Challenges to Modernity - M J Akbar

As a Muslim woman, I see the veil as a rejection of progressive values

Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Guardian


 

 ‘In 1899 Qasim Amin warned that unless Muslims embraced modernity and equality, the future would be bleak. We are in that bleakness now.’ Illustration by Noma Bar

It could be a millenarian crisis or a delayed reaction to decades of bad history, but millions of Muslims seem to have turned inwards, hankering for an imagined golden age. They are contemptuous of modernity’s bendable, ductile values. Some are drawn to reactionary dogma, and preachers while a good number have thrown themselves into political Islam to resist and combat western hegemonies – or so the story goes.

As a practising (though flawed) Shia Muslim, I watch the new puritans with apprehension. So too other Muslims worldwide, the silent many, watch and tremble. From the eighth to the early 20th century, Muslims strove for a broad education (as commanded in the Qur’an), questioned doctrines, and were passionate about scientific advancements, political and social ideals and art. Not even humiliating colonial rule deterred them from the march forward. Now the marchers are walking backwards. The hijab, jilbab, burqa and niqab are visible signs of this retreat from progressive values.

This article will divide people. Women I respect and like wear hijabs and jilbabs to articulate their faith and identity. Others do so to follow their dreams, to go into higher education or jobs. And an increasing number are making a political statement. I am not assuming that the coverings all represent simple oppression. What I am saying is that many women who take up the veil, in any of its forms, do so without delving fully into its implications, significance or history. Their choice, even if independently made, may not be fully examined.

Muslim feminists of the past critiqued and repudiated the veil. One of them was a man, Qasim Amin, an Egyptian judge and philosopher, who in 1899 wrote The Liberation of Women.He was the John Stuart Mill of the Arab world. Huda Shaarawi set up the Egyptian women’s union in the early 1920s. One day in 1923, as she disembarked from a train in Cairo, she threw off her veil and claimed her right to be visible. Educated Iranian women started feminist magazines and campaigned against the veil around the same time. These pioneers have been written out of history or are dismissed as western stooges by some contemporary Muslim intellectuals.

After the transformative 60s, Muslim feminists resumed the fight for equality. European rule was over. It was time. The Moroccan academic Fatema Mernissi, Egypt’s Nawal El Saadawi and the Pakistani scholar Riffat Hassan all argued for female emancipation. They rightly saw the veil as a a tool and symbol of oppression and subservience. Mernissi’s Beyond the Veil ( 1975) is a classic text. So too El Saadawi’s The Hidden Face of Eve (1975). But more conservative Islamic tenets have taken over lands, communities, families, heads and hearts.

The promise of this version is a return to certainties and “purity” of belief, a mission backed by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Deobandi revivalists, funded by Arab money, now run more mosques in Britain than any other Muslim subgroup. Women are told not to travel without male relatives, not to work, to be subservient, to veil. This movement began as a reaction against the Indian raj and mutated into a fundamentalist creed. Today their pushback against “cultural imperialism” appeals to many alienated young Muslims. And, in part, it explains the growing popularity of the hijab, jilbab and full veil .

But in the Qur’an, the veil is mostly used metaphorically to describe barriers between good and bad, believers and nonbelievers. In two verses, women are told to lower their gaze, and to cover their private parts and bosoms. Men are also instructed to lower their gaze, and to dress modestly. One verse commands the women in the prophet’s family to fully veil, partly to protect them from enemies and supplicants.

Sahar Amer, associate professor at the University of North Carolina, has studied these sacred injunctions: “[Nowhere] is the hijab used to describe, let alone prescribe, the necessity for Muslim women to wear a headscarf or any other pieces of clothing often seen covering women in Islamic countries today. Even after reading those passages dealing with the female dress code, one continues to wonder what exactly the hijab is: is it a simple scarf? A purdah? A chador? Or something else? Which parts of the body exactly is it supposed to cover? Just the hair? The hair and neck? The arms? Hands? Feet? Face? Eyes?”

