“WHAT HAS ATHENS TO DO WITH JERUSALEM?”

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, January 11, 2009

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

In the reading from Kahlil Gibran, he says somewhat dramatically:

“Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield upon which your reason and your judgment wage a war against your passion.”

The image of a battlefield might be an exaggeration justified by poetic license, but there surely is a sense of competition for many of us in which our rational selves and our spiritual selves vie for our loyalty. This may, in fact, be especially true for those of us who find we have landed our religious journey in the Unitarian Universalist tradition.

We Unitarian Universalists seem to have an identity confusion problem. Are we rooted in the tradition of the Enlightenment and science, where we find reason as the guide, where we embrace some form of intellectual integrity as the basis for evaluating belief? Or are we rooted in the Jewish and Christian religious tradition, that inspires to do justice, be merciful, and find our spiritual home in the universe.

The rational path and the religious/spiritual path are two poles that seem to tug at us, and call out to us on our journey of life. We know, at some deep level, that they are not really in competition for our souls. After all, many years ago here at All Souls, we adopted a “motto” that declares this to be a place “Where Reason and Religion Meet.” But in real life, we more often experience, I think, reason and religion to be found on different, though parallel planes.

Throughout Western history, in fact, this has been among the most consistent dichotomies of thought: what is the role of reason, and what is the role of religion, and do they have anything in common?

One of the oldest and most famous expressions of this quandary came from an early Christian Church writer of the third century named Tertullian. As the young church was growing, and before there came about rigorous hierarchical authority, there developed a broad spectrum of schools of thought.

Christianity, of course, was born in Israel after the death of Jesus. Like Jesus, most of the first Christians were Jewish, and thought of their religion as a new expression of ancient Judaism. They were obedient Jews who followed the teachings of a rabbi named Jesus.

But within the emerging Christian movement, there was a strong leadership from those who were influenced by Greek philosophical heritage. These leaders were called “Hellenistic Jews.” The most famous name, of course, was the Apostle Paul, who wrote the majority of the New Testament epistles. His letters to new Christian churches in Greece, in towns like Corinth and Philippi, became books of the Bible bearing the names of Greek towns. The earliest copies of the New Testament writings we have were written in Greek, rather than Hebrew or Aramaic.

Over the first couple of centuries following the beginning of the Christian Church, there emerged at least two different schools of thinking. There were those rooted in the Hebrew heritage, who viewed the Christian religion primarily as a fulfillment of Jewish scripture. And there were the Hellenistic, or Greek-influenced, Christians, who inherited some of the classical Greek thinking – of Socrates and Aristotle -- from the centuries preceding Christianity.

Which brings us back to the third century church writer Tertullian. Tertullian was keenly aware of the divergent influences on the new church. There were a number of other church writers who were drawn toward the classical Greek philosophers, such as Plato. The most famous, perhaps, was an Egyptian Christian priest named “Origen,” whose writings are described as “Christian Platonism.”

Tertullian was not impressed. He was an apologist for the Hebrew-shaped Christianity, and he thought Greek philosophy to be irrelevant to the religious and spiritual well from which the Church was nourished. Philosophy in general, and Greek philosophy in particular, were, in his view, not only unrelated to issues of Christian faith, they were a dangerous distraction, a sort of pop-culture diversion from the real work of religion.

It was in that context that Tertullian asked what was in his mind a rhetorical question, but a question that has been invoked throughout the centuries since by scholars of history and religion as being a concise insight into the roots of Western Civilization. With some sense of scorn, Tertullian asked,

“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”

“Athens,” of course, was shorthand for the influence of ancient Greek philosophy, the tradition of rational discourse and search for knowledge. “Jerusalem,” on the other hand, was shorthand for true religious faith, the revelation of divine wisdom, the path to wholeness and salvation. Tertullian believed that the legacy from Plato and Aristotle had nothing to contribute to the wisdom of revealed by Jewish scripture and Jesus’ teachings. What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? For Tertullian the answer was self-evident. Nothing. Religion has nothing to gain from philosophy. In fact, Tertullian went on to chastise Greek philosophy as heresy.

