Talk on the Common Course

II. Talk on the Common Course (1952)

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For our philosophical purposes, Abraham, the man of thinking action, is a free creative thinker. We want to find out how he answered our threefold ultimate question and which creative capability of man he discovered. However, one obvious obstacle presents itself: Abraham was a religious thinker. The question arises: Is there such a thing as free creative religious thinking that could meet our philosophical requirements? We shall postpone this question for the time being. One thing is certain: if a creative religious capability of man exists, it will have to stand the test of free reasoning, which is the test of philosophy; no assumption of religious belief or metaphysical speculation which cannot be accounted for in free reasoning can be permitted. Every concept of God based on preconceived belief has to be discarded because it does not result from free religious thinking but from certain metaphysical or theological speculations in terms of revealed truths or fundamental assumptions.

Not only Abraham, all our originators were also religious thinkers. Do we therefore have to discard them as we discard the metaphysician, the theologian and the believer because their teachings are based on assumptions?

There exist nine concepts of God without any such assumptions. They are the concepts of our originators and they are relevant for believers and nonbelievers. These spring from their thoughts, but transcend these thoughts in a final vision of a possible God; they are the end, not the beginning of their thinking. We therefore start with a consideration of these thoughts without at first taking into account their concepts of God.

This approach seems almost impossible for the Abrahamitic stories because Abraham was the man who walked and talked with God and God cannot be eliminated from a single of the stories. However, this God of Abraham is a very curious God. Abraham, who always expresses his thoughts in his deeds, talks with God as though He were an imaginary figure on Whom a solitary thinker calls for help in the conviction that God does better than he himself. The God of Abraham would have pleased Socrates because Abraham, a man, could argue and reason with God; God listens to reason and even concedes certain points to man. (Genesis, ch. 18, 20 ff., story of Sodom and Gomorrah). Abraham's God is engaged in the same task as Abraham himself: the establishment of righteousness on earth. He does not command; He gives advice and praise. And He keeps faith. God here is evidently a portrait of Abraham himself; it is as though Abraham is talking to the You within himself whom he identifies with God. This God cannot be seen and does not perform signs and miracles like the God of Moses. He tells Abraham what he is going to do (cf. Genesis, ch. 18, 17) and listens to reason. Deeply in thought, Abraham walks the earth with his God; they are thinking together. Abraham's concept of a transcendent personal God is evidently made in his own image, after the likeness of man. This concept is a model of man's highest creative abilities. There is only one way communication between a free personal God and a free reasonable man could possibly come about and be satisfactory to both - a communication in thought and in thinking. In order to find out whether Abraham's thoughts are valid in themselves for believers and nonbelievers alike, we assume that his God is his imagined thinking partner.

The two greatest marital stories in literature are stories of mutual faith. They are Homer's story of Ulysses and Penelope and the Biblical story of Abraham and Sarah. There is the man Abraham, living under patriarchal conditions with his wife, Sarah, who "bare him no children," and having children therefore by Hagar, his wife's maid; but Abraham is not satisfied because he wants a child by this one barren woman who is his wife. Although he himself almost becomes reconciled to her condition, he still desires the child more for her sake than for his own. When their child, Isaac,is born, he is the beloved son of the beloved wife. It is no coincidence that the sane man who for the first time conceived of a free personal God became fully conscious of himself as a person through the recognition of his wife as a person; from now on he could discover and respect the same quality in every human being. "Male and female created He them" - Abraham knew that he was he, because he understood that she was she; he remained himself by respecting her as herself, and everybody else as an himself or herself.

The conclusion to be drawn is that this transcendental interdependence of persons is a creative action: Abraham begins to guarantee the freedom of other persons. For this purpose the man of peace even takes up the sword and handles it well. (Genesis, ch. 14, 12 ff.).

