Michael Bauman: Pilgrim Theology: Taking the Path of Theological Discovery. Manitou Springs: Summit Ministries, 2007.

 

By “pilgrim theology,” the late Michael Bauman doesn’t mean the theology of the Pilgrims. He has a different journey in mind, a pilgrimage of the soul for Christian theologians. “Christian theology is an activity for those en route, and it should be conducted so as to aid those who study it and practice it to travel more efficiently and effectively toward truth. Theology ought to be, in other words, both a statement of present belief and an explorer’s compass for further intellectual navigation.” Regrettably, too many prefer “fortress theology,” system-building, structures whose inhabitants seek to guard themselves against enemy assault, expending their energies in elaborating their defenses instead of ranging out for new discoveries, “open[ing] the door to truth, to beauty, and to goodness.” By contrast, the theological pilgrim achieves not certitude—sure feeling about his convictions—but certainty—reasoned confidence in the steadfastness of the Person in whom we trust and in the convictions we have arrived at, concerning Him.

Our confidence should be reasoned because reason corrects mistakes, which human beings are prone to make. “We have a very good excuse for our distorted perceptions: we ourselves are distorted.” As Jonathan Swift had occasion to observe, human beings are only capable of reason, not entirely, or even very, rational. For this reason, when reading God’s revealed Word, we should try to follow its meaning, not attempt to fit it into a theological system we’ve thought up for ourselves, as if each insight were a stag’s head placed neatly on an inner wall of the castle. In that “fortress” approach, “rather than the theologian having a theology, the theology has him.” “We must not allow our theology to be turned into a hermeneutic,” a system for reading that will likely ignore God’s indications of His intent which do not fit into one’s ‘method.’ Readers should open themselves to words, not pull up the drawbridge of a structure that, however impressive, remains human, all-too-human.

Thus Bauman reprises a contrast seen in the practice of philosophy, the contrast between system-builders and Socratics. He favors the Socratics. As for philosophy itself, “I want simultaneously to endorse [it] and to identify its danger.” As a means of “skeptical debunking” in light of the principle of non-contradiction, “philosophy can disabuse us and our opponents of intellectual hubris and baseless self-assurance because it can strip away error.” In so doing, however, it cannot “supply us with much of the raw data we need for proper theologizing”; philosophy, too, must be undertaken with humility. Its zetetic or skeptical character should not be allowed to shade over into sheer denial, which is no more rational than unthinking affirmation. “Methodological skepticism must be informed by, and tempered by, objectivism, the common sense belief and practice that the working relationship between mind and senses is fundamentally valid and reliable”; “the basic dependability of mind and senses (when the function normally) cannot be denied without self-contradiction and epistemological collapse.” “Objects are what they are quite independent of anything we might say about them.”

Socratic philosophers investigate nature, beyond the cave of opinions, of conventions. Theologians investigate God, who, “unlike nature,” is “not merely passive to our investigations.” “The process of theological knowing entails both the work of the mind, on the one hand, and God’s active desire to be known, on the other.” God intentionally reveals Himself, through His Word. A theologian should respond with “a skeptical and tolerant biblicism”—the skepticism aimed at our own thoughts and those of others, the tolerance offered to those who disagree with us, the biblicism intended as the most reliable window into God’s revelation to us, affording the best view of what He wants us to know about Him. Theologians who refuse to do think this way “have never learned to distinguish between good thoughts and their own thoughts.” They often seek disciples, not students, having stopped learning themselves. “Professors and theologians” like that “have transformed institutions of higher learning into institutions of higher indoctrination,” and not always all that high, either. “Academic freedom has its dangers,” but “no ne loom so large as its abandonment.”

Bauman accordingly recommends three rules for Pilgrim Theologians: “statements of faith should be used as a base from which to explore,” not as a wall against contradictory claims; courage and candor rule out ad hominem attacks and require careful consideration of opposing views (“he who knows only his own side of the case probably knows little even of that”); “the only choice a scholar has is between truth and rest,” as “you cannot have both.” This means that a Christian theologian not only shouldn’t confine his thoughts to the creed of his sect but that he shouldn’t confine his thoughts to Christianity. That is, while remaining a Christian, he should not overlook interpretations of Christianity advanced by non-Christians. It can be illuminating to see oneself, and one’s opinions, as others see us, and them. Otherwise, he is “transform[ing] personal salvation into a way of knowing,” assuming “that one can move only from faith to understanding, but never from understanding to faith.” But “neither faith nor ecclesiastical commitment are a means of knowing” because “the proper functioning of the human mind when it does theology is not fundamentally different from its proper functioning when it does political theory or medical ethics,” for example. 

The Bible is authoritative for Christians. “I am not challenging the accuracy or authority of Scripture, which is inviolable, but rather, I am questioning our methods of defending and propagating it, which are not.” “We evangelicals” make several “tactical errors” in that regard. For example, some evangelicals argue that since God inspired the Bible and God does not lie, the Bible must be without error. But “other beings than God have had their way in the matter.” Some evangelicals also say that if you admit that one element of Scripture is wrong, you must throw it all into question, a practice no one follows in considering any other document. Instead of arguments founded upon theological deduction, evangelicals should focus “on the accuracy and reliability of the Biblical data,” the only kind of arguments that non-Christians are likely to “listen to patiently.” After all, “if we counsel our opponents to be open-minded, teachable, objective, and patient scholars of good will, scholars who can feel the weight of the other side’s case, then I believe we ought to insist upon the same qualities in ourselves and our colleagues.”

What, then, does Pilgrim Theology look like, in practice? Bauman shows us by doing some, beginning with the Person of Christ, necessarily the center of any doctrine called ‘Christianity.’ Human beings need to understand God in order to understand themselves. Unlike all other creatures, made “according to their kind,” human beings we “were made ‘in the image and likeness of God,'” which establishes “a reciprocity and kinship” between God and Man “not found anywhere else.” As “living pictures and partners of God,” human beings should not dismiss God as “irrelevant and insignificant in our quest for self-knowledge,” since “to know who we are is first to know who He is.” 

The God we therefore want to know is not simply an ‘I’ but an ‘us.” “Let us make man in our image,” He says. He ‘talks to Himself,’ engages Himself in what “we learn later” to be a Trinity consisting of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He does this as He makes, “mak[ing] worlds with words.” So do we, when we make, especially when we make families, tribes, and political communities. We, too are “communal and communicative”; “togetherness, not aloneness, is our natural condition,” and God makes Woman as Man’s companion in accordance with His own Personhood. This notwithstanding, to be like God, to be made in His image, is not to be God or even to be His equal, as Man and Woman quickly learn when they make their attempt to know something God doesn’t want them to know. In disobeying His authority, we defied our just subordination, inasmuch as “we come from the will, and mind, and Word of God,” not the other way around. At the same time, insofar as we are like God, insofar as we are persons, we are responsible for our choices and actions. He gave us “dominion” over the earth but we disobediently gave that rulership away, allowing ourselves to be overthrown by ‘the Satan,’ that is, the enemy of ourselves and of God.

We retain, however, some of the power of speech and of reason with which God endowed us. “God created us not only by his Word, but for his Word,” rightful recipients of that Word. “We were intended for dialogue with God,” and with one another, male and female. “When we fulfill our duty, we are doing what we were made for, doing what leads to our blessing and fulfillment,” whereas “in rejecting or neglecting our duty, we are turning from God and from our soul’s health.” If “we live lawfully with Him,” we fulfill our own purpose. We also fulfill our own need, especially now that “we are fallen and need everything.” “God is to us what water is for fish, what air is for birds, and what earth is for animals—He is our proper environment, our natural habitat,” although to say it in those words is to translate it into un-Biblical, or at least un-Genesislike, language, which does not speak of environment and nature. 

As the “Second Adam,” the second sinless man, Jesus Christ shows Christians “both what we are now”—inferior to what we were intended to be—and “what we shall become”—not only forgiven for our sin but cleansed of it. The New Testament promises that “we shall see Christ as he is, for we shall be like Him,” “partakers of the divine nature,” as the Apostle Peter puts it. As a student of theology, “if you ask what is God like, the answer is that he is not like anything. But, if you ask who is God like, the answer is he is like Jesus.” Therefore, “to know God is to know Christ.” To know Christ is also to know ourselves, as “without Christ, we don’t understand rightly the horrifying depth and breadth of our depravity.” We have divine assistance in this task of self-knowledge, still another Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. 

Christians who define themselves in opposition to the world, the flesh, and the Devil do themselves a disservice. They have inflated the importance of those things and that person instead of looking to the real standard, Christ. “The negation of a snapshot of the Devil is not a portrait of Christ” and “being out of step with the Pharisees is not the same as being in step with God.” “Christ is the center and standard of Christian existence,” not the apostles, not any segment of the Christian ecclesia, nor the ecclesia taken as a whole. It is important to know ‘about’ God, to gain some of the theologians’ knowledge, but this should not be confused with knowing God as a person. I might be able to know a lot about you, know your height, weight, form, genetic composition, mannerisms. That isn’t knowing you. Knowing God as Jesus Christ is to see how He was indeed innocent as a dove, prudent as a serpent, whether it came to carpentry or verbal combat. Everyone notices his agapic love, but this “shows up in the form of his diligent perceptivity, his resolute teachability, and his train-stopping shrewdness.” As for ourselves, opening ourselves to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we “must learn to grow as he grew before we can hope to do as He did and be as He was.” Mere admiration is not enough.

In reading the Gospels we are reading stories. They are the ‘data,’ the ‘evidence’ Christian theologians begin with. But “theologians must always bear in mind that the highest and clearest revelation God ever gave us of himself was as a Person, not as either a proposition of a story.” Persons are never as ‘parsable’ as propositions or stories. Martin Luther was right to say that “God hides not only in his revelation but behind it as well.” This being so, theologians need to approach their task with humility, “not contentiousness and bickering about such unknown, and unknowable, things as the functional relationship either between the divine ousia and the divine energies, on the one hand, or that between deity and humanity in the hypostatic union, on the other.” Such matters are beyond our intellectual pay grade. “Because persons are not reducible to propositions, no man, much less a God-man, can be fully or exactly captured in words or ideas, even inspired words or ideas.” For example, the Christian Fathers attempted to press Jesus into a “family of Greek concepts.” This “yield[ed] great insight,” up to a point. But “no theological road goes on forever.” 

So, for example, the Christian fathers ruled out the claim of the monothelites, “who said that the will native to the divine nature and the will native to the human nature coalesced into one will.” This cannot have been so, given Christ’s prayer to His Father at Gethsemane, in which He begs to be relieved of physical and spiritual torture on the Cross. But in claiming that Christ “had two natures and hence two wills,” while remaining “only one person,” they implied “that natures will, not persons, and that willing pertains not to persons but to natures, as if a human will and a human nature ever existed without a human persons and as if human nature and human person are (and ought to be considered) a distinct in extra-mental reality as they are in some people’s thought.” In willing, human nature must (as it were) go through human personhood, as human nature can manifest itself only in a person, even as it is recognizable in all human persons. 

Beginning with the historical record in the Bible, the Christian theologian should take care not to become a “historicist,” by which Bauman means a historian only. Similarly, he “must be rational, but not a rationalist”; Christ’s prudence is practical reasoning, not a form of theoretical system-building. In examining the Biblical text, we should follow Alexander Pope’s advice: “to read every work of wit in the same spirit as its author writ.” Again, objectivity: After all, is “meaning is the prerogative of the reader and not the author, no professor can properly prevent any student from giving the professor’s course syllabus, the professor’s lectures, the professor’s assignments, or the professor’s test questions whatever meaning the student sees fit.” ‘Deconstruction,’ indeed. We should not “confuse the role of the interpreter with that of the author.” 

