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Tomer Persico, "In God's Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea" (NYU Press, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Tamer Pricko
Hello, everybody.
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Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Interviewer
Today I'm privileged to talk to Tamer Pricko about his In God's Image, which I believe is encyclopedic in its scope. I will make no attempt to cover the whole book in its entirety, but will present a brief synopsis, very simplified synopsis, and then we'll move to questions, because I think it's most important part is actually to have our conversation so very quickly and very briefly. Pasika argues that the notion of being made in God's image originated in Judaism and profoundly reshaped how humans understand themselves and their lives. He makes a radical claim that the idea that all humans are created in God's image was seminal to the creation of the modern West. According to him, many of the West's most cherished secular ideas, and I point here, secular human dignity, personal autonomy, conscience and individual rights actually stem from biblical thought. He demonstrates that this transformation, this transformative idea, began in ancient Israel with the recognition of human beings as reflections of the divine. Anything you want to add before I move on to my questions?
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Tamer Pricko
No, I mean, just thank you for having me on. And I'm really excited to be speaking in the New Books Network. I will say that one thing about what you said. Of course, these are secular ideas, but they weren't always secular ideas. The idea of personal autonomy, rights. What I argue is that they began in the Christian tradition, which picked up the idea of the image of God, of course, from the Bible.
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Interviewer
All right, so let us just go directly to the questions. I am starting here with St. Paul. I'm sorry, with Paul Saul. And you devote quite a significant part of your work to him. And you argue that Paul transformed Jewish tradition from a focus on the physical body to the spiritual soul. How did this transformation make the individual believer less constrained by the community and enable the pursuit of personal meaning and authority? What was the most significant outcome of this particular shift?
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Tamer Pricko
Yeah, so, I mean, first to say I devote a significant part to Paul, to Paul the Apostle, because he's simply very important. I think he's one of the most important people to ever live. He basically laid the foundations for Christendom, for Christianity as we know it today, and thus for much of the Western world. And what Paul did, we need to remind ourselves what his mission was. Of course, Paul was born Jewish, considered himself Jewish, by the way, till the day he died. But his mission was to be the apostle to the Gentiles. His mission was to bring Judaism to the whole world. So what he needed to do was to universalize this ancient tribal, ethnic, faith, religion, or however we want to call it. It wasn't really a religion as we think of religion today, of course. And what he did was in order to do that, he individualized Judaism. Okay, so in order to universalize, you individualize. Because when we are all individuals, we are all a part of the whole of humanity. We're not a part of a single nation or an ethnic group or a sect or a cult. We're a part. We're simply individuals in the whole of humanity in. And that's what Paul did. And he did this by locating the image of God within us. Paul really internalized the most significant part of Judaism. What matters is your faith. What matters is the transformation that you go through within. Paul himself went through such a transformation. His conversion on the way to Damascus, right. His being born again until today. This is a foundational part of being a Christian. Something happens to you inside. You embrace Jesus as your personal savior, etc. Now, the minute you. You internalize religion, you make it, as I said, individualized. You make it privatized, right? And you make the. Your special group, the group you relate to universal humanity. Okay, now, how did Paul do this? And I want to read, if it's possible, I want to read one specific verse from the New Testament, from Galateans. Actually, it's a very famous verse, but it really, I mean, people who don't know it should really under. Or even people who know it should really understand how revolutionary this was. And I'm reading from Galatians 3, 26, 29. Paul says, for ye are all children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ, and there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free. There is neither male nor female. For ye are all one in Christ Jesus, and if ye be Christ's, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise. This is the revolution here. Okay? There are no, he says, no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male or female. So there's no ethnic divisions, right? The Greeks are of course, the epitome of gentiles, the best Gentiles, the symbolic Gentiles for the Jews. So there's no ethnic groups, there is no slavery or freemen or free people. There's no class distinction and not even a gender or sexual distinction, no male or female. Imagine saying this in the first century A.D. it's unbelievable. And by doing this again, Paul locates the crooks, the heart of religion within, he peripheralizes, he lays aside, he dilutes in significance all other qualities of one's identity, ethnicity, class, gender, etc. And he makes us all part of a universal Judaism, as it were, which is Christianity. He says, yeah, right, you are all Abraham's seeds, heirs according to the promise. You now are counted as being part of this universalized Jewish people and you carry on the promise of God to Abraham. That's the revolution. And so it's immensely important. And what Paul did with the image of God is of course again, internalize it and make it a part of each and every one of our internal lives. And this already, and I'm sure we will touch upon this later, this already sets the stage for the image of God as being the locus of dimensions and depth that we hold dear and must be protected, meaning our rights.
