Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS I05 1120a): these and much else form models of the meticulousness and also the daring with which such discussions should be conducted. THOMAS G. ROSENMEYER University of Washington Religious Philosophy, A Group ol Essays.By Harry Austryn Wolfson. (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1961. Pp. xii + 278. $6.00.) For those who have never dared to take the plunge into one of Professor Wolfson's massive studies--the two-volume sets on Philo and Spinoza, for instance, or the first part of The Philosophy of the Church Fathers--these ten essays offer a series of brief but enlightening introductory paddles. The eleventh piece, a concluding Sermonette, is neither enlightening nor a happy introduction to a rigorous mind. The essays, ranging over a considerable number of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and secular thinkers, are entitled as follows: "The Philonic God of Revelation and His Latter-day Deniers"; "Extradeical and Intradeical Interpretations of Platonic Ideas"; "Immortality and Resurrection in the Philosophy of the Church Fathers"; "Philosophical Implications of the Theology of Cyril of Jerusalem"; "Philosophical Implications of Arianism and Apollinarianism"; "Saint Augustine and the Pelagian Controversy"; "Ibn Khaldun on Attributes and Predestination "; "Causality and Freedom in Descartes, Leibniz, and Hume"; "The Veracity of Scripture from Philo to Spinoza"; "Spinoza and the Religion of the Past." Despite this wide variety of topics, the book is held together, Wolfson assures us, by a "common theme" (p. v). To accept this theme is, in effect, to look at the history of Western religious philosophy from New Testament times to Spinoza's in a very special way. Picking up three histories of philosophy at random, I find that Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy mentions the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (20? mC.--A.D. 54?) on two pages; B. A. G. Fuller's History of Philosophy devotes about three and a half pages to Philo but concludes that "Philo seems to have had no disciples of note and no direct influence, at any rate, upon the century and a half that intervenes between his death and the birth of Plotinus" (p. 305); W. T. Jones in his History of Western Philosophy (Vol. I) rates Philo's worth at just over a page and a caustic footnote. If, however, we look at religious philosophy in Wolfson's way, we see Philo as the root and determining origin of all medieval philosophizing, Jewish, Christian and Muslim ; we further see the medieval philosophy begun by Philo as a homogeneous system of thought, lying between pagan Greek speculations and the secular systems of the seventeenth century. Wolfson writes: 106 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Ostensibly Philo is only the interpreter of the Hebrew Scriptures in terms of Greek philosophy. But actually he is more than that. He is the interpreter of Greek philosophy in terms of certain fundamental teachings of his Hebrew Scripture, whereby he revolutionised philosophy and remade it into what became the common philosophy of the three religions with cognate Scriptures, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (p. v). In all the essays the topics are taken partly as Philonic in origin; it is Wolfson's aim to make the quarrels of medieval and later thinkers more intelligible in the light of their positions' intellectual ancestry. The result of his approach is a series of amazingly dexterous historical investigations; the reader moves with quite unexpected ease through intricate thirty-page discussions, each carrying some hundred or so footnotes of far-flung references to Plato, Aristotle, Scripture, Jewish and Arabic commentators, Patristic hagglers, Spinoza, Hume, Mill, et alii. The burden of erudition is wielded with simplicity and grace. Where there are historical obscurities and misunderstandings to be cleared up, one reads Wolfson with gratitude and enjoyment. Perhaps I can best fulfill my role as reviewer by summarizing part of his sixth and most exciting chapter, that on the controversy of Pelagius and Augustine over human freedom. Here Wolfson sets out to reverse history's verdict: to show Pelagius' account of freedom as keeping to "the original Christian belief"; to show Augustine's views as heretical by the measure of previous Christian tradition. He begins with much-documented observations that Greek pagan philosophy establishes a tension in man between the powers of...