Out of Our Minds

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Out of Our Minds Page 17

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

Another new idea – of God as unique and creative – is inseparable from it. The chronology of the relationship is unclear. Neither idea was convincingly documented until the second half of the first millennium. We do not know whether the thinkers responsible started with the uniqueness of God and deduced creation out of nothing from it, or whether they started with a creation story and inferred God’s uniqueness from that. In any case, the ideas were interdependent, because God was alone until he created everything else. It endowed Him with power over everything, because what we make we can remake and unmake. It made Him purely spiritual – or more than that, indescribable, unnameable, incomparable with anything else. This unique creator, Who made everything else out of nothing, and Who monopolizes power over nature, is so familiar nowadays that we can no longer sense how strange He must have seemed when first thought of. Pop atheism misrepresents God as an infantile idea, but it took a lot of strenuous thinking to achieve it. The simple-minded – who formerly, as always, as now, thought that only what is visible and tactile exists – responded, no doubt, with surprise. Even people who imagined an invisible world – beyond nature and controlling it – supposed that supernature was diverse: crowded with gods, as nature was crammed with creatures. Greeks arrayed gods in order. Persians, as we have seen, reduced them to two – one good, one evil. In Indian ‘henotheism’ multiple gods together represented divine unity. Hindus have generally responded to monotheism with a logical objection: if one god always existed, why not others? Most known kinds of unity are divisible. You can shatter a rock or refract light into the colours of the rainbow. Maybe, if God is unique, His uniqueness is of this kind. Or it could be a kind of comprehensiveness, like that of nature, the unique sum of everything else, including lots of other gods. Or other gods could be part of God’s creation.

  The most powerful formulation of divine uniqueness developed in the sacred writings of the Jews. At an unknown date, probably early in the first half of the millennium, Yahweh, their tribal deity, was, or became, their only God. ‘You shall have no other gods to rival me’, He proclaimed. Disillusionment with Him was, paradoxically, the starting point of Yahweh’s further transformation into a singular and all-powerful being. After defeat in war and mass deportation from their homeland in the 580s bce, Jews responded by seeing their sufferings as trials of faith, divine demands for uncompromising belief and worship. They began to call Yahweh ‘jealous’ – unwilling to allow divine status to any rival. Fierce enforcement of an exclusive right to worship was part of a supposed ‘covenant’, in which Yahweh promised favour in exchange for obedience and veneration. Not only was He the only God for His people; He was, by the end of the process, the only God there is.20

  ‌Along with God: Other Jewish Ideas

  Among the side effects were three further notions that we still espouse: linear time, a loving God, and a hierarchical natural order divinely confided to human lords or stewards.

  Typically, as we have seen, people model their ways of measuring time on the endless, repetitive revolutions of the heavens. In many cultures, however, instead of relating linear changes to cyclical ones – my (linear) age, say, to the (cyclical) behaviour of the sun – timekeepers compare two or more sequences of linear change. The Nuer of the Sudan, who, as we have seen, relate all events to the rates of growth of cattle or children are a case in point: the date of a famine, war, flood, or pestilence may be expressed as ‘when my calf was so-high’ or ‘when such-and-such a generation was initiated into manhood’.21 Annalists often juggle with both methods: in ancient Egypt and for most of the past in China they used sequences of reigns and dynasties as frameworks for measuring other changes. Every reader of the Old Testament will see how the writers tend to avoid astronomical cycles when they assign dates to events, preferring human generations as units of periodization.

  Different measurement techniques can give rise to different concepts of time: is it cyclical and unending? Or is it like a line, with a single, unrepeatable trajectory?22 In surviving texts, the earliest appearance of the linear concept is in the first book of the Hebrew Bible, with time unleashed in a unique act of creation. The Genesis story did not make a consistently linear narrative inescapable: time could begin like a loosed arrow or released clockwork and exhibit properties of both. The Jews, however, and everyone who adopted their scriptures, have stuck with a mainly linear model, with a beginning and, presumably, an end: some events may be echoed or repeated, but history as a whole is unique. Past and future could never look the same again.