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Interviewer
It's very interesting when you said that his intention was to make Judaism the whole world, which let us move to Martin Luther, who didn't see eye to eye, probably to Paul, but you can argue, so you suggest that what began with Paul, and there's no question that his actions were revolutionary, came full circle with Luther. According to Luther, access to God was no longer condition or relation to church. Here's another move, but on direct engagement with Holy Scripture and loyalty to one's conscience. So what were implications of this view. And how did it influence the growth of. We touched a little bit on the idea of individualism, but here is coming kind of full circle if we think about how do you think this is influencing the growth of individualism?
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Tamer Pricko
Yeah. So of course, Luther takes it to the next stage. Right. Because for Paul, of course, everything is centered on the individual and on the individual's inner life. But there's still the Catholic Church, of course, is established. There's hierarchy, there's customs, there's a lot of dogma. Obviously, you have to be part of a very large organization, perhaps today the oldest standing organization of humanity. And so you're still in this community, which lays a lot of obligations on you. And what Luther does is again, take that, this revolutionary individualism, another step. Because Luther says, listen, you don't need, actually the Pope, you don't need the church, you don't need the councils, you don't need the dogma. All you need to do is read the Holy Book itself, and I will translate it for you from Latin to German so you can read it for yourself. And Luther goes through all this process himself, I mean, because his rebellion against the Catholic Church grows in stages. First, he only wants, of course, to reform the Church, not to bury it, but not to, of course, to dissect from it. But what happens is that he is met with resistance from the Church. And slowly but surely, he comes to perceive himself as his own source of authority for interpreting the Holy Scriptures. And it comes to a clash in the diet of Worms. We're talking about 1521 with Luther's famous here I stand. I can do no other sentence that is often quoted, but what Luther really says there is that he is bound by his conscience to the word of God. So the word of God is Scripture, but his authority to interpret Scripture is his conscience. Basically, what Luther does is give each and every person the authority to interpret the Holy Scriptures themselves. And this is so revolutionary, and this has so much ramifications on what happens, on what happens to Christianity, because the minute you open the door, you have thousands upon thousands of Protestant churches. Luther obviously thought that if you read the Holy Scripture with open eyes, with clear reason, you will of course, become a Lutheran. You will think that the Lutheran interpretation of the Holy Scripture is the right interpretation. But obviously that didn't happen. And we immediately have Calvinism and we immediately have other, you know, Anglicanism, et cetera, and we basically have this individualization of Christianity. So instead of having one church in which each of us has an individual relationship with the divine. We have enormous number of churches in which each of us can basically chart out their own path. Right. That's what happens. And so we really today live in a Protestant Christian world because of what Martin Luther did.
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Interviewer
I want to move on to. We talked a little bit already about individualism, but you have here interesting term and I'd like to, for us to think a little bit more about it. When you talk about the fact that in 17th century England this complete possessive individual emerged. And what does this possessive individualism mean and how does it relate to human rights? You also revisit possessive individuals in chapter on conscience. So how does this concept shape the idea of conscience? So let's talk about possessive individualism.
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Tamer Pricko
So we're talking about late 17th century England. I mean, and I just said we live in a Protestant world. Really. Much of the liberal order was, was designed, was thought, was established and developed in England in 17 and 18 and 19th century England. And it's because the British Empire was so vast and was so influential. And it's because the United States of course, is descendant from the same Calvinist, Puritan Englishman that its influence is so, so large on the world today. Now, possessive individualism, it's something that we witnessed the spread of in late 17th century England. And this phrase is a phrase of CB McPherson, a known researcher and an author of a book named Possessive Individualism. And his classic definition denotes the individual as possessive individuals if their self conception of themselves is as owners of their own skills and autonomous and independent beings with no obvious obligations towards society. Right. This is what we mean. I own myself, I can do with myself whatever I want. I am autonomous. My autonomy is important to me and I want to protect it. And I have no obvious obligation. I mean, I can up and go, I can start a new profession if I want. I can go to another country if I want. All sorts of conceptions which were totally ludicrous if you were to propose them to a person 500 years ago and certainly 2,000 years ago. So it's important to understand that possessive individuals understand liberty and to mean freedom from