The purpose of this interdisciplinary series is to feature authors from around the world who will expand the influence of Catholic thought on the most important conversations in academia and the public square. The series is “Catholic” in the sense that the books will emphasize and engage the enduring themes of human dignity and flourishing, the common good, truth, beauty, justice, and freedom in ways that reflect and deepen principles affirmed by the Catholic Church for millennia. It is not limited to Catholic authors or even works that explicitly take Catholic principles as a point of departure. Its books are intended to demonstrate the diversity and enhance the relevance of these enduring themes and principles in numerous subjects, ranging from the arts and humanities to the sciences.
catholic ideas for a secular world
O. Carter Snead, series editor
The
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
RETRIEVINGFREEDOM Christian Appropriation of Tradition
D.C. SCHINDLER
Classical
CONTENTS Preface ix Acknowledgments xv Part I. Prolegomena 1 Christian Freedom and Its Traditions3 Part II. Late Antiquity 2 Plotinus on Freedom as Generative Perfection51 3 Augustine and the Gift of the Power to Choose82 Part III. The Patristic Period 4 Perfectly Natural Freedom in Dionysius the Areopagite115 5 Maximus the Confessor: Redeeming Choice137 Part IV. The Early Middle Ages 6 St. Anselm: Just Freedom163 7 Bernard of Clairvaux: Liberating Love189 Part V. The High Middle Ages 8 Bonaventure on the Trinitarian Origin of Freedom203 9 Thomas Aquinas: A Fruitful Reception of the Whole225
Part VI. The Late Middle Ages 10 Godfrey of Fontaines: The Absolute Priority of Act281 11 John Duns Scotus and the Radicalizing of Potency297 Part VII. General Conclusion 12 The Givenness of Freedom331 Abbreviations 343 Notes 347 Bibliography 496 Index 523 viii Contents
PART I
Prolegomena
Every scribe who is trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings forth from his treasure things both new and old.
CHAPTER 1
—Mt 13:52
S ETTING THE H ORIZON
Christian Freedom and Its Traditions
Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that “free will” was invented simply to justify punishment.1 One might initially smile at what one takes to be yet another instance of the German philosopher’s mischievous wit, but a patient survey of the discussions of freedom in the different periods of church history, and perhaps even more of contemporary scholarly discussions of those discussions,2 cannot help but introduce a worry that he may have been onto something. Explicit reflection on the theme of freedom more or less coincided with Christianity’s reflective selfappropriation, and the theme virtually always presented itself in these original reflections within the context of sin and eschatological judgment. 3 There can be no doubt that freedom lies at the center of the Christian vision of man and his relation to the divine order; indeed, we will be proposing here that it is the very essence of Christianity. If there were seeds of a notion of freedom in ancient Greek thinkers, these 3
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seeds came to a full flourishing in Christian thought, where this notion moved to the center and became the object of relentless investigation and eventually systematic exposition, to the point that we can fairly say that—at least from a classical perspective—to deny that man is free is to reject Christianity in toto 4 The question that arises at the outset, then, is whether the evident significance of freedom in Christianity is due to the fact that Christianity is centrally concerned with human sinfulness. To enter deeply into the matter, let us take a step back and put the question in more positive and fundamental terms: What role does freedom play in the Christian vision, which is to say, what special connection does it have with the way God has revealed himself in Christ? The most immediate and obvious response might seem to be that Christianity is indeed basically about sin and redemption, which is a drama that presupposes human freedom. There can be no sin unless man has the capacity to do good or to do evil, and the final responsibility for determining that capacity must fall to man alone. The notion of redemption, moreover, makes no sense without the reality of perdition as the consequence of sin, which would be inevitable but for God’s saving intervention. From this perspective, everything would thus seem to revolve around choice: man, at least originally if not in perpetuity, can choose to sin or not; God, too, then has a choice to make, since man’s choice presents him with alternatives, either to save man from the choice he (inevitably?) makes or to damn him. Taking this approach to the significance of freedom eventually brings us to face a more fundamental set of questions: What is the relationship between man’s power to choose and God’s? Can the almighty God really be affected by the actions of one of his finite creatures, actions that can ultimately have no other source but some God-given power, however that power may be proximately used? If the answer is yes, then we would seem to reduce God to a mere character in a drama that encompasses both him and his creature; if we instead more reasonably deny that God waits on his creature in some such way, we would seem to turn what presents itself in scripture as a drama into a mere farce, or perhaps just a puppet show. In this, God pulls all the strings, and he plays out a story before no real audience, not even himself, since he has always already known not only how it turns out in general but every detail along the way. The assumption that freedom is essentially the power to choose seems to
