Jean Bodin: Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime. Marion Leathers Daniels Kuntz translation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.

 

Note: The Latin title, Colloqium Heptaplomeres de Rerum Sublimium Arcanis Abditis, literally means Colloquium of the Seven on the Hidden Secrets of the Sublime. By selecting the locution, “hidden secrets,” Bodin may imply that they will be revealed in the course of the book. I am grateful to Professor Joseph Garnjobst of the Hillsdale College Classics Department for calling my attention to this nuance in the Latin.

 

Born around 1530, probably in Angers, Bodin became a novice in the Carmelite Order but left it, eventually spending much of his life practicing law in Paris. He was associated with the Politiques there—monarchists who sought national unity and what they hoped would be a consequent decrease in the religious asperities which spark civil wars. He admired the Huguenot logician Petrus Ramus, himself a victim of religious hatred, who criticized the Scholastic form of Aristotelianism upheld by the Catholic Church and recurred to the less grand philosophic practices of Socrates. The Colloquium may be said to propose a way, if not to make the world or even France safe for Socrates, and Socratic Huguenots, at least to make private discussions among philosophic friends safe for such.

The “Seven” are a Catholic (Paulus Coronaeus), a Lutheran mathematician (Fridericus Podmicus), a skeptic (Hieronymus Senamus), a natural philosopher (Diegus Toralba), a Calvinist (Antonius Curtius), a Jew (Salomon Barcassius), and a Muslim (Octavius Fagnola).  Paulus Coronaeus superintends the discussion, perhaps because Bodin writes in Catholic France, and perhaps also because he wants to introduce more catholicity into the Catholic Church and, consequently, into French politics. This Paul, too, is an evangelist, although one of a different temper and possibly a different intention than those of the Apostle, whom Leo Strauss described as a highly spirited man. Bodin judges that spiritedness already has had its day in the religious sun, that a more irenic spirit is now more needed.

“Seven” of course has Biblical significance as the Creation week in the Book of Genesis. Professor Kuntz remarks that it also suggests musical harmony (as in the seven-stringed lyre). And it may allude to the seven-branched candelabra of Moses, an image Bodin’s contemporary Guillaume Postel “used in his book, Candelabri typici in Mosis tabernaculo …interpretatio, to indicate the universal significance of Israel and France in establishing the kingdom of heaven on earth.” Postel, she relates, aimed at a syncretistic religion combining Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; Bodin extends the ambition to include two kinds of philosophers and three kinds of Christians. Kuntz also cites Ficino’s claim that ancient philosophers came from a common intellectual ancestor, Hermes Trismegistus, whose line then descended to Orpheus, followed by Aglaophemus, Pythagoras, Philolaus, and finally to Plato. This suggests a philosophic syncretism matching religious syncretism—an ideational settlement complementing the spiritual settlement.

There are only six philosophers on Ficino’s list, although in Bodin’s dialogue a seventh, Socrates, becomes important. Any syncretic religious or philosophic doctrine might fall into the same kind of rigidity that Ramus deplored in the Church’s Christian Aristotelianism. The presence of ‘Socrates’ within such a syncretism might prevent that. At the same time, the rational character of Socrates’ enterprise can pull thinkers back from what we now see in ‘postmodernist’ vapor about ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusiveness.’

Bodin divides the Colloquium into six books. The original Creation took six days, so the Colloquium evidently represents an act of creativity, of sorts. It would indeed take some carefully designed invention to realize the kingdom of heaven in France, but, as Kuntz notes, Bodin named his first son Elias, and even used the name “Elias Bodin” on the title page of one of his published writings—Elijah having been “assigned the task of bringing world peace and religious harmony to men.”

Bodin frames the dialogue as a letter to his friend “N.T.” This letter differs from a Pauline letter at first glance because it is much longer than all the Pauline epistles combined. Kuntz hazards no guess regarding N.T.’s identity, so I shall make one up: N.T. is a person standing in for a book, the Novum Testamentarum. Whereas Paul in the New Testament witnesses to the Holy God—the God separate from His creation, who proceeds to divide the waters from the sky, the earth from the waters, the night from the day—Bodin witnesses to the concordia discors, the harmoniousness of the whole composed of these differentiated elements.

On “my quest for educated and excellent men,” Bodin has arrived in Venice, “a port common to almost all nations or rather the whole world, not only because the Venetians delight in receiving strangers hospitably, but also because one can live there with the greatest freedom.” The great commercial republic of the day, the hub of Mediterranean civilization, trading in material and intellectual goods alike, Venice was a place where even the Athenian Stranger might have felt at home. “Whereas other cities and districts are threatened by civil wars or fear of tyrants or harsh exactions of taxes or the most annoying inquiries into one’s activities, this seemed to me to be nearly the only city that offers immunity and freedom from all these kinds of servitude.” Such civic peace, political, social, perhaps religious and intellectual freedom constitute “the reason why people come here from everywhere, wishing to spend their lives in the greatest freedom and tranquility of spirit, whether they are interested in commerce or crafts or leisure pursuits as befit free men.”

Fortune, if not Providence, led Bodin to meet Coronaeus, a man investigating “all the monuments of antiquity” who “had joined with the most scholarly men in an intimate society” in his home, “considered a shrine of the Muses and virtues.” Coronaeus “had an incredible desire to understand the language, inclinations, activities, customs, and virtues of different peoples”—a political-philosophic eros, so to speak. The Seven “were exceptionally well trained in the liberal arts,” yet “each seemed to surpass the others in his unique knowledge,” knowledge supplemented their “easy access to anything new or worthy of note in the world by means of letters from friends”—like this one, to N. T.—”whom they had made a point of acquiring in Rome, Constantinople, Augsburg, Seville, Antwerp, and Paris.” All of them “were not motivated by wrangling or jealousy but by a desire to learn.” Coronaeus’ vast library and archive, and his collection of musical and mathematical instruments featured the “pantotheca,” a box six feet square containing six square compartments per foot. “Thirty-six multiplied by itself produced 1296 small boxes,” each containing replicas of natural things duly divided according to their kinds. He selected the number six as the mathematical basis for the structure because it is the “perfect” number, “because most living things terminate in this number.” He may mean that the creation of most living things (but not God Himself, or the angels and demons) was completed to God’s satisfaction by the sixth and final day of creation. “Also in nature there are only six perfect bodies, only six simple colors, six simple tastes, six harmonious harmonies, only six simple metals, six regions, also six senses including common sense.” The Seven, then, seem eminently well equipped to consider nature, to consider this world if not Heaven. It may be that a city like Venice attracts a certain kind of Catholic, Lutheran, skeptic, natural philosopher, Calvinist, Jew, and Muslim—a kind animated by the philosophic quest, one manifestation of the desire to learn.

For this genial enterprise, Coronaeus proves a Socratic type indeed: “To preserve his strength he did not waste his time in writing or reading; rather he had developed the sharpest critical faculty by listening, discussing, and contemplating.” He does not walk like a Peripatetic, stand like a Stoic, recline like an Academic; he sits. He proposes six topics for discussion: nature and mathematics, the preeminence of laws and the best form of government, medicine and the reliability of history. The central pair, laws and the best regime, recall the topics of Plato’s longest dialogues. Bodin is Plato to Coronaeus’ Socrates. And ‘Coronaus’ suggests ‘crown’; the Socrates of Venice gently rules the dialogue as a philosopher-king. [1] If so, then Bodin acts as Plato to Coronaeus/Socrates, recording in writing a spoken dialogue. Each pair of topics corresponds to a pair of books in that written account, the Colloquium.

On the first day, the Seven resume an ongoing discussion of the immortality of the soul. Bodin who has been serving as the reader of texts for the group to discuss, has been reading from Plato’s Phaedo—specifically, the passage on “the power of immortal souls” and the subsequent discussion of Egyptian mummification. There Socrates claims that since a mummified body lasts a long time, the human soul, having no tincture of materiality, must last even longer, or even forever.

Salomon protests that they have discussed the matter sufficiently, and that “we”—we Jews—”have been persuaded for a long time of that immortality and that eternal rewards are fixed for the good and punishments decreed for the wicked.” Natural philosopher Toralba and skeptic Senamus demur, although Toralba admits that Epicurean atheism would have a bad effect: “For when the hope of rewards and the fear of divine punishment are removed, no society can endure.” The conversation evidently has reached an impasse.

But it continues because the account of mummification reminds Muslim Octavius of a ship voyage he took, smuggling a mummified Egyptian corpse stolen at the behest of a Genevan “empiricist” who coveted one because, he said, mummies ward off “almost all diseases.” Egyptian law prohibits the transportation of mummies because it stirs up storms. In this storm, Octavius recalls, “we had poured out our prayers in vain,” despite the many sailors from many nations, some of whom at least must have been praying to the true God. The storm subsided only after Octavius threw the mummy overboard. The point of the story isn’t to confirm the wisdom of the Egyptian law, based on a decidedly questionable theory of causation, but to recall the symbolism of mummies. In mummifying a corpse, the Egyptians remove the hear and replace it with a stone image of Isis, Egypt’s queen-lawgiver, who was taught by Hermes, the god-founder of philosophy. The Egyptian regime would keep philosophy to itself, prevent even its image from being brought to other countries. This clearly hasn’t succeeded, as Hermes also instructed Orpheus, a poet not a ruler, who transmitted philosophy to a line of Greeks.

When the storm subsided, “a venerable old man with white hair, extending his hands to Heaven and giving thanks to immortal God, forced the others by his example to praise God.” But are they not praying, unaware, to the god of the philosophers?

This prompts Coronaeus to raise three questions: Why should storms arise due to the transportation of Egyptian corpses? Are the seas stirred by demons, or “only from exhalations, as the physicists say”? “With such a variety of religions represented, whose prayers did God heed in bringing the ship safely to port?” The others want time to think about these matters, so Coronaeus adjourns the conversation until the following day.

At Coronaeus’ direction, Bodin switches from the Phaedo to letters from a merchant in Corcyra describing celebrations of the circumcision of the firstborn son of the Turkish king. These messages lead the Seven to take up the topic of messengers, and particularly the second question Coronaeus proposed. The Lutheran, Fridericus Podamicus, worries about “the wicked arts of magic,” which Plato makes punishable in the legal code proposed in the Laws. He credits stories about demon causation. Predictably, sceptical Senamus does not, demanding proof. Calvinist Curtius mediates: “The account of actions depends upon the senses the ‘that it is,’ but the proof of causes, namely, the ‘why it is,’ must be sought more deeply from the hidden secrets of philosophy.” Coronaeus asks natural philosopher Toralba to explicate “the mysteries of nature.” Toralba cautiously replies that although he can talk about natural causation, “the examination of the actions of demons and angels does not seem to me to pertain to natural science, but to those who study metaphysics, since it is evident that they take place by the will and power of demons.” He throws the topic back to Fridericus, who has studied both mathematics and the arts of magic.

This annoys the Lutheran, who rejects the implied connection between mathematics and magic. Picking up on the theme of Plato’s Laws and citing the Justinian Code, he criticizes lawgivers, lawyers, and judges for lumping practitioners of both as impious. In this he needles his rival Protestant, the Calvinist, a practitioner of the art of jurisprudence; that gentleman replies, in effect that the same degree of precision one expects in mathematics cannot possibly be matched by lawgivers. While agreeing that mathematicians shouldn’t be confused with magicians, he asks for a certain toleration of lawgivers’ errors: “Just as nurses are wont to baby-talk to babies, so it is inevitable that legislators often err along with the people.” That is, the art of legislation itself, intended for the government of the people, habituates lawgivers to ‘popular’—and thus inaccurate—ways of thinking.

This matter of what later philosophers might call epistemological hazard deepens when the Skeptic demands experiential proof that magicians and demons exist. The Calvinist says that the very act of observing them endangers the observer. The epistemological problem of ‘subjectivity’ matches another problem, that of ‘objectivity’: as the Seven discuss reported magical metamorphoses of men into asses, wolves, and other animals, it is obvious that if magic is real and nature so easily altered, nature itself, which philosophers attempt to understand, has no real nature at all. Accordingly, the Skeptic is the only one who outright denies the power of magic, calling it a craft aimed at producing illusions. The Natural Philosopher, who would seem to have at least as big a stake in the matter, contents himself by repeating that the question is for metaphysics, not physics, and adds, Socratically, “I realize that I do not know,” being “moved by reason alone, not by authority.” The Calvinist, who may be expected to question the authority of the Catholic Church, concurs, criticizing the ignorant, who live in “the cave of Socrates,” believing that they know what they do not know; “empty authority draws along many whom reason ought to have led.”

It is the Natural Philosopher who draws the theological point, criticizing natural scientists—that is, those who profess to know more than they do. “Of all the innumerable errors that our natural scientists can make, there is none more serious than to think that all things which are outside man’s power come from the necessary causes of nature or fortune. Those who think this try to snatch away free will from God.” Such self-described knowers “think it base to admit that they are ignorant of the causes of the things which fall under the senses.” Against the Scholastic Aristotelians, he argues that the First Mover “is bound by no necessity to act, but tempers all things with this freedom so that it can, if it wishes, restrain the attacks of men and beasts, control lifeless natures, keep fires from burning, shake the world at will or raise it up again.” That is, there isn’t necessarily any overarching Fate that rules the god. The Biblical God, for example, is ruled by nothing.  Consequently in the Bible, contra Aristotle, the world is not eternal; the work which depends on another’s judgment and will for its safety is not eternal.” Among philosophers, the Natural Philosopher prefers Plato to Aristotelians, Epicureans, and Stoics, as in both the Phaedo and the Statesman the possibility of divine providence is treated with respect.

Coronaeus adds that Aristotle’s opinions “leave no place for divine laws or authority.” It would seem that the Natural Philosopher’s critique of authority has led him to provide an opening for a defense of authority, albeit divine not human. Coronaeus takes this as evidence of the power of angels and demons “outside of or contrary to nature.” The Natural Philosopher remarks that Plato’s Socrates also affirms the existence of his own guardian daemon; the Jewish scholar cites rabbinical testimony that “each person has a good and a bad angel.”

The point having been settled to the satisfaction of all but the Skeptic, Coronaeus asks if the difference between angels and demons is restricted to the difference between good and evil, and what actions and affairs they involve themselves in. That is, having limited nature by the wills of God, angels, and demons, what are the limits of angelic and demonic action? What, exactly, are demons? The Lutheran student of demonology offers Apuleius’ definition: demons are “animal in kind, rational in nature, passive in soul, aerial in body, eternal in time,” then cites numerous other ancient writers who denied their immortality. For himself, the Lutheran agrees with the Natural Philosopher in thinking that “eternity is suitable for God alone,” not for demons or for “God’s lieutenants,” the angels. The Calvinist agrees, citing the testimony of Plutarch, via Eusebius, who tells the story from the time of the Emperor Tiberius, in which a voice from a god commanding a ship-master to announce that “Pan is dead.” Not only are angels and demons mortal, but there is evidence that they are physically constrained to certain regions. The Jewish Scholar is quick to intercede when the Skeptic ventures to allege that Jews assisted demons in possessing some Jewish girls who had converted to Christianity; demons “have always been hostile to Jews.”

The anecdotes multiply, and the Natural Philosopher prudently suggests that “it is easier to wonder at these stories than to ascertain the reasons for them.” For example, Hippocrates couldn’t tell the difference between demonic possession and epilepsy, but close observation had enabled modern physician to distinguish the symptoms of each. This is as far as natural philosophy can go. The Muslim goes a bit further, saying that “the authority of important men has the greatest influence in making faith more enduring than any opinion. However, as a few adopt this or that opinion because it pleases them to, most people wish to be convinced by necessary proofs to agree, as after a questioning, in order that by attaining knowledge they may throw off all opinion. Knowledge and opinion can no more exist at the same time than faith and knowledge.” This more than suggests that Octavius Fagnola, the Muslim speaker, has a bit of al-Farabi if not indeed of Averroës in him. Be that as it may, his astringent statement has the effect of turning the discussion from anecdote and appeal to distinguished authors, and toward a discussion of the more general philosophic questions the existence of angels and demons raises: such matters as the difference between corporeal and incorporeal substances, the limits that might or might not be placed on the latter.

Having insisted on the distinction between metaphysics and physics, the Natural Philosopher firmly rejects immanence, the notion that “the human mind is a particle of the divine mind.” On the contrary, “the human mind is not even like God, much less the same substance as God.” Crucially for the history of philosophy as the Seven conceive it, Hermes Trismegistus also denies that the human mind has been “cut away from the substance of God.” And the Book of Genesis confirms this, as the life-giving breath or spirit of God (Ruah) isn’t the substance of God, any more than the image of God, in which Man is made, is the substance of God. The Jewish Scholar readily concurs: “Wise indeed are those who have separated body altogether from the nature of God, for this is the principal point of our creed.” The Skeptic and the Calvinist alike concur on the point that this is why God can be properly contemplated only in silence, as no human words can truly describe Him. The Natural Philosopher concludes that only God, the first cause, has no parts because He alone is incorporeal and indissoluble. The Skeptic asks, how then is God said to have ears, eyes, nose, fingers, arms, and face? Because, the Jewish Scholar replies, “nurses and parents must stammer with babies and human attributes must be transferred to God, since divine things cannot be translated to men”—another example of exotericism, already noted in lawgivers. He adds that the senses of taste and touch are never attributed to God, as they require a body. [2]

Coronaeus is eager to hear a clear refutation of Epicureans, who avoid the problem of distinguishing the divine from all else by denying the existence of God altogether. The Natural Philosopher, who obviously doesn’t mind discussing metaphysics as long as it’s clearly separated from physics, replies with a refutation of Aristotle and Averroës instead. “It is as foolish for infinite essence to be joined to a finite little body in a finite manner as to assign infinite power to a finite nature, since there is the same discipline for opposites.” He and Coronaeus agree that the two philosophers are inconsistent on this point, although neither now considers the implications of this claim for Christianity. What the various distinctions the Seven have drawn do accomplish is to permit the Natural Philosopher to separate nature from the divine on the one hand and from chance on the other. “Action cannot be natural which happens either from God, with no help from lower causes, or from an angel or a demon or from the judgment of divine will or finally from chance. I call chance the union of many causes with unexpected effects; with these exceptions we shall say the rest are done by nature.” [3]

The Calvinist then takes the discussion in a political direction, urging that “this world ought to be ruled just as a republic after the image of a republic of this world, or rather our state ought to be a pattern of that exemplar and archetype of a mundane state”—God’s universe, in which “the provident parent of nature has ordained certain laws to be perpetual and inviolable,” with angels as messengers between God and men. When Fridericus remarks that Plato said something similar to this, Salomon insists that “Plato had received that secret as he did all the best things from the Hebrews.” This, the Calvinist observes, we also see “in a well-ordered state—namely, that laws are sometimes changed and extraordinary officers are appointed, instead of ordinary magistrates, for the safety of the state.”

As befits his role, the Skeptic is unconvinced of any of this. “Nothing seems good to me which happens outside of nature, as Aristotle writes.” The Jewish Scholar replies that “we should forgive Aristotle, who was ignorant of divine matters, even contemptuous of them.” “Then what keeps us from saying that all things which happen from nature are accomplished by demons and angels?” the Sceptic asks. To rescue the integrity of nature, and not incidentally the authority of God in creating it, the Jewish Scholar observes that natural things proceed gradually and regularly, as seen in the generation of plants, whereas events caused by angels and demons are abrupt. He complains that the Skeptic always “tries to direct everything clearly to natural causes.” Coronaeus agrees with the Jewish scholar, ascribing storms, falling stars, and earthquakes to demonic activity. The Skeptic observes that “many things are entangled with popular mistakes which we have finally seen explained.” If such violent occurrences “happen without demons because of a secret harmony of nature, it is consistent that those other things also depend on nature.” There are things in the heavens and on the earth that “possibly not really known by anyone.” This does not make them examples of the supernatural.

After listening to a series of further appeals to tradition and to what his interlocutors take to be the incoherence of Aristotelian natural philosophy, the Skeptic tries again. “You have explained these matters elegantly and charmingly,” but then (recurring to the Muslim’s original story, which sparked the discussion) why do demons pursue the bodies of Egyptians, in those sea-storms, rather than the bodies of Greeks? Because, the Lutheran explains, Greek bodies being transported have not previously been buried. The Skeptic confines himself to remarking that if demons cause so many things, there must be an enormous number of demons.

Coronaeus admits that “Senamus has proposed a very difficult but proper question,” and asks the Natural Philosopher to answer him. That gentleman demurs, referring it rather to the Jewish Scholar, inasmuch as the matter goes beyond physis. “We ought to seek an explanation of these things from the Hebrews, who drank divine secrets from those very fountains and sacred sources.” Moreover, he claims that both Aristotle and Porphyry wrote that “all things and hidden scientific knowledge had proceeded from the Chaldeans,” who were the original Hebrews; these “secrets of divine matters, treasures as it were,” have been “hidden” in “a certain occult discipline called Cabala which is inaccessible except to very few.” Salomon affirms that “the ancestors of our race were Chaldeans” who emigrated to Phoenicia. From there Cadmus “brought the alphabet to Greece.” “After our ancestors returned to Chaldea as prisoners”—the Babylonian Captivity—”they became acquainted with many things by divine communication.” “However,” he maintains (somewhat astonishingly) “we received nothing which has not been common knowledge throughout the whole world and available to everyone.” This speech meets with a respectful silence, the interlocutors not wishing “to disturb the elderly man” in his “honor and dignity.” Coronaeus finally speaks up, respectfully requesting that he reveal “only that which your customs, your discipline, your laws allow.” This account must wait for the third day.

In the first two days of creation, God separates light from darkness and the heavens from the waters. In the first two days of the dialogue, the interlocutors address the difficulties of separating knowledge from ignorance and the divine from nature. Of the three questions Coronaeus proposes at the outset, two are addressed explicitly, the last (which of the many religions addresses God effectively?) indirectly, through the tensions that arise among the Seven. The paramount question for both religion and philosophy is causation, and this points inquirers to the “hidden secrets” of philosophy and the “secret matters” of religion, in particular the Cabala. Salomon replaces the story of Hermes teaching Orpheus, who then brought philosophy to Greece, with the story of the Hebrews teaching the alphabet to Cadmus, who brings it to Greece, and rabbis teaching true doctrines to Plato, who refines philosophy in Greece, in part by following Socrates’ turn from the materialist natural philosophers to political philosophy. Even the Natural Philosopher here partakes of Socratism by knowing that he does not know, and by citing Socrates’ guardian daemon. For his part, Coronaeus resembles Socrates in conversing but not writing. The Calvinist is Socratic in invoking the image of the cave of conventional opinion Socrates invents in the Republic; the Calvinist also Socratizes by turning the discussion to politics, indeed to a regime he describes as a republic, one modeled on the structure of God’s creation, nature.

The distinction between God and man may be seen in the difficulty with which men struggle to separate light or knowledge from darkness or ignorance and even danger to the inquirer after knowledge and wisdom. It may also be seen in men’s struggle to clearly delineate the natural as distinguished from the supernatural. All agree that nature exists, but if the supernatural, especially in the form of angels and demons (as seen in the story of the Egyptian mummy), are taken to have power over nature, does nature really have a nature at all?

The central pair of books concern political philosophy with respect to the preeminence of law (the topic of Plato’s Laws) and the best form of government (the topic of Plato’s Republic.) Can the impasse seen in the first pair of books, the impasse Socrates noted in the thought of the natural philosophers who proceeded him, be approached Socratically, through the ‘epistemological’ approach of considering nature not directly but indirectly, by dialectical engagement with the opinions of men? Coronaeus, for one, evidently has some interest in doing this, given his fascination with the diverse customs of nations.

And so he begins the third day by returning to the Phaedo —specifically, to the passage at 107d when Socrates gives Simmias an account of the soul after death. Rather like Senamus, Simmias has expressed scepticism about the immortality of the soul. What men think of life after death has a moral implication, Socrates warns. If the soul is not immortal, bad men would welcome it as a release not only from their bodies but from their own souls’ defects. If the soul is immortal, then one should want to take care of it. Socrates goes on to say that after death the guardian daemon of each soul will guide that soul to the house of Hades. Impure souls will be shunned, and will wander for a time before being forced into the “proper dwelling place.” Pure souls will find gods for fellow-travelers and leaders, who will bring those souls to their proper dwelling place.

