hebrew

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There is, in the universe of the Bible, another aspect of the dialectic of the one and the many which corresponds to the Greek conception of it. Dust, to the Hebrew, corresponds to the Greek idea of the many, the divers, the indeterminate. Dust is the very figure of death, the final outcome of decay, an object of disgust and abomination. A sacrement of mourning, one might say: in days of disaster the Jews would throw dust on their heads as a sign of affliction.1 “You shall walk on your belly and you shall eat dust all the days of your life,” 2 God tells the serpent. Which recalls the psalmist’s cry: “dust is my bread.” 3 Death which awaits us, which inhabits us, is our potential of returning to dust: “...until you return into the earth from which you were taken. For you are dust and you will return to dust.” 4 ’eres, earth, often designates hell, (the Assyrian ersitu, the sheol): “those who turn from me are inscribed on the earth.” 5

11:43

Świat jako coś dobrego I widział Bóg że było dobre (edited)

11:45

Greek the one and the many are two constituent principles which build the world; the diverse, apeiron, is bound together and given shape by the one, sundesmos. In the Hebrew world, on the contrary, there are not two principles to being, there is one only, God. (edited)

11:45

Dust is not a constitutive element of the world like the matter of things. It is the result, rather, of a tendency: death. Dust is not cause of death, but it is death which fathers dust.

11:46

In other words, and this is one of the fundamental differences between Greek and Hebrew thought, the universe of the Bible is not dualistic.

11:51

Within a metaphysics of biblical origin generation does not necessarily imply degradation. A being may very well generate its equal.

11:56

Only the Hebrew tradition energetically asserts the creation of reality. It alone uncompromisingly affirms the goodness of reality, of the sensible world, of created things. Valde bonum, says Genesis, “The world is very good.” The idea of creation implies a) that there is a basic distinction between the creator and the created, and b) that the creator himself is transcendent

11:58

First: no distinction between God and the world in consequence of the absence of the idea of creation; second: a pessimistic view of the sensible world. The sensible, “matter,” “body,” are by nature an enslavement of the soul. Existence in this world is an exile; the body is a tomb; the soul’s “incorporation” a downfall; the many are a degradation of the One; becoming and time are a downgrade course, a fall from unchangeableness and eternity.

11:59

The narrative of Genesis distinguishes the Creator from the create d and the creation from the fall. On the contrary, and characte¬ ristically, Gnostic pantheisms make no such distinctions: Creator is creation, creation is fall. These two confusions are linked in logic; one calls for the other.

12:02

We do not find here any necessary link between the origin of evil and the origin of being.

12:02

All things created are excellent. Nothing is impure in itself.

( the concept of love, since the great number of persons is but the unfortunate and illusory reverse of a oneness which alone is real. What the Pantheist calls love can only be the return to the One Nor can we any longer speak of God’s love for His creatures, for “there cannot in any true sense be love of God for another being since all that is forms but one single thing, to wit, God Himself.” 1 ) (edited)

Time connotes the act of creation. Eternity is the creator s point of view.

16:08

To biblical thought, as to Bergson, eternity coexists with a creative and inventive time. Here again time is not an unfolding of that which already was in the timeless, in such wise that an eye freed from temporality could see at a glance that which had been given once and for all. Time is truly an endless genesis of “unforeseeable novelty.” Eternity therefore could not be beyond time. Time itself must first be accepted for what it really is, before the biblical meaning of eternity can be understood

16:09

The prophet has an understanding of the divine intention in its creative activity. His foreknowledge is restricted in that, as we have seen, the world is not a moving imitation of some motionless model which might be revealed to him. Precisely for this reason, and because each instant is creation, the prophet cannot tell, for instance, at which precise moment the end will come, except as the farmer knows the coming of harvest by the appearance of the grain

16:11

In biblical metaphysics God creates gratuitously. Time is the creation in process; eternity is the Creators’ point of view.

16:12

God’s creative activity, coexists with His rest (shabbath). We read, on the one hand: “My Father is at work even until now,” 1 on the other: “They will not enter into my rest;”2 and again: “Today have I begotten you.” 3 There is a kind of “today” for God — to God a thousand years are as a day — a “today” in which he engenders. But on the seventh day Genesis also says, God “ceased from doing all the work which He had done.” 4 This coexistence of God’s self-sufficiency and of His action opens a new perspective and forces on us a hypothesis which the New Testament will confirm: it is through love that God creates.

16:14

Human creative action coexists with divine Action; upheld by it, engendered by it, and by it carried forward to the fulness of its autonomy, of its freedom: “I said you are gods.” Human action unfolds within divine Action — (“in Him we are, we live and move”) — and conversely divine Action works through the activities of man, works through our works without constraining us: “it is God who works in you both will and action,” (Theos gar estin ho energon en humin kai to thelein kai to energein).2 God’s strength (dunamis) works through the action of men: “I am capable of everything in Him Who gives me strength,” (panta ischuo en to endunamounti me).* *

16:21

Biblical metaphysics is founded on a dialogue. If we are to understand it we must stop thinking in terms of a single force and try to penetrate the more complex and much richer play of a world engendered by two freedoms. The problem of man’s free will and God’s fore-knowledge, of free will and grace, runs parallel to that of time and of eternity. We must take care never to install a dichotomy within the common actions of God and man.