Veils, in truth, predate Islam. Zoroastrian and Byzantine upper-class ladies wore them to keep aloof from the hoi polloi. When Islam’s armies first reached Persia, they were shocked at this snobbery; then they adopted the custom they loathed; the control of women was hard-wired into their psyches.

All religions cast women as sinners and temptresses. Conservative Islam has revived the slander for our times. Women have to be sequestered or contained lest they raise male lust and cause public disorder. Some young Muslim women argue that veils liberate them from a modern culture that objectifies and sexualises females. That argument is appealing; but if credible, why would so many hijabis dress in tight jeans and clinging tops, and why would so many Muslim women flock to have liposuction or breast enhancements?

It is complicated: veils for me represent both religious arrogance and subjugation; they both desexualise and fervidly sexualise. Women are primarily seen as sexual creatures whose hair and bodies incite desire and disorder in the public space. The claim that veils protect women from lasciviousness and disrespect carries an element of self-deception. I have been at graduation ceremonies where shrouded female students have refused to shake the hand of the chancellor. Veiled women have provoked confrontations over their right to wear veils, in courts, at schools and in colleges and workplaces. But I regard their victories as a rejection of social compromise.

Of even more concern are young Muslim lives. Little girls are being asked to don hijabs and jilbabs, turned into sexual beings long before puberty. You can even buy stretchy baby hijabs with fake Calvin Klein and Versace logos.

Like a half-naked woman, a veiled female to me represents an affront to female dignity, autonomy and potential. Both are marionettes, and have internalised messages about femaleness. A woman in a full black cloak, her face and eyes masked walked near to where I was sitting in a park recently, but we could not speak. Behind fabric, she was more unapproachable than a fort. She had a baby girl in a pushchair. Her young son was running around. Will the girl be put into a hijab, then a jilbab? Will the son expect that of his sister and wife one day? To never have the sun warm your face, the breeze through your hair – is that what God wants? Whatever happened to sisterhood?

But do those who choose to veil think of women in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and even the west, who are prosecuted, flogged, tortured or killed for not complying? This is not a freestanding choice – it can’t be. Although we hear from vocal British hijabis and niqabis, those who are forced cannot speak out. A fully burqaed woman once turned up at my house, a graduate, covered in cuts, burns, bruises and bites. Do we know how many wounded, veiled women walk around hidden among us? Sexual violence in Saudi Arabia and Iran is appallingly high, as is body dysmorphia.

Liberalism is being tested by the new Islamic ardency. A French-style ban would be unwise and unjust. But institutions can apply dress codes. A bank worker cannot dress like a stripper; a child cannot wear a boob tube to school. Have rules and stick to them, within reason. In 1899, Qasim Amin warned that unless Muslims embraced modernity and equality, the future would be bleak. We are in that bleakness now, and few dare to speak up for its values.

India on stage and in-yer-face

Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Independent

In 2007, I went to the Royal Court to see Free Outgoing, a play by Anupama Chandrasekhar, from Chennai. It was directed by the then rising star, Indhu Rubasingham, who has recently replaced Nicolas Kent as artistic director of London's Tricycle theatre.

The central role of a distraught mother was played flawlessly by Lolita Chakrabarti, whose own first play, Red Velvet, is getting rave reviews at the Tricycle. Chandrasekhar sparkled in the constellation of Royal Court emerging playwrights and hers was the first contemporary Indian drama to be staged at a non-fringe venue in Britain. Five years earlier, she had been on the Court's International Residency programme and there she learnt to hone her work, raise her game. And how.

The play's subject was taboo – sex between unmarried, Indian teenagers and the revenge of society, its hypocrisies and repressive customs that push against modernity even in hubs of new technology. Deepa, a "good" girl and bright pupil, has sex with a schoolboy. He records the juicy moments on his mobile and the clips circulate. She, her widowed mum and brother are horribly ostracised. The audience, mostly white that day, seemed discombobulated, I thought. A comprehensive school teacher asked me if the sex was "realistic or believable". She sounded almost as disapproving as the cruel keepers of virtue on stage and miffed that India was not conserving its old self for the Occident to romanticise and to vacation in. In contrast, I and my Asian friends felt the opposite: Indian drama was finally getting away from Bollywood clichés and religious masques, speaking truths, repudiating conformity. Chandrasekhar's works are not generally staged in India, though some do sneak into small, rebellious venues. Other young talent is similarly thwarted by censoriousness, the lack of resources and spaces for inventive and daring work.

