The Triumph of Folly

Not quite 2,000 years ago, a new religious movement arose in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. There was nothing especially startling about this – it was an age that spawned religious movements at a prodigious rate. And this particular movement had little at the outset to set it apart from all the rest, except perhaps for a couple of fairly serious handicaps.


For one thing, it was a sub-sect of a national or tribal religion that already had gained a fairly widespread reputation for rebarbativeness, Judaism. The people of Judea, and their compatriots scattered throughout the empire, were widely seen by their pagan neighbors as alien, rather odd, and at times even atheistic. They declined to eat certain tasty foods, they worshipped an invisible god, they refused to recognize or respect the gods of the pagans, and they had a custom of refusing to do any work at all on the seventh day of each week.


The new movement also suffered, in the eyes of pagan critics, from a serious lack of distinctiveness. Its central narrative involved a god-man born of a virgin, who underwent a severe trial, was killed, and rose from the dead as a savior for those who believed in him. This was very old hat indeed: Pagan mystery cults centered around virtually identical dying-and-resurrected-god narratives had existed for centuries already by the time this new movement came along – those, for example, of Dionysus (Bacchus), Orpheus, Adonis, Attis and, probably most successfully, Osiris/Horus (i.e., the mysteries of Isis).


On the other hand, in a time when originality was valued much less than tradition, the new movement suffered from the very fact that it was, indeed, new. The other mystery-cults could claim chronological precedence and the authority lent by “the test of time.”


A further obstacle faced by the new movement was the philosophical and rhetorical sophistication of the cultural leadership in the world where it was attempting to grow. It was one thing to preach a visionary and emotional message of “good news” and a coming reversal of status to the illiterate and laboring classes; it was quite another to get anyone in authority, political or cultural, to take it seriously.


Largely because of these factors, the first wave, so to speak, of this movement left nary a ripple on the historical record, except for a few letters written by one (or possibly a few) of its most articulate adherents. This letter-writer had experienced first-hand the humiliation of facing pagan sophistication without adequate dialectical firepower (Acts 17:18-33) and perhaps as a result began to preach the virtues of becoming a “fool” for his savior-god and rejecting the counsels of the “wise.”


As time passed, however, the new movement adapted to its environment. Significantly, it distanced itself as much as possible from its roots in Judaism, especially after that nation rebelled against Roman authority and suffered a comprehensive and cataclysmic defeat. It began to put its teachings into writing, and in those writings it declared a hostility to Judaism that matched that of the empire that it increasingly sought to woo to its cause.


In those writings, the new movement also sought to build a case for its philosophical validity – indeed, its superiority – by claiming a sort of vicarious chronological priority. It might be true, they argued, that their founder had lived and died in a very recent time, but his life had been foretold long, long ago – much longer ago, indeed, than any of those other savior-gods had lived and died (and lived again).


The groundwork for this argument had been laid by a Jew, Philo of Alexandria, who lived at roughly the same time as the new savior-god but whose project was to demonstrate that Moses – to whom, in keeping with tradition, he attributed the authorship of the foundational texts of Judaism – was in fact a philosopher – indeed, the greatest of philosophers – whose teachings represented a sort of quantum leap above the pagan philosophers because 1.) Moses lived much longer ago than they did, and 2.) his philosophy originated not from human reasoning but from divine revelation, and so was complete in a way that the merely human conclusions of pagan philosophers could not be.


The advocates of the new religious movement – apologists, as they’re called – happily adopted Philo’s rhetorical strategy and conclusions, and then took things much further.


Yes, they said, the writings of Moses and the Jewish prophets are much, much older than anything you pagans can offer (except perhaps the Egyptians, and no one understands their stuff anyway). But unbeknown to the Jews, their texts were foretelling the coming of our savior-god. In fact, their account of the history of the world from its very creation is really secretly an account of God’s plan to save humankind through the life, death and resurrection of our savior-god.


Now, plainly, this interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures required a certain amount of intellectual squinting. The apologists had to patch together widely separated verses and create a lot of doubtful equivalences, chief among which was the equating of the new movement’s savior-god with the hoped-for “messiah” of the Jews. This was a rather dubious enterprise, seeing as how the messiah clearly was expected to be a temporal, political leader who would “restore Israel” to its rightful independence and prominence among the nations of the world; while the movement’s savior-god had died ignominiously and obscurely without the slightest direct effect on Israel’s status as a nation.


