A Longing for Heresy

...The Law of Moses introduced the most revolutionary idea into history, that of human equality, in its plain, worldly, anti-class sense...

...Actually, commitment as it was felt in the '30s was much less escapism than the sense which the intellectuals of the time had of the need for collective action in a world shadowed with joblessness and Nazism...

...Moreover, theologians "gerrymander" Biblical texts to suit themselves...

...For him, the enlightened life involves a plurality of concerns...

...Driven by uncommitted aggressive energies, man becomes a problem-seeking animal, and his heresy consists in the search for heresy...

...But the antinomy of progress has been that reformers are drawn mainly from the ranks of the heretics and fanatics who live for a single idea...

...The American compromise may not exclude Babbitts from office, but it has succeeded remarkably in keeping political issues from being embroiled with theological differences...

...Americans may prefer their political candidates to be church members, but politicians are very much aware that voters will avoid anyone whose commitment to religion partakes of zeal...

...Perhaps "gerrymandering" is a more valid procedure for religious thought than Kaufmann would acknowledge...

...This is a noble conception of Judaism, but I cannot help feeling that Kaufmann, like those he criticizes, "gerrymanders" the Bible...

...At this point, however, it turns out that Kaufmann reveres the academic names far too much to entertain such a heresy...

...He writes: "An ethic cannot be proved...

...In a vigorous chapter, Kaufmann shows cogently how fanaticism is implicit in the commitment of blind obedience which Kierkegaard extolled...

...The basis of Kaufmann's ethic, however, remains unclear...

...its yea is not yea, and its nay not nay...

...Kaufmann assails "commitment" as "a form of escape" in which one settles one's problems by joining a church or the Communist party...

...The President clearly meant to say that differences in dogma or ritual are unimportant, and to endorse the humanist ethic which Kaufmann finds best stated in Micah's words: "And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God...

...And Kaufmann believes that the U.S...

...They create a Jesus in their own image, making him a liberal or a socialist...

...to be held responsibly, it has to be based on encounter upon encounter...

...One would expect that he would then propose that academic philosophy be allowed an obsolescent demise from university curricula...

...What criteria, then, are we to use in deciding whether an encounter has invalidated an ethic...

...Democratic politicians were always disturbed by the fact that Henry Wallace had written a book on religion and took theology seriously...

...Theology, Kaufmann argues forcefully, is committed to a double standard in the use of words...

...But exactly how will scholarly erudition help in deciding, say, on which sexual ethic we should choose from among those offered by the Buddhist, Mohammedan, Confucian, Jewish and varieties of Christian answers...

...Thus the "heresy" in this book soon comes to terms with academicism...

...Heresy has virtually ceased to be a category useful in understanding American religious life...

...And centuries later, Maimonides was hard-pressed to accommodate Job to Judaism...

...Whenever a dogma is recognized as absurd, it is redefined to evade criticism...

...they were afraid they might have a religious fanatic on their hands...

...He finds a humanistic cosmopolitanism in Ruth and Jonah, but he tends to ignore Jehovah's command to the Israelites to destroy the Canaanite peoples...

...In their hands the notion of "sin," with its reminder of human fallibility, becomes a safeguard against fanaticism...

...Kaufmann generalizes that "the idea of commitment is close to the heart of existentialism...

...Likewise, for all his critique of religion and sacred texts, he finds that it is to books like the New Testament that he turns in times of crisis...

...This was perhaps true in Europe, but in America existentialism was characteristically the philosophy of those who, disenchanted with left-wing politics, sought both disaffiliation and disengagement in the postwar world...

...The Gallup polls on religious belief are in all likelihood a record of conventional speech habits...

...In practice, these virtues seem much like those set forth in the writings of Erich Fromm, toward whom Kaufmann is antagonistic...

...is a country where a man without religious affiliation cannot aspire to the Presidency...

...A Nietzschean attitude finally characterizes Kaufmann's answer to death...

...The fanatic, Kaufmann observes, is the person with one ultimate concern...

...The word "heretic" suggests a degree of physical risk involved in holding certain forbidden views...

...This outlook, found so much in German philosophy, is less that of a race with death than a race to outdo others...

...If he can win "in a race with death," he writes, "a project that is truly mine and not something that anybody else might have done as well," then he will have triumphed over death...

...A longing for heresy, rather than heresy itself, fills Kaufmann's book...

...In recent years, for example, some of the richest contributions to political ethics have come from Reinhold Niebuhr and Will Herberg, both of whom have been aided in their perceptions by theological ideas...

...there has been no measure as yet of the intensity of real religious conviction...

...Dwight Eisenhower is Kaufmann's whipping-boy for the alleged shallowness of American religion...

...As long as there are traditions, this will be the most hopeful pattern of their evolution...

...One recalls, however, that there was a division of opinion among the ancient editors as to whether they should include Job in the Scriptures...

...It will grate upon those who, with the American frontier pessimists, Mark Twain and Clarence Darrow, have seen in death an ultimate democratizer and reminder of the common status of people...

...In the United States, however, where the so-called "unchurched" far outnumber the largest denomination and constitute perhaps the majority of the adult population, Kaufmann's point of view is only slightly to the left of center...

...He finds a pure monotheism in the Bible which is hard to reconcile with the spontaneous polytheism which often crops up, as when Naomi tells Ruth to return to her gods, or when Jehovah shows his "back parts" to Moses...

...Kaufmann has a warmer regard for the Old Testament with its simple monotheism and prophetic ethic...

...For instance, Kaufmann begins his book by portraying how contemporary "analytic" philosophy has declined into verbal sterility...

...Yet the meaning of Eisenhower's celebrated statement is not really different from Kaufmann's own philosophy...

...He proposes instead a heretic's ethic with four cardinal virtues: humbition ("humility winged by ambition"), love, courage and honesty...

...The word "encounter" seems to serve the same function today that "experience" did a generation ago for John Dewey and the pragmatiste, except that "encounter" carries a dramatic, episodic overtone—as if to suggest that one's life, far from being a development, will be a series of discontinuous brief encounters with movements, persons, ideas...

...For Kaufmann, responsible judgment is guided by a knowledge of comparative religion and philosophies...

...They overlook what John Stuart Mill once emphasized, that Jesus and the Christian ethic were concerned with personal salvation, not with social justice...

...Similarly, Marxists today are "gerrymandering" Marx by emphasizing his youthful writings on "alienation" because they wish to import a more ethical consciousness into Marxism...

...A book such as the Bible is a collective historical document, a record of many moods and philosophies, and a developing religious society will select from it what meets contemporary needs and living beliefs...

...The remainder becomes recessive beliefs and antiquarian chronicle...

...Kaufmann displays a warm appreciation for Job's refusal to absolve God from man's suffering and, like Horace M. Kallen, sees in Job's philosophy the essence of Jewish piety...

...The book contains memorable chapters on the Old Testament, Jesus and theology...

...In this sense, it is part of that vague discontent that is shared by intellectuals who find no real problems or causes which call forth the full measure of their energies...

...Our government," said the General in 1952, "makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith—and I don't care what it is...

...Kaufmann dislikes the words "moral" and "immoral...

...Reviewed by LEWIS S. FEUER Professor of Philosophy and Social Science, University of California There is much wisdom and scholarship in Walter Kaufmann's philosophy of religion...

...Fortunately, though, the title of his book is a misnomer...