Wisdom in Classical and Biblical

Tradition Michael C. Legaspi

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Title Pages

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Page 2 of 2
Preface

reaches, and its highest ambitions. In other words, it is fitting to inquire into its
wisdom.

(p.x) I did not get very far in this endeavor before realizing that the traditional
pursuit of wisdom took its distinctive shape, to a great degree, from ideas and
perspectives identified with classical and biblical texts. Though the pairing of
classical and biblical is a familiar one, a common trope in the study of Western
civilization, it nevertheless bears asking why the two were held together over
time in the way that they were. It may have been a historical accident, but it was
not a historical necessity. A new look at old texts that have gone into the making
of this remarkable synthesis shows that there is more to the pairing than simple,
culturally expedient correlation. There is a deep affinity between the two, a
tensive and dynamic relation that resists easy characterization. To describe them
as opposites in a binary relation or as twins sharing a single view of the world
would be to misrepresent what is certainly a richer and more complicated
reality. I believe it is better to construe the relation dialectically and to try to
hear in a fresh way some of the voices that animated the ancient conversation.
Accordingly, the book aims more at thematic exposition than critical analysis
(though the latter is, to some extent, unavoidable). The goal here is not to offer
an apology for classical and biblical tradition as much as to understand its
beginnings and in doing so to shed light on its spectral presence in modern
culture. Related to this goal is the belief that it is possible (and valuable) to
understand the tradition in terms of certain moral, intellectual, and religious
aspirations. Others are surely more qualified than I am to describe the social,
political, and material conditions for the development of a classical-biblical
cultural synthesis in late antiquity. Instead of pursuing that kind of history, I
have sought to present the tradition, one might say, ideologically—that is, in
terms of what important texts and figures tell us about distinctive ways of
looking at the world. Whether or not this is itself a wise undertaking, it is
nevertheless the goal of this book.

I first began looking into wisdom some years ago as a researcher for the
Defining Wisdom project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation and hosted
at the University of Chicago. I gratefully acknowledge the support of this
initiative and the opportunity to think with others about the concept of wisdom
and its contemporary relevance. More recently, I benefited from support from
Eric Hayot and the Center for Humanities and Information at Penn State
University. They too have my sincere thanks. The University provided me with
time and resources to work on the manuscript at various points over the last
three years. I thank the College of Liberal Arts, the Department of Classics and
Ancient Mediterranean Studies, and the Jewish Studies Program at Penn State
for making my work possible. I would also like to thank Penn State colleagues
for their help with various aspects of this project. (p.xi) Mark Munn took an
interest in my work and cotaught a course with me on wisdom in the ancient
world, an experience that proved very helpful. Aaron Rubin generously provided
Page 2 of 3
Preface

help with philological and linguistic questions, despite a cordial and refreshing
indifference to the formal study of wisdom. I thank Daniel Falk, Jonathan
Brockopp, Mark Sentesy, Christopher Moore, and John Jasso for their collegiality
and help in thinking about many things pertaining to the study of wisdom.
Colleagues at other institutions have also provided help, encouragement, and
opportunities to discuss and present aspects of this work. I thank Ann Blair,
Rusty Reno, Walter Moberly, Janet Soskice, Will Kynes, Jennie Grillo, Michael
Azar, and Darren Sarisky, as well as Gabriele Boccaccini and the Enoch Seminar.
I owe my interest in the book of Job largely to Peter Machinist and the
opportunity to serve as a teaching fellow for his legendary course on Job and the
Joban tradition at Harvard. For this formative experience and much more, he has
my deepest gratitude. Tom Hodgson contributed more to this study than he
knows. Four years at his side taught me much about goodness, knowledge, and
intellectual midwifery. He is living proof that Socratic wisdom exists today. I
would also like to thank Cynthia Read at Oxford University Press once again for
interest in and support of this work. The anonymous readers whom she found for
the manuscript provided me with many helpful criticisms and suggestions, which
I have incorporated into the present version. They too have my thanks.

Finally, I would like to thank my family. I am grateful to my parents, Luciano and

Candelaria Legaspi, and to my father-in-law and mother-in-law, Bryan and Becci
Crist, for unfailing love and innumerable kindnesses. Though research and
writing exert a constant pull on my time and energies, I hope my children know
that I would rather be with them than at my desk. They are a constant source of
joy and satisfaction. The four of them correspond (perhaps not coincidentally) to
my fourfold definition of wisdom: Josiah who considers the cosmic, Olivia whose
work gives form to the metaphysical, Ana who embodies the ethical, and Cato
who thrives on the social. They have my love and gratitude. My wife, Abby, has
seen this entire project grow from a fleeting thought in 2007 to a fleeting
volume many years later. I thank her for her patience, encouragement, love, and
support throughout this period and in the many happy years leading up to it. She
has done me the great honor of believing in me and in my work. Through Abby I
came to know and admire her grandmother, Lois Crist, whose long and beautiful
life remains a stronger testimony to wisdom than anything I will ever do or
write. This book is dedicated, with love and appreciation, to her memory. May it
be eternal. (p.xii)

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Page 3 of 3
Introduction

everything else such that “all” can be named in the singular: the cosmos, the
world, the universe. What makes wisdom a difficult thing, however, is that the
scope and nature of this totality are elusive. We have a difficult time articulating
what unites the disparate realms of human concern that correspond to aspects
of life in the world. We find it hard to say, for example, what exactly holds
intellectual insight and moral commitment together, what (if anything) ties the
pursuit of individual happiness to forms of religious satisfaction, and what
consequences scientific knowledge of the world ought to have for specific ethical
deliberations. Given this uncertainty, it is not surprising that wisdom is a word
very often held in construct with nouns having to do with seeking: thus, the
“search for wisdom,” the “quest for wisdom,” or the “pursuit of wisdom.”

Wisdom in the Western intellectual tradition contains two elements. It includes

the belief that life in the world is, in some sense, a meaningful totality. That the
word “wisdom” has taken on a somewhat antique, musty air in modern culture is
perhaps one index of the decline in our collective (p.2) ability and willingness
to articulate the wholeness of understanding to which wisdom classically
aspires. Yet whether wisdom is named or not, the contemporary search for
meaningful connection between deeply held beliefs and hard-won knowledge, or
between questions of social and political order and fundamental moral
commitments, indicates that something of the old quest for wisdom is still with
us. Whether one considers the allure that a “theory of everything” has for
modern physicists, or whether one regards William Butler Yeats’s dark
premonition that the cultural “centre cannot hold,” one sees that the specter of
unitary thinking haunts the modern moral and scientific imaginations. Second,
wisdom as we commonly conceive it concerns action as well as belief. It is
animated specifically by the notion that life’s meaning can be sought and (at
least partially) discerned by humans who pursue it correctly. Once gained,
wisdom functions as a guide for living well and preserving the good life over
time. It is thus not surprising that modern environmental movements, for
example, have found wisdom language to be congenial to the cultivation and
promotion of “sustainable” forms of life.

Despite the fact that wisdom remains an influential cultural component, we are
uncertain about what it is and how it works. We are unsure, too, whether (or to
what extent) advocating a coherent intellectual-ethical program—a particular
path to wisdom—might be incompatible with contemporary religious, cultural,
and philosophical pluralisms. As the epigraph from Cicero shows, uncertainty,
perplexity, and even an aversion to wisdom are not specifically modern attitudes.
Doubts and questions surrounding wisdom are not entirely new. In order to shed
light on these and other questions, it is necessary to see that wisdom has a
history. To a great degree, our notions of wisdom are inherited ones, imprinted,
as it were, by earlier attempts to frame the pursuits of knowledge, goodness,
and happiness as a single, unitary endeavor. Historical perspective brings
wisdom into view as a cultural attitude that is intellectually fruitful and ethically
Page 2 of 17
Introduction

compelling; yet it also shows that the pursuit of wisdom, for all of its appeal, was
also attended by many of the epistemological and moral difficulties familiar to
contemporary wisdom-seekers.

This book, then, is a study of wisdom that offers precisely this sort of historical
perspective. It begins with the recognition that the roots of modern culture lie in
ancient soil and, more specifically, in the dialectical relation between the
legacies of ancient Greek civilization on the one hand and theological
perspectives based on the Jewish and Christian scriptures on the other. Later
periods—the late antique, medieval, and early modern—attest to the (p.3) fact
that, despite essential differences, Greek philosophy and biblical interpretation
formed a lasting cultural synthesis. Part of what made this synthesis possible
was a shared outlook, a common aspiration toward wholeness of understanding
that refuses to separate knowledge from goodness, piety from prosperity, virtue
from happiness, cosmos from polis, divine authority from human responsibility.
As that which names this wholeness, wisdom features prominently in both
classical and biblical literatures as an ultimate good. If the “classical” and the
“biblical” are indeed the “twin pillars” of Western culture as is commonly
claimed, then wisdom is the subject and inspiration of the relief sculpture on the
great frieze supported by the two. This book considers the basic elements of the
composition we find there; it proposes to examine texts and figures that mark
out its most salient features.

