The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea by Rémi Brague, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) (LG)

I.


He is encyclopedic and seems to have read all of the most important books in the world. No language seems unknown to him, philological humor abounds, and his natural bent of mind is towards the metaphysical and theological, the paradoxical and the infinite. He appears to have forgotten nothing that he has ever read, and he has a fascination with things Islamic and Jewish. No, it’s not Borges; it is Rémi Brague, who often can seem a character sprung from the great Argentine’s imagination.

Consider also the style: an infinite wealth of learning is deployed in a plot meant to get to the bottom of a mystery. Whether it is the disappearance of norms traced ultimately to some cosmology or other in modern thought, as in his previous book, The Wisdom of the World, or the eclipse of divine law and norms that claim a divine origin or end in his recent The Law of God: A Philosophical History of an Idea, Like some Borgesian sleuth, Brague sets out to take us through the Library of Babel to show us the myriad traces—philosophical and theological—of our world and our thought about the divine.

So who, then, is Rémi Brague? Brague is currently a professor of Arabic philosophy at the Sorbonne and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He is the author of much-admired books on classical Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle in particular, editor of outstanding volumes devoted to medievals such as al-Razi, Maimonides, and Bernard of Clairvaux, and more general surveys of Greek and medieval philosophy. He is also the author, more recently, of several challenging books on the fate of classical and medieval philosophy and its curious syntheses with revealed religion in the West: Eccentric Culture; The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought; and the recently translated The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea.

From the beginning it appears Brague was not timid. His doctorat d’etat, Aristotle and the Question of the World, sought to finish the work on Aristotle that Heidegger began before turning it into one of the twentieth century’s philosophical masterworks, Being and Time. And his more recent Eccentric Culture provocatively argues that European Civilization is not the product of Athens or Jerusalem, but of that other city, Christian Rome.

Brague’s recent project has been to think about the history of the attempts within philosophy and theology to ground norms. In The Wisdom of the World he looked to the cosmos, and in his more recent The Law of God he looks to divine law. His way of proceeding is to compare the three cultures of the medieval world—Jewish, Islamic, Christian—against their common bases in Greek antiquity and Biblical revelation so as to better comprehend our own modernity. Where The Wisdom of the World studied what in one of his many neologisms he names cosmonomy, The Law of God is devoted to what he names theonomy (LG, viii).

Ultimately Brague aims for more than a comprehension of modernity. Divine law “reveals what Judaism, Islam, and Christianity think and know about themselves” (LG, vii). And such a revelation Brague hopes “throws light on what is dubious in the modern project itself” (LG, 8). So The Law of God will let each of the three great Abrahamic traditions speak for themselves and, by juxtaposition with the speechlessness of modernity on the subjects of cosmonomy and theonomy, bring out both modernity’s core and ask after its hollowness (LG, 8). His conclusions, however, are quite atypical and certainly worth pondering: On the one hand, we are led to believe that modernity is simply an evolution, the working out of conceptual choices made at the beginning of the medieval ages. On the other hand, our modernity is in danger of committing suicide in its reckless disregard for grounding its norms in the cosmos or divine law.

In the end, behind the masks of the philologue extraordinaire and the encyclopedic Sorbonne professor lurks the Christian theologian engaged in an Olympian act of apologia.

II.


Why a history of the idea of divine law? Why are divine law’s subject-matter and its history Brague’s chosen method of approach?

Brague aims to explode the many clichés we tell ourselves, especially those that pertain to our putative liberation from sacred and divine claims—like those that would speak of “a great separation” between theological and moral-political things or seek like Kant to narrate modernity as the tale of Enlightenment, self-willed maturity from heteronomy to autonomy, or various other fables convenues of secularization.

To Europeans intent on secularization who perceive that separation as progress and Islamic conservatives who see it as a sign of decadence, Brague says it simply never took place. Better, he says, to speak of a parallel development of the political and religious as two independent sources of authority”: while their paths cross, they never merge (LG, 257–8).

To those conservatives who would adorn morality with the songs of theology, Brague replies, “There is no theological morality” (LG, 259). To those partisans of secularism quick to defend the achievement of a “long-term historical movement that might lead morality to emancipate itself from theology,” Brague replies, “There is no such achievement.”

Beyond these negations, what is Brague’s alternative tale? What story about divine law and the three Abrahamic religions does Brague tell? And what implications does it have for how we understand ourselves and our modernity?

Brague begins reasonably with the question, “What is divine law?” He quickly turns to the literary legacies of Athens and Jerusalem. The expression we learn connects two ideas. Authority must take the form of laws, and divinity must appear as a locus of power capable of exerting normative force. A brief summary is in order.

A law can be divine because of its origin, either by way of dictation or inspiration; or the law can be divine due to its intrinsic character, its perfection, goodness, and eternity; or it can be an admixture of the two: both having an origin in the divine and reflecting its origins by tracing it back to the Lawgiver. There are then two extreme possibilities: a law that is divine simply because it traces its origin to divine command or a law that is deemed perfect but whose origin has disappeared from view.

Egypt attributed divinity to the king who supposedly dictates the law, but it is in Mesopotamia that we must look for the precise idea of divine law, even if it left us no law texts. The Code of Hammurabi, Brague reminds us, is no code at all, but rather more likely an anthology of exemplary juridical decisions. For ancient Greece the divine described a law or a group of laws operating in the physical world, while for the post-Biblical world the divine law is rooted ultimately in a god outside the world but intervening in history.

