Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham

Rating:
Summary: Challenging, Rewarding Book
Review: An extremely learned, thoughtful study of the book of Genesis up to and including the binding of Isaac. Boasts an impressive command of commentaries ancient, medieval, and modern on the text. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: A Difficult Read but Thought Provoking
Review: First of all, this book is about philosophy and theology, not about politics. By the term "Political Philosophy" the author means "Political" in terms of how men organize their belief systems. Specifically, the author cites a number of theologians, both modern (Karl Barth, Soren Kirkegard, Milton) and ancient (Socrates, Plato, St. Augustine, Maimonedes).

Second, what this book is about: the author examines the text of Genesis from the beginning through the life of Abraham. I can imagine a follow-up book that examines the rest of the Pentateuch through the life of Moses. A primary concern of the author is the relationship between God and Man, especially regarding the nature of man as a sinful being, and his need to perform sacrifice to God. A secondary major theme is the nature of dialogue between individual men (Adam, Cain, Noah & his sons, and most importantly Abraham) and God.

This book is thoroughly researched and annotated. The actual text is 184 pages, and the remaining about 1/3 of the book is citations and short excerpts and explanations of the various philosophers that Pangle has referred to in the body of the text. A serious student could use the citations as a reading list.

My primary disagreement with Pangle's book, is that I believe,the two main contributions Abraham's experience with God gave to mankind's philosophy and theology were 1)there is But THE One God, and 2)the end of Human Sacrifice as a propriation of that God. Pangle ultimately is more concerned with the concept of Justice.

I read all of this book once, and several sections twice. In some discussions the author's main point gets lost in the heavy citation and quotations. Also, the author's own (theological) bias with regard to the need and requirement of sacrifice as expressed in Genesis seems to color the discussion. However, I am not a theologian or philosopher, nor do I have the extensive sources at hand that Pangle does, and my Hebrew and Latin skills date from high school coursework in the late 60's.

Still, this book is worth reading as it will encourage the reader to examine his own understandings and force him to at least think about he/she would defend them. The exposure to the writings of Milton, St. Augustine, Socrates, etc are certainly worth the price of time and effort to read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Athens and Jerusalem Revisited
Review: I am writing this review mainly in response to the two reviews submitted by Mr. Whitaker below. Apparently the main criticism of the aforementioned reviews is that Pangle does not take seriously enough the Bible's claim to wisdom. Indeed Mr. Whitaker appears to be more interested in defending his own teacher's (Leon Kass's) version of the Athens vs. Jerusalem debate against Pangle, and then to impute this version to the teacher of both Pangle and Kass, Leo Strauss, than he is to considering that what Pangle has written may be true. What Mr. Hancock has written regarding Strauss's supposed indecision or neutrality is simply wrong. It is true that Strauss approached the Jerusalem side of the debate with great sobriety, but he was no less than Pangle a defender of Socratic philosophy against revelation. As Stanley Rosen--one of Strauss's best students--has noted on many occassions, no serious student of Strauss ever doubted that he was an atheist who recognized the anthropological necessity of belief in revelation for the vast majority of mankind, i.e., for those lacking the intellectual gifts necessary to pursue philosophy in the Socratic sense. There simply is no doubt that, by Strauss's interpretation, one cannot be a true believer in the God of revelation and also be true to the philosophic (Socratic) way of life. The tension is simply irreducible, and is akin to the tension between the philosopher and the city. In Socratic terms this is the Delphic imperative to pursue self-knowledge rather than submit to orthodoxy of any kind. What is the nature of my soul? It should be noted that one does not choose to be a philosopher but rather is or is not capable of becoming a philosopher, if properly educated, based on the nature of one's soul. In the "Republic" Socrates describes to Glaucon and Adeimantus the differences among types of souls by telling the young men the myth of the lottery of lives (Er) and the mysteries of philosophy. The Myth of Er replaces the tragedy of the Fall with philosophy. Philosophy denies evil in the Biblical sense and replaces fear of God with wonder and amazement. This is why philosophy is closer to comedy than tragedy: a Socratic satyr-play. Those with souls which fall on the side of revelation would do better, in my opinion, not to attempt a synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem--as Mr. Whitaker obviously would like to pursue--but rather to defend revelation against Socratic rationalism, as did Kirkegaard. "Whether the Bible or philosophy is right is of course the only question which ultimately matters. But in order to understand that question one must first see philosophy as it is. One must not see it from the outset through Biblical glasses. Wherever each of us may stand, no respectable purpose is served by trying to prove that we eat the cake and have it. Socrates used all his powers to awaken those who can think out of the slumber of thoughtlessness. We ill follow his example if we use his authority for putting ourselves to sleep" (Leo Strauss, "On the Euthypron").

