The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Leon R. Kass is the Addie Clark Harding Professor (on leave) in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of Chicago and Hertog Fellow in Social Thought at the American Enterprise Insti-tute. Currently Chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, he is the author of three books, most recently Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics, and coauthor of two more. He lives in Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

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INTRODUCTION

THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM

This book offers a philosophic reading of the book of Genesis. Addressed to believers and nonbelievers alike, it should be of special interest to thoughtful children of skeptics, people who (like the author) now have good reason to want to see for themselves and to learn firsthand what it was and is that their parents or grandparents rejected. For though we are knowledgeable, powerful, and privileged with opportunities beyond our ancestors' wildest dreams, many of us remain psychically, morally, and spiritually adrift. This introduction aims both to clarify these claims and to invite the reader to take up a philosophic reading of the Bible.

What, you may well ask, do I mean by "philosophic" and "philosophic reading"? By "philosophic" I mean wisdom-seeking and wisdom-loving, after the literal meaning of the ancient Greek term philosophia, the love and pursuit of wisdom. Philosophy in this original sense refers not to some specialized academic subject matter (the field of philosophy) or to some finished doctrine (my philosophy of life) or to some method of reasoning and questioning practiced by card-carrying professional philosophers (the discipline of philosophy). Rather it denotes the activity of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and any of their descendants who single-mindedly and wholeheartedly -- yet thoughtfully and self-critically -- seek to discover the truth about the world and our place within it and to find thereby guidance for how we are to live. This book results from my efforts to read the book of Genesis in this spirit, the same spirit in which I read Plato's Republic or Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics -- indeed, any great book -- seeking wisdom regarding human life lived well in relation to the whole.

It is, I am well aware, unusual to read the Bible in this manner and with these aspirations, especially today. Contemporary academic prejudices tend to deny that the Bible can still serve as a vital source of human understanding and moral instruction. Since the nineteenth century most biblical scholars, interested less in the meaning and more in the sources of the text, have seen the Hebrew Bible not as a unified literary whole but as an aggregate of separate documents derived from diverse sources. They read it not as a possible source of wisdom regarding enduring human questions but as documentary evidence of the sensibilities and prejudices of an ancient people. In their view, the truths to be learned from the book are not universal and enduring truths about God and man, but merely parochial and historical truths about the beliefs of the ancient children of Israel whose book it once was. This view of the source critics is perfectly compatible with the more recent approach of many literary critics who read the Bible as literature but who do not regard literature as an aid to wisdom. They tend to be interested, for example, in finding cross-cultural comparisons between the biblical myths of the ancient Hebrews and the myths of Gilgamesh and other literary works of the ancient world, but they rarely ponder which, if any, might be closer to the truth of things. Most recently, self-proclaimed politicized scholars, distressed over the continuing authority of the book in some quarters of American society, have not been content just to historicize and relativize the text. Instead, reading it under the influence of, say, Marxist or feminist or environmentalist ideologies, they attack its apparent teachings as racist, sexist, and anthropocentric. In their view the Bible, if taken seriously, turns out to be a source not of wisdom but of dangerous error and folly.

There are, of course, serious readers of Scripture who still see it as a font of wisdom, there for the taking. I have in mind, among others, those fundamentalist Protestants and Orthodox Jews who approach the text piously and who study it reverently. Many of them engage in the hard work of exegesis and interpretation, but they usually do so not in what I am calling the reflective or philosophic spirit. They believe from the start that the text is Holy Writ and that it speaks truly. Often they brush aside textual ambiguity -- say, about creation ex nihilo or about the goodness of sacrifice -- and they incline to the most pious reading of any difficult passage and assign the most pious motives to all of their biblical heroes. Though they gain much of worth from their biblical study, their piety places certain obstacles in the way of a disinterested and philosophic pursuit of the truth, both about the meaning of the text and about the world the text illuminates. Such readers, too, will be suspicious of my approach, and, I hasten to add, for good reason.

The Bible, I freely acknowledge, is not a work of philosophy, ordinarily understood. Neither its manner nor its manifest purposes are philosophical. Indeed, there is even good reason for saying that they are antiphilosophical, and deliberately so.1 Religion and piety are one thing, philosophy and inquiry another. The latter seek wisdom looking to nature and relying on unaided human reason; the former offer wisdom based on divine revelation and relying on prophecy. There is, I readily admit, a reason to be suspicious of a philosophical approach to the Bible.

According to Plato and Aristotle, philosophy begins in wonder and seeks understanding for its own sake:

For it is through wondering that human beings both now begin and at first began to philosophize, wondering in the first place at nearby perplexities, then progressing gradually to raising difficulties also about greater matters, for example, about the occurrences [or changes] of the moon, and those of the sun and stars, and about the coming-into-being of the whole. But the one who is perplexed and who wonders supposes himself to be ignorant (thus the lover of myth [philomythos] is somehow a lover of wisdom [philosophos]; for myths are composed of wonders); so that if it was in order to escape ignorance that men philosophized, it is clear that they pursued knowledge for the sake of understanding, and not for anything useful.

Wonder at perplexity provokes thought, for "all human beings by nature desire understanding." It is especially those natural wonders manifest to sight -- for example, the changing phases of the moon or the wandering motions of the sun and planets through the zodiac -- that prompt the search for wisdom: "for of all the senses, sight most of all makes us know something and reveals many distinctions." Philosophy, born of wonder, seeks ultimately to know the nature and being of things, as well as the reasons or causes why things are the way they are.

For the Bible, in contrast, the beginning of wisdom comes not from wonder but from awe and reverence, and the goal is not understanding for its own sake but rather a righteous and holy life. True, the Psalmist sings that "the heavens declare the glory of God and the sky proclaims His handiwork." But "the beginning of wisdom is the fear [awe; reverence] of the Lord, and good understanding comes to all who practice it." The path to wisdom and happiness lies not through wondrous sights seen by the eye but through awesome command heard by the ear:

The works of His hands are truth and justice; all his precepts are enduring. They are established for ever and ever, they are done in truth and rectitude....He has commanded His covenant for ever; holy and awful is His Name....Happy is the man that fears [reveres] the Lord, that delights greatly in His commandments.

Not the attractive, beautiful, ceaselessly circling, and seemingly imperishable heavenly bodies, but the awe-inspiring, sublime, ceaselessly demanding, and imperishable divine covenant and commandments provide the core of biblical wisdom. The wisdom...