Enlightenment and Its Discontents

The Beginning of Wisdom
by Leon R. Kass, M.D., Ph.D.

(Page 2 of 3)

None of this is exactly news. We are often told that we live in secular, even postmodern, times. The old pieties, not only about God or morality but even about truth itself, no longer command our unqualified allegiance. We are too sophisticated to believe in the existence of absolute right and wrong or to make confident moral judgments. We are too worldly to submit to the genius of tradition. We are too enamored of our rights to take our bearings from what were once thought to be our duties. With science and technology pointing the way, the race for health, pleasure, and prosperity is rapidly becoming the only successful game in town.

Such, at least, is the conventional wisdom about life in the modern world, at least in the liberal democracies of the West. But this view of contemporary life must contend with certain inconvenient facts, both about our culture as a whole and about individual private life. Yes, science and technology have unquestionably yielded vast improvements in human life and will no doubt continue to do so. And modern freedom-loving political regimes friendly to scientific inquiry and technological innovation have liberated large parts of the globe from despotism and enabled a growing fraction of the human race to feel secure in life and liberty and to enjoy the pursuit of happiness. Yet we have lost our naïveté regarding the moral innocence and neutrality of technology. More important, the cultural victory of a science-based Enlightenment has proved to be but a partial success. For it has in practice and in principle weakened the moral ground — both philosophical and biblical — upon which progress was to be made. We have been increasingly deprived of firm confidence in any moral standard by which we could judge whether change was for the better or for the worse. The prominence of agnosticism, moral relativism, cynicism, and nihilism is only the most visible intellectual sign of our cultural moral predicament, a predicament made all the more worrisome given our ever-expanding technological powers to transform the globe, our own hearts and minds included. As we stand on the threshold of a new biotechnological age, armed with powers for genetic, somatic, and psychic human engineering, we feel — or should feel — the deep cultural weakness beneath our superficial technical strength. From where, precisely, are we to seek — never mind find — the wisdom we so badly need, if we are to use well and for good our awesome Promethean powers?

Few people, I admit, are personally concerned with such abstract and global concerns. But many people — including many young people, often the children of skeptics — are existentially unwilling to let science or postmodernity have the last word about the kind of world this is. For their own private existential reasons, they are looking for wisdom in their personal lives. Paradoxically, our secular society seems to be stimulating a reawakening of religious sensibilities and aspirations. In recent years, interest in religion has increased greatly in American society, and not only among evangelical Protestants, traditional Roman Catholics, Orthodox Jews, practicing Muslims, and similar denominations whose traditions continue to remain strong. Unaffiliated students on college campuses are flocking to courses on religious themes and texts, looking for meaning and "spirituality." Sometimes they are led to so-called New Age religions, but often they return to examine or practice the venerable traditions of their ancestors. Adult Bible study groups are springing up across the country even among the previously indifferent, and new English translations of, and commentaries on, the Bible are produced seemingly every year. Not long ago public television aired a ten-part series of serious discussions of the book of Genesis. More and more Americans are owning up to the fact that something is missing in their lives. More and more of us are looking for spiritual direction and guidance. It seems like only yesterday that the Enlightenment overthrew the rule of religious orthodoxy, promising an earthly paradise of human fulfillment based solely on scientific reason. Yet today, the enlightened children of skeptics are discovering for themselves that man does not live — or live well — by bread alone, not even by bread and circuses, and that science's account of human life and the world is neither adequate to the subject nor satisfying to the longings of the soul.

Both the moral crisis of modern thought and the public and personal need for wisdom make urgent a reconsideration of our present beliefs and opinions and recommend a reexamination of seemingly rejected or abandoned alternatives — to be sure, considered afresh in the light of modern thought and its challenges. Friends of wisdom today must be willing to seek help from wherever it may be found. This includes, too, undertaking a serious reexamination of the Bible, considered in the light of modern science. How much damage does science — and modern thought generally — really do to the biblical teachings about human life and the human good? Can a thoughtful person today still accept or affirm the teachings of the Bible? The answer to these questions depends, of course, on what the Bible in fact says and means. On a matter of such importance, we dare not rely on hearsay. We must read it and think about it for ourselves.