In doing so, this book enters a long-standing conversation about various aspects
of the classical-biblical dialectic in Western culture. In many of the older
treatments, the dialectic is characterized as an essentially competitive one. One
of the more famous examples of this attitude is Matthew Arnold’s essay Culture
and Anarchy, which appeared in 1869. Arnold writes of “Hebraism” and
“Hellenism,” noting that they represent two fundamental human orientations
and yet have the same “final aim,” namely, “man’s perfection or salvation.”1
What interests Arnold, though, is the fact that they present two alternative ways
to reach this end. Arnold’s essay is an ode to the redemptive powers of
Hellenism, its ability to embrace the full range of human abilities and thereby
overcome the coarseness and narrowness of a society oriented primarily toward
moral duty and a Hebraic “strictness of conscience.” With its love of reason and
beauty, its “sweetness and light,” Hellenism perfects Hebraism by investing life
“with a kind of aerial ease, clearness, and radiancy.”2 Arnold’s essay is a work of
cultural criticism for which “Hebraism” and “Hellenism” were useful rhetorical
devices, but even scholarly treatments have been animated by a sense that the
classical and the biblical stood in a competitive relation to one another. Two
works bearing the same title, Christianity and Classical Culture, illustrate the
point.3 The first, a masterful study of the first four centuries of the Common Era
by Charles Norris Cochrane (1957), is a historical account of the vicissitudes of
the Christian church under Roman rule and in the decades following the
conversion of Constantine. For Cochrane, the rise of the Roman Empire is
Page 3 of 17
Introduction

essentially a prelude to the triumph of the church. The empire that Augustus
built is answered—and surpassed—by the kingdom that Augustine proclaims.
The second is a work based on the Gifford Lectures presented by Jaroslav
Pelikan at Aberdeen (1993). Responding to the observation that the “Christian
(p.4) East” has no Augustine of its own, no singular “theological-philosophical
genius” of virtuosic rank in the fourth century, Pelikan proposes to treat the
Cappadocian fathers as an eastern analogue to Augustine.4 And just as
Cochrane’s Augustine clinches the triumph of Christianity over pagan Rome, the
Cappadocians carry off a successful transformation, a “metamorphosis” of
natural theology in the Greek philosophical tradition. The rivalry of Christianity
and classical culture, though more muted in Pelikan’s work, is nevertheless
structurally significant.

In other works, however, one observes a rather different orientation. One

striking feature of some of the more recent treatments is the emphasis placed
not on a rivalry between the two but on what the two have in common. Attention
paid to concepts, vocabulary, and perspectives in both classical and biblical
sources brings them into view as distinctive voices, certainly, but also as voices
within a single, shared cultural discourse. Why similarities have become salient
in this way is difficult to say, but it may have something to do with our cultural
position. Just as neighboring objects seem closer and more similar to one
another the farther one moves away from them, so too do the ancient
components of Western thought seem to us closer to one another and more alike
the more distant we, as denizens of late- or post-modern culture, find ourselves
from them. The pairing of classical and biblical is no longer fraught in the way
that it was for those who viewed the two-sided tradition as presenting, in some
sense, a set of live intellectual-ethical options. In older discussions of the
classical and the biblical, as I have suggested, authors were much more sensitive
to the contest of traditions, such that the choice between them seemed to be the
central matter of concern. But some of the more recent treatments suggest that
the significant contrast lies not between the classical and the biblical but
between the classical-biblical and the modern.

For Christine Hayes, author of What’s Divine about Divine Law?, the classical
and the biblical, taken together, structure and furnish an intellectual
“inheritance” at the foundation of modern, Western debates concerning the
nature and purpose of law.5 At the center of this inheritance is what Hayes
characterizes as an opposition between a Greek conception of divine law—
rational, truthful, universal, unchanging—and the biblical understanding of
divine law as something rooted in God’s will, subject to written form, and
“expressed in history rather than nature.”6 Over the course of the book, Hayes
provides a rich and detailed map of “discourses” that address features of divine
and human law in Greek, Roman, and biblical sources. Using these discourses as
points of reference, Hayes explains how essential differences among Jewish
interpreters like Philo, Paul, and the rabbis are ultimately intelligible in terms
Page 4 of 17
Introduction

(p.5) of the ways that each individual or group, aware of classical discourses,
articulated the divinity or humanity of the Mosaic Torah. If one takes Hayes’s
firm distinction between classical and biblical attitudes toward law in heuristic
rather than strictly historical (or historiographic) terms, then the book offers, I
believe, valuable insight into the ways that bearers of the biblical tradition
exploited and responded to the tensive, binary character of law in the ancient
world. The result, in each case, is a creative understanding of biblical law that
not only is intelligible in “classical” categories but, as Hayes shows, is capable of
challenging the very categories themselves. In this way, Hayes’s work opens a
window on the internal dynamics of the classical-biblical tradition, through
which parallel modern debates may also be fruitfully regarded. Though Hayes
indeed poses a distinction between the classical and the biblical, she does so,
specifically, in view of the fact that modern debates about law form the
counterpart or continuation of a coherent, ancient discussion of law.

Recent works by Dariusz Karłowicz and Yoram Hazony argue in a similar vein
that classical and the biblical authors are better understood in dialogue with one
another, as participants in a common conversation rather than as
representatives of irreconcilable personalities. In Socrates and Other Saints,
Karłowicz argues that, despite reputations as champions of faith, Christian
apologists like Tertullian never repudiated reason. They may have criticized
philosophy, but “the relationship of Christianity to philosophy, and its relation to
reason, are two entirely different things.”7 And provided one understands
philosophy expansively, in Pierre Hadot’s sense, as a way of life rather than just
a system of beliefs, one sees that pagan philosophers and their Christian
counterparts relied on both faith and reason. Both groups insisted on the “need
for conversion and spiritual transformation,” and both sought ways to order
“lives, desires, habits, and limitations so that the act of conversion [would] last”
and become a “stable disposition” of body and spirit.8 The classical and the
biblical thus aim at the same thing, albeit in different ways. By titling his book
The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, Hazony signals his claim that the Hebrew
Bible deserves to be read in the way that ancient Greek texts are typically read:
as works addressing the human capacity for reason rather than as a revelation
that offers “miraculous knowledge” and “requires the suspension of the normal
operation of our mental faculties.”9 In a programmatic, wide-ranging analysis of
texts in the Hebrew Bible, Hazony argues that a putative reason-revelation
distinction is alien to the Hebrew Bible (but, he argues, one nevertheless
appropriate to the attitudes of Christians like Paul and Tertullian) and that the
Hebrew scriptures should therefore be taken seriously as an internally diverse
anthology engaging perennial questions in ethics, (p.6) political philosophy,
epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. Hazony is not so much
concerned to articulate a single and singular perspective (the philosophy of the
Hebrew Bible) as to vindicate the Hebrew Bible’s character as an assemblage of
genuinely philosophical writings (the philosophy contained in the Hebrew Bible).

Page 5 of 17
Introduction

According to Hazony, the polarities that we use to organize the foundational

texts of Western culture—revelation versus reason, faith versus reason, religious
versus secular—have prevented the Hebrew Bible from receiving its due as a
serious contributor to our intellectual heritage. In this way, Hazony, like
Karłowicz, attempts to soften the line between the classical and the biblical by
assimilating the biblical, in important ways, to what we traditionally identify and
prize within the classical.

For Rémi Brague, the coherence of ancient thought is not discerned primarily in
its continuity with modern culture; its coherence is seen rather in its capacity to
offer an alternative to it. In his stimulating book The Wisdom of the World,
Brague turns to classical and biblical sources.10 He explicates their shared
interest in cosmology in order to demonstrate the impoverishment of modern
moral thought, which has severed the connection between human experience of
the world and the wisdom by which humans live. To the ancients, the connection
was strong and generative; to moderns, the nature both of the world and of
human situatedness within it bears no connection to human moral aspiration.
Brague charts the development of ancient and medieval understandings of the
cosmos and the crucial roles that various cosmologies played in larger ethical
and intellectual programs. Brague identifies in ancient thought four distinct
ways of relating a particular cosmology to the wisdom by which humans, in light
of this cosmology, are obligated to conduct their lives: the Platonic, the
atomistic, the Abrahamic, and the Gnostic. Despite the fact that the four differ
from one another in essential ways, Brague maintains that they “form a system”
in which “the intrinsic ontological value of the world” is the touchstone for
ethics and philosophical anthropology.11 This is, for Brague, an important
observation precisely because modern culture, by contrast, draws no connection
between moral philosophy and cosmic understanding; thus, “an entire aspect of
man—namely, his presence in the world—remains lacking in ethical
relevance . . . we can no longer determine what relationship there is between
ethics and the fact that man is in the world.”12 Brague argues that modern
refusal to acknowledge a “given” world ultimately dehumanizes us, giving rise at
various points to an “outrageous idealism,” to perilous revolutionary and
totalitarian schemes that consider natural limits to be “unbearable,” and to
moral philosophy that turns human beings into denuded, Kantian rational agents
or bare instances of Heideggerian Dasein.13 (p.7) In offering a “wisdom of the
world,” Brague argues, the ancients offered a wisdom that, in being more
worldly, was, at the same time, more human as well.

