The Great Partnership

by Jonathan Sacks

  What I have sought to show in this chapter, however, is that there is a significant history to the Western experience of God and religion on the one hand, philosophy and science on the other. They came together in the grand, unique synthesis of Christianity from Paul, through the Church Fathers and the scholastics, to the seventeenth century. Since then they have been progressively separated, but they may be coming together again in ways we cannot foresee. There always was, though, an alternative, the road less travelled, adhered to by a tiny people, the Jews.

  On this view, religion, faith and God are not among the truths discovered by science or philosophy in the Greek and Western mode. They are about meaning. Meaning is made and sustained in conversations. It lives in relationships: in marriages, families, communities and societies. It is told in narrative, invoked in prayer, enacted in ritual, encoded in sacred texts, celebrated on holy days and sung in songs of praise.

  The left brain, with its linear, atomising, generalising powers, is effective in dealing with things. It is not best at dealing with people. It does not understand the inner life of people, their hopes and fears, their aspirations and anxieties. Religion consecrates our humanity. In discovering God, singular and alone, our ancestors discovered the human individual, singular and alone. For the first time in history sanctity was conferred on the human individual as such, regardless of class, caste, colour or creed, as God’s image and likeness, God’s beloved.

  Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. They speak different languages and use different powers of the brain. We sometimes fail to see this because of the way the religion of Abraham entered the mainstream consciousness of the West, not in its own language but in the language of the culture that gave birth to science. Once we recognise their difference we can move on, no longer thinking of science and religion as friends who became enemies, but as our unique, bicameral, twin perspective on the difference between things and people, objects and subjects, enabling us to create within a world of blind forces a home for a humanity that is neither blind nor deaf to the beauty of the other as the living trace of the living God.

  4

  Finding God

  God lives where we let Him in.

  Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kotzk

  It was as though a more complex interlocutor had spoken.

  Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim’

  But the Lord God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’

  Genesis 3:9

  ‘Thank God for atheists!’ was my first response to philosophy. I was the first member of my family to go to university, and it hit me like a cold shower. Those were the days – Oxford and Cambridge in the 1960s – when the words ‘religion’ and ‘philosophy’ went together like cricket and thunderstorms. You often found them together but the latter generally put an end to the former. Philosophers were atheists, or at least agnostics. That, then, was the default option, and at the time I did not know of any exceptions.

  The first thing we did, a kind of nursery-slope exercise, was to refute all the classic proofs for the existence of God. Kant had disproved the ontological argument. Hume had shown that for any supposed miracle, the evidence that it had not happened was always greater than the evidence that it had. Darwin had shown the error in the ‘argument from design’. For me, far from being a threat, this was like an immersion in a mikveh, a ritual bath. I felt purified.

  All these arguments, by then deemed to be fallacious, were in any case wholly alien to the religion I knew and loved. They were Greek, not Hebraic. They carried with them the scent of Athens, not Jerusalem. They were beautiful but misconceived. As Judah Halevi put it in the eleventh century, they were about the God of Aristotle, not the God of Abraham. Now, every thinking Jew – none more than Maimonides – loves Aristotle, and every feeling Jew loves Socrates, who comes across the pages of history exactly like a rabbi, always asking unsettling questions. Socrates is that most Jewish of figures, an irrepressible iconoclast. But Greece is Greece, Jerusalem is Jerusalem, and the two are not the same.

  The ontological argument struck me as philosophical legerdemain of the lowest kind. It states, roughly, that if we can conceive of the greatest possible being, then it must exist, because if it did not exist, it would not be the greatest possible being. It immediately occurred to me that by the same token you could prove that the cruellest possible being exists, because if it does not exist, how cruel could it really be? At best, it qualified as a not-very-good Woody Allen–type joke. The idea that you can pass from concept to existence in that kind of way is actually a kind of magical thinking: the belief that saying, or thinking, makes it so. That is what Wittgenstein set himself against when he called philosophy ‘the battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language’.1

  As for the argument from design – the world looks as if it was designed, therefore it had a Designer – it was wobbly to begin with. Had John Stuart Mill not put the contrary case with immense passion and power?

  Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured like wild beasts, burns them to death … starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve … If there are any marks at all of special design in creation, one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals … [I]f Nature and Man are both the works of a Being of perfect goodness, that Being intended Nature as a scheme to be amended, not imitated, by man.2

  But is that not precisely what the rabbis meant when they said that Abraham encountered God in the vision of ‘a palace in flames’, meaning, yes, there was order, but there was also disorder, violence, chaos, injustice?3 God told Abraham to leave home and travel ‘to the land I will show you’, but no sooner had he arrived than there was a famine in the land and he had to leave. Design there may be, but it is not obvious, not on the surface, certainly not self-evident.

  As for Mill’s conclusion – ‘If Nature and Man are both the works of a Being of perfect goodness, that Being intended Nature as a scheme to be amended, not imitated, by man’ – that is precisely what the rabbis had in mind when they spoke of people becoming ‘God’s partner in the work of creation’. They believed that God left the world incomplete to be completed by humanity. That, in Judaism, is not heresy but mainstream belief.