16:21

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If the idea of matter seems ruled by confusion it is because in this term there meet at least three different views: (1) a dualism, of Platonic and Orphic origin, later picked up by Plotinus and rationalized by Descartes. In this current of thought matter itself is a substance, res extensa, which stands opposed to mind, res cogitans. Without a doubt affective currents of a Manichean kind flow into this dualist conception of matter against which Berkeley’s protest was directed. (2) the Aristotelian and Thomist metaphysics, to which, in principle at least, matter is not a thing, a substance, but a metaphysical aspect of reality. “In this sense there is no matter qua matter. But such or such a factor is matter in relation to such or such a form.” 2 “The conception of matter is relative; for different matter is suited to different forms.” * “Materia et forma dicuntur relative ad invicem.” ** Matter here is not a physical concept nor a physical substance. It is a metaphysical structure of concrete reality. Dualism on the contrary considers “matter” and “body” to be physical concepts, empirical facts. (3) Modern science, which speaks the language of Descartes but is finding more and more that matter has properties quite contrary to those which Descarfes attributed to it: energy, for instance. Modern science gives the name of matter to what Aristotle called the sensible. This to Aristotle was composed of “matter” and “form” in a quite different sense.

16:56

These analyses had to be made in order to distinguish the ideas of creation and fabrication, and in order to define more clearly the Hebrew conception of the sensible in so far as it differs from the Greek: the biblical world is a world in which the idea of “matter” does not occur. This is its characteristic — a negative one — in contrast to Greek thought, in which the idea of matter, and the dualism, “matter-form” played so great a role. Hebrew is a very concrete language. It has words only for what exists. It has no word for “matter” nor for “body” because these concepts do not cover any empirical realities. Nobody ever saw any “matter,” nor a “body,” such as they are defined by substantial dualism. The sensible elements, wood, iron, water, are not “matter;” they are sensible realities, which in Aristotle’s metaphysics are abstractly dissected into two principles: matter and form. If we wish to refer to the sensible as “matter,” there can be no objection. It is just a question of words. But then we must make quite sure of our meaning and not refer to the sensible world the characteristics attributed by dualism, and in fact by Manicheism, to their own peculiar myth of an inconceivable “matter substance.”

16:57

Precisely because it is not dualist, Hebrew, more than any other language, has an understanding, a love of the elements and of the flesh.

16:59

Indeed Hebrew thought is as far away from what we call idealism as it is from what we call materialism. More correctly, it transcends the dichotomy which brought about these two antinomic systems, both of which rest on the same postulate: a dualism. Hebrew thought resembles idealism in its belief that the sensible world is intelligible, that the world is essentially porous to intelligence because it is created by the word. But at the same time Hebrew thought is irreconcilably opposed to idealism by its realistic metaphysics of being, its love of the carnal, * and its conception of work and action in the elements. It is the thought of shepherds and farmers.

Because it was created by a word the sensible is meaningful. It is itself a language, the substantial manifestation of a creative word.

17:29

Because we are used to Cartesian dualism we tend to think of matter as of something entirely inert. To the Cabala on the contrary, matter is animated, it is, in the words of Novalis, a petrification of God.

Between rain and the word of God there appeared to the Hebrews an analogy. By its geographical situation Palestine is entirely dependent upon rain. Out of this material disadvantage a spiritual advantage arises: Israel cannot retire into itself in self-sufficiency. It depends on rain, on the word of Yhwh. It depends as does a lover who is glad not to be able to do without his beloved. Israel is materially in that uncertainty which makes it totally depend upon the love of Yhwh; the dialogue cannot be interrupted, under pain of death. The gratuity of rain recalls the gratuity of the word. “Yhwh will come to us like a shower, like a late rain watering the earth.” 1

17:52

Israel is called a vine: “The vine of Yhwh of hosts, that is the house of Israel.” 3 Wine, the yearly vintage, depends upon the gift of rain (“I shall command the clouds to let rain fall upon her no longer”),4 for wine “which rejoices the heart of man” is a figure of the spirit, of the spiritual fife which is love. “Let him kiss me with a kiss of his mouth, for your love is better than wine” says the Beloved in the Song of Songs.5 We find this same meaning in the New Testament where the renewal of the spiritual life is compared to new wine which should not be put into old wine-skins. 6 Surely it is significant that one of the first “signs” of Jesus was the turning of water to wine at Cana, at a wedding. It is in that same under¬ standing that we must read the cry of the Apocalypse: “Harm not the oil and the wine.” 7

17:53

Oil must also stand for something spiritual. It is the sacrament which anointed kings in Israel. From this anointment they received gifts of strength and understanding. In the words of the Psalmist the Messiah is one anointed with an oil of “rejoicing.” “Your name is an oil poured forth.”8 Joel’s proclamation (“Yhwh answered and said to His people: behold I shall send you wheat, new wine and oil”) foretells a profusion of the spirit: “I shall pour forth My spirit on all flesh.”

