The Honest Fool

For the greater part of the twentieth century, the most learned humanist in Cambridge was a jaunty Litvak with a thick accent named Harry Wolfson. He had learned Gemara in Slobodka, studied philosophy with Santayana, and he wrote lucid, witty all-American prose about the attempt by medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims to reconcile their respective scriptures with Greek philosophy.

He taught generations of Harvard students the history of this “triple philosophy,” which, he held, was inaugurated by one Jew—Philo—and laid to rest by another—Spinoza—some 1,600 years later. But what he taught, above all, was clear, unpretentious thinking.

Toward the end of his career, he walked into the Appleton Chapel of Memorial Church to preach a little sermon on Psalms 14:1, “The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.”

The fool, who in the Scripture lesson this morning is quoted as saying to himself “There is no God” was not a fool in the ordinary sense of the term . . . People, he knew, believed in God; and by God, he knew, they meant a Being above and beyond the world, the Creator and Governor of the world, a God who revealed Himself to men and told them what to do and what not to do . . . And so honestly and bluntly he said to himself and to others, ‘There is no God’ . . . He did not start to quibble about the meaning of God. He did not offer a substitute God.

Wolfson’s main targets were contemporary theologians (including, perhaps, his new Harvard colleague Paul Tillich), whom he called merely “verbal theists.” He wondered “how many of the things offered as God by the lovers of wisdom of today are not again only polite but empty phrases for the downright denial of God by him who is called fool in the Scripture lesson this morning!”

The great literary journalist Harold Stearns, once said that Wolfson taught him “to cast all forms of ‘bluff’ far from me.” This lesson, that neither theology nor scholarship should be a bluff, that one should write and speak clearly about important things and mean it, is still worth taking to heart, even, or especially, for fools like us.