Amongst the most formative encounters at the University of Glasgow in the 1970s was the time I was privileged to spend as a student with several remarkable teachers. First year Moral Philosophy, a young Alexander Broadie had us reading Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, that scary political study of power, commonwealth and society. For those who may not know, Hobbes is the one who described human life in the state of nature and deprived of the comfort of Government, as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Strong and stable government was therefore a matter of life and death, Hobbes argued, and a commonwealth based upon a social contract an essential for any kind of human life in community to flourish.
For a whole term, at 9,00 a.m., we came in and heard Broadie expound and explain this text of terror. It was the rudest of awakenings for students in first year encountering philosophical thought for the first time, and through one of the toughest political discourses in the English language. Broadie was a brilliant lecturer. He took us through Kant's The Moral Law, and John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, but it was his lectures on Leviathan I remember most clearly. Analytic logic, precise terminology, a clipped and controlled voice, a glass of water clutched in front of him from which he occasionally sipped, paused, then continued to stroll from lectern across the platform, and back. He never broke stride and he seldom faltered in his lectures, most of them apparently without notes. He was, to use a word far too often trivialised by misuse – he was awesome. The group I mixed with were unanimous that Broadie was the real deal, an intellect of such power you could almost feel the soft vibrations of mental machinery working with efficiency and without friction.
It was therefore a pleasant surprise when in second year I discovered Broadie was teaching part of the Principles of Religion course. The text was Pirk Aboth, the edition was by R Travers Herford, and we were introduced to halakah and haggadah, to rabbinic pedagogy and the ethics of the Talmud, and to the piety and wisdom of the Pharisees. These were conversational seminars, question and answer, Broadie performing like a virtuoso on the text as instrument, and an ethos of reverence laced with humour, and enquiry as an activity of the mind learning to be receptive to the moral and spiritual content of ancient words. I've never forgotten those afternoons chasing through Deuteronomy, following clues in the commentary and references in Pirke Aboth, and the heart and mind revelling in the discovery of a deep faith akin to my own but different, and the requirement upon each of us to respect that difference and the integrity of its truth.
Somewhere along the way, in the inflow and outflow of books from my study, I lost my copy of Pirk Aboth. I've only recently found another copy of the exact same edition, with its blue and white covers, black Hebrew script, published by Schocken, and printed in the late 1960s. I know it won't recreate the excitement and intensity of those afternoons in a room lined with books and a teacher demonstrating a method of learning as ancient as the text, and as a matter of genuine importance, a text dating from around the time of the New Testament documents.
It's no coincidence that my current engagement with the sermon on the Mount, and the wider Matthean presentation of Jesus' teaching, that my mind turns back to another document, compiled by Pharisees seeking to establish the foundations of Judaism in the changed world of no Temple, and a violated Holy City. These sayings were 'in the air' just as the oral traditions of the sayings of Jesus were circulating and coalescing in documents that eventually gave us our Gospels.
I've written about Professor Broadie before in 2010, and you can read it on this link over here. It is a fuller account of my own intellectual development, and the influence of a teacher to whom I still feel a sense of indebtedness for setting me up for years of enriched thinking.
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