Coronaeus remarks, “The difficulty of this passage makes me wonder why the ancient Greeks and Hebrews veiled their writings with such obscurity that even a wise man cannot really understand these precepts which are remarkably useful, first of all, and then enjoyable.” Aesop, Pythagoras, the poets, and “finally the most ancient philosophers hid the principles of their wisdom under a veil obscurity,” and “even sacred writings are full of allegories.” Declaring that “nothing is more useful than clarity,” the Lutheran declares that “there is no fault in a writer worse than undue obscurity.” The Calvinist thinks, on the contrary, that the ancients chose not to cast pearls before swine, or “to cheapen most precious wisdom by its accessibility.” The Skeptic dismisses exotericism as an attempt to “affect obscurity in words to produce admiration” for the writer. The Jewish Scholar, who will dominate the discussion on this day, says that the Skeptic’s complaint applies to sophists, not to the wise, “and surely not against those who veiled the teachings of sacred wisdom in very obscure writings”—men such as Moses Maimonides.

Very well then, the Skeptic replies, “What does this saying—’The evil of man is superior to the goodness of women’—accomplish?” It is absurd on the face of it. But the face of it is not the meaning of it, the Jewish Scholar explains. “The blandishments of women,” even and especially those who are good in the sense of beautiful, “are worse than the harsh words of men.” “Likewise souls excel bodies.” In allegory, ‘woman’ means body. Further, “the intellectual faculty, however base it might be, excels lust, which is called the brute and mortal soul.” This teaching “cannot be understood literally,” inasmuch as the Bible features such good women as Deborah; it can only be understood allegorically. “The word man indicates natural form, and woman indicates matter, which also is often called in Proverbs meretrix (harlot), since, as a harlot takes pleasure in a number of men, so matter delights in a number of forms.”

The use of allegory entails not only moral but religio-political distinctions. “Just as the people worshiped in the courtyard of the temple separately from the Levites, the priests but not the other Levites had access within the curtain, and only the high priest approached that most sacred place where the Ark of the Covenant was housed.” Similarly, in the Torah such things as the Decalogue and other commands, along with customs are “clearly explained,” understandable “by all”; “the occult rites and sacrifices which have less to do with salvation are understood only by the learned”; “the knowledge of the natural mysteries, the Cabala, is understood only by the most learned”; “finally, the most difficult of all pertains to the chariot which is described by Ezekial in a wondrous portrayal of the heavenly bodies and most holy matters.”

The Skeptic asks, in his down-to-earth way, How is this useful? It will only stir resentment among the spiteful and confusion among the ignorant. The Jewish Scholar says it is useful in exercising the mind, inciting men to “abstain from faults and embrace true glory… seek health for the body, prudence and wisdom for the mind, and the closest union with immortal God.” Much of that, it should be noted, parallels what Socrates tells Simmias, with the exception of the last point. But as a man of the Bible the Jewish Scholar insists that “without divine aid” no one can understand “all things.” This is an indirect rebuke to the Skeptic: “In the discussion of divine affairs, first we must see that nothing escapes anyone heedlessly since nothing can be more serious or damnable. This usually happens to those who, inflated with pride in human affairs and subtleties of dialectics, think they can understand all things above, below, first and last with the sharp keenness of their own ability.” But “wisdom separates piety from impiety; intelligence separates the good from the evil; knowledge separates the true from the false, and art the useful from the useless.” Salomon’s namesake, the original Solomon, thus asked God for “intelligence, so that he could separate the base from the noble and thereby urge men to the fear and worship of God.” The keeping of secrets stimulates the ignorant and even the evil, the deformed souls, to seek the wisdom withheld. “Therefore [God] taught Moses and Isaiah by what arts they were to call back miserable men from their criminal and depraved lives to true honor and to restore them to salvation.”

Salvation is necessary because man is mortal and inclined to evil. The Skeptic accordingly remarks that “nothing has challenged me for a longer time than the allegory of the tree and the serpent.” The Jewish Scholar says that Greek and Latin interpreters “did not know this allegory,” but Philo did, and his interpretation can be found in the Legum Allegoria. There one learns that Adam or Man means the mind; Eve or Woman means “outward sense”; the Serpent means pleasure, and serves as the link between mind and outward sense. “Of all the passions the most mischievous is pleasure”; “the life of the wicked is governed by pleasure.” That is why the Serpent is described as the most subtle of all the beasts that are upon the earth—lying, deceiving, telling the outward sense that partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Life will be good, ‘planting’ doubts of the goodness of God’s command, and thus of the goodness of God. When the outward sense rules the mind and seeks pleasure, it will injure both itself and the mind; hence the enmity between Woman and the Serpent, after the Fall.

The Jewish Scholar explains guardian angels as guides to good men on earth. “If a good man has turned to a wrong thought, suddenly he recognizes in the recesses of his soul a teacher and guide who leads him away from the base thought.” This is what Socrates’ daemon did. Evil demons, by contrast, “are a torrent of flowing matter,” which, “with a blindness of soul and passion torture and blot out reason from those who insult God, the parent of all things, and do violence to the pious mother, the laws of nature.” Whenever Solomon says “Father” he means God; whenever he says “mother” he means nature. The torrent of flowing matter, then, by itself is bad, but God rules it within the entirety of His creation. Therefore, “we must not accuse angels and demons who bring no calamities unless ordered and follow only the decrees ordered by God. Furthermore, each man must accuse himself and admit his own faults,” whereby he has released the torrent of passions upon himself, to his own injury. “Those who fear demons commit a serious offense” because they ignore God’s rule over the whole of creation.

The Skeptic remains troubled by the problem of evil. If God created Leviathan, “the prince of corruption and death,” then is He not “the author of evil,” “the cause of the cause”? The Jewish Scholar first remarks that Plato is mistaken in identifying matter with evil. God saw His creation, including matter, and pronounced it good. The Natural Scientist concurs: “There is no sin in matter in the first place because the force of action is not in matter but in form, and in the second place matter has no substance at all of itself in nature.” The Jewish Scholar says that the source of this error is in thinking that evil is “something when it is nothing at all.” In separating light from darkness, God made darkness the privation of light; allegorically, this means that “evil is nothing other than the privation of good”; it “follows the removal of good.” Thus ‘evil’ demons, in tempting human beings to crime, serve God’s purposes, as He “never allows any crime to be permitted unless something better will come from it.” For example, He “steals away famous and brave men in the prime of life lest they suffer worse conditions in this life.” God is not, Coronaeus summarizes, “the author of evils,” but rather the permitter of them, for the good.

Coronaeus accordingly turns away from the problem of evil and asks the Jewish Scholar to address the Skeptic’s other point, namely, that there seems to be such a huge number of demons (and, Coronaeus adds, angels). This brings the discussion from morality to politics, to ruling and being ruled. The Jewish Scholar grants “that there is nothing more excellent in nature than the proper order,” and if so “there is no doubt that dominion and sovereignty exist in each order of angels and demons.” Leviathan rules the army of demons; Michael rules the angels, as seen in the Book of Daniel. Even the stars possess reason, understanding, contemplation and action, as suggested in a verse from the Psalms and another from the Book of Judges. The Muslim and the Calvinist affirm this claim. The Natural Philosopher finds in the orderly, slow movement of the stars evidence that they are natural beings, and the Jewish Scholar concurs. And the number of the stars is vast, the Lutheran adds, which would account for the huge number of celestial intelligences, conjoined with heavenly bodies even as intelligence is combined with bodies on earth. Intellect governs; nature is orderly, governed by intelligences.

Given the emphasis on allegorical interpretation of Scripture, the reader will wonder whether this account of the heavens should be taken allegorically. The Book of Genesis itself calls the stars, sun, and moon the heavenly “signs.” The analogy of the natural concordia discors with the republican regime has already been posited by the Calvinist.

It is also noteworthy that the third day of the Colloquium corresponds to both the third and the fourth days of creation. The Seven have considered the Biblical teaching that there is a vast sphere of water above the visible heavens, which accounts for the Flood, which occurred when God caused some of that water to pierce through the heavens and fall on the earth on the third day. They have said even more about the events of the fourth day, in which God created the heavenly bodies. The Jewish Scholar relates the sun and the moon to the active intellect, the angels, and the passive intellect (the human beings). The moon is “illuminated and derives its light in conjunction with the sun,” obscured “when it is separated from the sun’s orbit,” just as the human intellect is “enlightened by the attendance of an angel,” then “languishes and grows dull without the angel’s presence”—evil being the absence of good, as he remarked earlier. This is why Joshua “ordered the sun and moon to stand still so that he might utterly destroy the Moabites,” Israel’s evil enemies. He cautions that many of the ancient peoples erred in taking the lights of the heavens to be gods themselves, but the active intellect of the angels is not God; it derives from Him. Moreover, “the actions of angels as well as demons are attributed to God so that all may know that man must confess to eternal God alone, that He alone must be worshiped and feared,” not any part of His creation.

The Skeptic “acknowledge[s] that power has been handed down to each best man who is skilled in governing.” He then reverses his previous argument almost literally, turning the matter upside down. If there is such a plenitude of angels and demons, what accounts for the scarcity of good men, good rulers, on earth? At most this shows that there are many more demons than angels. Coronaeus again asks the Jewish Scholar for assistance.

Initially reluctant to continue to reveal wisdom revealed only to a few, the Jewish Scholar offers that the souls of evil men perish with their bodies. It is therefore unlikely that the heavens house so many demons as the Skeptic has ironically suggested. Those who do survive suffer “eternal dishonors,” the prophet Daniel testifies, paying justly for their crimes before perishing. In addition, the lives of the good on earth are lengthened by God, the lives of the bad abbreviated. “Certain boundaries for the life of each man have been established and decreed by God, and these can be extended according to the excellence of unusual virtues of each man. But the wicked diminish and contract the boundaries of time and life.” In these matters Catholic Coronaeus agrees, except of course regarding the doctrine of the mortality of souls.

The Skeptic then questions the doctrine of resurrection. The Jewish Scholar says that mind, though invisible, is corporeal, like air. It isn’t the fleshly body that is resurrected but the mind, a “heavenly and delicate essence rather than… a heavy and impure body”—”the soul leaping from the tomb.” When the Bible-literalist Lutheran demurs, insisting that the concrete body is resurrected, the Jewish Scholar cautions him not to take Jacob’s ladder literally. In this he finds support from the Muslim, who cites Christ’s reply to “certain Epicurean Sadducees” who “asked Christ whose wife was the woman who had married seven husbands in turn,” eliciting Jesus’ deprecation of “the corporeal pleasures of marriage” and His affirmation that “the blessed would be like to angels.” The Jewish Scholar concedes that recently-deceased, undecomposed, corpses might be resurrected by the power of God, as when Elijah “brought forth the son of the widow of Sarepta,” a phenomenon that even the Skeptic is ready to admit.

Coronaeus closes the discussion by begging his friends “by immortal God and for the right of our piety and friendship that we not allow ourselves to be pulled away by any enticing arguments from the established and accepted opinion of faith,” wandering into the profanation of mingling sacred and profane. He proposes a fresh but related topic for discussion on the fourth day: “whether it is proper for a good man to discuss religion.”

The Seven spend the following morning listening to Bodin read a tragedy written by the Muslim on the parricide committed by three sons of Prince Solimannus. This raises questions, however. Suleiman the Magnificent, a contemporary of Bodin (and therefore of the Seven) was not the victim of parricide. Quite the opposite: He caused the deaths of two of his three sons. Why the distortion? In terms of the Colloquium, the ‘father’ of all religions is Judaism. If one is a Muslim, one can surely say that Judaism has three ‘sons’ who have attempted parricide, namely, Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism. In addition, like Suleiman’s three sons, they harbored fratricidal tendencies, as well (as did many rivals for the Turkish throne, through the centuries). And there is an even more radical possibility. If, as the Jewish Scholar has said, ‘Father’ means ‘God’ throughout the Book of Genesis, the Muslim may imply that the three Christian sects are deicidal.

The piece receives universal congratulations for the craft with which it was composed ;the interlocutors are silent on its content. This seems to lead the Seven to take up the matter of musical harmonies, then harmonies generally. The Natural Philosopher speaks of the delight taken in “the blended union of opposites.” “Opposites when united by the interpolation of certain middle links present a remarkable harmony of the whole which otherwise perish if this whole world were fire or moisture”—the claim of the earliest Greek natural philosophers. The Skeptic continues to raise the problem of evil; in this concordia discors, such evils as disease, pain, and anxiety form part of the mixture. The Calvinist replies that “the poisonous toad in the garden or the spider in the house are as necessary for gathering poisons as the hangman in the state.” This begs the question of why the poisons need be there in the first place: Would not a state without evil men not be a happier state?

The Skeptic’s interlocutors continue to talk around the question, albeit in interesting ways. They discuss the balance of hostile factions within the state, as seen in Rome’s mixed regime of patricians and plebeians. The Calvinist says that although “nothing is more dangerous in a state than for citizens to be split into two factions, whether the conflict is about laws, honors, or religion,” if there are “many factions, there is no danger of civil war, since the groups, each acting as a check on the other, protect the stability and harmony of the state.” In this he looks back to Aristotle, who regards the mixed regime as the best practicable regime, and ahead to James Madison and his argument for the “extended republic” in the tenth Federalist. That is, conflict among the evil can generate good. The Jewish Scholar adds that even angels fight among themselves, even if these are conflicts “of virtues and noble souls.” There is no avoiding strife. The Muslim cites the example of the kings of the Turks and the Persians, who “admit every kind of religion in the state,” producing “a remarkable harmony” in “reconcil[ing] all citizens and foreigners who differ in religions among themselves and with the state.” The Jewish Scholar also endorses kingship, although he is thinking of the Lord of Heaven.

Should a state establish a religion, even if it tolerates other religions? If so, on what terms? (The Muslim neglected to mention that the religious toleration seen in Muslim country nonetheless subordinates non-Muslims, permitting them only the status of dhimmitude.) The Lutheran, Catholic Coronaeus, and the Jewish Scholar advocate a religious establishment; the Skeptic, the Muslim, and the Natural Philosopher are the religious pluralists. (The Skeptic argues that either all existing religions are false or one is true; if so, then none should be excluded since the right one might be among those.) The Calvinist takes a more moderate ground, advocating political pluralism but not religious pluralism, inasmuch as the practices of some religions, up to and including ritual homicide, are evil.

The Lutheran worries that “whoever admits a variety of religious differences seems to bestir an upheaval of the true religion.” Who, after all, “can worship God and a demon at the same time”? The Jewish Scholar would not have the state punish the impious, but simply refuse to reward them. “The piety of the nations is impiety toward God,” and while such Gentile piety should not be persecuted, neither should it be honored.

Among the pluralists, the Muslim is concerned not so much with heterodoxy (of which he himself might be suspected, by fellow Muslims); atheism is the danger, not heterodoxy. “I think that the man who scorns the true religion and false divinities, which are believed to be true, is guilty of the greatest impiety.” Coronaeus, no pluralist, nonetheless concurs with that sentiment, saying that he believes all of the Seven “are convinced it is much better to have a false religion than no religion,” because even a false religion holds wicked men to their moral and civic duties. Anarchy is worse than a regime founded on falsehood. He is thinking of his bète noir, Epicurus, who “committed an unpardonable sin because in trying to uproot the fear of divinity he seems to have opened freely all the approaches to sin.”

The Lutheran criticizes pluralism because if error in religion is excused, a “cowardly servant” could avoid a just flogging by pleading that he “neglected the commands of his master” out of error. That is, religious pluralism tends to dissolve all authority. The Skeptic ripostes that “Indeed this is so, if we agree with the words of Luke.” He doesn’t. “Who will be so unfair a judge, so cruel a tyrant who wishes to kill those who violate the prince’s edicts which have been secretly hidden?” He seems to suggest that the Christian commands Luke issues and the Lutheran endorses are unknown to many, that (for example) an eternity in Hell is unjust punishment for those who have never heard the Gospel. The Calvinist claims that the divine law has indeed been promulgated—often, and for a long time. “But if there are laws contrary to laws and lawgivers hostile to lawgivers, religion opposed to religion, priests warring with priests,” the Skeptic replies, “what will the poor subjects do when they are pulled here and there into the sects?” And when the Lutheran asks, rhetorically, “Who can doubt that the Christian religion is the true religion or rather the only one?” the Muslim has an easy rejoinder: “Almost all the world”—Asia, most of Africa, much of Europe. Yes, but “the best kind of religion is not determined by numbers of people, but by the weight of truth which God himself has commanded.”

Coronaeus rescues his friends, and their conversation, by recalling the question he had presented the night before: “Is it proper for a good man to discuss religions?” Should we be having this latter debate at all?

The Natural Philosopher says it is not proper, saying that “Plato was wise in saying that it is difficult to find the parent of the universe and wrong to spread it abroad when you find him.” It is not Plato who says this but Timaeus, a character in a Platonic dialogue; at least one character in Bodin’s dialogue does not understand the dialogue form. Be this as it may, what the Natural Philosopher and Timaeus (and quite possibly Plato) think is that philosophy isn’t for everybody. This point the Natural Philosopher does understand. As he puts it, with some acerbity, “The common herd whose eyes are covered with mist cannot comprehend the splendor of sublime kings,” and even those can comprehend it lack “the eloquence to describe the secrets of divine majesty,” about which even the wise may be in error. The Jewish Scholar regards “conversation about religion” as “dangerous,” as the discussants may offend God and, in addition, “it is wrong to uproot anyone’s opinion of piety, of whatever sort it may be, or to cast doubt by arguments on anyone’s religion unless you believe you will persuade him of something better.” Indeed, when the Hebrew high priest “tried in friendship to draw Florus to the worship of one eternal God and turn him from the worship of empty idols, he was unsuccessful, and he caused deadly hostilities with a powerful enemy.” [4] The Lutheran agrees with the Natural Philosopher that “it is both dangerous and destructive for the masses to engage in discussion about the accepted and approved religion unless one can control the resisting common people by divine power, as Moses did, or by arms, as Mohammed did”; this notwithstanding, “a private discussion about divine matters among educated men” is indeed “fruitful.” For his part, the Skeptic also argues against the introduction of any new religion, even if it were true.

Coronaeus attempts to coax the Jewish Scholar into further discussion. He refuses, on four grounds: he is prohibited by Jewish laws and customs because Jews do not want to disturb needed certainties; he is too old to change his opinions; at least one of his interlocutors, the Lutheran, refuses to be converted in accordance with his own principles; God would disapprove if Salomon were to convert to another religion. The Skeptic, the Muslim, and the Natural Philosopher lend the Jewish Scholar their support in this.

The Lutheran persists: “But what if the reason [for discussion] is for teaching or learning?” This draws a thorough reply from the Natural Philosopher. Religion is grounded either in knowledge, opinion, or faith. If grounded in opinion, that opinion will often waver “between truth and falsehood” during a heated discussion, undermining piety. If grounded in knowledge, religion must rest on first principles “which admit no discussion of this kind.” “Moreover, there is no one, in my opinion, who has devoted himself to the proofs of each religion,” only those who have sought to prove their own religion—rather like the Seven themselves. Finally, if grounded on faith, religion will be injured by discussion because “faith is destroyed if it must rely on proof and science.” Science means knowledge; “knowledge alone can check the mind drawn here and there in different directions,” as it is when ruled by opinion. But “the theologians believe that faith is pure assent without proof.” Science and faith are therefore incompatible. For example, “whoever agrees with a teacher of geometrical theories and does not understand geometry has faith, not knowledge. But if he understands geometry, he obtains knowledge, but at the same moment loses faith.” Theologians call faith a virtue “which has God as its only proof and object,” a proof “granted by divine gift and concession,” not by ratiocination or even noetic apprehension by the divinely unassisted mind. Further, rational proofs proceed by logical necessity; one cannot not accept the Pythagorean theorem once having understood the proof of it. If, however, “faith is based on free assent, it is the greatest impiety to try to tear away from anyone by human arguments the instruction which God has bestowed from his bountiful goodness.” And that is why “we must abstain altogether from discussions about religion.”

Catholic Coronaeus will have none of that. Discussion of religion can proceed, argumentation can occur without great risk, if the arguments are grounded on reason, authority, tradition, knowledge, and clear proofs.” Such discussion ought to be undertaken “in the interest of the union of humanity and love that man has with man.” This is the first invocation of Christian love in the dialogue. It fails to convince the others. The Calvinist speaks up for the first time, observing that “Mohammedans and Jews refrain from discussions about religion because they cannot see the clear light of Christian truth with bleary eyes”—an accusation that by itself tends to block inquiry.

The provocateur Skeptic wants to know who would arbitrate such a discussion. The replies illustrate the difficulty: the Lutheran cries, “Christ the Lord!”; the Catholic says, the Church; and the Jewish Scholar says, the Israelites. As the Skeptic politely puts it, “Necessarily, the religion which has God as its author is the true religion, but the difficulty is in discerning whether He is the author of this religion or that religion. This is the task and the difficulty.” It is so great a difficulty that the Lutheran himself, a man of no small certitude, wishes “that a certain Elias in sight of kings and people would prove by a heavenly sign which religion from so many is best.” [5] The Jewish Scholar, who well knows the difficulties Elijah encountered, says that even that wouldn’t work: “No miracles and signs move the wicked.” “Elias” Bodin has turned to other methods.

A discussion of demonic deceptions and the unreliability of dreams ensues, followed by the assertion by the Natural Philosopher and the Jewish Scholar that the oldest religion is the best. Since religious novelty has been conceded to be disruptive, and since the oldest religion is the closest one to God, there is no need for either new arguments or new revelations, especially since arguments are perennially questionable and unsettling, revelations suspect as possibly demonic or delusional.

But what is the oldest religion? The Natural Philosopher considers “natural religion” the oldest, the one consisting in the law of nature. The Jewish Scholar of course holds up divine law, which consists of moral law (worship of God and the duties of men), ritual law, and political law. Citing Philo, he avers that “there is no sacrifice, no sacred verses, no rites which do not contain the most beautiful secrets of things hidden in the treasure chest of nature.” That is, Jewish law encompasses the natural law, which can be discovered by Philo’s allegorical way of interpreting Scripture. Thus “the first tablet of the Decalogue pertains to the higher faculty of the soul which is the mind itself [symbolized, one recalls, by ‘Adam’ or ‘Man], to which the laws of the first tablet about divine worship are related; the second tablet is related to the lower part of the soul by which we are taught to control anger, to restrain passion, to master desire, to keep our minds, eyes, and hands from another’s possessions”—the soul’s right relation to the body, ‘Eve,’ ‘Woman.’

The Natural Philosopher proves receptive to this claim. He remembers having been told by “a Jewish astrologer” that each of the Ten Commandments refers to one of the ten “celestial orbs.” The first commandment, to worship God alone, honors “the supreme author of universal nature’; the second commandment refers to “the second orb which is called by the Hebrews desert-place because no star is contained in this heaven,” paralleling the prohibition of graven images; the third commandment, forbidding His people to take His name in vain, corresponds to the planets and the stars, which we must swear oaths by; the fourth, establishing the holiness of the Sabbath “is related to the orb of Saturn to whom also the seventh day of Saturn is vowed”; the fifth, commanding children to honor parents, refers to Jupiter, the “helping father” among the Olympians; the sixth, prohibiting murder, refers to Mars, the man-slayer and destroyer of cities; the seventh, prohibiting “adulteries and lusts, is fitting to Venus’ orb”; the eighth, prohibiting theft, “is in the sphere of Mercury whom the ancients made the god of traders and the originator of gain”; the ninth, forbidding lies, “is attributed to the sun about which Vergil said, ‘Who can say that the sun lies?” and stands for esteem for the  truth and mercy of God; finally, the tenth orb, that of the moon, that inconstant body which symbolizes our desires, which “we are ordered to restrain.” To all of this the Jewish Scholar simply adds that the Decalogue was God’s renewal of the natural law, which had been violated by human sins and crimes. “All the secrets of the highest matters and the hidden treasures of nature are concealed in the divine laws” (emphasis added).

The Natural Philosopher agrees, except on one point. The “divine law is altogether consistent with nature except for the Fourth Commandment, on the Sabbath. While the Jewish Scholar concedes that this commandment was “a token between God and His chosen people,” it nonetheless serves a natural purpose, enabling us to fill our bodies with strength and to increase our wisdom in study. To those who object that the Sabbath rendered Israelites helpless against their enemies, he replies that “vengeance against the powers of the air” protected them. On the mundane level, the Sabbath may be broken if necessary, for example in self-defense against enemy attack, because “the laws were not made for the safety of the laws but for the safety of men.”

