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.

Roots

I'm sitting here with a rather obvious reminder of how rash it can be to forget that things that appear on the surface to be totally disconnected - for example, a nondescript, seemingly dead piece of vine on one side of the yard and a sprig of poison ivy on the other - often turn out to share a single root.

This image is a fairly obvious metaphor for the kind of connectedness I wrote about a few posts back in terms of family trees and "one life," but it's also a way to start attempting to reconcile what might appear to be a glaring inconsistency in my recent rambling divigations.

On the one hand, I spewed quite a bit of verbiage scorning contemporary atomistic-individualistic models of the person as "illusory" and "a betrayal of our true nature as humans." But in my last two posts, I endorsed the idea that the only real foundation for ethics "is each person knowing right from wrong and persistently trying to live in accordance with this knowledge." In other words, a truly ethical society exists only when each individual in that society lives ethically.

So it certainly could appear as if I'm condemning social atomism with one breath and promoting it with the next. Obviously, that's not my intention. By way of explanation, I want to reiterate the distinction I made previously between "individualism" and "individuality."

I defined individualism as "the assembling of a personal identity through selective self-identification with a collection of intellectual components such as beliefs, ideas, attitudes, interests or affinities, and physical activities, possessions and displays." I've ranted more than once, in fact, about our seeming acceptance of this externalized model of identity formation.

But I haven't offered a definition yet of what I would allow as "real" individuality or how it's cultivated, mostly because it's harder to define. In fact, I believe the ultimate basis of individuality or "personhood" is a kind of inner core that is the part of us that connects us with the whole stream of life. Ultimately, it's a mysterium, irreducible to a verbal formulation: It's to be lived, not discussed.

So it's easier to talk about the "how" than the "what." And the "how" is of course quite well known, and has been known for millennia. I'll let Plato explain one way of looking at it, and leave it at that for now:

“Now we have also been saying for a long time, have we not, that, when the soul makes use of the body for any inquiry, either through seeing or hearing or any of the other senses — for inquiry through the body means inquiry through the senses — then it is dragged by the body to things which never remain the same, and it wanders about and is confused and dizzy like a drunken man because it lays hold upon such things?”
“Certainly.”
“But when the soul inquires alone by itself, it departs into the realm of the pure, the everlasting, the immortal and the changeless, and being akin to these it dwells always with them whenever it is by itself and is not hindered, and it has rest from its wanderings and remains always the same and unchanging with the changeless, since it is in communion therewith. And this state of the soul is called wisdom.”

Phaedo, 79c-d; trans. by Harold North Fowler. Online at the Perseus Digital Library.