What We Have Lost, and How the Ancient Concept of the Cosmos Died

[Extract from correspondence with a specialist in ancient astronomy, on the question of why it is we are so disengaged with the concerns of the ancient world.] 

[....]

Thanks for your substantial mail, which I will work through in order, for clarity.

The day of the equinox was quite spectacular, with the full moon rising over the Pentland Hills to the south of Edinburgh. The weather has been very unsettled in the past couple of weeks, so I was not expecting to see anything.

[...]

...binding and loosing was important in Egypt also. In fact it seems to have been an idea universal in ancient civilisations. Though the basis of the idea is likely to have been the preserve of the educated, and the personnel of the divine cults (mostly, but not always exactly the same people). The core idea underlying binding and loosing is that our physical existence is, however it might look to us, a subjective perception of reality. And a subjective perception of reality is a subjective perception of Being itself.

That is why it is so difficult for scholars to understand what is going on. They see the practices and ‘beliefs’ which survive in the literary and archaeological record, but they have no frame in which to understand these things. They do not expect to find anything subtle and sophisticated, because they (they think) are dealing with forms of primitive stupidity, no matter how refined the cultural remains might appear to be.

The figure I gave for the number of offering tables recently turns out to be well out of date. The archaeological exploration of ancient Akhetaten (Tell El Amarna) continues, and the current figure is more than 790 offering tables. That is a staggering number.

You can term the perception of the cosmos which largely eludes modern scholars ‘a shamanic world view’. It is a world view which is extremely old. There were always people around who could see and think beyond the here and now. But the term ‘shaman’ is relatively modern, and fills a gap in the arsenal of modern anthropology. But supplying a name for a phenomenon does not explain what is behind the shamanic practices, and the associated patterns of understanding.

Once the inextricable link between the physical world and the reality beyond became part of the ancient mindset (probably from an immemorial time), it becomes obvious that what happens in Heaven has an effect on Earth, and vice versa. This explains a lot about Buddhist thought, which I’ve spent some time studying over the years. Recently I wrote an article on the possible influence of Buddhism on the philosophy of David Hume. The article explores the logic involved in Theravara Buddhism in some detail.  Theravara Buddhism isn’t a close analogue with with Mesopotamian and Egyptian thought, but it arises from a similar perception of what Reality itself is. The article also discusses ideas prevalent in the European Enlightenment (mainly in the context of Diderot’s Encylopedia, which explain much about negative attitudes to ancient thought in the eighteenth century). The Enlightenment of David Hume.

How was the ancient perception of the nature of the cosmos lost, and why? That’s two very large questions! Asking about the consequences of that loss is another big question. You know lots of stuff about that already, I know. But a discursive triangulation on this question between us, is likely to be useful for us both. This may take some time.

I’ve been writing about that loss for a long time, since it became obvious early on that it was necessary to understand the trajectory, the context, and the mechanics of the loss (in some detail), if we were to be able to (properly) understand what was actually lost.

As far as the savants of the European Enlightenment were concerned, the entire history of the human race before the eighteenth century was a morass of irrational thought – mythology, folklore, magic, legions of superstitious beliefs, a general credulity in the human race, and in earlier times, murderous ritual. They thought they could get clear of all of that by the rigorous application of common sense. That was the basis of Diderot’s Encyclopedia. So, the enoblement of common sense is one of the factors in the loss of the ancient world view.

It is hard to entirely blame the savants, given the limited information that they had. To them the past seemed to be a grim and dark place. They understood that even the crafts were wrapped around in superstition. But the crafts remained important for the wellbeing of the human race. So the crafts were described in the Encyclopedia, but shorn of anything which wasn’t entirely practical.

The savants often did not read and know ancient literature. So they did not know much that was worth knowing. That’s one of the problems with common sense: if the solution is common sense, that is already in your head. Reading is irrelevant. 

Common sense of course, when you are dealing with something which is transcendent of human experience and understanding, is entirely inappropriate. Common sense dictated that the transcendent did not exist, and served no purpose in understanding our world.

The loss of understanding has been going on for a very long time, and was already under way in the 2^nd Millennium BCE. This island is dotted with stone circles as you know, but the ancient Britons stopped building them around the 14^th century BCE. So something, some conception was lost, which removed the motive for building them.

I read a chapter of your writing about the esoteric recently, which was essentially sound. But it isn’t the case that esoteric knowledge in the ancient world was not deliberately kept as a secret. The various priesthoods and sages might have wished that every living person should know what it is, but because esoteric knowledge is often puzzling and counterintuitive in nature, it is easy for what it is to be misunderstood, and then reconstituted as something else. Knowledge which is misunderstood is worse than no knowledge at all. 