The Jewish Scholar then goes on the attack himself, criticizing Catholics for worshiping saints, which he regards as a sort of polytheism. Coronaeus wants to reply but holds back, “lest I seem to have hampered anyone’s liberty of speaking.” In this he is no Socrates, but he is a wise ruler of the colloquium. Does this suggest that the paradoxical character of the philosopher-kings sketched by Socrates in the Republic—that the intrepid inquiry of the philosopher doesn’t fit well with prudential decisions needed to rule well? And if there were no philosopher-kings, but kings did philosophize—perhaps by reading the Colloquium—how would they manage such inquiries in civil society?

A discussion of prayer and other religious customs brings the Muslim to a lengthy defense of Islam. It transpires that he is a convert from Christianity, a fact that the Lutheran wonders at. In his apologia, the Muslim discovers himself as a highly selective adherent to the faith. He cites with approval Averroës’ dismissal of the Muslim Heaven as “a paradise for pigs”—itself an adaptation of Glaucon’s complaint in the Republic, that Socrates and Adeimantus have proposed a city for pigs, not for real men. The Muslim does praise the Koran, but only if the “empty fables” in it are excised. His reason for conversion to Islam evidently was his desire for liberation from slavery, inasmuch as Christianity does give some support to the maintenance of slavery: “Many are accustomed to embrace Mohammed and allow themselves to be circumcised in order to obtain freedom.” This more than suggests a certain deviation from full belief in the content of Islam. It comes as no shock when he later endorses the Platonic and Xenophontic recommendation of the noble lie, regarding both Heaven and Hell as examples thereof.

And this has been true of many if not all among the Seven, with their allegorizing interpretations of Judaism and Christianity. The Natural Philosopher asserts, “If true religion is contained in the pure worship of eternal God, I believe the law of nature is sufficient for man’s salvation. We see that the oldest leaders and parents of the human race had no other religion” than this “oldest and best of all” religions, namely, the natural religion. Both the Jewish Scholar and the Muslim concur, although the Calvinist understandably remains more severe, especially with regard to Catholicism and Islam.

But the agreement between the Natural Philosopher, the Jewish Scholar, and the Muslim on the basis of the natural religion must be considered a breakthrough. If representatives of those three stances can come to an agreement on a shared foundation for a political regime, a city like Venice has the potential to endure and continue to thrive as a regime where commerce in material and intellectual goods has found a home.

These two central books of the Colloquium illustrate the Socratic approach to some advantage, even when attempted in a regime, indeed a civilization, which now sees prophetic religions rather than the ancient civic religions Socrates saw. Part of the solution to the religio-political problem in modern times is Socratic-Platonic: exotericism, respect for the secrets of the sublime, seen in Plato’s noble lie as recommended by the Muslim. Part of the solution to the political problem is not so much Platonic as Aristotelian, although none of the interlocutors, all of them inclined to criticize Aristotle, says so. This is the mixed-regime republicanism the Calvinist recommends, which dilutes factional conflict, even among evil men.

In view of the Muslim’s defense of the noble lie, Coronaeus sets the following question for the discussion after dinner: “Whether it is right for a good man to feel otherwise about religion than he confesses publicly.”

Book V begins with the after-dinner discussion on the fourth day of the colloquy. Bodin has continued reading the Muslim’s play about Suleiman the Great. But the focus of attention now is a basket full of natural and artificial fruit Coronaeus has placed on the table. The artificial fruits are so lifelike that it’s hard to distinguish them from the real ones; comically, it is the somewhat dogmatically-inclined Lutheran who bites into one of the fakes. If the senses are so easily deceived in such an insignificant matter, Coronaeus asks, how can we have “certain knowledge of difficult and sublime matters?” Wounded, the Lutheran deplores dissimulation, presumably including noble lies.

Later on, the Jewish Scholar will reveal that the center of the Book of Genesis contains the key teaching of that book. It so happens that the discussion of the distinction between art and nature occurs at the center of the Colloquium. There he says, “Art is the ray of man, but nature is the ray of God; moreover, art is so far from conquering or equaling nature that it cannot even imitate it.” This amounts to a denial of the modern philosophic project as outlined by Machiavelli and, and few decades after Bodin, by Bacon. The wisest of the Israelites, the Jewish Scholar’s namesake, outsmarted the wily Queen of Sheba, who tried to deceive him with artificial flowers. Solomon commanded that bees be brought in, and they foiled the deception. Animal instincts can be more reliable than human opinion, if that opinion does not marshal animal instincts wisely.

Still smarting from his Catholic host’s playful deception, and by no means lacking Martin Luther’s thumotic temper, the Lutheran wishes that men “who know very keenly how to simulate the false and conceal the true with such happiness be exposed.” But Coronaeus disagrees. The power of omniscience is “proper to God alone.” “For if every wish and thought of all men were exposed to all, good men would not be able to protect their innocence against the power of wicked men”—who would know their intended victims all too well—”nor could just punishments be meted out for the wicked, because according to human laws, wicked thoughts do not merit punishment.” In human beings were omniscient, bad men “would always try to trap good men, but good men would never try to tap the wicked.”

The Lutheran nonetheless deplores the ways of religious hypocrites, who do one thing while thinking and feeling another, secretly. The Skeptic responds with a typology of religious and irreligious men. He identifies seven classes of religious men: those who practice public and private worship of the eternal God, without fear; those who practice private worship and decline public worship of idols; captives who publicly worship idols but privately worship the eternal God; public worshipers of idols who do so in order to avoid losing their wealth or being exiled; private worshipers of “domestic gods” who shun the temples of the civic gods; those who worship “private gods and a false religion” both privately and in public; private doubters who worship in public. There are four classes of atheists: deceivers who want the reputation of piety; magicians and sorcerers who worship publicly but mentally curse God while thinking Him real; those who openly “follow like animals their lustful desires”; mockers of religion—”the most loathsome of all” atheists.

The Skeptic’s colleagues discuss these options. The Lutheran and the Calvinist support public confession of faith. The Muslim defends the noble lie, if necessary: “When two wrongs are proposed the greater must be avoided”; public worship and private disbelief is bad, but private belief coupled with public worship of idols is less bad. The Jewish Scholar disagrees, saying that idolatry is worse than atheism because idolatry unites God with created things, a violation of the Second Commandment.

What of those who simply know no better than to worship idols? The Natural Philosopher says that this is excusable in the uneducated and the mis-educated, “but there is no just cause of error for those educated and especially for those who have been imbued with a knowledge of natural things, from which they could have drawn the clearest ideas about the nature, power, and goodness of one God, as Paul himself openly declares” in his well-known ‘argument from design.’ The Jewish Scholar agrees that “there is a remarkable power of nature inserted in the minds of men which awakens them to piety, justice, and all virtues,” but “it is no more possible for man to attain divine knowledge without God’s inspiration than for a picture in a dark place to seem distinct without a clear light,” no matter how well-painted it may be. Otherwise, prophecy would be superfluous.

The Skeptic advances the most latitudinarian view, that all the religions represented by the Seven “are not unpleasing to eternal God and are excused as just errors” because religiosity itself leads to virtue. The Natural Philosopher disagrees. He, the Muslim, and the Jewish Scholar all agree that “the true religion is the natural religion.” “What is the need for Jupiter, Christ, Mohammed, mortal and fictile gods?” He cites Job as his exemplar. “Who likewise entwined more secrets of natural and divine things in allegory than he? Who of mortal men has worshiped eternal God more purely?” An Arab who predated Moses, and “who lived by no other law than the law of nature, the law of Abel,” Job nonetheless merited God’s praise as the most just, pious, and pure mortal. Further, “Job neither hoped nor ever thought that Christ, who was born two thousand years afterwards would come—much less Mohammed.” Job never worshiped such natural phenomena as the sun and the stars, worshiping God alone. For this reason, the Natural Philosopher prefers “clear arguments” to authoritative books.

How do you differ from “the philosophers?” the Lutheran quite understandably wants to know. The Jewish Scholar amplifies his earlier assertion about the need for divine revelation. Because human reason is insufficient to understand God—one might observe that Job speaks with Him—and because in today’s world divine prophecies are “very rare,” we need the Book. He cites the some many Christian and Islamic sects as evidence that human beings should recur to the Torah and abandon religious speculation undisciplined by it.

The two Protestants protest. The Lutheran insists that Christian sectarians agree on basic doctrine. The Protestant concedes that God chose the Israelites as His people, but they eventually denied God (i.e., Jesus) and brought down God’s wrath upon themselves. The Jewish Scholar rejoins that the Chaldeans killed more of their descendants, the Israelites than Christians have done, five hundred years before Christ. Further, Christians have suffered martyrdom, too. Why, then, were attacks on Jews by Christians a sign of God’s displeasure, and why is Christian martyrdom not such a sign? He explains calamities inflicted on Jews as punishment for failing to hold themselves separate from other nations, not for amalgamating with them. “Good men must not fear harsh fates.” Moreover, God’s punishment of Jews “is the very greatest proof of divine love for us,” as “prudence is obtained by punishments and griefs.” By scattering Jews around their empire, the Romans inadvertently spread the critique of the idolatry of their own civil religion; “those to whom heaven has fallen do not need land,” and indeed the Jews’ very landlessness now only enhances their holiness or separation from the concerns of nations that have land to defend.

The Hebrew language itself “has been granted to the race of men by a divine gift. The other languages… are illegitimate and fashioned by the will of men. This language alone is the language of nature and is said to give names to things according to the nature of each,” as Adam did, at God’s command, in Eden. This alone shows that Jews constitute “the true church of God.”

This is all too much for the Calvinist, who charges that Jews killed their own prophets, Christian apostles, and even Christ Himself, through whom members of the true Church can only be only be chosen, as seen in Jesus’ statements, “No one comes to Me unless the Father shall have drawn him” and “No one comes to the Father but through Me.” Jews, Romans, and Ismaelites (Muslims), pagans, and Epicureans “separated themselves of their own accord from the roll of the church.” The Jewish Scholar denies that there can be such an invisible church, inasmuch as ‘church’ means “a coming together” that can be seen, not an “invisible church of the elect.”

The Lutheran attempts to falsify Judaism by citing predictions of the coming of the Messiah and the several false Messiahs who were Jewish. The Jewish Scholar explains that the ancient Greeks and Latins “did not sufficiently comprehend” what the word ‘Messiah’ (translated into Greek as Christon) means: simply an anointed king or prince. Both Samuel and David “call themselves Messiahs.” “Therefore, those who think there is or will be only one Messiah are mistaken,” and even “more dangerous” is “the error of those who think that this messiah, who we hope will come, will be God” and indeed “the savior of the human race.” Jews rather expect a Messiah in the sense of “a strong leader” who will bring “the Israelites, scattered here and there, into Palestine and their ancestral homes and free them from the high-handed domination of others.” Jesus did not liberate God’s people from Roman servitude. He deprecates Jesus as “a dead leader.”

The Calvinist says, “I receive this answer very coldly.” He denies that rabbis have come to a consistent teach about the term, ‘Messiah.’ Both Protestants charge that Jews have distorted the meaning of their prophets’ own words. “You see what deplorable ignorance of the sacred language has driven the Christian theologians,” the Jewish Scholar replies, to which the Lutheran responds, “The Jews stir up amazing subtleties not as much out of ignorance as out of obstinacy so that they may color the clear passages of sacred scripture with inky darkness.” After more philological dispute, the Jewish Scholar continues to maintain that “it is necessary to return to the springs of the Hebrews if there is any ambiguity in the Greeks.” In doing so, not only the meaning of Hebrew words but their placement in the books of the Bible must be heeded if the secrets of the sublime are to be understood. The middle passage of Genesis—”You shall live on your sword”—is crucial, as are the middle passages of other books, including the Psalms. [6] The Hebrew Bible was composed with scrupulous care. But “no one can say what kind or whose writing the New Testament is.” “The written tablets of the Old Testament are most certain; their testimonies are most authentic according to the consensus of not only Hebrews but also Christians and Ismaelites. But what faith can there be in the Gospels which the Hebrews and Ismaelites rightly reject?”

The Calvinist answers that “if you reject the evangelical testimonies, it is as if you denied the principles of the sciences, without which not even the geometricians will have any proof.” The Muslim objects: “The principles or postulates of the sciences lie open to all the understanding of all men and are clear to the minds of the unlearned. But on what principles do these things which are contrary to nature rely?”—that is, the virgin birth, the new star that stood in the sky over Bethlehem when Mary gave birth.

The Muslim also contends that the Gospels are full of contradictions, sparking a debate over these alleged contradictions. The Lutheran, who earlier called the whole discussion of language “very subtle, or should I say futile,” now intervenes to say, “Trifling critics and those who split hairs find everywhere an infinite variety of readings and times.” This spells crisis for Socratic philosophy in circumstances when prophetic religions dispute. To claim a divine revelation delivered in words poses a problem that Socrates did not need to face, namely, which language was used to convey that revelation, and how (or even can) that language be accurately translated? This puts a premium on those who ‘rule’ the chosen language. This controversy would enter philosophy some four centuries after Bodin, with Heidegger, who claimed that one can philosophize adequately only in Greek or German.

To counter the Jewish Scholar, the Calvinist relies on an argument from exotericism in the Gospels. “Christ spoke one way to the Apostles another way to the Scribes and Pharisees who customarily maligned his words.” It might be added that Jesus commended both the innocence of doves and the prudence of serpents, before sending His disciples out into the world.

Abandoning philology for logic, the Jewish Philosopher says, “I do not understand what divinity there can be in Christ,” since “what is more alien to divine power than for God to be tormented by a demon?” Additionally, God is omniscient, yet “unless the Gospel is strongly distorted one cannot deny that Christ did not know many things.” How then could Jesus ask His Father why He was forsaken? The Calvinist recurs to traditional Christian doctrine: “Christ was not only true God but also true man, nor had each nature been mingled in him.” Further, Christ has been given authority to judge the world, and only God can have that.” He reaffirms the spiritual necessity of “never allow[ing] ourselves to be separated from the acknowledged faith,” regardless of any troubling arguments against that faith. That is, faith is faith.

Looking ahead to the next day’s discussion, Coroneaus tells the Calvinist, “Indeed you have spoken most correctly, Curtius. However, it is not enough to have explained that Christ is true God and man, as we are persuaded, unless we know what is the unity of each nature and of what sort it is.”

The discussion recorded in the sixth book is Friday, the fifth day of the colloquium; to go further in the week would be to violate the Sabbath of the Jewish Scholar. The fifth day and sixth book parallel the fifth and sixth days of the Creation week, wherein God created first the “moving creatures that hath life”—those that move in the air and those that move in the water—all “after their kind,” then the land animals, each “after his kind,” and finally man, after His “image” and “likeness,” with rule over all the other moving creatures. “Male and female he created them,” and all of these creatures are blessed with the capacity to “be fruitful and multiply.”

Human dominion over the other moving creatures is on display almost immediately in Book Six, as the Skeptic twits Coronaeus for observing Catholicism’s Friday fast by eating fish, a food once regarded as a delicacy fit for kings. The Seven briefly discuss animal sacrifices.

They are much more interested in discussing the nature of man and his relation to God. The Skeptic and the Lutheran as if the reports of men’s great longevity, as reported in the early books of the Bible, are plausible. The Natural Philosopher suggests that God granted long life to give men time to establish the arts and sciences, the exercise of reason; the Calvinist suggests that God intended to grant time to propagate the human race, a thought closer to the teaching of revelation. Given that Bodin began the meeting by reading from a tragedy he wrote on a high priest and interpreter of the divine law who “atoned for the death of three leaders by begging remission from God,” readers are led to suppose that the interpretations of divine revelation that follow, whether naturalistic or spiritual, have life-and-death significance, and may expose the interpreters to the need for divine pardon when they are done interpreting.

A discussion of fasting leads to a consideration of the varieties of religious custom generally, including dancing, the use of musical instruments, and songs. But it isn’t long before the Natural Philosopher and the Muslim renew their criticisms of the Christian doctrine which holds that Christ is both man and God. The Natural Philosopher insists that God can only be spoken of not as what He is (as we do of natural beings) but as “what He is not”—not created, not mortal, and so on. The Jewish Scholar agrees that it is wrong “to join the incorporeal God to any creature,” as this fails to conform “to the nature and essence of God” and is “also contrary to the honor of His majesty.” The Muslim sneers that it wasn’t hard to convince Greeks and Latins that God took on human flesh because they were accustomed to stories of gods mating with mortals.

The Lutheran replies that “the remarkable acts of Christ and His wondrous deeds furnish that which the weakness of the human mind cannot grasp,” but the Muslim dismisses these acts by likening them to magicians’ tricks. Coronaeus says that no magician has attracted a following that has spread so widely and endured so long. “A monkey is a monkey, though clothed in purple, so a magician, however he presents himself, will always be like himself,” and eventually found out. The Skeptic refutes this argument by observing that paganism lasted for centuries longer than Christianity has lasted so far, and was “considered most religious” for all that time; mere longevity is no valid evidence of truth. The Jewish Scholar adds that in any event Judaism has endured longer than Christianity, and longer than many paganisms.

Coronaeus returns the discussion to the question of how the “divine and [the] human” could have been united in the person of Christ. The Natural Philosopher goes on the attack. A creature “is able to be and not to be,” but the divine person is immortal.” Therefore, in Christ “the will of God was to produce only a creature, not only a person divine and uncreated.” The Lutheran points to Christ’s dual nature; “in Him it is necessary that contradictions be true at the same time,” since the purpose of each nature was different. The Calvinist warns that “we have entered an inextricable labyrinth,” which defers the debate, temporarily.

The Skeptic raises a more manageable problem. In commanding His disciples to pray for their enemies, Jesus contradicted the teachings of David and the prophets. The Jewish Scholar heartily concurs. While it is true that “there is no greater or better antidote against the lust of raging vengeance and the desire for revenge than to pour it all into the bosom of God Himself who would receive no vengeance except the most just,” the “new lawgiver,” Jesus, “detract[s] from the divine law” by commanding His disciples to turn the other cheek if struck. “All divine and human laws have always allow and will always allow one to repel an unjust blow from his head in an honorable manner”; to say otherwise is “absurd,” as “the wicked would be allowed to do everything against the good, and the good would be allowed to do nothing against the wicked.” The Lutheran remarks that Jesus’ precept isn’t comprehensive but rather a commendation of patience with and goodwill toward one’s enemies.

The Calvinist goes further in defending Jesus, saying that He surpassed the prophets of the Old Testament, as testified by those prophets themselves, who anticipated the advent of a Messiah. The Jewish Scholar rejects this claim as well, affirming that God reserved “the salvation of all” to Himself; “He did not say through His Son Jesus.” The Calvinist responds by turning the discussion back to the combination of divine and human in Christ’s person. Jesus was “called Savior not as a man, but as a Creator”; “the divine essence was not mingled with the human mind.”

What, then, is the character of this union? The Natural Philosopher again invokes the principle of non-contradiction. Finite and infinite cannot be united, unless “a certain third nature [was] established from both”—as Hegel would argue, much later. Not only does this disprove the possibility of a God-Man but it also disproves the possibility of God as Trinity, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Coronaeus “see[s] no contradiction in these pronouncements: God is one, God is not one, because they are not in the same order. The first is in the order of essence; the second is in the order of persons.” No, the Natural Philosopher says: “It is not possible that things which are united to one third thing are not united among themselves, and things which are to one thing the same among themselves are the same, according to the very principles and decrees of philosophy,” all founded on the principle of non-contradiction. “Therefore, if the divine mind is united with the human mind and the human mind to body, it is necessary that there will be the same union of divine mind and body. This is ridiculous; therefore, the former is.” The limited human mind cannot “combine with eternal God into a unity” because God’s infinitude precludes such a unity. The Jewish Scholar cites Maimonides on this point: “Moses Rambam thinks that he who believes there is anything corporeal in God is guilty of a more serious blasphemy than he who worships idols.”

The Lutheran dismisses this last point with an ad hominem argument. “Talmudic theologians” are “subverters of the Christian religion, who try by every means to snatch deity away from Christ, and reason, memory, and will which He shares in a certain way with man from God.” There is a real argument embedded in this: To say that Jesus was both God and man does mean that He was God and man at the same time, for 33 years, but it doesn’t mean that He was God and man with respect to the same ‘part’ of Christ. An infinite being could manifest itself in bodily form while remaining infinite in its essential being; an omniscient mind could restrict itself within that manifestation while remaining omniscient ‘in Heaven,’ that is, in its ruling capacity over that locally self-limited mind.

The Calvinist brushes past the arguments, saying simply that “faith is needed.” He cites Plato’s Laws (V. 738c), where the Athenian Stranger, in the Calvinist’s words, “orders the things which have been handed down by the elders to be believed without proof.” In the Laws itself, the Athenian Stranger discusses what should be done in founding a new city or in re-founding an old one that has become corrupted—either of which might apply to Jesus’ founding of his Ecclesia, as He conceives it. The Athenian Stranger says that an intelligent founder will not try to change what has been laid down by the three main Greek oracles—the ones at Delphi, Dodena, and Ammon; nor will he alter what has been ordained by the “ancient sayings” of those oracles. This is consistent with Jesus’ insistence that He changes not one jot or tittle of Jewish law, for Jews.

“That may be so for Christians,” the Natural Philosopher replies. If, as the Lutheran says, “There is one Father, unborn, and one Son, born from time eternal,” then, the Natural Philosopher says, that means “the substance of the Father and Son is different.” Even if one says, as the Lutheran does, that “hypostasis is is different from essence”—that is, the three Persons of God differ from the essence of God—”nothing begets itself nor can be the cause of itself.” If it could beget itself, this would mean that it was incomplete, not a whole. And in that case the Son “is different from the Father, not in the respect of persons but in the whole order of substance, as seen in what he says John has Jesus say in John 14:24: “The Father who sent Me is of another kind.” (As it happens, that isn’t what John has Jesus say; He says, “the word which you hear is not mine, but that Father’s which sent me.”)

The Natural Philosopher recurs to his core argument. “Nothing is so alien to God as to grant a part to Him or to take away a part, since His own nature cannot have parts; otherwise [His nature] would be bodily and indeed divisible.” The Lutheran counters, “in divinity God is not the efficient cause of the Son, but the essential cause, which is very different from the efficient cause.” To say the Father “begot” the Son is not to say that He begot Him in the way a natural father begets a son, as the planter of his ‘seed,’ but as an emanation of Himself. As Coronaeus explains it, “the Father is eternal without a progenitor and the Son also eternal but with a progenitor,” just as fire and the warmth it generates are simultaneous, or as the sun and the light it generates are simultaneous.

In that case, the Natural Philosopher says, they are not the same. Further, you can’t say that Christ was born but is also eternal. The Lutheran goes back to the Calvinist’s earlier insistence that these matters must be accepted on faith, inasmuch as “God cannot be comprehended in the hovel of the human mind.”

There are at least two questions here, a fact that explains the philosopher and the Christians are ‘talking past one another.’ Coronaeus isn’t saying that Father and Son are simply the same—else why distinguish them in the first place? He is saying that the Father’s generation of His Son, like heat from fire and light from the sun, is simultaneous with His being, which is eternal. It is not self-contradictory to say that heat and fire, light and sun, are ‘essentially’ the same in the sense that it’s ‘of the essence’ of fire to generate heat, sun to generate light.

On the other hand, the invocation of faith by the Christians doesn’t suffice. If I say, ‘I hold in my hand a round object,’ you can believe me, have faith in what I say, or disbelieve me, either by denying my claim outright or by asking for proof of it—’atheism’ or ‘agnosticism,’ respectively. If I say, ‘I hold in my hand a square object,’ the same responses are possible. But if I say, ‘I hold in my hand an object that is a round square,’ you cannot possibly believe what I say because you don’t know what I’m talking about. You might believe that I am holding something I am calling a round square, but that’s as far as you can go. You can’t believe something that is inconceivable, and that is what a truly self-contradictory statement is.

The Jewish Scholar intervenes, telling the Lutheran that his animadversion concerning the limitations of the human mind assumes what needs proof, namely, that Jesus is God. The Muslim cites II Corinthians 33:14, in which the Apostle John associates Jesus with grace, God the Father with love, and the Holy Spirit with communion. The Natural Philosopher concludes that there cannot be three essences or substances of God. “Who can seriously think that [God] that He is God who owes the principle of His origin, His essence, and power to another?” To these charges, Coronaeus can only repeat that “we must consider not three eternal, not three infinite, nor three gods, but one God, eternal and infinite, yet distinguished by a certain property appropriate to each Person.”

He goes on to observe that in the Old Testament has several names, but the Jewish Scholar disputes this, giving as an example the three “persons” mentioned in Zachariah 4:1-5, two of whom are actually cherubim. Losing his patience, he says that “when the Hebrew theologians write in earnest about Jesus, they do not even dignify him by calling him by name but scornfully refer to him as the one who was hanged.” When the Apostle John writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” he simply lapsed into incongruity. Neither the display of impatience nor the critique of John’s sentence fazes the Lutheran, who replies that whatever is in God is His essence; to say that the Word of God ‘is’ God means only that.

The Natural Philosopher takes up this latest charge of contradiction by asking, “Who would be so foolish as to say that he thinks the ordinances, the laws, the actions, and words which proceed from out of the man are the essence of the man?” The Calvinist would: “When John says that the word of God is the son, he understands not an utterance but His intimate essence, wisdom, and mind,” “for if wisdom had been created, there would have been a time in which wisdom not yet was,” but the wise  King Solomon himself said, “These things have been ordained from eternity, from the beginning, from the ancient days of the world.” The Lutheran concurs: “Nothing in the Trinity is before or after in time, but only in the order of relation; nor is the Creator less Son than Father, or less the Holy Spirit than either.” The first word of Genesis, bereshit bara’ (in the beginning, He created), that is, in the beginning the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit created; for the word of three letters, bara’, signifies three Persons, namely, av, ben, ruah, Father, Son, Holy Spirit.” Surely the Jewish Scholar “will not deny that this is drawn forth from the holy secrets of the Hebrews and the holier Cabala.” But of course he does deny it. “Who does not see that very diverse sentences can be fashioned from those same letters? Indeed our elders never strongly approved of that kind of Cabala. It would be much more likely to contrive a quaternity from the same Tetragammaton than a trinity.”

Such an argument reveals the ambiguity, the inconclusiveness, of reasoning about texts when the reader demands certitude, feeling an urgent need for it. The Skeptic therefore asks another question: Granted the Christian doctrine of Trinitarianism, why did the Son “assume human flesh”? And why was that necessary for human salvation? The Muslim adds, “Why was there need of so great a change, so cruel a punishment for a most innocent man?”

The Calvinist says it was because “it pleased Him”—God the Father—”to do so.” That is, God’s will is self-justifying, and human beings have no authority to bring Him to the bar of their own sense of justice. Coronaeus gives two reasons: Jesus’ death on the Cross “recalled us from the defilement of faults to virtues”; and it was done “to increase our love for him.” When the Natural Philosopher again raises the problem of whether it is even possible to conceive coherently the combination of divine and bodily nature, the Lutheran picks up the Calvinist’s point, charging the Natural Philosopher with “think[ing] that divine matters must be verified by the scales of philosophers.” What is more, “even if he knew the clear truth of the matter, he would still oppose it by subtle arguments.”

The Jewish Scholar asks why Jesus was not sent earlier. When the Calvinist says he was, in the sense that there were several ‘types’ of Christ, prefigurations of Jesus, among the Israelites, the Jewish Scholar denies it. The previous messiahs—Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, and the others—did not die for their people’s sins; “no one of these was killed as an expiation for the people.” “It is entirely unheard of that good men are sacrificed for wicked men.” The Natural Philosopher agrees: “It was fairer for each man to pay the penalty for his own sin,” and to worship dead men as gods is “insane madness.” The Calvinist has his answer ready: “All men are guilty of sin” except for Jesus; “therefore, why is it strange that God wished this victim who was most pleasing to him to be sacrificed?” That is, God requires of all sacrificial offerings to be unblemished.

The Muslim judges it “absurd” to think that “God, angered with mankind, exacts vengeance from Himself.” Coronaeus meets that assertion by denying that God acted out of vengeance. “The death of Christ not only was beneficial in atoning for the sins of the wicked”—what greater sacrificial act of atonement could there be?—”but also keeps us the more willingly from sin when we realize that immortal God was so displeased by the sins of the wicked that He wanted His dearest Son to undergo the most loathsome death because of the sins of others.” Customarily, an act of sacrificial atonement is undertaken by the sinner. In this case, the act was undertaken by the sinless Son of God Himself; human beings can then align themselves with that sacrifice, make it their own, by confessing their sinfulness and aligning their own wills anew, in accordance with God’s love and laws.

The Muslim worries that this doctrine is “very dangerous,” as “each most wicked man can fortuitously accept” the divine pardon: “What is this except to provide impunity for all and a wide path to all impieties for each most daring man?” I could live a life of crime, confident that my deathbed confession would spare me an eternity in Hell. The question would then be the moral and spiritual status of such a confession, inasmuch as it was calculated in advance. But the Lutheran doesn’t answer that way, saying rather that “the death of Christ was especially necessary for mankind to purge the foulest Fall.”

This raises the topic of original sin, which the Natural Philosopher regards as impossible because “there is no sin unless it is voluntary.” You can’t inherit sin. And if you can’t, all the problems surrounding the Trinity and the Incarnation and the Resurrection are meaningless. The Jewish Scholar regards Adam as a sinner, “but not because he plucked the forbidden fruit, or tasted it when his wife offered it to him, as people imagine in their childish error.” The right interpretation of the story is that “he sinned because he allowed his mind, led away from the contemplation of intelligible things”—naming the plants in the Garden according to their kinds—”to be enticed and overcome by the allurements of sensual desires.” The woman symbolizes the body, the serpent pleasures. “But in whatever way Adam sinned, why did that sin spill over to his innocent posterity?” No, “parents do not hand on to their descendants any virtues” or vices.

Coronaeus identifies this as the Pelagian heresy, “repudiated by the complete agreement of the theologians and driven out by the decrees of the councils” of the Roman Catholic Church. He quotes David as acknowledging having been conceived in sin and Paul as understanding that God’s curse was death and indeed damnation for all men. On the contrary, the Jewish Scholar insists, “the divine laws very clearly forbid that a son be bound by a fault of his parents” (Ezekial 18:1-23). “Each man suffers punishment for his own sin, not for another’s.” He then explains the fact that God punishes down to the third generation as a deterrent to sin in parents, who would not want their children and grandchildren so injured.

The Natural Philosopher vindicates nature and God alike. “Surely those who blame the nature of any sin relate the sin not to themselves but to the parent of nature, and nothing is more deadly than this.” But there is no sin “without the total will of the sinner.” Since an infant can neither avoid such an inheritance, if it exists, nor knowingly will sin, “no sin can be charged to an infant,” and no punishment “ought to be sought”. The Lutheran again takes this as an opportunity to deplore philosophy. “If we give assent to the subtleties of philosophers, we must reject faith and piety.” Adam knowingly sinned, incurring punishment, and as for us, his descendants, “with whatever color the root is imbued, it imbues the trunk, branches, leaves, flowers, and fruits with the same flavor, odor, color, and poison.” By the grace of God we can transform our own destiny, if not our own nature entirely, by heeding the Gospel: “Believe and you will be saved.” (I John 1:8) Coronaeus modifies this according to the Catholic teaching, imputing redemption to baptism. This sets the framework for the subsequent disputation on the topic, with the Natural Philosopher rejecting Scriptural authority and the three Christians disputing its exact meaning.

After listening to them talk, the Jewish Scholar argues ad hominem, attributing “all this discussion about the Fall” to “the leaders of the Christian religion,” who invented the notion “in order to draw the souls of unlearned men to themselves.” The story of Adam in the Garden is “an elegant and divine allegory,” not to be taken literally. After God’s rebuke, Adam “returned from the delight of the senses to the contemplation of intelligible things, which is to say, he enjoyed the tree of life, which Solomon interprets as true wisdom,” fathering Seth, “clearly a divine man,” and eventually dying—but surely not suffering “eternal death.” Far from it. God “even indicated to Adam a salutary remedy when He said: ‘Perhaps he will pluck the tree of life and live forever.'” This contradicts the context of God’s statement, which is presented as His reason for driving Adam and Eve out of the Garden, precisely to prevent that “remedy.” (Oddly, the Christians interlocutors fail to mention this.) The Jewish Scholar goes on to argue that Noah, Enoch, Job, Moses, Samuel, and Elijah were “greatly praised by God himself” and showed little or no evidence of pollution by original sin. Abraham, “father of our race,” was favored with “many and so great benefits” when God “opened the founts of divine goodness to all people because of him.” How sinful could Abraham have been?

The Natural Philosopher raises the question of free will, saying that the doctrine of original sin abrogates it, thereby ruining the basis for morality. Coronaeus agrees with him, remarking that the Catholic teaching does not go so far as the Protestant teaching does, regarding the alleged helplessness of man in the face of sin and the doctrine of predestination. The Calvinist responds by denying free will to man not only after the Fall but before it. Divine foreknowledge precludes free will for human beings. If free will really existed, “eternal God’s foreknowledge would depend on the changeable and fallacious opinion of men, which is absurd.” But God has no need to opine, to guess what his creatures will do, or to adjust his intended actions to their latest freaks. To this, the Natural Philosopher doesn’t deny divine foreknowledge (“Providence cannot seem to hang from” changeable human will), “but it foresees your future changes and therefore free will has not been removed from each man.” That is, God’s foreseeing in no way deprives you of your choice. The Jewish Scholar traces free will not to logic but to Scripture—specifically, to Moses’ admonition to his people, to choose to obey God’s commandments: “Choose life that you may live.” The divine law is the true Tree of Life.

The Calvinist asks if “anyone can obtain salvation from the law,” even if the doctrine of free will is granted. “I still deny that anyone except Christ could satisfy divine law,” and only he could “absolve us from the antiquated laws of Moses.” Since Moses said that he does not “exactly perform the letter of the law” shall be cursed, and because the Israelites consented to this, Paul “concludes that those who have placed their salvation in the actions of law are subject to this curse.” Christ redeemed our sins; only God could have done so.

The Jewish Scholar replies that “often Paul is caught cutting out words of the law and prophets or adding words or plainly changing the interpretation.” In this case, words Moses uses mean, “Be cursed who does not have the fixed words of this law that he might follow them.” But even a man who sinned as gravely as David was pardoned by God, precisely because he did know the fixed words of the divine law, repented of his sins (which included adultery and homicide), and then “gave compensation in part” for his deeds, in accordance with that law. The Calvinist replies with several New Testament citations, emphasizing redemption through faith in Christ, effective thanks to his grace. The obvious problem is that the Jewish Scholar denies the authority of the Christian Bible because he denies the accuracy of the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible by the Christian apostles.

The Natural Philosopher rebukes both men. “If you continue to lead out with authorities, I shall summon all the families of philosophers who easily conquer those insignificant theologians by the excellence of the erudition and training.” Better “to argue with the senses and clear reasons.” Yes, the Jewish Scholar admits, “except in obscure and ambiguous matters in which the human mind can find no way out”—that is, except when considering the secrets of the sublime. At the same time, one must be cautious, inasmuch as to rely on authorities does resemble the practice of tragic poets, who call down the deus ex machina to extricate their characters (and thus the poets themselves) from the plot tangles they, the poets, have plotted. Religious sectarians do exactly that, “hear(ing) divine oracles from the mouths of the prophets and from the sacred books which the theologians, not only Hebrew, but also Christian and Ismaelite, have now for a long time approved, each in his own religion.” Not only does this show why Bodin had two of his own characters, the Muslim and ‘Bodin’ the lector, read tragedies—why he introduced the theme of tragic poetry into his Colloquy—but it also shows why the Jewish Scholar has sided with those among the Seven who advocate religious toleration.

The Natural Philosopher deems it “utterly alien to all reason to confess with simple assent that Christ died for the salvation of the human race in order to secure not only pardon for immense disgraces”—why should these be pardoned?—”but also supreme praise for justice and integrity”—how can the Man of grace be considered just, strictly speaking?—”but to avow that just men” such as Socrates, Plato, and the Catos “are tormented as if by the wicked and sinful eternal flames of hell and the most cruel punishments.” The Skeptic states the same thought ‘positively’: “I believe that each man is blessed by his excellent acts,” that the more such acts he commits “the more he will be pleasing to immortal God, although he worships foreign gods in good faith and just error.” Whereas the Natural Philosopher finds the sure ground of conduct in reason, the Skeptic finds it in morality.

To this, and to the Christians’ recurrence to the several doctrines of their several sects, the Jewish Philosopher answers that “it often happens that a man most wicked in God’s sight is considered most just in men’s opinion. But in order for God to take away from men this arrogance and haughtiness, Gods clearly says: ‘No one of the living will be justified before Me.'” (Psalm 143:2) The Natural Philosopher, a Platonist or neo-Platonist, concurs: only the ideas are pure; nothing material is.

The Muslim intervenes to assert the superiority of Muslims to Christians in acts of virtue. Dependence on faith alone can only lead “far and wide to a destruction of states.” This confuses the path of salvation with the path or ‘way of life’ of a state, and Coronaeus immediately denies that he, as a Catholic, depends on faith alone for this-worldly conduct: “Surely all divine and human laws would perish if there were no rewards for deeds performed well and no punishments for sins.” The Lutheran stoutly resists, on grounds momentous not only for German religion but for German (and eventually Western) philosophy and politics. “No reward is owed for a duty.” The just man simply does his duty; “indeed, a reward is contrary to duty.” However, “he who does wicked things acts contrary to duty” and does deserve punishment. He derives these principles from the status of Christians as servants or slaves to God (Acts 16:17; Romans 6:16, 22; I Peter 2:16). In this the reader will see the lineaments of Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, with its strict rejection of ‘eudaimonianism’ in ethics, and its consequent need to derive moral right not from nature or even from God but from the categorical imperative.

The Jewish Scholar “grant[s] that no one is made just by actions, however worthy they may be, much less by an empty belief in a dead Jesus,” but by the blessing God gives for those just and honorable actions. And indeed, “if no one except the just is blessed, no one would ever be blessed,” as “no one is free from stain and impurity”—as both the Bible and neo-Platonic philosophy insist. Rather, one is blessed or cursed insofar as one commits acts of justice and honor. Further, “the divine law commands nothing which you cannot easily do if you wish.” Paul himself “boasts that he was blameless in the justice of the law.” (Philippians 3:6) “What lawgiver was ever so cruel that he commanded his people to do something impossible?” (He may be pardoned for having failed to anticipate the ‘ideological’ tyrants of the twentieth century.) But Paul also writes that the sinner stands condemned to Hell-fire for eternity (Hebrews 10:26), leaving no “room for confession or repentance” apart from Christ. “Yet there are those who think the divine law is harsher than the Christian law!” The Lutheran explains, or perhaps explains away, Paul’s threat as “hyperbole to frighten the wicked.” The Jewish Scholar, having carried his point with these interlocutors, then in effect endorses Jesus’ summation of the divine law. “What is the total justice of the law? It is for man to love God more than himself, but his neighbor as himself; a thing which each can do.”

The Christians fall into a debate over the Catholic practice of venerating saints and icons, treating them as intercessors with God. The Natural Philosopher, the Skeptic, and the Muslim scorn the practice as fodder for “the untutored masses,” as the Muslim puts it. The Jewish Scholar explains that when God ordered Moses to make a bronze serpent, the sight of which was to cure the Israelites from the poison of the fiery serpents God had sent among them as punishment for their sins (Numbers 21:8-9), God only wanted them “to see the serpent, but not to worship it, because of a remarkable secret in the serpent.” The sublime secret of the serpent was “to indicate that we should extinguish in us the mad desire for delicacies (which is indicated by the word for serpent) and would thus attain eternal life.” Since “the chief power of the serpent is in its teeth,” God used the symbol of the serpent not as a talisman but as a reminder that the Israelites must “eat the purest manna which had fallen from heaven and forget their old delicacies.” Once such a symbol has served its immediate heuristic purpose, it may be safely destroyed, lest it be worshiped (as Kant would say) as ‘a thing in itself.’

Despite his own noteworthy powers when it comes to allegorizing Scriptural stories in search of the secrets of the sublime, the Jewish Scholar adds a caveat: “I am accustomed to be amazed at the secrets of divine things which I understand less, and we ought not to be too inquisitive concerning them.” He therefore “consume[s] the secrets of difficult matters which I cannot understand with the fire of divine love”—also a theme of Coronaeus’ understanding of God. However, unlike a Catholic, the Jewish Scholar “wonder[s] whether or not God’s presence depends on the will and power of the priest, as they say.” He finds himself repelled especially by the sacrament, and indeed by the worship of Jesus Himself, both of which practices he likens to the Israelites’ forbidden worship of the golden calf; like the Israelites, who worshiped God in “the appearance of a calf,” Christians worship in the appearance of a man or worse, in the appearance of bread and wine.

The Muslim likewise deplores that the One worshiped as God “is torn by hands and teeth” in the partaking of the sacrament. “Averroës used to say that it seemed very strange to him that Christians were greedily swallowing so many thousands of gods whom they boasted they created in a moment under the appearance of piety.” What is more, “there is no greater poof of severity and hatred than to eat the flesh of an enemy.” Christians are cannibals of God. Coronaeus brushes off Averroës: “May the name of the atheist Averroës be abolished by eternal oblivion.” But this only returns the discussion to the issue of eternal punishment.

What justifies the concept of mortal sin?  “Christ clearly announced that eternal punishment had been decreed for the depravity of willful men,” (Matthew 18:32-35), and the Skeptic confirms that “these punishments are useful also or the terror of the wicked,” as does the Calvinist. The Natural Philosopher objects that those who commit the kinds of sins deemed mortal “believe that those terrors have been proposed for the ignorant and the womanish”; others “believe in the punishments of hell” but “despair of attaining pardon,” growing “old in perpetual wickedness.” In either case, the deterrent power of the doctrine is doubtful. More fundamentally, the doctrine of mortal sin is unjust. “With this reasoning, not only are all sins infinite, because one always sins against God”—which the Lutheran characterized as an “infinite” or mortal sin—”but also all sins are equal, since all infinite things are equal among themselves.” What is more, the whole notion of infinite sin makes no sense, as God is infinitely good, and the power of evil is never held to equal the power of God by Christians.

The Jewish Scholar disputes the Christian doctrine by saying that “divine punishment is always lighter than the sin” because God’s harshness is never “more severe than the transgression,” or “more lasting.” Coronaeus goes so far as to say that with God the punishment fits the crime, but not all crimes merit eternal punishment. The Calvinist and the Muslim alike insist that there is no middle ground. Salvation or damnation, those are the alternatives, and God will decide which to apply to which souls. The Calvinist adds that the Catholic doctrine of a gradation of sins serves the priestly interest in selling indulgences. For his part, the Natural Philosopher sides with Plato, who regards absolution by prayers and entreaties “dangerous” and “deadly,” instead proposing an afterlife not of punishment but of purgation of sins, with light at the end of the tunnel of Hades.

The dialogue has consisted of a long series of such impasses. The Natural Philosopher says, “I see that Jews differ from both Christians and Saracens in the key point of religion,” that “Saracens” or Muslims “have serious controversies among themselves about faith,” as do Christians and Jews. “In short, almost everyone is at odds with everyone; all are angry at all with curses and ill words for all.” Is it “not better to embrace the most simple and most ancient and at the same time most true religion of nature, instilled by immortal God in the minds of each man from which there was no division”? By that religion the “heroes dearest to God,” from Abel to Jacob, lived. The Jewish Scholar, who has worked toward religious tolerance throughout the dialogue, only demurs because “if we were like those heroes, we would need no rites nor ceremonies,” but “the common people and the untutored masses” need stronger restraints than “a simple assent of true religion” can provide. This suggests, however, that men such as the Seven might well form a society so founded.

Coronaeus also sees that the discussion has played out. Stating his belief in the Apostolic Succession, he concludes that “although I cannot persuade you of this which I do not despair will come to pass, I shall not cease praying to Christ, true God and man, and His hallowed parent, the honor of virgins , all the hosts of angels, martyrs, and confessors, and the orders of all saints that they render eternal God propitious to you and bear entreaties for your salvation.” The Jewish Scholar returns the benediction: “We owe unusually great thanks to Coronaeus for so many kindnesses and especially for his exceptional piety and love toward us, which we in turn must imitate and pray, each one for the other, to eternal God that He lead us in the right path of salvation, purged from all the brambles and thorns of errors.”

The Skeptic “approve[s] all the religions of all rather than to exclude the one which is perhaps the true religion,” drawing the Jewish Scholar to question whether it is “possible to defend the religions of all at the same time, that is, to confess or believe that Christ is God and to deny that He is God.” The Natural Philosopher, like the the Skeptic, “wish[es] neither to agree lightly nor deny rashly the things which the theologians turn upside down in doubtful discussion,” and observes that in contemporary Jerusalem eight Christian sects, Jews, and Muslims worship in separate temples but nonetheless “cherish the public tranquility with supreme harmony.” The Jewish Philosopher remains doubtful that such a harmony can endure among “such a great variety of religions.” The Calvinist warns that “to protect publicly the authority of different religions in the same city has always seemed to me the most difficult matter of all,” especially since “the common people” whipsaw their princes with religio-political animosities; at the same time, it is even more dangerous to ‘privatize’ religion, as that drives the sects underground, where they plot “secret conspiracies of citizens, which finally at some time erupt into destruction of the state.”

Coronaeus points not to Jerusalem but to Venice, where Jews and Orthodox Greek perform public ceremonies but other foreign religions are not allowed that privilege. “However, it is possible for each man to enjoy liberty provided he does not disturb the tranquility of the state, and no one is forced to attend religious services or prevented from attending.” The Muslim calls this “a wise judgment” by the city’s aristocratic regime because “in this kind of state no more dangerous pest can arise than civil discord.” The rule of the few may be wise and just, but remains vulnerable to the passions of the many and the conniving of would-be tyrants who exploit those passions.

After some discussion, the Seven agree that compulsion in religious matter is, as the Jewish Scholar puts it, “an insult against God,” “since no one can approach Him in love with a soul sufficiently eager.” Love can’t be coerced, but love is what the God justly expects from His creatures, as all Christians, Jews, and Muslims maintain, and as the Natural Philosopher feels toward his ‘god,’ Nature. “Henceforth,they nourished their piety in remarkable harmony and their integrity of life in common pursuits and intimacy. However, afterwards they held no other conversation about religions, although each one defended his own religion with the supreme sanctity of his life,” enjoying a seventh, Sabbath day of conversations that stretched out, evidently, for many years.

The Colloquy a Platonic dialogue in the sense that all the characters are ‘types’ as well as individuals, and their natural virtues and vices have been in certain ways shaped by the ‘type’ that their religious ‘regimes’ have inclined them to be. Coronaeus, for example is both Catholic in religion and catholic in temperament. [7] He defends Church doctrine, but in a spirit that earns the gratitude of the elderly Jewish Scholar, who has lived long enough to see instances in which Jews were not so well-treated by Catholics. Intellectual catholicity for French Catholicism will require less philosophic-theological system-building, more philosophizing as Socrates philosophized. Thomism, yes, but an opened-up Thomism, one never allowed to calcify into doctrinairism, much less persecution. What will bind such a reformed (if not ‘Reform’ or Protestant) church together?

The Seven move toward an appreciation of Coronaeus’ understanding of Christian love as the bond of their society. Agapic love looks to the good of the person in front of view, the one with whom you are conversing. It does not speak with asperity, having learned the patience which did not come naturally to thumotic Apostle Paul.

Coronaeus’ hospitality provides a framework in which reason and revelation may meet and even, to some extent ally. In this regard the alliance between the Jewish Scholar and the Natural Philosopher becomes crucial. They are the spokesmen for the two oldest ‘religions’: the worship of the Creator-God of the Bible and respect for, if not worship of, nature. The Jewish Scholar regards the divine law as the law governing God’s creation, nature; to that extent, divine law is natural law. The Decalogue renewed man’s cognizance of the natural law he had violated. At the same time, as the Jewish Scholar insists, although revelation is rational the God who reveals His intentions keeps certain sublime secrets, speculation concerning which must be undertaken only with the greatest caution and equanimity toward those whose attempts to ‘solve’ divine mysteries have resulted in conclusions at odds with those of Judaism, and at odds with each other.