This week at the Royal Court five more such writers will have their plays performed as rehearsed readings. I saw them all as full productions in Mumbai in January at the Writers' Bloc Festival of new writing from all over the country. Some were edgy and tragic, others sharp and funny, all profoundly affecting. 

Artistically brilliant, urgent, energetic, authentic and eloquent, they touched nerves in the body of their nation, made it twitch. They were among the most powerful examples of modern theatre I have ever seen.

The Royal Court collaborated with Rage, a Mumbai theatre company, to create this festival. Rage was set up in 1993, by Shernaz Patel, Rajit Kapur who are both esteemed actors, and writer Rahul da Cunha. The multitalented ensemble commissions, directs, produces and constantly stretches the parameters of the possible.

Da Cunha explained why and how it all started. Being in Mumbai, a city that "progresses and regresses at the same time" and in a nation "going forwards and backwards and still holding together and to its democracy" is what kicked the Rage trio into action:

"We were driven, restless, felt it was time for modern India to find its voice, its own stories and put them on stage. We didn't have our own English-language theatre except, of course, for Shakespeare, Pinter, Osborne and so on. We started Indianizing the great Western plays, but what we really wanted, and young urban audiences were hungry for, were Indian dramas in English. In a crazy, haphazard way we thought, we knew, the time had come for that to happen. Some people thought drama in English would be elitist. We didn't – what we wrote and directed would have to be in the English Indians actually speak, their intonation, expressions and articulations."

Just as their ideas were shaping up, the Royal Court's artistic director Dominic Cooke and associate director Elyse Dodgson, turned up in Mumbai for a night after conducting a workshop in Bangalore. Call it karma. Da Cuhna, grabbed them, introduced himself and Rage and using his immense persuasive powers got them to promise workshops in Mumbai. They did, and a partnership was forged, with valued help from the British Council. Dodgson, other Royal court nurturers and Phyllida Lloyd went over and released more pent-up creativity than they could ever have imagined. The incipient dramatists were given tools, taught essential skills. At the first Writers' Bloc festival in 2004, in Da Cunha's view, "The level was pretty stunning. Young people saw the results and were totally engaged." Chandrasekhar's disturbing festival play about an Indian talk-show hostess who has acid thrown at her proved that she was both brave and singularly gifted.

Rage's founders carried on making their own remarkable work too. One gripping play I saw in 2010 was Pune Highway, written by Da Cunha and with Kapur in the lead. It was a pacy buddy thriller exposing India's furious and thoughtless globalisation and its ethically vacant middle class, again cutting edge and unsettling for Indians who prefer PR or patriotic art.

India's theatre tradition began in classical times when religious stories were enacted in Sanskrit or as mimes in villages and communities. Gods, improbable heroes and myths were loved by high and low and kept them god-fearing. They are still performed during festivals and at auspicious times. A parallel tradition was drama in local and regional Indian languages. The works, whether classic, extraordinary, worthy or barren, were and still are loved by millions. Parsi theatre was another popular strand. Parsis are descended from original Zoroastrians who fled Persia when Muslims took over that land. They settled in India and under the Raj, this small, urban and successful community became famous for its well-produced and popular comedies and farces in Gujarati.

From the 19th century onwards, playwrights wrote questioning and more complex works – the greatest of them Bengal's polymath Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. By that time, Shakespeare and other European masters were being read and performed by Westernised urban Indians. After independence, those cultural bonds remained intact. Felicity Kendal's family were nomadic players who took the Bard to rural areas; the Sixties film Shakespeare Wallah told the story.

Since then prestigious drama and music schools have been established and become centres of excellence. I have seen some of their fine productions too, though these seemed to me to keep assiduously within the boundaries of "acceptable" art – unlike the breakout works produced at the Writers' Bloc festival.