Of Israel we learn that owing to its very peculiar early history, it was marked by deep ambivalence: the state never became well established, and Israel always remained uncomfortable with state institutions. First, Israel was always nostalgic, either for the nomadic days and nights of the desert or the “liberty” of life under the judges. Second, that life was essentially anti-state, was a reaction against the Canaanite or Egyptian models. Third, the founding event was the Exodus, a break with the Egyptian state. Finally, Israel worked out its thought in the wounded awareness of loss, a loss of something barely ever enjoyed, and compensated for it with a messianic dream. For Israelite thought “the political is held within a tension between the pre-political and the meta-political, if not laminated between the two” (LG, 32).

Of Christianity Brague informs us that once outside of Palestine it was mainly a private affair; Paul’s was “a new theocratic succession” (LG, 32) operating in opposition to the Roman Empire. In the context of these Roman persecutions we find the first pagan mentions of Christians (in a letter of Pliny the Younger to Trajan ca. 111). Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 granted the Christians a toleration that bordered on official recognition for reasons that remain opaque. Two generations later, Theodosius made Christianity the sole authorized religion, imposing obligatory acceptance of the Nicene Creed in 380 and then in 392 prohibiting the cult of the pagan gods, binding together the history of Rome and Christianity.

Of Islam Brague recounts that in the seventh century the Arabs conquered the Middle East and the shores of the Mediterranean in a conquest vaster and more durable than Alexander’s. No one knows the causes. The Qur’an records no divine call or mission. According to Muslim tradition, it is the story of a miraculous Bedouin success that brought their miserable life of “sand and lice” (raml wa-qaml) to one of fantastic opulence (LG, 35).

Where the founding texts of Christianity bear witness to a mistrust of things political—as witnessed by the political terms used in the New Testament reserved for persecutors and to those who eventually crucified Christianity’s central figure—a political dimension is instead coextensive with the Qur’anic revelation. At Mecca, the message was essentially the announcement of impending judgment, a reminder of the sorry fate of disobedient peoples. Moreover, what was separate in the traditional prophets was joined in Muhammad, who is both prophet and king.

III.


Despite an early declaration of “neutrality”—”to lead the Bible and the Qur’an to a neutral, philosophical reading,” Brague’s neutrality is not always on display (LG, 4). For while he makes ample use of historical criticism in his interpretations of Judaism and Islam, in the case of Christianity he does not avail himself of such literature and offers only pious readings.

Brague paints a picture of the divine law in Judaism as an as-if-political law, in Christianity as a post-political law and in Islam as an essentially political law. His narrative strategy has the effect of rendering Christianity proto-modern from the beginning, drawing it close to Judaism, as a revolutionary implication from within, as it were, and separating both by a wide gulf from the ruthless political imperium of Islam and its threatening ambitions.

Paradoxically, the connection between the political and religious in Israel came from outside; the religion of Deuteronomy was imposed with “Persian teeth” (LG, 52) in the translation of the commandments by Ezra, the “priest-scribe” (Ezra 7:11) (LG, 52–3). Jewish law was imposed by a third party, a regime for which it was not law. The connection between power and law imposed is arbitrary, which implies that the law can survive—which it did—even if the power does not.

A surprising consequence follows: the people of Israel return from exile to the land of their origin and re-appropriate the territory, only to find themselves among compatriots in that land whom they must symbolically separate themselves from. As a result, the exiles are never more exiled than they are since their return “home.” In this peculiar way foreignness comes to be defined by its opposite: belonging to the land; am-haaretz are those of the land ignorant of the law. To heap paradox upon paradox: this law detached from the land was originally understood as the law of the land, or more precisely, the law of a divinity tied to one geographical domain. Focused as he is on divine law Brague does not try to connect this idea with that other profound teaching of the Torah, that He is also the God of creation—what Brague’s other book would call “the world.”

Brague, like others before him, locates the deepest meaning of the law in the idea of covenant (berith), nothing less than its intention to be life with the divinity. Moreover, the God of Israel is not the god of the land of Canaan, the way the Greek gods are “the gods of Greece”; rather the God of Israel is “a ‘floating’ god who settles in a territory with his people” (LG, 58–9). About the peculiar relation of the universal and the particular in Judaism Brague is silent.

The preaching of Jesus, to the contrary, while in a political context, “cannot be reduced to the political” (LG, 65). The kingdom of God is described by means of parables and in the style of eschatological pronouncement, while the relationship with the political is brought out by means of powerful symbols in the account of the Passion. Nevertheless the Christian message appeared as politically subversive and indeed it did have political effects: it created a new type of social organization, the church, the first “purely religious form of social organization with no national dimension” (LG, 66).

According to Paul, the Christian is neither Jew nor Greek, neither free man nor slave, neither man nor woman (Gal. 3:28); the true state (politeuma) is in heaven (Phil. 3:20) and Christians are strangers on this earth (Heb. 13:14; 11:14). Since it was not a community of a political sort, strictly speaking, Christianity made no political demands. But it did possess a political theory: all authority comes from God and is dedicated to the common good.

When compared with Hebrew Scripture, the Christian has almost no juridical texts. According to Brague, the commandments are not rejected, but rather are maintained in “total rigor” (LG, 68). Total rigor? Following Matthew 5:17–9—Jesus had “not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it (plerosai)” (LG, 68). Brague understands him to recall and enforce the commandments with renewed vigilance for our inner attitudes. But is that rigor really total? What about the 613 mitzvot, the oral Law as well as those several Jewish laws Jesus changes? The meaning of plerosai remains obscure.