force us to choose between the nihilism of God being in control of everything or the nihilism of God being in control of nothing, since he too is at the mercy of the arbitrary moments of history. But if the outcome is all the same in either case, there is ultimately no real choice to be made. Making choice supreme undermines choice itself. The point in describing this conundrum is not to entangle ourselves in the dilemma in order, then, to work through the various dimensions of the problem as we think our way out of it. The point is rather to identify a typical set of concerns that we will not adopt in the present study. It is astonishing to see just how much of the discussion of freedom in the Christian context is dominated by two problems: the problem of sin or the Fall (whether of man or more basically of the angels), which is essentially how and why man has the power to do evil,5 and the problem of predestination, which is the problem of reconciling (finite) human freedom with (infinite) divine freedom, the uncertainty of future choices with absolute divine foreknowledge of what is to come, or human will with God’s causal power. These are of course profound, and profoundly important, problems. We do not mean here to dismiss them. Nevertheless, we wish to suggest that focusing the discussion of freedom principally on these is already itself a problem. These two problems concern a single aspect of freedom, namely, the power to choose between alternatives. If we allow the problems of sin and predestination to set the horizon for our understanding of freedom, we turn this single (and, as we eventually hope to show,6 derivative) aspect into the essence of the matter. But this reductive approach fixes an ultimate dichotomy as the archē, the governing principle, of all things, which locks us inside the radically unintelligible cosmos of Gnosticism in its endlessly recurring and ever-variant forms. Where, then, ought the horizon for our investigation into the Christian interpretation of freedom to be set, if not on the problems of sin and predestination? In the previous volume, we sought to retrieve a notion of freedom more fundamental than the power to choose between alternatives. Our aim in the current volume is to see how Christianity appropriates and deepens this more fundamental notion of freedom, while integrating within it the drama of choice that is an essential part of the Christian vision. The point, thus, is not to eliminate things such as the potency for choice and self-determination but rather to set the
Christian Freedom and Its Traditions 5
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Two basic themes will emerge as we explore some of the pivotal figures in the Christian appropriation of the classical tradition and the development of the distinctively Christian conception of freedom. On the one hand, we will see that some of the basic insights we discovered at least in nuce in Plato and Aristotle were made explicit or radically deepened, and taken up into a new context that recast them and brought out new and unsuspected dimensions. On the other hand, we will see the ways in which this appropriation failed, and how this failure gave rise to what we called in volume 1 the “diabolical” conception of freedom. If freedom is indeed a superabundant source, as we have suggested, then the question of how Christianity appropriates the classical source is not an indifferent one with respect to the quality and character of the freedom it offers, but turns out to be decisive. Nevertheless, it bears remarking that the present book does not intend in the first place to be a genealogy, to trace the historical roots of the problematic view of freedom in the contemporary world. Instead, the theme of relation to sources will emerge inevitably in the course of the fundamental project, which aims to bring out the positive development in the notion of freedom first and foremost. A failure makes sense, after all, only in relation to the positive aim it was unable to bring about. A note regarding methodology is in order here before we begin. The aim explains what may seem unusual in how we are approaching the subject matter, above all in this first chapter. We are seeking to expose the roots of freedom, so to speak. A typical approach to the origin of an idea is to start with the smallest and least controversial claims about what defines the concept and then to seek traces of the definition in one text or another.7 This is a reasonable approach in certain circumstances, but it is not appropriate for the project we pursue here or indeed arguably for any fundamental philosophical inquiry. The ultimate principle of freedom, we suggested in volume 1, is the priority of actuality over potency. If this is true, it requires that we do not begin with what is least significant and build up, which would imply a certain pri-
most basic horizon as amply as we can so that these dimensions may be seen as far as possible in their truth. If we isolate these aspects in themselves, we cut the notion of freedom off from its source, which renders it sterile. If, by contrast, we view these aspects from inside the relation to the origin, they flourish and bring forth life.