In the week I spent at the festival, I saw how Dodgson and her team and the transformative Rage company interacted with writers and directors, never letting standards slip, never slipping into patronising allowances. Their intensity, honesty and sense of purpose stimulated astonishing creative heat and resolve in the artistes and writers. Dodgson is a force of nature and was described to me as the "godmother" of the creative cohort. One of the youthful actors said to be it was "like being in the fastest car, feeling the breeze and excitement, but never losing control because you are trying to reach somewhere where nobody has gone before. It's about control and real freedom, giving expression to things kept locked up. Escape from the usual. You don't know how the young of India need that."

The five readings selected for London include Mahua by Akash Mohimen, which was originally written in Hindi and has been translated. Incredibly young and gifted, he chose as his theme extreme rural poverty and addiction to hooch. It made audiences weep silently. Ok Tata Bye Bye by Purva Naresh, also a translation from Hindi, is about feisty, smart sex workers selling their bodies to truck drivers. The other three deal with property developers and broken communities, the conflict in Kashmir and ruthless modernisation. None of these plays is maudlin or sanctimonious. They are real and engaging, reveal aspects of a country still barely known by Brits. And best of all, not one of them features a noisy wedding or call-centre story.

Is modern science Biblical or Greek?

By Spengler

The "founders of modern science", writes David Curzon in Jewish Ideas Daily [1] of October 18, "were all believers in the truths of the opening chapter in the Hebrew Bible. The belief implicit in Genesis, that nature was created by a law-giving God and so must be governed by "laws of nature," played a necessary role in the emergence of modern science in 17th-century Europe. Equally necessary was the belief that human beings are made in the image of God and, as a consequence, can understand these "laws of nature."

Curzon argues that the modern idea of "laws of nature" stems from the Bible rather than classical Greece, for "ancient Greeks certainly believed that nature was intelligible and that its regularities could be made explicit. But Greek gods such as Zeus were not understood to have created the processes of nature; therefore, they could not have given the laws governing these processes."

Is this just a matter of semantics? Is there a difference between the "Greek" concept of intelligibility, and what Curzon calls the biblical concept of laws of nature? After all, the achievements of Greek science remain a monument to the human spirit. The Greek geometer Eratosthenesin the third century BCE calculated the tilt of the earth's axis, the circumference of the earth, and (possibly) the earth's distance from the sun. Archimedes used converging infinite series to calculate the area of conic sections, approximating the calculus that Newton and Leibniz discovered in the 17th century.

An enormous leap of mind, though, separates Archimedes' approximations from the new mathematics of the 17th century, which opened a path to achievements undreamed of by the Greeks. Something changed in the way that the moderns thought about nature. But does the rubric "laws of nature" explain that change? Curzon is on to something, but the biblical roots of modern science go much deeper.

Before turning to the scientific issues as such, it is helpful to think about the differences in the way Greeks and Hebrews saw the world. The literary theorist Erich Auerbach famously contrasted Greek and Hebrew modes of thought [2] by comparing two stories: the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22, and the story of Odysseus' scar told in flashback (Odyssey, Book 19).

Homer's hero has returned incognito to his home on the island of Ithaca, fearful that prospective usurpers will murder him. An elderly serving woman washes his feet and sees a scar he had received on a boar hunt two decades earlier, before leaving for the Trojan War, and recognizes him. Homer then provides a detailed account of the boar hunt before returning to his narrative.

Homer seeks to bring all to the surface, Auerbach explained in his classic essay. "The separate elements of a phenomenon are most clearly placed in relation to one another; a large number of conjunctions, adverbs, particles, and other syntactical tools, all clearly circumscribed and delicately differentiated in meaning, delimit persons, things, and portions of incidents in respect to one another, and at the same time bring them together in a continuous and ever flexible connection; like the separate phenomena themselves, their relationships - their temporal, local, causal, final, consecutive, comparative, concessive, antithetical, and conditional limitations - are brought to light in perfect fullness; so that a continuous rhythmic procession of phenomena passes by, and never is there a form left fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths."

Auerbach adds, "And this procession of phenomena takes place in the foreground - that is, in a local and temporal present which is absolute. One might think that the many interpolations, the frequent moving back and forth, would create a sort of perspective in time and place; but the Homeric style never gives any such impression."

Stark and spare, by contrast, is the story of God's summons to Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. Where Homer tells us everything, the Bible tells us very little. God speaks to Abraham, and Abraham says, "Here I am." Auerbach observes, "Where are the two speakers? We are not told. The reader, however, knows that they are not normally to be found together in one place on earth, that one of them, God, in order to speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from some unknown heights or depths. Whence does he come, whence does he call to Abraham? We are not told."

Abraham and Isaac travel together. Auerbach writes, "Thus the journey is like a silent progress through the indeterminate and the contingent, a holding of the breath, a process which has no present, which is inserted, like a blank duration, between what has passed and what lies ahead, and which yet is measured: three days!" Auerbach concludes:

On the one hand, externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feeling completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and with very little of suspense. On the other hand, the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and "fraught with background".

Literary analysis may seem an unlikely starting-point for a discussion of science. But the Hebrew Bible's embodiment of what Auerbach called "the indeterminate and the contingent" has everything to do with the spirit of modern science. This emerges most vividly in the difference between the Greek and Hebrew understanding of time, the medium through which we consider infinity and eternity.

What separates Archimedes' approximation from Leibniz' calculus? The answer lies in the concept of infinity itself. Infinity was a stumbling-block for the Greeks, for the concept was alien to what Auerbach called their "perpetual foreground." Aristotle taught that whatever was in the mind was first in the senses. But by definition infinity is impossible to perceive. In the very large, we can never finish counting it; in the very small (for example infinitely diminishing quantities), we cannot perceive it. Infinity and eternity are inseparable concepts, for we think of infinity as a count that never ends.

For the Greeks, time is merely the demarcation of events. Plato understands time as an effect of celestial mechanics in Timaeus, while Aristotle in the Physics thinks of time as nothing more than the faucet-drip of events. That is Homer's time, in Auerbach's account. Biblical time is an enigma. That is implicit in Genesis, as Auerbach notes, but explicit in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Greek time is an "absolute temporal present."

In Hebrew time, it is the moment itself that remains imperceptible. Here is Ecclesiastes 3:15 in the Koren translation (by the 19th-century rabbi Michael Friedländer): "That which is, already has been; and that which is to be has already been; and only God can find the fleeting moment." As I wrote in another context, [3] Rabbi Friedländer's translation probably drew upon the celebrated wager that Faust offered the Devil in Goethe's drama. Faust would lose his soul will if he attempted to hold on to the passing moment, that is, to try to grasp what only God can find. The impulse to grab the moment and hold onto it is idolatrous; it is an attempt to cheat eternity, to make ourselves into gods.

A red thread connects the biblical notion of time to modern science, and it is spun by St Augustine of Hippo, the 4th-century Church father and polymath. His reflection on time as relative rather than absolute appears in Book 11 of his Confessions. And his speculation on the nature of number in time takes us eventually to the modern conceptual world of Leibniz and the calculus Aristotle's description of time as a sequence of moments, in Augustine's view, leads to absurdities.

To consider durations in time, we must measure what is past, for the moment as such has no duration. Events that have passed no longer exist, which means that measuring past time is an attempt to measure something that is not there at all. Augustine argues instead that we measure the memory of past events rather than the past itself: ''It is in you, my mind, that I measure times,'' he writes. Our perception of past events thus depends on memory, and our thoughts about future events depend on expectation. Memory and expectation are linked by ''consideration.'' For ''the mind expects, it considers, it remembers; so that which it expects, through that which it considers, passes into that which it remembers.''

Time is not independent of the intellect in Augustine's reading. Expectation and memory, Augustine adds, determine our perception of distant past and future: ''It is not then future time that is long, for as yet it is not: But a long future, is 'a long expectation of the future,' nor is it time past, which now is not, that is long; but a long past is 'a long memory of the past.''' This is the insight that allows Augustine to link perception of time to the remembrance of revelation and the expectation of redemption.

