by
Damien F. Mackey
Of relevance is Ch. 3 of Tracey Rowland’s book, Ratzinger’s Faith, this chapter being entitled “Revelation, Scripture and Tradition”.
“I will arouse your sons, O Zion, against your sons, O Greece ...”.
(Zechariah 9:13)
Introduction
Josef Ratzinger, who became pope Benedict XVI, is an original thinker and, he, though very much in the western mould of thinking - which is the theme with which I am basically interested here, west (Logos) against east (Chokmah, Dabar) - and the German west at that, from which has come a lot of problematical biblical exegesis relating to the JEDP theory (see my):
Preferring P. J. Wiseman to un-wise JEDP
can frequently surprise the reader with his wholly new insights.
Regarding this, I would thoroughly recommend, for instance, his three-part series:
for its insights into the Person of Jesus Christ, whilst not necessarily agreeing with every one of his original conclusions. Ratzinger’s books are replete with references to German scholars, understandably, given that he himself is from Germany. Rudolf Bultmann gets a lot of ‘airplay’. And one wonders at times if more orthodox exegetes could have been sourced instead. However, Ratzinger is a good enough writer not to get dragged in by his sources. He can consider another writer’s point of view at some length and then dismiss it in favour of a view that he prefers.
As the following section will show, Ratzinger is very much in the western mould of thinking, which, I have argued, is heavily indebted to Hebrew wisdom. See e.g. my article:
The following is taken from pp. 62-64 of Rowland’s Chapter 3:
…. Ratzinger frequently reminds academic audiences that the Church fathers found the 'seeds of the Word, not in the religions of the world, but rather in philosophy, that is, in the process of critical reason directed against the [pagan] religions'. …. He notes that the habit of thinking about Christianity as a 'religion' among many religions, all of roughly the same intellectual merit, is a modern development. At its very origins Christianity sides with reason and considers this ally to be its principal forerunner.
My comment: Though its roots are nonetheless in Hebrew wisdom. See e.g. my article:
Joseph as Thales: Not an "Hellenic Gotterdamerung"
but Israelite Wisdom
Rowland continues:
…. Moreover: Ultimately it [a decision to believe in God] is a decision in favor of reason and a decision about whether good and evil, truth and untruth, are merely subjective categories or reality. In this sense, in the beginning there is faith, but a faith that first acknowledges the dignity and scope of reason. The decision for God is simultaneously an intellectual and an existential decision - each determines the other reciprocally. ….
Ratzinger therefore does not follow the trend of thinking of Athens and Jerusalem as short-hand terms for two fundamentally different ways of approaching religious matters: one fideistic and one philosophical. The great University of Chicago philosophy professor Leo Strauss (1889-1973) popularized this dichotomy to such a degree that now two generations later there are almost as many subcategories of Straussians as there are Thomists, according to which side of this apparently unbridgeable divide they find themselves most at home.
However, Ratzinger's approach is to argue that there are quite amazing parallels in chronology and content between the philosopher’s criticism of the myths in Greece and the prophets' criticism of the gods in Israel. While he concedes that the two movements start from completely different assumptions and have completely different aims, he none the less concludes: the movement of the logos against the myth, as it evolved in the Greek mind in the philosophical enlightenment, so that in the end it necessarily led to the fall of the gods, has an inner parallelism with the enlightenment that the prophetic Wisdom literature cultivated in its demythologization of the divine powers in favour of the one and only God. ….
My comment: My view, instead, would be that much Greek mythology is an appropriation and distortion of Hebrew and Near Eastern writings, hence those “amazing parallels”.
The pope favours the modern tendency according to which the Book of Wisdom, customarily attributed to King Solomon, was a late compilation influenced by Greek thought. One could say (ignoring chronological factors) an influence of the wise Solon over the wise Solomon, a view that I would completely reject, however, given my re-identification of Solon as a Greek appropriation of King Solomon, in:
Solomon and Sheba
In Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two, p. 210, Ratzinger writes:
… the author of the Book of Wisdom could have been familiar with Plato’s speculations from his work on statecraft, in which he asks what would become of a perfectly just person in this world, and he comes to the conclusion that such a person would be crucified (The Republic, II, 361e-362a). The Book of Wisdom may have taken up this idea from the philosopher and introduced it into the Old Testament, so that it now points directly to Jesus.