Pangle does point out a positive connection between Socratic philosophy and the divine and thus religions of monotheistic revelation. The difference between ancient and modern philosophy is grounded in their differing views of human nature and divinity. Plato seems to indicate obscurely that the deepest fulfillment of human nature is achieved through rational inquiry into the eternally divine, and Socratic philosophy is the defense of this inquiry. Modern philosophy holds that human nature strives toward nothing but the satisfaction of base desires and passions and rejects as unnatural and fanatical the higher aspirations of human nature which the ancients took for granted. It seems that since all human beings are not equally capable of intelligently pursuing this divine way of life (philosophy) the moderns rejected divinity during the political project of emancipation brought forth in the Enlightenment in order to legislate such things as equality and the natural rights of man (and thus concealing the distintion between scholar and philosopher). It is true that the divine as understood by Socratic philosophy is quite different from the divine as understood by the believers in revelation. Socratic philosophy understands the Socratic way of life to be the most choiceworthy life for a human being which provides the only true view of the eternal, whereas revelation rejects Socratic skepticism (as it must) and the aporetic way of life of the philosopher in favor of politicized orthodoxy, i.e., communal religious practice. Pangle is keen to point out that, despite these differences, Socratic political philosophy and believers in revelation of the God of Abraham have common political principles which unite them against the Enlightenment form of political atheism. This commonality consists in the rejection of moral relativism spawned by the modern Enlightenment in the name of equality, which denies that there is an answer to the question "How should I live?" in favor of allowing each individual to decide for himself what is best, regardless of how base or immoral, and to go about "contructing" and "creating" for himself.

Rating:
Summary: Two Reviews that Read Between the Lines
Review: The Bible and Philosophy

A review of The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis by Leon R. Kass,
and Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham, by Thomas L. Pangle.

By Albert Keith Whitaker
Posted November 25, 2003

This review appeared in the Winter 2003 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

Several years ago, a friend told me a story about a most pious rabbi who met his end after a long life of serving others. Upon his final breath, his soul left his mortal remains and awoke-in the flames of Hell. "Blessed be God!" he immediately cried. "Now no one will think I did it all for the reward."

A week or so after hearing this story I shared it with another friend. He replied, with a laugh, "Yeah, I wonder if after a few days of torment he was still singing the same tune!"

The first friend was a student of Leon Kass (as I was, too), the second of Thomas Pangle. Students all too easily distort their teacher's thought. They often grasp one tendency of that thought, yank it, and unravel the whole like a pull in a knit sweater. But distortion may still preserve or even highlight some of the truth. These two students' very different reactions to the same story reveal something of the difference between their teachers, even though these two men come from the same philosophical school. In the same way, Kass and Pangle's attempts to grapple with the philosophers' perennial sparring partner, the Bible, reveal something of the thought of their own teacher, Leo Strauss.

Pangle, like Strauss, writes with care. But of all his excellent books, he seems to have taken the greatest care in writing Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham. Every sentence, every phrase, every word counts.

This attention to detail does not arise from mere fastidiousness. One understands Pangle's care only when one understands his project-and no small one is it. "The time is ripe," he proclaims, "and overripe, for political philosophy in the strict or genuine sense, political philosophy as the foundation of rationalism, to be brought back from its late-modern exile."