A glimpse of what Augustine's theory of time implies for mathematics appears in his later book, Six Books on Music. I argued in a 2009 essay for First Things: [4]

In De Musica, Augustine seeks to portray ''consideration'' as a form of musical number, that is, numeri judiciales, ''numbers of judgment.'' These ''numbers of judgment'' bridge eternity and mortal time; they are eternal in character and lie outside of rhythm itself, but act as an ordering principle for all other rhythms. They stand at the head of a hierarchy of numbers that begins with ''sounding rhythms'' - the sounds as such - which are in turn inferior to ''memorized rhythms.''

Only the ''numbers of judgment'' are immortal, for the others pass away instantly as they sound, or fade gradually from memory over time. They are, moreover, a gift from God, for ''from where should we believe that the soul is given what is eternal and unchangeable, if not from the one, eternal, and unchangeable God?'' For that reason the ''numbers of judgment,'' by which the lower-order rhythms are ordered, do not exist in time but order time itself and are superior in beauty; without them there could be no perception of time. Memory and expectation are linked by the ''numbers of judgment,'' which themselves stand outside of time, are eternal, and come from God.

That is an intimation of a higher order of number. Because it is buried in a treatise on musical time, Augustine's idea about "numbers of judgment" has elicited scant scholarly interest. But it is clear that his "numbers of judgment" are consistent with his much-discussed theory of "divine illumination." He wrote in Confessions, "The mind needs to be enlightened by light from outside itself, so that it can participate in truth, because it is not itself the nature of truth. You will light my lamp, Lord."

Descartes' "innate ideas" and Kant's "synthetic reason" descend from Augustine, although Kant recast the concept in terms of hard-wiring of the brain rather than divine assistance. The founder of neo-Kantian philosophy, Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) built his career out of the insight that the fact that infinitesimals in the calculus add up to a definite sum proves the existence of something like synthetic reason. That is why Kant triumphed in philosophy and the Aristotelians were reduced to a grumpy band of exiled irredentists.

Augustine's idea finds its way into modern science through Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). Theologian and mathematician, Cusa noticed that musicians were tuning their instruments to ratios that corresponded to irrational numbers. The "natural" intervals of music tuning clashed with the new counterpoint of the Renaissance, so the musicians adjusted (or "tempered") the intervals to fit their requirements.

The Greeks abhorred the notion of irrational number because they abhorred infinity. Aristotle understood that infinity lurked in the irrational numbers, for we can come infinitely close to an irrational number through an infinite series of approximations, but never quite get there. And the notion of an "actual infinity" offended the Greek notion of intelligibility. To medieval mathematicians, the irrationals were surds, or ''deaf'' numbers, that is, numbers that could not be heard in audible harmonic ratios. The association of rational numbers with musical tones was embedded so firmly in medieval thinking that the existence of an irrational harmonic number was unthinkable.

The practice of musicians, Cusa argued, overthrew Aristotle's objections. The human mind, Cusa argued, could not perceive such numbers through reason (ratio), ie the measuring and categorizing faculty of the mind, but only through the intellect (intellectus), which depended on participation (participatio) in the Mind of God.

Cusa's use of Augustinian terminology to describe the irrationals - numbers ''too simple for our mind to understand'' - heralded a problem that took four centuries to solve (and, according to the few remaining "Aristotelian realists," remains unsolved to this day).

Not until the 19th century did mathematicians arrive at a rigorous definition of irrational number, as the limit of an infinite converging sequence of rational numbers. That is simple, but our mind cannot understand it directly. Sense-perception fails us; instead, we require an intellectual leap to the seemingly paradoxical concept of a convergent infinite series of rational numbers whose limit is an irrational number.

The irrational numbers thus lead us out of the mathematics of sense-perception, the world of Euclid and Aristotle, into the higher mathematics foreshadowed by Augustine (see my article, ''Nicholas of Cusa's Contribution to Music Theory,'' in RivistaInternazionale di Musica Sacra, Vol 10, July-December 1989).

