by
Damien F. Mackey
“The Greeks were usually at pains to separate and
distinguish clearly what was physis from what was nomos. The word physis can perhaps
best be translated by the English word nature. The physis of things
for the Greek philosopher meant the real nature of things, the underlying
reality behind the appearances, the thread so to speak which persisted through change.
The physis then is the unchanging reality. The antithesis to
this is nomos or law. Nomos is that which exists not by
nature, but by artifice, convention, custom, or usage. It is man-made, and not
part of the everlasting order of the world”.
The
two orders of things, the real and
the artificial, can, and should,
exist side by side.
The
one, however, should by no means be mistaken for the other.
Nor
should the artificial order of things
be elevated to the level of deity, and worshipped, as were the “man-made” idols
of antiquity.
“The
words of the prophets” decry and ridicule this folly (e.g. Jeremiah 10:1-16):
Hear what the Lord says to you, people of Israel. This is what
the Lord says:
‘Do not learn the ways of the nations
or be terrified by signs in the heavens,
though the nations are terrified by them.
For the practices of the peoples are worthless;
they cut a tree out of the forest,
and a craftsman shapes it with his chisel.
They adorn it with silver and gold;
they fasten it with hammer and nails
so it will not totter.
Like a scarecrow in a cucumber field,
their idols cannot speak;
they must be carried
because they cannot walk.
Do not fear them;
they can do no harm
nor can they do any good’.
or be terrified by signs in the heavens,
though the nations are terrified by them.
For the practices of the peoples are worthless;
they cut a tree out of the forest,
and a craftsman shapes it with his chisel.
They adorn it with silver and gold;
they fasten it with hammer and nails
so it will not totter.
Like a scarecrow in a cucumber field,
their idols cannot speak;
they must be carried
because they cannot walk.
Do not fear them;
they can do no harm
nor can they do any good’.
No one is like you, Lord;
you are great,
and your name is mighty in power.
Who should not fear you,
King of the nations?
This is your due.
Among all the wise leaders of the nations
and in all their kingdoms,
there is no one like you.
you are great,
and your name is mighty in power.
Who should not fear you,
King of the nations?
This is your due.
Among all the wise leaders of the nations
and in all their kingdoms,
there is no one like you.
They are all senseless and foolish;
they are taught by worthless wooden idols.
Hammered silver is brought from Tarshish
and gold from Uphaz.
they are taught by worthless wooden idols.
Hammered silver is brought from Tarshish
and gold from Uphaz.
What the craftsman and goldsmith have made
is then dressed in blue and purple—
all made by skilled workers.
But the Lord is the true God;
he is the living God, the eternal King.
When he is angry, the earth trembles;
the nations cannot endure his wrath.
is then dressed in blue and purple—
all made by skilled workers.
But the Lord is the true God;
he is the living God, the eternal King.
When he is angry, the earth trembles;
the nations cannot endure his wrath.
Tell them this: ‘These gods, who did not make
the heavens and the earth, will perish from the earth and from under the
heavens’.
But God made the earth by his power;
he founded the world by his wisdom
and stretched out the heavens by his understanding.
When he thunders, the waters in the heavens roar;
he makes clouds rise from the ends of the earth.
He sends lightning with the rain
and brings out the wind from his storehouses.
he founded the world by his wisdom
and stretched out the heavens by his understanding.
When he thunders, the waters in the heavens roar;
he makes clouds rise from the ends of the earth.
He sends lightning with the rain
and brings out the wind from his storehouses.
Everyone is senseless and without
knowledge;
every goldsmith is shamed by his idols.
The images he makes are a fraud;
they have no breath in them.
They are worthless, the objects of mockery;
when their judgment comes, they will perish.
He who is the Portion of Jacob is not like these,
for he is the Maker of all things,
including Israel, the people of his inheritance—
the Lord Almighty is his name.
every goldsmith is shamed by his idols.
The images he makes are a fraud;
they have no breath in them.
They are worthless, the objects of mockery;
when their judgment comes, they will perish.
He who is the Portion of Jacob is not like these,
for he is the Maker of all things,
including Israel, the people of his inheritance—
the Lord Almighty is his name.
