Religion, the Enlightenment, and the New Global Order

John Owen IV, J. Owen, John M. Owen IV, J. Judd Owen

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231526623
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Largely due to the cultural and political shift of the Enlightenment, Western societies in the eighteenth century emerged from sectarian conflict and embraced a more religiously moderate path. In nine original essays, leading scholars ask whether exporting the Enlightenment solution is possible—or even desirable—today.

Contributors begin by revisiting the Enlightenment's restructuring of the West, examining its ongoing encounters with Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. While acknowledging the necessity of the Enlightenment emphasis on toleration and peaceful religious coexistence, these scholars nevertheless have grave misgivings about the Enlightenment's spiritually thin secularism. The authors ultimately upend both the claim that the West's experience offers a ready-made template for the world to follow and the belief that the West's achievements are to be ignored, despised, or discarded.

II

The Enlightenment, Secularity,
and the Religions

CHAPTER FIVE

The Enlightenment Project, Spinoza, and the Jews

David Novak

Enlightenment and Emancipation

Since the eighteenth century, many Western Jewish intellectuals have been among the most enthusiastic supporters of what could be termed the “Enlightenment project.” This support has been due to the identification of many Western Jewish intellectuals with the universal ideals of the Enlightenment. Yet this Jewish support has also been due to the more specifically Jewish agenda of gaining full political emancipation for Jews in the new secular nation-states in modern western Europe. Ostensibly, this process began there in the middle of the eighteenth century, yet we shall see how its philosophical justification had already begun in the seventeenth century. The origin of this process can be seen when Jews first had to radically rethink their own “theological-political” situation at the very time when the relation of church and state that had characterized medieval Christendom was undergoing profound changes, especially in northwestern Europe in the wake of the Reformation.

Many Jewish intellectuals not only identified with the Enlightenment project, but some of the most perspicacious of them have made significant contributions to its philosophical justification, a general justification that could be simultaneously employed in more specific arguments for the admission of Jews as full citizens in the new secular nation-states. Even today at the beginning of the twenty-first century, after Western Jews have long been the political equals of their non-Jewish neighbors, some Jewish intellectuals are still arguing for the Enlightenment project, especially for the Enlightenment’s project of totally separating secular society from any religious control or even from any moral influence of religion. In the United States some prominent Jewish intellectuals see the strict separation of church and state—which to them means the total separation of religion and politics—to be in jeopardy due to the rising power of traditionalist Christians. If that power is unchecked, many of these same Jewish intellectuals believe its political victory will quickly lead Jews back to the ghetto of medieval Christendom. They imagine this to be an historical regression in which the Jews will surely become disenfranchised outsiders once again due to Christian reconquest of the United States, the most powerful nation-state in the world today. There is the fear that Jews will sooner or later lose the hard-won political equality they have achieved in their emancipation from Christendom, indeed in the progressive trajectory away from Christendom that has been the lot of modern secular nation-states in general. By “Christendom” I mean a polity that sees its founding mandate to come from the Church and thus makes the Church the ultimate moral arbiter for that Christian polity and its public policies. Only Christians could be full citizens in Christendom. In that kind of political arrangement, the most that Jews could expect was some form of precarious toleration of themselves as an essentially foreign community, a community living at the margins of the Christian polity hosting them.

This emancipation from the imagined restoration of Christendom is conceived by these secularized Jewish intellectuals to be justifiable only by arguments based on the Enlightenment project, a project whose chief aim has been the thorough secularization of human society itself. (In fact, Jewish historians usually refer to this same period of time in Jewish history as the period of the Emancipation.)¹ And, whereas Jews fear a return to their becoming dominated political outsiders again, many of their liberal non-Jewish counterparts (often lapsed Christians themselves) fear a return to their becoming dominating political insiders again. Hence both Jewish and non-Jewish secularist intellectuals see the demise of Christendom as their own emancipation respectively, an emancipation whose essential meaning can only be supplied by the Enlightenment project’s rationale.