But the question has taken on somewhat a life of its own. It has come to represent the real cultural tensions between philosophy and religion, between the rational and the spiritual, between head and heart. Scholars seem to love the metaphor for its simplicity. Philosophers and theologians are drawn to it as a way of distinguishing between their realm of interests.

Amazon.com identifies several dozen books in which the phrase “Athens and Jerusalem” appears in the title, most of which have little to do with the cities, but much to do with the development of Western civilization. Try searching at Amazon for two other great world cities, as I did with “Rome and Cairo,” and there were no books with that phrase in the title. Two of the greatest political scientists of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, use the metaphor of “Athens and Greece” to describe the two foundations of Western civilization that continue to compete for our loyalty. All that is not a bad legacy for a throw-away phrase from a somewhat obscure figure of history almost two thousand years ago.

But it is also, I think, in many ways a question that pulls at the center of our Unitarian Universalist soul. After all, the All Souls “motto,” which declares this church as a place “Where Reason and Religion Meet,” can be restated symbolically in the phrase, “Where Athens and Jerusalem Meet.”

I believe human beings in general are, in fact, reflections of this dichotomy between Athens and Jerusalem, “head and heart.” It is a condition of human nature that has been observed since antiquity. The question of the role of the head and the heart dates back at least to Plato, who recognized that some people are ruled by intellect and others by passion, which he described in terms of "will." The question was a real one to the Enlightenment, when empiricist thinkers like John Locke defended the head against the heart, and the Romantic philosophers like Kant defended the heart against the head. The question was a real one for Freud, who used language of the id and the ego. The question is rooted in modern biological science in studies we've all seen about genetic sources of behavior, or about the bi-cameral -- mind, seeing head and heart as possible metaphors for the left side and the right side of the brain.

All of these great inquiries into the human condition seem to be asking, in one way or another, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”

Athens, of course, is the symbol, as I say, for philosophical inquiry. What was at the core of Greek philosophy was the search for knowledge, for wisdom. In fact the root meaning of the word “philosophy” is “love of wisdom.” This spirit first came alive in a powerful way in the town of Athens some five hundred years before Jesus. In his classic book “An Outline of History,” H.G. Wells described Athens this way:

Athens’ citizens “lived the better part of a generation under conditions which, in all ages, have disposed (people) to produce good and beautiful work; they were secure, they were free, and they had pride.” This produced “a remarkable outbreak of creative power, which for three and twenty centuries has been to (intelligent people) a guiding and inspiring beacon out of the past.”

This is the context in which great philosophical discourse took place, the grandest teacher of which was Socrates, whom Wells describes as “a clumsy, slovenly figure, barefooted, gathering about him a band of admirers and disciples.”

Socrates taught that the greatest value, perhaps the only value, of all was knowledge. “Knowledge is truth, and truth knowledge.” The Greeks had a somewhat different understanding of the word “truth.” In our day, we often use the word “truth” to represent certain and absolute knowledge. In ancient Greek writing, truth meant not "certainty," but "unconcealed" or "uncovered." In this sense the quest for truth is an unveiling of something which is hidden. That which is discovered is not necessarily absolute, permanent, or complete -- it is simply more revealed, more observable, more available, than it used to be.

Reason is the human faculty that operates to "un-conceal," to "unveil" pieces that were otherwise hidden. The revelation is piecemeal, not truth in entirety.

This is the legacy of Athens. The contrast to Athens is Jerusalem, a place which has inspired spiritual longing from long before Socrates walk the streets of Athens.

