In our chaotic time, it is more urgent than ever to have firmly grounded hope. Our own conviction enlivens and empowers our words. “Words spoken from the heart enter the heart,” goes an old Jewish proverb. People hear the difference between an obfuscating word salad and words that speak truth from the depths of one’s being. Such words are heard. Even an assassin’s bullet cannot hold back the light of a meaningful word, which lives on beyond our own mortality.
In the wake of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, the center of this scholarship switched to the Protestant world.
The source of our convictions is our religious thought, whether traditional or original. Religion is that which ties us to that which is both deepest and most high. I want here to trace a brief history of how religious thought figured in the development of classically liberal societies. It does so both directly, through political thinkers mining the religious tradition for its insight, and culturally penetrating and preparing the minds and hearts of good citizens.
A central concern of these thinkers was what underlay all the varieties of thought and religion. As their thought took hold, political thinkers applied that to politics: what would God’s constitution look like. Together, they set the ground for constitutional nations in thought that goes all the way to the deepest of all things, the One whose living example gives us the ability to forge a oneness in our own lives, in our persons and in our societies.
In the miraculous cultural flowering of the Italian Renaissance, religion, arts, and culture spurred each other on. The work of the great artistic masters encompassed both religious and worldly themes, with no rift between them. Michelangelo, Leonardo, and others found beauty and inspiration from wherever it came.
The foundations of Renaissance broadmindedness had been seeded in the Middle Ages. Great rationalist religious philosophers such as Maimonides, Aquinas, and Ibn Rushd carried on a lofty search for truth that was both loyal to each’s faith community and yet crossed faith community borders. “Accept the truth wherever it is to be found,” wrote Maimonides in the 12th century — a motto for the few philosophers of the age, but a seed that was planted deeply in the soil of Western culture.
In the rich loam of Renaissance Italy, this broadmindedness sprouted luxuriously. The young aristocrat and philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola set his sights on realizing a harmony of mind that could bring all thinking and religion together. In the words of Brian Copenhaver:
He started with harmony (concordia) that he saw beneath the surface of conflict between Platonists and Aristotelians. His peacemaking soon became global, aiming for a single symphony of ideas that would harmonize all schools of thought, past and present.
Crucial in this process was his embrace of Kabbala, the mystical Jewish tradition that had become public in the Middle Ages. He believed that in Kabbala, the ancient rift between Judaism and Christianity was overcome. He was filled with hope that, in its light, all religions and viewpoints could come to a unity that was already implicit in its teachings. Thus, oneness did not need to be imposed by external force, but it would arise naturally from the inner light of expanding human consciousness.
Pico studied with two accomplished Kabbalistic rabbis, Eliyahu del Medigo and Yaakov Alemanno, and pioneered a movement of Christian Kabbala that would percolate though the learned circles of Europe in the ensuing centuries as the West moved into modernity.
In a speech Pico prepared for a great conference of scholars he had hoped to convene, Pico distilled the Kabbalistic theme of the immanence of God within His creation and especially within the human being, created in the divine image:
Upon man, at the moment of his creation, God bestowed seeds pregnant with all possibilities, the germs of every form of life. Whichever of these a man shall cultivate, the same will mature and bear fruit in him. If vegetative, he will become plant-like; if sensual, he will become brutish; if rational, he will reveal himself a heavenly being; if intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God. And if, dissatisfied with the lot of all creatures, he should recollect himself into the center of his own unity, he will there, become one spirit with God, in the solitary darkness of the Father Who is set above all things, himself transcend all creatures.
Here the remoteness of divinity is counterbalanced by its dynamic living presence within the human being. The relation with God is imagined, as in the ancient rabbinic midrash, as a marriage, in which the human develops the divine seed into life. That life is each person’s own life, conceived in partnership with God, molded together by each person’s cultivation of self.
This is theology free from being a support for serfdom, demanding blind obedience to an inscrutable and endlessly powerful authority, both above and below. It is a religious humanism that gives rise to a concept of human freedom that is nested within God’s loving involvement with the world He made and the humanity He empowered as His stewards.
Pico’s thought had lasting repercussions. A German scholar, Johan Reuchlin, met Pico briefly, but was profoundly influenced by him. Reuchlin wrote a work of Christian Kabbala and he spread the study of Hebrew in European universities. He also engaged in politics infused with this broadmindedness. He took a public stance against the worst of medieval religiosity, pleading before the Holy Roman Emperor to halt a threatened confiscation and burning of the Talmud across central Europe. His example, in this activism as well as in his scholarship, was a giant step in the development of a culture of respect of religious difference, and ultimately to the cementing of that as the cornerstone of Western free societies.
These men opened the door to Hebrew scholarship in the Christian world, and many more followed. In the wake of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, the center of this scholarship switched to the Protestant world. Some, like England’s Henry More or Leibniz, were interested primarily in the theological and philosophical aspects of the scholarship, like Pico. Others, like Petrus Cunaeus, Hugo Grotius, and John Selden, concentrated on the legal aspects of the rabbinic tradition and applying the lessons gleaned there to politics.
This bifurcation between law and philosophy is a matter of calling and temperament. Even in the legal stream of this scholarship, this grand vision is present, though here it is applied to the very practical affairs of international and national law. In all of them, even Selden’s stout defense of the particularism of national laws, there is a broad view that reaches back to Pico and the sources that inspired him, the inclusive view of the Kabbalah that saw the world’s dynamism as located within God and within each human being. The result of that in law is that liberty is embedded within it, as each person is in a direct relation to the Source of the law’s authority.
In a recent book by Eli Rubin, Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity, we see the enduring relevance of this tradition in our time. In particular, his portrait of a modern inheritor of the Kabbalistic tradition drives this home. Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson was the child of a Kabbalist and community leader in Russia. Steeped in that tradition, he also studied physics under the pioneering quantum physicist Ernst Schrodinger in Berlin, before becoming an immensely influential religious leader.
He had a long correspondence with Ronald Reagan, in which he called the president’s attention to the Noahide laws that were so central to the thought of Grotius and Selden. He was honored in acts of Congress, and politicians of all stripes consulted him. Rubin shows, both in his case and in the case of others in modern times, how Kabbalistic teachings offer a profoundly apt response to the shattered, ruptured mindset of a our world that imagines itself beyond the need for religion.
The religion we need does not require us first to adopt our own most personal convictions to fit another’s forceful demands for conformity. Rather, as did our Founders, it respects the intimate relation between each person and that person’s Creator, on the intimate terms known and verified in the depths of each person’s soul. Each is free to speak from that genuine commitment, and when we are free to speak, we are free to learn and make the changes we realize are necessary.
Seeing the actual tracks through history of such an awareness shows that we have a living hope today. In our faith communities, we must seek out the practical answers that can and must bring ourselves together in a world in which love triumphs over hate. It is a practical matter. History proves its benefit.
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