Parenthetically, it might be noted that those contemporary intellectuals, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who appreciate the demise of Christen-dom—what some have called “Constantianism”—but without acceptance of the secularist Enlightenment project, need to provide an alternative philosophical justification for the value of modern secularity rather than merely carping at it.² Only sectarians, who have retreated from modern secularity and its political benefits, can engage in “prophetic” rejection of modern secularity with any credibility. The rest of us have to make our peace with it. Yet that peace needs to be a just peace, hence it needs to be rationally proposed and accepted.

As a political program, the Enlightenment project has been very much the attempt to construct society de novo (if not almost ex nihilo). Since the Jews had been outsiders in the ancien régime of Christendom, their political emancipation would only be possible in a society that had radically rethought its own theological-political stance. In this chapter I want to look at how the Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, was specifically concerned with the political emancipation of the Jews and simultaneously made a significant contribution to the Enlightenment’s radical rethinking of the general relation of religion and politics in a secular society. That philosophical contribution was most ostensibly concerned with the political question of Jewish emancipation and enfranchisement. Yet that political concern was very much connected to theological concern with the question of the election of Israel (i.e., the idea of the Jews being God’s chosen people).³ At the ontological level we also encounter the question of the relation of the transcendent and the immanent.

Despite his estrangement from the Jewish community, specifically the traditional Jewish community of seventeenth-century Amsterdam in which he was born and raised, I call Spinoza a “Jewish philosopher” for five reasons.⁴ One, as far as we know he never exchanged his Jewish identity for the identity of a member of some other traditional/religious community. Two, he took his primary intellectual cues from the Hebrew Bible as he first learned it in the traditional Jewish community of his youth. (And, in fact, he was at work on a grammar of biblical Hebrew at the time of his premature death in 1677.) Three, his ongoing intellectual struggle was with Moses Maimonides (d. 1204), who most Jews, and certainly most of the Jews of Amsterdam, regarded as the Jewish theologian par excellence. Four, I not only call Spinoza a Jewish philosopher, I call him the first Jewish philosopher, i.e., the first Jew who philosophized out of the Jewish tradition and about the Jewish tradition, but without the existential commitment to that tradition that characterized all his philosophically inclined Jewish predecessors. Spinoza’s Jewish predecessors were, as Leo Strauss liked to point out, theologians and not philosophers.⁵ That is, if one assumes that to be a “philosopher” one must not be beholden to any divine revelation or tradition rooted in any such revelation. Five, Spinoza set the agenda for modern Jewish thought in the West, whether for Jewish theologians or for Jewish philosophers. And, finally, one can see that Spinoza set the agenda for more general discussion of the theological-political question in the West. Thus to engage Spinoza is a desideratum whether one is in favor of continuing the Enlightenment project or whether one regards its overall treatment of the theological-political question to be flawed, originally and subsequently. Either way, to avoid Spinoza is to miss just how radically the Enlightenment really began.⁶

To be able to conduct a more focused enquiry into the issues just mentioned above about the Enlightenment project and Spinoza’s connection to it, I would like to suggest the question to be addressed: Does religion justify morality or does morality justify religion? That is how the question is best formulated at the political level since morality and religion or religion and morality are identifiable phenomena in any modern society. (Indeed, the very ordering of the terms themselves indicates one’s position on the question per se.). So, if we agree with Aristotle that “politics” is the full ordering of our lives together, then both “religion” and “morality” are “political” in the sense that religion orders our lives together with God, and morality orders our lives together with our fellow humans.⁷ Both phenomena are political inasmuch as they both function publicly. In fact, one can see the question of this interrelation of religion and morality or morality and religion appearing in almost every significant public policy debate in the world today. It is primarily the issue of culture, taking “culture” in the deepest sense possible which, for me, means dealing with the question of what is our place in the cosmic order and with whom do we share that place. The question of culture taken in its proper depth cannot avoid the question of God.⁸

At the theological level, at least for Jews, is the question: Did God choose the Jews or did the Jews choose God? Thus, connecting this theological question with the previous political question, one asks: Does religion as the God-human relationship ground morality as the interhuman relationship or does morality ground religion? In Jewish terms the question is: If God chose the Jewish people, then aren’t their own interhuman, moral relationships subordinate to their religious relationship with God (called the covenant)? Conversely, though, if the Jewish people chose God, then isn’t their religious relationship with God subordinate to their moral interrelationship among themselves? This latter option became what some nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jewish thinkers, largely following Kant, called “Ethical Monotheism.”⁹

