People of the Book – Haggai and Zechariah
The ancient Israelites defined two events as perhaps more formative of collective Jewish identity than any other: the Exodus and Exile experiences. After the latter, when the Jews were returned to their homeland after a long period of traumatic captivity in Babylon, two prophets arose nearly simultaneously to shake the returning people out of their spiritual and moral lethargy. Haggai and Zechariah began to gather the people under the reign of King Darius (c. 520 BC) and to encourage them to honor God by completing the construction of the postexilic Second Temple, the one which would be renovated by Herod the Great and out of whose precincts Jesus would scatter the moneychangers nearly five centuries later.
It is Zechariah who prophesies the coming of an eventual Prince of Peace, who will serve as a Messiah to his people. He entreats the Israelites: “Rejoice heartily, O daughter Zion, shout in exultation, O daughter Jerusalem. See your king shall come to you; a just savior is he, meek, and riding on an ass…he shall proclaim peace to the nations” (Zech 9:9-10).
Obviously, the Jews were well acquainted with this passage and so some of them connected Jesus’ triumphal entry into the city on the lowly donkey with the reference, hence the homage paid to him with palms and shouts of “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” As we all know, such honor and reverence would not last even a full week; public opinion was to shift dramatically from Sunday to Friday. His trek to Golgotha had a very different kind of fanfare.
A recurring theme in the rather short books of Haggai and Zechariah is to come to know the Lord who is ever beside his people. “Take courage. For I am with you, says the Lord of hosts. This is the pact that I made with you when you came out of Egypt, And my spirit continues in your midst; so do not fear” (Hag 2:4-5). The people come to know God not only as their ultimate duty, but also as their highest good.
This notion, of God as the Highest Good (summum bonum) comes a millennium and a half later to be a central theme in the scholastic period of medieval theology, when the conjunction of faith and reason (fides et ratio) takes on an increasingly important role for Christian thinkers.
St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109 AD) takes the allusions to such a concept prevalent in Haggai and Zechariah and constructs what has come to be known as the ontological argument for the existence of God. Though a devout believer, Anselm sought to “prove” the existence of God through rational argument and logic, without recourse to revelation. His analysis, though difficult, is worth serious reflection, for important thinkers such as Aquinas, Descartes, Kant and Hegel wrestled with it.
In concise terms, the argument is as follows: God as the highest good is “that than which nothing greater can be thought.” Because these words make sense to us (as opposed, for example, to a square circle), such a superlative concept “exists” at least in the mind. However, “that than which nothing greater can be thought (which exists in reality)” is higher/above/more perfect than “that which nothing greater can be thought (lacking existence in reality).” And thus, the very concept of God we hold in our intellects proves that the quality of necessary existence is an attribute of God, at least as provable as geometric discussions where a triangle must exhibit the attribute of having three angles. One cannot picture a non-three-angled triangle and, likewise, one cannot picture a non-existing highest good – for then it wouldn’t be highest good, now would it? But we can and do picture a highest good, therefore, God exists in reality and not just the mind. (Now re-read 40 times and lay awake at night thinking about this and you’ll appreciate how tortured a soul your humble author is!).
Neither Haggai nor Zechariah was likely the philosophical genius that Anselm was. Yet, all three came to the realization that to know God is to know the pinnacle of faithfulness, love and Being. He is the one who describes himself as “I am who am” (YHWH). He is predicate, while we are object; he is independent existence, while we are dependence; he is Unbegotten Creator, while we are creature. Only he “is,” and unqualifiedly so. And yet he reaches out to us in unfathomable love and generosity: “They shall call upon my name, and I will hear them. I will say, ‘They are my people,’ and they shall say, ‘The Lord is my God’” (Zech 13-9).
Michael M. Canaris of Collingswood is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty for the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University.
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