  Jewish input into Christendom and Islam ensured that the modern world inherited a sense of time as linear. For Christians a cyclical model is impossible, because the incarnation occurred once and Christ’s sacrifice was sufficient for all time. His Second Coming will not be a repeat performance but a final curtain call at the end of everything. Linear time has proved inspiring as well as daunting. It has launched millenarian movements, galvanizing people into action in the belief that the world’s end might be close at hand. It has nourished the conviction that history is progressive and that all its toils are worthwhile. Leaders and ideologues exhilarated by their sense of participating in the rush of history toward a goal or climax have ignited movements as various as the American and French Revolutions, Marxism, and Nazism.

  Jews have rarely sought to impose their ideas on others: on the contrary, for most of history, they have treated their religion as a treasure too precious to share. Three developments, however, have made the God of the Jews the favourite God of the world.23 First, the ‘sacred’ history of Jewish sacrifices and sufferings provided readers of the Old Testament with a compelling example of faith. Second, Christ founded a Jewish splinter group that opened its ranks to non-Jews and built up a vigorous and sometimes aggressive tradition of proselytization. Thanks in part to a compelling ‘Gospel’ of salvation, it became the world’s most widely diffused religion. Finally, early in the seventh century ce, the prophet Muhammad, who had absorbed a lot of Judaism and Christianity, incorporated the Jewish understanding of God in the rival religion he founded, which by the end of the second millennium ce had attracted almost as many adherents as Christianity. Although Islam developed in ways removed from Jewish origins and Christian influences, the God of the three traditions remained – and remains to this day – recognizably one and the same. As Christians and Muslims conceived Him, God’s cult demanded universal propagation and even universal assent. A long history of cultural conflicts and bloody wars followed. Moreover, in the legacy both religions got from Judaism, God required human compliance with strict moral demands that have often been in conflict with practical, worldly priorities. So the idea of God, thought up by the Jews in antiquity, has gone on shaping individual lives, collective codes of conduct, and intercommunal struggles. At an ever deeper level of sensibility, it has aroused inner conflicts of conscience and, perhaps in consequence, inspired great art in every society it has touched.

  The idea that God (by most definitions) exists is perfectly reasonable. The idea that the universe is a divine creation is intellectually demanding, albeit not impossible. But He might have created the world capriciously, or by mistake, or for some reason, as inscrutable as Himself, which it is a waste of time to try to fathom. The notion that God should take an abiding interest in creation seems rashly speculative. Most Greek thinkers of the classical era ignored or repudiated it, including Aristotle, who described God as perfect and therefore in need of nothing else, with no uncompleted purposes, and no reason to feel or suffer. Yet thought – if it was responsible for creation – surely made creation purposeful.

  Beyond that of a God interested in His creation, the further claim that His interest is specially focused on humankind is disquieting. That the cosmos is all about us – a puny species, clinging to a tiny speck – seems, for humans, suspiciously self-centred.24 That God’s interest in us should be one of love is stranger still. Love is the most human of emotions. It makes us weak, causes us suffering, and inspires us to self-sacrifice. In
commonplace notions of omnipotence there is no room for such flaws. ‘God is love, I dare say’, joked Samuel Butler, ‘but what a mischievous devil love is!’25 Yet the image of a God of love has exerted amazing intellectual, as well as emotional, appeal.

  Where does the idea come from? Who thought of it first? ‘The peak of the West is merciful if one cries out to her’26 was an Egyptian adage of the Middle Kingdom period, but it seems to have expressed divine justice rather than divine love. Chinese texts around the mid-first millennium bce often mention ‘the benevolence of heaven’; but the phrase seems to denote something a long way short of love. Mozi anticipated Christianity’s summons to love more than four hundred years before Christ: as even his enemies admitted, he ‘would wear out his whole being for the benefit of mankind’.27 But his vision of humankind bound by love was not theologically inspired: rather, he had a romantic mental picture of a supposed golden age of ‘Great Togetherness’ in the primitive past. This was nothing like what Christ meant when he told his disciples to ‘love one another with a pure heart perfectly’. Mozi recommended practical ethics, a useful strategy for a workable world, not a divine commandment, or a consequence of a desire to imitate God. His advice resembled the Golden Rule: if you love, he said, others’ love in return will repay you. The Buddha’s teaching on the subject was similar but distinctive and pliable into new shapes. Whereas Mozi advocated love for the sake of society, the Buddha enjoined it for one’s own good. Teachers of the Buddhist tradition known as Mahayana took it further in the second century bce. When they insisted that love was only meritorious if it was selfless and unrewarded, as a free gift of the enlightened toward all fellow humans, they came very close to Christ’s doctrine of disinterested love. Many scholars suppose that Buddhism influenced Christ; if so, he gave it a distinctive twist: by making disinterested love an attribute of God.