Abraham and Ulysses are perhaps the two greatest characters known to us. What distinguishes these stories from all others is the overwhelming omnipresence of the central figures. (Reference to the category of presence as discussed above.). This is chiefly shown in the description of the great impression they both make on other people. (Comparison of such situations in the Bible with those in the Odyssey). This impression reflected in the reaction of others brings them to life. Their appearance gives testimony to a consistency and continuity of life, whose end result we call character and which stands there, like a great piece of sculpture hewn out of the given material of mere existence. (Refer to the categories of consistency and continuity as related to time and space.).

What is character? (Discussion of our use of the word in everyday life. What is a character on the stage? Shakespeare's characters. What do we see in the appearance of a human person? Character-mask. Character and type. Character types.). All these uses of the word character indicate the various ways a character shows itself so that we can perceive it from without; this is the scientific, but not the philosophical approach. None of these terms helps us to understand what character is. Even the greatest character in literature, Homer's Ulysses teaches us only the appearances of character, its impression on other people, its ways of dealing with them. It does not show us what character is or how character is developed.

The word character is of Greek origin and means that which has been coined, and therefore, to become characteristic of something. In this sense, every thing, every animal, every human being can have a character; it is his or its individuality. But the Greeks still had another word for what we call character: the word ethos, from which our term ethics is derived. In one of his great flashes of thought, Heraclitus states: "Ethos -- man's demon," (Diels, Vorsokratiker, B 119; translation quoted from W. Jaeger, Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers.). In the context of Heraclitus' philosophy this can mean: No demon, neither a ghost nor a god, possesses man and is his fate; if man is possessed and a fate prepared for him, then it is only because his ethos, his character, developed through blind reaction to conditions; but man must not be possessed, his ethos does not need to be a demon; man can possess -- form and transform - this character of his by the creative power of logos, as it was discovered and established by Heraclitus himself, the great thinker of Ephesus.

While we think that Heraclitus' claim is right in the sense that the power of logos can be helpful in the formation of character, all experience points to the fact that this is not the specific and generally valid character-forming force. This force was discovered and established by the only free ethical thinker we know of: Abraham. It is the creative power of faith.

Abraham has been called the man of God and the man of faith; he became the man of the faithful God and of the God of faith. Abraham and his God together are engaged in the task of establishing faith on earth. Righteousness grows out of faith. Since Abraham and his God are only reflections of each other, we shall understand Abraham better by considering the chief difference between his God and all the other gods before him as well as many after him. All previous gods were immortal and infinite and not concerned with time; time meant nothing to them even though it could move indefinitely in circles around them. Abraham's God created a world with a beginning in time; He is a beginner and He wants to accomplish something that can only be accomplished in time and by timing. This God has a task and expects man to help him with it. God is concerned with the continuity of mankind and its consistency.

These traits ascribed to the God of Abraham show us, as in a mirror, Abraham's own distinguishing features. Abraham is a beginner who got himself out of his country and from his kindred (Gen. ch. 12, 1), who begins a new life, takes his own time and discovers his own space. He is the beginner of a new family, a new tribe; the beginner of a new way of life, the establisher of new, unexpected relationships with strangers. Like his God, he starts from the present, the here and now, and reaches out into time; thus he can distinguish and at the same time unify past and future. Abraham may not be the father of mankind; he certainly is the father of historical mankind.

Where does this creative concept of time come from? How did Abraham conceive of it? All the metaphysical and pseudo-scientific definitions of the "nature" of man tell us what man is, define his essence, and thereby at once deprive man of his freedom, which depends on continual self-determination. Among these definitions there is only one which is self-defeating in this respect and that is Nietzsche's definition of man as "an animal that can make promises." It is self-defeating because an "animal" or even an anima (the soul as a metaphysical supernatural entity) which possesses a "nature" could only do what it has to do according to this nature; that is, it could never promise, it could never determine itself and other things. Abraham corresponds precisely to Nietzsche's definition of man: he is the man who constantly makes promises and keeps them. Nowhere else is the unity of thought and action as close as in the relationship between making and keeping a promise. Here the thought, the making of the promise, is no thought if it is not followed by the deed, the keeping of the promise; whereas the deed itself does not exist without previous thought of it. Abraham is the man of promises; that is the reason why his thoughts can always be translated into immediate actions and why his actions always contain his thoughts. Abraham's God is a God of promises; because Abraham makes and keeps promises, God promises him many things.

