THE SEEKERS
THE STORY OF MAN’S CONTINUING
QUEST TO UNDERSTAND HIS WORLD
DANIEL J. BOORSTIN
The road is always better than the inn.
—CERVANTES
RANDOM HOUSE NEW YORK
Copyright © 1998 by Daniel J. Boorstin
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
American Bible Society: Excerpts from the Today’s English Version (TEV) Bible, 2nd Edition. Copyright © 1992 by American Bible Society. Reprinted by permission of the American Bible Society.
Fourth Estate Ltd: Excerpts from A Kierkegaard Reader, edited by Roger Poole and Henrik Stangerup. Copyright © 1989 by Roger Poole and Henrik Stangerup. Reprinted by permission of Fourth Estate Ltd.
Boorstin, Daniel J. (Daniel Joseph), 1914–
The seekers: the story of man’s continuing quest to understand his world / Daniel J. Boorstin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-679-46270-8
1. Civilization—History. 2. Meaning (Philosophy)—History. 3. Meaning (Philosophy)—Religious aspects—History. I. Title.
CB151.B66 1998
909—dc21 98-15430
Random House website address: www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 0-679-46270-8
This book is also available in print as ISBN 0-679-43445-3.
CONTENTS
A Personal Note to the Reader
BOOK ONE: AN ANCIENT HERITAGE
Part I. The Way of Prophets: A Higher Authority
1. From Seer to Prophet: Moses’ Test of Obedience
2. A Covenanting God: Isaiah’s Test of Faith
3. Struggles of the Believer: Job
4. A World Self-Explained: Evil in the East
Part II. The Way of Philosophers: A Wondrous Instrument Within
5. Socrates’ Discovery of Ignorance
6. The Life in the Spoken Word
7. Plato’s Other-World of Ideas
8. Paths to Utopia: Virtues Writ Large
9. Aristotle: An Outsider in Athens
10. On Paths of Common Sense
11. Aristotle’s God for a Changeful World
Part III. The Christian Way: Experiments in Community
12. Fellowship of the Faithful: The Church
13. Islands of Faith: Monasteries
14. The Way of Disputation: Universities
15. Varieties of the Protestant Way: Erasmus, Luther, Calvin
BOOK TWO: COMMUNAL SEARCH
Part IV. Ways of Discovery: In Search of Experience
16. The Legacy of Homer: Myth and the Heroic Past
17. Herodotus and the Birth of History
18. Thucydides Creates a Political Science
19. From Myth to Literature: Virgil
20. Thomas More’s New Paths to Utopia
21. Francis Bacon’s Vision of Old Idols and New Dominions
22. From the Soul to the Self: Descartes’s Island Within
Part V. The Liberal Way
23. Machiavelli’s Reach for a Nation
24. John Locke Defines the Limits of Knowledge and of Government
25. Voltaire’s Summons to Civilization
26. Rousseau Seeks Escape
27. Jefferson’s American Quest
28. Hegel’s Turn to “The Divine Idea on Earth”
BOOK THREE: PATHS TO THE FUTURE
Part VI. The Momentum of History: Ways of Social Science
29. A Gospel and a Science of Progress: Condorcet to Comte
30. Karl Marx’s Pursuit of Destiny
31. From Nations to Cultures: Spengler and Toynbee
32. A World in Revolution?
Part VII. Sanctuaries of Doubt
33. “All History Is Biography”: Carlyle and Emerson
34. Kierkegaard Turns from History to Existence
35. From Truth to Streams of Consciousness with William James
36. The Solace and Wonder of Diversity
37. The Literature of Bewilderment
Part VIII. A World in Process: The Meaning in the Seeking
38. Acton’s “Madonna of the Future”
39. Malraux’s Charms of Anti-Destiny
40. Rediscovering Time: Bergson’s Creative Evolution
41. Defining the Mystery: Einstein’s Search for Unity
Some Reference Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For RUTH
A Personal Note to the Reader
As long as there’s no find, the noble brotherhood will last.
Woe, when the piles begin to grow!
—B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Caught between two eternities—the vanished past and the unknown future—we never cease to seek our bearings and our sense of direction. We inherit our legacy of the sciences and the arts—works of the great Discoverers and Creators, the Columbuses and Leonardos and Shakespeares—recounted in my two earlier volumes. We glory in their discoveries and creations. But we are all Seekers. We all want to know why. Man is the asking animal. And while the finding, the belief that we have found the Answer, can separate us and make us forget our humanity, it is the seeking that continues to bring us together, that makes and keeps us human. While this brief volume does not aim to survey the history of philosophy or of religion, it does sample ways of seeking by great philosophers and religious leaders in the West. This is a story not of finding but of seeking. I have chosen those Seekers who still speak most eloquently to me, and whose paths toward meaning in our lives and in our history still invite us on our personal quest.