Some theologians attempt to bend Christianity into a rationalist system with political intent. One such attempt is ‘liberation theology,’ which puts Christianity into a Marxist or neo-Marxist framework. Bauman is well aware of the defects of Marxist ‘critique’ itself; he knows that free markets outperform command economies, the colonialism didn’t cause Third-World poverty. “Democratic capitalism succeeds where other systems fail because it is more firmly rooted in the inescapable facts of economic scarcity, of incomplete knowledge, and of human imperfectability”—all observation one easily gathered from the Bible as well as from experience. However, it is Marxism’s incompatibility with the Bible that he calls upon his fellow theologians to attend.

Considered Biblically, Marxists commit five “cognitive failures.” First, they do not see that human institutions cannot fundamentally change human nature, that “notoriously intractable” thing. As the prophet Jeremiah and the Apostle Paul both affirm, the human heart is desperately wicked. “Marxism cannot succeed because it has no way to harness human depravity for the service of others,” supposing instead that a radical revision of human institutions will eliminate human depravity. Marxism also assumes that economic conditions “shape everything and everyone.” But in fact “public policy and political theory are enacted only by real and identifiable human beings, not by any alleged impersonal forces of change set loose in the world at large.” By overlooking individuals and seeing only aggregates—imperialists and revolutionaries, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—Marxists “applaud or condemn millions of individuals for no other reason than that those individuals happen to fall into one or the other artificial category. For such ‘offenses’ millions of people, quite literally, have died.”

Third, Marxists entertain a faulty view of justice, making it “synonymous with equality.” The Bible never claims that socioeconomic equality is possible on earth, or even desirable there. Hence charity as manifested in uncoerced redistribution of wealth. “Christ indicates that God’s just judgment of human beings is based upon their wise stewardship of the varied gifts (financial and otherwise) that he has entrusted to them., not upon either the allegedly egalitarian initial allocation of those gifts or upon their egalitarian final disbursement.” Additionally, Marxists take a mistaken view of private property. “By abolishing private property rights, Marxism has cut economic rewards loose from risk taking, from effort, and from saving.” But the New Testament shows that when early Christians attempted to hold goods in common, the experiment failed, leading to “complaints and to divisions among believers (Acts 6:1).” “Socialism is a system that not even the apostles themselves could make work.” Moreover, human beings do not belong to themselves, either individually (as libertarians claim) or collectively (as per Marxism). We belong to God. This being so, human beings cannot claim the right to dispose of their property, including themselves, in any manner they please. This is what rules out suicide and abortion. My right to ‘control my own body,’ to swing my own fist, ends not only at or near the point of your nose but at the destruction of my life or of any life that has done no harm to me or to my family or country.

Finally, Marxism misunderstands the nature of wealth, neglecting the conditions of production and the human capacity for inventiveness in its transfixion on redistributing the products we generate. Capitalism or private ownership of the means of production does indeed recognize human selfishness, which is ineradicable with or without capitalism. But it also requires consideration of others. “If you neglect your neighbor’s needs; if you reuse to put your time, talent, and treasure to work providing for his convenience; your enterprise comes to nothing,” whereas “if you carefully consider and then appropriately satisfy your neighbor’s need you will enjoy the fruit of your labors.” In this way, “the marketplace is a school for virtue” in a way that the strictures of socialism can never be.

Marx’s atheist materialism alone makes it hard to combine with Christianity. But what about Christian leftism—seen, for example, in the writings of Jacques Ellul? Ellul is a Christian anarchist who claims that the Old and New Testaments are anti-political. “As is almost embarrassingly obvious, the Old Testament never impugns ‘political power in itself’ among Gentile nations”—as Ellul asserts—it rather “excoriates the abuses those powers sometimes perpetrate.” Nor does it “challenge Gentile regimes” in terms of their legitimacy or in terms of the regimes themselves; God vigorously condemns their idolatry, but not their origin or their regime form. As for Israel, the Book of Deuteronomy specifies an elaborate legal code and, as far back as Genesis 9, God prescribes and delegates capital punishment as a power to be enacted by human beings “at their discretion.” With respect to I Samuel 8, where the Israelites call for a human king, their fault lies in their rejection of divine rule, not “because political power is always and everywhere inescapably evil, or because monarchy is inherently vile.” Nor does Jesus reject political rule. On the contrary, he considers the rule of Pilate to be divinely ordained (John 19:11).

When it comes to politics, Jesus offers no counsels of perfection. Christian political theory instead “seeks that form of government that is attended with the fewest and most pardonable shortcomings, and it knows that anarchism is not that form which it seeks,” inasmuch as “Christian political theory deals with possibilities, not with unreachable goals.” In this, Ellul falls into self-contradiction, failing to understand that “the abolition of power can be accomplished, imposed, and maintained only by means of power,” inasmuch as “it takes a power to check a power.” “Without political power,” freedom is impossible, which is why the ‘ancients’ understood liberty to mean civic participation and why (some of) the ‘modern’ demand representative government and federalism in the modern state. Otherwise, “freedom without law endures as long as a lamb among hungry wolves.” To defend freedom, one needs not the absence of power but a right way of wielding it. Hence the importance of regimes and also of citizen virtue. “The various coercive powers of family, of church, of state, and of school are not inimical to virtue; rather, they help secure it and make it possible.” 

Ellul presents the unusual spectacle of a thinker who accepts the Marxist critique of modern society and the Marxist expectation that the modern state can, should, and will ‘wither away,’ while refusing to accept the socioeconomic and political means by which Marxists intend to get from here to there. He decries human alienation, capitalism, money; he embraces determinism (although he prefers neo-Marxist cultural determinism to the economic determinism of Marx and Engels), dialectics, and revolution. Perhaps because he is a cultural determinist, not an economic determinist, a materialist, he supposes that cultural revision can replace coercion.

An even more extreme form of ‘cultural’ politics may be seen in contemporary feminism, which weaponizes words. For his part, Bauman “will defy all those who insist on taking the language and the literature of Western tradition to the verbal veterinarian in order to have them neutered.” In theology, feminists attempt to substitute God, Jesus, and the Spirit for Father, Son and Holy Ghost, “as if the Son were not God, as if the revelation in Scripture could be altered at will, and as if heresy were a trifle.” Jesus almost always spoke of God as Father, “not merely continu[ing] the patriarchal theology of the Old Testament” but intensifying it, inasmuch as God is rarely described as “Father” in the Old Testament. “The feminists, in other words, are fighting with Christ, and they must be made to realize this,” if they do not already. Jesus insists that “no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son reveals Him, and the Son has revealed Him to us as Father. If you reject that revelation, then, in some profound fashion, you can not know God.”

Another way feminists describe the Trinity is as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. This replaces the personhood of God with a set of functions—a variation of the Sabellian heresy, “modalism,” which “denied that God is authoritatively revealed to us as three Persons, but which affirmed instead that God merely fulfills three functions and plays three roles.” To this, feminists add a second well-known heresy, the one advanced by Marcion, who “rejected the authoritative witness of the Hebrew Scriptures,” denigrating the God revealed in them. In their version of Marcionism, “feminists reject the God of the Jews because they think He is merely the culture-bound product of a political an sexist agenda. I reject the God of the feminists for precisely the same reason.”

That agenda includes legalized abortion, again by an act of “linguistic sleight of hand.” To call the murder of babies the ‘abortion’ of a ‘fetus,’ feminist words hide “the real nature (murder) of their action and the real identity (baby) of their victim”; some even go further, calling this the ‘termination of a pregnancy,’ which artfully re-centers the question on the condition of the woman, not the life of her child. This act is done on the basis of the claim that a woman has the right to control her own body. Indeed she does, “but that is not the issue here.” “It is not her body, after all, that is being murdered; it is someone else’s,” and the body of a human being at that—having “twenty-three sets of paired chromosomes,” a set different from her own. “It is not something she may do with as she pleases.” “I do believe in abortion rights. I believe that it is the right of every human being not to be murdered by abortion.”

More controversially, in turning to the foundations of ethical thought, Bauman argues that no firm morality can be sustained without fidelity to God. His target appears to be a form of Aristotelianism that attempts to incorporate modern evolutionary theory into its teleological account of nature. This neo-Aristotelianism holds that human nature has a purpose and that ethical conduct consists in habituating the soul in ways that conduce to fulfilling that purpose. [1] On the contrary, Bauman writes, “one must not contend that human nature and human flourishing yield moral absolutes, properly so-called, because such a theory fails to account for (1) the origin of human nature, (2) changes in human nature, and (3) the selection of ‘flourishing’ as a category of moral discernment.” 

With respect to human origins, “if nature arose as the chance result of mindless evolutionary process, a process behind which exists no divine mind and no divine plan, then moral absolutes disappear” because right and wrong themselves must be “accidents, not moral absolutes.” That is, such a theory runs squarely into Hume’s ‘is/ought’ problem. It amounts to “a system of biological relativism.”

Similarly, if changes in human nature occur as the result either of evolutionary theory’s natural selection or of humanly-designed transformation (for example, manipulation of the human genome to get rid of, say, aggression), then that “is the death knell of any and all moral absolutes supposedly rooted in human nature.” What will be produced will no longer be “fully human”; the means will have destroyed the end. Further, as such changes occur, over time, “which version of human nature supersedes the other and is to be considered the fountain from which all right and wrong arise?” We will then present ourselves with “the logical contradiction of having a number of competing sets of moral absolutes.” 

Finally, “why flourishing (and not something else) should be the measure of virtue, cannot be proven.” “Flourishing” is a squishy category; Bauman charges that it leaves us with the chaos of personal preferences, whereby there is no real way to choose between the morality of Jesus of Nazareth and the morality of the Marquis de Sade. In arguing as C. S. Lewis does in The Abolition of Man, that there exists among the nations “substantial agreement…about the rules of right and wrong,” and that “therefore these rules of right and wrong are moral absolutes,” makes consensus the “measure of morality.” But “‘majority’ is no synonym for ‘morality.'”

Given these observations, Bauman concludes that “virtue is not known by reason alone, but by revelation and by Providence.” “If there is no God, there is no good.” 

The conclusion doesn’t quite follow from the premises, however. The logical contradiction of having a number of competing sets of moral absolutes occurs as well among sets of religious persons as it does among atheists. Substitute ‘piety’ for ‘flourishing’ in the formulation above and you see what I mean. Indeed, Christian moralists are among the first to charge that a man like de Sade has made a (false) god out of his pleasure, especially in the satisfaction of his libido dominandi. And rightly so, one might well argue, but that doesn’t remove the problem of moral pluralism until you can show the falsity of all gods but God. And if one says that reason can’t show that but revelation can, that to know God is to know Him as a Person, noetically by means of His Holy Spirit, not logically as the conclusion of a proof, that still doesn’t show that an atheist can’t sustain a theory of virtue.

Why not? Because a proponent of virtue as flourishing can reply, ‘I base my ethics on a meaning of ‘good’ that differs from yours. There are at least two ways of calling someone or something good. One is on the basis of the judgment of some superior being; I say, “good dog” or “bad dog” depending upon whether the dog obeys me, as its master. The other is on the basis of whether the dog fulfills its nature, instances the characteristic qualities of its species and breed. A good human might well be good (or as good as humans get) in the eyes of God; a good human might also be good according to the standard of human nature. This might include not only bodily health but a rightly-ordered soul, a soul that exhibits the distinctively human characteristics of speech and reason. 

Having disposed to his satisfaction of nature as a source of morality, Bauman turns to another putative source of morality, history. He views it favorably, not as a source of morality (in the manner of ‘historicists,’ who tend to claim that the course of events points not only onward but finally upward) but as a source of vicarious experience, from which one’s native prudence may be enhanced. “The history of mankind is a narrative of frauds and deceits,” the storybook of evildoing and evil-saying. “An acquaintance with the ways of evil…engenders for us a protection”; “we need not fall prey to the same old ploys our fathers did.” History provides us with “a treasure trove of wisdom, gleaned from thousands of years of experience and thoughtful reflection.” History also “enables us to make informed predictions about the likely outcome of various possible courses of action.” One comes to beware those who tell us (for example) that the dictatorship of the proletarian vanguard may be harsh but it will yield sweet fruit. Still another benefit of historical study is the study of human reasoning. As Bauman has himself demonstrated, “most current philosophical and theological disagreements stem from presuppositions that reach far back into the history of ideas.” Listening to the latest ‘opinion maker’ or ‘thought leader,’ one almost always finds unoriginality. Intellectual shock tactics become less shocking if you know where the argument is going because you know where it’s been taken before. And the study of history itself delights, “afford[ing] both the excitement of discover and the satisfaction of acquired mastery.”