The artificial order
Can
be useful to a point
I already had cause
to visit this subject in Part Two, when
quoting from Dr. Gavin Ardley’s book, Aquinas and Kant, The Foundations of
the Modern Sciences, (Chapter II: Physis and Nomos, “The Two
Orders”). The usefulness, or utilitarian value of the order of nomos is
apparent from Ardley’s description of the activity of the butcher, by contrast
with that of the anatomist. It is worth re-telling:
Let us consider what is involved in this
process of analysis or dissection. In ‘dissection’ it is instructive to compare
the practices of, say, the anatomist and the butcher. When an anatomist
dissects a rabbit or a sheep he traces out the real structure of the animal. He
lays bare the veins the nerves, the muscles, the organs, and so on. He reveals
the actual structure which is there before him waiting to be made manifest. But
when the butcher chops up the animal, he is not particularly concerned with the
real structure; he wants to cut up the carcase into joints suitable for
domestic purposes. In his activities the butcher ruthlessly cleaves across the
real structure laid bare so patiently by the anatomist. The anatomist finds
his structure, the butcher makes his. The one pursuit is of the real,
that of which, we may say, God is the fashioner or creator. In the other case
man himself is the fashioner or creator, or rather the re-creator. Man becomes,
in a minor way, his own god. To this extent Protagoras was right when he said
‘Man is the measure of all things’. It is certainly true that man is the
measure of some things, even though not of all.
The anatomist proceeds by inspection, by
recognition of what is objectively there, using the senses with which he
has been endowed. The activity of the butcher on the other hand is directed subjectively,
and is literally, as well as metaphorically, the procedure of the Procrustean
bed.
[End of quote]
Pursuit of the nomic order will tend to lead one away
from, rather than closer towards, the objective order of the real. Let us consider some examples of
this pursuit.
Biblical Structures and Sources
When writing an article
on the:
Structure of the Book of Genesis
I had cause once
again to visit the Ardleian analogy of the anatomist and the butcher, there
writing:
The same sort of analogy may be applied to, I would
suggest, the different methods that have been employed to analyse the structure
of the Book of Genesis. Here I shall contrast only the
archaeologically-based approach, as used by P. J. Wiseman and others - which
method, I believe, resembles that of the anatomist in Ardley’s example -
Wiseman’s findings have captured the
imagination of, for instance, the renowned Old Testament scholar, Professor
R.K. Harrison. See e.g. his Introduction to the Old Testament (Eerdmanns,
1969), on pp. 545-553 of which he summarizes Wiseman’s toledôt theory.
Also, the linguist, Dr. Charles Taylor, who - on the basis of the same theory -
wrote The Oldest Science Book in the World (Assembly Press, 1984). It is
also worth mentioning here that P.J. Wiseman’s son, Donald J. Wiseman, who
wrote the Foreword to Ancient Records, is considered to be one of the
preeminent Assyriologists of our time.
with the Graf-Wellhausen approach - that to my mind
approximates to the activities of the butcher.
Astruc’s Theory
Jean Astruc (d. 1766) was really he who invented the
theory of separate documents, based on the Divine names used. The French
physician had noticed that in the first 35 verses of Genesis (chapters 1-24a),
the word Elohim … “God”, was used, and no other Divine name; while in
chapters 2:4b to 3:24, the only designation given is Yahweh Elohim … “Lord
God” – except where Satan uses the word God. Astruc claimed that the passages
must have been written by different writers; for if Moses himself had
written the whole of it, firsthand, then we should have to attribute to him
this singular variation, in patches, of the Divine name.
This was really the beginning of the documentist
dissection, into fragment upon fragment, of the Book of Genesis.
By the middle of the C19th, owing largely to the efforts
of the German critics Karl Heinrich Graf (1815-1868/9) and Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918), liberal scholarship had, to its own
satisfaction, isolated four main Pentateuchal sources: J,E,D,P. Thus it was
alleged that a writer who used Elohim was the author of a so-called E
document, and the writer who used Yahweh was the author of J (for Jehovah,
the German version of Yahweh). But since some verses that were
obviously written by the same person contained both names for God, an editor
had to be introduced, then a “redactor”.
Then a Deuteronomist source was identified (which R.K.
Harrison considered to be the only valid one amidst the JEDP ‘sources’). After
a century of conjectures and further redactors, it was decided that a
further document, P (Priestly) had been written nearly 1,000 years after
Moses, and so on ....
In this way Genesis has been reduced to a series of
confused fragments and authors, in order to account for the way in which the
name of God is used in the book. The fourfold sigla, JEDP, of Graf-Wellhausen
is now dogmatically retained (though in modified form) in academic institutions
the world over. Nonetheless, the critical scholars have to admit that
their literary expedients break, not only the logical, but also the grammatical
sequence of the passages. As Wiseman commented (Clues, p. 143): “It is
confusion confounded!”
Really, since what was formerly known as the
“Documentary Hypothesis” had its inception based upon an unrealistic
premise: the presumption that a single author would not be likely to use
more than one name to designate God, it does not come as a surprise to discover
that the modern end-product of such a line of reasoning is a totally artificial
form of analysis; a butcher-like activity, ruthlessly cleaving across the
natural structure of the scriptural texts - so chopping and hewing them into
fragments that their original form and shape are no longer recognisable.
Wellhausen himself had in fact acknowledged that the
result of all of this dissecting was “an agglomeration of fragments” (as quoted
by Wiseman, Clues, p. 144). Despite this, Wellhausen’s History
of Israel (1878) “gave him a place in Biblical studies comparable, it was
said, to that of Darwin in biology” (Clues, p. 145).
[End of quote]
One may wonder what could be the advantages of such
a dissection of the biblical texts, which does not immediately appear to have
the obvious advantages of the activities of the butcher. And if, as Wiseman
claimed: “It is confusion
confounded!”, then there may be very little at all to recommend it.
The same may not be said, though, about the division of
the Bible into chapters and verses. Whilst, again, this is quite artificial, it
serves the purpose of providing convenient points of reference. Thus: https://www.blueletterbible.org/faq/don_stewart/don_stewart_273.cfm
When the books of the Bible were originally
written there were no such things as chapters or verses. Each book was written
without any breaks from the beginning to the end.
They Have Been Divided For Convenience
The chapter and verse divisions were added to
the Bible for the sake of convenience. There is no authoritative basis for the
divisions we now find.
[End of quote]
Today we would be quite lost without these handy points
of reference.
However, we need to be ever aware of the fact that
these chapters and verses are of the order of the artificial and do not
define the true structure of the sacred texts. The difference between finding
the structure of something (as does the anatomist), and making it
(the butcher), is apparent from the following contrasting of the JEDP approach,
the “Documentary Hypothesis”, with the approach adopted by P. J. Wiseman, using
archaeological data. I continued to write:
….
Because of the newness of the science of archaeology … we
can say that, from a stratigraphical/historical point of view, the study of
Scripture is still in its infancy. Pre-archaeological theories, such as those
advanced by the C19th documentists, suffer from an almost total ignorance of
the methods and styles of the ancient scribes, since these really became known
only in the previous (20th) century, after the vast libraries of the
ancient world had been excavated and their data slowly and painstakingly
sifted by modern scholars. The modern awareness of ancient scribal methods
would serve to show up with embarrassing starkness the numerous defects in the
old “Documentary Hypothesis”.
P.J. Wiseman, on the other hand, was fortunate to have
had the opportunity of participating in some of the most important archaeological
digs that took place in Mesopotamia midway through the C20th; for example, that
of Sir Leonard Woolley at the site of Ur, and of Professor S. Langdon at
Kish. Wiseman had many discussions about ancient writing methods and related
subjects with these and other scholars (most notably, Professor Cyril
Gadd). In the light of all of this firsthand evidence and expertise that had
become available to him, Wiseman found himself perfectly equipped to re-examine
the structure and authorship of the Book of Genesis. He discovered that the
book’s structure was really quite straightforward, and was completely explained
by the facts of archaeology. In true anatomist fashion - according to Dr.