ority of “potential” parts out of which we then construct a whole. Instead, the priority of actuality demands that we set the horizon with what is highest, most basic, and most ultimate. In the present case, it means identifying what is most essential to Christianity and viewing the various aspects of freedom in relation to this horizon. The “test” of the truth in the modern approach is rigor of method and consistency of application, but we have argued that a radically impoverished conception of freedom stands at the basis of this approach.8 A priority of actuality over potency implies a priority of real object over method (only an abstract conception of method would take this to be a rejection of method or a lack of rigor). A priority of object over method means that the test of truth is to see what results: you will know by their fruits. How do we know what counts as fruits? In the end, the measure cannot simply be set in a univocal way beforehand, because this would again grant priority to method over object. Instead, the fruits will have to be ultimately good, true, and beautiful in a self-evident sense.9 And this means that the reception of truth, goodness, and beauty is in itself a free act, not compelled by anything extrinsic. Note that the model of inquiry differs from the standard one. We are not positing a claim and then unfolding the logical implications in a deductive way (which would be circular and would warrant the charge of theologizing philosophy). Instead, we are setting the horizon and then attempting to read particular figures on their own terms against this background. Thus, the explanation of the Christian notion of freedom demands that we set the horizon, not with some partial aspect or some general definition of a term, but with what is most basic to Christian revelation and how this bears on the notion of freedom. We will start with a basic sketch, to set the horizon, and will then explore individual figures inside the context thus opened up.
At the core of Christianity lies the grateful reception of what is given, a reception that takes into its depths (in-carnation) what is given and does so in what is inevitably a new way, allowing what is given to bear fruit that is unsuspected in some sense because it goes beyond what was present in the original gift.10 Thus, a kind of excess, as it were,
T ERTIUM D ATUR
Christian Freedom and Its Traditions 7
Christianity is itself a tradition, but it is a tradition that takes into itself, and so unites and transforms, traditions that preceded it. The cross on which Christ hung bore an inscription, written authoritatively by the ruling power (“Quod scripsi, scripsi”; Jn 19:19 – 22) but bearing a meaning that radically transcends the mens auctoris:12 “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” The inscription was written in three languages, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin, and was thereby meant to communicate in principle to the whole world. 13 We fail to unders tand Christianity properly if we do not recognize it as taking up into itself the Jewish, the Greek, and the Roman traditions as a kind of novel synthesis of the three.14 Because our focus here will be the philosophical dimension, which is inevitably metaphysical, theological, and anthropological, we will attend principally to the Greeks and the Jews, which in any event have represented a traditional pairing in Christian thought.15
marks the Christian ethos, but it is an excess that grows from within rather than descending from “out of nowhere.” The basic Christian image is the seed. It is not just the case that a single seed—a mustard seed, for example (Mt 13:31 – 32; Mk 4:30 – 32; Lk 13:18 – 19)—bears implicitly in itself, in its present, tiny reality, a massive tree incomparably greater than the form from which it springs. It is also the case that a seed contains an infinite past and an infinite future. As Bonaventure, speaking about the inexhaustible fruitfulness of scripture, exclaimed in wonder: “Who can know the infinity of seeds, when in a single one are contained forests of forests and thence seeds in infinite number?”11
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To simplify in order to start the discussion, we might say that, with respect to the essence of freedom, the “Greeks” represent nature as an ideal standard, while the “Jews” represent the power of will, above and beyond nature.16 These two traditions may seem to stand in direct opposition to each other, and it is not uncommon to take them to be fundamentally incompatible. It is striking, after all, to consider that the classical Greek thinkers had no notion of will17 and that on the other hand there is no Hebrew word for “nature.”18 Regarding the contrast between Athens and Jerusalem, which Tertullian made famous (“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”),19 Leo Strauss once wrote in a letter (to Eric Voegelin), “One reaches no plausible aim by covering up this contrast, by denigrating the tertium non datur. Every synthesis is in fact a choice either for Jerusalem or for Athens.”20 There is a certain logic to
Nature can thus no longer be a necessary order. They cannot both be ultimate. And so it would seem that we have to sacrifice one or the other.
Strauss’s claim, which it behooves us to appreciate. If we accept the general view that nature represents a kind of necessary order, and will represents a certain arbitrariness, then there is no clear way to integrate these notions into a greater unity, since in such an integration one of the two would have to be subordinated ultimately to the other. If nature is taken to be ultimate, the will cannot be permitted to disturb the order, which means that it will at some point have to be reduced to something else, typically to reason or desire. On the other hand, if we make personal will ultimate, then the order that would be established by nature cannot but represent a mere contingency, something that the will happened to choose at this moment but that can be in principle changed in the next.
But Christianity just is this tertium; it just is a genuinely novel synthesis that does not reduce simply to the one or to the other but represents a transformation of both. It is not an accident that Strauss, who is known for having generated the energy of his own thinking by exacerbating the friction between Athens and Jerusalem, nature and will, should have systematically neglected anything properly Christian in history, as Rémi Brague has observed.21 Our proposal is that one of the principal tasks of history, understood in the light of Christian faith, is the fruitful reception of revelation as the flowering of the deepest truths of the Greeks (and Romans) and the Jews, the “book of nature” and the “book of scripture,” the intrinsic goodness of the world, which manifests the being of God, and the holiness of the God who infinitely transcends the world and acts according to his good pleasure,22 the mysterious hiddenness of the “unknown God” and the positive manifestness of the God who has made known his glory through the world as his magnificent instrument,23 the God who is perfect goodness and so without envy24 and the God who is supremely and deservedly jealous.25 If any one of these aspects is lifted out and isolated over against the other in detachment from the paradox of the whole, we get a distortion, which has profound cultural implications. As we will suggest at the end of this book, the “diabolical” conception of liberty arises when the tradition is not received in full but shattered into fragments that appear so opposed it is impossible to imagine that they could ever have belonged together.26
Christian Freedom and Its Traditions 9
Strauss would appear to be right to reject any third possibility.
According to the interpretation of the original sense of freedom as taken up and developed by Plato and Aristotle presented in part 3 of Freedom from Reality, we can say in sum that, for the ancient Greeks, liberty has the basic shape of liberality ; it is a superabundance that streams forth with a noble indifference to cost. As we saw in some detail, this generosity is not exclusive of the moment of receptivity but integrates that moment. The virtue of liberality, according to Aristotle, is a mean between (otherwise abject) receiving and (otherwise extravagant) giving, though of course the giving remains the dominant note (at least from one perspective—we will return to this point). The activities that are properly called free are those that concern objects that are received into the soul precisely in the form of proceeding from the soul. The fundamental importance of this point cannot be overstated if we are to understand the Greeks properly. If such a basic shape was evident in the classical tradition (as we will see in Plotinus and all the way into High Scholasticism), it has become quite difficult for the modern mind to conceive, insofar as this particular paradox is essentially excluded by the materialist metaphysics that largely dominates our imagi nation. For the Greeks, the objects of contemplation most perfectly proceed from the soul in their being contemplated, since the actuality of the ideas is not an empirical fact that one may or not encounter but an eternal truth into which the mind rises up in its participation. Actions are free, by analogous extension, according to the degree to 10
The Wisdom of the Greeks
We are suggesting that the Greeks and Jews are best interpreted in light of each other and that just this is demanded by the Christian tradition. Given the limitations imposed by the present context, we can do scarcely more than draw some of the simple lines that will indicate the basic shape. Needless to say, the project would be enriched immeasurably by a careful study of the Roman contribution and a more thorough exposition of the Jewish than we can offer here. A sketch is at least a beginning. Because we have already spent a significant time on the classical Greek thinkers, Plato and Aristotle, in the previous volume, we can simply summarize what was developed in that volume, now specifically in relation to the discussion to come.
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Freedom and Its Traditions 11
which they contain truth, which is to say, to the degree to which they present an intrinsic, and not merely relative, goodness. This is why virtuous action (praxis), which has its end in itself, is the most free, and why, for Aristotle, productive activity (poiēsis), which has its end outside of itself or in other words concerns the bringing about of something external to the soul, always occurs under the shadow of servitude.27 The basic shape of free activity is an exitus and a reditus from and to a governing origin.