Of the works surveyed here, this book is most similar to Brague’s. Though it
does not lay special emphasis on cosmology in the way that Brague’s work does,
it resembles Brague’s in marking a contrast between the holism of ancient
wisdom and the atomisms of modern thought. Some, however, may argue that
the attempt to place the classical and the biblical together under a single
“ancient” umbrella is wrongheaded. One recent work, for example, argues
Page 6 of 17
Introduction

against a synthetic understanding of ancient schools of thought.14 Whereas

Brague sees a fruitful contrast between ancient and modern thought, Kavin
Rowe is provoked by a different (though related) disjunction, one that ultimately
prompts him to reject as futile all attempts to synthesize the classical and the
biblical. In doing so, Rowe takes a highly principled stand not only against
classical-biblical commonality as such but also against a mode of scholarship,
rooted in the Enlightenment, that places commonalities (and differences) within
the framework of an objective, progressively expanding, encyclopedic knowledge
of human cultures. According to Rowe, who relies here on the work of Alasdair
MacIntyre, the modern encyclopedic endeavor reflects the conceit that
individuals who possess “the translucifying power of scholarly reason” can
produce general knowledge about ancient religions and philosophies while
abstaining from the conflicts about which they write.15 Despite the fact that the
positivistic model of scholarly objectivity on which encyclopedic inquiry is based
has long since been discredited, Rowe argues, scholars continue to treat ancient
cultures, philosophies, and religions as sources of data to fill out purportedly
universal categories. What this approach to the ancient world fails to recognize
is that particular practices and beliefs coinhere within distinctive forms of life,
according to distinctive, historically situated rationalities. In sharp contrast to
encyclopedic inquiry, then, Rowe endorses a form of understanding that
acknowledges the deep incommensurability of ways of life, respecting them as
“rival traditions” that make exclusive claims on people’s loyalties. Each tradition
is “an existentially structuring pattern, a trajectory of living the one and only life
we can live in the midst of time.”16 One does not understand traditions, then, by
eliciting from them formal answers to generic questions that one poses to them
second- or third-hand. Traditions are wagers that one chooses to make with
one’s “one and only life.” To the extent that Christianity, for example, demands
one’s whole life, it is the one who wagers Christianly who understands what the
Christian wager is, what it ultimately involves.

(p.8) By speaking of early Christianity and stoicism as rival traditions in this

specific sense, Rowe does justice to a key feature of many religions or
philosophies in the ancient world: namely, the exclusive claim to truth. Rowe’s
argument ought to give pause to anyone seeking to arrange ancient traditions on
a smorgasbord for modern intellectual or cultural consumption. For when
traditions appear in that setting or in that form, they do so only as scholarly
objects and not, as proponents of the tradition insist they are, serious calls to
change one’s life. Because scholarly analysis does not engage Stoicism or
Christianity as a summons to a different kind of life, it runs, in a sense,
perpendicular to them. Scholars create from living traditions lifeless facsimiles
that are useful, perhaps, in the modern project of cultural replenishment but
unhelpful in coming to terms with traditions as they understand and present
themselves. As Rowe demonstrates, the knowledge that one gains from them
apart from personal commitment is not enhanced by “objectivity” but rather

Page 7 of 17
Introduction

distorted by it. This is because the disengaged knower is forced to make sense of
things that are fully intelligible only and precisely when one is existentially
engaged with that tradition. As Stephen Prickett has astutely noted, “to study
any tradition is inevitably to place oneself in relation to it.”17 In my judgment,
Rowe is correct to criticize studies of ancient religion or philosophy that take for
granted what the ancients themselves denied: namely, that knowledge may be
separated from life. To the extent that lived traditions unify all that we associate
with them, any attempt to isolate elements of traditions and equate them with
other things (in order to argue for historical influence, for example, or to
demonstrate a certain conceptual identity) risks distortion and superficiality.

As cogent as Rowe’s criticism is on this score, matters become more difficult

when we consider what, in Rowe’s treatment, counts as a tradition. Following
MacIntyre, Rowe defines a tradition (or tradition of inquiry) as a “morally
grained, historically situated rationality, a way of asking and answering
questions that is inescapably tied to the inculcation of habits in the life of the
knower and to the community that originates and stewards the craft of inquiry
through time.” Christianity and Stoicism, he adds, qualify as “traditions” in this
sense.18 The trouble comes in specifying the scope of a tradition so defined. With
some two thousand years of history and over two billion living adherents,
Christianity, for example, surely contains within it forms of life that have
functioned or continue to function as discrete, irreducible traditions. The long
history of Christian conflict and division today and in the past bears witness to
this. To point this out is not to deny that Christianity counts as a tradition but to
raise the possibility that the concept of tradition is, so to speak, scalable; it is to
suggest that traditions may exist (p.9) within larger traditionary
configurations. Put differently, to use the lens of “tradition,” one must still
decide at what level of magnification, wide-angle, close-up, or something in
between, to focus the lens. Employed at a certain distance—in Rowe’s case,
certain parts of the Roman Empire in the decades spanning the first and second
centuries—the lens of tradition indeed brings Christianity and Stoicism into
focus as “rivals.” But it is possible, in my view, to “zoom out” and discern the
parameters of a larger tradition that includes, among other things, the study,
preservation, and intensive reading of both classical and biblical texts over
several centuries. Western intellectual culture from Socrates to Aquinas, as both
MacIntyre and Rowe allow, constituted a tradition.19 From the late antique to
the early modern period, Western societies played host to a classical-biblical
tradition of inquiry that was indeed morally grained, historically situated, tied to
personal virtue, identified with intellectual craft, and carefully stewarded over
time.20 Though it is beyond the scope of this book to chart the later history of
this tradition, it will suffice to note that cultural ideals connected to the study of
old texts retain at least a vestigial presence in the modern academy.21 It is the
persistence of this Western intellectual tradition, I believe, that makes it possible
to understand the classical and the biblical in meaningful relation to one

Page 8 of 17
Introduction

another. It is also what enables Rowe, a Christian, to write insightfully and

reliably about Stoicism. If tradition indeed worked in the inflexible and atomistic
way that Rowe argues it does, he would have nothing valuable to say about
Stoicism. Consistency demands this conclusion, and Rowe indeed offers the startling
confession that he is “unable to understand certain Stoic things—perhaps even
central patterns of reasoning” because he is “a Christian who reads as a
Christian.”22 Yet, in spite of this intellectually honest concession, it is clear that
Rowe understands Stoicism well enough at least to discuss it as a rival tradition
to Christianity (or else the central argument of his book fails). It is precisely
because modern scholarship is part of a tradition that bears the imprint of
sustained engagement with the classical and the biblical together that Rowe and
others are able to address contemporary questions to ancient texts in this way.

The tradition in view in this book, then, is one at the roots of Western intellectual
culture. It is a two-sided tradition staked on Greek civilization on the one hand
and Judaism and Christianity on the other. That there are, in fact, more than two
“sides” or traditionary streams within the larger set of developments designated
by the term “Western thought” or “Western culture” is, I think, obvious. “Two-
sidedness,” then, is not a bare factual description of texts from the ancient
Mediterranean world but a specific, deliberate (p.10) way of organizing them.
The terms I use here to indicate two-sidedness, namely, “classical” and
“biblical,” are not neutral, self-evident designations. Rather, they are words that
reflect long and complex processes of canon formation and cultural
consolidation that stretch from Greece’s classical period to the era of the
Hellenistic kingdoms and into the Roman imperial age, late antiquity, the Middle
Ages, and beyond. To a significant degree, the meanings of “classical” and
“biblical” remain fluid, problematic, and opaque even today.23 It also bears
remembering that the dualism arises primarily from the “Jerusalem” side of
Tertullian’s Athens-Jerusalem binary. That is, the dualism reflects the
perspective of early Jews and Christians, for whom pagan writings constituted a
kind of problematic, theological “other” outside the bounds of God’s covenantal
dealings with Israel and (secondarily) with the lowly and despised people who
first received the Christian message.24 The dialectic, first visible in the writings
of (Alexandrian) Hellenistic Jews like Aristobulus, Philo, and the author of the
Letter of Aristeas, took on a new form in the work of second-century Christian
apologists like Tertullian and Justin Martyr. It featured prominently in the
thought of Augustine in the fourth century and was formalized into a classical-
biblical educational program by Boethius in the declining days of the western
Roman Empire. A slightly later figure, Cassiodorus, famously referred in 580 to
the combination of classical learning and Christian theology as a single “braid”
woven from ancient tradition.25 Guy Stroumsa offers a similar image when he
refers to the intertwining of biblical writings (the Old and New Testaments) and
the remnants of Greek and Latin culture in late antiquity as a “double helix” at
the core of “European medieval and early modern culture.”26