Only once does Jesus actually dictate a law, “I give you a new commandment” (John 13:34), which he later states is “his” commandment (15:12). It is shocking, perhaps blasphemous. The content is not, however, new: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” appears in Leviticus 19:18; Hillel a century before Jesus had already summarized the Torah by that commandment alone. Jesus’s only real addition according to Brague is a reference to his own biography—as when he says, “Love one another as I have loved you” (LG, 69). The whole life of Jesus including his death is to be understood as death for love (LG, 69).

Where the Hebrew Scripture linked the commandments to the historical event of the Exodus, the Christian Scripture links the commandments to the historical fact of the Passion. The very transfiguration is thus referred to as a passage (exodus) (Luke 9:31): “The passage from the Old to the New Covenant is a change from one exodus to another. . .” (LG, 69).

Brague reminds us that “we are much less well informed about the real origin of the Qur’an than Muslim tradition would have us think” (LG, 70). The Qur’an does not contain arguments; rather, it proceeds by analogy on the basis of signs. Neither does it contain narratives; no history is recounted from beginning to end except that of Joseph. Logical order is often turned upside down; no plot line is original, none claims to be.

Unlike the books of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, which are inspired texts, the Qur’an is dictated. Just as Mary had to be a virgin in order for the Incarnation to take place, according to Christian teaching, so the Prophet had to be innocent of all writing in order for his “inletteration” to be possible (LG, 72–3). A number of consequences flow from this. First, the Qur’an is supposed to be inimitable; second, interpreting the Qur’an is a problematic enterprise, and third, everything in the Qur’an must be true.

The Qur’an does not seem to present itself as a “law.” Yet from the Abbasid period, the Qur’anic message was perceived from the outside as “law.” The Qur’anic message does imply “a new deal, politically and socially; it brings a redefinition of ties among men” (LG, 74). The Last Judgment that Muhammad preached was to dissolve all social ties. Moreover, instead of facing God who judges, the individual faces Muhammad who recruits.

In Brague’s retelling, Muhammad set out less to found a political regime than to recruit a gang. Since his preaching was not aimed to lay the foundations for legislation, what became Islamic law was derived from it later and was only partially dependent upon it.

The Qur’anic imagination of God is profoundly political. Allah’s omnipotence is everywhere emphasized. Echoing Rosenzweig, Brague proclaims that in Islam—in contradistinction to Judaism and Christianity—Allah is not father, and his omnipotence stands alone: “It, and not the beauty of the Creator, is what creation reveals, that power is more likely to be manifested in a capacity for destruction than for construction” (LG, 78).

In contrast with Jewish and Christian scriptures, the Qur’an situates Allah’s omnipotence “on earth” and conceives of the fulfillment of God’s will as the installation of its terrestrial reign (LG, 78–9). Refusing him obedience—”frustrating” him—is claimed to reduce Allah to powerlessness (LG, 79). Divine omnipotence is to be realized through a terrestrial reign that legitimates the use of force.

It is nearly impossible, however, to deduce from the Qur’an a regime—monarchy, aristocracy or democracy—that Allah might desire. Instead we find that Allah himself exercises power. It is only with Muhammad’s death that a serious difficulty arose. Brague considers this the central political problem of Islam, a problem that haunts the history of Muslim civilizations. To wit: how to deal with the overabundance of legitimacy that the Qur’an furnished. How to decide “where that massive, terrifying, but floating power should be invested” (LG, 81).

As if before a single magnificent canvas, Brague reads the whole history of Islam as a religion of hopes and dreams “tending toward an ever purer formulation of the dream of a kingdom of law.” The embodiment, in a political body of law whose principles were directly derived from revelation, was to remain, however, “a pious hope” (LG, 258). Islam experienced a separation of the political and the religious despite itself—thanks to circumstances. In Islam, nothing corresponds to the separation—which was theorized elsewhere—of the temporal and the spiritual. The unity of “religion and regime” (din wa-dawb) was little more than “a retrospective dream intended to compensate for a reality” that strayed ever further from that ideal (LG, 258). Brague sees that other Islamic dream growing out of this one—that of fundamentalist legend—that long ago the sharia regulated all of Muslim life and must be reestablished in a utopian future.

IV.


In Brague’s pithy formulation the first Christians had too many sacred texts, while the first Muslims did not have enough. Christianity and Islam face the same problem of belatedness: they have to position themselves in relation to Judaism.

Christianity and Islam arise when the Jewish Scriptures already exist. Christianity arises out of Judaism: Judaism is its source, and it departs from it by both expulsion and secession. Christianity concerns Jews, beginning with Jesus and Paul. Islam, on the other hand, is born outside of the Jewish people, far from the land of Israel.

The strategy of Christianity was one of revolution. Christianity is a particular interpretation of the religion of Israel on the basis of an event that it considers to be central and that, according to the evangelical tradition, makes it obligatory to reread all of the experience of the Jewish people in a new light and a new hermeneutic key.

The problem that Christianity came second, chronologically, is at the center of Paul’s teaching. According to Brague, Paul’s theory of the law is only comprehensible as an entire set of effects produced by a new fact of colossal importance that, like a powerful magnetic field, reshapes everything that approaches it. That new fact is nothing less than the coming of the Messiah of Israel—and of a paradoxical messiah, a crucified messiah. In sum, Paul’s revolution consists in rendering the law less a collection of commandments and prohibitions than “a different regime of salvation” (LG, 92).

The strategy of Islam in dealing with its own belatedness is one of restoration through “falsification” (tahrif) (LG, 94). The history of salvation is replaced by a series of edifying stories. All personages are placed on the same plane in the Qur’an: all are precursors of Muhammad, and all show how God punished those who disobeyed him. The texts that the Qur’an confirms are not the real texts that we can read in the Bible. In fact, according to Islam the texts of the earlier Scriptures were tampered with by those who passed them on. The Qur’an accuses certain groups—in particular the Jews—of having engaged in such tampering.