Now, the reader will certainly note that this description of free activity exactly coincides with Aristotle’s definition of nature, which is “an internal principle of motion and rest.”28 In this regard, far from introducing some capacity to change, some intervention into nature, that would direct it to some end other than what is essentially inscribed in it by and from birth, as it were (“nature,” natus, etc.), freedom presents nothing but the perfection of nature. If man is the only properly free being, it is not because he can transgress his nature but because the rational soul is the only sort of soul that can truly return to itself in its outgoing activity, or, as Aquinas would eventually put it, the soul, precisely qua spirit, is capable of a reditio completa 29 The “self-knowledge” recommended by Greek wisdom is a call to be true to what makes man human. If man is the only being that is properly free, it is thus because man is the only being that is properly natural. What man is, all other kinds of being approximate in their own way.30 It is not surprising, then, that one looks more or less in vain among the classical Greek philosophers for an independent human faculty—namely, the “will”— that would introduce its own set of potencies and actualities over and above the supreme actuality of the soul and its unity with its objects in knowledge.31 There is no “separate” order of the will; there are simply the various powers, the desires and habits, that serve the realization of nature in truth.32
To say that freedom always remains within the bounds of nature, however, does not at all imply that, for the Greeks, nature remains simply trapped within itself, so to speak, as one almost inevitably assumes from our “postclassical” perspective. Here we see the importance of recognizing the distinctively Platonic contribution to the Greek conception of freedom, namely, what we might call the “immanent transcendence of the Good.” The exitus reditus in relation to a principal Christian
source, which characterizes genuinely free activity, is nothing but a moving image of the Good, an expression at the level of the externality of natural being of the absolute perfection that the Good simply is. Freedom is a participation in the Good. According to a properly Platonic interpretation of participation, to say that free action is the natural expression of the perfection of the Good does not simply mean that nature “looks like,” that is, externally resembles, the original; more profoundly, it means that the Good is causally present in natural activity, which is to say that free action is always a “begetting or giving birth in Beauty.” In this respect, though the note of generosity is indeed the dominant one in liberty-cum-liberality at the human level, this generosity rests on, or indeed more adequately put, results from, a more fundamental receptivity, not with respect to any particular object (i.e., in an “ontic” sense), but with respect to the transcendent source of all generosity (i.e., in an ontological sense).
Because this source is not ontic but ontological, which is to say because the receptivity with respect to the source is specifically metaphysical, it necessarily remains hidden or implicit: φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ 33 This is the nature of nature, and it presents the basic horizon within which Greek thinking unfolds. But the very depth of the source makes nature an inherently ambiguous reality, which may be interpreted in two different directions (to keep matters relatively simple).
On the one hand, the hidden source may be simply covered over, so that the imaging of the Good in freedom gets increasingly reduced to a mere external resemblance and the movement comes to be interpreted as a kind of wholly autonomous self-determination. We will see examples of this, briefly, in the Hellenistic period of Greek thought, which is in some sense a more resolutely—one might say, “resentfully,” in the etymological sense of the word34—materialistic return to the pre-Socratic shape after the rise of classical form, the bourgeoning of the Good, in Plato and Aristotle; in the early Middle Ages, when the pagan (and Muslim) world appeared basically as a threat to Christian civilization; and also in the late Middle Ages, when Christianity began to be cleansed of its Greek inheritance and so the modern era dawned. On the other hand, nature might be opened up more radically and reconceived in the light of its transcendent First Cause. In this respect, Plato’s reflection on nature in the light of the forms, and the forms in
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As we saw in part III of the previous volume,36 according to its etymology, freedom is an originally organic notion: it refers to belonging to a common stock, or in other words having the blood of the family line course through one’s veins. More specifically, the unifying source seems to be, not the blood first of all, but the seminal fluid, which, to be sure, is not self-contained but transcends the individual37 and is meant to be poured out and so multiplied beyond itself. If the first usage of the word tends to designate political membership (as extended family), the sense expands. The Greek philosophers’ recognition of the source of freedom as not a natural substance but a “super-natural” principle, the Good, opens up an interpretation beyond the mere biologico-political boundary of the family, the clan, the tribe, or even the polis, to the universal dimensions of human nature as such: because its reference point is no longer merely relative but now genuinely absolute, the freedom of friendship in the Good cannot exclude anyone simply in principle.38 Of course, though this opening to the universal was clearly seen,39 it is not obvious how it could be realized without departing altogether from the concrete particularity that may not be eliminated from the rootedness of the organic notion. Nature remains the ultimate Greek horizon, so that even the “super-natural” principle of the good tends to reside within it. We will come back to this point.