Our Western culture has seen three grand epochs of seeking. First was the heroic Way of Prophets and Philosophers seeking salvation or truth from the God above or the reason within each of us. Then came an age of communal seeking, pursuing civilization in the liberal spirit, and then most recently an age of social sciences, when, oriented toward the future, man seems ruled by forces of history. We draw on all these ways in our personal search. They still speak to us, not so much for their answers as for their ways of asking the questions. In this long quest, Western culture has turned from seeking the end or purpose to seeking causes—from the Why to the How. Might this empty meaning from our human experience? Then how can we recapture and enrich our sense of purpose?
The plan of this volume as a whole is chronological. But in detail it has a shingle scheme. Each of the three books overlaps chronologically with its predecessor, as the story advances from antiquity to the present. This, too, is a story without end, as we continue to explore our humanity in the eternal Why. And we see how we have come from seeking meaning to finding meaning in the seeking.
BOOK ONE
AN ANCIENT HERITAGE
We have a common sky. A common firmament encompasses us. What matters it by what kind of learned theory each man looketh for the truth? There is no one way that will take us to so mighty a secret.
—SYMMACHUS, ON REPLACING THE STATUE OF VICTORY IN THE ROMAN FORUM, A.D. 384
Great Seekers never become obsolete. Their answers may be displaced, but the questions they posed remain. We inherit and are enriched by their ways of asking. The Hebrew prophets and the ancient Greek philosophers remain alive to challenge us. Their voices resound across the millennia with a power far out of proportion to their brief lives or the small communities where they lived. Christianity brought together their appeal to the God above and the reason within—into churches, monasteries, and universities that long survived th
eir founders. These would guide, solace, and confine Seekers for the Western centuries.
PART ONE
THE WAY OF PROPHETS: A HIGHER AUTHORITY
When we do science, we are pantheists;
when we do poetry, we are polytheists;
when we moralize we are monotheists.
—GOETHE, MAXIMS AND REFLECTIONS
1
From Seer to Prophet: Moses’ Test of Obedience
The future has always been the great treasure-house of meaning. People everywhere, dissatisfied with naked experience, have clothed the present with signs of things to come. They have found clues in the lives of sacrificial animals, in the flight of birds, in the movements of the planets, in their own dreams and sneezes. The saga of the prophets records efforts to cease being the victim of the gods’ whims by deciphering divine intentions in advance, toward becoming an independent self-conscious self, freely choosing beliefs.
The Mesopotamians experimented with ways to force from the present the secrets of the future. Diviners watched smoke curling up from burning incense, they interpreted the figures on clay dice to give a name to the coming year. They answered questions about the future by pouring oil into a bowl of water held on their lap and noting its movement on the surface or toward the rim.
The Hebrew scriptures leave traces of how they too sensed the divine intention, and gave today’s experience the iridescence of tomorrow. Jacob “dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. And behold, the Lord stood above it, and said, ‘I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac; the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed.’ ” And the chief priest used the Urim and Thummim, sacred stones carried in his breastplate. These gave the divine answer, by whether the “yes” or the “no” stone was first drawn out. David consulted just such an oracle, manipulated by the priest Abiathar, before going into battle against Saul. When the “yes” stone appeared, forecasting his victory over the Philistines, he advanced in battle.
“A man who is now called a ‘prophet’ (nabi),” we read in the Book of Samuel, “was formerly called a ‘seer.’ ” The “seer” was one who saw the future, and his influence came from his power to predict. The priest-predictor who admitted his clients into the intentions of the gods was held in awe when his predictions came true. The prophet had a different kind of power. He was a nabi (“proclaimer” or “announcer”) and spoke with the awesome authority of God himself. So, the ancient Hebrew prophets opened the way to belief. “I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, . . .” declared the Lord, “and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him” (Deuteronomy 18:18). They used the words “mouth” and “nabi” interchangeably. Our English “prophet” (from the Greek: a speaker before, or for) carries the same message.
While the seer forecast how events would turn out, the prophet prescribed what men should believe, and how they should behave. In ancient Israel the two roles at first were not always easily distinguished. But seers, mere forecasters, came to be displaced by prophets, touched by the divinity for whom they spoke.
It was this transformed role that opened the way to the discovery of belief, toward the self-consciousness that awakened people to their freedom to choose, and their responsibilities for choice. The history of ancient Hebrew prophecy is a saga of this unfolding self. The seers, adept at interpreting signs and omens, sometimes drew on their own dreams and visions of ghosts and spirits for sights of the future. The seer could see things on earth that others could not see. But the prophet carried messages from another world. It is not surprising, then, that this “Man of the Spirit” heard his message in ecstasy and so seemed “touched” with madness. His ecstasy was commonly a group phenomenon, sometimes expressed in song.
This view of the prophet as messenger of God is distinctively biblical. With it came distrust of the techniques and tricks of the seer—the ways of the pagan Canaanite.