What the apologists did to overcome this objection was to declare – and to inscribe into their own “scriptures” – that what the messianic prophecies had foretold, and what their own savior-god had accomplished, was the institution of a spiritual, “heavenly” kingdom that superseded the earthly kingdom of Israel.


That’s a neat rhetorical trick, and nothing more, and not many people early on were taken in by it, least of all the bulk of the Jewish nation. But the apologists had an even better trick up their sleeves that also didn’t fool many people at the time, but which they continue to play even today, and surprisingly with better results now.


It’s a variation, or more accurately an extension, of the prophetic claim. The early apologists argued (if you can call it an argument) that the Hebrew scriptures told a story that the authors themselves didn’t understand. The authors thought they were telling the story of the relationship between Yahweh and his chosen people, but “we know better” – they were really telling the story of how God knew humankind would blunder into a state of unredeemable sinfulness, and he would enter into human existence at a certain time and place and fix the whole thing.


Okay, a lot of people (Christians all) have accepted this reading of the Hebrew scriptures over the centuries. But the apologists pushed this line of argument even further. In their time, there were lots of texts besides the Hebrew scriptures that were regarded as spirtually informative, from the deliberate writings of Plato to the recorded spontaneous utterances of the Pythoness of Delphi and the Cumean Sybil. There were all those mystery-cults, there were the long-standing and highly respected religious traditions of Persia (Zoroastrianism), Babylon, Egypt, and the native cults of every nation from Armenia to Greece to Rome to Gaul to Britain.


The adherents of the new movement acquired a bad reputation early on for frontally assaulting everyone else’s beliefs. But as time went on, they got a bit more subtle. They began acknowledging that the various pagan belief-systems contained an element of truth. But they went on to claim that any such kernel of truth served only to mislead.


You see, only when the movement’s own savior-god descended from timelessness into earthly manifestation did the full truth about existence become knowable. So anyone who sought to find truth before that could only have discovered a partial, and therefore untrue, truth – at best a “foreshadowing” of the full truth, just as the Hebrew scriptures “foreshadowed” the savior’s coming.


Worse, the eternal enemy of truth, Satan, was at large in the world long before the savior made his descent. But Satan knew that moment was coming (I’m not sure how; maybe the idea is that God told him to “test” us) and so he made it his business to confuse people’s minds by creating false precursors – anticipatory parodies – of the true savior.


Overall, the message of the apologists was this: The one and only god has made his one and only entry into material reality at this one and only time and place, and everything that anyone said or will say about divinity or spirituality is either a prediction of this one event or a lie intended to make you overlook it.


These were neat rhetorical tricks, but they didn’t fool many people in ancient times. The new movement remained very much a minority sect – its members far outnumbered by the devotees of Isis, certainly, and probably those of Mithras as well – until the Emperor Constantine threw the weight of his rule and his army behind it in the mid-fourth century.


Following this development, the apologists for the new movement came up with yet another sophism that still affects thinking about these things today: The fact that the new movement eventually gained enough power to crush all of its competitors demonstrates that God wanted this movement to “triumph” over all the other religious tendencies of the age.


The movement in question has of course splintered over the intervening centuries, but it’s interesting to note how much the various factions still rely on the same sophisms in their continuing project of dominating or eliminating the competition. That competition has broadened in ways that no one could have imagined in Constantine’s time, to include Islam and Buddhism and, perhaps most dangerously, the naturalist-materialist worldview.


If today’s apologists would just back away from some of their pointlessly but insistently held dogmatic positions – especially the claim to an exclusive, unique knowledge of divine truth – we might all make more progress toward real spiritual growth and social harmony. But alas, I fear that the apologists and their churches really have little regard for such things, and are really interested mostly in worldly power, and always have been.

ΦΙΛΟΣΟΦΙΑ

I want to adopt – or probably more accurately, to instigate – a convention for the use of the word “philosophy.” What I’m proposing is to use a capital P to refer to what was discussed and practiced in ancient Greece and successively into the Roman period, and a small p for everything else.