17:54

Bread and wheat are of prime importance in the Old Testament as in the New. The consecration of the eucharistic bread and wine effected in the New Testament (symbolizing the shedding of blood), had a long preparation through all of the Old Testament. It is this long tradition which allows Christ’s hearers to give the fullest sense to His words: “I am the living bread,” 2 “I am the bread of life.” 3 The analogy with manna is also pointed out. 4 The Christian sacraments cannot be understood apart from the history which ripened their significance. In . dualist metaphysics they remain unintelligible. (edited)

17:56

The elements created by the word are meaningful. Bread and wine give joy and sustenance. When the Word Himself comes in the flesh He consecrates the bread and the wine, teaching that He is the “true” bread,5 that He is food and that His gift is the food which will bring life to His creatures. The wine tells us that love shed His blood “for His friends.” The bread stands for the essential food.

In Platonism the sensible is a reflection, a shadow of the intelligible; it participates in the Idea through degradation. To join the Idea we must “flee” this nether region. Now in the biblical world the sensible participates in the intelligible by the fact of creation. It is in itself not only an image but also a subsisting reality. It is both being and sign. Here lies the originality of the biblical point of view. The sensible and the concrete have in it a greater consistency, a greater ontological reality, than they have in Platonism, yet they are in no way less significant.

In teaching us the epourania, the things of heaven, in describing the kingdom of God, Jesus, speaker of parables, uses as words the flesh of the most familiar realities: “A sower went out to sowhis seed... A woman took leaven and put it into her flour... Unless the grain of wheat die... Of the fig tree learn this parable...” He never has recourse to myth, to allegory or to legend, for existing reality already has sufficient content to signify the mysteries which must be revealed. There is nothing more contrary to the Hebrew mentality and to its entire conception of the sensible and of contemplation than the Platonic type of allegorism which, too frequently, the Fathers of the Church confused with biblical typology. * The allegory rests on a dichotomy between being and meaning, and on a conventional relation between the sign and its content, whereas biblical typology rests on the belief that, historical fact itself is pregnant with meaning; so too is all reality, which is “word.” * (edited)

10:13

From each of these metaphysical doctrines two different conceptions of contemplation and of love will naturally follow. To the Platonist contemplation and love is an elevation from the sensible to the archetype which the sensible represents. In biblical tradition contemplation is also an ascension from the sensible which is a word. But this is where the ways part. According to Plato and Plotinus one should flee the world. Biblical contemplation, on the contrary, admits the concrete and the particular. It proceeds by their mediation.

10:17

It is particulars which exist. The Hebrew thinks in terms of the existing particular; for the particular to him is not at all insignificant; it is a vehicle of meaning. To manifest truth God chose among all nations a particular people. His choice went first to a particular man, whose name was Abraham, at a particular time, in a particular place. The Incarnation in turn is a choice of the particular, of the real, with all its historical and geographical contingencies: a particular woman, a particular period, and a particular country with its social contingencies. God Himself becomes a particular person to us, a person with a name, a face, a story. This choice of the particular to manifest universal truth, to teach what is by rights universal, is without a doubt the greatest, the outstanding scandal to a Greek intelligence. From the Greek point of view there are too many particulars in the Books of Israel for their contents to be a metaphysics: too many proper names, too much geography, too many dates, and too much history. Too many contingencies: truth is necessary. Too many sensible things: truth is abstract. Too many real people: truth holds no personal preference. Too much geography: truth is beyond space. Too many historical events: truth is beyond time. Too many particulars: truth is universal. Why, they ask, should such a people rather than another, such a man, such a time, such a day and not another, be favored by a choice

10:18

All our most deeply ingrained intellectual habits inherited from Greek philosophy are opposed to this idea that truth is to be reached through the existing particular, opposed to this nativity of truth, to this manifestation of truth in some particular concrete reality. This method, which is the “method” of the Incarnation, offends the deep, congenital dualism of our minds, a dualism which establishes an essential distinction between the intelligible which

10:18

belongs to the order of essence, and the existent, the order of fact, which is contingent and absurd. We are told that there is too much history and geography, too many facts in the Scriptures for them to hold a metaphysics. The heart of the matter is that Scriptures are a metaphysics and a theology in the form of a historical narrative. The Hellenic mind can never come to terms with the Incarnation, because of the antinomy which it places between the sensible, which is temporal, and the intelligible, which is timeless. Its Manichean conception of the sensible, its pessimistic conception of becoming, its view of time as a degradation of the timeless, its theory of individuation by matter and its ontology of the many and the one, and of the particular existent, all incline it to reject as unthinkable the coming into this world of Truth through a concrete, particular reality. Dualism is the contradiction of the method of the Incarnation.

Salvation comes from the Jews.1 The scandal of the Incarnation begins here. The assertion that the approach to truth and salvation must be through a particular people, definitely located in time and space, is the first premise of the scandal. No Greek philosophy can reconcile itself to this proposition.

Israel is defined by an alliance (Berit). Whoever disobeys the commands of the Torah “will be cut off from the people of Israel.” (edited)

To be an Israelite is not really a matter of birth like being a Greek or an Egyptian. It is truly a matter of choice. Israel the nation does not cover the essence it implies. The Law and the Prophets defined it genetically, its true definition is spiritual. Very often, too often in fact, people will oppose the Old Testament to the New: one the exacting law, the other the rule of love. And so they echo an old heresy, Marcion’s. Truth lies the other way, in fact. From the Old Testament to the New we move, not to leniency, but rather to greater rigor. Let us see why. Opposing the Old Testament to the New amounts to parting justice and love. Here language holds a lesson for us: zedaqah in Hebrew means both justice and love, _ Every growth starts with a separation. And so the genesis of this new nation — this “mutation” — is accomplished by a departure. The spiritual adventure begins with exile. We find this “theology of the desert” elaborated in the writings of St. John of the Cross. Exile and wandering appear as Israel’s permanent state. These facts are meaningful because they are a part of the nation’s spiritual reality; its peculiar “metaphysical” make-up makes its history something eternally significant and prophetic. For Israel is not just a nation of men but also a theological fact bom with Abraham and still thriving within all those who live as part of this new spiritual breed.

15:06

When the mathematician, for instance, has examined a function in some particular case, he can go on to a generalized function. At this stage he forgets the individual case which he no longer needs, since, in the generalization he holds its “essence.” Thus the wars and wanderings and captivities shed their garment of contingency in order to show us the spiritual truth we must learn. The Exodus goes on, no longer in an empirical, but in an interior and spiritual, and therefore more real sense. War with the Philistines is no longer the battle against a nation which once opposed Israel; it is now the endless fight with the Philistines scattered among all nations, who are the enemies of the spiritual Israel. This spiritual war is much more merciless and awesome. Our concern is not with the Babylon of Nabuchodonosor, but with the Babylon whose name is a “mystery.” 1 Egypt and Assyria stood for another enemy. Now the sign has been transformed into reality. And on its fulfilment the empirical sign has passed away: “Yhwh shall reveal Himself to Egypt; and Egypt will know Yhwh.... In that day Israel will ally herself as a third party to Egypt and Assyria.... Yhwh will bless them saying: ‘Blessed is Egypt, my people, and Assyria the work of my hand, and Israel my heirloom.’ ”2 The historical wars belong to the past: they are over and done. But the spiritual war, of which the historical wars were a sign, goes on, sometimes with real persecutions, between Israel and “the great city whose name in a spiritual sense is Sodom and Egypt.” 3

15:06

“...All the wealth of full understanding, the knowledge of God’s mystery, Christ Himself, within whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge...” “for in Him full divinity is bodily enthroned.” (To pieroma tes teheotetos somatikos).1 This is the arduous peak to which the foregoing analyses have been leading us. The Hebrew conception of the sensible world, of time, history, individual existence, its rejection of dualism lead up to this keystone: the Incarnation; a keystone that secures the whole structure, that everything in the structure presupposes. We have seen how Hebrew thought avoids the division of form and matter, thus giving to the sensible a power of meaning which makes it a universal language. Similarly the biblical anthropology is characterized by: (1) the absence of the body-soul dichotomy. This is of great consequence. We need only consider all that the application of Platonic dualism implies in metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, and even in biology, to foresee the great reversal that a non-dualist conception of man, (such as that, for instance, held by Aristotelian Thomism), would bring about. (2) the appearance of an absolutely original dimension quite unknown in philosophy, a specific contribution of the Bible: ruah, what we call the Spirit. Ruah is translated as pneuma by the Septuagint, and it is this term which the New Testament, and particularly St. Paul, uses in a very precise sense. This new factor introduces a dialectic which, as we shall show, cannot be reduced to the Platonic antinomy of body and soul. This dialectic rules the relationship of man and the super-natural factor at work within him, that calls him to a life both naturally unforseeable and quite beyond his hopes. This and none other is the separation the prophets make when they distinguish man, a “living soul” (or “flesh” which means the same thing), and the “spirit.” These St. Paul in turns names the “psychical,” (or “carnal”), and the “spiritual.”

15:06

Language itself often has metaphysical implications. In Hebrew there is no word for “body.” Thus in Hebrew the word gouph which nowadays means “body,” appears only in the feminine gender in the Bible: gouphah “corpse.” Gewyyah too, usually means “corpse” rather than the living body... The tendency to reserve the generic term of body to the dead is already found in Assyrian. Here the word pagru which originally meant “body,” eventually came to designate the corpse. It is with this meaning that it was adopted in Hebrew: pheger. “When the Hebrew spoke of the living body, the body shaped by God in the womb, they used the word basar, “flesh.” It was distinguished from se’er which had less broad a meaning and signified rather the meat, the fleshy parts of the body. The expression Kol basar “all flesh” meant all human beings.” Festugiere points out that in the New Testament “there being no Hebrew word for body, sarx stands for the word basar which means flesh... * * Soma for Matthew, Mark and John, designates the dead body, the corpse.” *

15:06

Man is created a “living soul.” “Yhwh God formed man from the dust of the ground and He blew into his nostrils a breath of life; and man became a living soul.” 5 What does this mean? Once again we must be careful to avoid interpreting the Hebrew notion of soul in terms of Platonic dualism. Because they recognized no body-soul dichotomy the Hebrews did not consider the soul the disincamate thing that we imagine it to be. And it is just because we oppose it to “body” that we think of it in this way. In Hebrew the soul is the man. Indeed we should not say that man has a soul, but that he is a soul; nor consequently that he has a body, but that he is a body. By applying to the Hebrew Nephesch, which the Septuagint translates by psuche, the charac¬ teristics of the Platonic psyche, (conceived in the terms of a dualism of orphic origin), we let the real meaning of Nephesch escape us and furthermore, we are left with innumerable pseudo-problems. Unhampered by the body-soul dichotomy, the Hebrew calls this tangible, sensible, expressive, and living reality that is man, a soul. I perceive, not a “body” which contains a “soul,” but, directly, a living soul. Within the sensible that I am shown I may decipher all the wealth of its intelligibility. This soul is visible to me because it is within the world, fed on the world’s elements which in turn cause it to be flesh. The essence of this flesh which is man, is the soul. The soul gone, there is no “body” left: nothing is left. Nothing but the world’s own dust. Again language confirms this.