Here Pangle's condensed prose makes it necessary to clarify some terms. For Pangle (closely following the Strauss of the introduction to Philosophy and Law and of the Hobbes and Machiavelli sections of Natural Right and History), "genuine" "political philosophy" amounts to Socratic philosophy, the love of wisdom "refounded by Socrates--and then once again refounded, with a dramatically altered but not wholly new agenda, by Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Spinoza in the early modern period." Genuine political philosophy forms the basis of "classical rationalism," subsuming (in Pangle's view) much of what others would call "ancient" and "medieval" philosophy. "Modern rationalism" differs from the classical type precisely on the question of religion: modern rationalists "consciously prepare a world mesmerized by the rewards of secular progress, in which fewer and fewer" thoughtful souls take seriously the challenge posed to reason by revelation. The success of the modern project (understood this way) buried its own intention-to face down revelation's challenge-causing the "exile" of the philosophizing that gave that project life. The "political philosophy" that Pangle would return from exile, therefore, amounts to taking on that challenge, the challenge of revelation to reason.

Pangle leaves no doubt that he begins on the side of reason. On the first page he explains that he will read Genesis, "animated by the concerns and questions and doubts of the philosophic enterprise as it was refounded by Socrates...." And he makes clear the ground-Strauss calls it the "common ground"-on which to parley with the Bible:

Now, it is in regard to the right and the good-that is, in regard to justice or righteousness-that political philosophy and scriptural piety have the fullest basis for a conversation that may well be mutually illuminating. For righteousness, or justice in the fullest sense, is the theme of political philosophy, the cynosure of its meditations, even as righteousness (or justice in the full sense) is among the highest and most essential themes of Scripture.

Incidentally, though Pangle refers here to "Scripture," he restricts his attention to the first 22 chapters of Genesis. Why? As will become clearer below, for Pangle, these chapters reveal most clearly the connection between human righteousness and the righteous God-or between belief in justice and belief in an omnipotent God. Kass, in contrast, restricts his attention to Genesis because he sees in the book the richest presentation of "the human beginnings"-and not just the Jewish beginnings-an "anthropology" not blinkered with the blind spots of scientific anthropology. Kass anthropologizes, while Pangle critiques the highest political beliefs. Or, to use Strauss' distinction, Pangle's political philosophizing approaches politics as pre-philosophy, a necessary prelude to true philosophizing. Kass philosophizes about human affairs as worthy in themselves.

***

But to return to pangle's conversation-how does it go-a conversation that Strauss sets up in exactly this way, at the center of his article, "Progress or Return?" Like any good dialogue, it has its twists and turns, but one must keep one's eye on the ball: righteousness or "justice in the fullest sense." Pangle constructs this crucial element of the conversation, appropriately enough, in commenting on Abraham's dialogue with God, in which Abraham asks God to spare the few just inhabitants of Sodom. Pangle emphasizes that Abraham does not engage in "special pleading" for himself or his family (Lot). He then suggests, "Indeed, his strict subordination of his concern for his own desert is a precondition of his and his family's becoming deserving." Deserving of what? Deserving of God's bounty, prosperity, reward. For does not Abraham concede that the just should be rewarded and the unjust punished?

But this concession, this demand for reward and punishment, is precisely the problem, in Pangle's view:

...if Abraham's, if the righteous man's, justice (and piety), if his apparent subordination or sacrifice of his own good, if his apparent devotion to the good of others, are all in fact pursued with a view to receiving the reward that enhances his own good or avoiding the penalty that detracts from it, then the just man would seem no longer to differ radically in motivation and goal from the unjust.... Moreover, the just man would seem no longer so clearly to merit the recompense or reward for which he hopes, since he did not truly subordinate his own good to something beyond himself.

And so Pangle concludes, "The core of the just man's self-understanding would appear to become incoherent and self-canceling...." Even in the binding of Isaac, Pangle finds the same argument: "Abraham's unequaled deed is infinitely clearer to us than the coherence of the thought that was in his heart." But justice also demands coherence, not confusion, even good-looking confusion. So much, then, for justice.

But what about the conversation between faith and reason, of which justice was to form the basis? Do the two now go their separate ways, precisely as the late-moderns seem to wish? Not at all. Pangle points to the proper conclusion (in his view) in this parenthetical remark:

From the biblical point of view, the adherent of philosophy indulges in the idlest of speculations if or when he wonders how this experience [God's call], and the apparent evidence it supplies for the existence of the God experienced, would alter, for Abraham or for the countless others of us who have experienced some degree of something akin, if the intelligibility of the attribute of justice were to alter.

