The Central Question

The central question of my intellectual life, since I first began to think for myself with any credible degree of sophistication (i.e., when I began to read Kierkegaard around age 16), has been this: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem (and, by the same token, Ctesiphon with Yathrib)?

For Tertullian--who first posed the question (as a rhetorical exercise, more or less)--the presumptive response was negative: Athens has nothing to do with Jerusalem. And yet, had this been the case, biblical religion would never have evolved much beyond its origins as a priestly cult of sacrifice. The prophetic (i.e., ethical) tradition would have emerged regardless, but the intellectual hunger that eventually gave birth to the natural sciences would have gone unsatisfied. So we would have had a world in which priest-craft promised magic and redemption, moral conviction thundered, and nature was analyzed and, in part, harnessed--without reference to ethics or culture.

This is the world to which we seem to be, at present, reverting.

I find this world to be a dangerous place, because it is filled with certainties that resist all nuance and attempts at mediation and translation across the boundaries that separate priest from prophet, prophet from scientist, and scientist from priest. It is a world without poets and musicians: a world without humanists and the humanities.

Jerusalem without Athens and Yathrib without Ctesiphon are walled cities whose inhabitants are smug, self-satisfied, blind know-it-alls. Such a world is easily divided against itself; it invites conflict and fratricide.

The central question of my intellectual life has been, and remains, how do we avoid creating such a world?

My answer: we must insist on making room for the posing of this question not, as Tertullian did, as a mere exercise in rhetoric with a pre-determined answer, but as humanists have done since the beginnings of Mesopotamian civilization: as a challenge to our creativity, a spur to the imagination, and a call to lives of study and deliberation. Humanism does not provide answers to this question, it is itself an answer to this question.