The Wonders of the Jews Formal Features of the Will. The Jews are a people set apart. The movement of “election,” that is, the selection of one from the many as a distinct act of the divine will, is not at all incidental to the identity of the people. If freedom is not a word that appears often in the Greek
the light of the Good, can be seen as representing a certain kairos moment, in which the ambiguity of nature presents itself for decision. Heidegger, it seems, resented Plato for having given away the “secret” of nature by bringing it out into the light of the Good,35 and so betraying the early Greeks, with their profound insight into the rhythms of coming to be and passing away that define nature. But whereas Heidegger was no friend of the Jews, we wish to see Plato as opening the Greek world up to the biblical vision, and precisely thus bringing the Greek insight into nature to its full flourishing.
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world, and if it appears still more rarely as a central notion, it represents a decisive concept for the Jews.40 To be sure, the word that gets translated as “will,” ratson, does not in the first place refer to the spiritual power to make decisions or issue commands. Instead, it is connected to pleasure, delight, and favor.41 If this connection reveals the proximity of the Jewish concept to the Greek association of the appetitive power and the good, interpreting it in relation to the Old Testament presentation of God’s acts and man’s response casts a significantly different light on the matter. One might say that the difference between the Greeks and Jews on the notion of will does not rest in the first place on the content of the notion (appetitive relation to what is good and so what causes delight) but is due to its principal subject: for the Jews, the will belongs above all to the supracosmic agent, Yahweh. As we will see, everything else in the understanding of will follows from this Whatpoint.stands out in the Jewish notion is not first the (receptive) movement of desire but the (preceptive) movement of the bestowal of approval.42 God is presented as an agent who makes a definitive difference in the world; his intervention marks a permanent “before” and “after.” The Jews in fact understand themselves precisely in relation to such a difference. The decisive event in the history of the people is the Exodus from Egypt, which the Jews understood not simply as a discrete moment left behind in the past but as the abiding definition of who they are: the Jews are a liberated people.43 As Brague has shown, this liberation is, moreover, not a mere means for some further end but so fundamental as to be itself the purpose;44 the Jews are meant to live as liberated people, and their law is an articulation or codification of this freedom. It lays out what the life of freedom looks like, which is specifically set apart from the life that belongs to slaves.45 This being “set apart” is a sign of the presence of God, because God is, as it were, the One who is radically—indeed, absolutely—set apart. The word for “holiness,” qds, appears to come from the verb qd, “to cut”;46 a holy thing is what is separated out from the profane and granted a special status.47 If other religions tend to use the word holy for objects and rarely for God, in the Old Testament it is just the opposite. God is holiness itself because he is absolutely transcendent.48 This transcendence coincides with power. Because God transcends all things, he has power over all things, which is to say that they are subject to
God’s will. This will thus presents itself as the ultimate reference point,49 which is not to be understood (i.e., subordinated to discernable reasons)50 but obeyed (i.e., conformed to by the human will, which is, so to speak, called into existence by God’s will; cf. Ps 40:3).51 Given this absolute priority of God’s will, it is not surprising that one does not directly encounter in the Bible the notion of nature in anything like the Greek sense of eternal essences or an order that defines the cosmos in its entirety and so comprehends both God and men. If, on occasion, the regular order of nature is indicated as a sign of God’s wisdom, this is not meant to be a revelation of the divine itself, as it is in Greek philosophy; instead, when God reveals himself in nature in the biblical world, it tends to be in the form of a disturbance of the peace of order—in the thunderstorm or in fire, which are natural expressions of power.52 The most direct revelation of God in the Bible, and so the most potent of all realities, is the proper name of God, which conveys his immediate presence, that is, his “person.”53 God is principally known, not in nature, but above and beyond nature. If nature, with its intrinsic, self-related, and cyclical rhythm, is not the principal mediator of relation to God,54 what takes its place is history, meaning in this context not simply a sequence of recorded events in time, which we might say is the merely formal sense of history, but the narrative of God’s intervention into the world that he created.55
Note that there is a direct connection between an emphasis on the will of God and the centrality of history in a people’s self-understanding. If we except the distinctly Roman contribution, with its sense of temporal, worldly mission,56 Voegelin is right to speak of “the creation of history by Israel,”57 because it is with the Jews that we have a recognition of God’s transcendence as a real “agent” whose seat lies outside of the cosmos, and who can therefore “break in” to it, so to speak.58 This “inbreaking” can only take a narrative form, that is, can only be history, because an articulation as a strictly natural order would reduce it, as it were, back to the cosmological.59 A mythological narrative, it is worth pointing out, while capturing something of a personal presence beyond nature in an analogous sense, does not suffice in this regard insofar as its very nonhistorical character tends to allow it to be reduced to the “merely metaphorical,” as an articulation of eternal truths in the me dium of images, and so to bring us back once again inside the cosmological horizon.
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(1) There is a connection in the Bible between the will and transcendence, insofar as the will designates a capacity to act on what is other, with the source of this action thus lying outside or beyond what is acted on. This connection explains why the notion of will is not a generic term in the Bible which is then used in reference to God, but belongs absolutely to God. It is God, we might say, who is the will, because God is the Holy One tout court, that is, the absolutely transcendent one: “Our God is in the heavens; he does whatever pleases him” (Ps 115:3; cf. 135:6). To be sure, man, too, has a will,60 but this, again, is not a generic anthropological datum. Instead, from its very origin it appears to bear specific reference to God’s will: it is, so to speak, the organ of response—in history—to God’s will, an organ that is, so to speak, breathed directly into man at creation.61 Man can exercise his will over other creatures—“dominion” (radah)62—because he transcends them in a unique way as God’s image.
Let us pause in our general observations to gather together some of the essential features of the Jewish conception of the will and fill them out more explicitly in philosophical terms. Each of these features could be elaborated to a much fuller extent than we have the space for here, but our primary aim is in a fairly succinct fashion to present a general picture rather than to undertake an in-depth study. It goes without saying that the following list of features represents a philosophical interpretation of what is presented in scripture, and indeed one offered from a self-consciously Christian perspective. We will, moreover, focus on the clearest sense of will exhibited by divine action and will consider the human sense only in relation to this. In this first subsection, we are laying out only the formal aspects of will, which will be radically transformed when we consider their historical realization in the subsection that follows.
(2) The will is that by which God manifests himself in a direct and nonmediated way. In contrast, say, to the Greek notion of the world emanating from God’s nature, the Jews relate to God, not first through nature, but directly in response to God’s discrete acts over and above the natural order, which come from God alone. Thus, the will is revelatory, indeed, theophanic, and represents what would come to be called a direct, personal presence. The Jewish God is not a hidden First Cause but “a God who acts” and thereby makes his reality known.63
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(3) The acts of will therefore inevitably have something of an “interventionist” character. This is to say that, for the will to operate at all, it cannot but introduce into what was already there something new, something never before seen.64 There is something essentially “miraculous” about the will, in the sense of bringing about something extra-ordinary, something not already given, and so always anticipated in the normal course of things. This character follows necessarily from the transcendence of the agent “behind” the activity.
(6) Tied essentially to the historical dimension described above, the activity of the will is always in some respect particular and “eventlike,” or even “event-full.” Explaining an insight from G. E. Wright, Jon D. Levenson says that “the religion of Israel was a religion of recital, in which the highest spiritual level consisted of narrating the mighty acts of God. The key term is event.”67 As breaking in and intervening, precisely in the mode of introducing a change, the will “makes happen,” it causes something (new) to occur. An event is the result of
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(4) Because of the transcendence of the agent, and therefore the “otherness” of that on which the agent acts, the will’s activity is essentially “transitive,” in the sense that it expresses a movement across a distance (at least metaphorically). This “transitivity” does not in principle exclude the immanence of the acts of will, or in other words the fact that the act of will remains within the agent, is self-referential, even in its going out. In fact, the revelatory dimension of the act of will, or in other words the direct personal presence of the agent in the will, brings to light the essential immanence of its activity. Nevertheless, the more obvious dimension is its “out-going” character, the will’s acting on what lies outside of itself.