Page 9 of 17
Introduction

That there is sufficient historical warrant for speaking of a “classical and biblical
tradition” is, I hope, clear. To the extent that it is indeed a tradition, Rowe’s
observations concerning the incommensurability of traditions are pertinent. A
tradition, he argues, is a whole-life proposition, an entire “pattern of being in the
world” that is “to be taken whole or not at all.”27 What Rowe does not explain is
how he (or MacIntyre) has come to understand that this is in fact what a
tradition is. If there is indeed no Archimedean point from which to describe
cultural phenomena in encyclopedic fashion, no single, self-evident rationality by
which to understand life and thought, then all analytic categories—including the
category of “tradition”—must come from somewhere. In other words, Rowe’s
concept of tradition is not a given. I propose that Rowe’s way of thinking about
Christianity and Stoicism as traditions is itself the product of tradition. More
specifically, it is a way of thinking about human ethical and intellectual life that
has come down to us as a legacy, very (p.11) specifically, of the two-sided
classical-biblical discourse. To study the history of Greek philosophy or the rich
variety of Judaisms in the Second Temple period is to understand that there
were a number of competing proposals for how people ought to live their lives.
Yet it is also to see that what allows discrete ways of life to rival or compete with
one another is that each vies to occupy the same existential space in the life of
the individual and the community. Proposals are incommensurable. The
important point here, though, is that the incommensurability of proposals
presupposes formal similarity (a common shape) at the same time that it
manifests material differences (disagreements about how to fill the shape in). To
see one’s whole life as a response to a whole-life proposition and to live
according to an irreducible set of beliefs, practices, and dispositions that
corresponds to one’s rightful place in the world—these are customary
expectations that give traditions within the larger classical and biblical tradition
their basic form.

This is where wisdom comes in. In seeking to identify the correct “pattern of
being in the world” or the ideal “trajectory of living the one and only life we can
live,” classical and biblical authors did not aim at “tradition.” They aimed at
wisdom. Wisdom thus names the coherence by which human life is best lived.
Accordingly, this book has two central aims. The first is to explain in formal
terms what wisdom is. As I have intimated, what makes wisdom difficult to
analyze is its scope. Though it involves matters of practical judgment affecting
the life of the individual and the social sphere, it has also been identified with an
understanding of the world and of ultimate realities that frame, direct, and give
meaning to human thought and action. In addition to knowing what to do, the
wise person also knows why a specific course of action ultimately makes moral
and rational sense, why it “fits” the particular world that we inhabit. What I
propose, then, is to explain how, in its traditional form, wisdom was understood
to unify and govern a variety of endeavors: intellectual, social, and ethical. Put in
slightly different terms, wisdom is a program for human flourishing that is

Page 10 of 17
Introduction

ordered to a holistic, authoritative account of reality in its metaphysical, cosmic,

political, and ethical dimensions. Equipped with a four-dimensional account of
the form of wisdom, I pursue a second aim: to examine, in a substantive way,
figures and texts that have yielded and shaped the traditional understanding of
wisdom. To the extent that this book offers something distinctive, it does so by
using this formal description of wisdom to illuminate the discourse at the heart
of the classical-biblical dialectic in Western culture.

Homer, the subject of chapter 1, is the starting point. The writings of Homer
were an important source of wisdom in antiquity. This chapter (p.12) examines
books 1 and 2 of the Iliad and significant portions of the Odyssey with a view to
understanding how the epics’ presentation of heroes ultimately portrays wisdom
as something by which character, intellect, and piety are coordinated to yield a
worthy, satisfying form of life. In chapter 2, I turn to the Hebrew Bible.
Alongside the Homeric corpus, the Hebrew Bible must be counted as a
foundational anthology in the history of wisdom. This chapter looks specifically
at Genesis 1–3, select portions of Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes in order to show
how wisdom in the Bible is explicated as a guide to life that, in light of historical
and existential realities, replaces knowledge as the most appropriate form of
human understanding. Chapter 3 takes up the book of Job. This chapter offers a
fresh reading of Job, arguing that personal integrity (Heb. tummah) and cosmic
“fit” are crucial to the book’s distinctive presentation of wisdom. What emerges
from this reading of Job is a profound vindication of piety, subjectivity, and
personhood as components of wisdom. Socrates, the greatest exemplar of
wisdom in classical antiquity, is the subject of chapter 4. This chapter examines a
selection of Platonic dialogues (Ion, Euthyphro, Apology, Gorgias) and argues
that the famous “negative” understanding of wisdom identified with Socrates
(i.e., wisdom is knowing that one does not know) should be understood with
reference to Socrates’s particular notion of piety, such that wisdom is staked (as
in Job’s case) on a form of integrity that allows humans to withstand insuperable
deficiencies in knowledge.

Chapter 5 begins with a concise summary of wisdom as presented in the writings

of Plato and Aristotle. Their influential writings on wisdom connected it to
knowledge and virtue in ways that biblical writings did not, yet, as this chapter
shows, their emphasis on wisdom as a form of ruling knowledge encouraged
later figures like Theophrastus and Hecataeus of Abdera to “nationalize”
wisdom, to treat it as something that belongs not only to individuals but also to
cultures, societies, and groups of people such as the Jews. Chapter 6 turns to
Hellenistic Jewish writings. Jewish writers appropriated the Greek wisdom
discourse in new attempts to explain and commend the Jewish way of life. This
chapter examines the fragmentary writings of Aristobulus and what became the
period’s most influential text, the Wisdom of Solomon. It argues (against certain
scholarly opinions) that Aristobulus and the author of the Wisdom of Solomon
did not “Hellenize” Judaism by making it “universal”; they claimed instead that
Page 11 of 17
Introduction

Judaism was the fulfillment of Greek attitudes already attuned to the pious and
nationally particular character of wisdom. Chapter 7 turns, finally, to Christian
tradition and the texts of the New Testament. In contrast to familiar treatments
of New Testament wisdom that focus on attempts by New Testament authors (p.
13) to portray Jesus as the embodiment of wisdom, this chapter focuses on the
prominence of the newly formed Christian collective as the venue for a kind of
antiwisdom that unifies human and divine life in ways that are opposed but
analogous to earlier classical and biblical versions of wisdom. The conclusion
draws together the various portraits of wisdom presented in the book’s seven
main chapters, revisits the distinction between classical and biblical, and
considers briefly the modern legacy of wisdom’s textual foundations.

Classical and biblical authors attempted to coordinate wisdom’s four realms of

concern. That they did this in diverse ways virtually goes without saying. The
book surveys a range of wisdom accounts arising from foundational texts that
extend in time from the period of Homer to the destruction of the Second
Temple. Surveys of this type must strike a balance between schematization and
exposition. When overdone, schematization creates frameworks or taxonomies
marked by artificiality and oversimplification. On the other hand, some
schematization is necessary to prevent the exposition of texts from degenerating
into a pointless restatement of their contents. In addition to the fourfold
definition of wisdom provided above, the book attends to a set of common
themes that give wisdom in classical and biblical tradition a distinctive shape:
(1) holism, or the refusal to isolate knowledge from life; (2) personhood as an
achievement marked by integrity, self-mastery, rationality, and responsibility; (3)
metaphysical vulnerability as the inescapable condition out of which wisdom
arises; (4) wisdom as a counterpart to knowledge, especially when knowledge is
unavailable; (5) wisdom as something that is socially distributed and nationally
particular; (6) happiness or blessedness as the aim of a wise life; and (7) the
central importance of piety to wisdom. Though I have applied a formal definition
of wisdom to both classical and biblical texts and noted some themes common to
both, I do not seek to harmonize them. That is, I do not mean to say that both
sides of the tradition ultimately converge on a single, substantive account of
wisdom. Nor am I arguing that one can pare away superficial differences and
arrive at a single essential wisdom at the core of classical and biblical texts.
Rowe’s points about the incommensurability of discrete traditions are well
taken. For instance, with reference to the theme of “piety” noted above, it is
important to respect the fact that the same word can denote different things for
different authors. Theos meant something quite different to Paul and to Aristotle.
The fact that they both use this word does not mean that one is safe in
identifying Aristotle’s conception of divinity (or piety) with Paul’s. On the other
hand, the use of similar (Greek) vocabulary—not only with respect to God but
also to a larger set of philosophical considerations related to wisdom—is not a
(p.14) trivial phenomenon. Though I believe that harmonization is

Page 12 of 17
Introduction

wrongheaded, I maintain that the distinctive and incommensurable forms of life

that make up the larger “classical and biblical” category can nevertheless be
lived by adherents in ways that evince shared, formal characteristics: in this
case, the identification of wisdom with knowledge of what properly belongs to
the divine realm. Moreover, the historical career of these “braided” traditions
shows that they were often upheld and preserved self-consciously, that is, in full
awareness of a similar but different “other.” This awareness is the source of a
creative tension that is resolved in ways that ultimately furnish the materials of
the classical and biblical tradition.