There are, I think, good reasons for doing this. It was after all the Greeks who created and defined the term φιλοσοφια to describe what they were doing. It would be reasonable to reserve the use of the word to references to that particular set of activities and to find some other word to refer to activities that are significantly different, even if the latter are in some way derived from or imitative of the former. However, there is no generic term other than “philosophy” for the numerous schools and tendencies of thought that have arisen since the fall of Rome, so I’m proposing that we recognize the distinction by treating the word as a proper noun for Philosophy properly so-called and not so for everything else.

And there most definitely is a significant distinction between what was practiced and taught in the Hellenic and Hellenistic schools of Philosophy and the so-called philosophy that came to be practiced and taught after and outside them. The two began to diverge even during the heyday of Philosophy when Christian apologists and other religion-focused groups (the so-called Gnostics and Hermetists or Hermeticists, for example) began to appropriate ideas, terms and practices from the Philosophical schools in an attempt to give themselves intellectual respectability.

This disingenuous tendency is apparent already in the writings of Philo of Alexandria, whose project was to allegorize the Hebrew scriptures into an exposition of Platonic doctrine and Moses into a philosopher, and then to claim priority and superiority for the Mosaic writings. The Gospel of John goes Philo one better by rendering the narrative of Jesus’ life as an exemplification of philosophical theology that trumps both the Philosophers and the Jews.

By the third century, this project was in full swing in Alexandria, where Clement and Origen both embraced Philosophy with both arms. If one accepts their self-explanation, Philosophy was true but incomplete, and the Christian revelation was precisely what was needed to complete it. On a somewhat less tendentious reading, Christianity was indeed a “revealed” religion, with all the raw, emotional, even self-contradictory details that accompany any visionary breakthrough. It needed some intellectual reinforcement to make it palatable – indeed, to make it understandable – to a theologically sophisticated audience.

It’s from this point, and for these reasons, that the tendency grew to regard philosophy as “the handmaid of theology,” which prevailed until the Renaissance. The Christian (and later the Muslim) theologians happily pilfered or cherry-picked the findings of a millennium of hard-won Philosophical teaching to augment their own arguments, while denigrating the Philosophers themselves and ultimately shutting down their schools and sending them into exile.

When the grip of the church(es) over intellectual life finally began to ease, a large part of the legacy of the domination of theology over philosophy played out as a rejection of theology in all its forms by the newer thinkers. In particular, the new philosophers from Erasmus and Ficino forward seem to have focused exclusively on the content of philosophical discourse while ignoring or rejecting the Philosophical practices that had formed the basis of monastic life and Medieval mysticism.

That the Philosophical schools were in fact the model for Christian monasticism is at this point undeniable.

The late Pierre Hadot established with impeccable scholarship the fact that Philosophy was at least as much a “way of life” as a project of research into the principles of existence, and that the two were inseparable:

… there can be no question of denying the extraordinary ability of the ancient philosophers to develop theoretical reflection on the most subtle problems of the theory of knowledge, logic or physics. This theoretical activity, however, must be situated within a perspective which is different from that which corresponds to the idea people usually have of philosophy. In the first place, at least since the time of Socrates, the choice of a way of life has not been located at the end of the process of philosophical activity, like a kind of accessory or appendix. On the contrary, it stands at the beginning … Philosophical discourse, then, originates in a choice of life and an existential option – not vice versa. … The [ancient] philosophical school thus corresponds, above all, to the choice of a certain way of life and existential option which demands from the individual a total change of lifestyle, a conversion of one’s entire being, and ultimately a certain desire to be and to live in a certain way. This existential option, in turn, implies a certain vision of the world, and the task of philosophical discourse will therefore be to reveal and rationally justify this existential option, as well as this representation of the world. (Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? trans. Michael Chase, p. 3. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2002.)

In the same work, Hadot goes on to describe a general curriculum of the Philosophical schools, running from ethics to physics to psychology to theology, which can be found consistently across schools as far apart in their “theoretical” teachings as the Platonists and Stoics. He also enumerates a number of what he calls “spiritual exercises” that likewise are found across the Philosophical spectrum, such as meditating on the inevitability of death and cultivating a “cosmic” view of life. And unsurprisingly, he shows how these exercises continued to be essential in the writings and practices of the early Christian monastics.

Hadot, as befits an academic scholar, proceeds cautiously in these matters, drawing almost entirely on the writings of the philosophers themselves and rejecting suggestions that Philosophy was in any way a development from, for example, shamanism. (He does, however, accept in a sort of postscript that the Philosophical schools might have received some influence from India, specifically from yoga.) However, with no academic reputation to protect, I can range a bit further.

What I would point out first is that the writings of the “Desert Fathers,” as found in the Philokalia, for example, clearly show that the early Christian monastics’ understanding of “metaphysical anatomy,” so to speak, is precisely that of the Philosophers, and in particular that of the Platonists: the lower, “irrational” soul consisting of a desiring (“appetitive”) and an emotional (“incensive”) component; the rational soul (διανοια, dianoia, or discursive, dualistic reasoning faculty); and the νους (nous, the unitive, intuitive, holistic understanding). Moreover, the goal of monastic practice is precisely the same as that of the Platonist schools: to extricate the practitioner from over-involvement in physical reality and “turn” him or her toward the “higher,” truer reality of Form and, ultimately, God.

As Plotinus states quite specifically (Ennead 1.1.3), one goal of Philosophy is to turn the soul away from its desire for matter and turn it toward reason and the beyond-reason of nous. How is this done? In one important passage (VI.7.36), he writes:

We are taught about it by comparisons and negations and knowledge of the things which come from it and certain methods of ascent by degrees, but we are put on the way to it by purifications and virtues and adornings … [emphasis added]

And in another key passage, Plotinus writes:

How can one see the inconceivable beauty which stays within the holy sanctuary and does not come out where the profane may see it? Let him who can, follow and come within, and leave outside the sight of his eyes and not turn back to the bodily splendors which he saw before. … Shut your eyes, and change to, and wake, another way of seeing, which everyone has but few use. (I.6.8; emphasis added. Both translations are by A.H. Armstrong in the Loeb Classical Library edition, published by Harvard University Press.)

What we are seeing here are obviously references to some form of what we call meditation today. In Plotinus’ time, the Latin words meditatio and contemplatio referred to two different modes of mental activity, meditatio being “discursive” and dualistic, contemplatio being non-dualistic and unitive. Those terms remained standard in the Western Church until the 20th century. In Greek, the equivalent of contemplatio is θεορια (theoria); various words and phrases (e.g., συννοια, sunnoia) refer to introspection generally and may be translated as “meditation.”

The point, now that I’ve finished with the footnotes and glosses and flourishes, is that a school of Philosophy, in its practices, bore much more resemblance to, for example, a Buddhist monastery than to a modern university’s Department of Philosophy. And not just in its practices, but equally in its goals. No matter how much lip-service modern educators may pay to the idea of turning out “well-rounded” individuals (and in fact they’re advocating that approach much less these days than they did a few decades ago), what they’re really about is preparing people to become cogs in the machinery of the modern global economy.

From that point of view, absolutely the last thing our educational system wants to do is turn people away from physical objects and desires and toward a real, heartfelt understanding of the oneness and wholeness of reality. But that’s the one thing each of us needs if we – and our world – are to be healed and whole.

It's Always Now

I’ve been seeing a lot of news stories lately in which people (or politicians, if they qualify) are claiming that one thing or another is part of “God’s plan.” For example, the oilwell blowout that’s destroying the Gulf of Mexico is part of “God’s plan,” according to some. And various candidates for elected office are claiming that they’re running because it’s part of “God’s plan” for them personally.

Oddly enough, these kinds of statements are being made by self-professed Christians. I had thought Christianity was a monotheistic religion, but apparently I was wrong: According to probably the most rigorous monotheist ever, Plotinus, God doesn’t plan, and saying that He/She/It does plan is saying that God is multiple.

Instead, Plotinus says, God causes reality to exist by a timeless, eternally instantaneous, simultaneous, spontaneous sort of explosion of creative goodwill.

Frankly, the idea of God planning things is pretty silly. First, you have to imagine that God doesn’t know precisely what’s going to happen; instead, the all-knowing deity must form an intention to make something happen, then decide what is going to happen, and only then actually make it happen.