Beginning(s)

The best place to start is at the beginning, with the first book of the Bible. This book, known to us as Genesis, is famously a book about beginnings: the beginning of the heavens and the earth; the beginning of human life on earth; the beginning of the Children of Israel, beginning with Father Abraham; and before, behind, and above all these temporal beginnings, the tireless and enduring beginning that is God — Creator of the world, maker of man in His own image, covenant maker with Abraham and with Israel. In addition, as a book among kindred books, Genesis is itself the beginning of the Torah, of the biblical teaching about how human beings are to live. Though it contains very little prescription and propounds very few commandments, Genesis serves as a prelude to the laws (given mainly in Exodus and Leviticus, and repeated in Deuteronomy). This it does primarily by making clear through its stories why the laws might be needed and for what sorts of human weaknesses and difficulties. For this reason especially the book of Genesis lends itself to philosophical reading, at least at the start.

True, once Abraham appears on the scene in Genesis 12, the Bible's account of "human history" acquires a unique and singular particularity, with a portion of the human race living in a special relationship with the biblical God. Such a teaching could neither be discovered nor even be countenanced by unaided philosophic reason. But the so-called universal human history of the first eleven chapters — from the creation to the tower of Babel — is different.

To be sure, these stories also describe singular figures and unique events, for example, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood. But read philosophically, they convey a universal teaching about "human nature," an anthropology in the original meaning of the term: a logos (account) of anthropos (the human being). Without using argument or philosophical language — there is no biblical Hebrew word for "nature" — the stories of these first eleven chapters nevertheless offer (among other things) a coherent anthropology that rivals anything produced by the great philosophers. To see this, we must learn to read the beginning of Genesis as offering a more than historical sense of "beginning."

On the face of it, the early chapters of Genesis appear to give an account of humankind's temporal beginnings, a history that tells the sequence of what happened at the start: first the creation of the world and humankind; then the expulsion of man and woman from Eden; then Cain and Abel; then events leading up to the flood, and so on. But these seemingly historical stories are in fact (also and especially) vehicles for conveying the timeless psychic and social elements or principles — the anthropological beginnings or roots — of human life, and in all their moral ambiguity. The stories cast powerful light, for example, on the problematic character of human reason, speech, freedom, sexual desire, the love of the beautiful, shame, guilt, anger, and man's response to mortality. The stories cast equally powerful light on the naturally vexed relations between man and woman, brother and brother, father and son, neighbor and neighbor, stranger and stranger, man and God. Adam and Eve are not just the first but also the paradigmatic man and woman. Cain and Abel are paradigmatic brothers. Babel is the quintessential city. By means of such paradigmatic stories, the beginning of Genesis shows us not so much what happened as what always happens. And by holding up a mirror in which we readers can discover in ourselves the reasons why human life is so bittersweet and why uninstructed human beings generally get it wrong, Genesis reflectively read also provides a powerful pedagogical beginning for the moral and spiritual education of the reader. As a result of what we learn from this early education, when God calls Abraham in Genesis 12 we will also be inclined to pay attention.

The educational lessons of the beginning are supplemented by the rest of the book. After the first eleven chapters expose some of the enduring psychic and social obstacles to decent and righteous living, the rest of Genesis presents beginning efforts to overcome these obstacles in the lives of the Israelite founders Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their families. These national beginnings are fraught with difficulties and success is hard to come by. Yet remarkably, a new human way of acting and standing in the world is established and transmitted for several generations through the education of the patriarchs, an education in which we readers may vicariously and reflectively participate.

Genesis is thus in many different ways about "what is first." It tells of the temporally first men ("history"). But more important, it shows us what is first in man, what is primordial, elemental, principal, and essential ("anthropology"). It also invites reflection on what is cosmically first and how human beings stand in relation to the whole ("ontology'), as well as on who acts well and who acts badly, who is worthy of praise and who of blame, and why ("ethics"). It introduces us to the seeds of a new nation, following a new and God-fearing way, a way that will eventually be codified in law and transmitted through political institutions and religious-cultural traditions ("politics"). And by confronting us with all these firsts, in the form of stories told with very little commentary, it begins the education of the reader who is seeking wisdom not only about what is first but also and especially about how first or best to live ("philosophy"). What I am suggesting is that Genesis is a coherent narrative that conveys a moral whole, in which the opening part prepares the philosophic reader to take seriously, when it comes, the arrival of God's new way for humankind, while the rest enables him to learn along with the patriarchs what it might offer and require of him.

A full defense of this unusual claim cannot be provided in advance; evidence regarding Genesis's narrative, moral, and pedagogical integrity can be obtained only through careful scrutiny of the entire text. But I hope that it will not spoil the reader's pleasure of discovery if I provide here a few suggestions about the overall structure and direction of the narrative, indicating also what I take to be its central concerns.