The themes listed above are not found equally or in all chapters; others not
listed above also emerge within specific discussions. In this book, I have adopted
an approach that tilts more toward the expositional than the schematic. Though
I have sought to keep the formal characteristics and thematic elements of
wisdom in constant view, I also thought it important and necessary to allow the
overall thrust of ancient works to shape an understanding of their contributions
to the broader classical-biblical wisdom discourse. My method, then, has been to
select texts and figures that have been influential in the development of wisdom
thought and then to discuss these in ways that evince their central themes,
rather than attend narrowly to features that correspond to a preconceived
notion of what does and does not belong to wisdom. Though tightly controlled
forms of analysis can be valuable, there is also something to be said for a more
capacious, expositional approach that trusts the reader to see important
connections. In the case of something as large and labile as wisdom, an
expositional approach that respects the rich and diverse backgrounds for
ancient portrayals of wisdom seemed appropriate.

The durable, synthetic character of wisdom as something that belongs, in

modern retrospective, both to “Athens” and to “Jerusalem” warrants a very
specific type of treatment. Academic convention generally requires scholars to
restrict their work to specialized topics. Such a narrowing facilitates
thoroughness and comprehensiveness. In this case, though, the cost of
restricting a study of wisdom to a smaller range of materials is a loss of the
broader perspective demanded by wisdom itself. To understand how one text
portrays wisdom, it is necessary to recreate the larger context in which such a
portrait became culturally useful. To focus only on “Athens” or only on
“Jerusalem” would be to reproduce existing approaches and miss the dynamism,
the two-sidedness, inherent in Western culture’s distinctive pursuit of wisdom.
For this reason, this book is a deliberately capacious inquiry into the topic of
wisdom. Though it attends to terminological issues involved in discussions of (p.
15) wisdom, it is not merely a lexicographic study, one organized around a
particular wisdom word or set of words. The noun sophia (or sophiē), for
example, appears only once in Homer’s epics (Il. 15.412) and not at all in the
Gospel of John or in the Greek version of Genesis 1–3. Yet there is no denying
the importance of these texts for the study of wisdom in Western thought. Thus,
Page 13 of 17
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wall which we cannot scale if we would. Its very height is tempting,
but there is no rose-garden beyond it—only a bleak plain with the
sea of time gnawing its dreary shores.
To be old and to know ten thousand things—there is something
august and majestic in the thought; but to be young and ignorant, to
see yesterday pass, a shining ripple on the flood of oblivion, and
then to buckle down to the day’s business,—there’s a better thing
than being old and wise! We are forever praising the unconscious
ease of great literature; and that ease—typical of the life and time
reflected—was a thing of the day, with no yesterdays’ dead weight
dragging it down. Whitman’s charm for those of us who like him lies
in the fact that he doesn’t invite us to a rummage sale of cast-off
raiment, but offers fabrics that are fresh and in new patterns. We
have all known that same impatience of the past that he voices so
stridently. The world is as new to him as it was to Isaiah or Homer.
“When I heard the learned astronomer,
When the proofs and figures were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and
measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture room,
How soon, unaccountably, I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”
The old doctor can name all the stars without a telescope, but he
does not know that in joy they “perform their shining.” The real note
in life is experiment and quest, and we are detached far more than
we realize from what was and concerned with what is and may be.
There is a delightful comedy,—long popular in England and known in
America, in which a Martian appears on earth to teach Dickens-like
lessons of unselfishness to men. Since witnessing it, I have often
indulged in speculations as to the sensations of a pilgrim who might
wing his way from another star to this earth, losing in the transition
all knowledge of his own past—and come freshly upon our world and
its achievements, beholding man at his best and worst without any
knowledge whatever of our history or of the evolution through which
we have become what we are. There you would have a critic who
could view our world with fresh eyes. What we were yesterday would
mean nothing to him, and what we are to-day he might judge
honestly from a standpoint of utility or beauty. Not what was old or
new, but what was good, would interest him—not whether our morals
are better than those of our ancestors, but whether they are of any
use at all. The croaking plaint of Not-What-It-Used-To-Be, the
sanguine It-Will-Come-In-Time, would have no meaning for such a
judge.
“And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also; knowing that
tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and
experience, hope.”
The conjunction of these last words is happy. Verily in experience
lies our hope. In learning what to do and what not to do, in stumbling,
falling to rise again and faring ever upward and onward. Yes, in and
through experience lies our hope, but not, O brother, a wisdom
gained vicariously,—not yours for me nor mine for you,—nor from
enduring books, charm they never so wisely,—but every one of us,
old and young, for himself.
Literature is rich in advice that is utterly worthless. Life’s “Book of
Don’ts” is only read for the footnotes that explain why particular
“don’ts” failed,—it has become in reality the “Book of Don’ts that
Did.” It is pleasant to remember that the gentle Autocrat, a man of
science as well as of letters, did not allow professional courtesy to
stand in the way of a characteristic fling at Doctor Experience. He
goes, in his contempt, to the stupid creatures of the barnyard, and
points in high disdain to “that solemn fowl, Experience, who,
according to my observation, cackles oftener than she drops real live
eggs.”
If the old doctor were to be taken at his own valuation and we should
be disposed to profit by his teachings, our lives would be a dreary
round; and youth, particularly, would find the ginger savorless in the
jar and the ale stale in the pot. I saw my venerable friend walking
abroad the other day in the flowered dressing-gown which he so
much affects, wearing his familiar classroom smile. I heard him
warning a boy, who was hammering a boat together out of
wretchedly flimsy material, that his argosy would never float; but the
next day I saw the young Columbus faring forth, with his coat for sail,
and saw him turn the bend in the creek safely and steer beyond “the
gray Azores” of his dreams.
The young admiral cannot escape the perils of the deep, and like St.
Paul he will know shipwreck before his marine career is ended; but
why discourage him? Not the doctor’s hapless adventures, but the
lad’s own are going to make a man of him. I know a town where,
thirty years ago, an afternoon newspaper failed about once every six
months. There was, so the wiseacres affirmed, no manner of use in
trying it again. But a tow-headed boy put his small patrimony into a
venture, reinforced it with vigorous independence and integrity, and
made it a source of profit to himself and a valued agent in the
community. In twenty years the property sold for a million dollars.
Greatness, I assure Septimus, consists in achieving the impossible.
“Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleachèd garden, watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.”
The season is at hand when Time throws his annual challenge in our
teeth. The bell tinkles peremptorily and a calendar is thrust upon us.
November is still young when we are dragged upon the threshold of
another year. The leisurely dismissal of the old year is no longer
possible; we may indulge in no lingering good-bye, but the old fellow
hustles out in haste, with apologetic, shrinking step and we slam the
door upon him. It is off with the old love and on with the new,
whether we will or no. I solemnly protest against the invasion of the
calendar. In an age that boasts of freedom, I rebel against a tyrant
who comes merely to warn us of the fugitive character of Time; for
that sharp elbow in the ribs has prodded many a noble soul to his
death. These pretty devices that we are asked to hang upon our
walls are the seductive advertisements of an insinuating and
implacable foe. We are asked to be particeps criminis in his hideous
trade, for must I not tear off and cast as rubbish to the void a day, a
week, a month, that I may not have done with at all? Why, may I ask,
should I throw my yesterdays into the waste-basket? Yet if I fail,
falling only a few leaves behind, is not my shameless inefficiency
and heedlessness paraded before the world? How often have I
delivered myself up to my enemies by suffering April to laugh her
girlish laughter through torrid July? I know well the insinuating smile
of the friend who, dropping in on a peaceful morning, when Time, as
far as I am concerned, has paused in the hay-field to dream upon his
scythe handle, walks coolly to the calendar and brings me up to date
with a fine air of rebuke, as though he were conferring the greatest
favor in the world. I am sure that I should have no standing with my
neighbors if they knew that I rarely wind my watch and that the
clocks in my house, save one or two that are kept going merely to
avoid explanations, are never wound.
There is a gentle irony in the fact that the most insolent dispensers of
calendars are the life insurance companies. It is a legitimate part of
their nefarious game: you and I are their natural prey, and if they can
accent for us the mortality of the flesh by holding up before us, in
compact form, the slight round of the year, they are doing much to
impress upon us the appalling brevity of our most reasonable
expectancy. How weak we are to suffer the intimidation of these
soulless corporations, who thrust their wares upon us as much as to
say, “Here’s a new year, and you’d better make the most of it, for
there’s no saying when you will get another.” You, my friend, with
your combined calendar and memorandum always before you, may
pledge all your to-morrows if you will; but as for me the Hypocritic
Days, the Barefoot Dervishes, may ring my bell until they exhaust
the battery without gaining a single hour as my grudging alms.
We are all prone to be cowards, and to bend before the tyrant whose
banner is spread victoriously on all our walls. Poets and
philosophers aid and abet him; the preachers are forever telling us
what a dreadful fellow he is, and warning us that if we don’t get on
the good side of him we are lost forever,—mere wreckage on a grim,
inhospitable shore. Hypocrisy and false oaths are born of such
teaching. Januarius, let us remember, was two-faced, and it has
come about naturally that New Year’s oaths carry a reserve. They
are not, in fact, serious obligations. It is a poor soul that sets apart a
certain number of days for rectitude, and I can’t for the life of me see
anything noble in making a constable of the calendar. I find with joy
that I am freeing myself of the tyrant’s thrall. I am never quite sure of
the day of the week; I date my letters yesterday or to-morrow with
equal indifference. June usually thrusts her roses into my windows
before I change the year in dating my letters. The magazines seem
leagued with the calendar for man’s undoing. I sometimes rush
home from an inspection of a magazine counter in mad haste to get
where Oblivion cannot stretch forth a long, lean arm and pluck me
into the eternal shades; for I decline with all the strength of my crude
Western nature, to countenance the manufacture of yesterdays, no
matter how cheerful they may be, out of my confident to-morrows. A
March magazine flung into the teeth of a February blizzard does not
fool the daffodils a particle. This stamping of months that have not
arrived upon our current literature is nothing more or less than
counterfeiting;—or rather, the issuing of false currency by the old
Tyrant who stands behind the counter of the Bank of Time. And there
is the railway time-table,—the unconscious comic utterance of the
Zeitgeist! If the 12.59 is one minute or one hour late, who cares, I
wonder? Who am I, pray, that I should stuff my pocket with calendars
and time-tables? Why not throw the charts to the fishes and let the
winds have their will with us awhile! Let us, I beg, leave some little
margin in our lives for the shock of surprise!
The Daughters of Time are charming young persons, and they may
offer me all the bread, kingdoms, stars they like; but they must cheer
up or keep out of my front yard! No shuffling around, like Barefoot
Dervishes; but in golden sandals let them come, and I will kindle a
fire of next year’s calendars in their honor. When the snows weigh
heavily upon the hills, let us not mourn for yesterday or waste time in
idle speculations at the fireside, but address ourselves manfully to
the hour’s business. And as some of the phrases of Horace’s ode to
Thaliarchus rap for attention in an old file box at the back of my
head, I set down a pleasant rendering of them by Mr. Charles
Edmund Merrill, Jr.
“To-morrow? Shall the fleeting years
Abide our questioning? They go
All heedless of our hopes and fears.
To-morrow? ’Tis not ours to know
That we again shall see the flowers.
To-morrow is the gods’, but oh,
To-day is ours.”
We all salute heartily and sincerely the “grandeur and exquisiteness”
of old age. It is not because Doctor Experience is old that we distrust
his judgment; it is not his judgment that we distrust half so much as
his facts. They are good, as facts go, but we are all foreordained and
predestined to reap our own crop. He need not take the trouble to
nail his sign, “No thoroughfare,” on the highways that have perplexed
him, for we, too, must stray into the brambles and stumble at the
ford. It is decreed that we sail without those old charts of his, and we
drop our signal-books and barometer overboard without a qualm.
The reefs change with every tide, adding zest to our adventure; and
while the gulfs may wash us down, there’s always the chance that, in
our own way and after much anxious and stupid sailing, we may
ground our barnacled hulks on the golden sands of the Happy Isles.
Our blood cries for the open sea or the long white road, and
“Rare the moment and exceeding fleet
When the spring sunlight, tremulous and thin,
Makes glad the pulses with tumultuous beat
For meadows never won nor wandered in.”
Should Smith go to Church?
 Should Smith go to Church?
I THINK he should. Moreover, I think I should set Smith an example
by placing myself on Sunday morning in a pew from which he may
observe me at my devotions. Smith and I attended the same Sunday
school when we were boys, and remained for church afterwards as a
matter of course. Smith now spends his Sunday mornings golfing, or
pottering about his garden, or in his club or office, and after the
midday meal he takes a nap and loads his family into a motor for a
flight countryward. It must be understood that I do not offer myself as
a pattern for Smith. While I resent being classified with the lost
sheep, I am, nevertheless, a restless member of the flock, prone to
leap the wall and wander. Smith is the best of fellows,—an average
twentieth-century American, diligent in business, a kind husband and
father, and in politics anxious to vote for what he believes to be the
best interests of the country.
In the community where we were reared it was not respectable not to
go to church. I remember distinctly that in my boyhood people who
were not affiliated with some church were looked upon as lawless
pariahs. An infidel was a marked man: one used to be visible in the
streets I frequented, and I never passed him without a thrill of horror.
Our city was long known as “a poor theatre town,” where only Booth
in Hamlet and Jefferson in Rip might be patronized by church-going
people who valued their reputations. Yet in the same community no
reproach attaches to-day to the non-church-going citizen. A majority
of the men I know best, in cities large and small, do not go to church.
Most of them are in nowise antagonistic to religion; they are merely
indifferent. Clearly, there must be some reason for this change. It is
inconceivable that men would lightly put from them the faith of their
fathers through which they are promised redemption from sin and
everlasting life.
Now and then I hear it asserted that the church is not losing its hold
upon the people. Many clergymen and laymen resent the oft-
repeated statement that we Americans are not as deeply swayed by
religion as in other times; but this seems to me a case of whistling
through a graveyard on a dark night.
A recent essayist,[1] writing defensively of the church, cries, in effect,
that it is moving toward the light; don’t shoot! He declares that no
one who has not contributed something toward the solution of the
church’s problem has earned the right to criticize. I am unable to
sympathize with this reasoning. The church is either the repository of
the Christian religion on earth, the divinely inspired and blessed
tabernacle of the faith of Christ, or it is a stupendous fraud. There is
no sound reason why the church should not be required to give an
account of its stewardship. If it no longer attracts men and women in
our strenuous and impatient America, then it is manifestly unjust to
deny to outsiders the right of criticism. Smith is far from being a fool,
and if by his test of “What’s in it for me?” he finds the church
wanting, it is, as he would say, “up to the church” to expend some of
its energy in proving that there is a good deal in it for him. It is unfair
to say to Smith, who has utterly lost touch with the church, that
before he is qualified to criticize the ways and the manners of
churches he must renew an allegiance which he was far too
intelligent and conscientious to sever without cause.
Nor can I justly be denied the right of criticism because my own
ardor is diminished, and I am frequently conscious of a distinct
lukewarmness. I confess to a persistent need in my own life for the
support, the stimulus, the hope, that is inherent in the teachings of
Christianity; nevertheless the church—that is to say, the
Protestantism with which I am familiar—has seemed to me
increasingly a wholly inadequate medium for communicating to men
such as Smith and myself the help and inspiration of the vision of
Christ. There are far too many Smiths who do not care particularly
whether the churches prosper or die. And I urge that Smith is worthy
of the church’s best consideration. Even if the ninety-and-nine were
snugly housed in the fold, Smith’s soul is still worth the saving.
“I don’t want to go no furder
Than my Testyment fer that.”
Yet Smith doesn’t care a farthing about the state of his soul. Nothing,
in fact, interests him less. Smith’s wife had been “brought up in the
church,” but after her marriage she displayed Smith to the eyes of
the congregation for a few Easter Sundays and then gave him up.
However, their children attend Sunday school of a denomination
other than that in which the Smiths were reared, and Smith gives
money to several churches; he declares that he believes churches
are a good thing, and he will do almost anything for a church but
attend its services. What he really means to say is that he thinks the
church is a good thing for Jones and me, but that, as for himself, he
gets on comfortably without it.
And the great danger both to the church and to Smith lies in the fact
that he does apparently get on so comfortably without it!