15:06

For the living man, Hebrew uses indiscriminately the term “soul,” nepes, or the term “flesh,” basar. Both of these point to one reality: earth-bound, living man, So too the expressions “all flesh,” Kdl basar, and “every soul,” Kdl hanephes, are equivalent. Kdl basar first designates all the living,1 then more precisely, all men.2 In the same way Kdl hanephes designates all living beings.3 4 “Every living soul,” Kdl nephes hayah. In the New Testament we find the same expressions and the same coincidence of meaning: pasa sarx, (all flesh),5 * and pasa psuche. 6 Finally the expressions “to judge according to the flesh,” 7 “to walk according to the flesh,” 8 “to live according to the flesh,”9 must not be interpreted in terms of Platonism, in which sense they would mean: to satisfy the desires of one’s body. In the Bible these terms have a quite different meaning. To demonstrate this we need but quote St. Paul who, with exactly the same intent, uses the expressions: “to walk according to man,” 1 and “to walk according to the flesh.” To say: “are you not carnal?” he just as willingly writes: “are you not men?”2 “Can’t you see that as long as there is jealousy and squabbling among you, you are carnal and walking according to man... are you not men?” 3 In this same text, instead of: “ouk anthropoi este,” a variant proposes “ouchi sarkikoi.” 4 Nowhere do we find the word flesh used to convey what we mean by “body.” Flesh is our index of frailty. The flesh is the man inasmuch as he is not a god. The biblical distinction stands between the Maker and those He made, not between body and soul, as in Plato.

15:06

Each individual is created for his own sake. The Hebrew metaphysics of individuation is illustrated by the significance of the proper name in the Bible. “I have known you by your name.” * 1 God speaks to Jeremiah as to the particular being that he is: “before I formed you in the belly I knew you; and before you came forth out of the womb I sanctified you,” 2 for particular beings are willed and created for their own sake. Each one’s name, each one’s essence is unique and irreplaceable. Each being is, in the words of Laberthonniere, apax legomenon. The metaphysical lesson we may draw from the significance of the proper name is clearly at the counterpole from individuation by matter. It is the seed of Christian personalism.

15:06

Because it ignores the Platonic body-soul dichotomy, the Hebrew language often attributes “bodily” functions to the soul. The soul lives: “let my soul five to praise You.” * 1 And the soul dies: “let my soul die with the Philistines!” 2 “You would ensnare the souls of my people and your own souls would live?... You have dishonored me... causing souls to die that must not die.” 3 In the New Testament we find the same expression: “Every living soul will die.” 4 One should note that, whereas the soul dies, we never read that ruah, the spirit dies. In our dualist system it is the custom to attribute passions and organic functions to the body, and all that is of a psychological order to the soul. In Hebrew, because there is no dualism, passions, organic functions, sensations, are just as easily related to the soul as they are to the organs and, conversely, thoughts and sentiments are ascribed to the organs and to parts of the body. My soul hungers 5 and thirsts. 6 “If your soul lusts after meat...” 7 “I shall give water to the thirsting soul, and I shall satiate the languishing soul.” 8 “As the hart pants after the water brooks, so my soul pants after You, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.” 1 “My soul thirsts for you, my flesh languishes after you in a dry land.” 2 “I will satiate the soul of the priests with fat.” 3 “To fill the soul” means to feed it. 4 “The hungry man dreams that he eats, but he awakens and his soul is empty.” 5 “Our soul is dried away.” 6 “Our soul has conceived a loathing for this miserable food.” 7 “My soul is weary of life.” 8 The soul hears: “Do you hear, my soul, the sound of the trumpet.” 9 The soul despises,10 hates, 11 desires love 12 or vengeance. 13 The soul is afflicted: “Until when will you afflict my soul.” 14 It blesses: “Let my soul bless you before I die.” 15 The soul knows,16 remembers,17 and loves: “His soul clave to Dina, the daughter of Jacob, and he loved the girl.” 18 “You whom my soul loves.” 19

15:06

In the New Testament the word “soul” is used in exactly the same manner: “Do not worry about your souls in regard to what you will eat and drink.” 20 “You will find rest for your souls.” 21 “The fruits that you desired are departed from you.” 22 “My soul is troubled.” 23 “My soul is sorrowful unto death.” 24 “I shall say to my soul: my soul, you have many goods set aside for many years, so take your ease, eat, drink and be merry.” 25 “Tribulation and anguish upon the soul of every man that does evil.” No matter how paradoxical it appears to our secretly Manichean habits, the Hebrew has a sense and a love of the carnal because he has a sense of the spiritual and perceives the presence of the spiritual within the carnal. The carnal is desirable because of the intelligible mystery with which it is filled. Meaning lies just beneath the skin. The Hebrew is carnal because he knows what is to be learned through the sensible. * * Again because he does not recognize the body-soul dichotomy, the Hebrew can call the union of man and woman a knowledge (yada): “Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain.”