When you come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you, don’t follow the disgusting practices of the nations that are there. Don’t sacrifice your children in the fires on your altars; and don’t let your people practice divination or look for omens or use spells or charms, and don’t let them consult the spirits of the dead. . . . In the land you are about to occupy, people follow the advice of those who practice divination and look for omens, but the Lord your God does not allow you to do this. Instead, he will send you a prophet like me [Moses] from among your own people, and you are to obey him. (Deuteronomy 18:9-22)
When the founding prophet, Moses, spoke to the Pharaoh he spoke for God: “Thus said Yahweh.” And it was through the prophets that God governed His people. What proved crucial for the future of belief in the West was the Hebraic ideology that came with the Mosaic religion.
The single all-powerful, all-knowing, benevolent God would impose on mankind the obligation of belief—and eventually of choice. This “ethical monotheism” would create its own conundrums.
When the prophet brought no mere blueprint of the future but the commandments of God, he offered a new test of the believer, the Test of Obedience. Moses, who had seen God face-to-face, brought the Ten Commandments direct from God on Sinai. The first five commandments—prohibiting the worship of alien gods, forbidding idolatry and blasphemy, commanding observance of the Sabbath and honor to parents—affirmed the traditions of their society. But the remaining five commandments, all cast in the negative—prohibiting murder, adultery, theft, false testifying, and the coveting of neighbors’ goods—emphasize the freedom of the hearer to choose a way of right belief and so avoid sin. The Ten Commandments thus made obedience the mark of the believer. This idea would become, millennia later, the very heart of Islam (from Arabic, for “resignation,” surrendering to God’s will).
But another distinctive element of the Mosaic religion would open the gateways of belief. The intimate God of Moses had mysteriously shared powers with his creatures. He even treated his people as his equals by covenanting with them. The supreme paradox was that this all-powerful Creator-God sought a voluntary relation with his creatures. And the relation between God and his chosen people, the Children of Israel, was to be freely chosen on both sides. “If you listen to these commands and obey them faithfully, then the Lord your God will continue to keep his covenant with you and will show you his constant love, as he promised your ancestors.” This peculiar covenant relationship between God and his creatures proclaimed God’s preference for a freely given obedience. This signaled the divine intention that man’s life should be ruled by his choices and was the historic Hebrew affirmation of free will. As the ancient Hebrews were His chosen people, so He was their chosen God.
About the eighth century B.C. the oracles of the Hebrew prophets were written down by the prophets or their scribes. Then the prophets assumed a role beyond the community where they lived to whom God had first addressed His message. The prophet’s oracles now addressed all who would know his words—even far beyond his own time and place. So the utterances of prophets became an enduring prophetic literature. And the words of the prophets became a body of divine teachings valid for people everywhere. Thus writing expanded tribal revelations into a world religion. Such a transformation had occurred before when the utterances of Zarathustra (late second millennium B.C.) became the foundations of Zoroastrianism. It would occur later, too, with the recording of the words of Jesus, and then with the utterances of Mohammed in the seventh century.
2
A Covenanting God: Isaiah’s Test of Faith
The prophetic movement that set Western thought on the path of belief and of choice began around 750 B.C. and would last for about five hundred years. It brought no mere commandments but a call to faith. And the literature of prophecy, collected at various times, would give substance to the religion of Israel. The Hebrew prophets were quite different from the ear
lier cult prophets who had lived near the temples and joined in the rites with the priests—or the court prophets at the royal sanctuaries who predicted the desired victory for the king. Those “professionals” had included many who would be stigmatized as false prophets.
The great Hebrew prophets who opened paths to belief were a varied breed. They could be described as amateurs. For most were not priests. While their utterances had no authentic seal of a sacred profession, each had been called in his own way, and so had his own “vocation,” a personal invitation to speak for God. Each directed the voice of God toward the peculiar ills of his time and place. All reminded the people of Israel of how they were failing to live up to their covenant with their chosen God.
The words of the first of this line of classical Hebrew prophets to be preserved in writing were no longer directed only to the king. They already aimed at a wider audience. Amos was an orator directly addressing a whole people. “I am not the kind of prophet who prophesies for pay,” Amos explained, “I am a herdsman, and I take care of fig trees. But the Lord took me from my work as a shepherd and ordered me to come and prophesy to his people Israel” (Amos 7:14-15). He preached in a time of prosperity, when the wealthy lived in luxury and the poor were oppressed and overtaxed. Religion, he complained, had become mere ritual. He spoke for social justice and the simple faith of Yahweh. In the Book of Amos we hear God’s terrifying judgment on Israel, and foresee its destruction by fire and famine if its people do not repent.
“There will be wailing and cries of sorrow in the city streets. Even farmers will be called to mourn the dead along with those who are paid to mourn. There will be wailing in all the vineyards. All this will take place because I am coming to punish you.” The Lord has spoken. . . . For you it will be a day of darkness and not of light. It will be like a man who runs from a lion and meets a bear! Or like a man who comes home and puts his hand on the wall—only to be bitten by a snake! (Amos 5:16-19)
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