Occasionally the felicity of Brague’s expressions and neatness of his juxtapositions seem to beg credulity. According to Brague, Christianity presents no new texts; it simply presents a new fact: the life of Jesus, culminating in his death and resurrection as a new exodus. But in itself that event represents a form of text in that it produces meaning by polarizing around itself the preceding texts. But surely that is an overstatement. Are not the four gospels new texts with “good news”?

Likewise he writes that Islam, on the other hand, presents no new fact, but it does present a new text, which is the Qur’an. The prophetic mission he argues is too complex to be adequately described by the concept of an event, a textual event. The only “good news” that Islam announced is that prophecy, thought to be interrupted, is revived. But what about the new teachings in the Qur’an? As he makes clear, they imply new answers to the questions: What is God? What are His attributes? What does He demand of man, or, what is human excellence? In other words, doesn’t Islam, no less than Christianity teach “a new regime of salvation”?

V.


The tale Brague tells of the divine law in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is masterful, at once expansive, yet sensitive to details, shifts of emphasis, arresting juxtapositions. It remains, however, strangely abstract. We are led through thousands of years of books and words, ideas and concepts, but very little is said about concrete experience, those simple moral and political experiences, longings out of which—or to which—divine law answers.

While reflection on the different place of divine law is no doubt illuminating, one wonders what Brague would make of some of the concrete differences between the Abrahamic religions that seem no less revelatory. One thinks of other profound attempts to think through the implications of theological differences that do not start from divine law. In other words, what price might be paid for Brague’s particular focus? That focus never clearly asks either about the moral and political longings of or necessities behind law in general or divine law in particular or about what the various divine laws imply in answers to such questions as, “What is God?”; “What is Man?”; “Is the true beginning in asking about god or gods the powers of the human soul?”; “Or is it god or gods as species of superhuman beings, both like and unlike, human beings?”

Given his fine sensitivities, the reader wishes he had strayed a little further from the path of the divine law. One wonders what Brague would say about the place of the chant and recitation, the sheer power of poetry and figuration in Islam, the sense of all of humanity in the desert tuning in and thereby activating its humanity in the call to prayer, pure aural responsiveness in submission to the Highest; or, the idiosyncratic conjunction of teachings in Genesis that God is God of all Creation, all men are brothers, made in the image of God, (b’tzelem Elohim), and yet there is election of the seed of one, and what this implies about the place of the stranger and its moral and political possibilities; or that the logic of the mitzvot are couched as individual imperatives, and not as general rules to subsume particular cases; or, the strange understanding of body and soul, sex and marriage, sin and redemption, the literal and the figurative—the place of love and the poetic altogether—in the Gospel and the hopes—for perfect justice and happiness, for oneself forever—it addresses.

When Brague finally enters modernity it can feel a bit breathless, like a sprint to the end. But it is less than clear in his account whether modernity is simply the thinking through of medieval thought—the working out of conceptual decisions made by Christian thinkers then—or a radical break, a revolutionary experiment, that we attempt at our peril.

On the one hand, “Our societies, with their agenda of a law with no divine component, are in fact made possible, in the final analysis, by the Christian experience of a divine without law” (LG, 263). On the other hand, Brague says that it was only with Descartes “that the modern notion of a law of nature was most fully thought through” (LG, 234). Is modernity Christian? Is Christianity depleting itself of its residues of a relation to divine law? Or does Descartes’ decisiveness introduce another element?

How does Brague understand the role of modern philosophy in the rise of modernity? How does Brague understand its relation to what came before—Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem? On the face of it, it is hard to see how mathematical physics and the new understanding of number and symbolization at its core come from the Pentateuch, the Gospels, or the Qur’an. Moreover, it is hard to see how the rise of the project of modern natural science—with mathematical physics at its core—to “master nature” and “enjoy fruits without toil,” in Descartes’ clarion call, has its origins just in one of those august cities.

Brague would rather see a simple dialectic at work. Faced with a new understanding of a law of nature—now reduced to natural causal regularity predictable by the homogenizing methods of modern mathematical physics and the new concept of number and symbol at its core—we conceive of a law, now wholly human: “Faced with a law that contained nothing of the human, there arose, in reaction, a law that was nothing but human” (LG, 237).

But the principles behind modern natural law were also founded by Machiavelli in his destructive analysis of justice, pangs of conscience, moral experience, and his call to take our bearings by how men actually live and not by how men should live as preached up by philosophers and the Bible.

While the state of nature teachings can remind us of Pascal’s gloom—”all men naturally hate each other”—surely it is more precise to see in them the destruction of the heart of the Christian teaching, since if the war of all against all is the natural condition of mankind, not only is Aristotle’s benevolent nature in danger, but “the natural condition of mankind” would sanction all actions. In other words, there are no sins, specifically no original sin; all acts are legitimate in a life where all are exposed to perpetual danger. Sin is without meaning in the state of nature. Not only is nature not good, an enemy to be left behind for civil society and finally conquered, but grace is an illusion: since nature or creation is not good, all evils men commit do not stem from sin so much as natural necessity, or, as Machiavelli said, “the natural and ordinary desire to acquire.”

