Deuteronomy 32. 1-43.

A shorter version of this article was published by the Israel-America Renaissance Institute, March 2, 2012.

 

The Song of Moses is the last thing God commands Moses to tell the Israelites, although not the last thing Moses says to them. Moses’ last words to the Israelites are his blessing, but we do not know that God told him to speak the blessing. God does tell Moses to write the song. This gives the song more authority than the blessing has, and God wants it that way. He wants every child of Israel to hear it and to sing it, to know it.

God chose the Israelites to be His people, among all the peoples of the earth. God set down the terms and conditions of the Israelites’ way of life in His Covenant, His laws. In taking this people as His own, God rules them in the most profound way in which any people can be ruled: God provides the Israelites with a foundation for politics, the activity of ruling and being ruled. He gives them a political regime designed to enable them to serve His purposes and their good..

A political regime consists of four dimensions: the person or persons who rule a community; the institutions by which he or they rule; the common purpose or purposes the rulers intend to accomplish; and the way of life which prevails in that community, given the example the rulers set, the commands they enact, and the directions in which the ruling institutions set them, guide them. A regime fosters a certain character in the people, a character formed as their souls attend to their rulers and live according to their laws and institutions. A good regime will foster good character; the rulers will rule for the good of the ruled. A bad regime’s rulers will rule for their own good, and make the people fear them so much that they will not resist—or so bad rulers hope.

To see this, consider my mother. She was born in Cliffwood Beach, New Jersey in 1912. But what if she had been born of the same parents in Moscow—Russia, not Michigan—that year? It was five years before Lenin and his colleagues changed Russia’s regime with the Bolshevik Revolution. She would have had exactly the same genetic constitution and the same family influences. Yet would she not have grown up with radically different schooling, experiences, expectations? Would she not have been a different person, or at least a different kind of person? Now think of anyone else you know and ask the same questions, make the same kind of comparison. Think of yourself. That is why regimes matter. In many crucial respects, the regime of your time and place makes you who you are.

Who are the Israelites? God’s people. That is who and what they are. God is not only the founder of their regime, as Washington, Jefferson, and others are founders of the American regime; He is their regime, or rather the living and personal center of it: their ruler, their king, now and forever. Through Moses, he sets down their ruling laws and institutions, the form of His regime. And also through Moses, especially through Moses’ example, He shows them the way of life he sets out for them to walk. All three of these dimensions of God’s regime reveal the kind of character God wants His people to have, who He wants them to be. Just as He breathed His spirit into the clay He had formed to make the first man, making man distinct from all the other animals, so God breathed His spirit into the laws and institutions of the Israelites, making them distinct from all the other peoples.

Canaan featured a number of small political communities, allied with and subordinated to Egypt. With the escape of the Israelites, Egypt declined and Canaan succumbed to increasing disorder. Meanwhile, the Israelites declared their subordination not of course to Egypt but to God; the Covenant amounts to a treaty solemnizing that alliance, a treaty they renewed by oath before entering the Promised Land. But this treaty also amounts to something stronger, a constitution, an ‘institutionalization’ of the regime of God for the good, the salvation, of the Israelites. If the basic principle of the treaty is obedience to God, the rightful ruler of the Israelites, the basic principle of the constitution extends that obedience to every aspect of the Israelite way of life while also establishing equality as the principle governing relations among the Israelites themselves. “Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great; ye shall not be afraid of the face of man; for the judgment is God’s: and the cause that is too hard for you, bring it unto me, and I will hear it” (Deuteronomy 1.17). This principle even extends to foreigners who live among the Israelites. God hold all three ‘branches of government’—legislative, executive, and judicial. In a human ruler this would portend tyranny, but God’s unfailing wisdom and justice entitle him to such power.

In liberating the Israelites from Egypt and bringing them to the Promised Land, God does not ‘free’ them in our sense of ‘freedom.’ He does not release them to do whatever they want. There is no such freedom. No one exchanges one regime for no-regime. There is always some form of rule. Even a man alone on a desert island quickly establishes a regime or daily regimen for himself, or he perishes. To achieve a good life, a person or a nation needs wisdom, the practical understanding of how to get from where they are to the right way of life, to the ‘promised land,’ so to speak, of all human striving. Moses sees one big thing: God is the wisest of all, the One who knows man best because He created man, the One who knows what ‘makes man tick’ because He was the one who made man tick in the first place. In choosing the Israelites and legislating for them, not leaving the form of their regime up to the legislators who are all-too-human, God would establish them in the only genuine national greatness.

Thus Moses teaches them:

“Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the LORD my God commanded me, that ye should do so in the land whither ye go to possess it.

“Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.

“For what nation is there so great, who hath God so nigh unto them, as the LORD our God is in all things that we called upon Him for?

“And what nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day?” (Deuteronomy 4.4-8)

In the words of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, “Every other nation became a nation through its land and then made laws for that land. But you became a nation through the Law and received a land for that Law.” Only the Israelites received their spiritual gift before they received their material gift, but that is the only right order in which to receive things, the only order that ‘has its priorities straight.’ The right way of life, the right regime, provides the men and women who live under it both the means of preserving life and habits conducing to the good life because God, the source of all life, is also the source of the true law that guides His people to that way of life and because God is also the living ruler/protector of the God-obeying, Law-abiding people of God. All other peoples practice idolatry, the purpose of which was to draw the supposed deity to the place where the idol stands. But the true God chooses both the place and the people. An idol is literally mindless. Why would any true mind be drawn to it? Why should a human mind be drawn to it? The First Commandment is also first in importance: “Thou shalt have none other Gods before Me” (Deuteronomy 5.6). That sets the human mind straight, sets down the indispensable precondition for the right regime.

The way of life of God’s regime must be lived internally, in your soul, as well as externally, in your actions, or it won’t be lived externally for long. Nothing could be further from the true character of God’s regime than the claim that Israelites were reduced to a condition of rote memorization of and robotic obedience to God’s Law. On the contrary, God show Himself to be supremely alert to the inner lives of His people, of how they respond to His rule. The Israelites tell Moses that they have heard him. God heard them and said to Moses,

“I have heard the voice of the words of this people, which they spoken unto thee: they have well said all that they have spoken.

“O that there were such an heart in them, that they would fear me, and keep all my commandments always, that it might be well with them, and with their children for ever!” (Deuteronomy 5.28-29)

“Well with them”: God wants not mere life, but the good life, happiness, for His people. Fear of God and love for God should animate the soul of every Israelite, leading each to love but never to fear one another, each an image of that God but not himself God. Every regime that does not depend upon fear must depend upon mutual trust among its citizens. Shared trust in God, shared obedience to His Law, fosters trust among men.

Israelites live under a king, but He is a constitutional monarch. He rules His people through laws, and limits His own actions by treaty, which is a form of law. As Creator, God has no duties in principle. But He does have duties He chooses, announced in His Covenant. He does so for the benefit of His people, as a good parent rules his children, not as a master rules slaves. Israelites were well-situated to know the difference between parental rule and masterly rule; they had already experienced masterly rule in Egypt. In exchanging Pharaoh’s masterly rule for God’s kingly rule they went from tyranny to justice.

However, if God, being all-powerful, cannot successfully be mocked or finally thwarted, He can be disobeyed. Being made in the image of God, God’s people—all peoples—can defy his just rule and attempt to escape all rule, achieve anarchy, or attempt to rule themselves, in some other regime. Further, if God’s rule will truly benefit the ruled, they must consent to it—recognize its wisdom and justice. The Israelites must allow the wisdom and justice of God to enter into their souls. God and Moses tell the Israelites of the blessings, the benefits of such obedience, and then warn them at some length of the curses, the injuries, consequent to disobedience. It is for them to choose.

They choose to ratify the Covenant. But God is not satisfied with this outward consent. He wants the Israelites’ secret, inner consent. He wants His people to love their life-giving God, the One who loves them, gives them life. You did not create yourself; God knows you better than you know yourself and loves you better than you love yourself; because He knows you better than you know yourself He can love you better than you love yourself. He knows what is best for you, better than you do. Moses, who is about to die, without even entering the Promised Land he had led the Israelites toward for forty years, nonetheless urges his people to choose life, the best life, the way of life God has marked out for them in His Covenant.

Moses follows his own teaching; he obeys God. Upon God’s command, he publicly designates Joshua as his successor. If Moses had been a petty, small-souled man he would have made it difficult for Joshua to succeed him. But he tells the Israelites: This is my man, and this is God’s man, now follow him. He further follows God’s commands by writing down the laws, so that the regime will not only have a human ruler designated by God but a set of institutions by which they will be ruled. These laws are written down so that everyone will know them, not only the priests. The equality principle extends to Israelite law and Israelite institutions. Moses leaves the Israelites with a fully-formed regime before they enter the land God promised, and will now deliver.

But God is still not satisfied. God reveals some things to man, but conceals other things. Man can disobey God, but he cannot conceal anything from Him. God tells Moses, “I know their imagination.” He knows that they intend to “forsake me, and break my Covenant which I have made with them” (Deuteronomy 31.16). There are no secrets from God; He knows the people have not really chosen Him and His regime. “For when I shall have brought them into the land which I sware unto their fathers, that floweth with milk and honey; and they shall have eaten and filled themselves, and waxen fat; then will they turn unto other gods, and serve them, and provoke me, and break my Convenant” (Deuteronomy 31.20). Their secret desire for the life of the body has already overcome their public profession of  desire for the life according to the way of God, the life of the spirit. They want the fruits of the land without the life-giving God who gave them the land, and created the land that bears the fruits they would consume.

“Now therefore write ye this song for you, and teach it the children of Israel: put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for me against the children of Israel” (Deuteronomy 31.19). A witness: The people of Israel will be tried and punished by the just God for failing to deal justly with God. Unlike human founders, the Founder-God never dies, as his founding agent, Moses, must do. With God’s founding, with his monarchic regime, there can be no real ‘crisis of succession,’ as the Ruler is eternal. But what of his agent, his human ‘co-founder’?

Consider, for a moment, what Moses must think and feel at this moment, He is 120 years old. He has devoted the final third of his life to teaching the ways of God to the children of Israel—Israel, who held onto God, despite injury, in order to obtain God’s blessing, Israel, who would not let go of God. Israel’s children are all too ready to let go of God. Moses never let go, either, continuing to obey God even after God punished him, preventing him from entering the Promised Land. Now, Moses learns, his whole project will fail. The children of Israel will enter the Promised Land, because God follows through on His promises, upholds His side of the Covenant, but they will betray God and Moses, be killed and driven off. Why should Moses obey God now, write a final song, sing it to this wayward people? One of the great rabbis has written, “You wish to sing praise while the crown is on your head. I would like to hear how you sing after being slapped in the face.” God has now slapped Moses down twice. And yet Moses still obeys.

He does so because he cares more about God’s mission than he does about any mission of his own. Like God, Moses cares about the very long term, when God’s people will return to God, working with Him to constitute the regime of God. The work of justice is not the work of a day, or even of forty years. It will turn out to be the work of millennia. God can wait; Moses, who can no longer wait, nonetheless remains faithful in his consent to the regime of Him who alone is truly just.

Moses had sung to the Israelites before: at the beginning of the exodus, at the parting of the Red Sea by God, at the beginning of the liberation of the Israelites from the regime of tyranny. Now, at the end of the forty-year journey, he sings the song of the founding of the regime of God. Songs are good for liberation, and good for foundings, because songs lodge in your memory. You want people to remember the terms and conditions of their liberation, you need a stirring declaration of independence. Equally, you want people to remember the principles of their founding, the foundation of their regime. You want those principles in their souls, even if, especially if, they are tempted to depart from those principles—as they always are. One way to get a principle into a soul is to sing it in.

