Eric Fromm has an unusual talent for producing
topical books on subjects in which interest in rising. He did this in 1941 with
"Escape From Freedom," just as men began to thirst for discipline; in 1956 he
published "The Art of Loving," which reflected the younger generation's growing
taste for diffuse impersonal love. And now, in “You Shall Be as Gods,” he has
produced a guide for the contemporary yearning for theology without deity.
In this volume Fromm is concerned with the
Hebrew religious discussion of more than a thousand years, represented in the
Old Testament, and the even longer period of interpretations of this Testament
to be found in the Hebrew “Oral Tradition.”
The gist of that discussion, he feels, is that
man is compelled to be free, and thus personally responsible, in time, and that
the only satisfactory goal of that freedom is that he become increasingly
Godlike by developing his capacities for love and reason (the chief qualities of
God). This responsibility can be assumed by man only if he frees himself from
all distractions (even from God) to devote himself fully to the tasks of being
Godlike.
According to Fromm, the main religious theme of
the Old Testament is the war against idolatry, including the idolatry of God. An
idol is fixed, static, dead, a closed system, while God, and man striving to be
like God, must be a dynamic, open, system: “The contradiction between idolatry
and the recognition of God is, in the last analysis, that between the love of
death and the love of life.”
So far in man’s history, both in the narration
of the Old Testament and since, man has been distracted from his true destiny by
setting up, as idols, such false goals as the tribe, the family, the state,
nature, honor, power, flag, property, sex, the leader, production or
consumption, and artifacts made by man himself. But his true destiny should be
to develop the human qualities he shares with God: reason and love.
Total Responsibility
According to Fromm, Hebrew theology came to
feel that this goal could he achieved only if man was forced to stand on his own
feet, in total personal responsibility, without God, a process toward which the
prophets and the Testament moved by making the deity transcendental, and thus
outside of nature, and by man's expulsion from Eden, which pushed him, on his
own, into the flow of time in nature.
This book deserves to be read, especially by
those who have been struggling with the evasive ambiguities of Teilhard de
Chardin, with the rootless optimism of "The Secular City," and with the
confusions of "God Is Dead" and "Honest to God." Now, as we are becoming
disillusioned with the attractions of the drive for power and the mad rush for
material wealth, it becomes possible, to turn to the fundamental questions from
which we were distracted, in recent centuries, by the struggle for power and for
affluence.
The discussion has already begun and is now
intruding into the struggle in Viet Nam and the war on poverty. Much of it is
childishly confused, ambiguous, and misguided, chiefly because those who lead
the discussions, even the most pontifical professors and most tedious
theologians, act as if these questions had never been discussed before, as if
they had not been, for many centuries, the core of two traditions (the Hebrew
and the Western) which make up our past.
As Ritualism
Religion has come to seem irrelevant and
without meaning for ordinary men because these past discussions (over the long
centuries 300-1400) were forgotten, and religion was allowed to lapse into
ritualism and clericalism, the very things against which the prophets, including
Christ, were struggling. As a result, today's seekers, by rejecting the
ritualism and clericalism of the past few centuries as well as the centuries of
discussion, both Hebrew and Christian, which occurred earlier, are trying to
talk about these big problems by starting from scratch, without experience and
without a vocabulary, quite unaware that the great dialogues of Hebrew learning
and the Western tradition had, over thousands of years, marked out the problems,
set up a vocabulary, and reached tentative answers to many questions.
Today's seekers often do not realize this and
naturally do not see that they can move toward their goals only by resuming the
great dialogue of the Western tradition, by repairing the breaks which it
suffered, both in the deplorable split of the Protestant Reformation (which
crippled the tradition from both sides) and from the almost fatal gap in the
dialogue caused by the pursuit of secular, and materialist goals over the last
three centuries.
Behavior vs. Knowledge
Fromm's book is a contribution to the vital
need to splice backward onto the Old Testament tradition, without falling prey
to the present fad for Germanic theological gobbledygook. It is marred by minor
blemishes, such as its author's insistence on a non-theistic approach to
theology, his preference for giving priority to behavior over knowledge of God,
and his occasional lapse into unhelpful Freudian vocabulary, but these are not
major faults and may be justified. Fromm would seem to agree with Bishop
Robinson in "Honest to God": "I can understand those who urge that we give up
using the word 'God' for a generation, so impregnated has it become with a way
of thinking we may have to discard if the Gospel is to signify anything."
Fromm has done so well what he set out to do
that it would be unfair to criticize him for failure to do more. He is concerned
with the Judeo-Old Testament root of our tradition and can hardly be condemned
for his failure to point out its relationship to that other major source: the
New Testament-Greek-medieval scholastic side. It should, however, be pointed out
that Fromm's excellent volume is concerned with only one side of the story on a
rather elementary level, and that today's seekers, the lost sheep and confused
shepherds, will get on the road they are seeking only by grafting to both roots
to get back to the greatest of human tasks, the resumption of the development of
the real traditions of Western civilization.
-- CARROLL QUIGLEY
Scan of original
review