Still another source of morality is quite familiar to any theologian, pilgrim or otherwise. It is eschatology, a form of prophecy that can be much abused. In keeping with his personalism, Bauman turns away from “macro-eschatology” or “God’s plan for the nations and the world” toward “micro-eschatology” or “God’s plan for individual people.” The latter is “more suitable for a theological pilgrimage,” as Scripture “is more clear and accessible” in this realm than in the Book of Revelation (to take the most striking example). The Bible’s vision for individual Christians is that “they shall be like Christ,” and Christ is the embodiment of a telos on a human, not a ‘world-historical’ scale. As what the world Christians will live in with Jesus will be like, “I don’t know.” He will surprise us.

The final source of moral authority in the modern world Bauman addresses is science, which claims not to prophesy but to predict, with ever-increasing rigor, because it can make its predictions come true, with ever-increasing power. He considers scientists to be more like theologians than scientists care to admit, at least in terms of their cosmological theories, although the theories themselves vary more than Christian theological orthodoxy does. That may be because God assists theologians in their quest to understand him more than nature assists scientists in their quest to understand it: “unlike nature, God wills to be understood and actively reveals Himself to us,” given Christian revelation a finality not seen in scientific theologizing. At the same time, scientists “tend to resist the overthrow of their cherished beliefs” as much as anyone else, they can be as stubborn as theologians in resisting such challenges, albeit with less warrant, since they make so much of experimentation and revision of opinion.

Their claims to empiricism are also misplaced. “Many of the issues of science are neither purely scientific nor genuinely empirical,” inasmuch as scientific presuppositions and procedures are inescapably philosophical and, indeed, empiricism itself rests of philosophic grounds. “If, as some scientists insist, real science is truly empirical and reduces only to empirical methods and to the conclusions reached by using them, then there is no real science, because the theory-independent observation, analysis, and conclusions needed to establish such empirical premises are simply not possible.” “Physics always has its metaphysics.” On the basis of science so conceived, scientists can’t say why science is good.

Nor can it say what it is. To ask, ‘What is science?’ begs a philosophic, not an empirical answer “because the question itself presupposes and requires a vantage point from outside science.” 

What has this to do with Christ, as distinguished from philosophy? Science is procedurally a-theist, non-theistic. It implicitly “denies that Christ is Lord of the universe, an inescapably theological denial.” “Because Christ is foundational to the universe, He is foundational to science,” providing the rational ground upon which the sciences stand. By claiming “that only those things that are testable under controlled laboratory conditions qualify as hard knowledge,” that “all else is merely opinion,” scientists assume an empiricism that cannot confirm its own validity. In the moral and political realms, preeminently realms of opinion, this leaves only force, that empirical thing, as the only arbiter. 

To make a Person, Christ, the foundation of the universe, indeed its Creator, does not, however, require one to accept Bauman’s own radical personalism. He regards all taxonomies as artificial, even if “helpful and serviceable.” “While the beings that populate those categories most emphatically do exist, the families, orders, classes and phyla into which we have pigeon-holed them do not.” Such categories “do not exist outside the taxonomists mind.” This nominalism is little more than empiricism in disguise. It is also un-Biblical, given Adam’s God-given task of naming the plants and animals in the Garden according to their kind. The many nouns Bauman uses in the course of his book and the logical arguments he makes neither help nor serve any person (except by accident) if they exist only in his own head. Such wise sentences as “Because human nature is what it is, without great volumes of enforceable, law, freedom is impossible” fall into the void.

Bauman ends with a vigorous polemic against the mentality of the New Left of the 1960s, which he once admired. “Those who loved the sixties own today,” having occupied authoritative institutions in the universities, the media, and governmental bureaucracies. But this pilgrim has moved on. “My desire for you is that you throw off the vestiges of leftist cultural subversion” and “become the faithful and ardent friend of God.” That is the true liberation, which the liberationists of the Sixties had not achieved because they could not achieve it on the road they chose to take.

When he wrote this book, Michael Bauman had left that road, although he may have left a shoe behind on it, never having re-shod his thinking with a realism that recognizes not only persons and things as real but kinds as real, too. He was a colleague of mine for fifteen years, and it is one of my regrets that I didn’t read his book until after he had died. I wish I had given myself the chance to talk to him about it.

 

Note

1. An example of this claim may be found in Larry Arhhart: Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet: Discourse on Universal History. Part II, chapters 19-31, Part III. Elborg Forster translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. 

 

Bossuet argues that Jesus Christ transformed the course of human events, first of all by the miracles He performed. “His miracles are of a peculiar order and of a new kind”: unlike Jewish miracles, which were “signs from heaven,” Jesus works His miracles directly upon men, “heal[ing] their infirmities”; His miracles “imply kindness rather than power and do not so much surprise the beholders as touch the depths of their hearts”; He performs His miracles “with authority,” making nature and demons alike obey; “the source of the miracles is within himself,” not from God working through Him; and although “none had ever performed either so great or so many miracles,” He “promises that his disciples shall, in his name, do still greater works than these, so fruitful and inexhaustible is the virtue he bears within him.” Yet even with such powers, His children receive no promises of worldly rewards. When he speaks to them, revealing “the secrets of God,” He “tempers the sublimity of his teachings” to His hearers, offering “milk for babes and at the same time bread for the strong.” He “dispenses with measure” His measureless knowledge.

He similarly measures His power. The Pharisees and priests condemn Him; His disciples forsake Him; the Sanhedrin and the High Priest condemn Him as a blasphemer; the Roman governor, knowing Him to be innocent, nonetheless calls Him guilty and orders His execution. He never resists this evil. That is, “the most heinous of all crimes”—Deicide—is “the occasion for the most perfect obedience that the world ever saw.” “Jesus, master of life and of all things, voluntarily surrenders to the fury of wicked men and offers the sacrifice which was to be the expiation of mankind.” With His death on the Cross, “the Law” of Moses “ceases, its symbols pass away, its sacrifices abolished” by this one supreme sacrifice. [1] “Everything changes in the world” when Jesus, dying, says “It is finished.” Performing yet another miracle upon a human body, he rises from the tomb to be seen, heard, and touched by His followers. With these proofs in their minds, with His command to bear witness to them in their hearts, the preaching of His followers “is unshakable, its foundation a positive fact, unanimously attested to by those who saw it” and their sincerity “vindicated by the strongest proof imaginable, that of torments and of death itself” in imitatio Christi. By promising always to be with them, until the end of the world, “he assures the perpetual continuance of the ecclesiastical ministry.”

Having confirmed the Sonship of Jesus, Bossuet turns to a discussion of His ‘nature’—His relation to the other Persons of the Trinity and His Incarnation. Just as his defense of miracles aims at the criticisms offered by Spinoza, his theology aims at the philosophy of Descartes.

In revealing the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation to us, Jesus “makes us find the image of them in ourselves, so that they may always be present with us and so that we may understand the dignity of our nature.” Begin by doing as Descartes recommends. “If we impose silence on our sense and shut ourselves up for awhile in the inmost recesses of our soul, that is, in that part where truth makes its voice heard, we shall see there some image of the Trinity we adore.” Our intelligence gives birth to our thought, which “gives us some idea of the Son of God eternally conceived in the intelligence of the Heavenly Father.” Jesus is God’s Son in the sense that our thought comes forth from our intelligence, not a body “but that inner word which we perceive in our soul when we contemplate the truth.” Further, in our introspection “we love that inner word and the mind in which it is born; and by loving it, we perceive in ourselves something no less precious to us than our mind and our thought, something which is the fruit of both, which united them, which is united with them and constitutes with them but one and the same life.” The Holy Spirit, then, is the divine analogue to this human love. “Thus, I say, is produced in God the eternal love which proceeds from the Father who thinks, and from the Son who is his thought, in order to make with him and his thought one and the same nature equally blessed and perfect.” Just as human intelligence, thought, and love arise simultaneously within us, so “we must not imagine anything unequal or separate in this divine Trinity,” and “however incomprehensible this equality may be, our soul, if we listen, will tell us something about it,” being made in the image of it.” In “these three things” “lie the happiness and dignity of rational nature,” a nature that “knows perfectly what it is,” whose “understanding corresponds to the truth of its being” and “loves it being with its intelligence, as much as both deserve to be loved.” “These three things are never separated and contain one another: we understand that we are, and that we love; and we love to be and to understand. Who can deny this, if he understands himself?”

The analogy between God and Man extends to the Incarnation. The human soul, “by nature spiritual and incorruptible,” by which Bossuet means eternal not sinless. It has been joined to “a corruptible body.” Taken together, soul and body constitute “a man,” a being “at the same time incorruptible and corruptible, intelligent and totally brutish.” So too with the Son, Word become flesh as the son of Mary as well as the Son of God. “This makes him God and man together.” True, the analogy, like all analogies, is “imperfect.” Jesus’ soul existed before His body did, whereas “our soul does not exist before our body.” The human soul “elevates the body to its own level by governing it,” but “in Jesus Christ, the Word presides over everything,” keeping “everything under its control.” Jesus’ every thought, speech, and action are “worthy of the Word, that is to say…worthy of reason itself, of wisdom itself, ad of truth itself.” When we fail to understand this, we show ourselves human-all-too-human: “the senses govern us too much, and our imagination, which insists on intruding in all our thoughts, does not always permit us to fix our attention upon so pure a light.” As a result, “we do not know ourselves,” remaining “ignorant of the riches we carry deep down in our nature,” visible to “none but the most purified eyes.”

The mission of Jesus therefore “is infinitely exalted above that of Moses,” who was “sent to rouse sensual and besotted men by temporal rewards,” Bossuet alleges. The only way to elevate such debased men was to “lay hold of them through the senses and to inculcate in them by this means a knowledge of God and an abhorrence of idolatry, which for mankind has such an amazing propensity.” Christ’s mission was “to inspire man with higher ideals and to give him full and evident knowledge of the dignity, immortality, and eternal felicity of his soul.” Philosophy by itself can’t find its way to this truth, as “most of the philosophers could not believe in the immortality of the soul without believing it a portion of the deity; a deity itself, an eternal being, uncreated as well as incorruptible, and having no more beginning than end,” as seen in their doctrine of the transmigration of souls. The Pentateuch “gave man but a first notion of the nature of the soul and its felicity,” showing Man that he was animated by God’s breath. Once man failed to live up to his God-given origin, God gave Moses the Law by which a portion of humanity, made exemplary by that Law and that Law alone, to prevent the worst carnage. Under the dispensation granted to Moses, Judaism acknowledges the future life but doesn’t make belief in it and in God’s supremely self-sacrificing way of guaranteeing it “the foundation of religion,” as Christianity does. 

Therefore “the most characteristic law of the Gospel is that of bearing one’s cross”—the “true test of faith.” Jesus sets the example, dying “without finding either gratitude in those he serves, fidelity in his friends, or equity in his judges.” He does this “to let upright man see that in the greatest extremities he needs neither human consolation nor even any tangible sign of divine help: let him but love and trust, resting assured that God is mindful of him though he gives no token of it, and that eternal bliss is in store for him.” The cry of Man, even of the God-man in extremis, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” finds its answer in this faith.

This truth has a moral corollary. Plato’s Socrates tells the story of Gyges, a man who possessed a ring that made him invisible whenever he wanted to be, and so led a life of criminal vice without detection. Socrates argues that the truly virtuous man remains virtuous not only if his actions are unseen by other men but even if his virtues bring down upon him the envy of other men, “even to the point of being” tortured. That is of course exactly what happened to Jesus. “Does it not seem that God put this wonderful idea of virtue into a philosopher’s mind only to have it realized in his Son’s person and to show that the just man has another glory, another rest, in short, another happiness than can possibly be attained upon earth.” “What greater accomplishment could be reserved for a God coming into the world?”