restrictions to mean autonomy. Right. And this is one of the most common interpretations of liberty today in the West. That's how most of us understand freedom. Right. Freedom is let me do whatever I want. Now, of course, it's just one definition of freedom from many others, but this is the understanding of freedom that we have today in modern Western world generally, of course, there are a few others. And it's the understanding of freedom that leads to the liberal order, liberalism is the translation of many possessive individuals that want to establish a political order, right. Protecting their own autonomy and allowing with a minimal government that is restrained in its power to do whatever they want with their lives, to have their own pursuit of happiness. As of course, is said in the Declaration of Independence of the US and let me quote something, a quote from Montesquieu. Montesquieu visits England in 1729 and he writes that the English I'm quoting, had progressed the farthest of all peoples of the world in three important things. In piety, in commerce, commerce and in freedom. Right. And I think Montesquier here lays the finger exactly on what we're talking about. The English were very pious. They were Puritans. Right. And they were very sometimes fanatical about the religion. But also this very fanatical religion led them to a. An understanding of autonomy that was translated into liberal commerce, economics. Right. Adam Smith, etc. Right. Laissez faire, laissez passer, et cetera. Right. Let us do whatever we want and to freedom, meaning political freedom, that each and every subject at that time of the King has certain rights that are protected. The. The very famous rites of the Englishman. Right. This is not yet liberalism, but it's already an understanding of the sacredness of certain dimensions of our lives that the monarchy cannot touch, that we need to be protected. Now, as you asked in the question, this all relates, of course, to the freedom of conscience. The freedom of conscience was one of the most prevalent desires and demands of the Puritans. The Puritans meaning radical Protestants, hot Protestants, we might say, Protestants that are adamant on having their own way of worship. And they were in struggle with the Anglican Church. And, you know, this all relates to the English Civil war in the 17th century, etc. Or Oliver Cromwell, etc. Now, this freedom of conscience for them was supremely important. And this also has to do with the character of Christianity that we were talking about. Christianity as an internal religion. If I can't have autonomy to believe as I want, to worship as I want, my religion is not true. I just can't worship my God as I want. And that the worst possible thing, of course. Right. So we've got all sorts of groups of Puritans that are demanding freedom of conscience, first from the King, then from Oliver Cromwell, then the King again with the Restoration, Charles ii, et cetera. Right. And I can also. I can. Let me quote another. Let me give another quote. I want to quote Richard Overtone, a very famous Puritan leader whose, in his most famous Work an arrow against all Tyrants. This is the title of the book, An Arrow against all tyrants, 1646 states that everyone as he is himself, so he has a self propriety, else he could not be himself. For by natural birth all men are equally and alike, born to like propriety, liberty and freedom. I want us to notice here the connection Overton makes between freedom, liberty and us being ourselves. This is really a beginning of what we called possessive individualism, also in the meaning that we need to be ourselves, we need to be true to our own character, we need to express our uniqueness. And this will have an enormous history later on with Enlightenment ideals and also with romantic ideals of people needing to express their true authenticity, their true characters, or else they will be untrue to themselves. They will be living a counterfeit, a fraudulent life, which we of course, cannot stand for. Right. So all this is encapsulated in this possessive individualism that begins to take on a serious showing in the late 17th century in England, and today, of course, is ubiquitous.
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Interviewer
Yeah. So I want to challenge us a little bit. So there are certain expressions that you made. You said owners of their own skills, no obligations to society and freedom of conscience. Believe I want to do whatever I want to do, being true to ourselves. So what I wanted for us to do, challenge us a little bit and think about how does freedom influences our moral and ethical decision making. When we say the conscience is a little God in us, so when do we can err ourselves into justifying our behavior which feels right to us, but not necessarily is morally and ethically sound?
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Tamer Pricko
Wait, can you repeat that?
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Interviewer
How did the new freedom influence our moral ethical decision? So all those ideas that owners skills and no obligations to society, focus on autonomy, focus on being true ourselves and all those very noble ideas, but how they can influence our ethical decision making. When we are members of society, we are members of community, and we are focusing on this possessive individual, are there any implications that can lead us in the wrong direction?
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Tamer Pricko
So, I mean, first of all, obviously, yes. I mean, there's no development in human history that doesn't have its downsides.
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Interviewer
Exactly.