The spirit that arose from the streets of ancient Israel was a spirit of hope. For thousands of years, the Jewish people were victims of war and slavery. They recorded in their scriptures the stories of oppression and tribal conflicts and liberation. Through those years, the idea of monotheism was taking hold – the notion of a single God overseeing the welfare of humanity rather than that of competing tribal gods. As monotheism arose, so did the aspiration of hope for peace and protection from tyrannical conquest. There also came the prediction of a “Messiah,” one who is anointed by God to free the Jewish people from fear and brutality. Here is how H.G. Wells described it in his “An Outline of History”:

“The jealous pettiness that disfigures the earlier tribal ideas of God gives place to a new idea of a god of universal righteousness. . . . The breaking down of nations and kingdoms. . . release(d) men’s minds to a freer and wider religious outlook. . . . (There was) an overflow of moral ideas into the general community. The Hebrew prophets, and the steady expansion of their ideas towards one God in all the world, is a parallel development of the free conscience of humanity.

“From this time onward, there runs through human thought, now weakly and obscurely, (but) gathering power. . . a promise and possibility of an active and splendid peace and happiness in human affairs.”

Then Wells makes this more direct and personal comment:

“It is not the place of the historian to discuss the truth and falsity of religion, but it is his business to record the appearance of great constructive ideas. Two thousand four hundred years ago, and six or seven or eight thousand years after the walls of the first Sumerian cities arose, the ideas of the moral unity of mankind, and a world of peace, had come into the world.”

So here is the great legacy of Jerusalem. While the Greeks were asking “How can I discover truth,” the Hebrews were asking, “How can I discover hope.” They inherited a legacy of oppression and bondage, and they hungered for some assurance that their past was not their destiny as well. They hungered for hope – hope for freedom, hope for peace. And they found that hope in religion, in a sense of covenant with God who would look out for their protection.

When Jesus arrived some few thousand years later, his followers embraced that longing for hope, and gave it a new package. The longing for hope became not just the yearning of the people of God, it became more personal. They used the word “salvation,” and the metaphor of the “Kingdom of God.” Salvation came through love of God and love of neighbor, and it is such love that establishes the Kingdom of God on earth. (His later followers would move the location of the Kingdom of God to heaven). In many ways, it was the same message as the Hebrews before. It was a message of hope. It was the assurance that what you suffer today does not have to be your suffering in the future.

Six centuries later, in the very same venue, the prophet Mohammed announced yet another religion of hope. Adopting the label “Islam,” Mohammed spread the word that the future can be filled with promise. He declared another version of covenant between the people and God that would be rewarded by hope.

Athens and Jerusalem. Philosophy and religion. Head and heart. These are the twin poles of Western civilization. Eastern religions, such as Hindu or Buddhist, don’t seem to acknowledge such a powerful dichotomy in the human condition, but it has become a defining metaphor in our history for dual poles of the human journey.

“Athens” as a metaphor, of course, is not tied only to Greek philosophy. It is a metaphor about the human passion for knowledge and wisdom, about the faculty of reason as the primary guide for humanity. The spirit of Athens can be found 1500 years later in the Enlightenment thought that inspired science, and also inspired democracy. “Jerusalem” as a metaphor, likewise, is not tied only to Judeo-Christian religion. It is a metaphor about the human longing for hope, the quest for justice and peace, wholeness and acceptance. The spirit of Jerusalem has inspired movements for justice and peace. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bishop Desmond Tutu were inspired by Jerusalem. “Jerusalem” is a metaphor for faith – the conviction that in the end, whatever we suffer in life, whatever challenges we face, whatever failings we have – in the end, it will all have been worth it; in the end, all is well. In the explicit language of religion, in the end we know that “God loves us.” In the less literal and more symbolic language of people like Ralph Waldo Emerson or William James, in the end we can feel at home in the universe; we will know that we belong here. In the spirit of Jerusalem, the “God” that religious tradition identifies, and the “universe” that science explores, can be thought of as interchangeable.

“Athens” is the rational human nature; “Jerusalem” is the passionate, the ethical, and the spiritual human nature.