Two cities show how such a spirit might prevail in the modern world. The ancient city of Jerusalem currently exhibits religious toleration, although not without tensions which might be aggravated in a destructive way. The modern city of Venice, called a commercial republic but really an aristocracy, the city where the Seven meet at Coronaeus’ house, might be described as a ‘New Jerusalem’—a commercial regime in the comprehensive sense, trading in goods of all kinds, and located in Mediterranean, the center of Western Civilization from antiquity until Bodin’s day. Perhaps if the French Catholicism and monarchy heed Bodin, Paris will rise still further in the firmament of world civilization. And not to leave the Protestants aside, the Calvinist advocated republicanism while remaining a critic of ‘the people’—of democracy, which gets carried away with its own passions, religious and other. The Calvinist is the one who wants to see a mixed and extended republic, the one who anticipates the American of the American Founders.

The final ‘Sabbath’ achieved by the Seven for their own intimate, private society within the Venetian political regime enables them to strive for the purpose of the Sabbath as understood by Judaism: “to increase our wisdom with study.” With insoluble sublime secrets discreetly set aside, all of the Seven can continue their shared inquiries.

 

Notes

1. In Greek and Roman mythology, King Coronaeus is indirectly associated with the goddess of wisdom, Athena. In Ovid’s telling, the king’s daughter, Coronis, was assaulted by Poseidon as she walked along the seashore. Athena rescued her by metamorphosing her into a crow, enabling her to fly away. Ovid elaborates, saying that Athena chose Corona as her life-companion, only to toss her aside for Nyctimena, another maiden Athena changed into a bird, the ‘Owl of Minerva.’
2. This is not necessarily correct, inasmuch as God is said to savor the smell of the smoke produced by sacrifices as they burn.
3. Very roughly, what the Natural Philosopher calls chance corresponds at least in part with what later philosophers will call history. For him, however, there are no laws of history.
4. As related by Josephus, Gessius Florus ruled Palestine under the Emperor Nero, “fill[ing] Judea with abundance of miseries.” By imprisoning Jewish petitioners and several other oppressive acts, he provoked the First Jewish Revolt in 66 AD.
5. Professor Kuntz notes that “Elias” means the prophet Elias (Elijah) to the Lutheran, but may also mean ‘Elias’ Bodin or even ‘Elias Pandocheus’ (which means ‘Who-Reveals-All), a.k.a., Guillaume Postel.
6. The Jewish Scholar refers to Genesis 27:40. The passage forms part of the story of Isaac and his sons, Jacob and Esau. In collusion with his mother, Rebekah, Jacob has deceived Isaac, who gave him a blessing, that he will prosper and rule over his brethren; even the nations will bow down to him. When Esau and Isaac learn of the deception, Esau asks him for another blessing. “And Isaac his father answered and said unto him, Behold, thy dwelling shall be the fatness of the earth, and of the dew of the heaven from above; And by thy sword shall thou live, and shalt serve thy brother; and it shall come to pass when thou shalt have the dominion, that thou shalt break his yoke from off thy neck.” If this passage is understood not only as literally but thematically central to the Book of Genesis, then it appears to make armed liberation superior to clever calculation in God’s order of creation. But this seems to be belied by the fact that it is Jacob who ascends the ladder to God in his dream, and it is Esau who becomes the father of the Edomites, enemies of the Israelites.
7. For a spirited recently-published argument holding that Coronaeus and Catholicism form the center of Bodin’s dialogue, see Thomas F. X. Varacelli: “Coronaeus and the Relationship between Philosophy and Doctrine in Jean Bodin’s Colloquy.” (Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture June 2017). As argued above, I maintain that Bodin himself functions as Plato to a Coronaeus who resembles Socrates in some ways, but cannot finally be considered the spokesman for the thoughts of Bodin himself.

Pierre Manent: La Loi Naturelle et Les Droits des Hommes. Paris: Press Universitaires de France, 2018.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 56, Number 3, May/June 2019. Republished with permission.

 

We are told to respect ‘human rights.’ But why? Where do such rights come from, and why should anyone acknowledge that source as authoritative?

Philosophers once derived human rights from natural law. But, as Pierre Manent observes, natural law “has been radically discredited by modern philosophy and is today the object of unanimous contempt of enlightened opinion,” dismissed as an “archaism” by all but a few Catholic thinkers. If, then, our rights do not and cannot originate in “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” as independence-minded Americans famously proclaimed, does any non-arbitrary criterion of judgment exist?

Evidently not. “Citizens of modern democracies” show themselves eager to reform their own ‘culture’ (usually in the name of equality) while refusing to judge the ‘cultures’ of others, even when bearers of foreign ‘cultures’ arrive in their countries. Both the eagerness to judge and the refusal to judge is judged to derive from human rights, on the grounds of an implied pseudo-syllogism: “All human beings are equal, ergo, all cultures are equal.” As a result (for example) “it is not a rare spectacle to see the same person become indignant at the condition of women in the Muslim regime, and in the same breath condemn all pejorative estimation or criticism of Islam as a human ‘whole’ or form of life.” What begins as an assertion of universal equality ends in unequal treatment, an incoherent assertion of human rights applied to some humans but not to others.

So conceived, the “authority” of human rights simultaneously “excites and hobbles our desire to judge and hobbles our faculty of judgment.” We can only exempt other humans from judgments founded on human rights if the human nature in which those rights inhere has no real nature at all, if human nature is plastic; “the almost limitless diversity of life-forms manifests humanity’s almost limitless ability to self-actualize without rule or criterion“—without law—”whether this rule or criterion derives its strength from human nature or human reason.” Cultural diversity is taken as evidence of exactly this plasticity or no-nature, the “ontological weakness” of any moral criterion grounded in human nature or natural law. According to modern human-rights advocates, “there is no law valid for all men, which they would be free to obey or disobey.” Yet if human rights have no origin in nature, including natural reason, does this not return us to the ‘state of nature’?

Indeed it does—to the sophisticated state of nature called ‘postmodernism.’ Without the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God as the criterion of judgment, “what is truly human can be constructed and deconstructed as we wish, since it lacks a natural basis whose determinative or inspiring force we should recognize.” Thus unmoored, ‘human rights’ become in principle part of “an indefinite social, moral, and political movement.” But unlike the movement of ‘History’ as understood variously by Hegel, Marx, and Dewey, this movement, like nature, has no purpose, no telos. Like Topsy, it just grows, although unlike Topsy its indignation at perceived affronts grows with it. Christianity would say: Absent a criterion of truth, human beings will fall back on pride; and in a democratic society the points of pride will turn petty.

The ‘human rights’ movement radicalizes not only equality but liberty, there being no knowable constraints on human self-deconstruction and construction. At the same time, such radicalized equality and liberty seeks some goal for itself, a goal its own assumptions deny it. “The prior act of deconstruction meets the resistance or the or the opposition of a tendency to re-naturalization”; in choosing one’s ‘identity’ one cannot escape the secret desire to have some reason to prefer this identity over that, and moreover to keep one’s aspirations within the notion of ‘human rights,’ lest one’s choice turn out to be, well, wrong. Even one of the most urgent natural desires, sexual desire, becomes de-naturalized as a choice of ‘gender’—a term once reserved for grammar, the province of the unlusty. Under such an ideology, “sexual desire no longer has its movement and its destination inscribed in the sexual nature of beings,” instead becoming random, dependent “on the specific nature of each subject,” of each individual. Natural equality no longer inheres in human beings as a species but in human beings as individuals. This reproduces (if I may be permitted a dash of heterosexualist speech) the same dilemma as cultural relativism: How do we judge contradiction or indeed violent clashes between and among self-defining individuals?

Since we obviously cannot, Manent next asks where this self-defeating passion for overturning natural law came from. Beginning with Machiavelli, modern political philosophers rejected the claim that human beings are social and political animals. For them, “all that is natural is gathered and concentrated” in the individual. This comports with early modern science generally: atomistic, focused on efficient, material, and formal causes as fully explanatory of natural attraction and repulsion, to the exclusion of ‘final’ causes or purposes. For Machiavelli and Hobbes, “the desire for power is the fundamental trait of human nature,” which, like all else in in nature, amounts fundamentally to matter in motion. Politically, this means that all purposes or ends of human life must be established by the prince, the sovereign, he who has won the struggle for power; whereas Machiavelli lauds this struggle and the virtù exhibited in it, the more timorous Hobbes looks to the sovereign to impose order on the human ‘atoms’ which would otherwise collide with destructive velocity. Positing fear as the most powerful of the human passions, he initiates the ‘rights talk’ of modernity, making Machiavelli’s invention, lo stato, the modern centralized state, the guarantor of the right to life of the sovereign’s subjects. Recalling Aristotle’s definition of politics as the practice of ruling and being ruled in turn, Manent observes that the modern state, ‘Leviathan,’ isn’t really political in that sense at all; rather, it is a construct instantiating a theory about the nature of the universe. Far from being an expression of the reality of human life, the Hobbesian sovereign is “metaphysical,” or, as Hobbes puts it, a “mortal god,” laying down his law and enforcing it on his subjects. He differs from the God of the Bible in that his subjects are not his creatures, and he is by no means all-powerful or all-wise. Since the materialist Hobbes doesn’t believe that the God of the Bible exists, Leviathan will be (as Americans like to say) close enough for government work.

Machiavelli derides the unreality of “imaginary republics,” designed by prophets and philosophers, but the Florentine “does anything but look at human action ‘as it is,’ since he substitutes for action ‘as it is’ in practical activity, I dare say, a theoretical action, that is to say an action as it can be fully taken into view by the theoretician.” What Machiavelli calls “the effectual truth”—anticipating utilitarianism by four centuries—supersedes what he dismisses as the unreality of Biblical and classical morality, whose precepts fail to correct human behavior but only confuse those who pay attention to them. Whereas natural law unites citizens and subjects only in imagination, fear unites them in reality. Fear of visible men (in a republic) or one visible man (in a principality) replaces fear of the invisible divine and natural laws, and of the natural and/or spiritual consequences of defying that law.

What makes this unreal is that Machiavelli requires of his prince “an action greater than action,” by which Manent means an action “no longer subject to the limits arising from the fact that the action is naturally produced by an agent and therefore depends upon the virtuous or vicious dispositions of that agent.” Machiavelli holds out a vision of human mastery of fortune, mastery of circumstances, with no limits, no “practical reason” which respects circumstances, a mastery that manipulates the fears of ‘lesser’ men. Whereas Aristotle distinguishes theoretical from practical reason, Machiavelli posits an “unlimited indetermination” to replace “the limited indetermination proper to the action of an agent whose provisions and ends are relatively stable.” Whereas the Bible teaches that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, Machiavelli, anticipating Hobbes, teaches that fear of man is “the beginning of wisdom,” and that wisdom tout court amounts to knowledge of how to exploit that fear in order to master fortune. Heavenly angels give way to masterly princes whose God is Machiavelli.

All of this closes us off from “the field of practical life, that is to say, action under the law.” There is indeed “a great difference between what men do and what they should do,” as Machiavelli insists, but that very difference, and our acknowledgement of it, seen in both the Bible and in the writings of Plato and Aristotle, is the real realism. Machiavelli’s attempt to escape reality, to remold it into the fulfillment of a dominance fantasy, calls for men to produce “an unprecedented action which is no longer guided and therefore limited by practical reasoning or by ‘thoughtful choice.'” Prudence and what Manent understands as its Christian equivalent, conscience, gives way to vulpine cunning and leonine fearsomeness.

Manent considers Martin Luther and his three ‘solas‘ to have advanced a spiritual equivalent of Machiavellian reductionism. Unlike Machiavelli and Hobbes, Luther is of course no atheist, but he reduces the divine law to the simple Law of Love, and dismisses the natural law as irreparably polluted by sin. Like the modern philosophers, Luther centers human action on the individual—his conscience, his faith, his salvation; for him, my certainty of my salvation is the guarantee of “the authenticity of my faith.” The Church becomes a congregation, not to say a congeries, of individuals, with no need for guidance from the learned interpreters of the Bible and no need for the patient effort at improving or ‘perfecting’ one’s soul by obedience to the divine and natural law. Both Machiavelli and Luther “see and postulate an exist from and an access beyond the practical condition of men, which for both is characterized by a supremely shocking and decisively illuminating difference between the real life of men and the law that they hear or claim to follow.” Both maintain that human nature cannot have “the capacity for perfection.” Machiavelli then seeks radical change of man’s outer condition, in the course of which project virtuosity must replace virtue guided by divine and/or natural law. For Luther, a simple pietism at the command of the Holy Spirit replaces natural law.

How could Machiavellian ‘realism’ issue in a natural right teaching? The interplay of princely libido dominandi and the fear the prince inspires in his subjects recalls not the political rule that prevails between husband and wife or the kingly rule between parents and children, as described by Aristotle, but the masterly rule over slaves. How can this underlie a teaching on moral and political right? “As much as we are to be the sovereign authors of the human order and to depend only on our freedom, modern political construction could never have begun without relying on our nature, more precisely on the passivity of our nature, as it is imposed on especially by the affect of fear,” the central “node of passion” for the subjects of the prince. Hobbes sees that this master-slave relationship entails a sort of ‘good’ for both parties. The master wants to rule his subjects without too much trouble, especially such unpleasantnesses as regicide and rebellion; the subject wants to get away from the natural war of all against all, in which would-be masters contend for rule over the dead bodies of the slavish. Establishing a contract between master and slave stipulating that the master will protect the slave’s life in exchange for the slave’s obedience to the master solves both problems. Although right in the state of nature “has no meaning,” remaining indefinite and unenforceable, life in civil society under the social contract becomes decidedly less solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

The plasticity of human nature in the state of nature leads to the plasticity of rights in civil society, inasmuch as what begins as a minimalist contract of mutual protection soon elaborates, as both masters and slaves gain confidence in their security. In the name of “progress” new rights are invented. “To declare human rights in such a perfectly indeterminate and undeterminable way” (as eventually has come to be the case) “is to give anyone the formal authority to take whatever of the human world they judge or feel entitled to.” That is, the Machiavellian and Hobbesian desire for acquisition, understood comprehensively as the conquest of fortune and of nature, makes the accumulation of ‘rights’ yet another form of empire, with this gain, however, there is a loss. “What is lost sight of in particular is the determinacy and specific rule of the law as a rule of action, since the right, now understood as anterior to the law and independent of it, is presented to us as a sufficient principle of action, a function it cannot in any way fulfill” (emphasis added). In contrast, by defining man as a “political animal,” Aristotle (following Socrates) grounds human life in the concrete circumstances of human deliberation and action, where our elementary appetites and desires form the ‘lower’ limit and our natural capacities for speech and reason form the ‘higher’ limit.

“When,” departing from Aristotle, “we define man as ‘the being who has rights,’ or of ‘having always and everywhere the right to claim human rights,’ we say nothing about what constitutes and gives form to human life,” having followed Machiavelli and Hobbes in grounding political life in the subpolitical, in “a state or condition in which all human traits are absent.” “That is why Socratic political science, that political science which Aristotle presents as the specific science of the human world, proceeds from a description of the nature of which human cities are determined in their own eyes, that is, how they understand themselves and speak to one another, therefore from the opinion of the citizens on their city.” Socrates begins not only ‘politicking’ but philosophizing itself by talking with his fellow citizens, examining (and cross-examining) their opinions. This results in a practical, not theoretical, and an active, not passive, political science. By contrast, “modern natural right does not rest properly on a political philosophy [emphasis added] but on a doctrine of the State,” a doctrine that takes the majority of men to be passive subjects, not citizens at all.

Christianity complicates this classical understanding of political life, as the City of God cross-cuts the City of Man. Man understood as a creature of God is a more ‘determined’ being than a political animal especially because he is as much a slave in his own way—a slave to sin—as the subject dwelling in the Machiavellian state. One cannot simply start political science from an examination of opinion, anymore, not only because all opinions are likely to be corrupt but because true, Christian ‘opinion’—the promptings of the Holy Spirit—is invisible and hearable only by those who have ears to hear, by the grace of God. “The center of gravity of Christendom resides in an interiority” that makes it harder to estimate the trustworthiness of the fellow-citizen with whom we are speaking. It is this interiority—leading to this confusion—which the “doctrinaires of modern natural right” zeroed in on and attempted to sweep aside. “The effort of modern natural right and the State that it inspires and informs was to produce at this time”—and in this world—”a being defined by a right to be or to do what would not be limited or ordered by either the law of the city or the law of conscience.” This being would inhabit a “thoroughly human,” i.e. man-made world, the world of the modern state, offering equality of subject under its rule by eliminating the intermediary authorities (clergy, aristocrats) between itself and them. If life thereafter consists simply in command and obedience, “one does not have to worry about the inner rule of action.”

If, as Hobbes maintains, men are “naturally free and equal,” even in civil society under the rule of the state they will remain “essentially recalcitrant.” Hobbes’s new political science therefore amounts to “a science of obedience.” But even under the terms of the social contract, might I not wonder about “the morality of the State”? How does it intend to use its immense physical power? Moreover, by suppressing human action, citizens life, the state obscures our understanding of human action by causing it to fall into desuetude; we see countries like contemporary Iraq, where subjects liberated from the reigning tyrant fall into a state of war of all against all, if only because they do not know how to do better. Even the success of the modern state—success defined by its philosophic architects and princely executives—pushes toward a conquest of nature which includes the replacement of natural rights (however vaguely defined) with state-produced civil rights serving the purpose of—what,, if not the state? By constructing itself, the state also deconstructs the trust implied by the social contract that calls it into existence.

Manent then looks closer at the way moderns conceive of ‘command.’ If “the actions of the sovereign are authorized by those who obey him,” then they and not the sovereign “are the true authors of these actions.” In Hobbes and all subsequent moderns, this limits command, inasmuch as the social contract aims at preserving the life of the subject; if the sovereign threatens my life, I am entitled to resist, escape, even kill him. Locke notices that he would take away my liberty might easily take my life, and uses this as justification of resisting tyrants. As modernity has continued, the scope of ‘human rights’ widens, so much that we now hear claims of ‘autonomy,’ of subjects given themselves law. In contemporary states we don’t so much obey commands as we ‘go along with’ the policies of states that don’t really command—a condition reminiscent of Tocqueville’s sketch of ‘soft despotism.’ All of this follows from the seeming strength but actual weakness of the modern state at its theoretical origin: “the idea that one could produce command from a condition of non-command, from a state of nature, or of natural liberty.” But there is no “natural liberty,” no “human condition without command” because “the human world is essentially though potentially orderly,” a place where command aims at action but must stem from the deliberation and decision which are “implicit in practical life.”

This is the crucial part of Manent’s argument. Human beings are political and rational animals not only in the sense that they are innately (if often only potentially) capable of discussing amongst themselves what they intend to do and capable of thinking in accordance with the principle of non-contradiction as they discuss it; for human beings, speech and reason also form ineluctable parts of human action, part of “the very constitution of the human world, a world which supposes, to be thinkable, that action ahs reasons which govern it in principle.” Unless under such extreme duress or excitement that we active instinctively, we decide on an action and then command it—as individuals commanding our bodies to walk in a certain direction, as families managing a household, as citizens ruling and being ruled in a political community— after thinking things over. A genuinely human command derives from thought and not from libido dominandi. A political regime commands, makes the potential orderliness of human life real, but the modern state, deriving from a lawless ‘state of nature,’ lacks in principle any such humanly authoritative guidance. The natural law is not only a law of being but a law of action.

Rightly understood, political law derives from natural law. Political law has two dimension. In its “directive” aspect it guide the political community; in its “coercive” aspect it exercises “the right and the power to repress by force any contravention of it commands,” subject to review by a constitutional court. That is, genuine commands have their origin in rational deliberation and are subject to review and, if necessary, correction by rational deliberation. Because “the modern state intends to regulate a human world that believe itself to be without law or rule” but only ‘right’ that it constantly invent for itself—right derived from a “natural liberty” which has no real content—”the law from now on propose to give societies only commands necessary to lead a life without law” “We have charged political law to act contrary to it essence as law.” To counter this contradiction, we substitute ‘social laws’ for political ones; social pressures (sort of) rule us. Our characteristic social science become sociology, a science that avoids the essence of political life, which is the character of rule. For sociologists, feeling and folkway matter, but feeling and folkway do not address the human potential for purposeful deliberation, decision, and command. “What is in fact the modern republic in it time… if not a common action in search of its rule?”

For Manent, the “inflection point” of challenge to the modern state generated by claims of ‘autonomy’ was the évènements of May 1968, the rebellion of French students (temporarily in alliance with labor unions), asserting ‘rights’ against public order itself. “It should be emphasized that this ‘right’ was understood in a more and more extensive way, in a truly unlimited way, as the right to be whatever we are or want to be.” This went beyond even Aristotle’s description of how democrats define freedom badly, as doing what one likes; it speaks to being itself, beyond mere action. If our being has no law rightly to guide it, how can our actions be law-governed? Self-defined rights issue in non-law law; that is, law becomes “the slave of rights,” specifically, of the supposed right to be ‘recognized’ as whatever one says one is. “The human being from now on, if it is still likely to be defined, in a sentient or sensitive animal: an I qualified by the way it feels its life, or is ‘affected’ by it, a firm circle of the adherence to self, tautology of feeling of self from which no question is formed and which cannot be understood by anyone,” entitled to unquestioned recognition and indeed affirmation by everyone. “Instead of social energy being expended mainly to ‘get out of oneself,’ to enter into shared activities and to participate in the common life [of the political community], a growing part of [this energy] is diverted to assert the incommunicable feeling of the living ‘I,’ sentient or sensitive.” The ‘I’ ‘comes out’ as x, y, or z, but this coming-out never gets out of itself, merely asserting itself in an exercise of democratized or egalitarian will-to-power. Its slogan ought to be, Nietzcheism for everybody.

In moving to the modern state, human life has seen an increase and intensification of “activity,” of movement to satisfy man’s desire, as distinguished from “action,” movement toward purposes set by and planned for with “reflective choice.” The social conditions in which activity occurs have been equalized, at least in the sense that the tiled aristocrats, born to rule, have declined. And the scope of action has diminished, at least in comparison to the vigorous civic life of the Greek poleis. Esteem for conatus, for the effort at perfecting the human soul in part by means of participating in that civic life, has given way to the passivity of the ‘good subject’ (hardly a citizens) of the modern state, a passivity enlivened by the touchy self-righteousness of the demand for ‘recognition,’ which Christians would instantly recognize as a form of pride. Under modern conditions, liberty, which once meant free will and free choice, now means the liberation of “our natural necessity,” our physical desires. In Manent’s terminology “the free agent” or actor has been replaced by “the free individual.”

One practical consequence of this is euthanasia; “the modern state tends almost irresistibly to institutionalize euthanasia in one form or another.” Why? If freedom means liberating our physical desires from all external obstacles; if death is “the obstacle par excellence” for modern man, the fear of death “the king of terrors,” as Hobbes calls it; then modern man will want not only to avoid death as long as possible but to choose the moment he dies, and not allow death to ‘choose’ that moment for him. And if the modern state has been “entrusted” as the guarantor of modern freedom; if the modern state has no natural law above it to guide its choices; if, moreover, the state’s law by its very character as human law cannot possibly ‘know’ when and how to make life-or-death decisions regarding a person innocent of any objectively determinable criminal act; the ‘legal’ act of euthanasia must be arbitrary, which is to say lacking the character of law. This is a consequence of “the perspective of modern liberty, which defines death as an extrinsic accident of life.” This involves the modern state in self-contradiction, in legalizing what is non-legal in the strict sense.

Although much changes under the conditions of statism, the regime question remains. Manent does not in any way trivialize the importance of such republican principles as representation (“the great invention of modern politics”) and consent, especially given the alternative regimes of modern tyranny and oligarchy in the forms of bureaucratic despotism or of military juntas. But even consent to be governed by elected representatives does not match actual participation in political rule. This matters because “natural law is not a rule foreign to human action as would be a physical or metaphysical criterion elaborated by theoretical reason; it is a friend of action, motivating for action.” It lends judgment to action because practical reason originates, guides, and evaluates the results of action. Politics rightly understood is architectonic and politics animated by deliberation could not be farther removed from modern theory, in which the beginnings of human life are anarchic. Under modern conditions, “human association” becomes “more and more opaque to itself; it understands itself less and less since, as the practical and archic operation is more and more obscured by an-archic conventions and frameworks the bases of actions and of institutions and the sources of citizens’ own actions and institutions are less and less accessible to them.”