My comment: Quite on the contrary, I recently wrote in:
Socrates and Plato are similarly (like the Sophists) watered-down entities by comparison with the Middle Eastern originals. Such is how the Hebrew Scriptures end up when filtered through the Greeks, [and, in the case of Plato, perhaps through Egypt before the Greeks, hence a double filtering].
Even then, it is doubtful whether the finely filtered version of Plato that we now have could have been written by pagan Greeks. At least some of it seems to belong clearly to the Christian era, e.g. “The just man … will be scourged, tortured, and imprisoned … and after enduring every humiliation he will be crucified” (The Republic, Bk. 2, 362).
I submit that this statement would not likely have been written prior to the Gospels.
I would thus strongly adhere to the traditional view that King Solomon himself substantially wrote the Book of Wisdom. This later influenced Plato, who was, too, in his original form, I suspect, a prophet of Israel. This biblical wisdom (already diminished through pagan ‘Ionia’), came to Greece only later, where it received further transformations and transmutations. The stunningly Jesus like references (“be crucified”) could not, I submit, have preceded the Gospels – just as the biographies of Mohammed, a biblical composite, later acquired Christian era references. ....
....
There was already abundant Solomonic-like literature in the ancient Near (Middle) East, long before Greece, with Hammurabi of Babylon, for instance, who was Solomon’s contemporary ....
[End of quote]
For Hebrew influence on Hammurabi king of Babylon, for instance, see e.g. my article:
Davidic Influence on King Hammurabi
In my revised context, I should be largely sympathetic with what Del Nevo has further written in his review of Professor Peter Kreeft’s book, The Philosophy of Jesus Christ (my emphasis):
… Traditionally Christian thought, that is, Christian interpretation, has depended on Greek philosophy, more precisely on combinations of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. Jesus' philosophy — whatever it was — was Jewish, rabbinic, in the sense we read about in the Talmud, which reflects the oral tradition of Jesus' Jewish world. Jesus' philosophy was not Platonic or Aristotelian.
The problem for Kreeft, which his book bears out, is that philosophy for him is by definition non-Jewish.
There is a long quotation from C. S. Lewis in the Preface to show that Jesus' style followed broadly along Aristotelian lines as found in the Poetics and the Analytics. But Jesus' style was halakhic and aggadic. ….
[End of quote]
Moreover, by no means could I, in light of my re-evaluations of that non-historical composite, the “Prophet Mohammed” (see e.g. my series:
Biography of the Prophet Mohammed (Muhammad) Seriously Mangles History
beginning with:
accept the view of Josef Ratzinger about Islam, in his Regensburg address, that, in Rowland’s words (op. cit., p. 121), “… as a tradition, Islam needs to engage with the intellectual heritage of Greece”.
Rather, I think, Islam needs to rediscover its roots in Old Testament Israel.
Not to mention its opportunity for salvation in New Testament Israel!
Somewhat more reasonable, I believe, is Ratzinger’s other view given here that: “… the attempt to graft on to Islamic societies what are termed western standards cut loose from their Christian foundations misunderstands the internal logic of Islam as well as the historical logic to which these western standards belong”.
In light of all of this, I find it encouraging that the Catholic Church is involving Jews in biblical discussions, for example, Chief Rabbi Cohen who addressed the Synod of Bishops (2008).
Blessed Edith Stein, a Jew and a highly-skilled philosopher, now also becomes an important factor in considerations of Jesus as a Jewish philosopher. Beatified in Cologne on 1 May 1987, the Church has honoured her as “a daughter of Israel” (Pope John Paul II), who, as a Catholic during Nazi persecution, “remained faithful to the crucified Lord Jesus Christ and, as a Jew, to her people in loving faithfulness”.
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