Pangle's "conversation" demands precisely such an alteration-an "alteration" in one's belief in God. Pangle invites us to put these thoughts together: If we can make no sense of justice, what follows for the "Divine judge," the God who identifies Himself and lays claim to obedience precisely as "a God of Justice"? Clearly: No Justice, No God. No God, no creation ex nihilo-and no other "miracles" to obstruct the philosophic study of nature. The "common ground" of justice evaporates, and along with it go the phantasms. Philosophy alone remains standing, and so Pangle ends on the same side where he began: "I hope to have demonstrated how these foundational teachings of the Bible are illuminated when they are interrogated from the perspective of political philosophy." Illumination indeed.

***

By claiming that "classical rationalism" rests upon "Socratic" or pre-biblical philosophy, Pangle admits that such rationalism does not need, strictly speaking, to confront the Bible to exist. Indeed, in reviewing this "conversation," one gets the feeling that it does not so much grow out of the biblical text as fall upon it. The reader of all this "grappling" experiences a feeling similar to that of a spectator at a WWF bout: it's exciting, even dazzling, but in the back of your mind you know it's staged.

Such staging becomes especially evident in how Pangle treats the creation of woman. Pangle rightly concludes that God's choice of Eve as a fit helper for man (over such an alternative as, say, Socrates) means that the Bible presents the worshipful family as "the intended focal point of human sociability." But, he immediately adds, the full significance of that focus will not appear unless we compare it with the classical philosophers' account of sociability. Pangle then deftly shows how the these philosophers defended politics as a bastion of philosophical friendship. And, even further, he hints that philosophic friendship points to the goodness of a "divine" solitary life:

The moral life of the city transcends the family and is itself surpassed or at least crowned by intimate friendship, but even the latter is ultimately transcended, in and by an ascent toward the divine spiritual self-sufficiency that is the dimly beheld highest aspiration of the life of the city.


The contrast is clear: Eve versus the solitary life. (Pangle seems to side with 17th-century poet Andrew Marvell: "Two paradises 'twere one, To live in paradise alone.") And it is in light of such a contrast that Kass, quite incidentally but nonetheless powerfully, offers the beginning of a response to Pangle's challenging work.

***

Kass starts by confessing that his book "offers a philosophic reading of Genesis." He thus appears to stake out ground similar to Pangle's, an approach that has made uneasy many of his more religiously sensitive readers. But unlike Pangle's work, Kass's cannot be said to push "an argument." Instead, it invites "the thoughtful children of skeptics" to reflect, with Kass's encouragement, upon the biblical stories. The book acts almost as a commentary on Genesis. But it does this so effectively because of a sort of double-writing Kass employs: He consistently treats the biblical text as richer than any rational interpretation we can offer-and yet he himself mines those riches so well that he invites his skeptical readers to ignore or forget his humble, even pious, stance. He charms the skeptic into respecting and then embracing Genesis as a source of wisdom.

One small though not random example must suffice to show Kass's artistry. In dealing with Genesis 38, the story of Judah and Tamar, Kass attempts to understand the genuine "turning of the soul" (as Kass Socratically puts it) that Judah experiences upon recognizing his daughter-in-law as the harlot he had used only a few months before. Kass's treatment of the story works on several levels at once. At the most basic level he tries to make sense of the story, which means figuring out why Onan had to die. Kass suggests that the crime Onan (and, in his way, Judah) committed was to disregard the custom of levirate marriage, the duty to raise up a child for the dead brother.