  To understand the origins of the doctrine we should perhaps look beyond the catalogue of thinkers and the litany of their thoughts. Christ’s own thinking started, presumably, from the ancient Jewish doctrine of creation. If God created the world, what was in it for Him? The Old Testament discloses no answer, but it does insist that God has a special relationship with His ‘chosen people’: occasionally, the compilers of scripture called this ‘faithful, everlasting love’, which they likened to a mother’s feelings for her child. More usually, however, they spoke of a bargain or ‘covenant’ than of freely given love, but late in the first millennium bce, as we know from fragmentary texts found in a cave near the Dead Sea in the 1950s, some Jewish groups were trying to redefine God. In their version, love displaced covenant. By invoking a powerful, spiritual, creative emotion, known to everyone from experience, they made God humanly intelligible. In identifying God with love, Christ and his followers adopted the same approach as the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls. By making God’s love universally embracing – rather than favouring a chosen race – they added universal appeal. They made creation expressible as an act of love consistent with God’s nature.

  The doctrine of a loving God solved a lot of problems but raised another: that of why He permits evil and suffering. Christians have produced ingenious responses. God’s own nature is to suffer: suffering is part of a greater good uneasily fathomable by those immersed in it. Evil is the obverse of good, which is meaningless without it; bereft of evil, creation would not be good – it would be insipid. Freedom, including freedom to do evil, is – for reasons known only to God – the highest good. Suffering is doubly necessary: to chastise vice and perfect virtue, for goodness is only perfectly good if unrewarded. The rain raineth on the just.28

  The idea of God’s love for humankind had a further important but, in retrospect, seemingly ironic consequence: the idea that humankind is superior to the rest of creation. Humans’ urge to differentiate themselves from the rest of nature is obviously part of human identity, but early humans seem to have felt – quite rightly – that they were part of the great animal continuum. They worshipped animals or zoomorphic gods, adopted totemic ancestors, and buried some animals with as much ceremony as humans. Most of their societies had, as far as we know, no large concept of humankind: they relegated everyone outside the tribe to the category of beasts or subhumans.29 In Genesis, by contrast, God makes man as the climax of creation and gives him dominion over other animals. ‘Fill the Earth and subdue it. Be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven, and all the living creatures that move on Earth’ was God’s first commandment. Similar ideas appear in texts from across Eurasia in the second half of the first millennium bce. Aristotle schematized a hierarchy of living souls, in which man’s was adjudged superior to those of plants and animals, because it had rational as well as vegetative and sensitive faculties. Buddhists, whose sensibilities extended to embrace all life, ranked humans as higher than others for purposes of reincarnation. The Chinese formula, as expressed, for example, by Xunzi early in the next century, was: ‘Man has spirits, life, and perception, and in addition the sense of justice; therefore he is the noblest of earthly beings.’30 Stronger creatures therefore rightfully submitted to humans. There were dissenting traditions. Mahavira thought that souls invest everything, and that humans’ convictions of superiority imposed an obligation of care of the whole of the rest of creation; creatures with ‘animal’ souls had to be treated with special respect, because they most closely resembled people. His near-contemporary in southern Italy, Pythagoras, taught that ‘all things that are born with life in them ought to be treated as kindred’.31 So did human superiority mean human privilege or human responsibility? Lordship or stewardship? It was the start of a long, still-unresolved debate over how far humans should exploit other creatures for our benefit.32

  ‌Jesting with Pilate: Secular Means to Truth

  Alongside the religious ideas of the first millennium bce other notions arose, more easily classifiable as secular. At the time, I do not think anyone would have made such a distinction. The difficulty we still have today in classifying the doctrines of, say, the Buddha or Confucius testifies to that. But we shall never understand religion if we exaggerate its reach or its importance. It makes little or no difference to most lives – even those of people who call themselves religious. Unfortunately, except in spasms of conscience, most people ignore the injunctions of their gods and invoke religion only when they want to justify what they propose to do anyway – typically, war, mayhem, and persecution.