15:06

The flesh-spirit dialectics is proper to the Bible and must not be confused with the body-soul dialectics of the Greeks. Despite their superficial verbal resemblance these two points of view have nothing in common. They have been twined together for twenty centuries and we must be very careful to distinguish them in our own minds. The opposition of flesh to spirit is an opposition between two orders. Flesh, we have seen, is man’s index of frailty, that frailty that comes of being made of dust. The spirit is man’s participation in the supernatural order. The spirit summons him to the destiny of a god according to what is written: “Ye are gods.” The flesh, we said, is all of man. In Hebrew “flesh” and “soul” are synonyms. “All flesh” and “every soul” mean man or humanity. Hence the spirit-flesh opposition does not mark a duality within nature itself as does the dichotomy of body and soul. It is in fact a distinction between the order of nature and the supernatural which is a revealed order. From the biblical point of view there is nothing spiritual in an ethics that exalts the soul at the expense of the body. Such philosophies are carnal. Indeed the more they exalt the soul the more carnal they are. They contribute, says St. Paul, to “the satisfaction of the flesh.” 1 An asceticism that represses the “body” is at least as carnal as Epicurianism. *

15:06

In the Old Testament as in the New it is often difficult to tell whether there is question of the ruah, the pneuma of God, or of the pneuma of man. This difficulty is significant: the spirit within man is a participation. The inhabitation of man by God’s Spirit is made possible by the existence of a spirit in man. In any case spirit is constitutive of man’s very existence. “As long as... the ruah of God is in my nostrils...” 2 “My spirit will not always remain in man, for man is but flesh.” 3 “You take away their breath (ruah), they die and return to dust.” 4 When death comes: “The dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit — ruah —- returns unto God who gave it.” 5 “If He gathers unto Himself His spirit (ruah) and His breath (nischemat) all flesh shall perish together and man shall turn again unto dust.” 6 God is called “the God of the spirits of all flesh.”

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In the New Testament we find this same idea of a natural “asthenia,” a weakness, natural in man because he is flesh: “the pneuma is willing, but the flesh is weak (asthenes).” 4 5 (“Astheneia tes sarkos”). 6 Here as in the Old Testament it is the spirit that gives life: “It is the spirit that quickens, the flesh can be of no use here.” *If we live only within the biological order without participating in the spirit that calls us to a new destiny, then we shall die like all that is biological, without having set foot in the imperishable order: “for if you live according to the flesh, you shall die.” 6 “Flesh and blood (sarx kai aima, cf. Hebrew: basar zvedam) cannot inherit the kingdom of God, neither does corruption inherit incorruption. Behold I show you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.” 7 In all these texts we see that “flesh” is not what Plato called “the body,” but is man, “a living soul.” “Heart” in the Bible does not, as in our Western tradi¬ tion, mean the affections, sensibility as opposed to reason. It is rather man’s liberty, the centre in which are taken the fundamental decisions; in particular the choices between knowledge and ignorance, light and darkness, understanding and what the prophets call stupidity, foolishness. In the “heart” the strife unfolds what will decide man’s destiny, his very essence: according to the essence he has chosen, man will be judged. For man chooses himself as he wills to be and this is the justification of the judgment upon him.

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An old text clarifies this psychology of the heart’s secrets and its duplicity. As Cain is jealous of his brother, and as the desire to kill him grows — in the secret of his heart, “Yhwh said to Cain: Why are you angry and why is your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not well, does not sin lie at your door? Its desire shall turn towards you, but you must rule over it.” 12 The word used for “sin” in Hebrew is in the feminine gender. This expression “Its desire shall turn towards you” is the same as in Genesis 3: 16, where woman is told: “Your desire shall be unto your husband, and he shall rule over you.” 1 The picture evoked by the first text on sin is that of a bitch lying down on the doorstep. The essential idea is that there is a duality between sin and man, a spontaneity proper to sin that introduces a duality into man. If man recognizes this duality and rules over that portion of himself that, in a way leads its own life, the conflict can remain well defined and healthy. But if instead, by half opening the door he lets the bitch at his doorstep into the house without knowing it, he will become double. In the depths of his heart begins a dance. Man becomes a stranger to himself, alienated. The biblical conception of understanding is tied to its anthropology, and particularly to its doctrine of the pneuma. Understanding, in the Bible, is a “spiritual intelligence,” sunesis pneumatike.

