Philosophy of Religion

Athens and Jerusalem

City of Man, City of God

What, indeed, does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? Even before Tertullian posed his famous conundrum at roughly the turn of the third Christian century, the early Church was wary of attempts to subject knowledge derived from faith, revelation, and scripture to pagan hermeneutics. Paul warned early converts in Asia Minor to "beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit" (New King James Version, Col. 2:8) and so for those who, like Tertullian, find their faith sufficient in itself, no further elaboration is necessary.

Likewise, for those who see no support for assertions that cannot be derived from empirical and logical evidence, "faith" is error and using it to justify one's life -- to bring Jerusalem to Athens, as it were -- is at best frivolous. But for those for whom neither faith nor philosophy is enough to fully encompass and interpret every aspect of experience, some degree of mediation between the two orientations is necessary to navigate a world that is neither fully sacred nor profane. Most if not all philosophers of religion fall somewhere along this spectrum of mediated responses and so can be said to occupy territories somewhere between Athens and Jerusalem.

On the philosophical side, a vast multitude of writers have struggled to elucidate the internal logic contained "within" visionary or faith-based claims. William James, for example, adopted a phenomenological viewpoint, remaining effectively agnostic on the objective value of religious insights while pursuing investigation into how and why those insights develop:

Every religious phenomenon has its history and its derivation from natural antecedents. What is nowadays called the higher criticism of the Bible is only a study of the Bible from this existential point-of-view, neglected too much by the earlier church. Under just what biographic conditions did the sacred writers bring forth their various contributions to the holy volume? And what had they exactly in their several individual minds, when they delivered their utterances? (James 9)

Thus, for James and similarly "Athenian" students of religion, the content of faith is left for the faithful to evaluate and interpret; it is only the forms of faith that are suitable subjects for academic (historical, psychological, sociological, literary) interrogation. The question of whether this interrogation contributes in turn to religious understanding is reserved for the individual writer or reader; as James points out, "the best adepts of the higher criticism accordingly never confound the existential with the spiritual problem. With the same conclusions of fact before them, some take one view, and some another" (James 10).

Other philosophers deploy religious or quasi-religious content within otherwise logically oriented projects. All purely philosophical systems are incomplete in themselves, and so incorporate at least some premises that are accepted on faith. As such, to use Tertullian's language, even within the most rigorously academic context elements of the "church" orientation remain present in some form. While some (mathematics, for example) actively work to confirm or disprove these a priori assumptions, others (notably the Pre-Socratics and their great modern student Nietzsche) revel in their epigrammatic obscurity.

Quasi-religious terms also recur when otherwise secular philosophers attempt to describe phenomena or make arguments that impinge on the conventional concerns of faith. Enquiries into the "sublime," the good, or the philosophical absolute, for example, often come to resemble religious doctrine or even verge completely into mystical territory. Kant unifies these quasi-religious categories with the unproven (and to him, unproveable) existence of God to posit that whether or not the transcendental object of faith is real, the philosopher (or anyone else) must live "as if" it does in fact exist. "It is morally necessary," he wrote, "to assume the existence of God" defined as the basis of all duty, law, and other aspects of humanity's moral sense (Kant 134). Similar arguments "prove" religious claims by defining them in equally transcendental terms: Cantor's identification of divinity with the mathematical absolute, Anselm's identification of divinity with that which transcends the limits of thought, and so on.

Alluding to "proofs" that God exists shifts the discussion from attempts to mobilize "Jerusalem" in the service of "Athens" to more religiously motivated projects to justify faith. The goal here may be to assuage one's own doubts, develop latent truths within the content of faith, or, more often, to convince others through a demonstration of logic or even rhetoric. In many cases, these arguments are persuasive to the extent to which they define the religious proposition as a limit or convergent case: For Aquinas, for example, God as first cause or first mover, or God as the ultimate telos or source of all philosophical confidence.

While they may be rhetorically dazzling in effect, these arguments resolve to special pleading for faith as not entirely subject to secular categories of reason, as when Habermas defined God as that aspect of experience "that gives coherence, unity, and thickness to [a] life-world" that would otherwise be ruled entirely by secular systems (Habermas 121). Even contemporary apologetics are concerned with carving out a privileged territory for the "sacred" within a secular world; thus, if "philosophy" is consciously delimited as the study of the logos or of logic, then "religion" is allowed free reign over everything else, including love and faith (Lawless 2).

This carving-out strategy returns to Tertullian's now-ancient objection to attempts to blend philosophy with religion: If someone is searching for space for religion within philosophy, then in a very real sense, they are still primarily engaged with philosophy, not religion. Efforts to clear away space within "Athens" for "Jerusalem" are really only meaningful in a context where faith is not (yet) the ultimate arbiter of all questions.

Kierkegaard brought the entire history of religious and philosophical discourse back to Tertullian and "Jerusalem" by placing faith at the center of religion and demoting logic to a self-defeating role. Famously, Kierkegaard bases his discussion of God not on logical grounds but on the existential bedrock of personal conviction. Moreover, this conviction can only be achieved through the rejection of logic and the explicitly irrational embrace of the unknown: