Apologia Pro Biblione

To the Christians, the New Testament was (and is) a response to the harsh "justice", if you would so call it, of the Old Testament. The God of Justice was replaced by a God of Compassion. Now I will grant you this -- the interpretation is not valid, it is not particularly fair -- but I am just as disgusted, I must admit, when I hear a blindly pious Jew or Christian or what-have-you extolling the veracity and infallibility of Scriptures as when I hear an atheist attacking and (for this is the best word and the only word I can think of) debauching them. It shows a certain arrogance and assurance in one's own morality and world-view to attack the Scriptures as the documents of barbarians -- the same close-mindedness, in fact, that one displays when he extols them and lauds them as a perfect guide to the living of life.

I preface my own ironic defence of the very books I am questioning by admitting that many of them are not true in the sense of recording factual events. Doubtless there never was a universal flood, it is even likely that Abraham did not exist, and certainly the Exodus from Egypt is not to be regarded in the same way as the Battle of Thermopylae. Nonetheless, since when do we ever admire literature for its assiduous devotion to historical or scientific fact? It remains that Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic History, coupled with the poetry of the Prophets, the Psalms, and at least including the Book of Job, Song of Songs, and Lamentations are masterpieces of world literature and have as much right to a place in the canon as most of the literature from Greek and Roman sources, though of course the virtues of each respective source are different and I think that certain thinkers like Plato and Aristotle are, in their way, better foundations for a humanistic education than the direct and immediate study of the Bible. As for who wrote them, who cares? The writers were skilled, the editors (or as they are called in the scholarly literature, redactors -- I am not ignorant of the origins of the Bible) were ingenious, and they were rightly canonized by those who, finding themselves at the end of a long chain of epic events, a great human legacy, like all survivors sought to make some sense of the fragments that were left -- to compose from the past a new moral order -- in short, to restore civlization by plucking from it the greatest and sweetest of its fruits.

I will say this much in defense of the Bible: when I read it I am constantly inspired, awed, and challenged -- it is an experience in the same way that reading the Iliad is an experience, that listening to Confucius speak is an experience -- neccessary and useful because it allows me to see things in a way I would never have considered them before. Do you think that it is a bizzarre accident of superstition that so much of mankind is held in the thrall of this book, and other books of equal gravity? If the Bible were a knockabout affair, empty and devoid of meaning or value, if it had nothing to say to us, if it were not in its own way a powerfully persuasive (I might even remark the most powerfully persuasive ever written) account of the world, the divine, and history, would it have gained such a great magnitude of followers? You could answer that men's minds are naturally devoid of wisdom and are attracted, like flies, to those things which are most becoming of their character; that this superstition and predisposition to dogma rather than truth, eloquence rather than fact, and rhetoric rather than logic must be severed from the mind in the way that we take pains to separate gold from an alloy; that, in short, the mind must be forged like a weapon against these heresies -- but I am not so skeptical of man's basic devotion to truth and beauty. If the Bible compels our minds, it is because it is a fine piece of work, not because mankind is gullible; it is because we do see in it some spark of truth; because even the basest of characters worship the light of the sun, even if they bow down to the moon. The greatest scholars of all ages, and even ours, as enlightened as it may be, have been tantalized by the majestic obscurity of these books, and one abandons them only with grave error -- if the error is not moral, if Confucius is wrong in saying that there is found in a certain studied manner a zeal for goodness, then certainly it is one of ignorance and misunderstanding: simply put, to abandon the Bible, to learn nothing from it, to overlook it would be as unprofitable as refusing to read the books of the canon altogether and living life without the aid of literature. It can be done, but the products are nothing other than those very qualities, that very ignorance, that you so decry as manifest in these books. And as Jesus says, we should judge the tree by its fruits.

Now a final note about violence and immorality in literature: whose violence, whose immorality? Are you so confident in your ideals that you think that one is only through your knowledge able to embark on the path to goodness? This, I believe, is a conceit as dangerous as anything written in Mein Kompf, and perhaps indicative of the spirit in which that book was written. I have heard devout atheists call Hitler a Christian but I rather agree with those who call him a pagan -- he desired to destroy monotheism, and his first target was the Jews. Now I am not convinced that there is anything in monotheism that is inherently superior and I all too readily understand the ideological implications of calling Hitler a pagan, the position it places the allies in, and so forth, but what I object to is what I believe (if I may here make any comment on history, however humble and plagued with error) was his steadfast devotion to an ideal, a cause: the value of learning is that it shows us the tenuous natures of ideals, that it forces us to question our causes. We would stand alone; to be a philosopher is to be voluntarily in exile; we would attach ourselves, as Nietzsche remarks at least in the Case Against Wagner, not to the transient, but to the eternal, a sentiment echoed by a number of great philosophers stretching well back not to Plato but to Socrates' speech, at the end of his life, on the preference of death to the unexamined life. So thus I object to the self-righteous attitude of so many atheists, who believe that to quote Scripture is to understand it, in the same was as those zealot Christians who live in the Bible Belt that swells every day like a glutton's gut. And consider your position -- if you do not believe in God, if you believe that death is the final passage from life into darkness -- does it then make any whit of a difference if one believes so or not? Leave to the Christians their folly, leave to the Jews their stumbling blocks, and leave to all believers at all times their psychological incapacities; "deinde ut ea in alterum ne dicas quae, cum tibi falso responsa sint, erubescas", so that finally you may not say those things against another which, when falsely attributed to you, make you blush.

The danger is not that people will read or consider the Bible, or even that they will finally deem it a worthy guide in life. And besides, how far different are the strictures of the Bible from those of Aristotle -- there is not such a horrible chasm between Platonism and monotheism that they weren't finally reccomended in the same breath by Augustine (the breath, you might say, of the Holy Spirit), and Aquinas did not consider Aristotle so foreign to the ethical directives of the Church that he couldn't dare to reconcile them, a labor that, were the two really so disjointed and at odds, he never would have even considered, let alone dared to undertake. And yet how many advocates claim everyday, in schools and universities, in private and in public, in the forum and from the court-benches, that to read these great thinkers is to gain access to the seat of moral understanding? The danger is not that we *read* anything (and here I am inclined to agree with those whom I chastised above about the literal nature of the text) -- the danger is that we read it without understanding, without skepticism. Only then are we truly like those who Asaph chastises, who "neither know nor understand; they walk in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken".

I am no theist, but against all the rambling and prevarications of committed atheists everywhere (men, it seems, who have fallen more under the sway of that indelicate Science, wayward daughter of her rightful mother, Sophia), I must say that you yourselves are not philosophers but doctrinaires; Plato made Socrates turn even to the poets for wisdom, when he despised the art as misleading and false -- shall we, then, find nothing of merit in the Bible?