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Understanding is not separate from action. It is an action that demands the participation of the whole of man. Proceeding from man’s heart it is the act of his inmost liberty, and cannot be distinguished from the practical dispositions of the heart that does the choosing. Understanding depends on an innermost choice, the fundamental choice of the man. It is the essential act that defines and judges him, being elaborated by all his inner powers, both conscious and unconscious. No double ledger can be kept with action on one side, thought on the other. Thought is not in itself “pure,” not set in a place apart, topos noetos. Understanding is inseparable from the good. “To depart from evil is understanding.” 2 “When wisdom enters into your heart and knowledge is pleasant to your soul, reflection will watch over you, understanding will keep you, to deliver you from the way of evil.” 3 Understanding is our most important act. We are responsible for it. Understanding, in the Old Testament as in the New, is the foremost value. It is a virtue, the prime virtue from which all the others proceed: “Let him that glories glory in this: that he has understanding and that he knows Me.” 4 Knowledge is the prime virtue: “We know thee, (we), Israel.” 5 “Let us apply ourselves to knowing Yhwh.” 6 “Continue your kindness to those that know you and your justice to the upright in heart.” 7 “Pour out your wrath upon the nations that have not known you.” 8 The greatest blame that God lays on His people by the mouth of His prophets, is that they allow knowledge to be lost. “For my people is mad, they do not know me, they are senseless sons that have no understanding.” 9 “There is no truth nor mercy nor knowledge of God in the land.” 10 “For I desire the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.” 1

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Nothing is more contrary to the biblical conception of knowledge and understanding than a separation of thought and action. In the words of Marx: “The philosophers have merely interpreted the world in different ways: the important thing is to transform it.” Understanding and knowledge, according to the Bible, are an action that requires the whole of man. Knowledge of God is not at all an evasion out of this world in the Platonic manner; in fact it cannot be separated from concrete action: “By this do we know that we know Him: if we keep His commandments.” 4 “Whoever sins has not seen Him and does not know Him.” He that says: “I know Him, and keeps not His commandments is a liar.” 5 Understanding is holiness: “The knowledge of the holy is understanding.” The messianic era is that of the knowledge of Yhwh: “A man shall no more teach his neighbor, nor a man his brother, saying: know Yhwh. For they shall all know me.” 7 “The earth shall be full of the knowledge of Yhwh, as the waters cover the sea.” * The good is not separate from life

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Biblical thought contains nothing comparable to what philosophical thought calls “ethics.” This may, at first sight, seem paradoxical. The Bible’s specific contribution has too often been represented as a more perfected and more human moral doctrine. But such a representation is the reduction of one world — that of the prophets of Israel — to another — that of the Western philosophers — and a fundamental error concerning the originality of the Judeo-Christian contribution. To reduce this contribution to an “ethics” is in fact nothing less than a betrayal. Those biblical concepts that appear analogous to our notions of ethics really have a quite different significance. This is because they belong to an entirely different system of references. They are, as the physicist would say, in an absolutely new “field.” These concepts find their meaning in a world that gravitates about Him whose Name is I am. They are integrated into a metaphysics and a theology and cannot be separated from them without losing their substance. To consider separately the concepts of an “ethics” of the Old or New Testament is a fatal mistake for anyone that wants to understand their true scope. Such a separation leaves

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a mere corruptible residue which rots like manna, because it is being preserved apart from the whole that produced it. * Thus justice in the Bible (the Zedaka) has not only, nor primarily, an ethical or a social significance. The Zedaka is the justice, or the justness, of our essential metaphysical relationship with God. precise relationship is knowledge and love. Justice in the Bible is not opposed to charity. It is charity. The theological virtue of justice expresses itself in justice towards neighbor, which is also love, and in social justice. So we must avoid thinking of this term of Justice in the restricted legal sense we give it in the Western world. Biblical justice is primarily theological. If we wish to place the biblical metaphysics of understanding in relation to its exact opposite, we must turn to Kant. Kantism is really the reverse of the biblical point of view. And that which is one in the Bible is separate and dissociated in Kantian doctrine: knowledge and being, virtue and understanding, virtue and the fulness of being, life. From the biblical point of view the Kantian dichotomies break into ineffective fragments something which, to be effective, must remain one.

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Faith is a reading of a certain datum in which the act of understanding proceeds from the Spirit’s inhabitation. Faith, we repeat is, sunesis pneumatike,4 a spiritual understanding. Faith, pistis, in the New Testament, is what the prophets called understanding and knowledge. The pistis of the New Testament has too often been confused with the pistis of Plato which is one of the last and lowest modes of knowledge, even unworthy of the name of knowledge. * 1 In other words the pistis of the New Testament has been confused with belief. Thus faith becomes an unintelligible monster. Fideism is a latent heresy, an infantile disease that has ruled many minds since Descartes and Pascal. In the New Testament, faith is understanding and knowledge. “Have you understood all these things ?” 2 “Listen and under¬ stand.” 3 “Are you also still without understanding?” 4 * “Do you not yet understand?” 6 “Are you so without understanding also?”6 “Do you not yet perceive nor understand?”7 “How is it that you do not understand?”8 * “Let the reader understand.” 8 In the Gospel of John the link between faith and understanding is clear in many texts. “We believe and we know that you are the Holy One of God.” 10 “They have known surely that I came out from You, and they have believed that it is You Who sent me.” 11 “And we have known and believed.” 12 Witness also the juncture of the two texts: “...if you do not believe that I am...” (John 8: 24), and “...Then you will know that I am...” (8: 28). (Cf. Jer. 24: 7: “I shall give them a heart to know me.”)