(5) Bringing together the transitive and the interventionist aspects of the will, we can say that the Jews conceive the will essentially as a matter of power,65 understood in the active sense as the capacity to bring about a change in what is other. Connected with God’s absolute transcendence, this power is by its very nature “overwhelming”: it is in no way limited by what stands over against it, because such resistance would imply a denial, or at least a compromise, of its transcendent agency. It is thus the very nature of God’s will “to overcome.” One is not surprised, then, that the activity of God’s will in the Bible should so often be associated with a destructive force (e.g., thunderstorm or fire).66
an inter-vention; an e-vent is something that “comes from” and so has a source beyond, a source that thus makes itself felt in its effects. If what is inter-vened into is a given order or situation, the event cannot be a general state of affairs but must occur at a particular time and place, concerning some reality that is unique in the sense of being thereby set apart from what came before.
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(7) Finally, the sense of freedom that is associated with the will so conceived will always bear the trait of being a separation, a liberation from, at least in some analogous sense. There are in fact two words for “freedom” in Hebrew. The first, chupshah, appears only once in that form and means literally “loosed”;68 the second, which is somewhat more common, deror, is strikingly similar in its origin and early usage to the Greek eleutheria: deror most basically means “free-flowing,” like a liquid poured out, but was used first in a political sense to describe a people who had been taken out of the state of slavery.69 The most obvious reference is the literal one we mentioned earlier as the defining event of Jewish identity, namely, the Exodus, the liberation, by God, of the Israelites from the condition of slavery in which they had lived under the Egyptians. But this sense is not limited to the particular event; it pervades the whole of the Jewish relation to God. This follows, as we saw above, from the nature of God as absolute “holiness”: According to the Jewish understanding, “it is God’s job,” Brague says, “to liberate.”70 The Israelites are holy, that is, “set apart,” or in other words “set free,” because God is holy: “Say to all the congregation of the people of Israel, You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev 19:2).71 God’s election of Israel is the objective way his holiness is expressed in the world. Thus, the constitution of the people is an election that sets apart; the law that codifies their freedom as the people of God is a set of prescriptions that sets off a particular kind of behavior from what would otherwise be considered a normal way of acting. Indeed, an essential part of the law consists precisely in the sepa ration of one thing from the rest that are like it (kosher laws) in a manner that transforms one’s relationship to all of it, insofar as it allows one to live the whole, not as a merely natural reality, but as an expression from start to finish of the will of God.72 For example, in this regard, the institution at creation of the Sabbath, which is holy, is a liberation of work through the liberation of one day from the rest.73 In general, then, remaining in the freedom of the People of God means continually
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turning back to the origin (re-ligio), freeing oneself from the old ways into which one has fallen in order to live freely in the will of God even now: “today.”74 Mercy thus bears a close association with freedom because it indicates the abiding presence of God, who is never simply finished acting in the liberation he has already granted.75 It is the will of God that is absolute rather than any particular expression of it, and man finds his freedom in conformity to this holy will through the laws it institutes.
A More Concrete Consideration: Will as Bond. Now, given this initial description of God’s will as presented in the Old Testament, it is not surprising that the Hellenistic Greeks who encountered this view through their interaction with the Jews, however superficial, should have found this conception of God so fundamentally foreign. Galen, for example, used the Jewish view of God as a foil against which to set what is distinctive about the Greek view into greater relief: “For Moses thinks that all things are in God’s power, even if He wished to make a horse or cow from dust.”76 The general assessment is that the God who is will is arbitrary and whimsical, an ungodly God. Prayer, as an attempt to change God’s will, is insulting of the divine nature, since it assumes that God has not always already, from eternity, determined what is best.77 One finds a similar sense of the Jewish God as essentially arbitrary not only in the ancient world but still in the modern one, whether one champions this arbitrariness as the distinct origin of the modern conception of freedom as power to choose (i.e., a “libertarian” notion of will)78 or laments it as threatening the deep conception of nature that would seem indispensable for the very possibility of philosophical contemplation, among other things, since philosophy can exist only in an intelligible world.79 But it should be noted that the perspective from which the Jewish view of God seems essentially arbitrary tends to have its place simply outside the Jewish tradition, which casts this view as the “opposite” of the view rooted in nature. If we start more concretely from within this tradition, and attend more precisely to the particularity of its history, a profound and thoroughgoing qualification of the preceding characterization begins to take shape. This shape, which we will sketch momentarily, is not the simple opposite of the Greek view but plays a remarkably similar melody regarding freedom, even if it plays this melody in what is clearly a radically different key.