Perhaps there is one greater: the revolution or regime change Jesus makes against Satan, who had ruled this world. Satanic powers had murdered the one truly innocent man. All men were, and are, guilty of sin and therefore justly turned over to the most sinful of all rulers. But “by attacking the innocent,” Satan’s Hell “shall be obliged to release the guilty whom it held captive” because Satan overstepped the just limit God had placed upon him. “The woeful obligation by which we were delivered over to rebel angels, is wiped out: Jesus Christ has nailed it to his Cross, there to be blotted out by his blood.” In His grace, divine justice “is itself overcome; the sinner, its due victim, is snatched from its hands.” With this sacrifice, “Jesus Christ eternally binds to himself the elect for whom he sacrifices himself: they are his members and his body; henceforth the eternal Father can only see them through the body of Christ; and thus [the Father] extends toward them the infinite love with which he loves his Son.” “The true Promised Land” is not the physical one Moses saw from afar but “the heavenly kingdom” under a “wholly spiritual law,” the Christ-ian law of love, no longer the Mosaic law.

With this new ruler of the world comes a new ruling body—the Church or assembly of Christ’s people. The original body of the children of God, the Jews, had established the earthly site of God’s kingdom in Jerusalem, “notwithstanding the lack of belief of most of the nation,” for which they were repeatedly punished by their loving Father. Indignant at the Apostles’ preaching to the Gentiles, “the Jews” delivered Paul, the Jewish convert to Christianity, to the Romans. (Bossuet later actually claims that the Jews “crucified Him.”) They revolted against the Romans and were crushed by them; the Romans, unconverted either to Judaism or Christianity, were used by God as instruments of punitive judgment against the Jews, whom Bossuet regards as apostates, and against the Christians of Jewish or Gentile origin, now united as the new people of God, subject to chastising or corrective punishment by those Romans, whose persecution only strengthens the bonds of the new politeuma. “A new people is formed, and the new sacrifice, so much heralded by the prophets, begin to be offered over the whole earth.” As for the Jews, those who did not convert no longer belong to God’s people; “by their infidelity toward the seed promised to Abraham and David, [they] are no longer Jews or sons of Abraham other than in the flesh”; they thereby “renounce the promise by which all nations were to be blessed.” “The Gentiles incorporated with the Jews henceforth become the true Jews and the true kingdom of Judah, opposed to that schismatic Israel cut off from the people of God; they [i.e., both Jewish and Gentile converts] become the true kingdom of David through their obedience to the laws and Gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of David.” Indeed, “there is nothing more remarkable than that separation of the unbelieving Jews from the Jews converted to Christianity.”

Had Bossuet foreseen the ‘universal history’ of the subsequent three hundred years, he would have understood what dangerous ground he treads, here. He does admit that “the God of mercies has not yet exhausted his mercies toward that patriarch race, despite its faithlessness,” preserving them “outside their country and in their ruin, even longer than the nations that have conquered them.” The ancient Medes, Persians, Greeks, and Romans “have been blended with other nations.” By preserving the Jews, by not enabling them to ‘assimilate,’ God “keeps us in expectation of what he will still do for the unhappy remnant of a people once so highly favored.” At the end of days, Jews shall be redeemed; “they shall return, never again to go astray.” But for now, they are “slaves wherever they are”—as they had been in Egypt—without honor, without liberty, without identity as a people,” by which Bossuet must mean without sovereignty, since he just said God has carefully preserved them.  Their present diaspora “teach[es] us to fear God” and to consider “the judgments he executes upon his ungrateful children, so that we may learn never to glory in the favors shown to our fathers.” 

All of that notwithstanding, it still is necessary to pause and to consider what Bossuet teaches, here. This isn’t the modern pseudoscience of the ‘anti-Semites.’ Bossuet’s argument does not classify Jewish people as members of a ‘race’ in any biological sense, and therefore does not lead to genocide. In fact, it effectually prohibits it by classifying race-murder as an attempt to thwart God’s providence. But his supercessionist theology does lead to callousness with regard to Jewish subordination in ‘Christian Europe.’ In effect, he claims that Jewish slavery ‘serves them right’ for failing to convert to Christianity. He is explicit on this point. The unconverted Jews’ punishment for “the most heinous of all crimes, a crime until then unheard-of, namely, deicide…resulted in a vengeance such as the world had never seen,” much worse than the destruction of the first Temple by Nebuchadnezzar. “They had to perish,” not as a nation but as a sovereign nation united in one place. This isn’t anti-Semitism, but it is an attempt to justify the old-fashioned ghettoization of Jews, up to and perhaps including pogroms or at very least making pogroms likely. Where is Christian love, the love of the Holy Spirit, in any of this? A few pages later, he condemns the Roman emperor, Julian “the Apostate,” for “stoop[ing] so low as to court the Jews, who were the outcasts of the world.” More, “Jews remain the laughingstock of the nations and the object of their aversion.” Bossuet thus provides a window into the vile practices of many European Christians, crimes committed against innocent people deemed perennially guilty by their persecutors for their refusal to concur with Christian teachings. This sort of anti-Judaism sets up a cycle of self-justifying tyranny by tempting Christians to abuse Jews under the illusion that they, Christians, thereby act as divinely appointed scourges. [2]

The Biblical (not only New-Testament) humility he does commend makes considerable sense, quite apart from the teachings of the Bible, when Bossuet recounts the course of events in Christendom after the days of the Apostles. The blood of the martyr was indeed the seed of the Church, but the doctrines of the heretics were its herbicide. As it happened, the Church learned that “it has no less to suffer under Christian emperors than it had suffered under infidel emperors and that it must shed blood to defend not only the whole body of its doctrine but even every individual article.” It turned out that the ‘new’ Jews, the Christians, were as vulnerable to idolatry as the ‘old’ Jews. The old idolaters “forgot reason” by attempting to make their own gods. The true God did indeed want men to forget reason but “to forget it in another manner.” No one understands the Cross of Christ by reason alone, by ‘unassisted’ reason; you understand it “by bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ, by casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God.” God’s remedy for the disease of idolatry was faithful and grateful obedience because “it was not through reason that one could destroy an error which reason had not established.” Idolatry isn’t false reasoning, a thing refutable by logic, but the absence of reasoning at all, hence invulnerable to rational argument, “an inversion of good sense” not to be argued with. Reasoning only irritates a frenzied person. Even Plato could not overthrow pagan altars and found himself force to make sacrifices to them in the form of “a lie,” feigned religiosity. “What purpose have you thus served, O philosophy!”

“God completely overwhelmed reason by the mystery of the Cross; and, at the same time, he applied the remedy to the roots of the evil.” The Cross could do this because idolatry originates in “that profound attachment we have for ourselves.” Loving ourselves, we “contrive gods like ourselves.” In worshipping them, we really worship our “own thoughts, pleasures, and fancies.” By contrast, Jesus teaches us to “forget ourselves, renounce everything, crucify everything, in order to follow him,” to tear ourselves from ourselves, to love suffering instead of pleasure. “By taking upon himself the pain of sin without sin itself,” Jesus “showed that he was not a guilty person punished but the Just One atoning for the sins of others.” “An apparent folly,” the Cross calls us to a wisdom “so sublime that to our wisdom it appears folly; and its rules are so exalted that the whole seems an aberration.” Yet “the apostle and their disciples, the outcasts of the world, mere nothings, if we look upon them with human eyes, have prevailed over all the emperors and the whole empire of the Romans,” now ruined. In making this happen, God “has laid low all human pride which would come to” the defense of the idols, “perform[ing] this great work as he had created the universe, by the sole power of his word.”

A Christian shouldn’t take idolatry too literally. It has “diverse forms,” as sensual pleasure, self-interest, ignorance, “a false veneration of antiquity,” politics, philosophy, and heresy “all come to its aid.” In this struggle, the Bishop of Meaux looks to the Catholic Church as the true bulwark against the idols. “Some”—the heretical sects—were “perhaps lost in the by-ways; but the Catholic Church was always the highway taken by most of those who sought Jesus Christ.” Given the tradition it took over from pre-Christian Jews, Bossuet defends the Jewish tradition as authentic and venerable. “The Mosaic tradition is too clear and too persistent to allow the least suspicion of falsehood”; “the Jewish people always showed an invincible repugnance at accepting something they had never heard of before as ancient and as having come from Moses, and at accepting as familiar and established something just recently put into their hands.” They are the least likely people to have corrupted their own tradition. In “her clear victory over all sects,” the Catholic Church evinces the continuity of true religion—a “wonderful sequence of events” which, “through time…leads you to eternity.”

Bossuet’s account of Christianity teaches the Dauphin and other readers the true justification of humility against human selfishness and the delusions it fosters. In Part III, he teaches them the reasons for humility by presenting the universal history of empires. He doesn’t keep his intention secret, either, titling the first chapter, “The Overthrow of Empires Is Ordered by Providence and Serves to Keep Princes in Humility.” Or so one might well wish.

“Most of these empires” he will discuss “are by necessity linked with the history of God’s people,” God having used the Assyrians and Babylonians to chastise them, the Persians to restore them, Alexander to protect them. Even the persecuting Romans provided Christians with a framework for proselytizing by maintaining a multinational empire with good roads. In the end, “the Roman Empire yielded” to Christianity, “having found a power more invincible than its own.” After God chastised the Romans by permitting them to succumb to barbarian invasions, today “Rome continues to exist only through Christianity,” through the Roman Catholic Church, the religion it now “brings to the whole world.”

In light of this course of events, “even from a merely human point of view, it is extremely useful, especially for princes, to contemplate this passing of empires, since the arrogance which so often attends their eminent position is greatly dampened by this sight. For if men learn moderation when they see the death of kings, how much more will it strike the to see even the death of kingdoms!” Because “permanence is not for men,” because “change and unrest are the proper lot of human affairs,” human empire can never match the continuity of God’s religion, or at least not in the same way. The course of human empires has “its own continuity and its own proportion,” which may be seen in the causes “their progress and their decadence”—a topic Bossuet addressed (if in a very different manner) several decades before Montesquieu. “The true science of history consists in uncovering for each age the hidden tendencies which have prepared the way for great changes and the important combinations of circumstances which have brought them about.”

Unlike subsequent thinkers, Bossuet does not ascribe progress and decadence to impersonal causes. It is “the character of the dominating nations in general, and of princes in particular, as well as that of the outstanding men” who “have contributed for good or evil to the change in empires and the fate of nations.” ‘Fortune’ is not running the show. “By looking at unrelated occurrences we might think that fortune alone decides the rise and fall of empires, but…in reality, taking everything into consideration, the situation is rather akin to gambling, where the most skillful player wins in the long run.” “It is those with the most far-reaching plans, have been the most diligent, have persevered the longest in great efforts and, finally, have known best how to press on or to restrain themselves according to the situation who have, in the end, gained the upper hand and have been able to use fortune itself for their ends.” Neither a Machiavellian, promising the Dauphin that he can master Fortune nor a historical determinist denying that statesmen and other “outstanding men” have any real effect at all, Bossuet points to the interplay between impersonal and personal causes. Of the several empires he considers, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome best illustrate his approach.