Under the condition of passivity induced by statism, we are often told not to be ‘judgmental.’ On the contrary, Manent remarks, “we cannot avoid judging one another.” We cannot, because the “objective components of human nature” consist in large measure of three motives: the pleasant, the useful, and l’honnête —an untranslatable French word meaning both the honorable and the just. We cannot avoid pursuing these motives, judging which one will prevail in each circumstance we face. “The agent’s motives are not up to him, as to either their presence or their nature; they belong to the human being as such, to human nature; but the way they become his action is up to him.” We may have wrong ideas of the honorable and the just, as (for example) Islamic terrorists do; we frequently make mistakes about what’s useful, and we even make wrong judgments about the pleasurable, as addicts do. But even in the case of terrorists and tyrants, “it is less the idea that is false than their relation to the idea.” Heroic self-sacrifice for the sake of God is not in itself a bad idea, but the way terrorists and tyrants seek to honor God does indeed leave a couple of things to be desired—namely prudential reasoning and a refusal to sacrifice others along with oneself.

Given the inherent human desires for the pleasant, the useful, and the noble and just, Hume’s radical division between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ (a sensible response to modern philosophic doctrines) no longer holds. The human ‘ought’ is implicit in the human ‘is.’ This doesn’t mean that the ‘ought’ of natural law acts like a computer program, producing a detailed course of action; rather, it more nearly resembles DNA, which provides the core of our natural being while making that life both available for enhancement and susceptible to ruin, depending on our choices and circumstances, on how we ruled and are ruled. Natural law “help[s] us apply a simple and concrete criterion for determining whether it is possible for human nature to find satisfactory fulfillment in a given institution, political regime, or framework of action I general.” This practical, prudential character of natural law “save[s] us from the tyranny of the explicit and the exhaustive that is the fate and the scourge of the philosophy of human rights,” whose “dogmatism” has “ruined the whole architecture of practical life” by undermining deliberation and the true command that issues from deliberation. Natural law guides without commanding, leaving it to “the agent, enlightened by the natural law and alert to particular circumstances,” to “make the reflective choice that leads to effective action and commands it.” Natural law points human beings to “a happy life—that is to say a reasonably pleasant, useful and noble life.”

 

 

G. W. F. Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Ruben Alvarado translation. Wordbridge, 2011.

Paul Franco, ed.:  Leo Strauss on Hegel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

 

Note: This is the fifth and final essay of a series on Hegel’s Lectures and on Strauss’s commentaries.

 

As Strauss has remarked before, Hegel refers to the Oriental, Greek, Roman, and Germanic worlds not in the sense of the worlds in inhabited by Asians, Greeks, Romans, and Germans but in the sense of the “folk minds” of those cultures. Hence “Germanic,” not “German”—the Geist, the spirit of the Germans. Strauss explains to his English-speaking students that “Germanic” or Germanisch does not mean the same thing as “German” or deutsch. The distinctive characteristic of the Germanic is Gemüt, an “absolutely untranslatable” word often rendered as “heart,” meaning at once easygoing, friendly, and warm. Hegel considers this a characteristic of the inner man, and therefore a pervading spirit within the German people as individuals.

“The Germanic spirit is the spirit of the new world,” a spirit aiming at “the realization of absolute truth as the infinite self-determination of freedom,” a freedom “which has its own absolute form as its content.” “The destiny of the Germanic peoples is to be the bearers of the Christian principle,” the “principle of spiritual freedom” which reconciles God and Man by knowing “God” or Absolute Spirit to be immanent in Man. The ‘end of history,’ its purpose, has been attained in the Germanic world.

As always in Hegel, this self-consciousness came not all at once but in dialectical stages. But the Germanic evolution differed from those seen in Greece and Rome. “The Greeks and Romans had reached maturity within, ere they directed their energies outwards.” Self-development preceded empire. “The Germans, on the contrary, began by flowing outward, deluging the world, and overpowering in their course the inwardly rotten, hollow states of the civilized nations. Only then did their development begin, kindled by a foreign culture, a foreign religion, polity, and legislation. They cultivated themselves by taking up and overcoming the foreign element….” This was the process conducive to “the infinite self-determination of freedom” because the Germans began their conquests as a very nearly ‘blank slate,’ civilizationally and culturally—freer to transform themselves than bearers of any other world-historical national spirit had been. By contrast (as Strauss remarks), “in Byzantium the opposite was the case: the classical pagan culture antedated the Christianization.” “And therefore,” Strauss continues, “the modern world which arose from Latin Christianity and not from Greek Christianity is radically Christian.”

Christianity lends itself to such willing ‘capture’ and full integration by a barbarian people. Christianity has no nationality. Arising out of Judaism, it transcends the Jewish people, reaching beyond them to transform ‘the world.’ Moreover, the Christian church has “the Spirit of God actually present in it, it forgives the sinner and is a present kingdom of heaven,” albeit a community expecting a future, perfected kingdom of heaven on earth ruled directly by the Christ. The Christian church—assembly, ecclesia—freely offers membership to all comers, in exchange for their conversion, their freely-willed turning of their souls around, their openness to receiving the Spirit and thereby their coming-back to their true selves as children of God. In converting to Christianity, Germans were in no danger of making Christianity a national religion: Germans were Christianized; the Christian spirit filled vessels that were nearly empty. As barbarians, Germans could not Germanize Christianity, as they brought so little to the cultural ‘table.’

“The Germanic world took up the Roman culture and religion in their completed form,” incorporating these into itself. Church authorities in that world possessed “the whole culture, and in particular the philosophy, of the Greek and Roman world, a perfected dogmatic system; the church, too, had a completely developed hierarchy,” with a “perfectly developed” language, Latin, and fully developed political forms. “Thus the Germanic world appears, superficially, to be only a continuation of the Roman. But there lived in it an entirely new spirit, through which the world was to be regenerated—the free spirit, which reposes on itself, the absolute wilfulness of subjectivity.” Instead of the dialectical division of an inner world and an outer world—e.g., the matured Roman spirit conquering Asia—the Germanic world would see an entirely ‘inner’ dialectic, the dialectic between church and state. The church there developed itself “as the existence of absolute truth,” the “consciousness of this truth and at the same time the agency for rendering the individual harmonious with it” via the sacraments and teaching of the church. Meanwhile, the “secular consciousness,” embodied in the state, also develops itself. “European history is the exhibition of the development of each of these principles for itself, in church and state; then of an antithesis of both, not only of the one to the other, but within each of them, given that each is itself a totality; lastly, of the reconciliation of this antithesis” in a final synthesis. As in all Hegelian syntheses, one of the original elements will dominate; in the modern world, the state element will dominate the church element, in what Hegel calls secularization.

Three historical “periods” of the German world correspond to these dialectical stages. The first begins with “the appearance of the Germanic nations in the Roman empire” and culminated in the empire of Charlemagne. The second “develops the two aspects”—the church as theocracy, the state as feudal monarchy—and sees the confrontation of them, resulting in the corruption of one element, the church. This period ended with the reign of Charles V. The third period finds “secularity… coming to consciousness in itself” as a rights-bearing entity. This led to “the restoration of Christian freedom” in the Reformation, the purifying reform of the corrupted church. This dialectic transformed not only the church but philosophy; “from this principle are evolved the universal axioms of reason” because “thought received its true material first with the Reformation, through the resurgent concrete consciousness of free spirit.” And from this revolution in thought, in philosophy, came a reconstructed “constitution of the state,” as “customary morality, traditional usage loses its validity; the various rights must prove their legitimacy as based on rational principles,” thereby enabling “freedom of spirit” to be “first realized,” fully embodied for the first time in human history. “We may distinguish these periods as kingdoms of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit,” Hegel boldly declares. His ‘God,’ the Absolute Spirit, carries the dialectic within it. He adds parallels with previous world-historical empires: Charlemagne’s time corresponds to Persia; the divided world of Charles V to split-up Greece; and the unified Reformation world to the Roman world.

The Germanic world in its completion nonetheless differs from the completed Roman world, as it instantiated not merely “the unity of abstract world rule” but “the hegemony of self-conscious thought,” as “privileges and particularities melt away before the common object of the state” and “the “peoples will the right in and for itself.” Religion, philosophy, and politics combine in a well-articulated unitary, but never homogenized, system. “As little can religion maintain itself apart from thought, but either advances to the concept or, compelled by thought itself, becomes intensive belief—or lastly, from, despair of finding itself at home in thought, shrinks back from it in pious horror, and becomes superstition.” It should be recalled that the Apostle Paul describes the Church in exactly such terms—as a unity, but an articulated unity which he likens to a human body with many organs coordinated by the head, Christ (Letter to the Ephesians, 4:1-16). Hegel takes this thought, including the organicism, and extend it to the modern state, which integrates the several religious communities within itself. This is what makes the modern state as conceived by Hegel somewhat ‘churchy’ even in its secularity—undertaking public charity, for instance.

Strauss interrupts his class’s ongoing discussion of the Lectures with an instructive account of the idea of “the philosophy of history,” as distinguished from earlier philosophies of nature, of God (theology), and of politics. Political philosophy “was based from the very beginning on the difference between the good and the ancestral: the agathon and patrium.” If the good is the rational—the whole, without self-interfering contradiction—then the ancestral may be said to be “divinations or fragments of the good or even soiled fragments of it,” as Plato suggests. Hegel rejoins, “No, there is an order among these ancestrals,” indeed “an ascending order” aiming at an end, a telos. Both the end and the way to the end are rational; history could not have unfolded any other way. “Therefore, one can also say, turning it around, that the rational is the final ancestral”; “at the end there is complete reconciliation of reason and tradition.”

Whereas Vico presented a philosophy of history, this was “an ideal history and therefore not history pure and simple.” It was Rousseau in the Second Discourse who “explicitly gives a history of man which is truly philosophic in inspiration.” Although Plato and Lucretius both present early human beings as barbaric, “this view did not lead in antiquity to anything like a philosophy of history.” What changed, between antiquity and Rousseau? For one thing, Lucretius thinks that the process of the ascent from barbarism to civilization, followed by a decline into barbarism, occurs “infinitely often.” In the moderns, however, “there is only one historical process.” Whereas “classical philosophy, whether Platonic or Epicurean, was, we can say, cosmological,” placing human beings squarely “within the cosmos” and its cyclical rhythms, modern philosophy discards the rational attempt to understand the cosmos ‘as it is.’ Hobbes regards mere investigation and discovery insufficient to bring understanding, as nature is opaque to human understanding, as mysterious in its own way as the Creator-God of the Bible. Hobbes teaches that “we understand only what we make,” since we then know its origin, the materials we put into it, the design in which we ordered those materials, and our purpose in undertaking the project. “Since we obviously didn’t make the cosmos, the cosmos can no longer be the guiding theme. For Descartes, the beginning is the thinking ego, not the cosmos.” Another way to say this is that pre-modern philosophy is ‘objectivistic,’ modern philosophy ‘subjectivistic.’ For the moderns, “the thinking, understanding subject is the origin of all meaning” that we can discern. In terms of political philosophy, this leads away from natural law and toward the rights of man, “subjective rights.”

The assertion of subjectivism is “the necessary but not sufficient condition of the discovery of history”—insufficient because ‘history’ in the modern sense isn’t in Hobbes or Descartes any more than it’s in Lucretius or Plato. So, “What is at the bottom of the fact that in the last 150 years people speak of history as philosophically relevant?” The first element predates Hobbes and Descartes. Machiavelli disparaged the ancients’ “concern with the best regime,” calling for philosophers consider how men really live, not how they ought to live. This move “still led to ideals, but to a new kind of ideal, closer to earth, whose actualization is probable” because “enlightenment is probable.” Machiavelli advises non-philosophers, princes, to exercise their virtù, to make the effort to realize such regimes. Locke addresses “opinion leaders, as they are now called,” men of the gentry class “who influence the nonliterate and half-literate people,” including their initially nonliterate and half-literate children. “If enlightenment is necessary” to the founding of the best regime, “if the spreading of knowledge is a necessary consequence of the acquisition of knowledge, then the actualization of the best regime is necessary” because “chance is controlled.” Further, another thing also is necessary: “intellectual progress.” Pascal modestly remarks that even “dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants see farther ahead than the giants.” “By the spread of knowledge the people become enlightened and opinion is changed; and if opinion is changed, power is changed, because power will now move in a different direction than it moved before it was enlightened.” We know what we make; we can make good and useful things if we lower our standards from out of the clouds; and every reasonably intelligent man can contribute to the progress of such knowledge by standing on giants’ shoulders (building on the solid results of experimental science, for example). “All of this is presupposed by Hegel, integrated into his philosophy.” In putting this all together into a philosophy of history, the claim that human progress has unfolded dialectically, in a rationally knowable way, Hegel can claim to be the first philosopher to see “that the actual and the rational necessarily coincide,” by necessity not by chance, even as the conclusion of a syllogism follows the premises by logical necessity. Hegel can say that he and his contemporaries live in “an absolute epoch,” an absolute moment in the course of events (now called “history”), “in which the full coincidence” of the actual and the rational “takes place,” “the epoch in which all fundamental theoretical problems” have been solved. This is ‘the end of history,’ whereby philosophers no longer merely love wisdom but have self-consciously achieved it.

This sounds mighty fine, but Hegel also sees a problem. “This theoretical wisdom has the unfortunate characteristic that it belongs to a period of decay.” The owl of Minerva takes wing at dusk. “So when we have reached wisdom, the dusk begins.” Full enlightenment shadows forth endarkenment. How do we know this? For Hegel, as Hegel has insisted and Strauss has repeatedly remarked, “a nation gives itself the definition in its religion.” Christianity is “the absolute religion.” It has “permeate[d] the world.” “Christianity becomes worldly, i.e., it completely transforms the world,” becoming “completely secularized.” The rational state of modernity is “indifferent to religion,” and religion itself “has been transformed into philosophy taught by Hegel at the University of Berlin.” When “the common people” eventually get wind of this new spirit they will not, however, become philosophers. They will remain unwise, taking secularism in the only way ordinary folk can take it—as opinion. They will esteem science and scientists, enjoy the benefits of technological progress, but they will not understand what those things are, and what those persons are doing. “Hegel has no comfort for us at this point.” That is why the “end stage” of history is also “the beginning of the way down.” Deprived of their former belief in a transcendent and unquestionably good end in the afterlife, they are left with their own mortality, the finitude of a life spent fiddling with gadgets provided for them by scientists, a life less hopeful, less decent, and therefore less genuinely human than they had before. Nietzsche beckons, but ‘the many’ won’t read him; they will hear Nietzschean motifs as they have been dumbed-down by lesser thinkers, and by the thoughtless, and by demagogues and sophists.

Hegel divides his lectures on the Germanic spirit into three groups. As usual, he begins with the ‘makings’ of the national spirit, in this case “The Elements of the Christian Germanic World.” There are three of these elements: the barbarian “migrations” or conquests of Rome; “Mohammedanism”; and “The Empire of Charlemagne.” The second group of lectures discusses “The Middle Ages” in four sections: “Feudalism and the Hierarch” (of the Church); “The Crusades”; “The Transition from Feudalism to Monarchy”; and “Art and Science as Dissolution of the Middle Ages.” The third group, “The Modern Age,” consists of “The Reformation,” “Influence of the Reformation on Political Development,” and “The Enlightenment and the [French] Revolution.”

The migration of barbaric Germans south, into Rome, begins in the forests of Germany, where not-so-noble savages lived. True, the savage knows nothing of the exquisite agonies of civilization which so tormented Rousseau, but such a freedom is “merely negative, whole freedom must be essentially affirmative.” “The goods of affirmative freedom are first and foremost the goods of the highest consciousness,” not the ignorance of savages. The (negatively) free savages “inundat[ed] the Roman empire” in their quest for new and more fertile territories. Some of them joined with the Roman armies, becoming acquainted with Roman goods both material and mental. This issued in a distinction “between the Germanic nations who remained in their ancient habitations and those who spread themselves over the Roman empire and mingled with the conquered peoples.” But “however different might be the fates of these [Germanic] peoples” who did spread and mingle, “they nevertheless had one aim in common, to procure for themselves possessions, and to form themselves into a state.”

Although undeveloped, Germans did have a way of life which they brought to these experiences. “Among the Germans, the community did not lord it over the individual, for the element of freedom is the first consideration in their union in a social relationship”; they were already “famed for their love of freedom,” and “freedom has been the watchword in Germany down to the most recent times.” In practice this meant, for example, that even homicide “could be expiated by a pecuniary penance, because the individuality of the free man was regarded as sacred, permanently and inviolably, whatever he might have done”—prior even to the right to life. Freedom also meant that social organizations “formed by free association and by voluntary attachment to military leaders and princes,” a practice that valorized faithfulness, “the second watchword of the Germans.” “This we find neither among the Greeks nor the Romans.” The German heart freely “sets itself as dependent upon the person and the thing, renders this relation a compound of faithfulness and obedience.” In most places, states form in which “duties and rights are left no longer to arbitrary choice but are fixed as legal relations, precisely so that the state be the soul of the whole, and remain its ruler.” It is “the peculiarity of the German states” that “the laws are absolutely particular, and the entitlements are privileges,” the state being “composed of private rights” and duties. “Only much later, with difficulty, through struggles and convulsions, did a rational state life come about.” And such a state life would need to be made consistent with the German spirit of freedom and faithfulness. Meanwhile, as Strauss succinctly puts it, “according to Hegel there is no public right in the Middle Ages”; “there are only private rights because there is no general will.”

All of this made Germans receptive to Christianity, which itself puts so much emphasis on freely chosen fidelity to a Person. Although “initially only the clouded will is present,” and “a long process is required to complete this purification so as to realize concrete spirit,” the Christian spirit will work its way in and through the German peoples. At first, however, the confrontation of religion with “the violence of the passions” only “rouses them to madness.” “We behold the terrible spectacle of the most fearful extravagance of passion in all the royal houses of that period,” as the newly Christian Germans were only very incompletely Christian, their will “struggling with itself” and often losing. Although we often see a worldly man who “suddenly repudiates it all” and “betakes himself to religious seclusion,” in political life “secular business cannot be thus repudiated; it demands accomplishment, and ultimately the discover is made that spirit finds the goal of its struggle and its satisfaction in that very sphere which it made the object of its resistance,” finding “that secular pursuits are a spiritual occupation.” In Hegel we are only a few decades away from Weber, from “politics as a vocation.” Early on, Europe “comes to the truth” in its very struggle with the truth, in dialectic. “In this moment, Providence in the strict sense”—the Hegelian, not the Biblical sense—”rules, while through misfortune, suffering, private aims, and the unconscious will of the peoples, it realizes its absolute purpose and its honor.”

Meanwhile, in the East at this time we see another “purification of absolute spirit,” one “accomplished much more quickly” and indeed “suddenly in the first half of the seventh century.” This new Asian spirit will soon confront the West as the second “element” of the Christian Germanic World. Hegel knows that Muslims call their religion Islam, not Mohammedanism. He nonetheless calls it that, not out of disrespect but to contrast the founder of Islam with the Founder of Christianity. Islam itself differed in its effect on the ‘Near East’ from the effect of Christianity. Christianity left the nations of Europe intact; under it, “the West began to settle itself in contingency, complication, and particularity.” But “the revolution in the East… destroyed all particularity and dependence and completely enlightened and purified the hear, in that it made the abstract one into absolute object, and just, so, the pure subjective consciousness, the knowledge of this one, into the sole goal of reality—making the relation-less,” the abstract one, Allah—”into the relation of existence” for Man.

Judaism had exalted God as the One, but “Jehovah was the God of that one people”; “only to this people had He revealed himself. “Mohammedanism” eliminated this particularity. The worship of the one, of Allah, “is the sole final end of Mohammedanism, and subjectivity only has this worship as the content of its activity, as well as the design to subjugate secular existence to the one.” Thus human subjectivity under Islam becomes “living and unlimited,” universalized and universalizing, releasing “an energy which enters into secular life with a purely negative purpose, and busies itself and interferes with the world, only in such a way as shall promote the pure adoration of the one.” Mohammed himself is a prophet, not a Man-God, who with maximum energy fights to eliminate all social and political bonds, everywhere, “so that worship of the one remains the only bond by which the whole is capable of uniting.” National, caste, and class distinctions must go. In this struggle, this jihad, “the highest merit is to die for the faith.” “He who perishes for it in battle is sure of paradise.” Hegel links this spirit to the geography of the Arabs, among whom Islam began: “here spirit exists in its simplest form, and the sense of the formless is here at home; for in these deserts nothing can be formed” on the ever-shifting sands, shaped and reshaped perpetually by windstorms.

“Abstraction swayed the minds of the Mohammedans,” as they aimed to “establish an abstract worship” and “struggled for it with the greatest enthusiasm” or “fanaticism, that is, an enthusiasm for something abstract, for an abstract thought which relates negatively to what exists.” Because it is both abstract and valorized, such a thought would negate, destroy, everything in its path in order to replace all other things with itself, in its purity. “Desolating” and “destructive,” “Mohammedanism was, at the same time, capable of the greatest elevation, an elevation free from all petty interests, and united with all the virtues that appertain to magnanimity and valor.” As Robespierre would later unite liberty and terror, so Mohammedanism united religion and terror.

And this is the problem with both the religion and modern ideologies. “Real life is nevertheless concrete,” stubbornly so, with “particular aims,” specifically the “sovereignty and wealth” conquest confers to dynasts and peoples. But in his abstraction-in-principle from such matters, “the Mohammedan is really indifferent to this social fabric,” and as a result all he accomplishes “is only contingent and build on sand, here today and gone tomorrow.” The Mohammedan founds kingdoms and dynasties only to see them dissolve, “destitute” as they are “of the bond of organic firmness.” And in the meantime, individuals in the Muslim world, insofar as they pursue concrete aims, do so cruelly, cunningly, boldly, generously, and above all recklessly. “Never has enthusiasm performed greater deeds,” so quickly and so widely. But “the great empire of the caliphs did not last long, for on the ground of universality nothing is firm.”

It was the Ottomans, not the Arabs, who “at last succeeded in establishing a firm dominion” with a military elite at its core. The science, knowledge, poetry, and philosophy that “came from the Arabs into the West” remained, “but the East itself, when by degrees enthusiasm had vanished, sank into the grossest depravity.” The “sensual enjoyment” that was “sanctioned in the first form which Mohammedan doctrine assumed, and was exhibited as a reward of the faithful in paradise,” “took the place of fanaticism,” and Islam “vanished from the stage of world history” “retreat[ing] into Oriental ease and repose,” even as Christian Germanic Europe retained the intellectual and artistic fruits harvested from its evanescent presence on that continent.

The third and final element of the Germanic World was the empire of Charlemagne. Clovis founded the Frankish empire ruled by his Merovingian dynasty. The Merovingians were replaced by the Carolingians, as Pepin the Short became king of the Franks in the year 752. He allied with the Catholic Church, then “severely pressed by the Lombard kings.” His son Charlemagne was crowned Emperor by the Pope in A.D. 800; “hence originated the firm union of the Carolingians with the Papal See,” whose Roman lineage “continued to enjoy the prestige of a great power among the barbarians… as the center from which civil dignities, religion, laws and all branches of knowledge” grew. The Frankish empire became a new Rome, as the “Roman emperor”—Roman in the sense of having been legitimated by the Church of Rome—”was the born defender of the Roman church.”

“This great empire Charlemagne formed into a systematically organized state, and gave the Frankish empire settled institutions adapted to impart its strength and consistency.” It did not, however, succeed in so imparting such strength or such consistency, as it did not form a true “constitution” of the empire. Charlemagne was indeed “master of the armed force” of that empire and its largest landowner, as well as the holder of supreme judicial power. He manned his imperial troops by universal conscription, and he could fund his enterprises not with onerous and irritating taxes but with the revenues from his lands. He encouraged Catholic bishops to build cathedrals, establish seminaries and universities, “endeavor[ing] to restore scientific endeavor, then almost extinct, by promoting the foundation of schools in cities and towns.” “Such was the state of the Frankish empire—that first consolidation of Christianity into a political form proceeding from itself, the Roman empire having been swallowed up by Christianity.”