And I still think this question about Athens and Jerusalem may be the central question of our Unitarian Universalist tradition. We were born from the Christian tradition – not just its history, but also its spirit. We share that tradition which longs for hope, which hungers for justice. Our forbearers appeared over 400 years ago in Eastern Europe as a new Christian sect, but one that embraced reason as a crucial part of faith. One of the great historians of the Enlightenment period, John Hermann Randall, wrote that the “rationalistic spirit” of that time “appeared first in talshe sixteenth century among the (Polish Unitarian movement known as the) Socinians.

Every step of our history is imbued with the embracing of reason, and for that matter science, into religious thought. Unitarians were among the first in the nineteenth century to encourage biblical scholarship that treated scripture as writings to be studied as history and literature, as well as scripture. Unitarians were among the first to welcome with enthusiasm Darwin’s discovery of the theory of evolution.

In America, the Unitarians saw their movement as defense of reason against the extreme enthusiasms of the revivals that were spreading across the land. Reason was an important religious value, and the early American Unitarian leader, William Ellery Channing could write,

“I am surer that my rational nature is from God than that any book is an expression of his will. This light (of reason) in my own breast is (God’s) primary revelation, and all subsequent ones must accord with it.”

There is no question that the spirit of Athens remains an essential characteristic of the Unitarian and Universalist tradition. This, however, does not deny that we also inherit the much from the spirit of Jerusalem. Our heritage is also tied inextricably to the tradition of hope, the tradition of passion, passion for justice, the tradition of the heart, the tradition of faith in the ultimate goodness of the universe. Our heritage includes visionaries of the heart, people like Florence Nightingale or Dorothea Dix (the prison and mental health reformer). Our heritage includes voices for justice, such as women’s rights leader Susan B. Anthony, abolitionist Horace Greeley, and Thomas Jefferson, protector of freedom of speech and religion. All these from our Unitarian Universalist heritage are voices from Jerusalem. But the voice of Jerusalem also inspires those who speak not only from compassion, but from passion itself -- the voice of spiritual insight – Unitarian writers like Emerson and Thoreau who spoke often with a mystical insight, Unitarians with an aesthetic sensitivity, like Frank Lloyd Wright and Bela Bartok, or those who found poetic expression of their ideas, like Carl Sandburg and e.e. Cummings.

To be human, it seems to me, is to search out a balance between Athens and Jerusalem, the head and the heart. Norman Cousins, one of the great essayists of the last century, made this observation about the human quest:

“The essential philosophical quest is for integration--which is to say, the need to bring together rational philosophy, spiritual belief, scientific knowledge, personal experience, and direct observation into an organic whole.”

The problem isn’t that we must choose between Athens and Jerusalem in our personal experience – the problem is how to integrate them, how to embrace both in some healthy way. Another great essayist of the last generation is the writer Kahlil Gibran, whose book “The Prophet” is among the most inspirational literature our time. Gibran was Lebanese, and his life was extended beyond Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions.

In his book, the Prophet is asked to speak of “Reason and Passion,” and he answered, saying:

"Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul. If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in the mid-seas."

"Rudder and sails": this is what is needed for the spiritual voyage of life. We seek answers, but we need both the sails of religious vision to power us and the rudder of rational thought to keep us on course.

Unitarian Universalism, it seems to me, works best when we acknowledge our roots that reach deeply into both Athens and Jerusalem. My impression, after 25 years as a Unitarian Universalist minister, is that we are more easily inclined to recognize our legacy from Athens than we are our legacy from Jerusalem. To the extent that is true, we are doing ourselves a grave disservice. We are failing to integrate the wholeness of our human nature. Without the voice of Jerusalem, the voice of religion, of passion, of the heart, we are a ship with rudders to guide us, but no sail to power us, to inspire us, to move us.