The founding principle of Israel is not a principle but a person, the LORD. “Just and right is He.” The LORD is so fundamental that Moses calls him the Rock, whose work is perfect. God had punished Moses after trying to draw water from a rock, instead of relying on the true Rock, the Creator who lives above all rocks and all water. As Rabbi Ari Kahn has written, by calling God the Rock, the Rock of all rocks, so to speak, Moses accepts the justice of that punishment, the logic of preferring the Creator to the things the Creator creates.

Moses says that the teaching of his song will drop as the rain on the grass. He wants his song to have the same effect on Israel as the rain has upon the grass; he wants the earth to “grass grass,” as the Book of Genesis puts it. He wants a kind of new genesis. He knows he will not get one, as the unstable and crooked people will defy the eternal Rock. The grass will not grow; it will wither, refusing God, the source of its life. This is why Moses begins the song by addressing neither God nor the people but the Heavens and the Earth—God’s creation, the result of God’s life-giving intention from the moment of Creation, on.

But Moses soon addresses the Israelites, sternly. “Do ye thus requite the LORD, O foolish people and unwise?” As befits a political community, Moses says “requite,” using the language of justice. Because the people do not fear God they think and act unwisely, imprudently, failing to perceive their own good, failing to honor their benefactor, “the father that hath bought thee,” made thee, established thee, as a father does his child.

Aristotle, the wisest of political philosophers, identifies two kinds of monarchies, two kinds of regimes ruled by one person. The regime ruled by the one for the benefit of the one is a tyranny; it resembles the rule of the master over the slave. The regime ruled by the one for the benefit of the ruled is a kingship, resembling the rule of the parent over the child. The children of Israel are the children of the man who held fast to God. If they let go, they de-constitutionalize themselves. Or so it seems for now.

Moses sings, “Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations: ask thy father, and he will show thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee.” Who else could know about the days of old, in this society with no knowledge of books? The elders are the living links to father Israel, and before him father Abraham, and to God, the living Father of fathers, who established Israel as the man whose children God would choose for Himself.

“When the most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel. For the LORD’s portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance.” Man’s injustice in building the Tower of Babel provoked God to separate humanity into nations. God then justly gave each nation its inheritance, as a father allocates an inheritance to so many sons. He set the bounds of the several nations in relation to the population of Israel. Jacob, who wrestles with God and holds on, inherits God’s blessing and becomes ‘Israel’; at the same time, God ‘inherits’ Jacob. God and Israel belong to one another.

Parents and children also belong to one another. “As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings: So the LORD alone did lead [Israel] and there was no strange god with him.” God did not set Israelites down on the land but lifted them up. As the eagle forces her eaglets out of the nest, catching them on her wings, God makes Israel “ride with him on the high places of the earth.” The advantage of the heights is that you can survey all the earth, select its choicest riches, the fattest lambs, the finest rams, and “the pure blood of the grape,” that is, the best wine, the red wine symbolic of the blood that is life. The eagle tends to her nestlings but readies them to see the whole of Creation, to select the choicest parts of it for themselves, and to deserve what they choose because she has nurtured in them the courage that lets them open their eyes and look at the world without fear, and thus really to see it, calmly and clearly.

Now Moses lets the Israelites know that he knows their hearts, their secret thoughts, having learned from God. “But Jeshuran waxed fat, and kicked: thou art waxen fat, thou art grown thick, thou art covered with fatness; then he forsook God which made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation.” The Israelites would eat the fat of the land, the best of Creation, but then grow fat in the bad sense—surfeiting themselves on the physically best, ignoring the hard, demanding spiritual best: the God who created all physical things. Like spoiled children they will cease fearing their Father, kicking at Him in their tantrum.

When one does not fear God he does not stop fearing altogether. He fears false gods: “They provoked him to jealousy with strange gods, with abominations they provoked him to anger,” sacrificing to devils, gods their fathers did not fear. But such gods did not form you. They are not yours, and you are not theirs; they lack a father’s love of their own. They are not the eagle or the rock; they are neither He who soars to the heights, taking His people with Him, to see all Creation, nor are they the One who underlies everything, the permanent foundation of all Creation and especially of that portion of His Creation that is most like Himself, man, and of that portion of men most ‘his own’: Israel. “Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and has forgotten God that formed thee.” The mind, the spiritual part of man, the part God breathed into the clay—this is what the fattened, spoiled child has covered up. He has turned his mind toward the satiation of the senses. What is more, if he ever stops fearing his false gods he will not kill his fears altogether; he will begin fearing death, and other men.

The true parent is jealous of the beloved child who goes astray. “And when the LORD saw it, he abhorred them, because of the provoking of his sons, and of his daughters. And He said, I will hide my face from them, I will see what their end shall be: for they are a turnabout generation, children in whom is no faith.” God will send them men to fear, but men who “are not a people,” a “nation of fools” who will drive them out of the Promised Land. Rabbi Hirsch suggests that this paradoxical ‘non-people’ means a nomadic people, a people with no land of its own, such as the marauding Amalekites. Whoever these people may be, they will number as one missile among a barrage of curses: fire, arrows, hunger, beasts, and serpents. “The sword without and terror within, shall destroy both the young man and the virgin, the suckling also with the man of gray hairs.” No fear of God? Very well then: fear of everyone and everything that can harm. “I would scatter them into corners, I would make the remembrance of them to cease from among men.” They will be the nomads, now. Having forgotten Me, they will be forgotten, no longer one people with one true Ruler, one set of just laws, one right way of life.

This would be an entirely just punishment, were the Israelites all that God needed to consider. But they are not. God sees that if He allowed Israel’s enemies to scatter and destroy His people, the Amalekites would take credit for Israel’s defeat. Were the Amalekites not “a nation void of counsel,” of wisdom, they would understand that they, a no-people, could hardly overcome a people blessed with a rightly-framed regime on its own land. The Amalekites’ regime and all of the regimes that make themselves the enemies of Israel and therefore of God are regimes that rest not on the Rock of salvation but on the soil of Sodom and Gomorrah. Their fruits are bitter and poisonous, not life-giving, not from God, the Source of all Life. God intends Israel to enlighten the nations; Israel’s utter destruction, just ‘in itself,’ would ruin God’s ‘geopolitical’ plan for His Creation, above all for mankind.

