Кардинальные добродетели в книге Премудрости Соломона: эсхатологический контекст

Abstract

The four cardinal (so-called Platonic) virtues are mentioned twice in the Old Testament according to the Septuagint version – in the Book of Wisdom of Solomon and in the Fourth Book of the Maccabees, of which the latter was rarely included in the biblical canon. We will focus on the Book of Wisdom as a work that presents a generalized biblical view of the universe and the historical, as well as eschatological fate of the Jewish people. There is still a strong opinion in the scientific literature that the philosophical intuitions of this book, although subordinated to the logic of the Jews’ being chosen by God, are themselves entirely borrowed from ancient thought, and therefore serve either as a rhetorical refinement or a metaphysical improvement (and, accordingly, transformation) of ideas drawn from the Old Testament tradition. This should, of course, especially be suitable for the cardinal virtues, which are torn out of their philosophical (platonic or stoic, but most likely just eclectic) context and transferred to Jewish soil, as it seems at first glance, without special work on their reinterpretation. With this presumption about the nature of the book as a whole, scientists find in it teachings about metempsychosis and individual spiritualistic immortality. At the same time, not enough attention is paid, in our opinion, to the “general” (as opposed to the “private”) eschatology of Wisdom, which requires not only the usually undertaken structural and compositional, but cross-cutting thematical analysis. The eschatology of the book is built around the image of the righteous, destined to reign over the world and judge it. Immortality is justified by the author in such a way that its form turns out to be resurrection. Cardinal virtues, borrowed originally from political ethics, make it possible to build a mediation between the moral appearance of the righteous and his royal dignity.