Education in Reverence

“What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Thus the famous cry of Tertullian, the ancient Christian theologian, as he blamed Greek philosophy for its corrupting and heretical effects upon early Christian doctrine. Although Tertullian himself was not without his heretical aspects, notably his attraction to the fringe doctrine called Montanism, his words pointed toward a grand tension between reason and revelation, between Greek philosophy and biblical religion, the twin poles that, as Leo Strauss argued, made Western civilization what it is.

Athens stood for the spirit of free rational inquiry undertaken in a largely intelligible world whose contours and dimensions are commensurable with our powers of understanding, and thus will yield answers to our queries. Jerusalem stood for the spirit of piety, which concedes the weakness of human understanding and the inadequacy of unaided human nature, and insists that we are utterly reliant for guidance upon the few ways in which God has revealed Himself and His will to us, and that such reliance constitutes a wisdom superior to any ratiocination, since God’s ways are not ours. In this view it is by our faith that we are saved and not by our knowledge; and, as the apocryphal book of Ben Sira has it, there is “nothing better than the fear of the Lord, . . . nothing sweeter than to take heed unto the commandments of the Lord.”

The antagonism, Strauss argued, between these two “conflicting roots” is “the core, the nerve of Western intellectual history,” and the secret of the West’s vitality—a life lived “between two codes,” in fundamental and unresolved tension. We would no longer be ourselves, he believed, should we become all one or all the other.