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Tamer Pricko
But what we see here is a increasing level of individualism that more and more places the center of gravity with the individual and with the individual's internal lives. Really, we are seeing the an internalization of our sources of meaning, authority and identity. So if 500 years ago, 2,000 years ago, my source of meaning, what's the meaning of life? What do I need to do? What is the proper way to live? The source of these. The answers to these questions was outside of me tradition, the priests, of the shamans, of my tribe, whatever the church, my rabbi, holy Scripture, what happens is that I internalize this meaning. And now I myself can think for myself and can decide for myself what is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of my specific life, Right? Maybe I'm a unique snowflake that has its own course in life, that needs to fulfill something that's very special only for me. There's an internalization also of authority. Again, where did I get my directions of how to live, of what's right and wrong, of what's good and bad outside of me, my rabbi, my priest, my church. Now I myself decide again, it's me that decides what should I do, what's good and bad, etc. And finally, even my identity is being internalized. And I understand who I am by turning within, not by being someone's husband, someone's wife, a father, a priest in a church, but by trying to understand from within what's special about me and what my specific course should be in life right now. I want to use this opportunity to reflect back on all that we said until now and to understand this process of internalization and individualization which goes on from era to era, from generation to generation, and increases. In its deepness, in its severity, we might say, is a pattern that we can find simply in the Jewish and Christian tradition. I would say that the history of Christianity can be broadly understood as a history of recurrent attempts, cast in the model of St. Paul and in the model, then of Martin Luther, to promote a more authentic version of Christianity by making it more internal and more private, according to the internal logic of the Pauline revolution, right? Any attempt to be more Christian pulls us into the direction of being more spiritual, right? Which is less fleshly or less bodily, less corporal. That's the basic logic. And that means also rejecting laws, rejecting dogma, rejecting institutions, rejecting formality. We need all the time to be more spontaneous, more authentic, more internal, more expressive. So over the last. The past two millennia, Christians repeatedly denounced the church establishment and the former laws of their own religion and tried to promote a form of religiosity that was more internal, subjective, hostile to the body and the establishment, and therefore considered more pure, higher, and of course, more spiritual. This, I think, is a recurring, again, pattern in Christianity that we must notice. And it brings us in modern times, even to secularization, because it's the same pattern that rejects institutions, rejects dogma in the name of some inner spiritual truth.
- [27:43]
Interviewer
We didn't address ethics, but we can do it later because I want to move on to enlightenment.
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Tamer Pricko
Yeah, of course.
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Interviewer
Because one of the things that you said, enlightenment and its corresponding force, Jewish emancipation, transform Jews into individuals. You already mentioned the change in identity. And you say here for the first time, Jews define themselves as individuals rather than solely as members of people, of idiots, of chain of generations devoted to particular tradition. This transformation regarded Jews made Jews to think about their beliefs, about themselves and about Judaism, to redefine not only religion, but the essence of entity called Judaism. So what you're saying here, a change in their identity and also change of how they understand what Judaism is all about. So can we talk a little bit about what this redefined Judaism looks like? What distinguishes Judaism itself from the essence of the entity called Judaism? And placed in a context of current discussions of Jewish ingenuity and indigenity, Sorry, what does it mean to define Judaism as something more or less than the religion? So what is now Judaism and would it define it?
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Tamer Pricko
So I mean, the question really is, what is now Judaism? And for that to understand that, we need to ask what was Judaism before modernity?
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Interviewer
Yeah, exactly.
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Tamer Pricko
And Judaism before modernity, let me just say in very simple terms, was a minority ethnic group within Europe or within Islamic countries. That's what it was. We look at Judaism today and it's hard for us to understand that Judaism was not as it is today. It was not Modern Judaism. Pre modern Judaism was simply another minority ethnic group that we can see the likes of even today. For example, the Druze in the land of Israel, or the Alawites in Syria, or the Yazidis in Iran, Iraq. Sorry. Or even indigenous peoples of the Americas, the Apache, the Navajo, the Cherokee. These are peoples which are minority in relation to the broader society and they have their own way of worship. That's what the Jews were. That's all the Jews were. Right. Maybe they were more famous. Right, because they had their famous book, of course, you know, the Bible, etc. Now, what happens in modernity is that Jews, with all others become individuals. And because they are in Europe within a context of the developing modern nation state, they are requested also to become citizens. Now, if, and we must understand, of course, that the development of modern nation states was not. They were much less tolerant for minorities than nation states are today, when even today they are not the most tolerant. Of course, Right. So Jews were requested when becoming citizens, to cease being a people. Right. You can't have two peoples in the same state. So I'll give you an example in 1789. This is the national assembly of the French Revolution, right? And Count Clermont Tonnerre gets up and says, and of course, they're debating what to do with this small minority that they have within France, the Jews. And he says, to the Jews as individuals, we give everything. To the Jews as a people, we give nothing. Okay? What he means is Jews are welcome to become equal citizens in France, meaning become Frenchmen, but they are not welcome if they insist on staying a separate people. We can't have a separate people within the Republic of France. Right? Now, what does this mean? What does this do to Judaism? This basically means that Jews that want to accept the deal in which they are given equal rights and citizenship within a new nation state, the French Republic or the British or the USA, etc. What they need to do is that they need to turn their Judaism into a religion, meaning they become Frenchmen of Mosaic faith, or Englishmen or German or Dutch of Mosaic faith. Right? And so you've got Catholic Frenchmen, you've got Protestant Frenchmen, of course, you have also Jewish Frenchmen, but they are all nationally Frenchmen.
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Interviewer
Right.
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Tamer Pricko
This is the basic idea that really changed Judaism in its core and Judaism in modernity becomes something that it was never before. It becomes a religion on one hand. And of course, there were Jews who refused to accept this logic, and they said, actually, Judaism is not a religion, it's actually a nation, and we need a separate nation state. These are, of course, the Zionists. Right. But this also is going to. According to the logic of modernity, which splits religion and state into two different spheres, which of course, are separated. Right. And you can be either one or the other. Yeah. I mean, and you can. You can blend them. You can be parallelly. In parallel, you can be a Frenchman and a Protestant, but the Protestantism doesn't influence your Frenchness and your Frenchness doesn't influence your Protestantism. And they're separated. The same thing had to do. Jews had to do the same thing with their Judaism. So that's. That's, of course, the. The. The most important thing.
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Interviewer
So I don't have this question on my question list, but I'm wondering, will Israelis be Jews of Mosaic faith than Jews? Jews in both cases, is this the only place where Jews can be both people and religion?
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Tamer Pricko
I mean, so in Israel, there's an interesting thing. So, first of all, of course, there's this separation in modernity to religion and state, as some Jews turn their Judaism into the religion. These are the modern Orthodox, These are the Conservative Jews. These are the reformed Jews, these are the reconstructionists, whatever. And some Jews turn their Judaism into their nationality. These are the Zionists in Israel. At first there was an attempt to combine the two. These are religious Zionists, right, They're both orthodox and national. But this is again a sort of a manufactured unification of things that were separated before. It's not a return, it's not a real return to the pre modern condition. But today in Israel, I think you have many Jews in Israel who are in a way, in a way not returning but, but, but, but reconstructing something that, that in modernity was lost, which is a Judaism that is somewhat obvious, somewhat matter of factness, somewhat simply, simply your daily life. Because if everybody speaks Hebrew, if you celebrate the holidays in the public sphere, you know, everything is, you know, Hanukkah, there's the, the whole country is celebrating in a Sabbath, everybody's, I mean, the character of the public sphere is different. There is this Judaism that you don't need any effort to sustain. And in a way it returns to what pre modern Judaism was, which was just a way of life in a minority tribe. As I said.
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Interviewer
Interesting. Yeah, I know I didn't have it on my list. I just thought about it as you were talking. Let's move on. And one of the most important parts of, there is many important parts, but one of the parts that I find really interesting and important is the way you portray treason and as the image of God. And if secularization thrives on reason, if reason already reflects the divine, why do we have atheism then? So the argument presented that reason is continuation of the divine image, a manifestation of God within humanity. Yet the same reason dismantles believe in God. This creates this conceptual tension. If reason is of divine origin, how does it become a tool of divine negation? I don't know if you want to address this question or we can move on to the next one.
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Tamer Pricko
Oh, definitely. I think it's a great question because really we need to understand that for hundreds of years in the Western tradition, and by the way also in Islam, reason was considered of divine origin. It was obvious for people because if God didn't give us the ability to think, where did it come from? How are we better than the animals? Something in us was given by God. This gift of understanding, of reason, of discerning, of analysis, of innovation. All this was given by God. And reason was considered by many, by Monodis, by Thomas Aquinas, as the image of God. The image of God in us is reason. That's why we can think. That's why we have language, because God stamped us with his image, which is again recent. And this was by the way, obvious also to very important philosophers like Rene Descartes and Jean Locke, etc. It was obvious that of course there is a God, and of course God, because there is of God. We can think the way we can think. Because if God didn't give us the ability to think, how is it possible? How did we get this ability? And again, this is long before any explanations about evolution were offered, long before secularization of any kind. And so for a long time, reason is the image of God. And it is because we can think that we are sure that there is a God. Because if there was no God, obviously we would not be able to think. But then begins a very interesting and a very intricate development or process in which reason at first is the proof of God and God is the reason that we are reasonable creatures. But this goes into a. This gets a character of reason, allowing us to think straight and discern between foolishness and cleverness. And this also in the field of religion, and this perhaps even goes back to Luther, because the minute we are able to interpret the Holy Scriptures ourselves, we don't need a church. That's the minute that we also use our own reason and our own tools of discernment to understand perhaps what's real and what's not. Spinoza, already in the 17th century, can say that probably Moses didn't write the whole of the Bible, right? The whole of the Torah. There was another person, or maybe many. So reason becomes a tool in which we can analyze the Holy Scripture. And then in order for us to protect the dignity and the worth, the self worth of our reason and of our image of God, we need to be clear about superstition, about beliefs that are not true. And let me mention a name which I of course go into in depth in the book. Matthew Tyndall, right, An English philosopher of the 18th century, beginning of the 18th century, really. And he's a deist. What is a deist? A deist is one of the leading Deists, one of the major Deist thinkers. A deist is a person who believes in God, but basically thinks that God created the world and then let it loose and is totally passive and does not do anything opposite, except for again, giving us the ability to think straight reason and basically allowing us to discern what is good and bad and wants us to be good.
