Israel and Humanity - Western Paganism
V.
Rabbinical doctrines and pagan ideas.
§ 1.
WESTERN PAGANISM.
The Rabbis have taught as explicitly as possible the doctrine of man's cooperation with God. They </ref 'call the righteous, the associated of the holy God. In the Talmud we read that anyone makes a decision consistent with the truth becomes a member of God's work in the creation of heaven and earth. "God, he told us in another passage, Abraham said, Because thou hast exercised hospitality to strangers, I'll keep account as if you were my partner in the creation of the world. That is what is meant by the words: Blessed be Abram of God Most High, possessor of heaven and earth! "And just as it is said that God ponders the Act keeping the world by his providence, so also the man who is engaged in the study of divine law contributes, according to the doctors, the creation and Conservation universe.
We do not expect to find confirmation of these ideas in contemporary philosophy. It is, however, and "School of absolute idealism, writes Giuseppe Allievo, leaving [1] this basic premise of the identity of being with thought, led by a logical consequence, confusion of the intellect with voluntary activity or, if you will, of the speculative life in man with life ... Hence the maxim of modern idealistic philosophy that the universe is tantamount to creating [2] ".
The rabbinic doctrine of human cooperation is quite different from the pagan ideas, such as Rabbis themselves, strange to say, we have in their writings. We have already reported, about the theory of progress, the controversy between a philosopher and a rabbi in which the first objected that circumcision is not natural, while the second one took up the defense by proclaiming that everything in nature as in human development needs. In another similar discussion, we see that paganism was dependent on all things in a fatality or natural necessity, which left for human freedom that share secondary. There can be no conjecture too ventured to suppose that philosophers in question were none other than the Stoics, which offer more resemblance to the Pharisees than other schools and the ethos was to supreme principle the idea that he must comply at all to nature, while the Epicureans, less influential elsewhere, were supporters of moral freedom, superior, according to them, the physical necessity.
"Epictetus said: As in all arts wise man submits to the appropriate level, as well as the good man must submit to lose self in the universe. The whole is better than the game, the city better than the citizen: you are therefore a part of the whole, aligns up with the whole. If the good man knew the future, he would quietly and contentedly even his illness, his mutilation, upon his death, knowing that the order of the universe wills it. " And after Marcus Aurelius' religious thought back to the idea that we must foster the course of nature and that it would be a rash, sore want to prevent the ways of Providence, even when we could [3] ".
Some modern critics have attributed to the worship Epicure [4] from ideal. It would be more accurate, we believe, merely to assert that, according to his system, there is something in nature and in man that is, if not higher than the fatality, at least another species because there is freedom or simply the effort to dominate the physical necessity. Is it true that freedom to argue that natural and man was among the Epicureans, a consequence of their fundamental doctrine of chance involved and their share of the denial of a providential order? Anyway, here's what Turnus Raphus objected to R. Akiba, "If God loves the poor, why did he not eat? To which the Doctor said it's to give their fellow deserves to do so and that, far from reproach them for having acted against his orders, they will be grateful. A king, "added the rabbi, did show he not grateful to him who will go secretly to rescue his son, though, because the faults of the prince, he was obliged to punish him, generosity that he also would support the point where, instead of his child, he was a slave?
Everything is very remarkable in this passage: the idea that God loves the poor, which is authentically Jewish and not exclusively Christian, as it supports so readily, and this important distinction between slaves and children who threw a dazzling Light reports that Judaism established between God and men, or rather, the ideal that confronts us as a goal. But what interests us particularly here is the contrast between who we are offered the Roman theory on the one hand, with respect for its reality and its moral any positive merely requires obedience to nature, and, Secondly, the role attributed to man by Judaism to correct and improve on nature itself. If one goes to the bottom of things, this idea is the very soul of reasoning holds that the teacher of Israel. It is no less visible in the other example where this is still a controversy with wise pagan "philosophers, we are told, a rabbi asked: If God does not shirk, why does not abolish it not? "Polytheism in question, as evidenced by the context, is astrolatry, that is to say the worship of nature at its most beautiful and the response of Rabbi again opposes the cult of material fact, the realities of nature, the cult of the ideal, one worthy of man. [5] Some doctors later, including the rabbi Elghazi have seen, we think he, the question in its true light, saying it depends on that other preliminary issue raised in some way the Talmud, to which of the two works is greater, of heaven and earth, or that of man? Pagans opted for the superior works of nature and the rabbis for human works: "The actions of the righteous, they said, outweigh the creation of heaven and earth," and it's not wrong to we called this valuable maxim most beautiful thing that has been said about human nature. "
However, it is fair to consider some Stoic ideas that at first glance, would demonstrate compliance with the doctrine of the Pharisees. Ritter says that the disciples of Zeno "more the individual is divine and perfect, the more active, and can even change the whole sequence in the universal causes [6]. This view betrays itself in this strange paradox of Chrysippus that "the wise are not less useful to Jupiter than Jupiter is to do the wise." These words seem to raise the wise, the righteous rabbis, even at Jupiter and therefore over nature. But to appreciate, we believe, the true value of the maxim in question, it must distinguish two things: first, the freedom it seems wise to give and then use that it is called do. There is no doubt that without freedom, the sage himself is unable to act otherwise than nature's grows, so that there is an apparent contradiction with stoic fatalism; but it is equally certain that the wise must use the freedom that is granted, to comply fully with nature. That is indeed the true meaning of the principle of Chrysippus, as the Jupiter which, he says, the sage is so necessary, is not far from it, a god outside and above the world and it appears at more like the general officer of the nature of which he seems to be part itself and the rest all other gods. The pantheism of the Stoics could not confirm that philosophers in this view. We do not exaggerate by saying that freedom whose sphere of action is so restricted that it is only to imitate nature, is actually as if it did not exist, for what purpose this option [7] to determine it was given to man, if he should use it only to accomplish what he had been obliged to do in case she would have been denied? It would also have objected to the Stoics, that the existence of freedom which alone a glimpse of a whole class activity that exceeds the forces and natural laws and therefore must make a man capable of improvement.
