Jerusalem and Athens, the two cities every free society still lives in

Around the turn of the third century, a Christian writer in North Africa named Tertullian asked a question that has been quoted ever since: what has Athens to do with Jerusalem? He meant it as a sneer. The philosophers, he thought, had nothing to teach the church, and the church had nothing to learn from them.

He was wrong about that, and the fact that he was wrong is the most important fact about Western civilization. The West is what happened when Jerusalem and Athens refused to stay out of each other's business. Take either city away and what is left cannot hold up a free society for very long.

That is my thesis, and I will argue it in the usual order. First I will define the terms. Then I will lay out the argument in numbered premises. Then I will give the strongest case against it, which is that reason alone suffices, and answer it. At the end I will say what a conservative should do with all this.

The terms

By Jerusalem I mean the moral and religious inheritance of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament: a Creator who is the source of moral law, the claim that every human being bears the image of God, the idea that law stands above kings, and the conviction that history has a direction and that people answer for what they do.

By Athens I mean the inheritance of Greek philosophy: the conviction that the world can be understood by reason, that arguments must be tested by argument, that questions about the good life and the just city can be asked openly, and that nature has a structure that thought can discover.

By free society I mean a political order in which the government is limited by law, citizens hold rights that the government did not give and cannot take, and public questions are settled by persuasion and vote rather than force.

These are not rhetorical categories. They are places and texts and men, and the story of how they met is the story of the West.

What Jerusalem gave

Start with the claim that law stands above the king. In the ancient world, the king was typically the source of law, or even a god. The Hebrew Bible says something different. In Deuteronomy 17, the law of the king, a future ruler of Israel must not multiply horses or wives or silver and gold for himself, and he must write out a copy of the law, keep it with him and read it all the days of his life, so that his heart will not be lifted up above his brothers. The king is under the law, and he is one of the brothers.

The narratives enforce the point. The prophet Nathan walks into the palace and tells King David, "Thou art the man," after David arranged the death of Uriah to take his wife (2 Samuel 12). In 1 Kings 21, King Ahab covets the vineyard of a man named Naboth, has him killed on false charges and takes it, and the prophet Elijah confronts him in the name of God. The story is preserved in the national scripture of the people, and it tells every later reader that a king can commit murder and be held to account.

The second gift is the dignity of the person. Genesis 1:27 says that God created man in his own image. Every human being, the slave and the king alike, carries that image. Whatever else you say about the Bible, that sentence is the root of the idea of equal human dignity, and it stands in contrast to ancient traditions in which the king alone was treated as the god's image.

The third gift is the Sabbath and the idea that work has limits and that rest is owed to everyone, including servants and strangers. The fourth is the notion of covenant, a binding agreement between a people and their God and among the people themselves, which Americans would later translate into compacts and constitutions.

What Athens gave

Athens gave the West the habit of asking why. Socrates went through the city questioning those who claimed to know what justice or courage was, and he found that they could not define it. Plato wrote dialogues in which ideas had to defend themselves. Aristotle and his students are credited with gathering the constitutions of 158 city-states, by the traditional count, and Aristotle wrote the Politics, the first systematic treatise on how to organize a political community and why some arrangements last longer than others. I give the number from the ancient tradition, so check it as a tradition and not as a modern figure.

What Aristotle and the Greek tradition contributed to political thought was a method. Regimes could be compared. Mixed constitutions, which balanced monarchic, aristocratic and popular elements, were more stable than pure ones. A good ruler ruled by law, not by whim. The idea that there is a natural order that reason can read, the idea of natural law, went from the Greeks to the Stoics, and from the Stoics to Rome. Cicero, in the first century before Christ, wrote that true law is right reason in agreement with nature, universal and unchanging. The Founders, who read Cicero as schoolboys, would echo it.

So Athens supplied the instrument, which was reason, and a way of using it on the questions of politics.

The meeting: Aquinas and the natural law

The synthesis took centuries. The early Christian writers, Augustine above all, used Greek philosophy, especially Plato, to defend and explain their faith. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas, working with Aristotle's writings which had come back into Europe, built the great structure of the Summa Theologiae and, within it, the treatment of law.

Aquinas distinguished eternal law, divine law, natural law and human law. The part that matters for freedom is natural law: the claim that human beings, by the use of reason, can grasp basic moral principles that bind everywhere, because they are grounded in what human beings are. A human law that contradicts the natural law, he said, is not truly law but a perversion of law. That sentence was to be echoed across the centuries, and Martin Luther King Jr. drew on Aquinas by name in his Letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963.

That is the meeting of the two cities in one argument. The content, a moral law above the state, comes from Jerusalem. The method, the claim that reason can discover and apply it, comes from Athens. And the result is the tradition on which the Declaration relied when it appealed to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." The phrase has both cities in it. "Nature" is Athens. "Nature's God" is Jerusalem.

Strauss and the tension

In 1967, the political philosopher Leo Strauss gave a lecture titled "Jerusalem and Athens: Some Preliminary Reflections" at City College in New York. Strauss was a refugee from Germany who had seen what happened to a modern, educated nation when it lost its moral moorings, and he spent his life asking what the West stood on.

His argument was that Western civilization is not a single thing but a tension between two sources that disagree at the root. Athens trusts the human mind to find the truth by inquiry. Jerusalem trusts a revelation that comes to us from outside and calls for obedience and faith. Neither, he argued, could finally refute the other. And the West, he suggested, has drawn its vitality precisely from living in that unresolved tension, with each side keeping the other honest. I am giving a compressed summary of a dense lecture, and anyone who wants the exact argument should read it.

I will not claim Strauss was making a conservative argument about politics. He was making an argument about what the West is. But it helps us see why the two cities cannot be merged into one, and why we should not want to try. A world where Athens had won would have no source for the moral claims it wishes to defend. A world where Jerusalem had won, and reason had been silenced, would not need a free press or a trial or a debate.

The argument in numbered premises

Here, then, is the argument the way I would put it to a skeptic.

1. A free society requires a moral law that binds rulers as well as ruled. If the ruler is the source of the law, there is no law, only will.
2. That moral law must have a source that is not the will of the people or of the state. If a majority can create right and wrong, then a majority can vote away anyone's rights.
3. Jerusalem supplies that source: a Creator, whose law stands above kings, and whose image every person bears. That is the root of unalienable rights.
4. A moral law that cannot be reasoned about cannot be applied to new cases or defended to those who do not share the faith. Athens supplies that capacity: argument, definition, the weighing of cases, the appeal to common nature.
5. Therefore the free societies of the West have rested on both. Where one was removed, the structure weakened.

Notice the test of the last premise. Where Jerusalem was cut away and Athens kept, as in the radical phase of the French Revolution, reason set itself up as a goddess and the guillotine followed. Where Athens was cut away and Jerusalem kept, you get the religious wars and the censoring of inquiry, which the West suffered in its own history before the settlements of the seventeenth century. Each city, left alone, has done terrible things. Together, they have restrained each other.

The steelman: reason alone suffices

The best case against my thesis is the one made by the secular philosophers of the Enlightenment and their heirs. It runs like this.

Human beings are rational, and reason can discover moral truth without any appeal to revelation. Kant argued that the moral law is a product of practical reason, that every rational being can recognize it, and that persons are ends in themselves and never merely means. John Stuart Mill argued from the greatest happiness. Modern liberal philosophers argue that equal dignity follows from the capacity for reason or from fair procedures that rational people would agree on. On this view, the biblical story is an interesting historical source, perhaps a useful myth, but not a necessary foundation. The secular argument for human rights is complete without it, and many of the best defenders of liberty in the modern age have been nonbelievers.

That argument deserves respect, and I think its best advocates are serious and often admirable. I would answer it in four points.

