Martin HenryMartin Henry
WHO ARE we? Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? What obligations do we have to fellow humans? How should we best conduct our lives? We want answers to these questions and others. Human beings are, by nature, philosophers. When life is chugging along at a fairly even pace these questions may only vaguely trouble us and we can get rid of them through busyness, hedonistic pleasure, or by elevating emotion above thought. But when we are faced with radical and threatening changes, swift and large, we are forced back to examining fundamentals.
We are at such a moment. But where shall we start. "Aristotle said. Plato said. Some Roman said." The Renaissance and later Enlightenment in a Europe growing into world dominance gave pride of place to Greek and Roman thought and started a process which separated philosophy from theology, from science and from life.
Long before Aristotle's student, Alexander the Great, Hellenized much of the world or wolf-nurtured Romulus and Remus founded Rome which Latinized the world, the most practically influential of all philosophical systems was developed among the tiny Hebrew people precariously stuck between great powers and miraculously surviving as a distinct group until today. Their philosophical system was utilitarian, it served practical ends. And it was religious, so religious that it is now mostly regarded as a religious system. But it deals with all the fundamental issues of philosophy. As Max I. Dimont noted in Jews God and History, "the spiritual, moral and ethical and ideological roots of Western civilisation are embedded in Judaism. The furniture in the Western world is Grecian, but the house in which Western man dwells is Jewish."
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth". Philosophy has to begin somewhere. And if we can see through everything, there will be nothing to see at all, as C.S. Lewis perceptively noted. The Hebrew notion of a single, all-powerful, transcendent God as Creator is almost without parallel among people groups of the ancient world.
EGYPTIAN EMPIRE
The Egyptian Pharaoh, Akhen-aton decreed monotheism, but the Egyptian empire quickly lapsed back into the old polytheism after his death. But such a God is absolutely necessary, as so many modern philosophers have been forced implicitly to acknowledge, if ethics is to have any solid grounding. If God is dead, the only sensible conclusion is nihilism, existential meaninglessness and the arbitrary rule of the Strongman to stave off chronic endemic lawlessness. But how can humans know such an infinite God? They can't from reason alone. To be known, such a God must, and has, revealed Himself, Hebrew thought proclaims. But how can we trust either the conclusions of reason or the proclamations of revelation? Both must be brought to empirical tests in the real world.
The acid test for validating Hebrew thought is its prophetic component. The God of Hebrew thought is a Lawgiver of moral absolutes who proclaims 10 simple precepts as the basis for law. In a radical break from the ethos and practice of the age, the king too was to be governed by the Law. Lex Rex (the law is king) may be Latin, but the principle was long before Rome deeply embedded in Jewish thought. The Law placed great value on human life, regulated sexual expression and family and social life, protected while limiting property rights, and established a cycle of work and rest of profound economic and social significance.
FREEDOM, JUSTICE AND RIGHTS
We give too much credit to the Greeks and Romans for the ideas of freedom, justice and rights. The Hebrew ideas of man, made in the image of God, and of human free choice with accountability to a Moral Authority who will judge his actions by Moral Law are the real roots of these ideas. Hebrew thought has clear ideas of human sin and the need for a Messiah/Saviour and rejects the perfectibility of humans and human society by purely human effort. Hebrew thought sees clear purpose in a linear history which has an imminent end, with Good triumphing over Evil.
In clashing contrast to Hebrew thought is what has been collectively labelled as 'Babylonian' thought (from Babel forward), a metaphor for all that opposes Yahweh and defies His laws. There have been several dramatic head-on clashes of these systems of philosophical ideas and religions, although mixing and merging has been more the order of history. When the Neo-Babylonian Empire fell to the combined armies of the Medes and Persians, the philosopher-priests of the system dispersed with a major settlement in Rome, from where they have influenced Western thought.
The Hebrew philosopher-prophets thundered against Babylon, which was under Divine judgement and doomed to destruction. Babylon was the "habitation of demons" and makes the nations drunk with the wine of her philosophical and religious ideas. "Come out of her My people." There is no question that our moment of history is caught up in a massive clash of old ideas; and ideas have consequences. We cannot remake our world without philosophical foundations, and those foundations will determine how things turn out.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