Not the Amalekites but God wields the sword of just vengeance. He will punish the Israelites; He will also punish their enemies. His justice towards Israel will not permit the elevation of Israel’s enemies forever. “For the LORD will judge His people, and repent Himself for His servants, when He seeth that their power is gone, and there is none shut up, or left.” He will not merely punish but educate: “And He shall say, Where are their gods, their rock in whom they trusted, which did eat the fat of their sacrifices, and drank the wine, of their drink-offerings?” They are nowhere, and all peoples shall see that they are nowhere.

Moses began his song with the desire to be heard. By its end its hearers have heard what God wants them to see. God has laid out His proofs, made His case before the jury of mankind. “See now that I even I, am He, and there is no god with Me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand. For I lift up my hand to heaven”—swearing, as in a court of law—”and say, I live for ever.”

God is more than the witness in this court. He is also judge and executioner in defense of the laws He has made and handed down. “If I whet my glittering sword, and mine hand take hold on judgment; I will render vengeance to mine enemies, and will repay them that hate me. I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh; and that with the blood of the slain and of the captives, from the beginning of revenges upon the enemy.”

Far from mere threats, the promised acts of God give mankind its only genuine hope. “Rejoice, O ye nations, with His people: for He will avenge the blood of His servants, and will render vengeance to His adversaries, and will be merciful unto His land, and to His people” Without such just punishment, dark gods would rule. The law of God expresses the love of God. God stands ready to enforce that love, through that law.

And so Moses, knowing he will never live under God’s regime in God’s promised land, ends his song and tells his people to obey the laws of that regime in that land. Only such command and such consent, from one generation to the next, can save them. “For it is not an empty thing for you; because it is your life: and through this thing ye shall prolong your days in the land.”

 

Augustine: Confessions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960. William Watts translation, revised by W. H. D. Rowse.

 

If the liberation offered by the liberal arts culminates in the philosophic life, and the philosophic life culminates in in in the trial and death of the philosopher at the command of the city, Christianity demurs. Christianity begins in humility; not wonder but fear of the Lord is the beginning of its wisdom. As Ann Hartle observed some years ago, a confession is the opposite of an apologia. Confession is humble, the opposite of presumptuous self-defense (VII. xx. 395).

Augustine devotes the first book of his Confessions entirely to prayer. His only judge is God—not the people, not his philosophic friends, least of all himself. And he admits his guilt forthwith.

Early education is a metaphor for man’s relationship with God: no one wants to go to school, but it’s good for you (I. viii. 30). God’s school is much better for you than the schools of men. The liberal arts are mere ornaments of pride; the truth is humblingly simple. Two plus two equals four, no matter what rhetorical embellishments human learning can add. Rhetoric stems from vanity, the desire “to content the eyes of mortals” instead of God (II. I. 65). Men do evil apparently for the thrill of liberation, love passion for the sake of the feeling of passion, but really only to please other men (II. iii-viii). Philosophy or the love of wisdom is only the most refined form of love for human admiration. (The ‘modern’ or Machiavellianized version of this claim is Nietzsche’s: philosophy in only the most refined form of the will to power.)

Augustine’s philosophy and his Manichaeanism contradicted each other. Philosophy can refute false religious doctrines (V. iii. 211; VI. xiv. 259, 261). False religions typically make claims to control the natural world, but philosophy really does understand nature as it stands, if not in its origin. Pseudo-religious niaiseries quickly succumb to philosophic scrutiny.

The vanity of public display, the rhetoric of the philosophic life, caused Augustine to become “a great riddle to myself” (IV. iv. 161). Contra the philosophers, philosophy cannot bring self-knowledge precisely because it must become politic and is at core social, vain. One cannot know what never stops changing: the self is driven by the passions, especially the passions of the crowd. In the central book of the Confessions Augustine confesses, “I was not able to discern my very self” (VII. I. 335). “I stood with my back to the light, and with my face towards those things that receive that light” (IV. xvi. 199). This is Socrates’ image, but Augustine replaces the Good with God. “The good that you love is from Him” (IV. xii. 181).

Turning from the crowd, Augustine examines his own soul. He sees that he has a will, which chooses good and evil (VII. iii. 343). Over the mind that examines itself and the rest of the soul is the light of God. ‘Over’ means not only ‘superior to’ but ‘prior to’: Whence came this soul, this willing mind, if not from a creator-God, that is, one who first of all wills? If corruption is a fading-away of being, then is genesis not the source of goodness, of strength of being or virtue? The Creator who can create such a being as man makes Augustine not wonder like a philosopher but “tremble with love and horror” (VII. x. 373). “I learned to rejoice with trembling” at the thought of such a powerful God (VII. xxi. 397). “Thou has created us for thyself, and our heart cannot be quieted till it may find repose in thee” (I. I. 3). Although introspection is necessary, it is insufficient. You cannot know yourself directly; your own passions preclude such knowledge. You can only know yourself by knowing your Creator, who knows you because He created you. Seneca advises: Let your true ancestors be the philosophers. Augustine replies: Your true father is God.

Both the philosophers and the Christians see the conflicts of the human soul. Philosophers see a battle among the elements of the soul itself—reason versus spirit versus appetites. Christians see the soul more as a battlefield where spiritual beings contend for rule: angels and demons, God and Satan. But in Augustine these spiritual beings approach the soul through the mind in the form of opinions. Bad people are not by nature any worse than good people; good people too are by nature fallen, inclined toward evil. Bad people are rather those who believe bad opinions; good people are those who believe good opinions (VIII. x. 451). In this, Augustine follows Paul in I Timothy 1:10 on “sound doctrine.)

