Roger Arpajou /Sony Picture Classics Owen Wilson plays Gil, a Hollywood screenwriter on vacation in Paris who wishes he could escape back to the 1920s. David Edelstein says his performance is one of the finest by a lead in a Woody Allen film — and rivals many of Allen’s performances, too.

Midnight in Paris – The Golden Age – greek and italian subs

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Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (by Vincent Menjou Cortes)

Edgar Degas

Paul Gauguin

Chapter 7

THE MAN WITHOUT THE BIBLE

In three different places Paul speaks solely to men without the Bible. The first is in Lystra (Acts 14:15-17) where the message is fragmentary because it was interrupted. The second is on Mars Hill (Acts 17:16-32), where he has a longer speech but one that was also broken off. Third is Romans 1:18-2:16, where he can develop his argument at ease. We can see here what he was really saying in all these places, for the other two conform to this early section in Romans….

(Lystra area, Turkey. Paul visited on his First and Second Missionary Journeys)

But the Bible is clear: there is a moral law of the universe. And that basic law is the character of God Himself. There is no law behind God that binds God. Rather God Himself is the law because He is not a contentless God but a God with a character. His character is the law of the universe. When He reveals this character to us in verbalized, propositional form, we have the commands of God for men. Thus there are absolutes and categories; the law which God has revealed and which is based upon His character is final. This is the biblical position.

Therefore, when men break these commands, they are guilty, guilty in the same way as a man is guilty when he breaks the law of the state. When a man sins, he sins against the character of God, and he has moral guilt in the presence of the Great Judge. I know very well that people no longer talk very much in these terms. But it is to our loss. You may wonder if one can say such things to the far-out twentieth-century people with whom I come into contact. I would tell you with all my heart that I could not talk with them if I did not say these things. For in contrast to left-wing or right-wing totalitarianism with its changing arbitrary absolutes and in contrast to modern man’s relativistic chaos, the Bible’s teaching alone gives moral answers to men.

(page 268)

We are told in this eighteenth verse that the man without the Bible holds the truth in unrighteousness. Or if you choose, you can say, he ‘hinders’ or ‘suppresses’ the truth. I will deal later with the difference between ?hold’ and ‘hinder’. For the moment I will use the word ‘suppress’, which is used in most modern translations.

What truth then does the man without the Bible suppress? Formerly we talked about apostasy in a generation which knew the gospel and turned away from it. The Jews of Jeremiah’s day suppressed the truth of the Bible which they had. But what truth does man suppress if he does not have the Bible? We read in verses 19 and 20, ‘Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath manifested it unto them. For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived by the things that are made.’

Paul divides the truth which they suppress into two parts. It is interesting that it is the same two things that Carl Gustav Jung  says cut across man’s will: first of all, the external world; and secondly, those things that well up from inside himself. Jung, though he has no real solution, exactly identifies the two basic things that confront man – man himself, and the external universe. And Paul said long ago, these are the two truths which man, even the man without the Bible, suppresses. As we have seen, Paul preached in other places to the Gentiles without Jews present, in Lystra and on Mars Hill. There too he used exactly the same approach to the man without the Bible.

(Mars Hill in Athens, Greece pictured below)

(Carl Gustav Jung  below)

We should look in more detail at the truth about man which those without the Bible suppress. The list is fairly long, for man is distinguished from both animals and machines on the basis of his moral motions, his need for love, his fear of non-being and his longings for beauty and for meaning. Only the biblical system has a way of explaining these factors which make man unique.

In Romans 2:15 Paul put special emphasis upon the moral nature of man: ‘Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness, and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing.’

(page 269)

God through Paul is saying here exactly what I feel we should say to modern man. Despite what a man may say in theory, he cannot escape being a moral creature. The man who says morals do not exist is not amoral in the sense that he has no moral motions. Men may have different mores, but one never finds men without a moral nature.
Take a girl from the streets of London, for example. She may seem absolutely amoral. But if you get her alone and talk to her, you find that she does have her own moral standards. They may be different; they may be very poor. But she is not just a machine. Modern man, as I have said, sees himself in the deterministic situation where morals indeed have no meaning, but he cannot live this way.

(Francis Schaeffer pictured below)

We have a startling illustration of this in the Marquis de Sade, who was not only a pornographer, but a real philosopher. Those who are materialists have something to wrestle with in the Marquis de Sade’s formulation, something that no determinist has ever been able to answer. The Marquis de Sade says that since everything is chemically determined, then whatever is, is right. Think about that for six months. The simple fact is that, if you are a determinist, there is no way around that conclusion. De Sade is right. And sadism is then the perfectly logical result.
Obviously nature made man stronger than the woman: therefore, a man has the right to do anything he wants to a woman. That was de Sade’s particular form of sadism. Nobody who holds any concept of determinism, either chemical or psychological, can explain why the Marquis de Sade is wrong. Determinism leads in the direction of cruelty and inhumanity, whether it takes the specific form of de Sade’s sadism or not.

But even the Marquis de Sade, who indeed would have claimed that all men were merely determined, could not live this way. If you read carefully from his words and his history, you find that at the end of his life he was in an asylum for the insane, at Charenton. What he was doing hardly seems possible. He was spending his time grumbling about the way he was being treated by the jailors, and he was reading the letters of his wife with meticulous care, having worked out some sort of system whereby he thought he could figure out from the number of letters in the lines the day he was going to get out. Figure it out for yourself.
The simple fact is that men, even a Marquis de Sade, may say there is no such thing as morality, and that all is a fixed system, but in their own actions, in their own writing, they demonstrate what they deny.

(Geoffrey Rush plays the Marquis de Sade and Kate Winslet as Madeleine in the film ‘Quills’. Source: AP)

(page 270)

I have always enjoyed the thought of Khrushchev sitting at the United Nations, pounding on the table with his shoe and shouting, ‘It’s wrong. It’s wrong.’ Isn’t that an interesting thing for a materialist to say? He did not mean that something was merely counter to the best interests of the Soviet Union. He was saying something was wrong.

Moral motions distinguish man from non-man, but so does the need for love. Man feels the necessity of a love that means more than a sexual relationship. Many of the same people who say that love is only sexual go through marriage after marriage, hoping to find something more than physical satisfaction. Even when they say love is only sexual, they are looking for something to make ?love’ mean what the heart of man longs to have it mean. They simply cannot live consistently with their own view.

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For a few men the need for beauty is the point at which the ‘mannishness’ of man most clearly shows through, even though on the basis of their own concept of man as a chance configuration of atoms in an impersonal universe, the very meaning of the word ‘beauty’ is open to question.

All men, however, have a deep longing for significance, a longing for meaning. I was struck just recently by the opening to Will and Ariel Durant’sThe Lessons of History. In the first paragraph they meditate on the cosmic dimensions of the universe, on the fact that the planets will remain not only when individual men are gone but even after the whole race of man is gone. They were impressed with man’s transience much as Proust was when he said that the dust of death is on everything human. But as to man’s significance all the Durants can point to is a kind of dignity that man has because he can observe the planets and they cannot observe him. It is quite clear: no man – no matter what his philosophy is, no matter what his era or his age – is able to escape the longing to be more than merely a stream of consciousness or a chance configuration of atoms now observing itself by chance.

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (/pruːst/;^[1] French: [maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist.

In an extreme form the longing for significance expresses itself most clearly in the fear of non-being. It has been obvious for centuries that men fear death, but depth psychologists tell us that such a fear, while not found in animals, is for man a basic psychosis: no man, regardless of his theoretical system, is content to look at himself as a finally meaningless machine which can and will be discarded totally and for ever. Even those who seek death and cry for the fulfillment of the death-wish still have a fear of non-being somewhere inside them. I am struck that when you talk to men contemplating suicide, somewhere inside they see themselves as a continuing spectator.

(page 271)

If you go back in art as far as you can go, you find that wherever man is, his essential mannishness is there too. Recently archaeologists unearthed a man that they claim lived something like 30 thousand years ago. They found him buried in a grave of flower petals. Now that’s intriguing. You do not find animals burying their dead in flower petals. Or, examine the cave paintings – the largest early work of art which gives us extended content. (I would accept the date of about 20,000 BC for these.) The paintings reveal that those cave dwellers had the same human longings we have. Right there in the midst of the painting are indications that a man is crying out, ‘I know within myself that I am more than the dust that surrounds me.’ As a matter of fact, there is a theory that explains the cave paintings in southern France and northern Spain as a symbol system speaking out the longings of man. Although it is open to discussion, I think it is probably right, and even if that theory proves not to be correct, still they do show man considering himself as uniquely distinguished from that which is non-man.

We may also mention the testimony of the scholar Levi-Strauss. Though his theories are highly controversial, Levi-Strauss is one of the most important anthropologists in the world today. This French scientist has put forward a notion that has shaken the world of anthropology. No matter where you go, he says, into the past, into the present, to primitive peoples or cultured societies, you find that all men think in the same fashion. Man’s thinking has not basically changed along the way. Thus, although primitive tribes may not make high-level, analysed antitheses, there is in tribal thinking a clear antithesis between ‘tribe’ and ‘non-tribe’, ‘hot’ and ‘cold’, and so forth. The mannishness of man is evident as far back as anybody has been able penetrate.

Claude Lévi-Strauss,  (born Nov. 28, 1908, Brussels, Belg.—died Oct. 30, 2009, Paris, France),

 

Michael Polanyi’s arguments concerning the DNA template show much the same thing. Without going into details let me say simply that Polanyi specifically rejects the chemical determinism of Francis Crick. The chemical and physical properties of the DNA template do not give an explanation of what man is merely on the basis of those chemical and physical properties.

Michael Polanyi below

James Watson and Francis Crick (right), co-originators of the double-helix model, with Maclyn McCarty (left).

So Levi-Strauss says to look at the thinking of man; wherever you go into the past, into the present, man is man. Polanyi says the DNA template alone does not explain those peculiar things which man is. Mortimer Adler also testifies to the problem of man’s uniqueness in “The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes”. He does not have an answer, but he says there is something different in man and we had better identify it or we will start to treat people as non-human and even more tragedy will result. No matter what his theoretical system is, man knows within himself that he cannot be equated with non-man.

Mortimer Jerome Adler (December 28, 1902 – June 28, 2001)

(page 272)

What Paul says in Romans is as up-to-date as the present ticking of the clock – men, even men without the Bible, suppress the truth of what they themselves are. Primitive man, cultured man, ancient man, modern man, Eastern man, Western man: all have a testimony that says that man is more than their own theories explain.

(Jean-Paul Sartre pictured below)

Paul then turns to the second area in which men suppress the truth. In Romans 1:20 he says, ‘For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived by the things that are made.’ So the second testimony man suppresses is the truth of the external world. Jean-Paul Sartre has said that the basic philosophical question of all questions is this: Why is it that something is there rather than nothing? He is correct. The great mystery to the materialist is that there is anything there at all.

EINSTEIN AND OPPENHEIMER BELOW (IMAGE: ALFRED EISENSTAEDT, LIFE MAGAZINE)

However, it is not only that something chaotic is there but that something orderly is there. Einstein understood this very well at the end of his life. According to his friend Oppenheimer and what we know from his own writing, Einstein at the end of his life became a modern mystic. He did not have the answer, he did not return to the Judeo-Christian position or the Bible, but he understood that there had to be a bigger answer because he saw in the universe an order that is indisputable. Einstein worded it beautifully when he said the world is like a well-constructed crossword puzzle; you can suggest any number of words, but only one will fit all the facts. And so Sartre says, ‘There’s something there,’ and Einstein adds, ‘Yes. Look at the marvel of its form.’ Let us put it another way: there is a distinction between science and science-fiction. In science-fiction you may imagine any kind of universe, but in science you must deal with the universe that is there.

For several years Murray Eden at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been using high-speed computers to calculate the possibility of whether on the basis of chance there could be so much complexity in the universe within any acceptable amount of time. His conclusion is that the possibility is zero.
We find the same thing in Charles Darwin himself in his autobiography and his letters. It is amazing that this old man toward the very end of his life keeps saying, ‘I cannot believe with my mind that all this was produced by chance.’ Not his emotions, but his mind. And he has to excuse the testimony of his intelligence by saying that his mind has just come by evolution from a monkey mind, and who can trust that? But, of course, there is a trick in this. If he could not trust his mind on such a crucial point, how could he trust it to formulate the evolutionary hypothesis itself? ( end of page 272)

(page 275)

…Romans 1:28: ‘And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over [or God gave them up] to a mind void of judgment.’ The Authorized Version ‘a reprobate mind’ misses the point. It is a mind void of judgment, a phrase referring back to verses 21 and 22, ‘they became vain in their reasoning’, religiously but also intellectually foolish. These people do not understand what the universe is, and they do not understand who they themselves are. That sounds very modern indeed.

(Painting of Paul Gauguin below)

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Paul Gauguin, the French painter, brilliant as he was, provides an excellent example. Following Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea that man is (or ought to be) autonomous, completely free, he said that what troubled him was that 2 and 2 always equaled 4. He wanted to be so free that on a Tuesday morning at eight o’clock he could say 2+2=4.5.
What Paul is stressing here is that when you turn away from God and follow other presuppositions, the more consistent you are to your presuppositions, the further you get away from reality itself. So you see Gauguin trying to paint an autonomous freedom, a primitive simplicity, and, as it were, stamping his feet and saying, ‘If my system is right, somehow or other 2+2 should not always equal 4.’

(PAINTING SCHAEFFER IS REFERRING TO ABOVE IS Paul Gauguin, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?, 1897-98, oil on canvas, 139.1 x 374.6 cm [Museum of Fine Arts, Boston] )

Let us summarize briefly the course of the argument in this chapter. We began by noticing that Paul speaks in a special way to the man without the Bible, for he has not suppressed the special revelation, that is, the revelation in the Bible, but the general revelation given by the mannishness of man and by the external world. It is then plain that the man without the Bible holds the truth in unrighteousness, he holds some of the truth about himself and the universe, but he does not follow it to its reasonable conclusions. Thereafter, a breakdown in morality occurs. God says to man in this position: You are under my judgment. And so the questions arise, how is man without the Bible going to be judged? Is this just?

 

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