I
My personal experiences of religion and of churches have been
rather varied, and while they present nothing unusual, I shall refer to
them as my justification for venturing to speak to my text at all. I was
baptized in the Episcopal Church in infancy, but in about my tenth
year I began to gain some knowledge of other Protestant churches.
One of my grandfathers had been in turn Methodist and
Presbyterian, and I “joined” the latter church in my youth. Becoming
later a communicant of the Episcopal Church, I was at intervals a
vestryman and a delegate to councils, and for twenty years attended
services with a regularity that strikes me as rather admirable in the
retrospect.
As a boy I was taken to many “revivals” under a variety of
denominational auspices, and later, as a newspaper reporter, I was
frequently assigned to conferences and evangelistic meetings. I
made my first “hit” as a reporter by my vivacious accounts of the
performances of a “trance” revivalist, who operated in a skating-rink
in my town. There was something indescribably “woozy” in those
cataleptic manifestations in the bare, ill-lighted hall. I even recall
vividly the bump of the mourners’ heads as they struck the floor,
while the evangelist moved among the benches haranguing the
crowd. Somewhat earlier I used to delight in the calisthenic
performances of a “boy preacher” who ranged my part of the world.
His physical activities were as astonishing as his volubility. At the
high moment of his discourse he would take a flying leap from the
platform to the covered marble baptismal font. He wore pumps for
greater ease in these flights, and would run the length of the church
with astonishing nimbleness, across the backs of the seats over the
heads of the kneeling congregation. I often listened with delicious
horripilations to the most startling of this evangelist’s perorations, in
which he described the coming of the Pale Rider. It was a
shuddersome thing. The horror of it, and the wailing and crying it
evoked, come back to me after thirty years.
The visit of an evangelist used to be an important event in my town;
converts were objects of awed attention, particularly in the case of
notorious hardened sinners whose repentance awakened the
greatest public interest and sympathy. Now that we have passed the
quarter-million mark, revivals cause less stir, for evangelists of the
more militant, spectacular type seem to avoid the larger cities. Those
who have never observed the effect of a religious revival upon a
community not too large or too callous to be shaken by it have no
idea of the power exerted by the popular evangelist. It is commonly
said that these visits only temporarily arrest the march of sin; that
after a brief experience of godly life the converts quickly relapse; but
I believe that these strident trumpetings of the ram’s horn are not
without their salutary effect. The saloons, for a time at least, find
fewer customers; the forces of decency are strengthened, and the
churches usually gain in membership. Most of us prefer our religion
without taint of melodrama, but it is far from my purpose to asperse
any method or agency that may win men to better ways of life.
At one time and another I seem to have read a good deal on various
aspects of religion. Newman and the Tractarians interested me
immensely. I purchased all of Newman’s writings, and made a
collection of his photographs, several of which gaze at me, a little
mournfully and rebukingly, as I write; for presently I took a cold
plunge into Matthew Arnold, and Rome ceased to call me. Arnold’s
writings on religious subjects have been obscured by the growing
reputation of his poetry; but it was only yesterday that “Literature and
Dogma” and “God and the Bible” enjoyed great vogue. He translated
continental criticism into terms that made it accessible to laymen,
and encouraged liberal thought. He undoubtedly helped many to a
new orientation in matters of faith.
My reading in church history, dogma, and criticism has been about
that of the average layman. I have enjoyed following the experiments
of the psychical researchers, and have been a diligent student of the
proceedings of heresy trials. The Andover case and the Briggs
controversy once seemed important, and they doubtless were, but
they established nothing of value. The churches are warier of heresy
trials than they were; and in this connection I hold that a clergyman
who entertains an honest doubt as to the virgin birth or the
resurrection may still be a faithful servant of Jesus Christ. To unfrock
him merely arouses controversy, and draws attention to questions
that can never be absolutely determined by any additional evidence
likely to be adduced. The continuance in the ministry of a doubter on
such points becomes a question of taste which I admit to be
debatable; but where, as has happened once in late years, the
culprit was an earnest and sincere doer of Christianity’s appointed
tasks, his conviction served no purpose beyond arousing a species
of cynical enjoyment in the bosom of Smith, and of smug satisfaction
in those who righteously flung a well-meaning man to the lions.
Far more serious are the difficulties of those ministers of every
shade of faith who find themselves curbed and more or less openly
threatened for courageously attacking evils they find at their own
doors by those responsible for the conditions they assail. Only
recently two or three cases have come to my attention of clergymen
who had awakened hostility in their congregations by their zeal in
social service. The loyal support of such men by their fellows seems
to me far nobler than the pursuit of heretics. The Smiths of our
country have learned to admire courage in their politics, and there is
no reason for believing that they will not rally to a religion that
practices it undauntedly. Christ, of all things, was no coward.
There is, I believe, nowhere manifest at this time, within the larger
Protestant bodies at least, any disposition to defend the inerrancy of
the Bible, and this is fortunate in that it leaves the churches free to
deal with more vital matters. It seems fair to assume that criticism
has spent its force, and done its worst. The spirit of the Bible has not
been harmed by it. The reliance of the Hebrews on the beneficence
of Jehovah, the testimony of Jesus to the enduring worth of charity,
mercy, and love, have in nowise been injured by textual criticism.
The Old Testament, fancifully imagined as the Word of God given by
dictation to specially chosen amanuenses, appeals to me no more
strongly than a Bible recognized as the vision of brooding spirits,
who, in a time when the world was young, and earth was nearer
heaven than now, were conscious of longings and dreams that were
wonderfully realized in their own hearts and lives. And the essentials
of Christ’s teachings have lost nothing by criticism.
The Smiths who have drifted away from the churches will hardly be
brought back to the pews by even the most scholarly discussion of
doubtful texts. Smith is not interested in the authenticity of lines or
chapters, nor do nice points of dogma touch the affairs of his life or
the needs of his soul. The fact that certain gentlemen in session at
Nicæa in a.d. 325 issued a statement of faith for his guidance strikes
him as negligible; it does not square with any need of which he is
conscious in his own breast.
A church that would regain the lost Smiths will do well to satisfy that
large company of the estranged and the indifferent that one need not
believe all that is contained between the lids of the Bible to be a
Christian. Much of the Bible is vulnerable, but Jesus explained
himself in terms whose clarity has in nowise been clouded by
criticism. Smith has no time, even if he had the scholarship, to pass
upon the merits of the Book of Daniel; but give him Christ’s own
words without elucidation and he is at once on secure ground. There
only lately came into my hands a New Testament in which every
utterance of Jesus is given the emphasis of black-face type, with the
effect of throwing his sayings into high relief; and no one reading his
precepts thus presented can fail to be impressed by the exactness
with which He formulated his “secret” into a working platform for the
guidance of men. Verily there could be no greater testimony to the
divine authority of the Carpenter of Nazareth than the persistence
with which his ideal flowers upon the ever-mounting mass of
literature produced to explain Him.
 II
Smith will not be won back to the church through appeals to
theology, or stubborn reaffirmations of creeds and dogmas. I believe
it may safely be said that the great body of ministers individually
recognize this. A few cling to a superstition that there is inherent in
religion itself a power which by some sort of magic, independently of
man, will make the faith of Christ triumphant in the world. I do not
believe so; Smith could not be made to think so. And Smith’s trouble
is, if I understand him, not with faith after all, but with works. The
church does not impress him as being an efficient machine that
yields adequate returns upon the investment. If Smith can be
brought to works through faith, well enough; but he is far more
critical of works than of faith. Works are within the range of his
experience; he admires achievement: show him a foundation of
works and interest him in strengthening that foundation and in
building upon it, and his faith will take care of itself.
The word we encounter oftenest in the business world nowadays is
“efficiency”; the thing of which Smith must first be convinced is that
the church may be made efficient. And on that ground he must be
met honestly, for Smith is a practical being, who surveys religion, as
everything else, with an eye of calculation. At a time when the ethical
spirit in America is more healthy and vigorous than ever before,
Smith does not connect the movements of which he is aware in
business and politics with religion. Religion seems to him to be a
poor starved side issue, not a source and guiding spirit in the
phenomena he observes and respects.
The economic waste represented in church investment and
administration does not impress Smith favorably, nor does it awaken
admiration in Jones or in me. Smith knows that two groceries on
opposite sides of the street are usually one too many. We used to be
told that denominational rivalry aroused zeal, but this cannot longer
be more than an absurd pretense. This idea that competition is
essential to the successful extension of Christianity continues to
bring into being many crippled and dying churches, as Smith well
knows. And he has witnessed, too, a deterioration of the church’s
power through its abandonment of philanthropic work to secular
agencies, while churches of the familiar type, locked up tight all the
week save for a prayer-meeting and choir-practice, have nothing to
do. What strikes Smith is their utter wastefulness and futility.
The lack of harmony in individual churches—and there is a good
deal of it—is not reassuring to the outsider. The cynical attitude of a
good many non-church-going Smiths is due to the strifes, often
contemptibly petty, prevailing within church walls. It seems difficult
for Christians to dwell together in peace and concord. In almost
every congregation there appears to be a party favorable to the
minister and one antagonistic to him. A minister who seemed to me
to fill more fully the Christian ideal than any man I have known was
harassed in the most brutal fashion by a congregation incapable of
appreciating the fidelity and self-sacrifice that marked his ministry. I
recall with delight the fighting qualities of another clergyman who
was an exceptionally brilliant pulpit orator. He was a Methodist who
had fallen to the lot of a church that had not lately been distinguished
for able preaching. This man filled his church twice every Sunday,
and it was the one sought oftenest by strangers within the city’s
gates; yet about half his own membership hated him cordially.
Though I was never of his flock, I enjoyed his sermons; and knowing
something of his relations with the opposition party in his
congregation, I recall with keenest pleasure how he fought back.
Now and then an arrow grazed his ear; but he was unheedful of
warnings that he would be pilloried for heresy. He landed finally in
his old age in an obscure church, where he died, still fighting with his
back to the wall. Though the shepherd’s crook as a weapon is going
out of style, I have an idea that clergymen who stand sturdily for their
own ideals receive far kindlier consideration than those who meekly
bow to vestries, trustees, deacons, elders, and bishops.
Music has long been notoriously a provoker of discord. Once in my
news-hunting days I suffered the ignominy of a “scoop” on a choir-
rumpus, and I thereupon formed the habit of lending an anxious ear
to rumors of trouble in choir-lofts. The average ladder-like Te Deum,
built up for the display of the soprano’s vocal prowess, has always
struck me as an unholy thing. I even believe that the horrors of highly
embellished offertories have done much to tighten purse-strings and
deaden generous impulses. The presence behind the pulpit of a
languid quartette praising God on behalf of the bored sinners in the
pews has always seemed to me the profanest of anomalies. Nor has
long contemplation of vested choirs in Episcopal churches shaken
my belief that church music should be an affair of the congregation.
There seems to exist inevitably, even in the smallest congregation,
“a certain rich man” whose opinions must be respected by the pulpit.
The minister of a large congregation confessed to me despairingly,
not long ago, that the courage had been taken out of him by the
protests evoked whenever he touched even remotely upon social
topics like child labor, or shorter hours for workingmen. There were
manufacturers in that church who would not “stand for it.” Ministers
are warned that they must attend to their own business, which is
preaching the Word of God not so concretely or practically as to
offend the “pillars.”
Just what is it, I wonder, that a minister may preach without
hazarding his job? It is said persistently that the trouble with the
church at the present day is that the ministers no longer preach the
Word of God; that if Christian Truth were again taught with the old
vigor, people would hear it gladly. This is, I believe, an enormous
fallacy. I know churches where strict orthodoxy has been preached
uninterruptedly for years, and which have steadily declined in spite of
it—or because of it. Not long ago, in a great assembly of one of the
strongest denominations, when that cry for a return to the “Old Bible
Truth” was raised, one minister rose and attacked the plea, declaring
that he had never faltered in his devotion to ancient dogma, and yet
his church was dying. And even so, many churches whose walls
echo uninterruptedly an absolutely impeccable orthodoxy are failing.
We shall not easily persuade Smith to forego the golf-links on
Sunday morning to hear the “Old Gospel Truth” preached in out-
worn, meaningless phrases. Those old coins have the gold in them,
but they must be recast in new moulds if they are again to pass
current.