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The first commandment is “to love God... with all one’s understanding.” 13 Faith in the words of St. Paul, is “an under¬ standing of the mystery of Christ.” * “We do not cease praying for you, asking that you be filled with the knowledge of (God’s) will, in all wisdom and spiritual understanding.” 1 Faith is an assent to truth, pistis aletheias. * Because it is an understanding it requires attentiveness: pistis ex akoes,2 “faith by hearing.” And because it is a spiritual, supernatural under¬ standing, it is also a “mystery”: “Holding the mystery of faith in a pure mind.” 3

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That spiritual (supernatural) understanding which is faith, is rooted in the secret recesses of the heart, at the very base of our being. It defines this being’s essence, whose main action it is. It is a sign of the fundamental choice, the answer that cannot be constrained. Jesus asks: “Do you believe this?” 4 “Do you believe that I can do this? And they said: Yes, Lord. Then he touched their eyes saying: Let it be done to you according to your faith.” 5 The answer that Jesus awaits with an infinite respect reveals an inner dialogue hidden in the heart of man, between the Holy Spirit and the spirit of man, a dialogue of two liberties. “Blessed are you, Simon Peter...” 6 “Hearing this Jesus was in admiration, and said to those that were with Him: ...in no person in Israel have I found so great a faith.” 7 “Great is your faith.” 8 This is the only compliment that Jesus ever pays. For faith is a value, the prime value, as understanding and knowledge were in the Old Testament. Pistis is a continuation of what the Old Testament calls knowledge of Yhwh, understanding. Pistis is man’s essential act, the one act which defines him. “Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is already condemned because he has not believed in the name of God’s only Son. And this is the condemnation: it is that the Light came into the world, and that men preferred darkness to fight because their works were evil.” 9 As did the prophets before Him, Jesus reproaches His hearers with their lack of understanding: “O men without understanding and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have said.” Everywhere the heart’s own freedom is important in the act of understanding: “the heart believes to its own justification.” 1 Whe have seen that in the Old Testament understanding and knowledge are the foremost virtues: Yhwh prefers knowledge of Him to sacrifices.

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In the New Testament we find the same idea transposed: faith, pistis is justice, is justification. It is that because it is an expression of the essential act that defines a man, proceeding from his “heart.” That justice of action and thought (the zedaka), which is “to know Yhwh,” finds its supreme criterion in faith. Faith, pistis, reveals the prime choice secretly made, the choice that is part of man’s very substance. It is so much a part of it in fact, that he may never separate himself from the Yes or the No spoken in the depths of his heart. This is the idea developed by St. Paul when he says that “man is justified by faith.” 2 The understanding which is faith, reveals the heart’s lack of duplicity, what the New Testament calls purity: “...having purified their hearts by faith.” 3 As we saw with understanding in the Old Testament, pistis is the relationship of two liberties, the liberty of God, the giver, and the liberty of man. This is why Paul calls faith “the justice (the righteousness) of God,” “the justice of God by faith.” 4

he third argument is from texts in which Traditions are condemned. Mark 7:7: In vain do they worship men, teaching as doctrines the precepts ofmen. Matt. 15:6: For the sake ofyour tradition, you have made void the word of God, Gal. 1:14: Iwas extremely zealousfor the traditions ofmyfathers. Col. 2:8: See to it that no one makes a prey ofyou by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition. 1 Tim. 1:4: They should not occupy themselves with myths, etc. 1 Pet. 1:18: You were ransomedfrom the futile ways inherited from your fathers. Here the traditions are condemned, which the Jews claimed they had received by hand from Moses and the Prophets. Therefore similarly the traditions are thought to be condemned, which we say have come down to us from Christ and the Apostles through the hands of the Fathers. I respond that Christ and the Apostles did not reprehend the Traditions, which the Jews had received from Moses and the Prophets, some of which were from the canonical books, which were true, and some were not true; but the traditions which they had received from some more recent sources, some of which were inane and others perverse and contrary to the Scriptures. For Christ or the Apostles never called them the Traditions of Moses and the Prophets; and they say clearly that they are speaking about those that are opposed to the Scriptures. Moreover, the old Fathers explained clearly who the author was of the traditions, which Christ and the Apostles reprehended.

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Irenaeus in book 4, chapters 25 and 26 argues against the old heretics who thought that under the name of Traditions reproved by Christ and the Apostles the Law of Moses was understood, and he teaches that it was not the Law of Moses, but the traditions of the more recent elders corrupting the Law that was reproved by Christ and the Apostles. Epiphanius against the heretic Ptolemy teaches that the traditions of the Jews were four explanations of the sacred books. The first is of Moses, and that is not reproved. The second is that of Rabbit Akibam. The third is that of Rabbi Juda. And the fourth is that of the sons of Asamonaeus, and these were what were reproved by the Lord. Jerome in his commentary of Isa. 8 and Tit. 3, and in this letter to Algasias (question 10), teaches that the Jewish Traditions reprehended by the Lord took their beginning from Sammai, Kittel, Achiba and some others, who lived shortly before the birth of the Savior, who did not so much explain the Law as to corrupt it; and they called these traditions δευτερώσεις. Concerning these there is in the civil law a certain constitution of Justinian which in number 146 is spelled out in these words: This deuterosis, which is said by them to be like a secondary Tradition, we forbid in general, since it is not contained in the sacred books, nor handed down from above by the Prophets, but it contains certain excerpts of men who speak only about earthly things and do not have anything of the divine will in themselves. Also, from these sources come the fables, which are now found in the Talmud, and in almost all the books of the Rabbis. But they have nothing to do with our Traditions, which have Christ and the Apostles as their authors, and are in harmony with the divine Scriptures.

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