Brague had begun by invoking Machiavelli’s path, he set out to “follow Machiavelli and read the Bible ‘judiciously’ (sensatamente)” (LG, 3), but not in the service of Machiavelli’s aims. Rather, he said, his “goal is more sober: to lead the Bible and Qur’an to a neutral, philosophical reading” (LG, 4). It would take a casuist of extraordinary powers to judge the relative sobriety of the acts. But is neutrality the sign of philosophy? Machiavelli, like the philosophers before him after all, was concerned with the truth of the Bible. Perhaps there are still things to learn from Machiavelli even about the Bible, as well as modernity. For example, Brague rhetorically asks at one point, “Does the Bible contain narrations of how a prince acquires knowledge? Is there a biblical Cyropaedia?” (LG, 42). Brague knows full well that Machiavelli had presented the life of David—the only life we have portrayed from birth to death from antiquity—as precisely the Biblical Cyropaedia, if read sensatamente, which he proceeded to give us lessons in doing. Why his reticence here?

The question of Machiavelli goes further. Brague wants to find the origins of modern democracy, the individual, and the state in medieval Christendom. He points to the use of the word status in the sense of “state” in ecclesiastical authors of the thirteenth century, “long before Machiavelli” (LG, 136). But neither in those authors nor in Machiavelli do we have the modern state: the modern state is an abstraction; it is there before the government arrives, and it will continue after it departs. Our modern notion of legitimate power is bound up with this impersonality of the modern state. While Brague is surely right that status appears in political contexts in the Middle Ages, it appears to name a regime and not an impersonal state. The status or welfare of the Church sets limits on the actions of the pope, but this is a far cry from the extent of effective power we know as power generalized to do anything, a radical innovation we seem to owe to Machiavelli’s student, Hobbes.1

VI.


From the very beginning Brague tells us that lurking behind his inquiry into divine law is “the theologico-political problem” and Leo Strauss (LG, 5). And so to measure the book by its own exacting standards requires us to ask whether Brague succeeds in challenging its inspiration. Brague claims that he will “enlarge” upon “the theologico-political problem” and even move beyond its boundaries (LG, 6). First, he contests the term, preferring “theo-political problem,” spared as it is of any residue of “theo-logy,” which ties the problem too much to Christianity (LG, 6). Second, Brague “would like to add an iota and speak of the theio-political” to denote that we are speaking of “the divine (in Greek, theios),” in order to preserve what he takes to be the revolutionary event implicit in Biblical religion (LG, 6).

Beyond philology, Brague sets his sights on displacing the special place of the political, which is for him but one part of the practical. So he will speak of the theio-practical as the larger genus of which the theio-political is but one species. And this because he thinks that “as long as the theio-practical problem remains unresolved, any statement or resolution of the theio-political problem remains unbalanced and resolved in a wobbly manner” (LG, 7). But what exactly is the statement of the theio-political problem that is unbalanced? What would it mean to state it having resolved the theio-practical problem? And can one resolve the theio-political problem in a non-wobbly manner? What’s so wrong with wobbling? There is a puritanical streak in his desire for straightness.

From the beginning, the problem for Brague is that of grounding norms; finding superhuman support—in nature or God—for the direction of our lives, the ends we pursue, and the means we can choose to pursue them. In other words, the problem for Brague from the beginning is the grounds of morality.

Here, however, Brague would seem to part company with those classical authors for whom, to quote Aristotle, politics is the comprehensive association and political science the architectonic art and ethics only admits of “wobbly” practical solutions.2 At the center of Brague’s investigation, both its inspiration and obstacle, is an attempt to challenge Strauss as well as deny this classical contention. Even the choice of subject matter—the divine law—Brague owes to Strauss. For according to Strauss (as Brague reminds us),

the divine law…is the common ground between the Bible and Greek philosophy… The common ground between the Bible and Greek philosophy is the problem of divine law. They solve that problem in a diametrically opposed manner.3

In Brague’s gloss this means that in “both cases, it [divine law] is external to the human and transcends the quotidian” (LG, 18). Now leaving aside whether that is what Strauss had in mind as their diametrically opposed solutions, Strauss says that there is a problem of divine law, that that problem is the common ground between the Bible and Greek philosophy. Brague is silent as to the problem and instead moves on to how he understands them as answers; he suggests that the problem is how to find a source of law “that transcends the quotidian.” But is that the problem of divine law? Why is there a need for such laws? What longing is at work that divine law is meant to address?

Moreover, the importance of the problem of divine law serving as the common ground between the Bible and Greek philosophy is also silently dropped. Why is it important that one find a common ground? What is at stake here?

Strauss had led up to this formulation by first showing how despite their disagreements regarding the one thing needful—autonomous understanding for philosophy, obedient love for the Bible—they presuppose a profound agreement. That agreement concerns the importance of morality or justice, the disagreement the basis of morality or justice. Moreover, both understand justice as primarily obedience to law. So Greek philosophy and the Bible are said to agree regarding the importance of justice, the connection between justice and law and the “the difficulty created by the misery of the just and the prospering of the wicked.”4

Justice is not only central—it is also very strange. Justice, we know, is the universal virtue, the virtue most obviously related to the city, which means the question of justice is in need of an answer even if all the evidence needed for an adequate answer is not yet in. While prudence, temperance, and courage bring about pleasure simply by nature, justice is attended by the pleasure which is expected from it—a sense of security—only on the basis of convention. In addition, the other virtues—prudence, temperance, courage—have a salutary effect regardless of what other people think. But one’s justice has a salutary effect only if perceived. The other vices are evils regardless. But injustice seems to be an evil only in so far as one is in danger of detection.5

Justice is also inherently controversial. There is a tension within justice: on the one hand, justice is the art which assigns to every citizen what is good for his soul; on the other hand, it is what determines the common good of the city. But is the common good always in harmony with the good of all individuals? Is it good to be just? Is the primary consideration the common good or the individual’s good?6