But this textual inquiry leads Kass, at a higher level, to a polemic: to defend this custom before readers who likely find it "peculiar, even ugly and barbarous." To do that, Kass must up the ante further, and show that the custom-and the story-"uphold what is centrally important in marriage altogether." That challenge allows Kass to make a proleptic summary, one that characteristically combines care with beauty:

The heart of marriage, especially but not only biblically speaking, is not primarily a matter of the heart; rather, it is primarily about procreation and, even more, about transmission of a way of life. Husband and wife, whether they know it or not, are incipiently father and mother, parents of children for whose moral and spiritual education they bear a sacred obligation-to ancestors, to community, to God-an obligation symbolized first in the covenant-making commandment of berith milah, of circumcision.... Precisely because of their communal commitment to care for righteousness, they must not, even in marriage that takes them from their fathers' house, cease to be their brothers' keepers.... If the home of one's progeny is to become a home also of perpetuation and transmission, reverence for one's origins is paramount; kinship and attachment to the community must triumph over sibling rivalry and moderate somewhat the drive for independence.

In the exposition that follows, Kass shows how the story embodies this lesson. The levirate law makes sense, a sense recognized with stunning drama by Judah upon the revelation of Tamar.

But one more interpretive level stands above Kass's defense of this custom or even his exposition of "the heart of marriage." Kass entitles this section of his book "The Other Candidate: the Education of Judah." The "other candidate" alludes to "a certain Adullamite whose name was Hirah": he was Judah's friend. Kass recognizes that in the story of Judah two ways of life contend: the life of the friend and the life of the brother (and father). While the Bible clearly teaches the superiority of the latter, Kass makes the best possible case for friendship, not only by citing its most famous biblical examples (Ruth and Naomi, David and Jonathan), but also by appealing to its greatest defenders, the Greeks, especially the Greek philosophers. Nonetheless, this story, by revealing the importance of marriage, also reveals-and criticizes-the goal of friendship: "The goal appears to be a kind of independent self-sufficiency-in the heroic extreme, to become like a god, ageless and immortal (at the very least, in song and story)-in defiance of our finitude and neediness."

Pangle could not have said it better. In the context of the biblical story, friendship plausibly appears as a sort of self-forgetting, a trunctuation (even if a highly pleasant trunctuation) of the wholeness of human life. Ironically, however, what idolizing friendship trunctuates is our finitude and neediness.

This realization, in turn, forms a possible response to Pangle's argument about justice. Judah gets exactly what he deserves. Not simply as a "wrong-doer" who deserves "punishment," though he is and does. He gets what he deserves as a father, a brother, a father-in-law, a son, a future leader. Justice is not an individual calculus of benefits and losses. Justice demands seeing ourselves wrapped within a garment of destiny, the threads of which are our family ties. It forbids cutting ourselves from those ties, as though we ever could be self-sufficient. The true good is never "my" good; it is God, Who wove this garment as the fitting cloak for naked man. Reasoning about "my" good or "one's" good only snares us anew in the web of the Fall.

***

As mentioned, Leo Strauss, the teacher of both Pangle and Kass, set up exactly the conversation which Pangle attempts to complete. He does so at the center of his "Progress or Return?" But Strauss does not complete that conversation. Though in the center of that article he claims that reason and revelation do have a common ground-"divine law," or to be "more precise," "the problem of divine law"-in its final part he states that they share no common ground, that they and their claims must exist in insuperable "tension."

Strauss's moderation, no less than his daring, presents an example to his students and his admirers. Every page of his work shares the fruit of solitary contemplation, in a most friendly manner. Yet he repeatedly thanks the Bible, not as a beaten adversary but as a worthy challenger. Contrary to his most popular critics, there does not lurk at the center of Strauss's thought a political project, of the Left or the Right. Contrary to his most popular defenders, "what Strauss was up to" was not simply the close study of political excellence. In his own various autobiographical statements (such as the "new" introduction to his Spinoza's Critique of Religion or his widely disseminated-and widely misunderstood-speech "Why We Remain Jews"), Strauss emphasizes that the enduring touchstone of his thought, the point around which it revolved, was not any merely political matter, but the "theological-political question." The central word of that triad has received the most attention. The first deserves more. But the last should never be overlooked. The truly Socratic philosopher lives a question. And in this way he may not be all so different from the humble believer.


A second review, by Ralph C. Hancock
This Review appeared in First Things, April 2004

"Thomas Pangle, author of numerous acclaimed studies spanning the entire history of political philosophy from Socrates to today's various postmodernisms, is arguably the most prominent and accomplished of the many distinguished students of Leo Strauss (1899-1973), himself one of the most influential and controversial figures in postwar American intellectual life. In his important new book, Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham, Pangle ventures well beyond the great books of his discipline to devote himself to the study of the Hebrew Bible, as well as to ancient, medieval, and modern traditions of biblical commentary. His goal is ambitious-nothing less than to reinvigorate what he describes as "the encounter between political philosophy and the Bible" at the highest intellectual level.



Those familiar with Strauss' work will recognize Pangle's formulation, which assumes a fundamental tension between philosophical reflection (understood as the attempt to comprehend "the whole" using unassisted human reason) and biblical faith (treated as thoroughgoing submission of one's mind and heart to God's law). Pangle, like Strauss, claims that the ineradicable antagonism between the two parties is a fruitful one for both, as each illuminates the human possibility proposed by the other. Yet Pangle diverges from Strauss, who tended to leave his ultimate allegiance somewhat obscure, when he indicates that his primary concern is with showing how reason, on nothing but its own authority, can guide human life to a supremely satisfying end. In other words, Pangle sets out to take biblical religion seriously in order to expose it more effectively as an unsatisfactory alternative to what he describes approvingly as "Socratic rationalism."



According to Pangle, the en-counter between political philosophy and the Bible is possible because both address a common core of our humanity. Reason and biblical faith agree that a "fully human life can and ought to be guided solely by the manifest Truth." They also agree that the primary theme of our interest in truth is the question of "justice or righteousness." As Pangle writes, "It is in regard to the right and the good . . . that political philosophy and scriptural piety have the fullest basis for a convergence," just as it is their very different responses to moral phenomena that ultimately lead them to fundamental and irreconcilable disagreement.



In order to illuminate this rivalry, Pangle proposes to begin at the beginning, with the book of Genesis. He presents a serious and careful philosophical commentary on the Hebrew text, including a sustained conversation with the most notable authorities of the Jewish and Christian traditions, as well as with modern critical scholarship and philosophical-literary reflection. Pangle's interlocutors include the Talmud, Maimonides, and Abravanel; Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Milton; Spinoza, Locke, and Bayle; Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Leo Strauss and Leon Kass.



Passing over Pangle's masterful and engaging discussions of these figures-not to mention his thoughtful and provocative reflections on such important topics as the differing accounts of the origins of the universe in the Bible and Greek philosophy-we find the heart of the book in the chapter on "Creation and the Meaning of Good and Evil." Pangle there presents with exceptional clarity the classic puzzles surrounding the nature of sin and divine justice in the Bible, and he makes every effort to propose rationally intelligible solutions. For example, Pangle discerns the germ of biblical sin in the serpent's appeal to Eve's capacity for envy, which reveals a nascent longing for autonomy that is equivalent to philosophical reason's "desire to govern one's own existence on the basis of one's own knowledge." As Abravanel argues, by yielding to the rationalistic desire, mankind abandoned the tree of life for the tree of knowledge.



But what is the alternative? Pangle claims that it involves radical obedience, understood as self-conscious submission to God. But, he wonders, is such a way of living "possible, or even conceivable as coherent?" Judging from the highly compressed account presented here, Pangle's doubts are inspired by a suspicion that God demands the impossible-namely, that human beings knowingly renounce the guidance or rule of reason. As Calvin pointed out, such an act of self-conscious renunciation is most coherently understood as having been made possible by a new kind of cognition or knowledge, revealed by God, that trumps what human beings can discern on their own by the use of reason. But according to Pangle, the decision to accept or reject this revealed knowledge must itself be based on a still more fundamental "grounding knowledge of the utterly trustworthy goodness and justice of God." However we cut it, belief in God and the decision to obey Him must rest on human knowledge of what is good and true, a knowledge acquired, or at least interrogated, by rational reflection. But once this has been conceded, rationalism, with its insistence on the autonomy of the human intellect, has won the day.