1. The historical point. The claim of equal dignity of all persons is not obvious from reason alone, because the greatest reasoners of the ancient world did not hold it. Aristotle defended natural slavery, in the first book of the Politics, and Plato's Republic is a hierarchy of natures. The equal worth of every person came into the West through the Bible's teaching that all are made in God's image. Secular philosophers inherited the premise and then built arguments for it. The question is whether they would have found it without the inheritance.
2. The grounding point. What makes persons equal? If the ground is the capacity for reason, then those with less of it, children, the very old, the cognitively impaired, have less claim. If the ground is some trait that all humans share equally and absolutely, it is hard to name one that is not simply a secular translation of "made in God's image." Habermas, a secular philosopher, has said that moral universalism in the West has its source in Jewish and Christian monotheism. I will say more about that in another post on this blog.
3. The motivation point. A moral principle needs not only a justification but a power to move people. The Bible's stories, laws and commands have moved millions to risk themselves for strangers. A bare syllogism rarely does.
4. The stability point. Systems built only on reason have shown a tendency toward the rule of experts who believe they have the right answer and the right to impose it. The twentieth century's ideologies claimed to be scientific and rational. A moral law above the state is what was lacking in them.

None of this means that nonbelievers cannot be good citizens or even brilliant defenders of liberty. They can, and many have been. It means that the foundations they stand on were laid by a civilization that was not secular, and that they should know it.

The same point about Jerusalem alone

A fair argument must apply the test to the other side too. Jerusalem alone falls short, and conservatives who love the faith should say so.

Faith without reason can become something dangerous or dull. If the moral law is given only by decree, it can be claimed by anyone who says he is its spokesman. Reason is what lets a believer say to a self-appointed prophet that his demand contradicts what God would command. The long Christian tradition of natural law, from Augustine through Aquinas, is just that: an insistence that faith and reason are allies. Pope Benedict XVI, in the lecture at Regensburg in 2006, made this very point about the Greek inheritance in Christianity.

And there is the political point. A theocracy, a government that rules by the claim of divine authority, contradicts the Bible's own teaching that no earthly ruler is God. The Founders were right to refuse an established national church. Jerusalem is the source of limits on the state, not a license for it.

What the conservative answer is

What does a conservative do with this?

First, preserve both. Conservatism, at its best, is a defense of an inheritance. The Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the Greek and Roman tradition of reasoned inquiry together make up that inheritance. A conservative who treats faith as a mere tool, or reason as an enemy, has misread what he is conserving.

Second, teach both. A school that cannot explain where the idea of equal dignity came from, or where the idea of the rule of law came from, is graduating citizens who do not know what they are defending. That means the Bible as a book that shaped the West, and the great books of Greece and Rome as the origin of the arguments we still use.

Third, take the arguments of both seriously in public life. Defend religious liberty, because Jerusalem's claim on the conscience cannot be coerced. Defend free inquiry, because Athens's claim on the mind cannot be silenced.

And fourth, hold the founders' standard. Federalist No. 1 asks whether societies of men are really capable of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. "Reflection and choice" is Athens. The assumption that there is something worth choosing, a good to be sought and an evil to be resisted, is Jerusalem.

Where to read more

The posts on this blog that follow these threads: the Founders' view of religion in a republic is in Why Washington's Farewell Address called religion and morality indispensable. The question of whether the Declaration's equality needs a Creator is argued in Why 'created equal' is a claim about God and not just about politics. The nonbeliever who defends the heritage is the subject of Can a conservative who doesn't believe still defend the faith of the West?. The conflict that people claim between faith and reason is tested in Galileo, Mendel and a Belgian priest, the myth of faith at war with science. And the principle that decisions belong to the smallest competent body, which comes from the same tradition, is in Subsidiarity, the 1931 Catholic principle every federalist should know. The Founders' own sources are at the founders page.

The case in brief

1. Western liberty rests on two inheritances: Jerusalem's moral law above kings and the image of God in every person, and Athens's reasoned inquiry and natural law.
2. Aquinas joined them in the thirteenth century, and the Declaration's phrase "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" has both in it.
3. Strauss, in his 1967 lecture, argued that the West lives in the tension between the two and that neither has refuted the other.
4. The case that reason alone suffices is serious, but the equal dignity of all persons did not come from the greatest ancient reasoners, and secular grounds for it struggle to say what makes persons equal.
5. Faith alone also falls short, because it needs reason to resist false prophets, so a conservative should preserve, teach and defend both.

What you can do: read Deuteronomy 17:14-20 and then the first paragraph of the Declaration in one sitting, and write down where each one limits power.