“The Egyptians were the first among whom the rules of government were known,” “the first to recognize the true aim of politics, which is to make life easier and to make the people happy.” To these ends, they made virtue “the foundation of the entire society,” and chief among these virtues was gratitude. Gratitude was reserved for the gods and divinely guided lawgivers, and “ignorance of religion and of the laws of the realm was not tolerated on any social level.” While those laws “were very good, it was even better that everyone was brought up to observe them” ‘to the letter,’ as “the exactitude with which small things were preserved was also the safeguard of the great.” This resulted in extraordinary political continuity: “no people has kept its customs and its laws for a longer time.” In Egyptian courtrooms, no demagogues were permitted to exhibit that “false eloquence which dazzles the mind and stirs the passions,” fomenting change. “The truth could not be exposed in too dry a fashion” in the senate where cases were judged, and where the Egyptians “preserv[ed] their ancient maxims” by “surround[ing] them with certain ceremonies, which impressed them on people’s minds. Most remarkably, the Egyptians extended the reach of the law beyond death. “When we [moderns] die, it is a consolation to leave our name in esteem among men; and of all the worldly goods, this is the only one death cannot take away. but in Egypt it was not permitted to praise the dead indiscriminately. As soon as a man was dead, he was brought to trial,” his final reputation to be established in formal judicial proceedings. Those found worthy won perpetual gratitude from all subsequent generations of the living.

So, too, with parents. Mummification had a moral and political purpose: to establish perpetual gratitude toward parents. “When children saw the bodies of their ancestors, they remembered their publicly recognized virtue and endeavored to love the laws they had left to them.” Even the kings were bound by the laws, as Egyptians “believed that reproaches would only exasperate them and that the most efficacious way of inspiring them to virtue was to show them their duty in lawful praise, solemnly expressed before the gods.” The kings were accordingly revered, and rightly so. Whereas in most political communities the kings are not the greatest men, in Egypt under the Theban dynasty “the greatest men were the kings.” “The two Hermes, who founded the sciences and all the institutions of the Egyptians—the one living around the time of the Flood, the other, whom they called Trismegistus, or the Thrice Great, living at the time of Moses—were both kings of Thebes.” They invented astronomy, arithmetic, the art of land surveying that developed into geometry, and medicine. Egypt was “the first nation to have libraries,” with which “Egypt cured itself of ignorance, the most dangerous of illnesses and the source of all the others.” No wonder “most kings were so beloved by the people that everyone mourned their death as much as that of a father or a child.” Making sure that the Dauphin doesn’t miss the point, Bossuet encourages him to study the artworks of Thebes and the inventions of Egypt.

Egyptian architecture, seen most notably in the pyramids, contrasted with the impressive but unstable structure of the Tower of Babel. Of a piece with its laws and the regime behind them, “from the very beginning the taste of the Egyptians was such that they liked solidity and unadorned regularity,” in imitation of the simplicity of “Nature itself”; “once taste has been corrupted by novelty and extravagant boldness” (perhaps as seen in the Palace of Versailles?) it is “hard to recapture.” But “Egypt did not expend its greatest effort on inanimate things. Its most noble labor and its most accomplished art consisted in forming men” with the “art of developing the body as well as the mind” by “frugality and exercise.” “The country was healthy by nature, but philosophy had taught them that nature needs to be helped.” As a result of this “frugal diet and vigorous exercise,” even the bones of the Egyptians, like their monuments, were hard, unlike “the fragile skulls of the Persians” with whom Egyptian remains were mingled on battlefields. And the brains inside those skulls were still more impressive. “Egypt ruled by giving advice, and this rule of the mind seemed to them more noble and more glorious than any rule that can be established by armies.” This brought such Greeks as Homer, Pythagoras, Plato, Lycurgus and Solon “to Egypt to learn wisdom.” And “God wished that Moses himself be learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians; this is how he came to be mighty in words and deeds. True wisdom avails itself of everything; and God does not wish those whom he inspires to neglect human mans, which, in their own way, also come from him.” That is, the two wellsprings of Western civilization, the Greeks and the Hebrews, both flowed from Egypt.

The Babylonian Empire provides a contrast to Egyptian wisdom. Babylon “had a strange destiny, since it perished through its own inventions.” They had diverted the Euphrates River into an artificial lake in order to build a bridge, giving them control of the entrance to the city against any would-be conqueror. When Cyrus besieged the city, he simply rediverted the river back to its original course and marched through the dry riverbank into Babylon. And even then, had “the slopes been guarded, the Persians could have been overpowered when they passed through the riverbed” below. But the “insane self-confidence” and hedonism of the Babylonians made them neglectful even of establishing a proper military order and chain of command. “This is the downfall not only of the strongest fortifications but even of the greatest empires.” France, take note. 

Persia’s Cyrus, although indeed great, “well brought up in warlike pursuits,” failed politically by exhibiting less-than-Egyptian wisdom when it came to his successors. He “did not take enough care to give the successor to his empire an education similar to his own; and, as is usual in human affairs, too much greatness was detrimental to virtue.” With the exception of Cyrus, Persia generally lacked the civic virtues, thanks to a defective education. “The respect for royal authority which the Persians were taught from childhood on was carried to excess by its admixture of adoration; and” unlike the Egyptians, “the Persians seem to be slaves rather than subjects who submitted their reason to lawful authority.” Bossuet find a possible excuse for this in “their Oriental temperament,” a “keen and violent nature” which may have “called for a firmer and more absolute government.” The East is not the West; Egypt civilized the Greeks and the Hebrews but the Babylonians and Persians, for all their refinement and all their conquests, lacked the virtues necessary for self-government under their gods.

Bossuet regards this point as well worth repeating to the Dauphin. “The Greeks, naturally intelligent and courageous, had been educated early by the kings and colonists from Egypt, who, established in various regions of the country from the earliest times on, had widely spread the excellent institutions of the Egyptians,” among which “the best thing taught them was a willingness to learn and to be molded by the law for the public welfare.” As a result, the Greeks learned “to see themselves and their families as parts of a greater body, the state,” which they regarded as “a common mother, to whom they belonged even more than to their parents.” The Greek polis or city-state fostered liberty understood as civility. “To the Greeks the word civility meant more than that graciousness and mutual deference which makes men sociable”—the ‘polite society’ seen in the royal courts of Europe within the vaster boundaries of the centralized modern state. For them, “a civil person was the same thing as a good citizen, who always considers himself as a member of the state, abides by law, and works within it for the public welfare without encroaching on anyone.” By “show[ing] their love of the people, not by flattering them, but by furthering their well-being and upholding the rule of the law” with “uncompromising rectitude,” the ancient Greek monarchs established “a regime” in which “the Greeks gradually came to feel that they were capable of self-government, and most of the cities formed themselves into republics” under the guidance of “wise legislators, such as Thales, Pythagoras, Pittacus, Lycurgus, Solon, Philotas, and many others known to history,” who “prevented liberty from degenerating into license.” Under the republican regimes, “the liberty the Greeks had in mind was a liberty subject to the law, meaning to reason itself as recognized by all the people,” a feature of politics as Aristotle defined it, as ruling and being ruled in turn. “The magistrates, though feared during their tenure, later became private citizens again.” Bossuet carefully states that although “every form of government has its own advantages,” and “the Greeks profited from theirs in the sense that the citizens were all the more attached to their country since they all had a share in its government and since every individual could aspire tp the highest office,” “lawful submission” under a law-abiding monarch presents fewer risks than “the hazards of liberty” in a republic.

Bossuet judges that philosophy made the Greeks better republicans. “The freer these people were, the more it became necessary to found the rules of behavior and of society upon sound reasoning,” as found in the teachings of Pythagoras, Thales, Anaxagoras, Socrates, Archytas, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, “and an infinite number of others” who “filled Greece with these noble precepts.” “It was a common tenet among the philosophers that a man should either retire from public affairs or consider nothing but the general welfare.” The poets too instructed the Greeks “even more than they entertained them”; Alexander the Great “regarded Homer as a master who taught him how to rule well,” as “this great poet also taught how to obey and to be a good citizen.” “When Greece, nurtured in this manner, saw the Asians in their daintiness, their finery, and their effeminate beauty, it had nothing but contempt for them,” while the Asian “form of government, which was constituted in such a way that the will of the prince was above all the laws, even the most sacred, inspired Greece with horror,” as for them “there was nothing more hatred than barbarism,” whose regime is despotism, the antithesis of ruling and being ruled. They loved Homer’s poetry in part because “it celebrated the victories and advantages of Greece over Asia.” Whereas Asia’s goddess was Aphrodite, the goddess of “pleasure, licentious love, and effeminate manners,” Greece’s goddess was Hera, goddess of “steadiness and conjugal love.” To Hera they added Hermes, god of eloquence, and Zeus, god of “political wisdom.” In Homer’s poems, ” on the side of Asia was the impetuous and brutal Ares, that is, savage warfare; on the side of Greece was Athena, that is, military art and valor controlled by the mind.” Since Homer’s time, then, “Greece had always believed that intelligence and courage were its natural patrimony,” never to be subjugated by Asia, a “yoke that seemed equivalent to subjecting virtue to voluptuousness, the mind to the body and true courage to uncontrolled power, which consists only in numbers,” as seen in the vast Asian armies the Greeks defeated at Salamis.

Impressive though this was, it wasn’t sufficient in the long run. “Reason alone was incapable of restraining” the “overly spirited and free minds” of the Athenians. Plato, “a wise Athenian who admirably understood the character of his country” suggested that “it was no longer possible to govern them once the victory of Salamis had reassured them as to the Persians.” The overconfidence seen in Babylonian despotism overtook the people of Athens, eventually causing them to lose their war with Sparta. Again, Bossuet implicitly commends a certain reasonable humility to the Dauphin.

Bossuet turns finally to Rome, “the empire whose laws we still respect and which we consequently should know like any other.” “The very essence of a Roman, so to speak, was his attachment to his liberty and to his country. These feelings reinforced each other; for because he loved his liberty, he also loved his country as a mother who constantly fostered his generosity and his liberty” under the laws. The Romans further reinforced their attachment to liberty and country by refusing to “consider poverty an evil.” “On the contrary, they saw it as a means of preserving their most complete liberty; for who is freer or more independent than a man who is able to make do with very little and who, not expecting anything from anyone’s protection or liberality, counts only on his own industry and his own work for his livelihood?” As Livy observes, “there never was a people to hold frugality, thrift, and poverty in esteem for so long a time”; and so, for example, “when the Samnites offered Carius gold and silver dishes, he replied that his pleasure was not to have them but to give orders to those who did.” “Nothing could be further” from the Roman regime, the Roman “way of life,” than Samnite “effeminacy.”

The Roman way was the way of a military, not a commercial, republic. Conquer or die was “the inviolable law” of the Roman soldier. Nor was that soldier dependent on his personal virtue, alone. He was a part of a prudently designed military structure, an army divided into small units that could adjust to any terrain, “be united or separated as required,” ready for “separate or concerted actions and to all sorts of deployments and changes, which are executed by the whole army or parts of it, as the need made be.” This organization enabled the Romans to defeat the Macedonians and many others. And you, Dauphin, “see practiced under the command of Louis the Great” exactly such military organization, which lends itself to the flexible tactics prudence or practical reasoning requires, and which the exigencies of warfare demand. [3] Thanks to their superior virtue and organization, the Romans “triumphed over  courage when they defeated the Gauls, over courage and art when they defeated the Greeks, and over both of these qualities, sustained by the most artful strategy, when they triumphed over Hannibal.” “Therefore, nothing in their government gave them as much pride as their military discipline. They always considered it the cornerstone of their empire. Military discipline was the first thing their state brought forth and the last thing it lost, and this shows how closely it was connected with the organization of their republic.” 

Bossuet now draws the explicit lesson for France and its Dauphin. Here is how you can win the statesman’s gamble against fortune in the long run: “If a government can give its people a taste for glory, patient labor, the greatness of the nation, and patriotism, it can claim that it ha constituted tis state in such a way that it will surely bring forth great men,” who are “an empire’s strength.” “Nature does not fail to endow all nations”—and that must include Asian or ‘Oriental’ nations—with “lofty minds and hearts, but it needs help in developing them.” The French nobility “is so valiant in battle and so bold in all its ventures…because it was taught from childhood on and confirmed in this opinion by the unanimous feeling of the nation, that lack of courage degrades a gentleman and makes him unworthy of the light of day.” Likewise, “in the best days of Rome, even children were trained for war; the greatness of the Roman name was all that counted,” and a father’s failure so to raise his boys was “brought to trial by the magistrates and convicted of an offense against the public.” Thus Rome’s great men brought forth others; Rome’s regime thus “engender[ed] many heroes.” Its rival, Carthage, a commercial republic, inadequately trained for war, hired foreign troops, preferring money to virtue. Carthage lost. [4]

Rome declined, however, partly because its extensive conquests were unjust, consequences of “the desire to dominate,” and “therefore justly condemned by the rules of the Gospel” and also the teachings of philosophy—notably those of her own Cicero who, following Aristotle, taught that the purpose of war is a just peace, that martial courage must be tempered with civil justice. “The sweet taste of victory and domination soon corrupted the rectitude which natural equity had given the Romans.” Their empire lasted as long as it did because although they were “cruel and unjust” in war, “they governed conquered nations with moderation,” partially following philosophic precept. Indeed, conquered subjects eventually could become citizens, eligible to serve in the Roman senate. “Rome came to be looked upon as the common fatherland.” Ultimately, Rome’s truly fatal flaw was not its injustice in wars beyond its boundaries but its injustice within, its factionalism, its inability “to find a middle course” between patricians and plebeians. “Weary and exhausted by this long period of civil war and in need of tranquility, Rome was forced to renounce its liberty” and to adopt Caesarist despotism. As long as Romans under the republic had external enemies, they remained somewhat united; when their empire was well established, fear no longer united them and their jealous passions destroyed their regime. Moreover, “the character of war is such that the command had to fall into the hands of a single man” and the armies under such men saw that “the empire was at their disposal.” Having “created so many new citizens” in the aftermath of its far-flung conquests, Rome “could hardly recognize itself in the throng of naturalized foreigners.” In the end, the patrician ‘few’ lost to “men of great ambition, together with the wretched poor, who have nothing to lose”; such ambitious men, allied with such wretched men, “have nothing to lose” and so “always favor change” of regime,” in this case away from the mixed-regime, military republican empire to the despotic military empire of the Caesars. Bossuet suggests: Don’t let that happen to France, and to its monarchy, which by his time had a military monarchy that was corrupting its aristocratic element by drawing them into the hedonist society of Versailles.

Bossuet concludes his book with a Christian message. “Let us no longer speak of coincidence or fortune,” since “God alone can subject everything to his will.” “While you will see almost all [great empires] falling of their own weakness, you will see religion upheld by its own strength; and you will discern without difficulty where solid greatness lies, and where a man of understanding is to place his hopes.”

 

Notes

1. This isn’t quite accurate. The Apostle Paul explains to the Galatians that “a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified” (Galatians 2:15-16). Christians receive “the Spirit” not by “the works of the law” but by “the hearing of faith” (Galatians 3:2). This in no way exempts Christians from God’s law, the sum of which is to love God and love your neighbor as yourself. It rather puts law in its rightful place, subordinate to the Spirit of God.
2. Bossuet would have benefited from revisiting Ephesians 2:11-22, in which passage Paul explains that Jesus has “broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility” between Jews and Gentiles, having “abolished in His flesh the enmity” between the two, “that he might reconcile both unto God” and make them “fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God.” 
3. Charles de Gaulle took the same lesson, as seen in his book, Vers l’armée de métier. Decades later, he said to André Malraux, “I understand Rome.”
4. Famously, Montesquieu will commend the peaceful commercial republican regime, not military republicanism or military despotism, as a means of overcoming Europe’s chronic civil and international wars, wars spurred not only by aristocratic pride but by Christian zealotry.

Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet: Discourse on Universal History. Elborg Forster translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

 

Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, published his book in 1682. Louis XIV was king; Bossuet had tutored his eldest son, Louis’ presumptive heir, who predeceased his father and whose own son eventually reigned as Louis XV. Bossuet dedicated the book to the Dauphin, continuing the long tradition of courtesy books and mirrors for princes dating back to Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, a tradition revived and adapted to Christian teachings in the thirteenth century by several English, French, and German writers. The Renaissance saw two of the most eminent contributions to the genre, one by Castiglione and another (with a very different twist) by Machiavelli. The Bourbons had founded the modern state in France, inclining to deploy the Catholic Church as a civil religion; at the time of the Discourse‘s publication, Louis was quarreling with Pope Innocent XI over the extension of the droit de régale, whereby the king could claim revenues from vacant dioceses and abbeys. The most prominent French clergymen, beginning with Cardinal Richelieu, who had served as Foreign Secretary under Louis’ father, were suspected of some degree of Machiavellianism, and Machiavelli’s philosophic inheritors, Descartes and Spinoza, were widely read. Bossuet opposes them, reminding the king and especially his son that the divine right of kings can scarcely sustain itself without belief in divinity. As Elborg asks in his helpful introduction, “Is it significant that, regardless of edition, Bossuet’s history of Jesus comes almost exactly in the middle of the book?” Quite possibly so. 

In his dedication to the Dauphin, Bossuet states his intention: “to explain the history of religion and the changes of empires.” While religion is unitary and perpetual, thanks to God’s continuous direction, empires are plural and changeable, human-all-too-human. Moreover, “even if history is useless to other men, princes should be made to read it,” as it shows them the effects of passion and interest, time and circumstance, good advice and bad advice. “If they need experience to acquire the prudence of a good ruler, nothing is more useful for their instruction than to add the examples of past centuries to the experiences they have every day,” at no risk to themselves or to their people. This should have a salubrious moral effect. “Seeing even the most hidden vices of princes exposed to everyone’s sight, despite the spurious praise they receive during their life, they will be ashamed of the vain pleasure they take in flattery and will understand that true glory comes only with merit.”

History’s effect of moral and straitening complements its intellectual effect, the ability to make distinctions. “He who has not learned from history to distinguish different ages will represent men under the law of Nature or under written law as they are under the law of the Gospel.” Spinoza attempts precisely to bring men to accept a new form of the law of nature; the ability to distinguish pagan natural law from the law of the Gospel, and both from the law of Moses, will guard the prince against such beguilement. Central to Bossuet’s list of distinctions is the one between the time of liberty under Themistocles and the time of Macedonian rule under Philip. Is it significant that Bossuet places a lesson on liberty in this place, even as he places he places the distinction of France during its civil wars and France “united under that great king,” Louis XIV, in which “France alone triumphs over all of Europe,” last on the list? Does he suggest that liberty leads to factional strife, empire to peace? Or is he, on the contrary, thinking of Catholic Christian liberty, threatened by the imperial monarch?

However this may be, religion and empire are “the two points around which human affairs revolve.” “To discover their order and sequence is to understand in one’s mind all that is great in mankind and, as it were, to hold a guiding line to all the affairs of the world”—no small thing for any prince to discover. History identifies “epochs” in the course of events, stops or resting places, great events “to which we an relate all the rest.” Of these twelve epochs, the sixth is Solomon’s founding of the Temple in Jerusalem, the seventh Romulus’ founding of Rome; that is, in keeping with the two points of human affairs, there is no one central epoch but a pair. A third and truly crucial turning point in terms of empire is Charlemagne’s founding of the new, Christian empire, ending ancient history. It is noteworthy that Bossuet so often marks the beginning of new epochs in the course of events with a founding, beginning with God’s founding of the human race.

Bossuet titles the first epoch “Adam, or the Creation.” It lasted from the Creation in 4004 BC to the Flood in 2348 BC. As related by Moses, author of the Pentateuch and therefore “the first historian, the most sublime philosopher”—pace Spinoza—and “the wisest of legislators,” in Adam God fashioned “all men within one man,” as even his wife “was fashioned from him.” The formation of Eve out of Adam indicates God’s intention to establish “harmony in marriage and human society.” After the expulsion from Eden, God’s providential care nonetheless continued, as he taught men the arts indispensable to their survival: agriculture, animal husbandry, weaving, and “perhaps that of finding shelter. For his part, beginning the second epoch, Noah preserved those arts after having preserved mankind itself by the art of carpentry. The Epoch of Noah, or the Flood, lasted 426 years until 1921 BC. It saw the first three founders of nations: Japheth, who established the peoples of the East, Ham, who established the peoples of the South, and Shem, ancestor of the Hebrews. Acting in contradiction to these builders, Nimrod’s “violent nature,” consonant with the way of hunting, made him into the first conqueror, beginning his destructive work at Babylon, the symbol of human pride. In both their constructive and destructive efforts, peoples “were going their separate ways, forgetful of their Creator.” Human learning also began to flourish, as the Chaldeans invented astronomy, which they gave to Callisthenes in Babylon, then by him to Aristotle.

God’s calling of Abraham, “the beginning of God’s people and the Covenant,” began in 1921 BC and lasted until 1491 BC. God chose Abraham “as the stem and father of all believers,” and Bossuet cleverly adds “It was Jesus Christ whom Abraham honored in the person of the high priest Melchizedek, who represented him”—an elegant way of inserting the authority of the Christian clergy into an Old Testament story. Under this interpretation, the Catholic Church goes back a long way, indeed. And, like Christians in many times and in many places, “the Hebrews were unjustly hated and persecuted without mercy,” enslaved in Egypt. There, the great prophet, Moses, learned “all the wisdom of the Egyptians,” having been “brought up by Pharaoh’s daughter.” 

During this epoch, Cecrops founded twelve Egyptian colonies in Greece, colonies which eventually became the Kingdom of Athens. The Deucalion flood, “which the Greeks take to be the universal flood,” wiped it out. Deucalion’s son, Hellen, escaped, reigning in the Thessalian city of Pythia; hence the term “Hellenes.” In Thebes, a non-Egyptian set of Gods were introduced by Cadmus, the gods of Syria and Phoenicia. Thus, Greece became polytheistic and (to deploy an anachronism) multicultural, even as the Israelites were monotheists who integrated and subordinated foreign wisdom under divine law.

The exodus from Egypt and the establishment of that written law by Moses inaugurated the fourth epoch, which lasted from 1491 BC to 1184 BC. Previous to the receipt of God’s law, natural law, consisting of reason and ancestral tradition, guided human conduct. But God’s tabernacle among the Israelites now became the “symbol of the future” of humanity. Jewish history during this epoch consists of events, often violent, by which God “slowly mold[ed]” His people, an education and habituation recounted in Moses’ Pentateuch, in which he recorded these “foundations of our religion.” Elsewhere, Pelops ruled what is now called the Peloponnesus, beginning in 1322; the first Assyrian empire was founded in 1267. Hercules and Theseus came “later,” Theseus founding the city of Athens.

The fall of Troy occurred in 1184 BC, inaugurating the fifth epoch, which concluded with the completion of Solomon’s Temple in 1004. In the Gentile world, this epoch comes down to us in the form of legends and heroes. In sacred history, Samson, Eli, Samuel, and Saul ruled Israel, followed by David, the “pious warrior.” Athenians “abolished kingship and declared Zeus the only king of the people of Athens,” as the archons or rulers were made accountable to the people of the city. In Greece, then, monotheism was associated with popular rule, not monarchy, whereas in Israel monotheism issued led to a popular call for monarchy.

The first of the two central epochs began slightly more than a millennium before the birth of Jesus. With perhaps a glance at the French monarchy of his own time, Bossuet relates that Solomon’s reign “ended in shameful weakness,” as “he indulged in the love of women; his spirit grew base, his courage weakened, and his piety degenerated into idolatry.” This brought down God’s judgment, with the kingdom divided after Solomon’s death. Around 890 BC, Dido enlarged and fortified Carthage, a “warlike and commercial republic” with “aspirations for domination of the sea.” If Solomonic Israel parallels seventeenth-century France, ancient Carthage parallels seventeenth-century England. 

“In these times Homer flourished, and Hesiod flourished thirty years before him. The venerable old ways they depict for us and the vestiges of ancient simplicity they preserve with such nobility are most useful in making us understand much more remote times and the divine simplicity of the Scriptures.” For Bossuet’s modernity, French and English, the sixth epoch holds up the contrast between the decadence of rulers and purity of ancient poetry and the way of life it shows us, to some extent neatly harmonizing those pagan practices with the God-given way seen in the Bible. 