Pangle returns to this theme toward the end of the book, in a chapter titled "Abraham at the Peak." Abraham's obedience to God in his willingness to sacrifice his son, the son of the promise, would seem to represent a singularly pure and clear manifestation of biblical righteousness. How are we to understand this obedience? Pangle finds "the deepest and most momentous puzzle of divine justice" to be implicated in the question of whether (as suggested by Hebrews 11:19) Abraham "was rationally calculating" as he set out for Moriah that he would not lose Isaac and the promise he represented. For if he was so reasoning, then "does not the whole drama become rather histrionic"? Either Abraham rationally pursued his own good-in which case, for what was he subsequently rewarded?-or "he was indeed sacrificing everything conceivably good for himself." But if the latter is the case, did he in another sense understand that by this sacrifice of the good he was "achieving the peak of human existence," and so seeking the good after all?



On Pangle's account, biblical faith terminates in the following impasse: Abraham's "unequaled deed" seems to represent the highest possibility of the human soul, a kind of nobility beyond nobility, a truly transcendent orientation of the mind and heart. But as we rationally scrutinize Abraham's possible motives, we seem to be left with this uninspiring alternative: either Abraham's deed is completely unintelligible, arbitrary, groundless, and effectively mad-the act of a man who deliberately does what he knows not to be good for him; or it must be explained in terms of rational and egoistic calculation (in terms of what was good for him). In either case, obviously, the biblical promise of transcendence proves to be a pure illusion.



Or does it? There are, to say the least, reasons to doubt the solidity of Pangle's position-even, and perhaps especially-on its own terms. Consider his view of the origin and meaning of "philosophy" itself. While biblical piety, says Pangle, is rooted in the patriarchal family, philosophy, by contrast, springs from the ancient Greek city-state's "radical subordination of . . . most individual goods" to loftier civic ends; in other words, philosophy involves a purification or transcendence of the city's own purification or transcendence of "corporeal, familial, and mundane needs." That is, philosophy aspires to a divine self-sufficiency that grows out of, but ultimately leaves behind, civic and personal attachments.



This stands in stark contrast to biblical piety, which Pangle says "remains firmly within the bounds of our commonsense conviction" that moral responsibility is real. But it is not clear that philosophy can afford, any more than the Bible can, to dispense with some form of such a conviction. On Pangle's own account of philosophy's human origins, the nobility of philosophy emerges as "the dimly held highest aspiration of the life of the city." But a world in which moral responsibility has been revealed to be rationally incoherent would seem to lack any ground for nobility, for a sense of "high" and "low." To the extent that Pangle holds philosophy to be noble, he draws on or relies on opinions derived from prephilosophical moral, familial, and civic life. But the validity of these is denied by philosophy, as Pangle defines philosophy.



Of course another possibility is that Pangle does not view philosophy as noble at all-and that he merely employs an exalted rhetoric to attract people, and especially young people, to the study of it. As their philosophical education proceeds, however, they will ultimately discover that such a philosophy's highest truth is that the world lacks any basis for judgments of "higher" or "lower"-and hence that the philosopher is merely a hedonist, pursuing the pleasure of autonomous reflection as the highest good.



But what an odd hedonist he is, this modern-all-too-modern Socrates who derives his pleasure from voiding the ethical, political, and religious content of life, savoring above all else his ever-renewed awareness of the groundlessness or incoherence underlying his attachment to other human beings. No wonder Pangle is so eager, not to say desperate, to sustain a sense of philosophy's seriousness by conjuring a worthy foe to battle. But, alas, like all conjured foes, the biblical piety contained in his book is a mere phantom of the real thing. Having failed to come to terms with the truly monstrous resignation of human goods required by his idea of philosophical autonomy, Pangle blinds himself to the genuine alternative to that idea. As Kierkegaard recognized when he described the "infinite resignation" of philosophy, biblical hope, as represented by Abraham, holds out the promise of holding fast to the beloved (Isaac), even as one prepares to sacrifice him to God.



In the end, Pangle has not thought through either what it would mean to abandon all hope, as his idea of philosophy demands, or to have faith in a God who is "concerned about the least things." And so he has staged for us not so much a battle of giants about the meaning of existence as a wrestling match between a falsely modest bully and a straw man of his own creation. We might have guessed who would win."

Ralph C. Hancock is Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University.