III
The difficulties of the clergy are greatly multiplied in these days. The
pulpit has lost its old authority. It no longer necessarily follows that
the ministers are the men of greatest cultivation in their community.
The Monday morning newspapers formerly printed, in my town,
pretty full excerpts of sermons. I recall the case of one popular
minister whose sermons continued to be printed long after he had
removed to another city. Nowadays nothing from the pulpit that is not
sensational is considered worth printing. And the parson has lost his
social importance, moving back slowly toward his old place below
the salt. He used to be “asked,” even if he was not sincerely
“expected” at the functions given by his parishioners; but this has
changed now that fewer families have any parson to invite.
A minister’s is indubitably the hardest imaginable lot. Every one
criticizes him. He is abused for illiberality, or, seeking to be all things
to all men, he is abused for consorting with sinners. His door-bell
tinkles hourly, and he must answer the behest of people he does not
know, to marry or bury people he never heard of. He is expected to
preach eloquently, to augment his flock, to keep a hand on the
Sunday school, to sit on platforms in the interest of all good causes,
and to bear himself with discretion amid the tortuous mazes of
church and secular politics. There seem to be, in churches of all
kinds, ambitious pontiffs—lay popes—possessed of an ambition to
hold both their fellow laymen and their meek, long-suffering minister
in subjection. Why anyone should wish to be a church boss I do not
know; and yet the supremacy is sometimes won after a struggle that
has afforded the keenest delight to the cynical Smiths on the outside.
One must view these internecine wars more in sorrow than in anger.
They certainly contribute not a little to popular distrust of the church
as a conservator of love and peace.
There are men in the ministry who can have had no clear vocation to
the clerical life; but there are misfits and failures in all professions.
Some of these, through bigotry or stupidity, do much to justify
Smith’s favorite dictum that there is as much Christianity outside the
church as within it. Now and then I find a Smith whose distrust of
religion is based upon some disagreeable adventure with a
clergyman, and I can’t deny that my own experiences with the cloth
have been, on one or two occasions, disturbing. As to the more
serious of these I may not speak, but I shall mention two incidents,
for the reason that they are such trifles as affect Smith with joy. Once
in a parish-meeting I saw a bishop grossly humiliated for having
undertaken to rebuke a young minister for wearing a chasuble, or not
wearing it, or for removing it in the pulpit, or the other way round,—at
any rate, it was some such momentous point in ecclesiastical
millinery that had loosened a frightful fury of recrimination. The very
sight or suggestion of chasubles has ever since awakened in me the
most unchristian resentment. While we fought over the chasuble I
suppose people actually died within bow-shot of the church without
knowing that “if any man sin we have an advocate with the Father,
Jesus Christ the Righteous.”
And speaking of bishops, I venture the interpolation that that office,
believed by many to be the softest berth in Zion as it exists in the
Episcopal Church, is in fact the most vexatious and thankless to
which any man can aspire; nor have I in mind the laborious lives of
adventurous spirits like Whipple, Hare, and Rowe, but others who
carry the burdens of established dioceses, where the troubles of one
minister are multiplied upon the apostolic head by the number of
parishes in his jurisdiction.
Again, at a summer resort on our North Atlantic Coast once familiar
to me, there stood, within reach of fierce seas, one of the most
charming of churches. It was sought daily by visitors, and many
women, walking the shore, used to pause there to rest, for prayer, or
out of sheer curiosity. And yet it appeared that no woman might
venture into this edifice hatless. The locum tenens, recalling St.
Paul’s question whether it is “comely that a woman pray unto God
uncovered,” was so outraged by the visits of hatless women to the
church that he tacked a notice on the door setting forth in severe
terms that, whereas men should enter the church bareheaded,
women should not desecrate the temple by entering uncovered. I
remember that when I had read that warning, duly signed with the
clergyman’s name, I sat down on the rocks and looked at the ocean
for a long time, marveling that a sworn servant of God, consecrated
in his service by the apostles’ successors, able to spend a couple of
months at one of the pleasantest summer resorts in America, should
have been horror-struck at the unholy intrusion of a hatless girl in his
church, when people in the hot city he had fled suffered and died,
ignorant of the very name of Christ.