Genesis begins with a comprehensive and universal panorama of the entire cosmic whole (chapter 1), moves to naturalistic and universal portraits of human life (chapters 2-11), and concludes with the emergence of a tiny and distinctive people, bearing a new and distinctive human way on earth (chapters 12-50). Throughout, the text is concerned with this question: Is it possible to find, institute, and preserve a way of life, responsive to both the promise and the peril of the human creature, that accords with man's true standing in the world and that serves to perfect his god-like possibilities?

In the opening chapter of Genesis, we learn how cosmic order is produced out of primordial chaos by means of a progressive process of separation and distinction. At the peak of creation stands man, the one god-like creature, alone capable, thanks to his reason, of recognizing the distinctive articulated order of things. But as we learn, beginning in Genesis 2, man is also the creature — again, thanks to his reason and freedom — who is most capable of disturbing and destroying order, especially as pride in his own powers distorts his perception of the world. In a series of tales — from the primordial couple in the Garden of Eden, through the fratricide of Cain and the warring Age of Heroes leading to the Flood, to the ambitious building of the universal city of Babel — readers are shown the dangerous natural tendencies of humankind: on the one hand, toward order-destroying wildness and violence, on the other hand, toward order-transforming efforts at self-sufficiency and mastery of the given world. Against the aspiration toward man-made unity and re-creation, with its proud illusion of human autonomy, the text begins (in chapter 12) to recount a new human alternative, carried by a separated small portion of humankind yet ordered in pursuit of wholeness and holiness. The new way accepts as given the heterogeneous world of distinctive peoples but seeks to cultivate attitudes that will treat strangers justly, generously, and, ultimately, as one would treat oneself. And it recognizes human dependence on powers not of our own making and the need to align human life with the highest principle of Being. In a word, the new human way — the way of the Children of Israel, launched as a light unto the nations — is to be built on two related principles: the practice of righteousness in relations toward others, informed by the pursuit of holiness in relation to the divine. Both are grounded not in human reason or freedom but in the peculiarly human experience of awe and reverence, elicited by the mysteries of the world's order and power and especially by the voice of commanding moral authority.

Beginning with the call of Abraham (Genesis 12), the text enables us to experience the struggles to embody the ideals of righteousness and holiness in the way of life of a nascent people — beginning with one man, the founder (Abraham), moving to one household of perpetuation (Isaac and Rebekah), and flowering into one clan or tribe, on the threshold of nationhood (Jacob and his sons). Each generation faces and solves the perennial threats to survival and decency, including the intrafamilial dangers of patricide, fratricide, and incest, the international dangers of conquest, injustice, and assimilation, and the spiritual danger of idolatry. Through their trials — domestic, political, and spiritual — Abraham (the founder) and Isaac, Jacob, and Judah (the perpetuators) are educated to the work of proper patriarchy, all in the service of advancing the cause of righteousness and holiness in the world. ("The Education of the Fathers" would be a most appropriate subtitle for the book of Genesis; it was, in fact, the working title under which I first began this book.)

Yet although the focus of Genesis often centers on the household, its most important implications are cultural and political. For the new way is set off against, and can best be seen as an alternative to, important competing cultural alternatives: the heaven-gazing and heaven-worshiping Babylonians, the earth-worshiping and licentious Canaanites, and the technologically sophisticated and masterful Egyptians. As Abraham must emerge out of and against the ways of Babylonia, so the nation of Israel must emerge out of and against the ways of Egypt. Accordingly, Genesis culminates in an encounter between nascent Israel and civilized Egypt, exemplified especially in the contrast between Judah, the prudent and reverent statesman, and Joseph, the brilliant and cosmopolitan administrator. Although the full picture will not emerge until the book of Exodus, which follows next, Genesis leaves us with these clear alternatives, which represent in fact a permanent human choice: a world in which the rational mastery of nature and the pursuit of immortality leads ultimately to the enslavement of mankind under the despotic rule of one man worshiped as a god, versus a way of life in which all human beings, mindful of their limitations and standing in awe-and-fear of the Lord, can be treated as equal creatures, equally servants of the one God toward whose perfection we may strive to align our lives.

Copyright © 2003 by Leon R. Kass, M.D.

About the Author

Leon R. Kass is the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of Chicago and Hertog Fellow in Social Thought at the American Enterprise Institute. Currently Chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, he is the author of three books, most recently Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics, and coauthor of two more. He lives in Washington, D.C., and Chicago.