The reestablishment of the Olympiads, founded by Hercules but long discontinued, in 776 BC “marks the end of what Varro calls the legendary times—since up to that date secular histories were full of confusion and legend—and the beginning of historical times—in which world events in more faithful and precise reports,” thanks to the exact chronology those annual events made possible. Generally, in this chapter Bossuet impresses upon his reader the increasingly unruly character of the Hebrew nation, ruled by kings, and the corresponding improvement and democratization of the Greeks—especially of the Athenians.

Romulus’ founding of Rome in 754 BC began the seventh epoch, the second of the epochs Bossuet makes central to his book. Rome “was to become the mistress of the world and the seat of religion,” a city dedicated by its founder to the god of war, “whom he called his father.” Bossuet makes no mention of Romulus’ murder of Remus, which would parallel Cain’s murder of Abel and recall Bossuet’s strictures against violence. If France under the Bourbons has become the modern Rome, Bossuet wants no suggestion of crime at the founding of its ruling dynasty. And even in his version of Rome, after Romulus the lawgiver Numa “gave form to religion and softened the barbarous manners of the Roman people.” Gradually, Romans learned to restrain their warlike character without losing it. In the 670s, “as its conquests extended further, Rome established the rules for its militia; and it was under Tullus Hostilius that it began to learn that magnificent discipline which was to make it mistress of the world” and, not incidentally, to “make citizens of its enemies” after mastering them in battle.

Away from the proto-French Romans, several potential rival empires emerged during this epoch. Weakened by the misrule of an “effeminate prince,” Sardanapalus, the first Assyrian empire fell to the “warlike Medes.” After this event, the Medean empire, the second Assyrian empire, and the Babylonian empire rose and fell in succession. By 600 BC, “Babylon was threatening to enslave the world” and Solomon’s temple was burned. In 562, Nebuchadnezzar died in Babylon, not after foreseeing “the coming ruin of his superb city” while on his deathbed. Indeed, Cyrus the Great of Persia would conquer Babylon not long afterwards. By joining the Kingdom of Persia with that of the Medes, Cyrus “became the uncontested master of the East and founded the greatest empire the world had ever seen.” Under his rule, he ordered the “restoration of God’s Temple in Jerusalem and of the Jewish people in Judaea.” 

Bossuet draws his account of Cyrus from the Bible and from Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. Among the several Gentile historians, he regards “the wise philosopher and skillful captain,” who served in Persia, as the most reliable. “What determines me in my choice is the fact that Xenophon’s history, more coherent and more probable in itself, has the added advantage of being more consistent with the Scriptures, which, because of their antiquity and the relations of the affairs of the Jewish people with others in the East, would merit being preferred to all Greek histories, if we did not know that they were dictated by the Holy Spirit.” As for Greek historians generally, he judges them to have been “more eloquent in their narrations than painstaking in their research.”

The years between 536 BC—the year the Jewish people returned to Jerusalem—and Rome’s conquest of Carthage in 202 saw the beginning of the hostility between the Jews and the Samaritans, who mixed worship of false Gods with Jewish observances and were on that account denied participation in rebuilding the Temple. “Irreconcilable hatred sprung up between the two nations, and there is no greater opposition than that between Jerusalem and Samaria.” Among the Gentiles, the year 510 saw Athens liberated from tyranny, with the Romans overthrowing the Tarquins a year later. The invasion of Greece by the Persians was defeated at the battles at Marathon and Thermopylae early in the fifth century.

“Meanwhile, the new magistrates that had been given to the Roman people exacerbated the divisions within that city. Having been shaped by kings, Rome lacked the laws necessary for the proper functioning of a republic.” The Romans sent delegates to Athens to study the laws there, resulting in the rule of the decemvirs, who wrote the Laws of the Twelve Tables, “the foundation of Roman law.” Simultaneously, in Jerusalem Ezra and Nehemiah “reformed abuses and enforced the Mosaic Law, which they were the first to obey,” making all the Jewish people, “and especially the priests” to divorce the foreign women they’d married in violation of that law. The Old Testament books named for those men “complete the long history begun by Moses and continued by subsequent authors without interruption until the restoration of Jerusalem.” “Thus the last authors of sacred history meet with the first author of Greek history; and when it began, the history of God’s people—to take it only since Abraham—already comprised fifteen centuries” when Herodotus first began to write. 

The Peloponnesian War began in 431 BC, raging on until 404. After the Spartans won they supported Cyrus the Younger in his revolt against Artaxerxes. When Cyrus was killed, the 10,000 Greek soldiers in his service retreated under the command of Xenophon, who chronicled this in his Hellenica. It was Thebes, under King Epaminondas, which broke Sparta’s hegemony in Greece, and this weakened the nation sufficiently to enable Philip of Macedon to conquer it. His son, Alexander, caused “all of the East [to come] to know Greece and {to] learn its language,” since although he died at the age of thirty-three, his fellow Macedonian generals founded the Seleucid Empire in Syria in 312 and the Ptolemaic Dynasty in Egypt in 305.  As a result of these interrelations between East and West, “the Jewish religion and the Jewish people came to be known among the Greeks,” who translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek in 277. Centuries later, the New Testament would be written in “the Hellenistic language,” that is, “Greek interspersed with Hebraisms.” “All during this time, philosophy was flourishing in Greece.” Bossuet mentions the outstanding natural philosophers but emphasizes Socrates, who “brought philosophy back to the study of proper living and became the father of moral philosophy.” Of the several schools of moral philosophy, Bossuet deprecates only the Epicureans—if, indeed, “we can call philosophers those who openly denied the existence of Providence and who, not knowing what duty is, defined virtue by pleasure.” The Romans, too, began to delve into philosophy “of another kind,” one “which had nothing to do with disputations or discourses but consisted of frugality, poverty, and the hardships of rustic life and war.” This befits a people who had fought wars for some five centuries, “found themselves masters of Italy,” and went on to defeat the Carthaginians and their great general, Hannibal.

Scipio’s final defeat of Carthage in 202 BC marks the beginning of the ninth epoch. By now, “the Romans were feared throughout the world and no longer wanted to tolerate any power but their own.” In 173, “the persecutions of God’s people began,” not under the Romans but under Antiochus the Illustrious, a Syrian who “ruled like a maniac” and provoked a Jewish revolt against his tyranny. A few years later, after Antiochus’ death, however, Rome placed the Jewish people under their protection, “delighted with the opportunity to humiliate the kings of Syria.” In the course of their conquests, the Romans destroyed Corinth, “the most beautiful and voluptuous of all Greek cities,” taking care to remove “its incomparable statues” and to bring them to Rome, albeit “without knowing their value.” In general, “the Romans knew nothing about the arts of Greece, being satisfied with their knowledge of war, politics, and agriculture.” But by 133, Rome saw a major slave revolt against its rule at home; the Romans “were becoming too wealthy.” They continued to press their conquests, “but though the aspect of the republic was made resplendent on the outside by these conquests, it was marred by the unbridled ambition of its citizens and internal struggles.” “Everyone wanted to rule,” none to be ruled. “Even a man like the gladiator Spartacus believed that he could aspire to the command,” leaving a second slave revolt in 103. 

The republic was slowly failing. By 58 BC, a supremely ambitious general, Gaius Julius, conquered Gaul, “the most useful conquest [Rome] ever made,” the patriotic Bossuet remarks. Julius defeated the rival general, Pompey, in 49, ended the republic by becoming emperor in 44, died by assassination a year later. Twelve years later, Octavianus defeated Marcus Antonius at the Battle of Actium. “Forsaken by all his friends, including Cleopatra, for whom he had ruined himself,” Marcus Antonius committed suicide, as did Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemaic line. In 27, Octavianus became the Emperor Augustus.

It was under Augustus’ long and largely peaceful rule that Jesus Christ was born, beginning the tenth epoch of human history, approximately 4,000 years after Creation. Bossuet saves his considerations of Jesus for Part Two; in this chapter, he focuses his reader’s attention on Rome. In 66 AD, the Emperor Nero became “the first emperor to persecute the Church.” But this didn’t prevent the Church’s advance throughout the empire, which proceeded throughout the second and third centuries AD. “The purity of its ways was so striking that it was praised even by its enemies.” A series of invasions by Germans and Goths in the West, Scythians and Persians in the East, weakened the Western Roman Empire and eventually overran and divided it. “Still hostile to Christianity,” Rome “made a last effort to smother it but, in the end, established it definitively” under Galerius. “New tortures were invented every day” and “the modesty of Christian virgins was attacked as much as their faith.” But “the Christians exasperated” the Romans “by their patience,” and “other nations, impressed by their saintly way of life, converted in large numbers.” The frustrated Galerius “lost all hope of vanquishing them,” dying a few years later. “But Constantine the Great, a wise and victorious prince, publicly converted to Christianity” in 312 AD and ruled the Eastern Roman Empire for the next twenty-five years—thirty-one in all. 

In accordance with this emphasis on Rome, Bossuet places the two men he considers its finest rulers in the center of this chapter. Antoninus Pius, who ruled from 138 to 161—patron of religion, the arts and sciences, who fought no wars of conquest—and Marcus Aurelius—who ruled from 161 to 180 as that rarest of men, the philosopher-king—defended the empire and persecuted no Christians.

Bossuet titles his chapter on the eleventh epoch “Constantine, or the Peace of the Church.” The Peace of Constantine lasted until the accession of Charlemagne to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire, the new Rome, in 800. Constantine’s reign saw the condemnation of the Arians, who denied the divinity of Jesus, at the Nicaean Council in 325, followed five years later by the reconstruction of Byzantium, renamed Constantinople. A century later, Macromeres founded “the monarchy of France, the most ancient and noble of all the monarchies in the world.” But the fifth century, “so unfortunate for the empire, and in which so many heresies sprung up, was nevertheless a fortunate one for Christianity. No discord was able to shake it, no heresy to corrupt it. The Church, rich in great men, confounded all doctrinal errors.” And so, while the Western Roman Empire was “irretrievably lost” in the 470s, the French king, Clovis, converted to Christianity two decades later and the great Christian emperor Justinian ruled in the East, beginning in 527. Later in the sixth century, St. Gregory the Great became pope, sending Augustine to England to convert the pagans there.

Gazing further to the East, Bossuet describes the failure of the Persian Empire. With what is likely another allusion to Louis XIV’s Versailles and the character of the Dauphin, Bossuet comments, “debauchery is often more harmful to princes than cruelty.” The Persians captured, then lost, the True Cross and, their power broken, Mohammad “posed as a prophet among the Saracens,” “subjugating all Arabia by fair means or foul, thus laying the foundation for the empire of the caliphs” and threatening Constantinople itself. By the second third of the seventh century, “the East was going to its ruin.” “While the emperors were consuming themselves in religious disputes and inventing heresies,” the Saracens invaded and occupied Syria, Palestine, Persian, parts of Africa, and Cyprus. It remained for a French general, Charles Martel, to defeat them in the Battle of Tours in 725. “Powerful in peace as in war, and absolute master of the kingdom,” Charles “ruled under a number of kings, whom he made and unmade as he saw fit, without daring to assume that great title.” His son, Pepin, did assume the throne as king of France; Pepin’s son, the future Charlemagne, defeated the Lombards, “enemies of Rome and its popes,” in a three-year series of campaigns ending in 776. 

Charlemagne inaugurated the twelfth and final epoch of world history, being elected Emperor of the Romans in 800. At this point, however, Bossuet ends his chronological narrative. In order to understand the history of God’s people and the history of the great empires, “it is sometimes necessary to separate them and to examine in detail the things which are peculiar to each.” He devoted Part II to Church history, Part III to imperial history.

Bossuet titles Part II “The Continuity of Religion.” It consists of 31 chapters. The seventeenth, central chapter consists of a critique of Judaism; the center of the book as a whole comes a few pages later and consists of a statement of what has come to be called ‘supersession theology’—the claim that Christianity became the true Judaism, and that what is now called Judaism has deviated from its origins. In Bossuet’s terms, the continuity of religion means that religion has been “always the same since the Creation of the world” but that human beings have consistently deviated from God’s way. This is also the claim of the Old Testament, and therefore of orthodox Jews to this day, who regard Christianity as anything but the true Judaism. The question, then, is how political regimes should address this principled disagreement between Christians and Jews. Bossuet’s formula opens Jewish citizens (or subjects, as in the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV) to vile persecution. To recount his argument is profoundly offensive but also useful in the sense that it opens a window into the minds of those who inflicted pogroms upon innocent persons precisely because they were deemed guilty of the most heinous crime by the highest religious authorities of those times and places, men like the Bishop of Meaux.

“Religion and the continued existence of the people of God throughout the centuries is the greatest and most useful of all things a man can study,” Bossuet begins. This continuity “shows clearly God’s sustaining hand,” His providential rule over his creatures. Creation itself bespeaks that care; although He could have done it in an instant, God took six days to create the world “to show that he does not act out of necessity or blind impetuosity, as some philosophers have imagined.” On the contrary, “the account of the Creation as given by Moses shows us this great secret of true philosophy: that fecundity and absolute power dwell in God alone,” and not, he implies, in the ‘absolute’ monarchy of Louis XIV or any other human ruler. 

When God says, “Let us make man,” his use of “us” deserves note, Bossuet remarks. “Nowhere in the entire Scriptures does anyone but God speak of himself in the plural,” and He does so “only two or three times,” using this “extraordinary language for the first time when it is a question of creating man.” That is because when God creates man “he speaks to someone who creates as well as he, to someone of whom man is the creature and image; he speaks to another self; he speaks to him by whom all things were made, to him who says in his Gospel, What things soever the Father doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.” Not only does God speak to Jesus, “he speaks at the same time with the almighty Spirit, equal and coeternal with both of them.” The trinitarian God has existed since before “the beginning.”

To speak this way also indicates “a new order of things,” a founding. “The Trinity manifests itself for the first time when it creates a creature whose intellectual operations are an imperfect image of those eternal operations whereby God is fruitful in himself.” And this is itself a new kind of creating. Prior to Man, God had never touched the “corruptible matter” he created, “but to form the body of man, God himself takes earth; and that earth, molded by such a hand, receives the most beautiful form that has yet appeared in the world,” a creature whose “body is straight, his head…held high, and his sight…turned toward Heaven”—a form which shows this new being “whence he has come and whither he must go.” Again: providential. Even “more wonderful” is way God ensouled man with “a breath of life that proceeds from God himself.” “Let us not,” Bossuet cautions, “believe that our soul is a portion of the divine nature, as some philosophers have dreamed.” It proceeded from God, but it was a new act of creation; God is not immanent in Man, whose soul, and particularly his intellect, are rather created in the image of God. “Woe to the creature that delights in itself and not in God!” That is why the angels who fell, fell.

Man’s imperfection manifests itself rapidly. The successful temptation of Eve by the Serpent “is the beginning of the spirit of revolt” in Man: “first, the command is discussed, and then obedience is brought into doubt.” Adam wants intellectual satisfaction—knowledge of good and evil—and sensuous pleasure—his wife convinces him that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is good to eat. The result is that “the rebellion of his senses” against God’s command. It is impossible not to see in this a tacit critique of Bossuet’s contemporary, Descartes, who makes so much of doubt as the pathway to knowledge, a method by which the human mind can clear itself of everything we have been told, including anything we’ve been told not to do. Such efforts fail, Bossuet thinks, because doubting God’s commands leaves the human mind defenseless against the power of the passions. “For Adam, “the rebellion of the senses makes him observe in himself something shameful,” requiring him to clothe himself, covering up the physical being God made because he knew he was no longer worthy of his God-breathed original being. The Serpent’s “You shall be as gods” tempted Eve, then Adam, to attempt to overcome, irrationally, the distinction god had delineated, the distinction between Creator and created. This soon leads Adam’s progeny to another form of sensualism—idolatry, whereby men begin to worship physical objects they themselves have ‘created.’ this is the final derangement of man’s God-breathed reason. Having been formed by God, Man absurdly “thought he could make a God.” All of this shows that there is “no power more inescapable or tyrannical than the power of vice and passion.”

Each generation of men degenerated further—so much so that God lost His patience with His creatures, destroying all but the relatively decent few in the worldwide Flood. Even after receding, the waters left all of nature weakened, as the lingering moisture accelerated decomposition and the human lifespan shortened. Enfeebled human beings began to supplement the vegetarian diet with meat, fueling warfare. 

The simple Noachide commandments God imposed upon mankind proved insufficient to hold human attention. To counteract men’s continued failure to follow in God’s way, His regime, God gave Moses not another set of verbal commands but a system of written laws to a people He chose to bind “with fearful strictness” and thereby improve, providing (for example) “stronger barriers against idolatry.” In choosing the Israelites he did not reward them for any merit; they “were as vulgar and rebellious as any other people, or more so.” And in preventing Moses from entering the Promised Land, God offered Israelites and the rest of mankind an indispensable lesson: “His Law made nothing perfect.” Like Moses, thanks to God’s lawful guidance we can see His promises “from afar”; the Law “conducts us at most, as it were, to the gateway of our inheritance.” It was Joshua, whose “true name” is Jesus, who brings God’s people into the Promised Land itself.

Bossuet draws many such parallels between the Old and New Testaments. The warrior-king David fights God’s wars but Solomon, the man of peace and wisdom, is the king God permits to build His Temple in His city, Jerusalem. “David’s wars showed how much toil it takes to attain [the glory of Heaven], and Solomon’s reign showed how peaceable is its enjoyment.” For their part, Bossuet asserts, the prophets who spoke truth to the Israelite kings saw Jesus; this may be why he spends so much effort in retelling stories from Hebrew Scripture to the heir apparent to the French throne. One day, “Under [Jesus’] admirable reign the Assyrians and the Egyptians shall form with the Israelites but one and the same people of God. Everything becomes Israel, everything becomes holy. Jerusalem is no longer an individual city: it is the image of a new society, in which all nations are gathered together.” Throughout all the vicissitudes to come, “God never permitted his voice to become extinct among his people.”

His power never ceased to enforce what His voice said, and that power was not uniformly gentle. “When the royal sons of David follow their father’s good example”—Dauphin, take note—God “works surprising wonders on their behalf; but when they degenerate, they feel the invincible strength of his arm.” God eventually allowed the Assyrians to destroy His Temple, to let Israelites “see that he was not confined to an edifice of stone, but that he would find his habitation in faithful hearts.” Nonetheless, “the overthrow of the cities and empires which harassed God’s people or profited by their destruction were written in the prophecies,” enabling (for example) the Jewish people to escape Babylon, “having timely warning.” To His chosen people, God administers fatherly chastisement, “merciful judgment,” punishing them for their own good; to the Babylonians and other nations he administers “rigorous judgment” and chastisement, ruining them. “God left no appeal” for the Babylonians. “But not so with the Jews. God chastened them like disobedient children, whom he returns to their duty by correction, and then, moved by their tears, he forgets their faults.”

As always, however, God sets limits to His patience, as seen in the promises and warnings of the last prophets. Daniel foresees the life and death of Jesus. Jacob had taught the future advent of the Messiah; he did not “tell us that his death should be the cause” of Judah’s downfall. “God revealed this important secret to Daniel and declares to him that the ruin of the Jews shall be the consequence of the death of Christ and of their rejection of the Messiah.” That is, Daniel learns that many Jews will become like Gentiles, rejecting their Messiah, and will afterwards be judged and chastised as Gentiles had been judged and chastised. The prophecies of Zechariah and Haggai foretell the betrayal of Jerusalem “by her own children”; the last prophet, Malachi, looks forward to John the Baptist and Jesus. After these prophets, prophecy ceased. There was no more need for them. “The proofs [the Jewish people] had received were sufficient, and once their incredulity had been not only overcome by events but also frequently punished, they at last became docile,” eschewing idolatry and the words of false prophets for a long time. 

In secular terms, “instructed by their prophets to obey the kings to whom God had subjected them,” they found those kings to be “their protectors rather than their masters,” living under their own laws with “the sacerdotal power…preserved in its entirety.” “The priests guided the people; the public council, first established by Moses, enjoyed its full authority.” This was in fact the way most ancient empires ruled their subject peoples. Limitations of transportation and communications enabled rulers to rule no other way. “For 300 years they…enjoyed this rest, so often foretold by their prophets, when ambition and jealousy arose among them and came near to undoing them.” They began to imitate Greek ways, “prefer[ring[ that vain pomp to the solid glory which the observance of the laws of their ancestors acquired for them among their countrymen.”

The Jews’ “whole history, everything that happened to them from day to day, was but one continued unfolding of the oracles which the Holy Spirit had left them.” As for the Greeks, who ruled the Jewish people at that time, even what took place among them “was a preparation for knowledge of the truth.” Greek philosophers understood “that the world was ruled by a God very different from those whom the populace worshiped and whom they themselves worshiped with the populace,” albeit mostly for the sake of safety from ridicule or even (in the case of Socrates) persecution. [1] But this should not be taken as an independent discovery. “The Greek histories show that this excellent philosophy came from the East and from places to which the Jews had been dispersed.” Whether this claim of origins is true or false, mankind “began to awaken” to teachings that “furnished beforehand certain proof to those who were one day to rescue [the Gentiles] from their ignorance,” namely, the Apostles of Christ, who would cite the doctrine of ‘the god of the philosophers’ when teaching who that god really is. Philosophy, however, is not quite enough. “The most enlightened and wisest nations, the Chaldeans, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans, were the most ignorant and the most blind in matters of religion, which only proves that one must be brought to wisdom by a special grace and by a more than human wisdom.” 

In the end, and as per the original Satanic temptation, the Jewish people “succumbed to ambition.” By now, they were under the Roman Empire, wherein they enjoyed a substantial degree of self-government. “The Pharisees wanted power and accordingly assumed absolute power over the people, setting themselves up as arbiters of learning and religion.” Their “presumption went so far as to arrogate to itself the gift of God.” Under their regime, “the Jews…forgot that [God’s] goodness alone had set them apart from other nations, and they looked upon this as their due,” confusing divine grace for divine justice. They “thought themselves of a different species from other men, whom they considered deprived of the knowledge” of God, “look[ing] upon the Gentiles with an unbearable disdain.” “They fancied themselves holy by nature”—a contradiction, given nature’s postlapsarian corruption. “It was the Pharisees who, priding themselves on their own lights and on their strict observance of the ceremonies of the Law, introduced this opinion in the latter days.”

Factionalism resulted. In search of a cure, the Jewish people allowed “all public power” to pass “into the hands of Herod and the Romans, whose slave he [was], and he shook the foundations of the Jewish state,” hitherto self-governing if not sovereign within the Roman Empire. The Pharisees and the people alike chafed under “the yoke of the Gentiles,” their “contempt and hatred” intensified. They yearned for a Messiah who would be a David, not a Solomon, a man of war not of wisdom and peace. “Forgetting the many prophecies which told them so specifically of [the Messiah’s] humiliations, they no longer had eyes or ears for any prophecies but those which announced triumphs.” The triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem on an ass was not what they anticipated.

Readers of the Hebrew Scripture know that God’s prophets do not hesitate to denounce the bad behavior of God’s people. In his retelling of the times before Jesus’ birth, however, Bossuet sometimes inclines to identify corrupt priests with the Jewish people as a whole. This is a dangerous thing to do, and one must watch closely as he proceeds, next, to give his account of the life of Jesus, having now reached the center of his book.

 

Note

1. “Plato, speaking of the god who had formed the universe, says that it is hard to find him and that it is forbidden to declare him to the people. He protests that he never speaks of him but enigmatically, for fear of exposing so great a truth to ridicule.” Thus “mankind was plunged into such an abyss that it could not bear the least idea of the true God!” Bossuet places this account of Greek philosophy in the sixteenth, central chapter of Book II.