This is why Christianity must open itself to philosophy with deadly seriousness, while at the same time must firmly rule it. Without a detailed legal code or praxis, as in Judaism or Islam, Christianity faces a paradox. “The unlearned start up and take heaven by violence, and we with all our learning, see how easily we wallow in flesh and blood!” (VIII. viii. 443). The unlearned easily accept right opinion. The learned must think before the accept, and are easily misled by corrupt thought-processes. Thus the audience of the Confessions cannot be God, to whom it seems to be addressed—why confess to an omniscient being?—but learned men, students of the liberal arts (II. iii. 71).

We happy few? You will find your true friends only among those who are truly good. Aristotle says as much, but Augustine adds: The truly good share the same opinions, they share the Holy Spirit (IV. iv. 159). Given the immortality in Heaven of right-minded souls, you will never lose a true friend. (I once talked to a Christian college professor who regretted the death of an unbelieving friend because “I’ll never see her again.” Augustine would have had to convince him that she had not been a true friend. Augustinianism need not take second place to Stoicism in the severity of the love and the liberation it offers.)

How then shall the learned few be brought to believe? Unlike Socrates, who knows he does not know and lives with that knowledge, the young Augustine sought certain knowledge (VI. iv. 279). He wanted to be as certain in spiritual matters as he was of arithmetic truths. God rectified his heart by causing him to reflect upon the many things he believed that he could not see; “we could do nothing at all in this life” without such beliefs (VI. v. 283), such as reports of reliable witnesses of cities we have never seen and of medical remedies we have never tried. The reports of Scripture, preached “among all the nations” (VI. v. 283), supplements the human-all-too-human inability to find the truth by “evident reason” (VI. v. 285). Unassisted human reason cannot account for its own genesis, and must therefore depend upon reports. What the Bible reports are the right opinions brought by the Holy Spirit which alone make human souls good—happy because they have rediscovered their true nature or origin as images of God.

Human souls confirm the truth of the Holy Spirit not first of all by thinking but by first of all believing—by gaining a knowledge available only by means of believing because it is a knowledge granted, not achieved. To Socrates Augustine replies: What you know you do not know is what you most need to know, and you can know it only if you first believe the true reports of the Holy Spirit as He spoke through His prophets. Only after you believe those reports is the Holy Spirit likely to speak to you as well, although the Holy Spirit has been known to speak in a still, small voice to unbelievers. Only then will the question of human origins be answered for you. The right questions are not ‘What is?’ (the ancient philosophers) or ‘How?’ (the modern philosophers) but ‘Who?’ and ‘Where from?’

This is why, before philosophizing, Augustine prays to the most authoritative Person: “Courage, my mind, and press on strongly. God is our helper, he made us, and not we ourselves.” (XI. xxvii. 264). Unassisted human reason can understand nature ‘as it stands,’ refuting the charlatanries of astrologers. But unassisted human reason cannot understand the origin of nature, cannot understand nature as a whole as it exists in time.

Augustine’s meditations on time (Book XI0 and on substance (Book XII) both concern origins. His meditation on time is a meditation on the beginning of time, where the Bible narrative itself begins. This meditation is a ‘baptized’ version of the philosopher’s ‘eternal present’—now truly eternal and truly present because Augustine acknowledges the Creator-God. The meditation on substance is a meditation on chaos, the first substance, the stuff the Creator-God shaped.

To be, to know, to will: One being ‘does’ all these; the knowledge of the Creator-God is creative as no ‘god of the philosophers’ can be. What the Creator-God wills is absolutely coterminous with what He does and knows. Human art is only weakly analogous to this; it is merely productive, not truly ‘original’ or creative. The coterminousness of being, knowing, and willing are more analogous to the three-personed God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. A being that is knowing and willing—whose very being deliberately creates—is one person and three.

For a Christian, to love wisdom is to love God. But this love differs from philosophic love in two ways. To love God is to love a person. A person is not a form, nor is it ‘the Good’—which, in Plato, somehow accounts for the forms. A form can be ‘seen’; it is an object of noēsis. A person can be seen externally, but not fully understood by sight. A person’s soul also can be known as it were externally, by classifying it as to its ‘type.’ And a person can be known intimately but remain surprising in ways that a form, once known, cannot be. God says: “My thoughts are not your thoughts.” And some of God’s creations—angels, men—can surprise God, rebel against Him, change their minds and thereby induce God to change His mind—as he does more than once in the Bible. God knows man much better than man knows God, but man, being a person too, having free will, retains a touch of opacity even in the eyes of God.

The Christian love of God differs from philosophic love in a second way. The Confessions is is no more a Symposium than it is an Apology. To desire the wisdom and power of God would lead not to the Cross but to Machiavelli. Agapic love is neither erotic nor ‘philiac,’ friendly. God is not our beloved or our friend. Even as God does not love human beings erotically or as a friend—why would he need or desire or buddy up with an inferior?—God properly loves man agapically, as does man love God. Agapic love can be between unequals. In Greek, agape refers to brotherly love, or the mature fondness of a husband and wife; it is the only kind of love associated with justice.

God’s knowledge of man is superior to man’s knowledge of himself because God is the creator of man. “There is some thing of man, that the very spirit of man that is in him, knoweth not. But thou knowest all of him, who made him.” (X. iv. 85)  To create is to know in a way that the introspective philosopher wants but cannot do; it surpasses even the self-knowledge that comes from dialogue with other people. God’s knowledge is the only kind that is intrinsically efficacious, a perfect fusion of theory and practice. Machiavelli and his followers (most spectacularly, the Germans) attempt to know man by making him a self-creating being. The results are more impressive than felicitous.

At best, man knows by seeing, first, that the senses collect data but do not bring knowledge. He then sees that sounds are not the things signified by the sounds, as sounds differ from language. Neither sense impressions nor words by themselves yield knowledge. As for the operations of the mind, memory in the simplest sense—memory of sense impressions including those made by words—does not bring knowledge. Animals have such memory. To know, one needs the Platonic notion of ‘remembering.’ ‘Remembering’ or seeing the forms must then be reconciled with the God of the Bible. Unlike such disguised ‘Christian’ Platonists as Clement of Alexandria and Origen, Augustine really does adapt Platonism to Christianity (and not the other way around) by asserting that the core memory is the ‘memory’ of God in oneself, the self created in the image of God. This image is not darkened by ‘selfishness’—actually false selfishness or love of corporeal things. Love of things aims at the created, not the Creator. Just as God’s crating is as much will as knowledge, so man must “make choice of thee” in order to know God (X. ii. 77). Only in such choosing can such knowledge be had.

Against Plato, Augustine maintains that there can be no noble lie. God and a lie “cannot be possessed together” (X. xli. 199) precisely because God is a creator. Divine truth is persuasive by itself—creative or transforming. When he writes “On Lies” Augustine permits, at most, misdirection. Lies are human pseudo-creations, apings of God—private, one’s own, like sin. God and Word are seamless; His creating Word is eternal, wisdom’s self (XI. ix. 229). To the philosophers, by contrast, wisdom has no self. It is an attribute of a self.

Augustine answers not only Plato but Nietzsche and Foucault, in advance. To Nietzsche he says: Wisdom and life are one in God’s creating Word (XI. ix). Light is the first of all created things because God’s mind is enlightening to all His creations. Christianity is therefore not Platonism for the people. It is the salvation of the philosophers, saved from their own inability to explain origins. How can any will to power be separated from some one who wills it?

Against Foucault, Augustine warns that the desire to know is “more dangerous” than sensual temptation—”of making experiments with the help of the body” (X. xxxv. 175). Foucault therefore in a way does not love too dangerously but not dangerously enough. To attempt to combine the desire to know with sensual experiment would misdirect mind and body alike, ending in un-creating wordlessness. The better course is, “Be angry and sin not”—angry at one’s self for its clottishness (IX. iv. 21).

A genuine liberal education would aim at—or, more modestly, keep before it—the angelic ideal. Angels read not books but the face of God. Angels “always behold thy face.” “They read, they choose, they love. They are ever reading; and that never passes away which they read; because by choosing and by loving, they read the very unchangeableness of thy counsel.” (XIII. xv. 407) As for Christians, they should follow a special form of the Biblical injunction to increase and multiply: They should spread the Word as preserved in the Book of books. For man, believing is seeing (after hearing); for God, seeing and speaking is creating.

It is very difficult for a philosopher to convert to Biblical religion. Intellect, reasoning, aim at principles, even as the senses aim at empirical substances. A Biblical orientation elevates the dialogical or ‘political’ element of Platonic philosophy to a ‘metaphysical’ level. Dialogue becomes a meta-cosmic condition, but it is not a dialogue among equals—even less than a Socratic dialogue is a dialogue among equals. Although not political in Aristotle’s distinctive sense—as the dialogue between God and man more resembles fatherly rule than it does the reciprocity of ruling and being ruled between husbands and wives or among fellow-citizens—it is political in the more capacious sense of personal rule, including rule by God via His laws. In this, philosophy retains a place, as a handmaiden, because creation also means separation; in Christianity if not in Judaism you do have nature, if in a weaker sense than in ‘the ancients,’ many of whom supposed nature to be eternal. (In saying the personal is the political, modern feminism follows Christianity. But by focusing politics narrowly on human ‘power relations’ its atheism deprives it of Christian metaphysics and classical rationalism. Indeed, its irrationalism tends to give feminism its secular-fanatic air, its ‘German’ tendency to conflate the least lovely elements of philosophy and Biblicism.)

The Confessions shows the difficulty philosophers and ‘intellectuals’ more generally have in converting, reorienting their souls, away from nature, from principles, and toward personhood as a metaphysical truth.

Damascene Christensen: Not of This World: The Life and Teachings of Fr. Seraphim Rose. Forestville, CA.: Fr. Seraphim Rose Foundation, 1995.

 

Note: Father Seraphim Rose (1934-1982) was a convert to Russian Orthodox Christianity. Born Eugene Rose in San Diego, California, he entered the Orthodox Church in 1962, eventually living a life of strict asceticism modeled on Eastern monastic way of life. He was a prolific author, translator, and publisher, and above all Christian witness until his untimely death.

 

“The City of God is captive and stranger in the earthly city.”
–St. Augustine

Augustine means that the City of God is persecuted on earth, by the earthly. But he also and equally means, the City of God is here. Not of course in the fullest sense of its re-founding, an event that awaits the return of Jesus Christ and finally the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, ruled by Him. Rather, the City of God is here insofar as the Holy Spirit recruits citizens who live on earth now, and will never be silenced. Christians are not of this world because they fear God as ruler more than they fear any man or group of men as rulers; their hope rests in God, even as they cherish unworldly hopes for man.

What do the Christian fear and the Christian hope mean in the United States of America? Father Seraphim Rose never stopped raising this question. Through his life and the example he left, he built the foundation of an answer with the living materials of Scriptural doctrine. In defending St. Augustine against detractors within the Church, Father Seraphim defended nothing less than his own experience, his own living witness, as “captive and stranger” in his own earthly city.

Long before knowing what he needed, Eugene Rose knew what he did not need, or want. He did not need the America of his place and time: California in the 1950s, the drive by, drive-in way of life. Looking back, some might mistake the place for a paradise during a time of innocence. There is pleasure in rootlessness. ‘Fifties California might be described as ‘Lockeland’ with beaches, a place in which the life of comfortable self-preservation commended by the English philosopher needed little of the sober and industrious habits of mind and heart Locke judged necessary and commendable. This laid-back Lockeland had a religion of sorts, and Eugene Rose called it by its right name: “comfortable Christianity.” Comfortable Christianity’s faithful went to church Sunday morning while looking forward to the real highlight of the week, football. Comfortable Christianity prefers compassion to charity, eros to agape; it goes along to get along.

Eugene Rose was born in but not of this bourgeois world. He was well-named. ‘Eugene’ means well-born, and this young man was what Thomas Jefferson called a natural aristocrat. A natural aristocrat’s soul wants not pleasure and comfort but honor and victory. It is spirited, not erotic. Depending on the direction it takes, it may despise the weak or defend them; either way, it will not rest satisfied with weakness. At every one of his way-stations to the Cross, Eugene Rose enacted his aristocratic, spirited nature: first Spinoza, disciple of Machiavelli, that derider of effete Christianity; then Nietzsche, the manly and eloquent ‘Anti-Christ,’ condemning Pauline Christianity with the ferocity of Luther attacking the Papacy. Eugene Rose later saw that real atheism is both spiritual and spirited—a passionate wrestling with the angel of God. Music, too, is the sound of passion, of a spiritedness that wants to leap beyond this world, that hates finitude, loves liberty; and he loved music. Even his heavy drinking at this time fit the portrait; I never knew a serious drinker who didn’t have a chip on his shoulder. Self-destructive rage is as spiritual and as spirited as determined atheism and the impassioned love of music; such rage is a critique of the self, a symptom of dissatisfaction of the earthly city. From the first Eugene was, as his biographer tells us, “a warrior of the mind and spirit.”

The soul of the spirited man cannot sustain itself on spiritedness alone. Hitler went from conquest to mass murder to suicide. Nietzsche’s soul descended to madness. the soul of Alan Watts, Eugene Rose’s teacher, descended to slack eroticism, enabling his student to see through the hypocrisy of the ‘Sixties—that bizarre pose of high moralism covering soft self-indulgence—before the ‘Sixties began. His own hedonism was characteristically spirited: unsatisfied and unsatisfiable, resulting in a sort of Hell-on-earth or demonic possession. When he saw that spiritedness and spirituality can degrade as well as ennoble, Eugene Rose became ripe for the sanity of Orthodox Christianity.

But not immediately. He did not want to be his father, a kind, well-meaning man, a Christian man, but lacking his son’s fire. Frank Rose was an American democrat, the sort of man Tocqueville describes as tyrannized by public opinion, Nietzsche’s “Last Man,” who has replaced the morning prayer with the morning newspaper, a man who says, above all else, ‘Please do not hurt me.’ Frank Rose was not a bad man. He was a kindly, sympathetic man. But neither was he a strong man, a ‘man’s man,’ as people said in those days. Not the sanity of Orthodox Christianity but the sanity of Chinese tradition, the down-to-earth sobriety of the Tao and Confucius, attracted Eugene Rose before Orthodoxy did. “The end of learning is to be a good man, he teacher Alan Watts told him; “respect is the regulating force of love.” Aristocratic, yes: but the wisdom of China was not enough for Eugene Rose. The real answer to a spirited soul must be a personal God, whom China does not recognize. (Watt’s “Impersonal Self” is a flat contradiction in terms.) Only a personal God can care, can accept honor, can show favor by His Providence. To this God, to the God of the Bible as found in the living tradition of the Orthodox Church, Eugene Rose finally turned.

How to be an Orthodox Christian in Lockeland-by-the-Beach? America, let alone California, has no long tradition of Orthodoxy, as Russia does. A false ecumenism along the lines of the World Council of Churches—really the Worldly Council of Churches—could never satisfy a manly (or womanly) Christian. As monks recently ordained in the Russian Orthodox Church, Eugene Rose and his Russian émigré friend, Gleb Podmoshensky, set sail on an ocean that was anything but pacific.

Taking the Russianness of Russian Orthodoxy most seriously, they revered czarism, hearkening to the words of a Russian who warned that “a government must rule by the Grace of God or the will of the people.” They perhaps did not recall that this was precisely Lincoln’s point when he confronted Stephen Douglas’s argument for ‘popular sovereignty’ in the 1850s. Lincoln knew (having learned it from reading Jefferson) that popular sovereignty must itself be governed by “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” or it can excuse slavery or any other evil—”blow out the moral lights around us,” as Lincoln said. Vox populi is not vox Dei. Neither Eugene Rose nor Gleb Podmoshensky had a teacher on America, which by their time and in their place had wandered far from its best principles, enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. And so they had to find their way slowly, according to the Spirit of God, not the ‘spirit of the times.’

They did find their way. His friend saw the beginning of an answer: The earthly city is here, but so is the City of God. The City of God is not so much to be founded (although it is to be re-founded and perfected). It has already been founded by the Prince of Peace, the Archegos or Founder. This spiritual city, this spiritual regime, maybe be easier to rediscover at a distance from the secular cities; hence their move to the fruitful ‘desert’ of the California forest, and their cultivation their of “the desert ideal.” In so moving, the two men faced their most dangerous challenge not from indifferent, indulgent America but from their own archbishop. Once again, Gleb Podmoshensky proved to be at least as ‘American’ as his friend: The archbishop “wants to take your own piece of American earth, for which you labored, in order to kick you off it!” What you earn by your labor is yours. So spoke Locke, so spoke Jefferson, so spoke Lincoln; so spoke a Russian émigré who knew why he wanted to be in America. The archbishop wanted these spiritual brothers to be dependent upon himself, rather as George III wanted to bring the American colonists to heel. He wanted to compel obedience for the ostensible good of the souls of these young monks. (Similarly, the divine right of kings, asserted by the English, was very far from a despicable doctrine; it was intended as a framework for Christian peacemaking, as Robert Filmer makes clear in his Patriarchia. The problem remains the same, however: Where do wholesome obedience and due humility end, servility and cowardice begin?) In modern terms, the ethos of the archbishop is the ethos of bureaucracy, the dream of the false elder who, in the words of I. M. Kontzevich, “eclipses God by means of himself.”