Abraham was no prophet. Sometimes he guessed what was going to happen, either because he knew what happened before or because God told him what He was going to do; but there was never any certainty about these guesses because this God, like Abraham himself, had to make up His mind in every single case. Abraham, therefore, could not pretend to know the mind of God - nor for that matter, the logic of eternal ideas. He did not belong to the Biblical prophets and does not belong to the modern prophets, who, like Marx, pretend to know the iron laws of nature or history. He did not predict, he did not teach, and he did not convert. He only showed what man can do. He knew of the future insofar as he knew that he could make true his promises. Unlike the prophets, therefore, he never became a slave of time, subject to the future which they predict, engulfed in the stream of God's providence, or of becoming, or of nature, or of history, which they pretend to know but which they cannot avert. Abraham has time, is the master of time, because he makes promises for the future and keeps them; the more promises he makes, the more he becomes the master of future time. In this sense, he predicts what is going to happen; it is as though he said: This will happen tomorrow or Abraham will not be.

If we consider the historical conditions under which Abraham lived, the nations among which he moved and with which he and his small tribe had to get along, the risks involved seem simply fantastic. The historical circumstances explain a good deal about the impression he made on others; he must have left them gasping with surprise, probably including his own relative, Lot, when he offered him his terms for a division of the land between them. (Gen. ch.13). There is the story of King Melchisedek, who saw Abraham as the "priest of the most high God" (ch. 14, 18) -- that is the unknown highest God for whom the Egyptians were searching -- because how could a man take such risks without higher, unknown protection?

The more we consider the circumstances surrounding our story, the less we can understand how a man could do all this without God keeping His hand over him. As a result of Abraham's life, the acceptance of Abraham's God seems almost a matter of course. Yet none of our originators who acted and thought as free personalities took a lesser risk. Solon was rejected and overthrown by the Athenians, Heraclitus was hated and cursed by the Ephesians, Socrates was forced to drink poison, and Jesus of Nazareth was crucified; the others, including Abraham himself, were probably just lucky.

All these men, and Abraham the first among them, were without fear (in the singular), although he, like the others, was often afraid. Fear in the singular, fear as a basic condition of human existence, can be overcome only through the creative joy of life. What made Abraham fearless was that he concentrated on the creative procedure of establishing faith among men. Nothing could keep him back, as nothing could keep Socrates, Jesus and the others back.

At this point, we must pay attention to the remarkable absence of any concept of sin, especially original sin, in the Abraham stories. Except for the original teachings of Jesus, who tried to destroy this concept, this is the only part of the Bible where sin does not play a decisive or even a major role. God destroys unfaithful people and rewards faithful ones; that is all. At their own risk people can act faithfully or unfaithfully; they are never depraved by original sin. (The few instances which seem to be exceptions to this do not fit into the Abraham stories. Abraham clearly conceived his task to be the establishment of faith on earth; he never thought that this was impossible on account of the degradation of man, nor did he conceive of a better hereafter where his task could be fulfilled.).

No less remarkable than the absence of the concept of sin in a religious thinker is the absence of any attempt at conversion. Abraham never tried to impose faith and he never preached faith as a duty for all men. Faith for him was not a duty but the highest human privilege, which required freedom; to impose faith would have seemed to him a contradiction in terms, if not an outright lie. It was Moses, not Abraham, who established faith in the form of a command -- as Plato established reason as a commanding force and as St. Paul made a command out of love; against them stand Abraham, Socrates and Jesus. The fundamental discoveries of the originators concerning the creative abilities of man are meant to be true for every human being, to be used by everybody who is a person. In reconsidering these discoveries, everybody can find out who man can be and how he can be. But nothing more.

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