Posted on 08/04/2003 4:27:05 PM PDT by shrinkermd
Before Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, the serpent had already opened her eyes. Genesis tells us that she saw that the tree was "good for food," that it was "a delight to the eyes," and that it could "make one wise." She already understood, that is, three human needs: the physical, the aesthetic and the intellectual, and that the tree promised satisfaction. Reason is at work; so is imagination. What she did not yet know was what it would mean to choose to transgress.
In that choice, as Leon R. Kass shows, Genesis finds both the pathos and the possibility of human life, for the world will not accommodate itself to desire and desire will demand more than the world can ever offer. The question is where humanity will seek its consolation and its satisfactions. Properly read, Mr. Kass argues, Genesis begins that education.
This is a somewhat daring position. In our secular society Genesis, along with the rest of the biblical canon, has long been severed from the educational enterprise. Instead it has become a source book for folk tales, or a portrait of "dysfunctional families," or a politicized set of doctrines wrestled over by fundamentalists and secularists alike.
A few years ago, in a series of television discussions led by Bill Moyers, Genesis seemed little more than a postmodern novel, meaning just about anything.
But Mr. Kass — drawing on interpretations by scholars like Robert Alter, Leo Strauss, Umberto Cassuto and Robert Sacks (along with the work of numerous, generously cited students) — has something else in mind.
It would be worth attending to for its source alone: Mr. Kass has inspired controversy as chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics and has sought a temporary ban on human cloning research. Trained as a biochemist and physician, he was a founding fellow of the Hastings Center, the country's first bioethics institute.
As a professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago (where I studied with him), he has broadened his perspectives on medicine by an intimate acquaintance with philosophy and the Greek classics.
These perspectives are also reflected in Mr. Kass's commentary, which grew out of 20 years of teaching a seminar on Genesis. He includes fascinating asides comparing, say, Jacob's limp and Oedipus's leg injury, or ideas of vengeance in Genesis and Aeschylus. Mr. Kass's conservative position on bioethics is also related to his interpretation of biblical views about human life.
Put aside, for a moment, those controversies, for Mr. Kass's dense book is extraordinary. It soberly works through the text and demands comparable labors from its readers, piercing through two millenniums of commentary. It may not always convince and more historical background would help at times, but its analyses and hypotheses will leave no reader's understanding of Genesis unchanged.
So what sort of inquiry does Genesis pursue? Mr. Kass argues that even the creation story, which appears historical, is actually philosophical. First, it denies the eternal, divine character of heavenly bodies — one of the axioms of the Mesopotamian world. It defines creation as an intellectual process requiring conceptual distinctions and categories. During the first days, for example, objects that lack a defined and specific place (light, heavens, sea) are created. On the third day, objects that exist in a particular place but lack motion are created: plants. The following day, objects that exist in a particular place and possess motion but lack life are created: the heavenly bodies.
Man is the climax of this creative distillation: a moving, living, terrestrial creature created in God's image. But then the Eden story reveals what that means. By beginning with a prohibition, the story of the Tree of Knowledge acknowledges that man is capable of acting against a prohibition; man, like God, is capable of free choice. As in God's own creative acts, free choice makes distinctions. Every choice reflects a judgment; and every judgment is a claim of knowledge of good and bad.
The danger, Mr. Kass suggests, is the snake's promise that full knowledge can be had simply by exercise of human faculties. The snake is, he writes, "an embodiment of the separated and beguiling world of autonomous human reason," a voice of "rationalist mischief."
That primal temptation recurs. Genesis is punctuated with human attempts to be radically self-sufficient. This is what was so problematic about Babel's tower, Mr. Kass notes; residents aspired "to nothing less than self-re-creation through the arts and crafts, customs and mores of their city." Genesis is deeply suspicious of cities; it is even suspicious of civilization itself. Its heroes are not farmers (cultivators), but shepherds (guides).
But civilization cannot be avoided; after Cain and Noah and Babel even God has to acknowledge as much. So, in Mr. Kass's telling, other constraints on hubristic humanity become necessary. In this case it is a covenant, an agreement that God makes with Abraham and his descendants. A covenant binds; it also promises. For Mr. Kass this notion of a transmittable tradition, is crucial; it becomes the central preoccupation of Genesis.
The transmission of that covenant, though, is tenuous: wives don't conceive, husbands don't acknowledge wives, sons unman their fathers, fathers fail their sons; primogeniture is overturned. Mr. Kass stringently revises traditional judgments of characters, arguing, for example, that Rachel, Jacob's beautiful and favored wife, was far from admirable, and that the much-championed Joseph proved himself an unfit leader of his people.
Ultimately the covenant is so precarious that it must be supplemented by binding law. Nothing mitigates Genesis's skepticism about the nature of humanity. As a religious book Genesis is dark and troubling. Its skepticism, common to many religious traditions, also gives religion a peculiar place in modern societies. It can seem illiberal and threatening: it sees limits on humanity's abilities to perfect itself through the use of reason alone.
The tensions outlined in Genesis still have political resonance in contemporary debates between liberalism and conservatism. In Norman Podhoretz's recent book, "The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are," he argues that the prophets saw idolatry as a form of "self-deification," a delusion that humans could become as gods and remake the world in their own image — a delusion Mr. Podhoretz connects to self-reliant liberalism run amuck.
Mr. Kass sees similar dangers in the unbounded ambitions of modern "democratic man." One result, he suggests, is that the "project of Babel has been making a comeback," as science and technology threaten a "human imperium over nature." Mr. Kass has argued that unrestricted research into human cloning will transform "procreation into a form of manufacture," undermining its "dignity."
But what compels an avowed secularist to adopt Mr. Kass's views of "dignity"? Without a belief in God, what are the first principles by which human behavior can be limited? What contemporary covenant could possibly help resolve such issues?
These questions are beyond this book's scope, which leaves matters unsettled and unsettling — just the way Genesis leaves things. But Mr. Kass, with his relentless questioning and devotion, suggests that one way to find first principles is to begin by taking the idea seriously.
Really?
Really?
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