  The great sages thought about God on their own time. In their day-jobs they were usually at the service of patrons, pupils, and public, who, like most of education’s ‘customers’ today – alas! – wanted vocational courses and value for money. Some sages were rich enough to be independent or to teach for fun or for self-glorification. The Buddha and Mahavira came from princely families. Plato was a wealthy aristocrat who gave lavish endowments to his own academy. Most counterparts, however, were professionals, who had to foreground the practical thinking for which they were paid. Especially where the political world was also fissile and competitive, in Greece and in the China of the Hundred Schools, they prioritized rulers’ needs: rules of argument to fortify ambassadors, or of persuasion to enhance propaganda, or of law to fortify commands, or of justice to guide elite decision making, or of rights to bolster rulers’ claims. Plato, who could afford to be high-minded, denounced hirelings and flatterers who sold useful arts of rhetoric rather than courses designed to enhance virtue.

  Inevitably, however, some sages carried their thinking beyond the limits of what customers deemed useful into areas of speculation that touched transcendence and truth. Being, Brahman, and reality, for instance, were the focus of the teachings collected in the Upanishads. ‘From the unreal’, as one of the prayers pleads, ‘lead me into the real.’33 Reflections on these matters were not disinterested: they probably started as investigations of rhetorical technique, designed to equip students with proficiency in detecting other people’s falsehoods and masking their own. Anxiety about exposing falsehood focused th
ought on what seemed the most fundamental of problems: what is real? Did not access to knowledge of everything else – in this world and all others – depend on the answer?

  The consequences included some of the most powerful ideas that still shape our world or, at least, the way we think about it: metaphysics, realism, relativism, pure rationalism, and logic – the subjects of this section; and the reaction represented by the ideas we shall turn to in the next: scepticism, science, and materialism.

  ‌Realism and Relativism

  The starting point of all these developments was the idea that all the objects of sense perception, and even of thought, might be illusory. It was, as we have seen (see here), strongly expressed in the Upanishads and may have spread across Eurasia from India. It is such an elusive idea that one wonders how and when people first thought of it and how much difference it can really have made to them or to the successors who took it up.

  Proponents of the notion of all-pervading illusion were contending with received wisdom. The intensity with which they argued shows that. In China in the mid-fourth century bce, Zhuangzi, dreaming that he was a butterfly, woke to wonder whether he was really a butterfly dreaming of manhood. A little earlier, shadows that Plato saw on a cave wall aroused similar misgivings. ‘Behold’, he wrote, ‘people dwelling in a cavern … Like us, they see only their own shadows, or each other’s shadows, which the fire throws onto the wall of their cave.’34 We are mental troglodytes whose senses mislead. How can we get to see out of our cave?

  To Plato and many other sages the best route seemed to lead through levels of generalization: you may be convinced, for instance, of the reality of a particular man, but what about ‘Man’? How do you get from knowable, palpable particularities to vast concepts that are beyond sight and sense, such as being and Brahman? When you say, for instance, ‘Man is mortal’, you may merely be referring to all men individually: so said philosophers of the Nyaya school in fourth-century bce India. But is ‘Man’ just a name for the set or class of men, or is there a sense in which Man is a reality that exists independently of its instances? Plato and most of his successors in the West believed that there is. Plato’s visceral idealism, his revulsion from the scars and stains of ordinary experience, comes through his language. ‘Think’, he said, ‘how the soul belongs to the divine and immortal and eternal and longs to be with them. Think what the soul might be if it reached for them, unrestrained. It would rise out of the mire of life.’ He thought that only universals were real and that instances were imperfect projections, like the shades the firelight cast in the cave. ‘Those who see the absolute and eternal and immutable’, as he put it, ‘may be said to have real knowledge and not mere opinion.’35

 

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