Yet it was all short-lived. After Charlemagne died his empire “proved itself utterly powerless” against such foreign invaders as the Normans, Hungarians, and Arabs, “internally inefficient in resisting lawlessness, spoliation, and oppression of every kind.” The empire hadn’t adequately developed itself internally, ‘organically,’ as Hegel would say (and has said) about some previous empires. “Such political edifices need, for the very reason that they originate suddenly, the additional strengthening afforded by negativity within themselves”—by dialectical testing and refining in the crucible of thoughts and events; “they need reactions in every way, which in the following period manifest themselves.” Because the Christian Germanic world retained a concrete, real-world character lacking in the abstractions of Islam flickering across the sands of Arabia, it could maintain itself, even if the Franks could not maintain their empire over it. The epoch of dialectical testing and refining was the Middle Ages.

Hegel’s second group of lectures, “The Middle Ages,” consists of one section each on three “reactions” to the imposing but shaky Frankish empire, followed by a section on the dissolution of the Middle Ages as world history transitioned to “The Modern Age.” The first reaction consisted of the resistance of nationalities, of particularism against universalism; the second was the resistance of individuals “against legal authority and the state power”; the third was the reaction of the church against “worldly ferocity.” The “universal instability” which resulted from these rivalries eventuated in the Crusades, but the lasting result was the “internal and external independence” of “the states of Christendom.”

Kings and peoples asserted “particular nationality against the universal rule of the Franks.” The resistance succeeded because “the entire political system” of the Franks “was held together only by the power, the greatness, the regal soul” of Charlemagne, not “the spirit of the people,” as Charlemagne’s spirit hadn’t “become a vital element” in that spirit. Hegel compares Charlemagne’s rule to that of Napoleon’s over Spain, “which disappeared with the physical power that sustained it.” What “makes for the reality of a constitution is that it exists as objective freedom—the substantial way of the will—as duty and obligation acknowledged by the subjects themselves.” The Germanic spirit acknowledged no such reality, rather being given over to “an inwardness of indifferent, superficial self-seeking.” Charlemagne’s constitution or regime “was destitute of any firm bond; it had no objective support in subjectivity; for in fact no constitution was as yet possible.”

The second reaction succeeded for the same reason. Individuals resisted the empire’s legal power, which had “no vital existence in the peoples themselves.” When “the brilliant administration of Charlemagne vanished without a trace,” individuals were left defenseless against outlaws. Barbarians “look upon it as a limitation of their freedom if their rights must be guaranteed them by others”; they begin to feel the need for protection only by experiencing ruination. The dialectic of history’s slaughter-bench was the only teacher they would heed. “The impulse towards a firm organization did not exist: men had first to be placed in a defenseless condition, before they would become sensible of necessary appearance of the state.” The central, imperial state proved too weak to serve that need because the Germans as yet felt no duty towards it. “Individuals were therefore obliged to take flight to individuals, and put under the power of a few rulers who, out of that authority which formerly belonged to the generality [the empire], formed a private possession and personal sovereignty”: in a word, feudalism. Men “committed their estates to a lord, a monastery, an abbot, a bishop, and received them back, encumbered with feudal obligations to these lords. Instead of freemen they became vassals—feudal dependents.” “Feudum is connected with fides; faithfulness is here a bond through injustice, a relation intending something lawful, but just as surely with injustice as its content: for faithfulness on the part of vassals is not a duty toward the generality, but a private obligation which equally is left to contingency, arbitrariness, and violence.” Such conditions revived “the martial spirit,” but on behalf of “subjective interests”—particularities, not an overall, general state. “Only in a few cities, where communities of freemen were independently strong enough to secure protection and safety without the king’s help, did relics of the ancient free constitution remain.” Everywhere else, arbitrary personal rule by local aristocrats (secular or churchly) prevailed. “Thus all right vanished before particular might; equality of rights and rationality of laws, which is the goal of the state, had no existence.”

The Catholic Church mounted the third reaction, but by promoting an “element of generality,” indeed of catholicism, against feudal particularism. Given the violence that permeated the continent, “in the eleventh century the fear of the approaching Judgment Day and the belief in the speedy dissolution of the world spread through all Europe.” The church benefited, as some gave their possessions to it and turned to lives of humble penitence, while others, the majority, “dissipated their possessions in riotous debauchery.” Either way, the church’s relative power and authority waxed, as famines killed the worldlings. Corruption entered the church itself; to resist it, Pope Gregory VII introduced the rule of clerical celibacy, attacked simony, and laid claim to secular power (this last as a counter to attempts to take over monasteries by aristocrats). The church’s claim to power rested on “the abstract principle that the divine is superior to the secular.” This claim met with some substantial success, as “whole countries and states, such as Naples, Portugal, England, and Ireland came into a formal relation of vassalage to the papal chair.” Church authorities took care to buttress their abstract claim based on divine right with binding agreements. If, for example, a prince wanted a divorce, he could get permission from the church only if the met clerical demands; similarly, clergy could intervene as mediators in otherwise unstoppable private feuds. “But in these proceedings the church brought to bear against opponents only a force and arbitrary resolve of the same kind as their own, and mixed up its secular interest with its interest as a spiritual, i.e., divine substantial power.” Such hypocrisy was best known on the papacy’s home turf; “Italy was the country where the authority of the popes was least respected; and the worst usage they experienced was from the Romans themselves. Thus what the popes acquired in point of land and wealth and direct dominion, they lost in regard and esteem.”

On the spiritual side, the church also entangled itself in contradiction. Christianity teaches that “Man realizes his spiritual essence only when he conquers his naturalness. This conquest is possible only on the supposition that the human and the divine nature are one in and for themselves,” that the indwelling divine spirit can resist the indwelling natural sinfulness of the (fallen) human soul. Christ exemplifies this unity of human and divine. “The main thing is, therefore, that man should lay hold of his consciousness, and that it should be continually roused in him.” For this purpose the church established the mass and the host, whereby “Christ is set forth as present.” In this the church erred. “The host is adored even apart from its being partaken of by the faithful” as a “sensorial object.” This places “the presence of Christ” “not in the imagination and spirit” but in a physical lump of bread. Later, Martin Luther “proclaimed the great doctrine that the host was only something, and Christ was only received, through faith in Him; apart from this, the host was a mere external thing, possessed of no greater value than any other things. But the Catholic falls down before the host; and thus is the outward made into something holy.” The church compounded this mistake, this taking of “the holy as thing,” as an “externality,” by establishing “a separation between those who possess this [thing] and those who have to receive it from others—between the clergy and the laity.” “The laity as such are alien to the divine.” This meant that church doctrine became exclusively the domain of the church; “it has to ordain, and the laity have simply to believe,” faithfully and blindly, “without insight on their part.” “This relation rendered faith a matter of external law and progressed to compulsion and the stake.” To approach God, the laity could not pray directly to Him, but only through such “mediators” as saints and relics. “To this degree, the essential unity of the divine and human is denied, since man, as such, is declared incapable of recognizing the divine and of approaching thereto.” When guilty of sin, the laity could not ask for God’s forgiveness; only the clerical confessor could call upon God to grant the sinner His grace.

“Thus the church took the place of conscience: it put men in leading strings like children,” “stupefy[ing] the soul” of the layperson. This “produced an utter derangement of all that is recognized as good and moral in the Christian church”; a “condition of absolute unfreedom is therefore brought within the principle of freedom itself.” By imposing this “absolute separation of the spiritual from the secular principle generally,” the church effected a “perversion” of both the intellectual and the ethical “divine kingdoms.” Mere piety does not question, does not inquire; nor does it exert itself in a free, legal, ethical way. “Piety is outside of history and has no history; for history is rather the empire of spirit present to itself in its subjective freedom, as the ethical kingdom of the state.” But in the Middle Ages there was no such “actualization of the divine”; rather, the antithesis was left unresolved. Instead of love and marriage, chastity was revered; instead of activity and labor, poverty; instead of rational, consensual obedience, thoughtless servitude. “All morality was degraded,” as the church “was no longer a spiritual power, but an ecclesiastical one; and the relation which the secular world sustained to it was unspiritual, volitionless, and insightless.” “Accordingly, the church of the Middle Ages exhibits itself as a manifold contradiction to itself.”

The medieval state was no better off, equally “involved in contradictions.” Imperial rule had become “an empty title.” The basis of the feudal state, “which we call faithfulness, [was] left to the arbitrary choice of the heat which recognizes no objective duties”—a faithless fidelity, self-contradictory, faithful only for “selfish aims.” Within individuals under feudalism, piety burned aside barbaric passions. “We find an acquaintance with abstract truth, and yet the most uncultured, the rudest ideas of the secular and the spiritual; cruel rage of passion and yet a Christin sanctity which renounces all that is worldly, and devotes itself entirely to holiness.” Hegel fulminates against this hypocrisy, calling it “the most disgusting and revolting spectacle that was ever witnessed,” one that “only philosophy can comprehend and hence justify.” Only the philosopher of history can see, and bring his students to see, that this was “a necessary antithesis, which must arise in the consciousness of the holy, when this consciousness is still primitive and immediate.” The antithesis itself was necessary because when “the individual is not yet protected by laws, but only by his own exertion, there is present a general vitality, activity, and excitement.” “Certain of eternal salvation through the instrumentality of the church,” with its sacraments external to the inner man, the “ardor in the pursuit of worldly enjoyment becomes the greater,” as “the church bestows indulgences, when required, for all caprice, iniquity, and scandal.”

All of this recalls the old joke, beloved of lecturers on European history, that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Only in the cities could reaction against feudal church and state rise to an ethical life. There and then “for the first time we behold the few feeble commencements of a reviving sense of freedom,” that freedom of property the “ancient Germans” had prized. In joining together in cities, individuals “formed among themselves a kind of union, confederation, or conjuration,” agreeing freely “to be and to perform on their own behalf that which they had previously been and performed in the service of their feudal lord alone.” They formed militias, courts, treasuries, systems of self-taxation. City life conduced more to artisanship than to agriculture; there are no serfs in cities, “forcibly driven to work” by landlords; artisans “displayed activity really their own, and a corresponding diligence and interest in the result of their labors.” As they amassed property, the citizens began to purchase their rights from the aristocrats; indeed, whole cities did so. Such factions as arose were along lines of wealth, not birth, and oligarchic power can be overcome by the diligence of the ‘democrats,’ the many, more readily than fixed ranks maintained by ‘noble’ birth. And the cities could also successfully resist the claims to rule asserted by the German emperors. Marx (who wrote his dissertation on Hegel) would soon describe this as the rise of the bourgeoisie.

Meanwhile the emperor and the pope, Henry V and Clixtus II, finally settled their differences in 1122, resolving the ‘investiture controversy’ by reserving the scepter for the emperor, the ring and crosier for the pope. This left the pope and the church with spiritual authority over emperors, and in the Christian German world that was decisive. It led to popes demanding, and receiving, imperial armies for fighting the Crusades.

Why were the Crusades plausible as a real-world undertaking? Part of the reason was the belief that with God anything is possible. If Christ is present in the Eucharist, why might He not appear to devout Christians in their daily life? And why not the Holy Mother? Sightings abounded. “The church present[ed] the aspect of a world of miracle; to the community of devout and pious persons, natural existence [had] utterly lost its stability and certain; rather, absolute certainty [had] turned against it, and the divine is not conceived of by Christendom in general as the law and nature of spirit, but rather manifest[ed] itself in individual manner, in which rational existence [was] perverted.” At the same time, what Christianity lacked in its geographical place of origin was territory; neither the approach to the Holy Land from Europe nor the Holy Land itself were “in possession of the church.” The Crusades seemed both possible and imperative.

Here Strauss intervenes with a key point. “In Catholic Christianity, the divine is within the world not as law and nature of the spirit, but as interruption of the lawfulness,” that is, as the miraculous. But more than that, the obsession of with conquest of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulcher bespeaks the aforementioned “carnal understanding of Christianity,” the location of God in the Host, an object. The Sepulcher was the ultimate version of such carnality, inasmuch as it is the one supreme holy object, not one of many pieces of bread consumed at every Sunday church service. When that supreme holy object was discovered to be empty, the purpose of the Crusades was defeated, even as the crusading forces triumphed.

“The West once more sallied forth in hostile array against the East,” Hegel says. It was the enthusiasm of Islam transferred to Christendom, but with no Mohammed at the helm, nor any Agamemnon or Alexander. The first Crusaders consisted of “an immense mass of rabble” who did more damage while passing through southeastern Europe than in the Holy Land. Eventually, “with much trouble and immense loss, more regular armies attained the desired object.” “Jerusalem was made a kingdom, and the entire feudal system was introduced there—a constitution which, against the Saracens, was certainly the worst that could be adopted.” This triumph was empty, quite literally. The hard-won Holy Sepulcher was empty. “The Christian world received a second time the response given to the disciples when they sought the body of the Lord there: “Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen.” As Hegel glosses it, “You must not look for the principle of your religion in the sensorial, in the grave among the dead, but in the living spirit in yourselves.” “The absolute result of the Crusades” was the recognition that “man must look within himself” for the “particular concrete individual which is of a divine nature”; in this “subjectivity receives absolute authorization, and in itself has the determination of relation to the divine.” The Crusades began “self-reliance and spontaneous activity” in the West. As Strauss remarks, “the bond between the worldly and the eternal must be found in a this one, but not in any thing, only in the subjective consciousness, in the ego. I, this one. Because the ego, too is a this one. Another man is not I.” To be certain, to know: this condition can only occur within myself, within each self. This discovery truly inaugurated the modern world.

As Hegel puts it, “At the Holy Sepulcher, the West bade an eternal farewell to the East, and grasped its principle of subjective infinite freedom.” “From this time forward we witness religious and intellectual movements in which spirit, going beyond repulsive and irrational existence, either finds its sphere of exercise within itself, and draws upon its own resources for satisfaction, or throws its energies into an actual world of general and morally justified aims, which are therefore aims of freedom.” We witness Descartes, with respect to thought, and we witness Luther, with respect to the will.

The Crusades also weakened respect for the Papacy. “Zeal for the holy cause was exhausted among the princes of Europe.” Princes no longer heeded the papal “lamentations and entreaties” to continue; “princes and peoples” alike “were indifferent to papal clamor urging them to new crusades.” The superiority of divine claims to rule over the claims of princes and emperors could no longer sustain itself.

Within the church itself, thought began to declare its independence from dogma. “Thought was first directed to theology, which now became philosophy under the name of scholastic theology”; in the beginning scholastics devoted their energies to proving the content of Christian doctrine. “Philosophy was indeed called an ancilla fidei, an aid to faith.” However, “it was impossible for the opposition between thought and belief not to manifest itself,” as “intellectual jousting” began to imitate the jousting of knights in armor at the tournaments.

As the church hesitated, its secular power diminished and its spiritual power dividing against itself in the great scholastic debates, the political realm began to consolidate. “Feudal rule is a polyarchy: we see nothing but lords and serfs; in monarchy, on the contrary, there is one lord and no serf, for servitude is abrogated by it, and in it rights and law are recognized; it is the source of real freedom.” This is so, Hegel claims, because “in monarchy the caprice of individuals is kept under, and commonality of rule is established.” As monarchic power extends over the feudal lords, the territory controlled by the monarch accretes. The very extent of the monarch’s territory “necessitates general” rather than particular “arrangements for the purposes of organization, and those who govern in accordance with those arrangements are likewise essentially obedient: vassals become state officials who duty it is to execute the laws by which the state is regulated.” Further, the monarch’s own power “can no longer be merely arbitrary” in such a large place, requiring now “the consent of the estates and corporations,” which he will last only if he “ordain[s] what is just and fair.” Eventually, as Strauss observes, this will require not only the modern state was the sole legitimate enforcer of the laws but also the modern state as controlled by rational administrators, professional bureaucrats.

State formation occurred along three pathways: by straightforward subjugation of his independent vassals; by seizing territory; or by consent, “unit[ing] the several particular lordships with his own and thus [becoming] master of the whole.” Forceful subjugation was aided by the invention of gunpowder. (“Humanity needed it, and suddenly there it was.”) The military prowess of the aristocrats had consisted of strong arms and strong hearts; guns enabled “a cowardly wretch at safe distance in an obscure hiding place” to kill “the bravest, the noblest” lord. Thus gunpowder made “a rational, considered bravery—spiritual valor—the essential thing,” as the new warrior must go into battle “calmly, sacrificing himself for the generality,” thereby exhibiting “the valor of cultivated nations.” Such valor “does not rely on the strong arm alone, but places its confidence essentially in the intelligence, the generalship, the character of its commanders and, as was the case among the ancients, in the cohesion and consciousness of the whole.”

This was the world of Machiavelli, of The Prince. “This book has often been thrown aside in disgust as being replete with the maxims of the most revolting tyranny; but nothing worse can be urged against it than that the writer, having the profound consciousness of the necessity for the formation of a state, has here exhibited the principles on which alone states could be founded in the circumstances of the times,” times in which “individual lords and dominions had entirely be subdued” in no other ways but force and fraud, since they could be subdued “in no other way, since an indomitable contempt for principle and an utter depravity were thoroughly ingrained in them.” Machiavelli merely tells his reader to fight fire with fire.

Forceful subjugation and territorial seizure thus prevailed in Germany and Italy. France saw “the converse of that which occurred” in those countries. Hereditary monarchy had already been established there. In 1302 Philip the Fair convoked representatives of the cities as a third estate along with those of the first estate (the clergy) and the second estate (the aristocrats). By ‘institutionalizing’ (as we would now say) the three major elements of French political society, “the kings of France very soon attained very great power.” And in England, where Norman kings held sway after their conquest three centuries earlier, struggles over the throne induced contenders for the monarchy to ‘reach down’ for support from aristocrats and cities. The Magna Charta’s limitations on monarchic power emerged from this.

“A general goal for secularity, a goal perfectly justified in itself, arose in state formation, and the will, desire, arbitrariness of the individual subjected itself to this goal of commonality.” The Middle Ages had done its disciplinary work with “two iron rods”: the church and serfdom. “The church brought the heart out of itself, made spirit pass through the severest bondage, so that the soul was no longer its own; but it did not degrade it to Indian torpor, for Christianity is an intrinsically spiritual principle and, as such, has a boundless elasticity.” And serfdom, “which made a man’s body not his own,” “dragged humanity through all the barbarism of slavery and unbridled desire,” in the process destroying that desire “by its own violence.” “It was not so much from slavery as through slavery that humanity was emancipated.” Both the spiritual warfare of the church, with its threats of hellfire, and the physical warfare of master and slave used terror to “break down the spirit of barbarism and to tame it into repose.” This “phase of negation is, indeed, a necessary one in man” in any epoch, but thereafter it could take “the tranquil form of education, so that all the fearfulness of inward struggle” vanishes. “In its reality, in secularity, humanity has attained the feeling of actual reconciliation of spirit in itself, and a good conscience. The human spirit has come to stand on its own feet,” without rebellion against the divine but rather as “a manifestation of that better subjectivity which feels itself divine in itself, which is imbued with the real, and directs its activities to general goals of rationality and beauty.”

The first step toward secular culture occurred in the church, in the realm of art—the grand architecture of the cathedrals, decorated with their noble sculptures and beautiful stained-glass windows which liberate the spectrum of the light of the sun. “Art spiritualizes,” taking the sensorial and giving it a form, “a soulful form.” The host, a piece of bread, or a saint’s relic, a fragment of bone or piece of wood from a cross pale before “an intelligent painting or a beautiful work of sculpture, in which soul relates to soul and spirit to spirit.” You only know what you make, Hobbes would later assert; art is a pathway to knowledge. Nonetheless, art has a limitation. “This element of truth as it manifests itself is only a sensorial form, not one in accordance with itself,” not a manifestation of the spirit in spiritual form. The church “separated itself from the free spirit which emerged from art, when [art] elevated itself to thought and science.”

Art did this because to improve their technique artists began to study the ancients. The turn to the ancients brought back more than technique, and also more than the emptiness of the Holy Sepulcher. “Through this study the West became acquainted with the true and eternal element in the activity of man.” At the same time, such study also caused a certain ‘cognitive dissonance’ in the Christian Germanic world, as “the Greeks in their works exhibited quite other moral commands than those with which the West was acquainted.” “Scholastic formalism had to make way for a body of speculative thought of a widely different complexion; Plato became known in the West, and in him a new human world presented itself.” Disseminated with the help of the new art of printing, “these novel ideas” circulated widely and rapidly.

Finally, the ‘outward’ or evangelical energy of Christianity, coupled with the new secularity, took on the project not of crusading but of discovering new lands, a project animated by “that desire of man to become acquainted with his world.” Chivalry embodied itself not in the knight-errant out to conquer Jerusalem but in “the maritime heroes of Portugal and Spain.” And the church’s task of conversion found its outlet in the voyages of Columbus, who aimed not only at riches but at a rich harvest of souls for God.

All of these events “may be compared with that dawn which after lengthy storms first betokens the return of a bright and glorious day,” the “day of universality which breaks upon the world after the long, eventful, and terrible night of the Middle Ages, a day which is distinguished by science, art and the drive for discover, that is, by the noblest and highest, which the human spirit, rendered free by Christianity and emancipated through the instrumentality of the church, exhibits its eternal and true content.”

The “Modern Age” began and, as usual, it has consisted of three stages: the Reformation, “the all-transfiguring sun following on that dawn at the termination of the medieval period; post-Reformation development; and the years following the French Revolution. As do all things for Hegel, the Reformation resulted from its dialectical antithesis, “the corruption of the church.” Nor was this corruption accidental. “The corruption of the church developed from out of itself”; as he’s argued, the Catholic practice of attempting to present the divine in “sensorial” or material form proved ruinous to Christian thought and practice. The “world-spirit” or Absolute Spirit moved on, “transcended it.” “It is externality in the church itself”—its sensorial worship practices—”which becomes evil and corruption, and develops itself as a negative principle with the church’s own bosom.” Catholic piety became superstition, seen in its “slavish devotion to authority, whereby spirit ‘inside’ the human soul becomes “unfree” and self-contradictory, “in itself outside of itself.” Superstition also may be seen in Catholic belief in “miracles of the most inane and silly form,” and in “lust of power, riotous debauchery, all the forms of barbarous and vulgar corruption, hypocrisy and deception.” These failures occurred because in the church the sensorial wasn’t “subjugated and trained by the understanding.” This freed conduct gratifying the senses “in a crude and barbarous way,” while such virtue as remained did “not know how to be moral within sensoriality, and therefore [was] only fleeting, renouncing, lifeless within reality.” To reconcile this contradiction, the church turned to the practice of offering “indulgences” to those who paid for them, thereby offering forgiveness to sinners “in the most grossly superficial and trivial fashion.”

Against this stood “the ancient and thoroughly preserved sincerity of the German people.” The other European nations sought wealth and power in overseas exploration and conquest, but in Germany “a simple monk,” Martin Luther consulted his true, German “heart” (Gemüt), “detect[ing] the perversion of the absolute relation of truth in its minutest features.” He set out to annihilate that perversion. He did so by calling for the “removal of externality” from church practices and replacing them with an ‘inward’ worship founded on faith and joy in God—”the subjective assurance of the eternal, of truth in and for itself, the truth of God,” produced by “the Holy Spirit alone” with no sensorial intermediaries. “Christ is an actual presence,” not in the Eucharist but “in faith and in spirit.” Luther “maintained that the spirit of Christ really fills the human heart”; “man sustains an immediate relation to Him in spirit.” This enables man precisely to be moral “within sensoriality” because the sensorial gradually becomes ruled by the spirit. Jesus became not only a presence in the souls of Christians but the ruling presence.

How? “The spirit dwells in him, that is, in the language of the church, he has come to brokenness of heart and the breakthrough of divine grace.” Man’s nature is sinful, ‘fallen.’ “Man is not what he ought to be”; “the human heart is not what it should be.” The first step away from this condition is self-consciousness, knowledge of oneself as evil by nature, then seeing that “only by a transforming process”—by progress in historical time—”does he arrive at the truth.” The individual Christian must both “know himself to be depraved, and that the good spirit dwells in him.” He then prays to God, studies the Bible, and opens himself to spiritual correction.

This obviates the distinction between priests and laymen, as all men can possess “the content of the truth” because “the heart, the feeling spirituality of man” is the common potential “of all mankind.” “Subjective spirit has to receive the spirit of truth into itself, and allow it to dwell in itself,” gaining both “absolute inwardness of soul” and “freedom in the church.” Freedom consists in the necessary coincidence “subjectivity and the certainty of the individual” with “the objectivity of truth,” and also with the fact that “truth with Lutherans is not a finished and completed thing; rather, the subject himself must become genuine” as he “makes this truth his own.” “Thus has Christian freedom become real.”

