive. But if on the other hand I say that this happens to be the greatest good for a human being—each day to make rational arguments about virtue and also about the other matters concerning which you hear me carrying on dialogues and examining both myself and others; and the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being—you will believe me still less when I say these things. But so it is, as I a≈rm, men—though to persuade of it is not easy. Socrates’ reference here to his proclaimed obedience to the god, taken together with his previous invocations of his famous personal experience of the daimonion, or ‘‘demonic voice,’’ su≈ces to indicate that he (and the authentic heirs to the enterprise of political philosophy that he initiated)≥ does not by any means discount divine revelation or inspiration as an experienced source of guidance that may be beyond what reason and the evidence of the senses manifestly provide. Socrates himself went so far as to proclaim that his peculiar refutative activity had been ‘‘given him as a commandment by the god, even from prophecies and from dreams and in every manner in which any divine dispensation has ever been a√orded any human being as a commandment to do anything’’ (ibid., 33c4–7). But the Socratic way is to bow to such guidance solely insofar as it can be recognized as delivered by an intelligibly wise and benevolent deity—supplementing (especially for educational purposes), but not contradicting, reason . Accordingly, we hear from Xenophon of at least one momentous occasion on which Socrates repeatedly refused to obey a commandment delivered by his demonic voice; Socrates had evidently not yet grasped the reasonableness, and therefore or thereby the truly divine authorization, of the audible injunction that he finally came to accept as from ‘‘the gods.’’∂ Near the beginning of the private conversation that Plato allows us to overhear in his Symposium, Socrates declares that he...