IV
“My church home” is an old phrase one still hears in communities
whose social life is not yet wholly divorced from the church. There is
something pleasant and reassuring in the sound of it; and I do not
believe we shall ever have in America an adequate substitute for that
tranquility and peace which are still observable in towns where the
church retains its hold upon the larger part of the community, and
where it exercises a degree of compulsion upon men and women
who find in its life a faith and hope that have proved not the least
strong of the bulwarks of democracy. In wholly strange towns I have
experienced the sense of this in a way I am reluctant to think wholly
sentimental. Where, on crisp winter evenings, the young people
come trooping happily in from the meetings of their own auxiliary
societies, where vim and energy are apparent in the gathering
congregation, and where one sees with half an eye that the pastor is
a true leader and shepherd of his flock—in such a picture there must
be, for many of us, something that lays deep hold upon the heart.
They are not concerned in such gatherings with higher criticism, but
with cleanness and wholesomeness of life, and with that faith, never
to be too closely scrutinized or analyzed, that “singeth low in every
heart.”
One might weep to think how rare those pictures must become—one
might weep if there were not the great problems now forced upon us,
of chance and change, that drive home to all thinking men and
women the great need of infusing the life of the spirit into our
industrial and political struggles. If, in the end, our great experiment
in self-government fail, it will be through the loss of those spiritual
forces which from the beginning have guided and ruled us. It is only
lately that we have begun to hear of Christian socialism, and a
plausible phrase it is; but true democracy seems to me essentially
Christian. When we shall have thoroughly christianized our
democracy, and democratized our Christianity, we shall not longer
yield to moods of despair, or hearken to prophets of woe.
The Smith for whom I presume to speak is not indifferent to the call
of revitalized democracy. He has confessed to me his belief that the
world is a kindlier place, and that more agencies of helpfulness are
at work, than ever before; and to restore the recalcitrant Smith to the
church it is necessary first of all to convince him that the church
honestly seeks to be the chief of such agencies. The Young Men’s
Christian Association, the Charity Organization Society, and the
Settlement House all afford outlets for Smith’s generous
benevolences. And it was a dark day for the church when she
allowed these multiplying philanthropies to slip away from her. Smith
points to them with a flourish, and says that he prefers to give his
money where it is put to practical use. To him the church is an
economic parasite, doing business on one day of the week, immune
from taxation, and the last of his neighbors to scrape the snow from
her sidewalks! The fact that there are within fifteen minutes’ walk of
his house half a dozen churches, all struggling to maintain
themselves, and making no appreciable impression upon the
community, is not lost upon Smith,—the practical, unemotional, busy
Smith. Smith speaks to me with sincere admiration of his friend, the
Salvation Army major, to whom he opens his purse ungrudgingly; but
the church over the way—that grim expensive pile of stone, closed
for all but five or six hours of the week!—Smith shakes his head
ruefully when you suggest it. It is to him a bad investment that ought
to be turned over to a receiver for liquidation.
Smith’s wife has derived bodily and spiritual help from Christian
Science, and Smith speaks with respect of that cult. He is half
persuaded that there must be something in it. A great many of the
Smiths who never had a church tie, or who gave up church-going,
have allied themselves with Christian Science,—what many of Mrs.
Eddy’s followers in familiar talk abbreviate as “Science,” as though
Science were the more important half of it. This proves at least that
the Smiths are not averse to some sort of spiritual food, or quite
clearly demonstrates a dissatisfaction with the food they had