Justice then is a strange good, less our complete good than the promise of it. Justice does not so much make individuals happy as sustain our hopes for happiness. Rather than the complete human good—is it even the core of that good?—justice makes us deserving of the other goods we need as if deserving of rewards. In Socrates’ unforgettable presentations, however, justice does not itself deliver these rewards. For justice to be the kind of good we expect it to be there would have to be just providential gods or God who do not neglect the affairs of virtuous men who can and do ensure that virtuous men get what they deserve. Virtue reveals itself to be a kind of claim on the attention and concern of just gods, and justice—or deserving—a kind of middle term that links morality with piety. Thus at the core of morality or the ethical virtues is the concern with just providential gods.7

The problem of divine law may be rooted in the problem of justice. It remains, however, a separate problem. For Brague the problem would seem to be how to ground norms or secure morality, for which divine law is an answer. But for classical political philosophy and the Bible the problem of divine law is precisely the variety of divine laws.

Brague turns to divine law to explore the ground of morality and norms, Strauss in order to begin to adjudicate the quarrel between reason and revelation over the best way of life. Brague’s problem is how to ground morality, how to limit human action, and divine law is an answer. The question of the best way of life would seem to be answered for Brague, and justice not problematic.

Strauss and his Socratics suggest that it is precisely the concern for justice—for the law wishes above all to be just and to instill in its followers an understanding and devotion to justice or righteousness—that animates the attachment to law in general, and divine law in particular. Divine law brings out explicitly what our attachment to all law points to: our concern for justice, since the divine law is distinguished above all by its superior justice.

In an unintended irony Brague’s book begs comparison with that other ancient book on divine law strangely never mentioned by Brague, namely Thucydides’ War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians. Thucydides is nothing if not irrepressibly concrete and political—little in the way of books or philology or intellectual history is mentioned—and yet it amounts to a relentless investigation of the possibility and meaning of divine law and its relation to justice and political life.

This is perhaps the most remarkable fact about Brague’s remarkable tale. For if the ancients are right, it is precisely the analysis of justice, one that begins from and stays true to the concern of most importance to adherents of divine law, that provides the only proper starting point for understanding that law and the piety that animates it, that is strangely absent in The Law of God. Brague never takes us back to any concrete experience in all its complexity and contradictoriness, no voices heard, visions seen, miracles witnessed. Instead he finally declares that the problem is not a problem: Brague wonders whether the theological-political problem is only apparently serious, a mere subset of a larger practical problem.

But this is precisely what the classical thinkers deny when they argue for such propositions as the comprehensiveness of the political association, or that the regime is the prima causa of the law,8 or that the city is the Cave,9 or that the greatest motion can reveal the eternal truths regarding the human things.10 To which Brague begs to differ, “It is not to be taken for granted that the question of the nomos, the law, is a first question; to ask whether one gives himself the law or whether it is received from elsewhere goes to the bottom of things even less” (LG, 264).

What is the question of the nomos? Human life—according to Strauss’s classical political philosophers—is dynamic and open as well as static and closed. It is not hard to discern that the faculty of reason is restless, irreverent in its quest for the truth, unable to bow to any authority simply on the basis of authority. Nor is it hard to see that this may bring the one who reasons into conflict with the traditional political community, which is nothing but an authoritative settlement regarding the most important questions. While reason opens us up to what is beyond the political community, the authoritative power of custom or nomos is what closes the authoritative settlement and functions as the foundation of political society, as Aristotle teaches, the city is both open and closed to the whole.11

Now the authoritative settlement is ultimately rooted in tradition, which is the weight and authority of custom. Tradition is not only different from reason, but even in fundamental tension with it. Both reason and custom are rival sources of human guidance. And philosophy and divine law are two specific interpretations of those two sources, two existential possibilities, answering the fundamental question, “How should I live?”; “What way of life should I follow?” As we are all born of a mother and a father, we are born, with friends and enemies, members of a particular society, with its authoritative answers in the form of traditions, conventions, opinions, laws, nomoi, which answer the question of how we should live, often with laws backed up by teeth in them.

Clearly, reason can work in harmony with custom: reason can discover something that is then sedimented in custom, preserved and handed down, infuse a tradition with insight so that each generation and each individual need not discover it for himself. But in a more profound sense, reason and nomos present a fundamental conflict both in the city and the soul. From the point of view of philosophy—as the interpretation of a life of reason in which “the perfection of reason and therefore the perfection of man is philosophy”12—nomos, or custom and authoritative law and opinion, is what attempts to compel us to stop thinking, to end our doubting and searching. Its means are simple: nomos furnishes an alternative ground of belief, a source of answers, a consensus which breeds a confidence born of certainty issuing in a final closure, and the basis of the decisions active life demands, all independent of philosophy.

While reason begins its striving by an awareness of the multiplicity of ways, nomoi, or contradictions in a nomos, and wonders at the accidental, contingent, ungrounded, in a quest for the true grounds or ground, cause or causes, the underlying necessities; authoritative nomos lends the contingent and accidental the penumbra of necessity, casting an illusory veil over all things, claiming to offer the true account of things. In this way, nomos settles all important questions, invisibly as it were, by denying and concealing the possibility of alternatives that would require reasonable comparison. In other words, nomos precisely closes off reason’s opening to doubt and wonder. Nomos covers over our radical ignorance and seduces us into the sleep of the unexamined life. It is only by means of a great effort that we are able to wake up and recover our knowledge of ignorance.