This reality in the Protestant church then pervades culture generally. “Law, property, ethics, government, constitutions… must be determined in general manner”—not in the particularistic arrangements of feudalism. Placing all things under the universal God enables these features “to accord with the concept of free will and to be rational.” “While the intensity of the subjective free spirit,” which is destructive when it takes the particular (passions, material interests) as its object, moves to the form of universality,” the general or common good, “objective spirit is able to manifest itself.” “This is the sense in which we must understand the state to be based on religion. States and law are nothing else than religion manifesting itself in the relations of reality.” “This is the essential content of the Reformation: man sets himself to be free.”

Such freedom is good, but from where will it derive its content, if no longer from Catholic theology? Luther “repudiated” the authority of the church, “and set up in its stead the Bible and the testimony of the human spirit.” This meant that each individual can freely learn from God’s Word, freely “directing his conscience in accordance with it.” “Luther’s translation of the Bible has been of incalculable value to the German people,” making the Bible “a people’s book, such as no nation in the Catholic world can boast.” In reading the Bible, in thinking about it, in attempting to follow its teachings, Germans engaged in a form of self-education, of enlightenment-before-the-Enlightenment. In this carefully limited sense (as Strauss observes) Hegel is a democrat. Although no Hegelian, Tocqueville would concur with this claim that equality, the democratic principle, entered the world as a condition of social life via Christianity.

Hegel poses two questions for himself: “Why was the Reformation limited to certain nations, and why did it not permeate the entire Catholic world.” For the Reformation “struck root only in the purely German nations.”

He begins by observing that “authority has much greater weight than people are inclined to believe.” We easily fall into “the habit of receiving” our “fundamental principles” on “the strength of authority.” In Austria and southern Germany, force of arms, stratagem, and persuasion “indisputably stifled” the Reformation. Among the Slavic nations, meanwhile, agricultural life prevailed, not the urban life of the Germans. “In agriculture the agency of nature predominates; human industry and subjective activity are on the whole less brought into play in this department of labor than elsewhere.” Nature, as we’ve seen, consists of (very) congealed spirit; add the lord-serf relation to that stubborn physicality, and the appeal to freedom in the spirit will likely fall flat. As for the “Romanesque nations” (Italy, Spain, Portugal, parts of France), force “perhaps did much to repress” Protestantism, but they are also afflicted with “the principle of division.” That is, “they are a product of the fusion of Roman and German blood, and still retain the heterogeneity thence resulting.” These nations lack the wholeness, the capacity to will a single purpose in a fully self-integrated way, “lack[ing] [the] entirety of spirit and sentiment which we call heart; there is not that pondering of spirit within itself; rather, in their inmost being they are outside of themselves,” prone to abstraction or dualism of the spirit and the sensorial, an inability to blend the two in a coherent synthesis. “Cultivated Frenchmen,” for example, “therefore feel an antipathy to Protestantism because it seems to them something pedantic, depressing, pettily moralistic, since it requires that spirit and thought should be directly engaged in religion: in attending mass and other ceremonies, by contrast, no thought is required, but an imposing spectacle is presented to the senses, which does not make such a demand on one’s attention as entirely to exclude a little chat, while yet the duties of the occasion are not neglected.”

As an example of the right integration or synthesis of the spiritual and the mundane, Luther commended marriage over celibacy. “The family introduces man to commonality, to the reciprocal relation of dependence in society” (as Aristotle remarks), and this association is an ethical one, while on the other hand the monks, separated from ethical society”—in Aristotelian terms, from the political community of which the family is the foundational element—”formed as it were the standing army of the pope, as the Janissaries formed the basis of the Turkish power.” “The marriage of priests entails the disappearance of the outward distinction between laity and clergy,” even as reading the Bible makes the inward distinction between them disappear. Further, “unemployment no longer was held to be something holy.” What Weber would later call the Protestant work ethic made to “more commendable for men to rise from a state of dependence by activity, intelligence, and industry, and to make themselves independent” economically, even as Bible-reading frees them spiritually. In sum, “The rational no longer meets with contradiction on the part of the religious conscience.” As Strauss paraphrases it, “Hegel sees in the asceticism of the Catholic Church the root of immorality”; “true morality is not ascetic.” One might add that true morality leads into, and is consistent with what Hegel calls the ethical, the instantiation of morality within a civil society.

It is for that reason that the epoch of church reform also saw political reform. Modern, centralized states, initially under the regime of monarchy, replaced the feudal state. Hegel considers monarchy indispensable to state formation because a “ruling dynasty,” a regime in which “hereditary right” determines who rules, “gives the state an immovable center.” Before primogeniture, German kings were elected by aristocrats, a practice which “prevented [the state] being consolidated into one state; for the same reason, Poland has vanished from the circle of independent states.” “The state must have a final decisive will: but if an individual is to be the final deciding power, then [under dynastic rule] that decisiveness of necessity takes place in an immediate natural way, not in terms of election, collective wisdom, and the like”—all of which introduce the element of “arbitrary volition” into the succession. Just as important, both the royal domains and the state offices must be understood as public entities. Monarchs may no longer own the royal lands, and state offices may no longer be purchasable. Finally, standing armies, not militia, “supply the monarchy with an independent force. All of these reforms contributed to “the lowering of the aristocracy in the several states in Europe,” serving an interest “common to both king and people” and leading to greater political freedom as Hegel defines it, just as the Reformation led to greater religious freedom.

Why would substantially increased state power produce freedom? Hegel insists, “When freedom is spoken of, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interest which is thereby designated.” Aristocratic ‘freedom’ entailed the suppression of the people under conditions of serfdom, the denial of the people’s right to sell the things they worked to produce. “The supreme interest of emancipation from this condition redounded both to state power and to the subjects themselves that they as citizens now also be truly free individuals, and that which was to be performed for the generality be meted out in terms of justice rather than contingency.” Statism regularized the laws, bringing whole populations into a condition more nearly resembling equal protection under the laws. Meanwhile, in “lowering” the aristocracy statism placed aristocrats in “the binding middle position,” by which Hegel means that they became employees of the state, administrators working on behalf of its “generality,” and thus redirecting its energies toward state interests, not their own particular interests.

Internationally, there now arose “a system of states and a relation of states to each other.” Now well-financed, with standing armies at their disposal, and with no worry that rogue aristocrats would betray them, monarchs fought foreign wars for the purpose of conquering territories. “From these wars between state powers there arose common interests,” particular the interest every state shared in maintaining their independence. Rulers began to strategize in terms of “the political balance of power,” that is, “the protection of the several states from conquest.” The balance of power took “the place of the previous general goal, the defense of Christendom, the center of which was the papacy.” Although several rulers made bids to conquer Europe—Charles V, Louis XIV, Charles XII—each one was thwarted and the balance was maintained. At the same time, European monarchs could unite freely if faced with an alien threat—specifically, the Ottoman Empire. As the Reformation led to secularization within the European states, so the system of states led to secularization by reducing the international power of the papacy, refocusing rulers’ attention to power-balancing. This too meant freedom, as Catholicism, once praised for “promoting the security of the government of princes,” but at the price of “slavish religious obedience” to the popes, was forced to give way to more strictly political and military calculations. “If the constitution and laws are to be founded on a veritable eternal right, then security is to be found only in the Protestant religion, in whose principle rational subjective freedom also attains development.” Thus freedom of monarchic action in the international sphere reinforced freedom within the newly-empowered states.

The 1648 Peace of Westphalia, whereby European states agreed not to intervene in each other’s internal affairs, had a double-edged effect. This set of treaties was enacted “to the great mortification and humiliation of the Catholic church,” a fact that troubles Hegel not at all. But it also solemnized the breakup of the German empire, legitimizing “the particular rights of the countries into which Germany had been broken up,” and therefore “involv[ing] no thought, no conception of the proper aim of a state” but instituting “a constituted anarchy” among the states. But even this did result, through the historical dialectic, in what Hegel regards as a very favorable result. “The Protestant church finalized its political guarantee by the elevation of one of its member states to the level of an independent European power,” a power that “came out of nowhere.” Prussia, where Hegel happens to be lecturing, under the rule of Frederick the Great, emerged as the leading state of Germany. “Frederick the Great not only made Prussia one of the great powers of Europe as a Protestant power, but was also a philosophical king, an altogether peculiar and unique phenomenon in modern times.” Frederick “took up the Protestant principle in its secular aspect,” having “consciousness of universality, which is the profoundest depth of spirit and the force of thought,” now “conscious of itself” in the monarch’s own mind. Plato’s philosopher-kings rule an imaginary polis; in modernity, such a monarch can, and did, rule in this world. Frederick was the Hegelian philosopher-king, before Hegelianism itself existed.

Hegel concludes his book by considering the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and its aftermath. In his account, the Reformation, a religious event, led dialectically to the Enlightenment, the secular event par excellence. By turning men’s spiritual attention inward, away from the external and “sensorial” church rituals, the Reformation emphasized both the evil that exists within every soul and also the good qualities of external or ‘worldly’ things, if purged of false claims of spiritual content. Indeed, the modern state could become an instrument for the good if it protected Protestant countries against the depredations of Catholics. “This dialectic, in which everything particular is unsettled, while evil is converted into good and good into evil”—a dialectical reversal—”left at last nothing remaining but the mere activity of inwardness itself, the abstract of spirit—thought.” Thought generalizes; modern thought (as per Hobbes) not only generalizes, it issues in “activity and production of the universal.” “In thought, self is present to itself, its objects are just as absolutely present to it; for, in that I think, I must elevate the object to universality”—that object of which I am thinking is a tree, a member of a species, a specimen of a general category, and not ‘Ed’ or ‘Louise.’

Now, in both scholastic and Protestant thought the content of thought consists of other-worldly things. But thought in and of itself is “absolute freedom per se, for the pure ‘I,’ like pure light, is with itself per se; hence that which is diverse from it, whether sensorial or spiritual, is no longer to be feared, for in contemplating such diversity the ‘I’ is inwardly free and can freely confront it.” This radical denial of the need in principle to fear nature, or God-as-holy or external, or Hellfire, sounds very much like Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”—the Cartesian “I am” obviously a ‘humanist’ or ‘secular’ response to the “I am” of God when He spoke to Moses out of the burning bush. Sure enough, Hegel observes that “Consciousness of thought was first extricated by Descartes from that sophistry of thought that unsettled everything.” “Man is not free,” Hegel writes, “when he is not thinking,” and Descartes liberated pure thought thinking itself. Strauss adds that “Descartes was a Catholic,” at least formally, which means that modernity in terms of thought, as distinguished from modernity in terms of action, practice, morality, ethics, derives as much from the 17th-century Catholic milieu as from the Protestant.

Pure thought clears away “sophistry,” all illogical or self-contradictory thought-content. In doing so, as it considers things other than itself it discovers that “reason is the substantial foundation both of consciousness and of the external and natural.” “Inner” and “outer” have rational order in common. “Thus the opposing is no longer something other-worldly; it is not of a substantially different nature.” In the Enlightenment “spirit perceives that nature, the world, must also have some reason in itself, for God created it rational,” a coherent structure which He called good. “A general interest in the contemplation and comprehension of the present world now arose,” with the gathering of empirical knowledge having become interesting to the human spirit, which for the first time has seen its affinities with ‘the other,’ the external. “The human eye became clear, perception excited, thought industrious and explanatory,” attentive to the discovery of “the laws of nature” while rejecting “all notions of mighty alien powers which magic alone could conquer.” “The dominion of the subject in its own strength was posited against faith based on authority and the laws of nature were recognized as the only link connecting external with external.” No more miracles. The dominion of the subject also recognized the laws of nature as the only link between internal and external. [1] “Thought was then also directed to the spiritual side: law and ethics came to be looked upon as being founded upon the present will of man, whereas formerly it was referred only to the command of God enjoined externally, written in the Old and New Testaments, or appearing in the form of particular right, in old parchments, as privileges, or in treaties.” General goals of state replaced particular goals of aristocrats. “Frederick II may be mentioned as the ruler through whom the new epoch emerged into reality, in which interest of state attains its generality and highest entitlement.” In this, of course, Frederick simply followed Machiavelli.

Hegel vigorously points to the secularization arising from the Reformation, which intended no such thing. “Luther had secured to mankind spiritual freedom and the concrete reconciliation” of the human spirit with the Absolute Spirit. “He triumphantly established that man’s eternal repose must take place in himself. But the content of that which is to take place in him, and which truth is to become vital in him, was taken for granted by Luther as something already given, something revealed by religion.” No longer. “Now the principle was established that this content must be something current, something of which I could convince myself inwardly, and everything must be capable of being reduced to this inward ground.” This is of course Descartes’ claim: The Bible says that the Holy Spirit gives you certain knowledge of God, but from introspection I learn that the truly certain certainty, as it were, is my consciousness of myself thinking.

Hegel applauds, but stops. “This principle of thought initially makes its appearance yet abstractly.” Cartesian logic still bases itself “on the axiom of contradiction and identity,” on the same principle of non-contradiction first enunciated by Plato’s Socrates in the Republic and systematized by Aristotle in his books on logic. Such logic assumes that the content of thought is finite; “the Enlightenment utterly banished and extirpated all that was speculative from things human and divine.” But although this rejection of ‘metaphysical’ thought was “of incalculable importance” in reducing “the multiform complex of things” to “its simplest conditions” and in bringing that complex of things “into the form of universality,” this was an “abstract” operation. It “does not satisfy the living spirit, the concrete heart” or Gemüt. Classical logic leaves no room for change, for the vitalism Hegel prizes, for the organic, dialectical progress and growth that characterizes the Absolute Spirit, rightly conceived. But its acknowledgement as a “formally absolute principle brings us to the last stage of history, our world, our own time.”

“Secularity is the spiritual kingdom in existence”; that is, it is the rule of spirit in the world of practice, “the kingdom of the will.” The will is the moral equivalent of thought: inward and purged of sentiment and sensoriality. “That which is just and ethical pertains to the essential will existing in itself,” for “to know what true law is, one must abstract from inclination, impulse, and desire, as from the particular; one must thus know what is the will in itself.” The will is truly free only “when it wills the will,” as “absolute will is the will to be free.” The freedom of the will “is even that through which man becomes man, thus the fundamental principle of spirit.” The Absolute Spirit goeth where it listeth. If so, then how does it fix on any determinate action? How does it make moral and ethical decisions?

“It can here be noted that the same principle was proposed theoretically in Germany, in the Kantian philosophy.” In positing his categorical imperative Kant firmly rejects all moralities based on teleology (e.g., Aristotelian eudaimonia), moral sentiment, or utility. Kantianism is a moral form of Cartesianism—pure will willing itself. “Among the Germans this remained tranquil theory; but the French wished to put it into practice. Hegel interprets the French revolutionaries ‘Rights of Man’ as freedom under the name of natural right, freedom seen especially in equality of rights before the law. [2] Since in both Descartes and Kant purity of spirit remains on the level of abstraction, not Hegelian speculation, the attempt to transfer abstract morality directly into ethical/political practice proved disastrous—the imposition of rigid categories on the rich, concrete variety of the practical world. [3]

Why did the French so badly abuse Kantian morality? “In Germany the formal principle of philosophy encounters a concrete world and reality where there is inward satisfaction of spirit and where conscience is at rest,” a world in which Protestantism had “advanced so far in thought as to realize the absolute culmination of self-consciousness,” and where it enjoyed the assurance that it served as “the fountain of all legal content in private law and the state constitution.” That is, “in Germany the Enlightenment was conducted in the interest of theology.” Hardly so in France, where Voltaire and his allied railed against still-existing abuses of the Catholic Church, with its “dead wealth” and supposed virtues which were “the sources and occasion of vices.” In Germany, Protestantism had prepared the ground for Enlightenment; in France Catholicism had impeded it. In France, “the principle of the freedom of the will, therefore asserted itself against existing law,” against “the confused mass of privileges altogether contravening thought and reason,” the “corruption of morals,” and the whole “realm” of “shameless injustice” that was the French regime. The revolution “was necessarily violent, because the work of transformation was not undertaken by the government,” imbecilic and rotten as it was. “The thought, the concept, of law imposed itself all at once, and the old framework of injustice could offer no resistance.”

“Never since the sun had stood in the firmament and the planets revolved around it had it been perceived that man stands on his head, that is, on thought, and reality is constructed in terms of it,” that “thought ought to govern spiritual reality.” “Spiritual jubilation” reigned, “as if for the first time it had come to a true reconciliation between the divine and the world.” But with what result? What kind of state could issue from such a jubilee?

A genuinely “vital state” has three “elements and powers”: laws of rationality (freedom of property and person, removal of all feudal relations, based “on the thought and consciousness of man recognizing the spiritual character of his existence”); a government that executes the laws impartially, representing the many through a scientific administration and defending the nation “against other nations”; and “disposition,” “the inward willingness regarding the laws—not mere habit,” the active will to obey the laws. “Nothing must be considered higher and more sacred than good will towards the state, or, if religion be looked upon as higher and more sacred, it must involve nothing really alien or opposed to the constitution, since “at bottom” religion and state “are one, and the laws have their highest confirmation in religion.” “Here it must be stated frankly that with the Catholic religion no rational constitution is possible; for government and people must mutually share that final guarantee of disposition, and can have it only in a religion that is not opposed to a rational political constitution.”

The French therefore lacked the right disposition, having had their spirits formed by the Catholicism they rebelled against. “Robespierre set up the principle of virtue as supreme, and it may be said that with this man virtue was an earnest matter,” as he made virtue and terror “the order of the day”—a “subjective virtue [which] brings with it the most fearful tyranny.” Essentially a secularized echo of Islam, “this tyranny could not last, for all inclinations, all interests, reason itself revolted against this terribly consistent freedom, which in its concentrated intensity exhibited so fanatical a shape.” First the regime of the five-man Directory, and then one man, Napoleon, took control. Napoleon dispersed the “lawyers, ideologues, and men of principle,” ruling the French by inspiring in them “respect and fear.” “He then, with the vast might of his character, turned his attention to foreign relations, subjected all Europe, and diffused his liberal institutions in every quarter,” like a modern Charlemagne. The spirit of nationality in the conquered eventually defeated him, and the French ever since have oscillated among regimes of the many and the one.

The problem is with liberalism itself, which opposes “the establishment of rational rights, with freedom of person and property, with the existence of a state organization within which are spheres of civil life each of which conducts its own affairs, wherein the intelligent members have influence among the people and enjoy their confidence” to liberalism’s “atomistic principle which insists upon the sway of individual wills, maintaining that all government should emanate from their express power, and have their express sanction.” That is, liberalism opposes reason in the name of caprice. “This conflict, this knot, this problem is that with which history is now occupied, and which in the future it has to solve.” Fundamentally, however, there can be no “Revolution without a Reformation.”

Because Germany had that Reformation, it eliminated feudalism in an orderly manner. “Offices of state are open to every citizens, aptitude and usefulness being of course the necessary conditions” for membership in the German civil service, whose ruling decisions are ratified by the monarch in his capacity as the symbol of the national will. The strength of a great state “lies in its reason”; “the knowledgeable are to rule, not ignorance and the vanity of know-it-alls.” This is now possible because “in the Protestant world there is no sacred, no religious conscience separated from or indeed hostile to secular law,” consciousness having attained objective freedom, the laws of real freedom,” which “demand the subjugation of the mere contingent will.” In the German state “Philosophy concerns itself only with the glory of the idea mirroring itself in the history of the world,” as world history is “the course of development and the actual development of spirit,” “the true theodicy, the justification of God in history.”

With respect to the regime issue, Strauss concludes that “Hegel was a liberal but not a democrat.” He was a liberal in the sense that he loved liberty, but he defined liberty differently tha previou liberals had defined it. “If one wants a single formula indicating what Hegel’s philosophy of right stands for, it would be ‘rights of man’ plus a wholly independent civil service.” The excesses of the French Revolution had soured him on democracy. Attempts at establishing a constitutional, liberal democracy he regarded as chimerical. “Hegel does not see a clear way of how the West will finds its way between the acceptance of the rights of man with its political implications—in other words, the democratic solution—or what he regards as better, the rights of man without the political implications, i.e., without democratic consequences.” He prefers the Prussian constitutional monarchy (“which was not very constitutional”). He might have preferred the “Napoleonic Caesarism which came to France after the failure of liberalism in 1848,” years after Hegel’s death. Had he lived an impossibly long time, he might have pointed to the American Civil War, and the subsequent replacement of democratic republicanism with a mixed regime ruled in part by an increasingly large and imposing bureaucratic element, as confirmation of his distrust of democracy. For his part, Strauss remarks that the course of events since Hegel’s time has shown that the regime of constitutional democracy “is not necessarily such a terrible thing, as we have come to see in some of the more stable countries.” Those who pretend to find some sort of incipient authoritarianism or even fascism in Strauss will need to avert their eyes from his actual remarks to his students.

 

Note

1. Strauss unpacks this very carefully. The sphere in which inner and outer, subjective and objective, may be reconciled initially is the sphere of thought, “because thought knows no beyond. This is the meaning of the thesis that thought is free.” (Strauss, 361) That is, “As Hegel understands it, thought is never dependent on something other than thought.” (361) Unfreedom means dependence on something or someone outside oneself. If nature can be found to operate according to rational laws (gravitation, for example) then nature is rational and, in Hegel’s words, “embodies Universality.” If the world is rational, and can be shown to be so by experience (that is, experimental science), then reason pervades both the human subject and non-human, objective nature. In Strauss’s words, “therefore nature is reason.” (364) This applies “to moral-political matters,” as well: there is “no longer reliance on tradition or authority.” (364) “The present will of man is the basis of everything”. (364) “The truly free will wills nothing but itself, because otherwise it would be dependent on something, i.e., the truly free will wills nothing but its freedom, its self-determination.” (367) Thus far, Kant. But (and here is where Hegel goes beyond Kant) if ‘God’ or the Absolute Spirit is immanent in subject and object alike, then the course of events, now called ‘history,’ can be seen as giving real content or substance to human willing. In freely giving our consent to the historical dialectic, we link the inner and the outer, thought-certainty and experimental/experiential certainty, while also linking moral certainty with ethical certainty within civil society in the modern state. In so freely consenting to the dialectic, we endorse the course of events, history, the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit in time; we avoid being (as later historicists would say) ‘reactionaries,’ ostriches blinded by the sand in which we bury our heads. Hegel tells such people: The sands are always shifting. They offer no secure refuge.
2. Strauss rightly doubts this. “Hegel imputes wrongly… that this Kantian notion of freedom was the motivation for the French Revolution; whereas it was really a much more old-fashioned notion of freedom which animated the French people. That could easily be shown by a study of Rousseau.” “The Rousseauan concept of freedom is not the Kantian concept,” as the Rousseauan concept is still bound up with the natural. (Strauss, 401 n.17)
3. Strauss traces this problem back to the Reformation and what Hegel calls the “painful introspection” of Protestants. “This is the essential defect of Protestantism, according to Hegel.” In his introspection, the Protestant can arrive at “no objective certainty,” as “the certainty of salvation must be found within the individual.” In seeing sinfulness in himself and also “the breakthrough of divine grace,” the Protestant risks “a distorted view” of himself because he has “no terms of comparison.” “Hegel’s own view is that the individual cannot know what he is except through his deeds, through the whole course of his life.” (Strauss 355) His readers see this in the famous passage Hegel inserts into his Phenomenology of Spirit, where he speaks of the master-slave dialectic. As Strauss summarizes it, the slave, “subjugated by the master, succumbing to the master because of a failure of nerve in the life-and-death struggle… has to work and does not enjoy the fruits of his work,” which “are enjoyed by the master.” However, the slave’s work “is the origin of a higher culture because he is compelled to actualize all the powers of his mind and his heart in order to acquire self-respect. (Strauss 346) What this means is that for Strauss morality and knowledge both have a social dimension lacking not only in Protestantism but in the Kantian and Rousseauian moralities that derived from it. Further, the Catholic Descartes derives his theory of knowledge not from Catholicism simply but from the introspective Jesuit Catholicism of the 17th century; this too lacks the social dimension, what Hegel calls the objective content that is needed to substantiate subjective certainty, whether in morality or in thought. Descartes and Kant are therefore both indispensable and inadequate to the full unfolding of the Absolute Spirit.