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Interviewer
Right?
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Tamer Pricko
That's all. There are no miracles, there is no revelation. We don't need a Revelation in order to know that there is a God and what God wants from us, because we know that there is a God, because we are reasonable. And we know that because we are reasonable, what is good and what is bad, right? God wants us to love our neighbor, etc. Tyndale will already say that we need to preserve our dignity, which is our reason, which is our image of God, by rejecting false beliefs. So the belief in miracles, we need to reject the virgin birth, rejection Jesus walked on water, reject the parting of the Red Sea, reject. All these are nice myths, they mean a lot for the history of religion, but they're not true. And it infringes and blemishes our reason and our dignity and our image of God, if we believe in them. But we do believe in God, because, of course, reason instructs us that there is a God because we can think right now. That's a stage on the way already to secularism, because deism is really, you know, it's one step from. From saying, actually there's not even this. This passive, miracleless God, right? There's. There's actually there's nothing. And this step, of course, is taken, and I bring in the book, the example of Paul Henri Thierry Baron d', Holbach, a French intellectual, man of the Enlightenment philosoph, who writes in his book the System of nature, it's 1820 now. He writes that actually deists are too frightened to make that crucial extra step and to understand that really there is no God at all. So for Thierry, for Bau, and there's already no image of God because there's no God, but there is the dignity of man. And in order to preserve our dignity, we need to reject all false beliefs and all superstitions, including the major superstition that there is a God. So reason goes, goes on a course that I mentioned. Three big steps that are on its track, right? First, reason is given by God. It is the image of God, and it allows us to know the world, to know the Holy Scriptures. And of course, it proves that God exists, because look at Rene Descartes, what he does with God in his philosophy. The next step, yes, reason is the image of God, but it also allows us to reject false beliefs which are an affront to our dignity and our image of God. The third and final step is reason rejecting God in the name of human autonomy and dignity. In order to keep our dignity, in order for us to think totally straight and to be brave enough to face the world as totally reasonable creatures, we need to reject the existence of God. And this is Baron d'. Orbach. And you can see this also with Albert camus in the 20th century and even also with Richard Dawkins today, right? People who are saying if you are true to yourself, if you want to think totally straight, if you don't want to fall into illusions and all sorts of self satisfying fictions that will confront you, that comfort you that death is not the final stage or whatever, you also need to reject God and be brave enough to look into the blackness of the abyss of nothingness and say and confirm that yes, there is no actual consolation for life and perhaps not even any meaning to life, but you are at least honest and using your reason in the highest possible sense in rejecting all false beliefs.
- [45:23]
Interviewer
Okay, so we want to move on to ethics again, because I think with rejection is also something else is happening. And you write it here. You write about this buffered, autonomous self. What is really interesting, you say here that God's existence is immoral because it impairs. You kind of already alluded to this because if you're true to yourself, you need to reject God. But here you even say that God's existence is immoral because it impairs morality, it sabotages our capacity for independence and self esteem. So this is very interesting to me because it's also in my view, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but it impacts the community life. So maybe we can talk a little bit about on the meaning of this ethos of atheism that you already alluded in this discussion about how reason leads us to reject God, to be true to ourselves, and then become dispowered individuals, and then we question even God's morality because it impairs our morality.