It is not difficult to discern the danger philosophic efforts pose to customary society. Philosophy, in its radical openness, threatens to expose the groundlessness of custom, potentially undermining the most precious beliefs and laws of a society. Moreover, there is the danger that philosophy will reveal, by tearing off the illusory veil of nomos, a terrifying abyss of ignorance regarding the most important things.

But this is all very abstract. How does nomos, authoritative custom, exercise its power to cast its almost all-powerful shadows on the walls of the Cave? Why do people believe its claims and obey its strictures?

First, there is the sheer force of habit. Custom works primarily through habituation, which demands repetition and changelessness. Healthy traditional societies were and are conservative, and they stubbornly resist change. As a result, such customary societies are on a collision course with reason, the arts, and philosophy, which thrive on diversity, change, daring, innovation, and progress. In Aristotle’s classic reply to those who would assert that laws—hence societies—should be as open to change as those rudimentary manifestations of reason, the arts and crafts,

The argument from the example of the arts is false. Change in an art is not like change in law (nomos); for law (nomos) has no strength with respect to obedience apart from habit, and this is not created except over a long period of time. Hence the easy alteration of existing laws (nomoi) in favor of the new and different ones weakens the power of law (nomos) itself.13

Second, a nomos or custom is not merely my private habit, it is the way of the community, “our way.” Thus, the power of social pressure at work is in nomos. The tendency of human community towards conformity, closed-mindedness, and intolerance is never too far behind. If the authority and worldview of a given society is supported, not by rational demonstration, but by the brute fact of agreement, it is hard to see how it could be otherwise. The fear of the foreign and the stranger is endemic to traditional social life. The community rallies to defend “our ways” with clannish, ethnocentric, xenophobic fervor. Our ways are the right ways because they are our ways. Loyalty—the love of one’s own because it is one’s own—is the beginning of all wisdom.

Philosophy cannot but appear as a cold-hearted traitor, indifferent or even hostile to what is our own as simply our own. Philosophy will always ask after the intrinsically good, beyond custom. It casts its eyes upon the strange and declares it a wonder and “delight to the eyes,” in its quest to liberate itself from the shared commitments and unquestioned prejudices of the community. In the words of the Philosopher, “And in general all men really seek what is good, not what was customary with their forefathers.”14

Third, and most powerfully, a nomos is not only one’s own, but is old or ancestral, “the ways of the fathers and their fathers.” Set in the distant past, forever inaccessible to us, embodying the consensus of many generations, and seeming to stand the test of time, such customs inspire awe and reverence. In this way, the power of custom is rooted in the authority of parents over children, nomos is the wisdom and commands of our ancient ancestors, our most ancient fathers. To which the Philosopher responds, “The first (human beings), whether they were earthborn or preserved from a cataclysm, are likely to have been similar to average or even simple-minded persons [today]…so it would be odd to abide by the opinions they hold.”15

If the ancestors were primitives, is the ancestral not inferior to the present?; the idea of progress subverts such authority. The final vindication of nomos, the ultimate source of our reverence for it, is essentially religious: that our ancestors were not primitives as Aristotle suggests, but rather vastly superior to us, superior in the decisive respect, superior regarding wisdom. So far are we from having progressed beyond them, that in fact, we have fallen off from their elevated status as gods, demigods, or speakers with God or the gods.

Nor is this view simply ridiculous. If we ask about the beginning, the first thing or things, the arche, it is clear that what comes earlier must be superior to what comes later; that which generated without being generated must be most powerful. Our earliest ancestors were closer to this power—that which formed the heavens and the earth, which has all but withdrawn from the world—and may have even conversed with it.

That is to say, the ancient nomos, our traditional way, has been handed down for generations and is ultimately derived from a divine source, infinitely wiser than we are. Nomos in its fullest sense is a sacred idea, the authority of nomos fully thought through is divine law. Traditional society is a sacred society. Its wisdom and authority is only understandable on a divine basis. The whole orientation by nomos only makes sense—the trust we place in it, the security we hope for from it—if it is sacred, divine law.

In recovering the ancient cities—Athens and Jerusalem—Leo Strauss was enabled to recover the character of traditional society, that the city is the sacred city, the authoritative moral-political-theological community. And by recovering the sacred city and the divine law, he was aided in recovering the original meaning of political philosophy. The ascent from the sacred city to the natural city is its action. Such philosophic ascent threatens not only the fixity of habituation, and the loyalty of communal consensus, but more fundamentally, the faith in, reverence for, and abiding love and obedience to, the divine law and the God or gods that stand behind it.

The philosopher, in his quest for the truth, begins from the nomos—in its contradiction with other nomoi, in its own contradictoriness—and sets out to find the one true account by nature. In other words, nomos—with is authoritative myths, laws and mores—is the primary source of illusions in the Cave, but it can also serve as the beginning of the way out. Nomos is that which both opens and closes the Cave. “A true science of the law” might help a potential philosopher as “a key permitting one to enter places the gates to which were locked. When those gates are opened and those places are entered, the souls will have rest therein… the eyes will be delighted, and the bodies will be eased of their toil and of their labor” by means of reflection on a “divine law” itself.

VII.


But if Brague doesn’t think a concrete account of divine law is necessary, or that the question of nomos is the first question, what are the first questions? What is the bottom? Just why has he given us this beautiful mosaic of the histories of the divine law in Judaism, Christianity and Islam? In other words, Brague seems to suggest the starting point is not life under law, obligation or a sense of restraint or limit on what we can do, born as we are to a mother and a father, hence with friends and enemies, the sky above and the earth below and the question, what should I do. What does Brague think is “first for us”?