Finally, at the ontological level: Do we humans intend what lies beyond us by constituting it onto a horizon of our own making, thus engaging ourselves in a transcendental enterprise, or, are we humans confronted by the God who transcends us? This is very much Plato’s old question of whether man or God is the measure of all that is.¹⁰

In this chapter I shall try to show that, for Spinoza, the answers to the first two questions are interrelated in essence. That is, at the political level, he argues for a moral justification of religion rather than the religious justification of morality; and at the theological level, he argues for the Jews’ choice of God rather than God’s choice of the Jews. But at the ontological level he gives the transcendent priority over the immanent rather than vice versa. But first we need to look at the pre-Enlightenment/pre-Emancipation theological-political situation of the Jews and Judaism. Only thereafter can we appreciate how radical a break with premodern Judaism is Spinoza’s philosophy—especially concerning the question of religion in its political, theological, and ontological dimensions.

The Chosen People in Exile

Since the destruction of the Second Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, the Jewish people have regarded themselves as a community in exile (galut). Yet even though the Jews did not have full political sovereignty since the destruction of the First Jerusalem Temple in 586 BCE, living in their own land under a series of foreign empires (Persian, Seleucid, Ptolemaic, Roman), the presence of the Temple and its attendant Sanhedrin had given the Jewish people enough of a sense of their own theological-political independence to function as if they had full political autonomy in relation to the outside world. When the Temple stood and functioned, the Jews could still regard themselves more or less politically subordinate to God. Moreover, when the Temple stood and functioned, there was a real political difference between Jews living in the land of Israel and Jews living in the “Diaspora” (tefutsot ha-golah): the former were living under at least quasi-Jewish sovereignty, whereas the latter were clearly living under the sovereignty of gentiles. But, after the destruction of the Temple, this difference of kind became but a difference of degree. The most that could be said about Jews in Palestine (the very name given to the land of Israel by the Roman conquerors as a direct repudiation of Jewish sovereignty there, by calling it after Israel’s ancient enemy, the Philistines) and Diaspora Jews is that the former still had certain unique religious privileges connected with the still operative sanctity of the land of Israel. But, politically, Diaspora Jews, especially the powerful Jewish community in Babylonia, in many ways had more political independence than Palestinian Jewry.¹¹

After the destruction of the Temple and, especially, after the defeat of the last major messianic movement to restore the Temple and full Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel (that of Bar Kokhba in 135 CE), the Jews began working out a political arrangement with the gentile rulers under whom they now had to live. This political arrangement, when coherently thought out and acted upon, enabled the Jews to operate in this outside world with still enough independence to continue their own communal life, even including considerable independence in inner-communal civil (and sometimes even criminal) matters. So, in what we would term moral questions, let alone what we would term religious questions, the Jews continued to enjoy a good deal of communal autonomy, in many cases only lacking full economic independence. (The one form of independence they always lacked, though, was military independence.) But, because the Jews did not look to their host societies for any moral warrant (much less, for any religious warrant), it could be said that they were only marginal participants in this non-Jewish world by their own volition, and, even more, they were in no way parts of it. As such, they could never enjoy true political equality; they could only approximate it occasionally.

This general political arrangement operated for Jews in most medieval societies, whether Christian or Muslim. Its theological warrant emerged when Jews could discover enough of a common morality between themselves and their host societies for each side to be able to trust the other—at least in principle—in basic matters of interhuman relations. This was especially important in the area of commerce, where most transactions between Jews and gentiles had to take place. Thus a leading Provencal rabbi in the fourteenth century, Menahem ha-Meiri, asserted that earlier Talmudic suspicion of gentiles in civil matters no longer applied to either Christians or Muslims because the members of these two religious traditions are “bound by divine law.” Hence these Christians and Muslims are in an essentially different theological category than the Roman pagans about whose morality the rabbis of the Talmud were so rightly suspicious. For the same reason, already in the eleventh century, the leading rabbi in Northern France, Rashi, explained that when gentile courts operated with due process of law, which Jews saw as having a biblical warran...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• I: The Enlightenment Revisited: Theoretical Questions
• II: The Enlightenment, Secularity, and the Religions
• Contributors
• Index