In the invitation to this conference, the organizers pose a question that I believe reflects keen insight into the matter we are discussing: “Could it be inferred that for the good of humanity, monotheistic religions could only become a positive contributing factor to world harmony when they were neutralized through secularization?”

In my view, religious tradition is not in need of being neutralized through secularization. The very concept of the “secular” relies for its plausibility on a dualism of body and soul, of matter and spirit, which cannot ultimately be defended. Take away the insistence that man lives in two distinct worlds—the City of Man and the City of God—and you have neither a divine world accessible through miraculous knowledge, nor a “secular” world that needs to be protected from the divine one that threatens to inundate it at any moment. God’s word is then understood to be immanent within the world, and accessible through reasoned exploration of the teachings of tradition, which seeks the betterment of this world.

I have suggested in these remarks that the rejection of religion as alien to the public life of the modern state is not tenable; that such a view is based on a poor understanding of the history of political ideas, and on a poor understanding of the different possibilities that can inform a religious worldview. But I cannot help feeling that if religion is to take its proper place in political discourse, religious men and women will have need of a humility that has historically proven difficult for them. Treating Scripture as though it is capable of inducing direct revelation in the mind of the reader is not much less dangerous than treating the writings of Marx and Lenin in this same fashion. In either case, the intoxication that comes of believing that one’s mind has been in touch with the Absolute has a distinct tendency to leave men blinded with regard to the public good that is evident before their eyes. And this danger exists in Judaism just as it does in Christianity.

Jewish religion has its own internal methods for coping with this problem. The rabbis had already proscribed political decision-making on the basis of “voices from heaven” two thousand years ago. They insisted that no man may be treated as though he has received the whole truth, as though his own mind can stand in the place of God’s mind. This decisive theological insight is the basis for the rabbinic tradition of toleration of divergent viewpoints, and for the rabbinic institution of rule of the majority opinion in matters requiring communal decision. It means that Judaism is capable of turning its back on the siren song of miraculous knowledge, and entering into reasoned debate with those of other viewpoints, for the betterment of the Jewish people and of humanity. It means that Judaism is, in principle at least, capable of serving as the basis for the life of a free modern state.

With respect to Christianity, the matter is more difficult. The modern state was forged in the midst of a rebellion against Catholicism. At that time, the intellectual and political leaders of this rebellion drank deeply from the Hebrew sources of Christianity—although just how deeply, we do not yet know. The political liberty we so cherish is in part the result of this renewed encounter with the Hebraic political tradition; and it is not necessarily a coincidence that even in the last century, the cause of liberty was at all times strongest in those countries in which Hebraic religion had historically left the deepest impression. If this is so, then the road to a modern Christian state may yet be found to run through a renewed encounter with the political teachings of Israel. Today, this possibility seems remote. But as we have seen, in the history of Western political thought, there is precedent even for this. 

Yoram Hazony is a Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center and a Contributing Editor of Azure. His last book was The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul (Basic Books and The New Republic, 2000). This article was adapted from a lecture delivered before the Third Annual International Worlds Converge Conference on Religion and Humanity held at the Law Society in London on June 22, 2003.

 

 

1. George H. Sabine and Thomas L. Thorson, A History of Political Theory (Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden, 1973), pp. 800, 825, 829-830. There is also a mention of the Jews in the section on Nietzsche, p. 812.

2. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, p. 144.

3. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), p. 97.

4. Wolin, Politics and Vision, p. 96.

5. To back himself up, Wolin is satisfied with citing a single passage in the Bible, Daniel 7:9-27. But compare Micah 4:3-6: “Nation will not lift up sword against nation…. But they will sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and none will make them afraid… for let all people walk everyone in the name of his god, and we will walk in the name of the Eternal our God for ever and ever.”

6. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), pp. 116, 118.

7. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E.S. Haldane (Lincoln: Nebraska, 1995), vol. 1, p. 101.

8. Hegel, Lectures, vol. 3, p. 22.

9. The reliance on Jewish sources in Christian political thought is discussed in Fania Oz-Salzberger, “The Jewish Roots of Western Freedom,” Azure 13 (Summer 2002); Frank E. Manuel, The Broken Staff: Judaism Through Christian Eyes (Cambridge: Harvard, 1992); Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (New York: Knopf, 1987); and in the proceedings of “Political Hebraism: Sources in Early Modern Political Thought,” a conference held in Jerusalem under the auspices of the Shalem Center, August 23-26, 2004.

10. My dating refers to the reliance on Jewish sources in European thought. In America, overtly Hebraic political thinking seems to have been acceptable until much later.

11. Petrus Cunaeus, The Hebrew Republic, trans. Peter Wyetzner (Jerusalem: Shalem Press, 2005).

12. Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1997), especially chs. 1-3.

13. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson (New York: Penguin, 1968), pp. 409-715.

14. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1970), pp. 141-264.

15. Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1979), chs. 4-6, esp. pp. 101, 132, 139.

16. Gottfried Leibniz, “Opinions on the Principles of Pufendorf” (1706), in Leibniz,Political Writings, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1988), p. 66, cited in Oz-Salzberger, “The Jewish Roots of Western Freedom.”

17. This passage begins: “Such an enumeration of religious sects as has just been given should mention a strain of English opinion which was bred in opposition to all of them, but more especially to the pretensions of Presbyterianism…. John Selden may be taken as representing it.” Sabine, A History of Political Theory, p. 415.

18. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan,trans. Yosef Or (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1962) [Hebrew]; John Locke, On Government: Second Treatise, trans. Yosef Or (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1948). [Hebrew]

19. Matthew 22:21.

20. John 18:36.

21. Numbers Rabba 13; Eruvin 13b; Gitin 6b.

22. Bava Metzia 59b.

23. For a discussion of religion in the writings of Hobbes and Locke, see A.P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1992); Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002).