It’s only from the point of view of time- and space-limited beings (e.g., humans) that one thing appears to follow another, and thus that one thing appears to cause another. Through a kind of back-fitting, we thus imagine that an omniscient God knew ahead of time that a given phenomenon was going to be the cause of a certain effect; in other words, that God “planned” it that way.

This way of thinking posits that God has “foreknowledge” of events and thus gives rise to all the arguments about predestination and free will. But it’s actually an act of anthropomorphism: We’re imagining a God who “sees” things from a human-like perspective and needs to control, manipulate and micromanage like a power-drunk CEO.

In fact, there can be no “fore” knowledge if there’s no before or after; as I like to say, “It’s always now.”

One implication of this difference of perspective that I haven’t heard discussed much: From our time- and space-bound point of view, there’s a lot that’s “not here” or “not yet,” and this is precisely what enables humans to practice dishonesty on each other, if they’re so inclined.

For example, I could offer to sell you some shares in a gold mine, promising that there is in fact a mine where I say it is and that it will in fact produce gold when I start digging there. Or I could tell you that nasty little brown-skinned people are tunneling into your garden and planning to steal all your goodies and ravish your wife and children, and you need me to stop them.

From your time- and space-restricted perspective, you might not be able to verify what I’m saying, so you might just take my word for it based on your desires or predispositions. But from the point of view of what Meister Eckhart called the “eternal now,” everything is present. So no one can deceive God.

Plotinus and Plato (and Eckhart and lots of other people) taught that the “highest part,” so to speak, of the human being exists in that “eternal now,” but our fragmented, matter-focused way of life keeps us so distracted that we’re disconnected from it — unaware, in fact, that any such part of ourselves exists.

The whole point of real philosophy (and true religion, which is the same thing) is to transform ourselves so as to (re-)connect with that highest, timeless part, which is in fact the true self and the central unity of the self and the one part of the self capable of knowing God. So to put it bluntly, anyone who claims to know “God’s plan” doesn’t know God.

All Outside

I pulled out C.G. Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy (volume 12 of the collected works) last week for the first time in several years. It’s a large book, and a lot of it is aimed strictly at the practicing Jungian psychologist and is fairly unintelligible. However, the opening essay, “Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy,” is a lot more interesting than it sounds. Anyone who’s read Jung’s “Modern Man in Search of a Soul” or “The Undiscovered Self” will recognize some of the same themes. Here are some points I consider exceptionally well-put:

“Western man is held in thrall by the ‘ten thousand things;’ he sees only particulars, he is ego-bound and thing-bound, and unaware of the deep root of all being. ... The Western attitude, with its emphasis on the object, tends to fix the ideal – Christ – in its outward aspect and thus to rob it of its mysterious relation to the inner man.”

“Christ the ideal took upon himself the sins of the world. But if the ideal is wholly outside, then the sins of the individual are also outside, and consequently he is more of a fragment than ever, since superficial misunderstanding conveniently enables him, quite literally, to ‘cast his sins upon Christ’ and thus evade his deepest responsibilities – which is contrary to the spirit of Christianity. ... If the supreme value (Christ) and the supreme negation (sin) are outside, then the soul is void: its highest and lowest are missing.”

“It may easily happen ... that a Christian who believes in all the sacred figures is still undeveloped and unchanged in his inmost soul because he has ‘all God outside’ and does not experience him in the soul. His deciding motives, his ruling interests and impulses, do not spring from the sphere of Christianity but from the unconscious and undeveloped psyche, which is as pagan and archaic as ever. The great events of our world as planned and executed by man do not breathe the spirit of Christianity but rather of unadorned paganism. ... Christian civilization has proved hollow to a terrifying degree: it is all veneer, but the inner man has remained untouched and therefore unchanged. His soul is out of key with his external beliefs; in his soul the Christian has not kept pace with external developments. Yes, everything is to be found outside – in image and in word, in Church and Bible – but never inside. Inside reign the archaic gods, supreme as of old. ...”

“The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity. Christianity must indeed begin again from the very beginning if it is to meet its high educative task. So long as religion is only faith and outward form, and the religious function is not experienced in our own souls, nothing of any importance has happened. It has yet to be understood that the mysterium magnum is not only an actuality but is first and foremost rooted in the human psyche. The man who does not know this from his own experience may be a most learned theologian, but he has no idea of religion ....”