Perhaps the best model of such integration I can think of, a model so impressive that few if any of us can aspire to follow is Albert Schweitzer. He was truly a man of both Athens and Jerusalem. Inspired by the legacy of Athens, he earned five academic doctoral degrees, including becoming a medical doctor. But some of those degrees also reflected his Jerusalem legacy: in Theology and, for that matter, in Music. Inspired by Athens, he wrote and researched scholarly work, including an historical study of Jesus’ life.

But inspired by Jerusalem, he devoted the greater part of his professional life as a medical missionary in the isolated and poverty infected villages of Africa. He summarized his religious vision in the phrase, “reverence for life.”

Schweitzer managed to integrate both Athens and Jerusalem with dexterity, expertise, and devotion, in ways that I certainly can’t imagine from myself, or most people I know. It was no surprise to learn that while serving as a medical missionary in Africa, Albert Schweitzer formally joined the Unitarian “Church of the Larger Fellowship” – the Unitarian Church for those who live in isolated areas.

“What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” Unlike Tertullian, I think each is incomplete without the other. Unitarian Universalists, I believe, have a unique situation, indeed a unique responsibility, to practice and to demonstrate that the two can be integrated.

I close with a poem from Doris Jeanine Stevens entitled “Totally.” To me it speaks of that integration of Athens and Jerusalem:

My heart is singing out; but listen you...

Can't you hear? My mind is singing too.

There's passion in my soul, we can agree;

But fire is in the intellect of me.

I could not be this person so complete

Were I of lesser mind. The songs most sweet

Could never rise impassioned on the air

Without cerebral power to put them there.

With heart and mind united, musing rings

And poetry takes flight on amber wings;

So love me totally, body and soul...

Wit and wisdom...

Know me. Want me whole.

READING from William Ellery Channing:

"Christianity A Rational Religion" (about 1825)

We must never forget that our rational nature is the greatest gift of God. For this we owe him our chief gratitude. (Our reason) is a greater gift than any outward aid or benefaction, and no doctrine which degrades it can come from its Author. The development of our reason is the end of our being.

If I could not be a Christian without ceasing to be rational, I should not hesitate as to my choice. I feel myself bound to sacrifice to Christianity property, reputation, life; but I ought not to sacrifice to any religion that religion which lifts me above the brute and constitutes me as human.

I can conceive of no sacrilege greater than to prostrate or renounce the highest faculty which we have derived from God. In so doing we should offer violence to the divinity within us....and take our place among the brutes. Better pluck out the eye, better quench the light of the body than the light within us.

READING: From Norman Cousins

One grows into one's philosophy. Year by year an individual is shaped by sights, sounds, ideas. Consciously or not, we are forever adding to or subtracting from the sum total of our beliefs or attitudes or responses, or whatever it is we mean when we refer to our outlook on life. It is one of the prime glories of the human mind that the same idea or experience is never absorbed in precisely the same way by any two individuals who may be exposed to it.

In this sense, each human being is a process--a filtering process of retention or rejection, absorption or loss. The process defines human individuality. It determines whether we justify the gift of human life or whether we live and die without having been affected by the beauty of wonder and the wonder of beauty, without having had any real awareness of kinship or human fulfillment.

We try to throw our arms around infinity and are left--not with the universe in our arms, but with a closed and empty circle. The more we know about the discernible and theoretical universe, the more confused we become.

The essential philosophical quest is for integration--which is to say, the need to bring together rational philosophy, spiritual belief, scientific knowledge, personal experience, and direct observation into an organic whole.

From “The Prophet”

by Kahlil Gibran

Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against your passion and your appetite. Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and the rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody. But how shall I, unless you yourselves be also the peacemakers, nay, the lovers of all your elements?

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul. If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas. For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.

Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing; And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.

I would have you consider your judgment and your appetite even as you would two loved guests in your house. Surely you would not honour one guest above the other; for he who is more mindful of one loses the love and the faith of both.

Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows -- then let your heart say in silence, "God rests in reason." And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky -- then let your heart say in awe, "God moves in passion." And since you are a breath in God's sphere, and a leaf in God's forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion.