James Diamond's review of Philosophical Religions in Iyyun

Book Reviews Carlos Fraenkel, Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza: Reason, Religion, and Autonomy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pb edition, 2014. At first glance the title of Carlos Fraenkel’s masterful and exhaustive study regarding what he categorizes as “philosophical religion” in the history of western philosophy and religion may appear quite puzzling. For both professional philosophers on the one hand, and religious devotees on the other, the terms philosophy, religion, reason, and autonomy do not generally reside comfortably with each other, and, for the most part, militate against each other. We are used to seeing courses on the philosophy of religion in university curricula associated with such names as Antony Flew and Richard Swinburne, but it would be difficult to find one titled philosophical religion. The puzzle is especially compounded with the title’s bracketing of philosophical religion on its emergent beginnings by Plato, and, on its ultimate end, by Spinoza. Plato is of course one of the founding fathers of western philosophy, while Spinoza is known as the champion of liberal democracy, author of one of the most devastating critiques of religion, pioneer of the historical critical approach to the Bible, who unequivocally divorces prophecy from philosophy, thus rejecting the programmatic staple of philosophical religion. What an odd couple to circumscribe the historical development of any religion! Philosophy, as the original term implies, is a discipline, or according to some scholars such as Pierre Hadot, a way of life like religion, rooted in the love of wisdom. Religion, at least in the so-called monotheistic forms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, with which the book is concerned, revolves around the love of God. Patently these two loves are mutually exclusive, each being wedded to opposing modes of thought and being, thus defying even maintaining a harmonious polygamous relationship with the two. Can wisdom associated with reason and a life guided by the human mind along with its various tools of analytic thinking, logic, and empiricism leading to certain knowledge coexist peacefully with a life of faith and belief, dedicated 96 © Iyyun • The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 65 (January 2016): 96–106 Book Reviews 97 to an existence that transcends the world, reveals itself to select individuals who are privy to its intentions, and surpasses the limits of the human intellect? The relationship between religion and philosophy is often depicted as a conflict between Athens, the original home of the philosophical pursuit, and Jerusalem, the location of the most ancient of the three religions and the Israelite Temple Mount, where God was literally thought to reside. These two geographical locations, representing disparate cultural, intellectual, and social milieus, indicate the impossibility of taking up citizenship in both at the same time unless it is colored by a dual loyalty where one pledge of allegiance is a pretense for the sincerity of the other. In Jerusalem the axis mundi is a sacred mountain, whereas in Athens it is the mind. “Philosophical religion” then appears to be an oxymoron. Combining the two in a less paradoxical form would seem to require it apply either to a religion that has been so drained of everything we associate it with, to the point that it is reduced to philosophy simpliciter, or a philosophy that has been so diluted by “beliefs” as to transform it into theology, another discipline altogether. In addition, if such a religion consists of stripping down the respective religious traditions to accord with the findings of reason, then why not dispense with religion altogether? Why not simply become disciples of Plato and Aristotle rather than Moses, Christ, or Muhammed? There is also the apparently odd pairing of religion with autonomy when the two terms seem dichotomous. Another characterization of the clash between religion and philosophy is a kind of antinomy between reason and revelation, with the former leading to universal truths applicable to all human beings, while the latter divulges parochial laws and teachings applicable to a particular community and, indeed, produces different religions. There may be Muslims or Jews who philosophize and conduct science but there is no Jewish or Muslim science. Judaism, for example, considers the contents of its originating revelation binding only on its adherents, while Christianity abrogates much of that content, and Islam claims ultimate supersession over both. Commandments and imperatives issuing unilaterally from God as a sovereign lawgiver, through the medium of prophecy, sanctioned by threats of punishment and promises of reward, are inconsistent with modern notions of autonomy. Nothing captures this religious heteronomy more emphatically than a rabbinic tradition, which has God suspending Mount Sinai over the heads of the Israelites, and threatening them with being buried alive should they reject his Law. 98 Book Reviews Indeed, in the case of Islam, its very name reflects a life lived according to its tenets, which were disclosed to one prophetically enlightened individual. It demands absolute submission to the contents of those private communications between that individual and God, entailing unmitigated capitulation to the will and word of one particular human being. While there may be freedom to choose such a life, itself a questionable assumption in light of Islam’s history, both at its inception and currently, the choice is one that assumes heteronomy and abject surrender to an external authority. When one speaks in the name of reason there can be