The brothers did the American, as well as the Christian thing. They declared their independence. There are no ‘masters’ and ‘slaves’ in the Church. The master/slave dialectic is Hegelian and Marxist, not Christian. “To meekly bow down to tyranny, most especially when this tyranny only destroys a God-pleasing work and extinguishes the Christian and monastic spirit in its victims—is certainly only a parody and mockery of Orthodoxy and monasticism,” Brother Eugene remarked, in the spirit of God and with the spiritedness of the Continental Congress of 1776. “The canons were made for man and not man for the canons”; “above the canons is the spirit that inspired them,” namely, the spirit of the Creator-God, and of His laws and the laws He put into nature. Above the United States Constitution, Lincoln said, is the Declaration of Independence, affirming the self-evident, God-endowed rights of every human being.

The author of the Declaration of Independence was no Christian, although many of those who signed his declaration were. The Declaration is deliberately crafted to form the foundation of a political alliance between religious and secular men. As such, it can be overbalanced fatally in the direction of secularism, whether of a vox populi that commands as if it were the vox Dei, or of a bureaucracy seeking to instantiate Hegel’s ‘Absolute Spirit,’ which is anything but holy. It took Lincoln to see the spiritual dimension of the American regime. Democracy, Lincoln said, was the desire to be neither master nor slave, but a self-governing citizen under God. The United States Constitution, the letter of the law, is not enough. Only a rededication of Americans to the principles of the Declaration could renew the spirit of the law, bringing “a new birth of freedom.” Brother Eugene and Brother Gleb asked, If monasticism is not for the salvation of souls, then what is it for? Lincoln asked, If America is not for self-government in accordance with the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, then what is it for?

And what is asceticism, if not a declaration of independence from the world, the flesh, and the devil? For Brother Eugene, rechristened Father Seraphim, self-government was the chance for victory in the spiritual warfare, in which war he enlisted in the army of God. Whatever they may say, tyrants never enlist in the army of God. Stalin asked Churchill, sneeringly: “How many divisions has the Pope?” Churchill repeated the question to Pius XII, who rejoined, “Tell my son Joseph he shall meet my divisions in eternity.” To Pius XII, Father Seraphim might have replied, “Those divisions are not yours, but God’s. It is for us to soldier on, not to command.” This suggests that in declaring one’s independence from the earthly city, one must not only assert oneself. Nor must one only assert God’s law. One must also repent. Every declaration of independence is also and more importantly a declaration of dependence. Self-government is not autonomy. Self-government is aligning one’s soul with God’s government, to “acquire the mind” of the Holy Fathers, while recognizing that we will not soon live up to God’s government. The warning of St. Theophan the Recluse should resound in the ears of every American Christian: When royal government falls, self-government emerges. If it this is nothing more than government of, by, and for the self, the government of humans who imagine themselves self-sufficient, self-government will fail. There is no such thing as self-government in this sense. There is only government by God or by Satan. The City of God is captive and stranger here, not of the earth but still very much down-to-earth. Only in this living experience of Christianity here can a genuinely American Orthodoxy be built and sustained.

At their next step, it was Father Seraphim, even more than Father Herman, who saw what needed to be done. Life in a commercial republic bustles rather than meditates. Constancy or fidelity finds little encouragement in a society forever in motion. But only he who endures to the end will be saved. How to find constancy in such turmoil. Through work. Down-to-earth, practical work, not meditative navel-gazing, much less chiliastic utopia-building, is the antidote to powerful distractions of the commercial republic, precisely because work is what commercial republicans do and respect. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak? Very well then: strengthen both spirit and flesh by working. Strengthening the flesh is good, if the spirit governs the flesh. Work with all due care, following Bishop Nektary’s injunction not to spill the grace of God. Work intelligently. Add the prudence of serpents to the innocence of doves. Or, as Father Seraphim put it, “We must follow the advice of St. Basil and begin to learn to take from the world around us where there is wisdom, and where there is foolishness to know why it is foolishness.” This is much more than ‘Yankee ingenuity,’ but can take hold in America because it builds on Yankee ingenuity.

Self-government is local government. “To practice love, trust, and life according to the Holy Fathers in the small circle where one is,” and not to cherish grand national or ‘world-historical’ ambitions: Father Seraphim saw, with Tolstoy, that the Kingdom of God is within you, but he did not mean this is Tolstoy’s Rousseauistic sense. Say it, rather, as a question: Is the Kingdom of God, the City of God, the Regime of God, within me? “The original Catacomb Church was not an organization at all, but a gathering in oneness of soul,” Damascene Christensen writes; it is citizenship in the City of God. We strive to be good citizens while knowing we will not be perfect citizens in this life, and with equanimity refusing to expect perfection in our neighbors. Such an expectation would be neither loving nor neighborly, and will lead to disunion, to civil war.

Local self-government requires the right education of the young, so that they may become fellow-citizens. “From infancy,” Father Seraphim writes, “today’s child is treated, as a rule, like a little god or goddess.” As Dostoevsky saw, such treatment ends not in godliness but in Raskolnikov, the son of the most misguided mother in Christian literature. Self-esteem—the obsession of the demi-educated of today—for Christians can only mean esteem for your true soul, as created by God. Inasmuch as every human soul is flawed by sinfulness, this means that true self-esteem is esteem for someone we are not, an undefiled being created in God’s image, or what Lincoln called, thinking not of any individual but his nation, “the better angels of our nature.” True self-esteem is not self-worship but God-worship, loving God and loving neighbor as oneself, as a creation of God. This is difficult but not impossible. The next time you are in a waiting room or on a bus, look at the people around you, at your fellow Americans, and conceive of them as souls. Then you are on the path to loving them. Abraham Lincoln had ‘the kind of face only a mother could love.’ But his soul—that was another matter.

In considering the life of Father Seraphim Rose, American Christians will find a captive, a stranger, a friend and fellow-citizen. They will find themselves. Perhaps American of many faiths will also find him, as they found in Lincoln, a soul who calls them to themselves? And therefore to their Creator, the endower of their unalienable rights. This is the true “new birth of freedom.”