Ardley’s analogy - Wiseman was able to lay bare the real structure of the Book
of Genesis, and thereby scientifically to expose, by stark contrast, just what
an unholy mess the JEDP dissectors were leaving behind them. In fact, nowhere
do the clumsy techniques of the documentists show up so embarrassingly as when
contrasted against the light of Wiseman’s patient uncovering of the essential
structure of the Genesis texts. Wiseman had at least been prepared to concede
on behalf of the early documentists, as an excuse for their radical fragmenting
of the texts, that they had not been in a position to compare the literary form
and structure of Genesis with other ancient methods of writing, that would have
enabled them to have read Genesis in the light of the times and circumstances
in which it was written. But, in the case of contemporary exegetes, he
considered that: “... it cannot be regarded as other than serious that
notwithstanding archaeological discoveries, many still read Genesis not as
ancient, but as though it had been written in relatively modern times” (Clues,
p. 143). The mistake had been made, he said, despite the very obvious fact
that the Genesis narrative itself “is constructed in a most antique manner
by use of a framework of repeated phrases” ….
[End of quote]
Pursuit of the real
is of a far higher order, and is wiser, than is the pursuit of utilitarian ends. The one pertains to
the kingdom of Jesus Christ and the other to that of
Pontius Pilate:
A Kingdom of Truth not Power
Matthew 6:33: ‘But seek first the
kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to
you’.
I do not know whether Eduard Meyer, a German, was himself also a Kantian by philosophical
persuasion, but Meyer certainly did to Egyptian chronology what Kant claimed the
physicists were doing to the order of nature. He actively imposed his pre-conceived mathematical system, which, unfortunately, has no compelling basis in reality. His elabo-structure, like
some clumsy and mis-placed scaffolding offering no practical points of
reference, is basically the model that is so lauded today, whilst the real
Egyptian history awaits its Tutankhamun-ian resurrection.
History - Ancient (Eduard Meyer)
I do not know whether Eduard Meyer, a
German, was himself also a Kantian by philosophical persuasion, but Meyer
certainly did to Egyptian chronology
what Kant claimed the physicists were doing to the order of nature. He actively imposed his pre-conceived mathematical system, which,
unfortunately, has no compelling basis in reality. His elabo-structure, like
some clumsy and mis-placed scaffolding offering no practical points of
reference, is basically the model that is so lauded today, whilst the real
Egyptian history awaits its Tutankhamun-ian resurrection.
Introduction
Though I would be far from describing myself as ‘Kantian’, my favourite book
on the subject of the philosophy of science is Gavin Ardley’s Aquinas and
Kant: The Foundations of
the Modern Sciences, in which Dr. Ardley gives the
credit to Immanuel Kant for having uncovered the nature of modern theoretical
science (or physics). The modern physicist apparently, quite unlike the earlier
scientists, does not seek to study nature as it really is (Kant’s Ding an sich), but, instead (and this is Kant’s immense contribution), actively imposes his/her ‘a priori’
mental constructs upon nature.
According to Ardley this is for utilitarian and/or commercial purposes.
Now I believe that a similar type of artificial ‘a priori’
process has been applied by the Berlin School of Egyptology’s Eduard Meyer to
ancient Egyptian chronology, which then became the yardstick for the
chronologies of other ancient nations.
Meyer’s ‘Sothic Theory’
an unmitigated disaster
The pattern of this series has been to distinguish
between the two orders of things, namely:
(i) the real
nature of things or underlying and unchanging reality behind the appearances, and
(ii) that which exists not by
nature, but by artifice, convention, custom, or usage. It is man-made, and not
part of the everlasting order of the world.
- known to the ancient Greeks as, respectively,
(i) physis, and (ii) nomos.
The reason for taking pains to make the
distinction is so that the artificial is not taken for reality, and virtually
idolised (as with those ancient man-made idols), as so often tends to happen.
The order of nomos
we have found to serve some most useful purposes, as aide-mémoire,
as points of reference – for
example, in the case of the artificial numbering of biblical texts into
chapters and verses.
As long as one does not lose sight of the underlying reality, though.
For, in the case of the modern numbering of the Bible, the artificial divisions
can also be an impediment when it comes to one’s grasping the original
intentions and meanings of the authors. I gave an example of this previously.
But, whilst the mathematising of the Scriptures
has proven to be a most effective contribution to biblical studies - though with
the types of limitations just referred to - Berlin chronologist Eduard Meyer’s attempt
to bring
some type of mathematical (astronomically-based) order to the highly complex
Egyptian chronology (30 dynasties), laudable though his intentions may have
been, has had the most disastrous results from which ancient history is yet far
from recovering. For a handy summary of all of this, see my:
The Fall of the Sothic Theory: Egyptian Chronology
Revisited
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