Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham

Extract

Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham. By Thomas L. Pangle. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 285p. $39.95.

Thomas Pangle's book begins with a flourish: Taking issue with modern rationalists (e.g., Hobbes, Locke) and their claims that Scripture is wholly amenable to and comprehensible by the tools of rational analysis, Pangle argues that “this contention of theirs is in fact a key dimension of a titanic strategy of propaganda, whereby Holy Writ is to be reconceived and in a sense rewritten so as to be subsumed in a vast secular cultural revolution” (p. 6). As opposed to Socratic philosophy, which always recognized and insisted on the knowledge of its own ignorance, such modern rationalists ultimately want “to reduce religious reflection and argument … to the status of a birdlike cacophony of merely private and personal, shallow and shifting, opinions” (p. 11). Furthermore, Pangle insists, any reader of the Platonic corpus will recall that Socrates was prosecuted for impiety, and relied heavily on his daimonin in justifying his public conduct in the Athenian square, thus throwing into doubt all such attempts to subsume the revealed under the rational.