  As for miracles, David Hume would surely have enjoyed the approach of Moses Maimonides, who argued that miracles are not a proof of anything, since there is always the possibility that they have been performed by magic, optical illusion or the like. The Israelites did not believe in Moses because of the miracles he performed, he says in his code of Jewish law.4 Why then did Moses perform them? Because they answered a physical, not a metaphysical need. Why did he divide the Red Sea? Because the Israelites needed to get to the other side. Why did he produce manna from heaven and water from a rock? Because the people were hungry and thirsty. Believe in miracles, said Maimonides, and there is a danger you will believe in false prophets.

  Lest it be thought that Maimonides was a lone voice, consider the Bible itself. Two prophets, Elijah and Elisha, both raise the dead to life (1 Kings 17:17–24; 2 Kings 4:8–37). Yet neither the biblical text nor later Jewish tradition made any great fuss over this. The real miracle in both cases – as it is in the stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs in Genesis, and of Hannah in the book of Samuel – is that infertile women were able to have children in the first place. In that sense, modern fertility treatments, including in vitro fertilisation, are our miracles. We should not need supernatural intervention to see children as the gift of God.

  The Babylonian Talmud displays a fascinating attitude towards the miraculous. It tells the story of a man whose wife died giving birth. The man was so poor he was unable to pay for a wet-nurse. A miracle happened, says the Talmud, and his
own breasts sprouted milk (male lactation is, in fact, a natural though rare occurrence). What is fascinating is what the Talmud says next: ‘Rav Joseph said: Come and see how great is this man that such a miracle was performed for him. Abbaye said to him: To the contrary, come and see how lowly was this man, that he needed the natural order to be changed for him.’5

  Abbaye believed, with many of the sages, that we should not need miracles, nor should we rely on them. Judaism is a religion that celebrates law: the natural law that governs the physical universe, and the moral law that governs the human universe. God is found in order, not in the miraculous suspension of that order. If you read closely the book of Exodus, the book that contains the most and greatest miracles, you will see that none induced lasting faithfulness on the part of the Israelites. Within three days of the division of the Red Sea they were complaining about the water (Exodus 15:22–24). Forty-one days after the revelation at Mount Sinai, they were making a golden calf (Exodus 32). Faith is about seeing the miraculous in the everyday, not about waiting every day for the miraculous.

  So my induction into godless philosophy did wonders for my faith. It cleared the garden of religion from the covering of weeds that was disfiguring the lawn and hiding the flowers. Nor did I expect otherwise. If God created the world, then his existence must be compatible with the world. If he created human intelligence, his existence must not be an insult to the intelligence. If the greatest gift he gave humanity was freedom, then religion could not establish itself by coercion. If he created law-governed order, then he could not have asked us to depend on events incompatible with that order.

  Oddly enough, it was the atheist Bernard Williams, who later became my doctoral supervisor, who really clarified the issue for me. In what must have been one of his first published articles, ‘Tertullian’s Paradox’, he delivered a devastating onslaught against irrationalism in the religious life.6 His target was the famous statement made by Tertullian in the third century: Certum est, quia impossibile, ‘It is certain because it is impossible.’ Faith transcends understanding.

  Williams rightly argued that, once you start down this road, there is no way of distinguishing between holy nonsense and unholy nonsense. If a belief cannot be stated coherently, then what is it to believe in it? Faith would then become ‘whistling in the dark without even the knowledge that what one is whistling is a tune’.

  Maimonides had made almost exactly the same point eight centuries earlier. In The Guide for the Perplexed he referred to people who objected to giving reasons for the divine commandments, on the grounds that if their logic could be understood by mere mortals, then there was no reason for believing they were divine. Maimonides dismissed such views as unworthy of consideration, because they resulted in making God lower than mere mortals. Shall we really say that human beings do things for a reason while God does not?7

  Williams’s second point, though, was deeper. Religious believers were called on to believe two things that cannot both be true. On the one hand God is eternal, unchangeable and beyond time. On the other, God is involved in history. Williams spoke about the central events of Christianity, but the same is true in Judaism. God speaks to Abraham, gives him a child, is with Joseph in Egypt, summons Moses at the burning bush, and rescues the Israelites from slavery. Williams, with great elegance and subtlety, in effect said: you cannot have it both ways. Either God is within history or he is beyond history, but not both.

  Given that this was the only theological statement of Williams I know of, written when he was relatively young – twenty-five – it may have been that this was one of the reasons he decided to abandon his faith, though this is mere speculation on my part. To me, however, it suggested exactly the opposite, the first intimation of the argument I have set out in the previous three chapters. What Williams saw as a contradiction within faith, I recognised as a contradiction between the Jewish and Greek conceptions of God. The changeless, unmoved mover was the God of Plato and Aristotle. The God of history was the God of Abraham. They simply did not belong together. Williams the atheist helped me clarify, and thereby strengthen, my faith. He did more – but of that anon.

  What led me to examine my faith in depth was not the success of philosophy in refuting proofs for the existence of God. It was its failure to say anything positive of consequence about the big questions of life: Who am I? Why am I here? To what story do I belong? How then shall I live?

  I loved philosophy and still do. I read it, teach it and cherish it. At Cambridge, and later at Oxford, I was taught by people of awesome brilliance, especially by my undergraduate tutor Roger Scruton, for whom I have a deep affection and admiration. But philosophy in the late 1960s and early 1970s had reached a dead end. Under the influence of the Vienna Circle and Logical Positivism, it had given up on the big questions. Instead philosophers spent their time focusing on the meaning of words. Instead of asking what is right and wrong, it asked, ‘What do we mean when we say this is right, that is wrong?’ It seemed less like the search for wisdom than a kind of high-minded lexicography, as if the great arguments that had divided serious minds for twenty-five centuries could be resolved, or dissolved, by mere reflection on what words mean.

  Besides which, it often seemed to turn out that they did not mean anything at all. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’, it was argued, were nothing more than an expression of emotion or perhaps not even that. The combination of technical virtuosity and naiveté was sometimes staggering. G. E. Moore had argued that morality was a matter of intuition, as if it was not patently obvious that people in different cultures and ages had different moral intuitions. A. J. Ayer, in a mere twenty pages of Language, Truth and Logic, consigned the entire worlds of aesthetic and moral judgement, metaphysics and religion to the wastepaper basket on the grounds that they consisted of statements that could not be conclusively verified and were therefore meaningless. Either this was a joke whose point I could not see, or it was philistinism on a stunning scale.

  Slowly it began to dawn on me that I would have to turn to religion, not philosophy, to find the wisdom I sought. I was beginning to see why. Philosophy aimed at universality – at propositions that were true in all places, at all times. But meaning is expressed in particularity. There is no universal meaning. There are universal rules. ‘Treat others as you would wish to be treated’ – the so-called Golden Rule – is one. ‘Do not cause suffering where it can be avoided’ is another. But they are too few, thin and abstract to constitute a way of life.

  There was a witty philosophy professor at Columbia University, Sidney Morganbesser, who is said to have taught this point to his students by taking them to a restaurant, summoning a waiter, and ordering soup. ‘And which soup would you like?’ asked the waiter. ‘We have chicken soup, fish soup, leek soup, lentil soup and a very fine borsht.’

  ‘I don’t want any of those,’ said Morganbesser, ‘I just want soup.’

  Whether or not the waiter got the joke, the students eventually did. There may be a Platonic essence of soup – soup in general, the universal form of soup – but it belongs strictly to a Platonic heaven. Down here, if you want to drink soup, it has to be of a particular kind. The same, I realised, applies to meaning. Science may be universal, but meaning is not. The great error of the Enlightenment was to confuse the two.

  One of the great joys of my life was to discover, some years later, that some great thinkers had reached the same conclusion: Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, Michael Walzer in Spheres of Justice, Stuart Hampshire in Morality and Conflict, Michael Sandel in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, all of them appearing in the early 1980s. Together they gave back to philosophy its history and substantive particularity.

  Something else happened in 1967 that led to a real crisis of faith: not faith in God but faith in human beings. It is hard for anyone who did not live through them to describe the mood that prevailed among Jews in the tense weeks before the Six Day War. Arab armies were massing on Israel’s borders. Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser
had closed the Straits of Tiran and was threatening to drive Israel into the sea. It seemed, not just to us but to Jews throughout the world, that there was a real danger that Israel would be totally annihilated. The little synagogue in Thompson’s Lane was full day after day. Jews we had never seen there before were praying daily for Israel’s safety. As it happened, Israel won a swift victory. But it was a transformative moment for my generation. We who had been born after the Holocaust had just lived through the fear of a second Holocaust, and nothing would be the same again.

  At about the same time I encountered the English don George Steiner. We debated one another at the Cambridge Union. He had just published a book of essays, Language and Silence, and this too made a great impression on me. What he wrote about the Holocaust was about the failure, in Germany, of the humanities to humanise. ‘We know now,’ he wrote, ‘that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.’ This was new to me, and the more I have read in the intervening years, the more disturbing it becomes.8

  The Holocaust did not take place long ago and far away. It happened in the heart of rationalist, post-Enlightenment, liberal Europe: the Europe of Kant and Hegel, Goethe and Schiller, Beethoven and Brahms. Some of the epicentres of antisemitism were places of cosmopolitan, avant-garde culture like Berlin and Vienna. The Nazis were aided by doctors, lawyers, scientists, judges and academics. More than half of the participants at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, who planned the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’, the murder of all Europe’s Jews, carried the title ‘doctor’. They either had doctorates or were medical practitioners.9 This was devastating to me. I have known people who lost their faith in God during the Holocaust, and others who kept it. But that anyone can have faith in humanity after Auschwitz to me defies belief.