Once irrational numbers had forced their way into Western thinking, the agenda had changed. Professor Peter Pesic [5] recently published an excellent account of the impact of irrational numbers in musical tuning on mathematics and philosophy. [6]

Another two centuries passed before Leibniz averred, ''I am so in favor of the actual infinite that instead of admitting that nature abhors it, as is commonly said, I hold that nature makes frequent use of it everywhere, in order to show more effectively the perfections of its author.'' Theological concerns, one might add, also motivated Leibniz' work, as I sought to show in ''The God of the Mathematicians'' (First Things, August-September 2010).

Unlike Archimedes, who still thought in terms of approximations using rational numbers, Leibniz believed that he had discovered a new kind of calculation that embodied the infinite. Leibniz' infinitesimals (as I reported in ''God and the Mathematicians'') lead us eventually to George Cantor's discovery of different orders of infinity and the transfinite numbers that designate them; Cantor cited Cusa as well as Leibniz as his antecedents, explaining ''Transfinite integers themselves are, in a certain sense, new irrationalities. Indeed, in my opinion, the method for the definition of finite irrational numbers is quite analogous, I can say, is the same one as my method for introducing transfinite integers. It can be certainly said: transfinite integers stand and fall together with finite irrational numbers.''

Gilles DeLeuze (in Leibniz and the Baroque) reports that Leibniz ''took up in detail'' Cusa's idea of ''the most simple'' number: ''The question of harmonic unity becomes that of the 'most simple' number, as Nicolas of Cusa states, for whom the number is irrational. But, although Leibniz also happens to relate the irrational to the existent, or to consider the irrational as a number of the existent, he feels he can discover an infinite series of rationals enveloped or hidden in the incommensurable.'' Leibniz thus stands between Cusa in the fifteenth century and the flowering of the mathematics of infinite series in the nineteenth century. That is a triumph of the biblical viewpoint in modern science.

We can thus draw a red line from the Hebrew Bible (most clearly from Ecclesiastes) to Augustine, and through Nicholas of Cusa to G W Leibniz and the higher mathematics and physics of the modern world. The Hebrew Bible remains a force in modern science, despite the best efforts of rationalists and materialists to send it into exile.

Kurt Goedel, perhaps the greatest mathematician of the 20th century, approached all his work with the conviction that no adequate account of nature was possible without the presence of God. Inspired by Leibniz, Goedel destroyed all hope of a mechanistic ontology through his two Incompleteness Theorems as well as his work (with Paul Cohen) on the undecidability of the Continuum Hypothesis, as I reported in a recent First Things essay. [7]

There is always a temptation to offer simple homilies in honor of the Bible, for example, "intelligent design" theory, which in my view tells us nothing of real importance. An atheist like Spinoza also would contend that God designed the world, because in his philosophy God is the same thing as nature. Design contains no information about the unique and personal God of the Bible.

Curzon's discussion of the laws of nature is by no means wrong, but it would be wrong to leave the matter there. "The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom." As Ecclesiastes (3:11) said, "I have observed the task which God has given the sons of man to be concerned with: He made everything beautiful in its time; He also put an enigma [sometimes "eternity"] into their minds so that man cannot comprehend what God has done from beginning to end" (Ecclesiastes 3:11, Artscroll translation). Eternity is in our minds but the whole of creation is hidden from us. Steven Hawking has gone so far as to conjecture that something like Goedel's Incompleteness Principle might apply to physics as well as mathematics.

What divides Hebrews from Greeks, above all, is a sense of wonder at the infinitude of creation and human limitation. The Odyssey is intended to be heard and enjoyed; Genesis 22 is to be searched and searched again for layers of meaning that are withheld from the surface. The Greek gods were like men, only stronger, better-looking and longer lived, immortal but not eternal, and the Greeks emulated them by seeking become masters of a nature infested by gods. The Hebrews sought to be a junior partner in the unending work of creation. With due honor to the great achievements of the Greeks, modernity began at Mount Sinai.