discussion and debate working out the intrinsic merits of whatever position is supported by reason. However when one speaks in the name of God, all discussion comes to a crashing halt in the face of unchallengeable authority and power. As Hannah Arendt asserted, “To hold different opinions and to be aware that other people think differently on the same issue shields us from that godlike certainty which stops all discussion and reduces social relationships to those of an ant heap.” Ever since Kant’s categorical imperative, which views moral norms as authentic only if chosen for oneself, only if posited through the independent exercise of reason, the contrast between the autonomous life of philosophy and the heteronomous one of religion has become even more pronounced. However, despite these barriers between the domains of religion and philosophy, Fraenkel’s core thesis is that a primary aim of philosophical religion is precisely to “lead all members of the religious community to the highest level of rational autonomy they can attain” (p. x). What then is “philosophical religion”? Although Fraenkel points out nuanced differences between different schools of thought, in essence there is a common thread that weaves its way through them all. It is the belief held chiefly by sophisticated philosophers who are also masters of their own religious traditions, and loyal members of their respective religious communities, that their foundational religious texts teach philosophical doctrines and truths. Eminent examples of such exponents of philosophical religion, to name just one representative of each religion dealt with in the study, are Philo (d.c. 50) for Judaism, Origen of Alexandria (d.c. 254) for Christianity, and Averroes (d. 1198) for Islam. Each one recasts their respective founding fathers – Moses, Christ, Muhammed – as philosopher rulers who, in one form or another, adopt a pedagogical-political program modeled on Plato. Their scriptures are the instruments of that program, fashioning communities whose members must be habituated to rein in their Book Reviews 99 non-rational desires as much as possible in the process of moving toward the ultimate goal of moral and intellectual perfection. Like Plato’s philosopher king, these pioneers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam know the good through their own intellectual efforts but cannot directly teach that good to their communities, which are largely made up of non-philosophers, for two reasons. One is the average person’s insufficient capacity of intellect to assimilate philosophical argument thus potentially leading to despair at his or her own shortcomings. The other is the inability to cope with ideas that may seem at variance with naïve religious beliefs, thus leading to either a rejection of religion or an attack on the bearers of those very philosophical teachings. The prophet’s advantage over the philosopher is his skill in translating the concept of the good and the prescriptions of reason into a communicable language to the masses. Moses, Christ, and Mohammed do not offer the people strict philosophy, but rather pedagogical political guidance that can best redirect their focus away from the exigencies of an embodied life, prioritizing such goals as money, sex, food, power, and honour, toward the more sublime dictates of a reasoned life. In order to do so, in addition to being consummate philosophers, these pioneers of mass religious movements also possessed “the skills of a legislator, poet, and orator,” qualifying them to “speak in the language of the cave dwellers: the language of the imagination” (p. 129). Indeed for such major advocates of philosophical religion as Moses Maimonides (1138–1205) what distinguishes the prophet from the philosopher is the prophet’s acutely honed imaginative faculty. As Maimonides claimed, adapting a rabbinic adage, “the Torah speaks in the language of common men.” Generally, philosophical religion identifies the “image of God” in which human beings are cast at creation with the intellect and the capacity to cultivate reason. Concomitantly, God is the ultimate truth in the universe, the final cause of all existence, pure thought, and the sole necessary existence, toward which all human endeavours must be directed. Since divine activity consists in thought, the supreme religious virtue of imitatio dei in a philosophical religion is neither ethical conduct, nor ritual worship, but rational thinking. For example, according to Maimonides, intellectual apprehension approximates godlike activity since it is conducted wholly abstractly without any sensual involvement. Thus the biblical phrase image of God consists in the exercise of reason whereby “the divine intellect 100 Book Reviews conjoined with man.” Intellect constitutes the human form and, consequently, any person who fails to engage that faculty resembles a human being only in physical configuration, but essentially is no different than an animal. In other words, people are born human only potentially, and are thus tasked with the lifelong enterprise of earning membership in the human race through cultivating the intellect, or that dimension which defines humanness. In exploring such a religion Fraenkel returns repeatedly to a critical question as he visits the various attempts to foster it across a wide arc of time. What is the point of religious texts that consist of laws, narratives, prophecies, and mythic fables, many of which defy reason and philosophically demonstrated truths? The answer, in one form or another, is that scriptures’ stories and laws are modeled on Plato’s parables offered in the Phaedrus, the Republic, or the Timaeus, such as likening God to a craftsman or lawgiver, the soul to a charioteer, or the form of the Good to the sun. Similarly, to convey certain truths, the non-philosophical content of canonical scriptures like the Bible and the Koran is pedagogically calibrated to address non-philosophers. Anthropomorphic conceptions of God, narrative legends, rituals, and laws are formulated to help those not equipped to independently pursue the rigorous life of the mind gain access to the practical and theoretical wisdom of the philosophers. One of the key methods of proponents of philosophical religion is the development of reading strategies applied to scriptures, which can pierce through the literal to extract its philosophical subtext. Scripture is then the equivalent of books which popularize extremely difficult physical theorems by trite analogies that bear mass appeal, omitting their underlying complex mathematical formulae. As Fraenkel states in relation to one of the Christian advocates of philosophical religion, “Religion’s allegorical content, then, is the true philosophy of which religion’s literal content is an imitation or shadow” (p. 89). In fact, Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, one of the most sophisticated and systematic treatises in the textual tradition of philosophical religion, is entirely concerned with the enterprise of how to read the Bible philosophically, and thus is largely taken up with constructing a lexicography of biblical terms which can operate on literal or philosophical planes in order to achieve that. This strategy rationalizes the crude anti-philosophical nature of biblical texts as a concession to the limited intellectual capacities of most people and is best captured by his metaphor picturing the biblical text as “apples of gold in silver filigree.” Just as viewing the apple from a distance Book Reviews 101 only reveals its silver casing, a superficial reading of scripture results in grasping only its literal political and ethical teachings. However, just as one who approaches the filigreed object begins to discern its encased gold, a more probative attentive reading apprehends the Bible’s concealed internal meaning “concerned with truth as it is,” or, in other words, its philosophical wisdom. Here we arrive at one of the most crucial of questions that percolates underneath the surface of Fraenkel’s entire book. Does the whole venture of philosophical religion rest on a pragmatic ruse, or what Plato considered a “noble lie?” Is religion simply the pabulum necessary to feed the public at large whose inferior minds are unable to digest anything more sophisticated? Are the simplistic narratives such as Adam, Eve, and the snake, in the garden of Eden, or laws governing sacrifice and the priestly cult, crafted only in order to maintain the political order, to keep the intellectually immature masses in check? At the same time, do they serve largely to protect the elites and their freedom to engage in philosophical discourse from the public’s fickle animus that tend to target what it perversely considers subversive thought? After all, while Socrates may be only the most famous of those executed for exposing the public to truth, history is littered with the torched books and tortured bodies of “heresies” and “heretics” whose only crime was to profess truths arrived at by reason that conflicted with the received “wisdom” of religion. Galileo is merely another prominent exemplar of this long list, who concretely illustrates the dangers posed by overt philosophical and scientific thought that runs afoul the tenets of established religion, being condemned of heresy, ordered to renounce his findings, and imprisoned for life. Or is the religious philosopher’s commitment to his religion inextricably intertwined with his commitment to philosophy? In the former case there is an irreconcilable conflict between Athens and Jerusalem, the chief exponent of which was Leo Strauss, whereby the religious philosopher only feigns allegiance to a religious tradition while employing an esoteric form of writing to conceal his true fealty to philosophy. Fraenkel announces at the outset his challenge to this scholarly paradigm fuelled by Strauss, which, he claims, fails to understand philosophical religion from the inside, depicting its exponents as “notorious liars who held the vulgar in utter contempt” (p. 35) rather than authentic adherents of both their religion and philosophy. However, though Fraenkel mounts a valiant effort to challenge the Straussian model, there are two problems I note with his dismantling of 102 Book Reviews what he characterizes as the “conventional wisdom.” Firstly, his description of Strauss’ position may be the “conventional” one, but I do not believe it is the correct one and does insufficient justice to Strauss’ highly nuanced argument, which was constantly refined and complicated across his lengthy and prolific intellectual oeuvre. The strict dichotomy between Athens and Jerusalem, adopted at the beginning of this review for rhetorical reasons, is actually a caricature and, as any straw man, easily refuted. However, as scholars have noted, most recently probingly and insightfully by Kenneth Green, Strauss’ binary of Athens and Jerusalem is much better understood as one of dialectical tension than strict incompatibility. Strauss himself considered the conflict between medieval philosophy and theology “the secret of the vitality of Western civilization,” which should be constituted as a “life between two codes, a fundamental tension.”1 If we were to accept the clichéd conception of Strauss’ thought, one would expect Strauss to have called for the abandonment of a tension that has run its course with the Enlightenment. In fact, quite the contrary, he urges moderns to continue to embrace it.2 A lifelong intellectual engagement with Maimonides, on its own, would belie any simplistic assumption that Strauss’ approach to his thought inevitably reduces Maimonides to a “notorious liar.” But Kenneth Green convincingly demonstrates that, rather than banishing revelation from the modern vocabulary, that lifelong engagement persuaded Strauss “that reason needs revelation precisely in order to remain reasonable,” and that “this opposition about the one truth may energize and revitalize both.”3 In that case perhaps Strauss himself is a stronger advocate for the perpetuation of philosophical religion than Fraenkel. Secondly, and more substantively aimed at Fraenkel’s thesis, is his counterargument that from an inside perspective, Athens and Jerusalem cannot stand for two mutually exclusive perspectives since “the distinction between philosophy and religion is not meaningful” (p. 29) in the minds of such proponents as Philo, Origen, Averroes, Maimonides. In effect they could not have engaged in a synthesis of reason and revelation, or some kind of 1 “Progress or Return? The Contemporary Crisis in Western Civilization,” Modern Judaism 1:1 (1981): 17–45, at p. 44. 2 Ibid. 3 Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 158. Book Reviews 103 reconciliation between the two, since they are viewed as identical with each other. These thinkers had no notion of a ‘between’ when thinking of religion and philosophy. However, Fraenkel’s removal of any meaningful distinction between Athens and Jerusalem as a rebuttal to Strauss ends up to be a distinction from Strauss’ position without a difference. If Christ is, according to Spinoza, “the most accomplished philosopher of all times” (p. 266); if Moses, according to Philo, “apprehends the Forms and their order in God’s mind,” reaching the very “summit of philosophy” (p. 110); if Muhammad is a “philosopher-ruler” according to Averroes; if Maimonides believes that the hermeneutical key to deciphering scripture is Greco-Arabic philosophy (p. 178); and if everything in revealed religion must accord with reason, either patently or through allegorization, then all that meaningfully remains of religion is in fact the “noble lie” of its political-pedagogical program. According to most exponents of philosophical religion miracles are false; divine interventions in history are false; a responsive affected God who governs the world reactively is false; a God who has attributes and is merciful and compassionate is false; an incarnated divinity is false; a triune God is false; a God who punishes and rewards is false; angels do not exist; revealed law is not the eternal word of God, but is rather historically, anthropologically, and culturally determined; and the prophet might be ultimately inferior to the philosopher. For all intents and purposes religion has disappeared for the elite champions of philosophical religion in the wake of philosophy’s findings According to Maimonides divine providence is a function of intellectual perfection, not religious devotion and observance, while proximity to God is achieved by philosophizing, not by prayer and/or good works. In fact, the three primary formal mandates (mitzvoth) of Jewish religious law codified, not in the Guide, his philosophical magnum opus, but in the Mishneh Torah, his halakhic compendium, or code of Jewish law applicable exclusively to Jews, are identical with philosophical pursuit. First, it is incumbent to know, not believe, the existence of a Primary Existent and its unity, a commandment that can only be fulfilled through the rigorous demonstrative proofs available for it. Secondly, love and fear of God, the next two mitzvoth, can only be accomplished through a philosophical/scientific study of the world. The biblical Genesis account and Ezekiel’s grand vision of God (the Chariot vision) simply convey whatever the physics and metaphysics of the day are. God’s word then can only be judged by the yardstick of philosophy, 104 Book Reviews ultimately rendering God’s word subordinate to man’s. In fact the epiphany at Mount Sinai, the decisive foundational event of Judaism as a religion, where traditionally God’s law was transmitted to Moses including the Ten Commandments, is really an allegory for intellectual enlightenment. What actually occurred was a mass exercise in philosophical contemplation where every individual reasoned his or her way to the knowledge of God’s existence and unity, being universal truths “knowable by human speculation alone.”4 He then delivers the ultimate philosophical coup de grace over religion, in this case Judaism – knowledge of the minutiae of Jewish law and the study of the endless debates in the Jewish oral tradition, the bread and butter of the rabbinic academy ever since the first centuries of the common era, are merely intended to settle the average mind, to placate it, while the elite engage in questions of metaphysics. Taken altogether, these Maimonidean underpinnings of philosophical religion leave us only with Athens as Judaism’s natural locus. Jerusalem exists solely as an imaginary homeland for those incapable of arriving at universal truths through the exercise of reason. Jerusalem becomes the home where the prevailing rule of law is the noble lie, while the ruling classes indulge their philosophical acumen in the hidden Athenian space they have carved out for themselves within the confines of their mosques, cathedrals, and synagogues. Finally we arrive at another major objective of the book, which is to challenge firmly ensconced opinions, and, as the title again, intriguingly and counter-intuitively, suggests, locate Spinoza along a continuum of advocates of philosophical religion. Fraenkel’s argument is essentially that Spinoza’s Theological Political Treatise amounts to a precarious balance of two objectives, the primary one being a philosophical reinterpretation of Christianity. Fraenkel relegates its critique of religion, commonly considered its core project, to a secondary intention, motivated by the defence of freedom of thought and expression against the coercion, censorship, and suppression exercised by state religion (pp. 216–217). Fraenkel corroborates his argument with excerpts from Spinoza’s writings and correspondence prior to embarking on the TTP, which consistently endorse what he calls “dogmatism,” or the enterprise that preceded Spinoza of philosophically reinterpreting religious traditions. Furthermore, Fraenkel argues, Spinoza’s corpus subsequent to the 4 Guide of the Perplexed, trans. and ed. S. Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), II:33, p. 364. Book Reviews 105 TTP continues to struggle with promoting Christianity as the religion best suited for carrying on the banner of philosophical religion. Fraenkel marshals much persuasive evidence in support of Spinoza’s advocacy of philosophical religion and the continuing need for traditional notions of an omnipotent, omniscient God that rewards and punishes in order to keep the non-philosophical masses in line with the dictates of reason. However, he himself admits that it is ultimately inconsistent with Spinoza’s devastating critique of religion and ends his lengthy discussion with an honest expression of exasperation that “in the long run having it both ways proved impossible” (p. 281). In addition, from a substantive point of view, Spinoza, more explicitly in his correspondence and obliquely in his publications, denied Christ so much of his accepted Christian sacred configuration that it is, I believe, impossible to characterize his admiration for Christ as advocacy of Christianity. To begin with, miracles, for Spinoza, are simply infantile perceptions of what really amounts to the natural order. But more than that, Spinoza explicitly states in correspondence with Henry Oldenburg that he has no comprehension of divine incarnation which is no less absurd than a belief that “a circle has taken on the nature of a square.”5 Furthermore the authors of the Gospels were “deceived,” because of their prophetic imagination, into believing that Christ was resurrected.6 Advocating a Christianity that is devoid of any of its fundamental beliefs upon which it stands or falls, and that distinguish it from other religions, is not, as Fraenkel argues, a reinterpretation of Christianity, but rather a subversion of it. If we combine that with Spinoza’s pioneering of a philological-historical approach to the Bible that undermines its integrity and authority as nothing else has, the evidence points to his TTP as an obituary for religion in all its forms, or, at the very least, the spadework for its burial plot. One question remains that Fraenkel does not address, but that I believe is vital to the book’s entire project. It is really an empirical one – what have been the actual practical results of philosophical religions as they were advocated in their respective traditions? Did the political-pedagogical program, as conceived by its advocates, ever actually succeed in its intended goals of shepherding non-philosophers toward a life governed by ethics and 5 Spinoza: The Letters, trans. S. Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), letter 73, p. 333. 6 Ibid., letter 78, p. 348. 106 Book Reviews reason? Returning to one of Fraenkel’s core theses regarding the primary aim of philosophical religion identified at the beginning of this review – was there ever a historical example of a philosophical religion that actually succeeded, even remotely, to “lead all members of the religious community to the highest level of rational autonomy they can attain”? (p. x) The evidence would tend to suggest otherwise. Philosophical religion never really trickled down from its ivory tower practitioners to impact those it was primarily intended to affect. In fact, the Enlightenment did not succeed in overcoming firmly entrenched trends in religion such as literalism, fundamentalism, mystification, and all the associated moral and social ills of misogyny, homophobia, religious supremacism, and conflict, that seem to persist as the order of the day. Recent polls conducted in North America, the home of universal education and scientific progress, consistently show that popular religious beliefs based on literal understandings of scriptures trump rational and empirical evidence to the contrary. What this implies is that those very scriptures and canonical religious texts philosophical religion promotes as conducive to steering people toward “rational autonomy,” are actually instrumental in preventing them from achieving it. Despite any reservations expressed in this review, Fraenkel’s philosophical credentials, linguistic skills, and command of the pertinent sources are impeccably displayed in this book. No research into the phenomenon of philosophical religion can be conducted without resort to it as a seminal study, and no course can be taught that relates to it without including it in its syllabus. Rather than categorically convincing and putting an end to further discussion, Fraenkel’s book achieves something far better. It will compel scholars to reconsider texts over which they have long considered to be in command, and stimulate reasoned and lively debate concerning vital issues that are not simply academic in nature. Fraenkel’s book authentically provokes in every good sense of the word, and is itself worthy of Spinoza’s parting words in the Ethics – “all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” James A. Diamond Joseph & Wolf Lebovic Chair of Jewish Studies University of Waterloo Herzl Institute/Templeton Foundation Fellow