Part Four of a symposium on Rémi Brague’s The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Read Part One. Read Part Two.

Excerpt from Modern Age 50:1 (Winter 2009)

The Law of God’s stunning display of erudition makes many fundamental contributions to illuminating for us the history of human reflection on God, Being, human beings, morality, and politics. My purpose here is limited to employing Brague’s wisdom to highlight the philosophical contribution Christianity has made to our understanding of who we—human individuals or persons—are. My modest contribution is to support the thought so eloquently expressed by the present pope in his Regensburg address: The fundamental tension in Western thought, for philosophic Christians, is not between reason and revelation, but between the impersonal logos described by Aristotle and the personal logos best described by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.

Brague says his book is a philosophical reading of the Bible in the spirit of Machiavelli. He writes neither as a believer nor as a disbeliever, but from the neutral view of observing the effects of belief and disbelief in “the law of God.” The study of the history of ideas shows us the effects of the best books on transformations of moral and political life. It also shows us that the authors of these books have always approached the Bible both with and as the source of philosophical conceptions of both man and God. His study of the Greek and Roman philosophers’ views of the law of God aims to show how they affected the best Christian, Muslim, and Jewish readings of the Bible. For the Christians, the Biblical view of the personal God transformed the philosophical understanding of the human person. For the best medieval Jewish and Muslim thinkers, revelation’s explicit teaching on particular providence had to be transformed rhetorically in light of what they saw as the deep, impersonal truth articulated by classical or un-Biblical or “true” philosophy.

The Athenian Stranger in Plato’s Laws—the classical text about the law of God in the context of legislation in general—endorses a “penal theology” that opposes impiety. The law asserts that gods exist, that they are providential or care for humankind, and that they cannot be corrupted or bribed. But that legal assertion doesn’t correspond to what the philosopher actually believes about either divine reality or personal freedom. For the philosopher, what is most truly divine is what is most true according to nature. That would be the intellect and its ability to apprehend the structure of the physical universe. So the true law of God—the true divine art—is this natural order. The law of God or the true law is nothing more or less than the nature of what is. There is, in truth, no personal God who operates outside the law of nature and is capable of making personal exceptions to that law.

What’s more, in the view of the medieval Muslim and Jewish philosophers, there is no evidence of a God who cares about particular human beings or who providentially secures the ground of human freedom. The idea of divine legislation to support the moral lives of particular men or women—or particular political communities—is a lie, but a lie made necessary by the nature of human beings. But in the best cases, legislation against impiety—which must be enforced by both persuasion and force—can actually be the beginning of the truly persuasive education about the nature of divine law. The human mind can be led to reflect on the limitations of the morality of personal theology and so toward the impersonality of the true or “essential” divinity described by Aristotle. But that discovery by rare philosophic minds can never fundamentally transform the essentially physical necessities that limit the enlightenment of every particular moral/political community.

The difference between the leading Christian thinkers (particularly St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas) and the best of the Jewish and Muslim thinkers (particularly Maimonides) concerns the truth about true or “essential” divinity and so the truth about true or “essential” humanity. Thomas seems to have followed Maimonides in contending that providence pertains to particular human individuals, and not to “humanity” as a species. That means that each human creature exists for his or her own sake, and not merely as part of his or her political community or species. Each of us is an end, not a means, as God Himself is an end and not a means.

For Maimonides, however, the existence of particular human beings—separate and distinguishable individuals—appears to fade away when a man is what he is most truly—what he is “at the level of intellect.” There, individuation no longer exists, and the lawful divinity that characterizes the world is revealed as being for the mind as such. The truth is not for particular beings with names; it is anonymous or not for or about anyone in particular. The close reader of the great Jewish philosopher eventually discovers that “the idea of individual providence, which Maimonides nonetheless claims to defend, remains highly problematic.”

Because particular persons aren’t real in the view of these Muslim and Jewish philosophers, the real source of divine law could not be a person. The content of divine revelation or moral/political legislation depends upon premises about human individuation that don’t correspond to what minds can really know about what, most deeply, man really is. The body, but not the mind, can be subordinated to such law. So the source of the Law is either radically mysterious (and so offensive to the mind) or the product of the will operating in the service of the mind’s freedom. Maimonides says that religion is based on “healthy opinions” and not true faith in God, and the philosopher or free mind, in the best case, determines which opinion—and so what legislation—is healthy according to a truth that has no place for a personal, willful, trans-natural God. By subordinating the will to the mind or to what the mind can know, the philosopher denies that the will—even as a manly assertion—can be a true foundation of personal significance.

Thomas disagrees with Maimonides on the truth we can see with our own eyes about what or, better, who we are. The intellect does not have some abstract existence detached from its existence in a particular individual, and the individual cannot be reduced to mind or body or even some incoherent mixture of the two. There is no intellect, but intellects, and intellects exist only in the context of a uniquely personal reality: “There is no Man, no ‘humanity,’ but a plurality of persons, all of whom are irreplaceable.” Providence must be genuinely particular, because who each of us is cannot be regulated by or reduced to some species-based instinct. We are led to know of God’s personal providence, through the providence each of us can exercise personally in determining how to act freely and rationally in the midst of the complex circumstances and persons we encounter. Thomas defines the law as the providential gift of God to the free and rational beings made in His image. God, in this sense, “wants nothing of us but ourselves”—that we develop or be what we should be “according to our own inner logic.” (This is why Thomas claims that the law is principally concerned with the happiness of each of us, with the movement of each of us toward our shared final end.)

The law is what we follow when we act freely according to what we can really know about our personal beings, which includes our social nature as lovers of particular persons. We follow the law when we act freely according to who we are as knowers and lovers, and all knowers, as persons made in the image of the loving God, are lovable. We know of God’s loving providence, in part, because we can actually share in it. The law is for us what instinct is for all the other creatures, and so the law, properly understood, is the furthest thing from a willful and external imposition on us. The species-based law of nature that governs the whole lives of the other creatures is far from identical to the natural law by which we govern ourselves under God. Following the law of God is acting truthfully, participating in the moral order God has given to creatures who are capable of governing themselves in accordance with their natures as rational and free persons. For the Christians, the law of God is not some revealed, commanded legislation that opposes the truth about our natural inclinations. “Christianity,” the great historian of antiquity Fustel de Coulanges wrote, “is the first religion that did not claim to be the source of the law.” The early Christians surrendered the Jewish idea of revelation and approached the Greek view that natural law and divine law are one and the same. The law of God is the divine, personal wisdom found in the very nature of creation, not some arbitrary exception to what we can know by nature.

For Judaism and Islam, the source of the law is God’s will as expressed in His commandments. For the Christians, revelation is a personal logos. The irreducible mystery for us is the existence in nature of persons, beings who cannot be reduced to the impersonal logoi of either minds or bodies. But it also seems that logos is irreducibly personal; only persons—and not minds or bodies—are open to the truth about all things, including the truth about persons. The most strange and wonderful thing we know is ourselves; the stars and everything else our biologists and physicists describe are boring by comparison. Our eros is, most of all, directed toward persons, and it remains personal when we experience ourselves, most deeply, as who we are. So logos as we actually experience it points us toward the ground of our freedom in being itself, in the creative, providential logos of a person. Revelation must be grounded in the logos of God presenting Himself as He is. For the Christians, the fundamental choice is not between the reason of the liberated mind and willful subordination to divine revelation. It is between the impersonal logos of the philosophers and scientists and the personal logos that does justice to what we can really see about who we are.