- [46:28]
Tamer Pricko
So yeah, I just say, I first of all say that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that for people who wanted to reject God or who felt the need to reject God, that's their explanation to themselves, that if they want to preserve their autonomy, they need to reject the big king in the sky. Right? That's what they said to themselves. And this is another path to what we just talked about, another path to secularization and to atheism, which again hinges on the very idea of the image of God. Why? Again, remember what we said all through our talk, that the image of God individualizes, privatizes, internalizes sources of meaning, of authority, of identity, and you become a possessive individual thinking that your capacities are your own and you can do whatever you want with them and your autonomy is not Only something that you inherit and take care, but something that must be protected. Now, if you think that, and if from that, John locke in the 17th century can write that governments should be limited in their power as so not to infringe and not to restrict our autonomy, of course, to some minimal boundaries, of course. So basically lays the foundation for modern liberalism in saying government has limited power in everything that's connected to my rights. It can't infringe on them, it can't run over them, et cetera. And because my autonomy is something sacred, because I am in the image of God. And Locke will say this, right, take this to the next step. And you can understand why for some people, their autonomy is so important that they cannot have it infringed or even theoretically have the potential to be infringed by a enormous infinite king in the sky, right? How can we have. How can we feel totally free if at any moment this infinite power can crush us or can send us to hell? Or how can we even feel totally beings of moral ethical beings if everything we do is judged by this supreme judge and we are getting rewards after death or punishment after death if we do good or evil, right? I want to do good for goodness sake, simply just for being good, not to get a reward after I'm. So I need to reject this whole idea of a being in the sky or whatever right, that can influence what I do, can reward or punish me. This all has to go. And so God's existence becomes a restriction or a is something that hampers my ability to be autonomous and even my ability to be moral instead of the very thing, the very condition that allowed me to be moral and autonomous just a few hundred years ago. Now I need to reject God in order for me to feel totally free and totally ethical, right? And you can even see this already with Kant, Immanuel Kant, right? We're talking Prussia in the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century, right? And you can with Kant saying that morality has nothing to do with God, right? We are moral beings simply by adhering to internal imperatives that we understand ourselves, not because God said something or other. Now, again, this is just one last step before feeling threatened by the very idea that God could potentially reward or punish or restrict us in any way. So for many people, God had to go. And just to say, what I try to do in the book is show what I just said is show that secularism stems also from an ethical standpoint. So it's not. Secularism is not because the scientific revolution suddenly discovered that There was evolution, or we noticed that the Bible is actually many different sources put together. It's not coherent, it has contradictions. Or that we discover that we are actually biological beings and perhaps there's not even any soul whatever. It's not all that. I mean, these things obviously had a lot of influence. But what I try to stress is that at the very depth, secularism and atheism are ethical stances, are ethical positions which people take in order for them to feel that they are truly individuals, truly autonomous and truly ethical. By the way, it's not a position I'm taking myself. I myself am a religious person. But I want to understand the move.
- [52:22]
Interviewer
But let me ask you, there is an assumption then in this view that we always know what is right and wrong.
- [52:28]
Tamer Pricko
That what? That we know.
- [52:30]
Interviewer
Right. There's an assumption. Well, if you decide that you are the one to decide what is good, there's an assumption that we know what is good is wrong. But that's not always true. I mean, my assumption what is good might be completely going against morality in different ways. So maybe I decided killing is completely, perfectly good.
- [52:52]
Tamer Pricko
Of course.
- [52:53]
Interviewer
Right. So that's their problem. I think within some of this buffered individual kind of view that decides that I am the one who. Okay, but we don't need to preach to the choir then. So interesting that you also saying that God actually you said that the concept of being created in God's image sow the seeds of God's own decline. So that's very, very interesting.
- [53:24]
Tamer Pricko
Yeah, but again, I want to stress, I'm not saying that this is an inevitable development from the idea of the image of God. That's what happened in the West. Really nothing that I write in the book is deterministic or inevitable. It's not that if you plant the idea of the image of God somewhere, 3000 years later you will get the liberal order. But developments and right conditions that were in the west led specifically to the development of what we call today the liberal order, the rights discourse, individualism or possessive individualism that we have in the west and also secularism, which for some people was a direct result of the process that we have just gone over.
- [54:10]
Interviewer
Yeah, when I say you argue or you write, I'm not implying that it's your belief. I understand this. So that's the shortcut. So I don't equate the writer to his own belief system. I understand this intellectual history. So I just want to make sure that you. I want to talk a little bit, just briefly, about the fact related to God's own decline in relation to Judaism itself here. So what are the major benefits and drawbacks of viewing God's image essential to Western modernity, both in general and in relation to Judaism in particular? For instance, does it invite beneficial refinement from within Judaism itself, or does it have unintended drawbacks from secular drift?
- [55:04]
Tamer Pricko
Right. I mean, so first of all, first of all, of course I write the book in order for something that is true to be understood. Right. Even before drawbacks or results. But I think we can understand a few things from what we just went over. First of all, I will say that there's a concept that many times is being denigrated and people think it's some sort of manipulation, which is the Judeo Christian tradition or the Jewish Christian tradition? I actually think that such a thing exists. There is a Judeo Christian tradition, which I think my book fleshes out pretty clearly. It's a tradition that has the seminal idea of the creation in the image of God, that emphasizes individualism and emphasizes interiority that has a lot of, makes a lot of significance out of autonomy of the human person. It has a dialogical relationship with the divine and it even has an ethos of rebelliousness towards laws, towards institutions, even towards God. Right. This is all characteristics of a certain line of ideas of a certain historical development, which is the Judeo Christian tradition. So there is such a thing. Right. And if we know there is such a thing, I think it already explains quite a bit about the modern world, about the relationship between Judaism today and Christianity and about why people who want to reject Judaism also reject its connection to Christianity. Right. It also means that people who want to reject Christian morality or liberalism, sorry, people who want to reject liberalism will reject Christian morality or Christianity itself. And we can already see this with Nietzsche. Right. So Nietzsche himself has a lot against Christianity because he is against what he calls slave morality, the morality of the downtrodden, the morality of the victims, the morality of, of the poor and the widowed and the weak. He wants, of course, the morality of the Ubermensch and the superman, et cetera, and that's why he rejects Christianity. And from Nietzsche you can see this line of thinkers in the west that because they are anti liberal, will reject, will reject Christianity. I can give a contemporary example with a French thinker called Helene de Benoit, a French political philosopher, one of the founding members of the New Right in France. And he also, he writes a whole book called On Being a Pagan. That's the name of the book. Why? Because he rejects Christianity as a Method of rejecting liberalism. Right. So again, if we understand this tradition of ideas coming from Judaism through Christianity and eventually ending up as the liberal order, you can understand why if you want to be anti liberal, you need to reject Christianity and indeed you need to reject Judaism. And some of today's antisemitism is also explained that way.
- [58:50]
Interviewer
Right, interesting. Yeah. Well, so we nearing the end, so I want to ask you the question I always ask, and my question is beyond academic circles, who was your intended audience for the book and what did you hope from your readers to gain outward with it?
- [59:19]
Tamer Pricko
Okay, so first, yes, this book is, is made, is, is written. I try to write it in a very friendly and, and under and you know, as, as simple as I could way in order for it not to be only for academics, but for the general educated public. And that's what it's meant for. And really first of all, I want, I'm interested in people understanding and knowing these ideas that we just talked about and really the roots of our own civilization. Right, the roots of Western civilization. This book is also another of a series of books you can say that try to answer the interesting and perhaps scandalous question why the West? Why the west is so successful? Why the west has become hegemonic in the world today. I don't think the west is the best civilization. I don't think it's chosen by God or anything like that. But I do think it's unique in quite a number of ways. And this book gives another prism from which to see this uniqueness. So that's also an answer that that many readers I think will be interested in. But personally also I have to say I wrote this book first in Hebrew. The English is an extended and more elaborated version, but it was first written in Hebrew and I wrote it for people in Israel, Jews like myself, that I wanted to get the message that the liberal order and feminism, humanism, universal humanism and democracy, rights discourse, all these things are not something foreign to Judaism. Because if you follow the news, you must know that in Israel today there are quite a number of people who are religious, Jews, extremists, sometimes fundamentalists that want to reject liberalism. They are also anti liberal that want to reject feminism and universal humanism in the name of Judaism, saying that these ideas are foreign, Western, Christian, etc. And for me, one of the goals of the book is to say no, to say these ideas are as Jewish as the first chapter of Genesis. Right? It's ours and there's no need. Indeed it will be a grave mistake to reject them.
- [62:02]
Interviewer
Interesting. Do you think this book can help also with what's happening right now in terms of antisemitism? Because you alluded slightly to this.
- [62:10]
Tamer Pricko
Oh, yeah, so that's what I said. I mean, if we understand there is a Judeo Christian tradition that it's not just a phrase used in order to, you know, to excuse some, some. Some, you know, deal between Israel and the United States or, you know, this actually is. There is this tradition that has its own characteristics. If we understand this, I think it can allow us to appreciate more not only our own civilization, but the connection between these two ancient traditions.