Here we arrive at the heart of the matter. For Brague the idea of divine law is but “one model of the articulation of the theio-practical… the idea of norm is not the only way the divine can enter into a relation with practice” (LG, 264). Modernity, Brague seems to say with Heidegger, is “the danger that saves” and, like him, hopes for an eschatological insight akin to revelation of the highest order.

But to see this we need one more turn of the screw, we need to listen to Brague, the theologian, who claimed that the “New Testament writings thus contain nothing ‘political’ and, in the final analysis, hardly any ‘morality’ either. In compensation, they contain the seeds of a transformation of the entire domain of the practical” (LG, 70). What are we to make of this “transformation of the entire domain of the practical” containing hardly any “morality”?

What is Brague’s theology? In a justly famous phrase, St. Augustine summarized Paul’s thoughts: “Love and do what you want” (dilige et quod vis fac) (LG, 92 & 220). According to Brague the statement is highly ironic. To love is precisely what we do not know how to do. The second part of the statement is just as hard to fulfill as the first. In Brague’s eyes, “the necessity for love is thus not the dream of an exalted leap outside the moral domain; to the contrary, it implies an entire program for the human subject, turned back to his own responsibility” (LG, 93).

So the transformation is not beyond morality after all, but to call us to the true ground of morality in the command to love. Or more fully:

Christianity does not propose a “way”: it supposes “the way” to have been known for a long time, perhaps even forever. It is the way of common morality. What Christianity proposes is only the means for following it. God enters into the domain of practice as a source of aid and pardon. For Christianity, grace is not opposed to law; rather, it gives what enables one to fulfill the law. (LG, 261)

About this “way” Brague is maddeningly reticent. He does offer, however, a final enigmatic prayer:

Perhaps it is even when one ceases to believe that the normative modality of the relation to the divine is the only possible one that such a relation to the divine in general has a chance of appearing as necessary to the full deployment of human action. (LG, 264)

And so Brague leaves the reader perplexed. What is “the full deployment of human action”? What makes it full? Why is it good? Why does such fullness require the divine? What vouches for its divinity? And why does this divinity require the sacrifice of the belief that morality conditions our relation to the divine? What finally is “an experience of the divine without law” (LG, 263–4)? We have an inkling of Plato’s answer.16

Gershom Scholem had the intuition that the revelation at Sinai was a traumatic divine call, a voice so overwhelming that in reaction Moses responded with an attempt to contain it in an action of profound contraction. The law is but the shell, the true power of God is the thundering call that reverberates on its backside as it were, like the law’s unconscious, underneath that shell of normative Judaism. Here is where the source of its power and vitality lies that overflows and shoots through the bounds of the law and can be released at moments of crisis or creativity when the law breaks down in various messianic or mystical stirrings or attempts to contain them with their antinomian potentials. Perhaps Brague is simply drawing out Scholem’s suggestion, by placing Paul and Christianity into that same matrix—yet another Jewish heresy—where the messianism coincides with antinomianism in an attempt to release the underlying vibrations from Sinai grown stale in the procrustean bed of the law.

However that may be, Brague’s strategy is now clear. In an effort to secure Christianity against the objections of Judaism or a political philosophy that would start from the law and our elementary opinions about justice and nobility, Brague’s Christianity is somewhere else. But where it is—and what it is—remains tantalizingly elusive.

The genuine Auseinandersetzung with Leo Strauss—to say nothing of Plato and the Pentateuch—must await a fuller exposition of Brague’s theology and its connection with our most elementary experiences of love and justice. The stakes are high—one might say, infinite. But for reminding us of how much of our spiritual history has been moved by the wish or prayer that our laws, and with it our lives, be touched by the eternal, and what forgetfulness of such eternity might imply, we are indeed in Rémi Brague’s debt. The Law of God is must reading for our time. Perhaps his next book will be his Confessions. Let us hope.

Daniel Doneson
University of Virginia

  1. Cf. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., “On the Impersonality of the Modern State: A Comment on Machiavelli’s Use of Stato,” American Political Science Review 77 (1983): 849–57.
  2. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b12 ff.; 1098b5 ff.; cf. Rhetoric, i.10, in fine.
  3. Leo Strauss, “Progress or Return? The Contemporary Crisis in Western Civilization,” Modern Judaism, I (1981), 37.
  4. Leo Strauss, “Progress or Return,” The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 248.
  5. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, 110–1.
  6. Cf. Leo Strauss, The City and Man, 83–4.
  7. Cf. Maimonides, Moreh Nevuchim 3.16; Plato, Laws 899e–900a, Xenophon, Symposium 4.47–8. For a fuller treatment cf. Christopher Bruell, “Strauss on Xenophon,” Political Science Reviewer, Vol. 14 (1984), 262-318.
  8. Aristotle, Politics, 1252a7–23; 1253a8–10, 1274b38–41; 1274b38, 1275a7–8, 1276b3–11.
  9. Plato, Republic, 485b, 486a–b, 496c6, 499c1, 501d1–5, 517c7–9, 519c2–d7, 539e.
  10. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, I i.2; II. 41.4.
  11. For a fuller treatment of what follows, cf. Leo Strauss, ch. III, “The Origin of the Idea of Natural Right,” Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 81–119; “Progress or Return,” The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. T. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 227–70; Arthur Melzer, “On the Inherent Tension between Reason and Society,” in Reason, Faith, and Politics: Essays in Honor of Werner J. Dannhauser, ed. A. Melzer and R. Kraynak (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 9–29.
  12. Leo Strauss, “Reason and Revelation,” in Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 141.
  13. Aristotle, Politics, 1269a19–24.
  14. Ibid., 1269a3–4.
  15. Ibid., 1269a5–8.
  16. Cf. Plato, Sophist, 216a.