Examining the philosophical works of the great 20th-century sage Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the Catholic thinker Matthew Rose argues that Christians have much to learn from them, especially about how to confront the challenges of modernity. Rose also notes that Soloveitchik’s best-known book, The Lonely Man of Faith—which begins with the distinction between the Adam of Genesis 1 whose task is to “fill the earth and subdue it” and the Adam of Genesis 2 whose task is to “serve and safeguard”—began as a lecture to Catholic seminarians.
Soloveitchik did not accuse modernity of dividing what had once been integrated. He charged it with doing precisely the opposite. He argued, in effect, that modernity’s most powerful ideologies and institutions are trying to unify human nature—not by harmonizing its two discordant aspects, but by abolishing one of them.
In his 1965 lectures at St. John’s Seminary, Soloveitchik spoke out of Jewish loneliness in a Gentile world—a loneliness, he implied, that faithful Christians would soon experience amid the onrushing secular revolution. His reading of Genesis offered subtle advice: relinquish any dreams of building a Christian order that would restore the imagined harmonies of premodern life. Our divided natures, he insisted, and not only our disordered loves, make such a society an illusion. But unlike many Christian thinkers in that disruptive decade, Soloveitchik was no less worried about the demons of secularism, and he warned both Jews and Christians against internalizing the stunted perspective of Adam the First. For the ambition to overcome Adam the Second, and to replace the hope for redemption with the ideal of liberation, masked its own darkness.
More about: Christianity, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Judaism, Secularism
