Kass' The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis

Libertarianism and Theology after the 80s.

Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2006).

Leon Kass begins his gloss of Genesis by reminding us that he is not a trained theologian. He is a biochemist and medical doctor. Religion is not for people like him. In 1978, visiting Santa Fe, NM for a lecture, and while his ‘observant co-religionists’ were at synagogue, he asked a friend for a lift to a local quarry where he intended to search for fossils. It was not a particularly fruitful search. But while was there, his friend began to talk about his own just-finished commentary on Genesis. Kass soon became convinced that the bible was worth reading not just as a literal historical text, or in a pious frame of mind, as the revealed and inerrant word of God, but rather as a socio-political and philosophical text, one that could and should be contrasted with Greek, Hittite, Egyptian, and other mesopotamian traditions. The Beginning of Wisdom is the result of decades of careful and anthropological reading. But it is also peppered with references to his friend’s commentary, and with one eye on modern economic policy.

Like Heschel, Kass believes that unlike philosophy and scientism, Wisdom comes not from ‘wonder, but awe and reverence.’ 

Philosophy, born of wonder, seeks ultimately to know the nature and being of things, as well as the reasons or causes why things are the way they are. [The Bible on the other hand, has as its end]  not understanding for its own sake, but a righteous and holy life. 3

Again and again, Genesis tells stories that underscore both the dire ends of rationalism and the difficulty of righteousness. Part of the issue here comes from Man’s status as imago dei; humans are different from other animals yet part of the world by virtue of their god-like and god-given ability to create, imagine, plan, and speak figuratively. Just as God created the heavens and the earth, the planets and the stars, and every distinction of animal, so too does Man attempt to do the same by recognising and granting them labels in order to assort them. ‘It creates a linguistic world’ in which the sign and the signified never quite overlap, because man is not divine. When a woman is created ‘for it is not good for man to be alone’ (indeed there is a subtext that Man’s proximity to the animals will end in what could be delicately described as corrupted sexual practice), naming turns to dialogue, dialogue to the beginnings of a society, and then to the fall. The tree, in this reading, is the tree of knowledge - (wo)man is promised (or convinces himself through sophistry and reason) that the human-defined world can be perfect, and the knowledge of how to cross the gap between ‘imago’ and ‘deus’ lies in that tree. The serpent is therefore the first philosopher, a socratic questioner who suggests that through breaking down dictum and analysing language we can build a better world.

Of course, this is not the case. 

Independent reason, having mentally eroded the force of the prohibition and suggested new possibilities, now takes control also of action. Speech issues in the momentous and transforming act of free choice. Thanks to the growth of human mental powers, the woman “sees” in a new light; mind and desire both colour and reflect the new powers of a liberated imagination. 87.

God’s warning that partaking of the fruit will cause death is not, however, the first anagnorisis. For Kass, the fall is not a misstep but an innate quality of humanity. Genesis 3:7 points to their first self-conscious thought being sexual. They were painfully aware of their own sexuality and nakedness in a way that their animalistic pre-lapsarian natures were not. ‘Human self-consciousness is radically sexual self-consciousness’ (89), and shame crosses the gap between our awareness of our higher nature and the realities of our newly-discovered baseness. Alas, ‘clothing the bodies visible nakedness cannot cover over these disturbing passions of hte soul’ (ibid).

Kass therefore argues that the nature of the fall is not so much a causal punishment,  because you have transgressed here, so your natures will be transformed there by me - an angry and vengeful god but a quality of a sociable man.

It is rather a making clear of just what it means to have chosen enlightenment and freedom, just what it means to be a rational being. The punishment, if punishment it is, consists mainly in the acute foreknowledge of our natural destiny to live out our humanity under the human condition. 96

This thus encapsulates Kass’ anthropological reading of Genesis. Neither theological nor philosophical (it does not tell us _how_ to live, because such direct instruction is precluded by our self-consciousness and acculturation), it is instead a description of our ongoing predicament.

Unsurprisingly, Genesis has at its core a steady eye on the image of the mesopotamanian city. This is most evident in the story of Babel, which recounts the errors of city - Babylonian? - life. Shutting ourselves away in the polis, we delude ourselves that it is possible to fix the postlapsarian condition. But unlike Aristotle’s promise, the ideal polis cannot exist. We might be able to delude ourselves that a single language and way of thinking is able to close the gap between signifier and signified, that we can read the - in fact, non-divine! - heavens and their influence on us, but we would be just as deluded as those prisoners in the allegory of the cave. The problem of course is that it takes God to come down and scatter the city, rather than leave it to its own (inevitable?) destruction. It may not be good for man to be alone as God said of Adam, but the effect of reifying social and reasoned order is that we forget the Creator. His destruction of Babel is therefore not simply a ‘punishment’, but is a ‘gift to treat and rehabilitate the criminal. Failure is offered as a remedy’ (236). Scattered to the wind, man is once more able to ‘think about the eternal and the divine’ without the self-delusion of rational city life and its claims of a perfect epistemology.

Kass’ argument is therefore pregnant with political meaning. In his consideration of both the aristotelian and babylonian polies, he comes close to James Scott’s suspicion of ordered society in Against The Grain and Seeing Like A State. It would therefore be amiss not to mention that Kass is intertwined with the American Enterprise Institute and Libertarian economics. Though it would be equally remiss to draw a causative conclusion, it remains interesting how - despite claiming his project is neither economic nor political but anthropological - Kass’ dismissal of sociability and emphasis on personal qualities of willpower and righteousness are inextricable from his libertarianism. In other words, Kass believes that ordered societies tend inexorably towards a quasi-gnostic belief in the legibility of nature. We need only the right tools and we will be able to perfect our societies and our language. Not so, says Kass, such societies are pointless at best and actively harmful at worst. It is only through an active anti-idolatry of state and nation that we can strive towards righteousness and our proper telos in God.