I think that is the general pattern of the loss of understanding. Some insight into the nature of reality itself is achieved by an individual, and that insight is taught. An entire culture is developed on the bedrock of that insight. Then it is taught badly, or taught to those who cannot understand what they are being told. The insight becomes something other than what it actually is, and then serves some other cultural or social function. Once a culture is on that slope, it is hard to put the slide into reverse.

I can give some examples here, plus pointers to articles in which I’ve discussed the disconnects between ancient and modern understanding.

First, the ontological argument, which constitutes a huge obstacle to an understanding of ancient thought about the divine. The principal problem with the modern ontological argument is that, for the past seven or eight centuries or so, the argument has been formulated on the basis of the notion that the property of ‘existence’ indicates that something is real. Which is why the argument attempts to provide credible grounds for saying that God exists, and is therefore real. Which is tantamount to a denial of transcendent reality, or the transcendent nature of god. There are other issues with the argument.

I discussed both Anselm’s and Descartes’ versions in The Sacred History of Being, and an extract from the article on Descartes is at: The Ontological Argument In Descartes.  

How did the Christian church, and the philosophers, make this mistake? Probably because they were afraid of the unbounded, the limitless, and the concept of infinity. They wanted an omniscient and perfect entity as their god, but not one that was necessarily beyond human fathoming, and wrapped around in puzzles and paradoxes. They were making God in their own image, rather than the other way around.

I’ve written about the history of the idea of infinity in mathematics, religion and philosophy, via a critical review of Adrian W Moore’s BBC radio series on the subject, broadcast in 2016. My review identifies what is missing from Moore’s tendentious argument.  A long read, but worth the time, I think. It shows just how much pain and intellectual difficulty the idea of the infinite can cause the human mind: ‘Evading the Infinite’

They still had the notion that God lay somewhere behind the physical world, but that notion was not a very sophisticated one. They didn’t need a sophisticated version of God any more, since the main function of religion in the West, from sometime before the fall of Rome, was to support temporal power. 

Divines in the early modern period ended up splitting into two major factions. The Theists saw the world as the creation of God, and that God could be petitioned by Man. Though they had by this time lost all understanding of the mechanism which might make this connection possible. The other major faction was the Deists, who conceived that God had created the world, but that God was the prime mover, and once the world and the cosmos was set in motion, he did not interfere. This view took hold particularly after Descartes and Newton, and the regularity of the motions of the heavenly bodies was then taken to be evidence of the existence of God (this view became known as uniformitarianism, meaning that the forces which were in play in the past, are the same ones which are at play now. The implication is that everything can be calculated).

Much of this is down to early modern misreadings of Aristotle from the 12^th century CE onwards, and his notion of ‘substance’ (ousia). When is Aristotle talking about matter, or about Being, and/or Reality itself? In the Middle Ages they weren’t very sure. The earlier Arian controversy in the 4^th century CE also revolved around substance (is God one or Triune? They decided that God was Triune – ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost’ - but the component parts ‘were of the same substance.’ (homousia) What that common substance actually was, was never established in Christian doctrine (and the trinitarian view of God is still not accepted by all Christians). The triadic nature of the divine in Christianity is something which has its origins in Egyptian religion. It’s a feature of Christian theology because the ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost’ are mentioned in the Old Testament. Just without the political fudge of the homousia, which is the legacy of the Council of Nicaea, held in 325 CE.

   

Reliance on Aristotle as a guide always was an error of judgement among scholars. He sometimes argues something other than what he actually thinks (he wrote a book on rhetoric, the Sophistical Refutations), and clearly sometimes actively intended to mislead his students. A case in point is his Nicomachean Ethics, the argument of which proposes that the Gods, by their nature are wholly contemplative, and cannot engage in the world.  Which is an odd and essentially heretical kind of argument to make in the late 4^th Century BCE. The book is a series of lecture notes, probably by different hands (there is an obvious duplication in the text in Book 8). We know that Aristotle held different classes in the morning, and in the afternoon. In the morning he taught exoteric knowledge, in the afternoon he taught esoteric knowledge. The notes on ethics must come from his exoteric teaching, since the argument arrives at, what was at the time, a nonsensical conclusion.

Why would Aristotle do this? The point of spending time building a painstaking argument that leads to a nonsensical conclusion is to find out who the intelligent students are in your class: the intelligent ones are those who pick at the inconsistencies and absurdities of your argument. Those are the ones who you allow to move on to study esoteric thought. Something like this procedure is still used by tribal elders in Africa: you ask a question about the gods, and they give you what sounds like a plausible reply. But it isn’t the real one. The student will only get the real reply once he has shown he is no fool. And that takes a lot more questions on the subject.

Aristotle’s greatest and most dangerous legacy to us also comes ultimately from his exoteric teachings, and is a main cause of our intellectual exile from antiquity. These are his Laws of thought. These Laws became the basis of formal logic as we understand it in the modern world, and they are also the basis of much theological argumentation from the middle ages onwards. Aristotle did not write a treatise on the laws of thought – the various component parts are mentioned and described in his Metaphysics. Put in the most simple way, The first is the Law of Identity (a thing is itself, and not something else), the second is the Law of Non-Contradiction (a thing cannot be one thing and another thing at the same time); the third is the Law of the Excluded Middle (a thing cannot be halfway between what it is and something else).

You can see that the laws revolve around the idea of identity. But it is a purely secular conception of identity, not at all applicable to something which is transcendent.  If you accept the universality of these laws, you cannot discuss the transcendent in any meaningful sense, even if you have academic tenure in a theological seminary. And it is entirely impossible to understand anything useful about ancient religion and ritual, except in purely phenomenological terms.

I have pointed out however that an alternative logical modality has come down to us in the pages of Plato (in the Timaeus), and it is this one which illuminates ancient religion and philosophy. The Neoplatonist writers referenced it. The account of this modality in Plato is rarely discussed by specialists, in terms of what it is and what it means, though it is often read, since Plato’s Timaeus is a text often set for students. Detail available in: Logical Modality in Classical Athens. You might find it interesting then to read The Greek Ontological Model in the 1st Millennium B.C.E.

Though the idea of Being was discussed in classical Greece, by Parmenides and Plato, as well as the Presocratics, the idea was not much discussed in late antiquity, except by the Neoplatonists from the third century CE onwards (Proclus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, Olympiodorus and Plotinus, and some others). But very few outside of their circles were paying attention at the time. Their moment came as late as the Italian Renaissance. And then they were lost sight of once again after the Newtonian revolution.

So the ideas of the Divine as coterminous with Reality itself, and that Reality itself was entirely transcendent in nature, dropped out of philosophical discourse within the Church. It was not picked up again by philosophers in the early modern period. Hence the endless and vacuous discussions about whether or not God could be said to have the property of existence.

With the advent of the European Enlightenment, the history of human thought began to be written about again in detail, for the first time since Diogenes Laertius wrote his Lives of the Philosophers. But the rewriting was done on the basis of certain presumptions. It was axiomatic that abstract ideas,  such as Being,  were difficult things to discuss, and it was agreed that the Greeks had been the first to do this, during the middle of the first millennium BCE. Why was this decided? The evidence for the Greeks was unquestionably in the surviving texts. Whereas it was decided that there was no evidence that other cultures had ever risen to such levels of discussion.

At the time, it could be argued, it would have been difficult to have come to any other conclusion. Several ancient writers however, had suggested that philosophy was an immensely old discipline, including Plato and Clement of Alexandria. Clement even gave a list of the cultures who practised the discipline. Both Diogenes Laertius and Aristotle suggested that it might have had an origin elsewhere. Aristotle suggested that it required a relatively leisured professional class to emerge, by which he probably had the Egyptians in mind. Isocrates (a rival to Plato, and actively opposed to Plato’s outlook) mentioned the Egyptians in connection with philosophy four times. These statements were (and still are) dismissed.

The European Enlightenment marks the point where the Egyptians ancient reputation as philosophers was systematically downgraded by German scholars (documented in detail in Martin Bernal’s Black Athena). In the end it was agreed that the Egyptians dealt in terms of concrete ideas (whatever that means), and consequently were not capable of abstract thought, and were not capable of contemplating ideas of a wholly transcendent level of reality. Even now, Egyptologists refer to ancient Egyptians as ‘pragmatic’ (as opposed to philosophical) in the way they thought about their religion and rituals.

All this was done in order to preserve the Enlightenment fiction of a stupendous achievement of the Greeks in the middle of the 1^st Millennium BCE, by isolating and downgrading contemporary cultures which might have influenced their development.

Over the past 170 years, an enormous amount of evidence has come out of the ground, and quite a lot of it suggests (to those who are awake at least) that philosophy, transcendental thought, and a sophisticated concept of Being was at the root of a number of cultures around the Mediterranean and the Near East. However Egyptologists (in particular) just ignore this evidence as irrelevant to their profession. Most classicists do too, but with some of them, the dam is starting to break.

That’s the short answer to your question…. There is much more, however, which I will skip for the moment. Where are we going on this long trajectory? I had an exchange of mails with a friend in San Francisco in 2015, where we discussed this question.  I took out personal stuff from the exchange, anonymised her, and turned it into an article which is on my website. I will point you at that.  Locke, Newton, and the Rejection of Reality.

I entirely agree with you that the materialistic paradigm necessarily results in the denial of the possible non-locality of consciousness. If you think that thought and consciousness itself are the products of biological processes in the brain, the idea that consciousness is not localised in the human head just sounds like so much nonsense.  The non-locality of consciousness has been a subject for a few philosophers over the years, but is not discussed in terms of the paradigm which we clearly have in common. P. F. Strawson was one, Wittgenstein was another (Strawson was influenced by Wittgenstein’s thought). Among philosophers it is generally referenced as the ‘no-ownership’ model of consciousness. Usually the argument is along the lines of: “we are constricted to think as we are about identity, perception, experience, physicality, location, etc., by the limitations of (apparently) being physical entities in space and time. Which may not actually be the case”. Not much fun to read, but at least they understand that a materialist interpretation of human existence is problematic.

I also agree that there is a lot of evidence which suggests that consciousness is not localised in the brain, or associated with matter at all. Consciousness may interact with matter, and have some kind of interface with the material world, but that is not the same as being a phenomenon which is entirely localisable. There is a two-way traffic, as you said earlier in your mail.

For me I understand this to be possible because things which are apparently in different places, are actually together in one place, which I reference as the plenum. Which is a place which is not localisable. It is also the key idea we have lost, which makes it impossible to understand both reality itself, and the representations of it, in which we live.

The implication of the concept of reality being a plenum (as it was understood in antiquity) is that both God and gods are necessarily real. This is the consequence of the way they were defined. Each of them has an excellence special to them. That excellence is what makes them real. The plenum is itself real because it is complete and perfect in itself [...]. This fundamental idea is what underpins Greek and Assyrian conceptions of the importance of excellence in thought and activity. It is also why excellence in craft skills was venerated in antiquity. Excellence is what connects everything with everything else. It is why the perfect  execution and observance of a ritual or ceremony was regarded as the most important thing to achieve. This pattern of ideas served as a model among the Greeks for the human soul, and to the organization of society, discussed at: Justice and the Harmony of the Soul. Excellence was also what gave access to the divine: Excellence and the Knowledge of Divine Things.

So I accept that consciousness can be understood as a bridge between ourselves as we are in the form of finite representations, and what we are in that place (which is paradoxically no place) which is filled with the complete and the perfect.  And I agree with you that an important aspect of ritual is about facilitating traffic between the worlds. As you suggest, the traffic is a bit constricted now, since many fewer people have any conception of this purpose…. However, it is necessary for ritual to be performed, and observance to be made, but not essential for the process to be fully understood for it to have an effect. There are still people performing rituals and observances.

   

I read somewhere (in what I’ve read of your work so far), that myth is often about travelling to that other place, either by ascending to Heaven, or descending to an underworld (actually the same place, the plenum, just dressed differently). I agree. [...] The creation of a myth, and the telling of it, can be understood as performative also, particularly if rituals are associated with it: it is ritual made visible. Placing myths in the sky, to descend into the earth, and to rise from it once again, as part of a regular cycle, like a rotating Tibetan prayer wheel, is performative and served the same function.  

Best, Thomas

The Idea of Knowledge in the Ancient World

Ten articles on the idea of knowledge as it was understood in the ancient world, as they were tweeted:

Nick Zacharewicz @NickSCZach (Jan 9, 2017)

"A great source if you're wondering how ancient peoples thought."

Divination in Antiquity (and the sense it made) #Telos #Divination #Sacrifce #immanence https://t.co/leDJpoajDl pic.twitter.com/uTdNItBrGP

To know about important things in the ancient world it was understood you needed to have insight into the mind of God. The process of gaining that insight involved the technique of divination, and the paying of due honour in the form of sacrifice.

****

'Whose right is it to make Gods?' The Idea of Being in Israel #Assyria #Israel #gods #images #idolatry #divinity https://t.co/WYnVhopYbt pic.twitter.com/1exc8TUhG7

How can man make gods, and know the will of the gods? This was a live question in the middle of the 1st millennium BCE, and it is still a problematic notion. It is a main focus of my book The Sacred History of Being, and this is a chapter from it.

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The Fifty Names of Marduk https://t.co/KOJyRtPEOv #An #Babylon #EnumaElish #Marduk #Mesopotamia #NewYearFestival pic.twitter.com/VQJsvB7jha 

How the gods were characterised in the New Year Festival liturgy in Babylon. The pantheon reflects knowledge of the Divine. A chapter extract from The Sacred History of Being.

**** 

A Metaphysic beneath Theology? 'The Divine and the Limit' https://t.co/ofHvuTuQD6 #Janus #liminality pic.twitter.com/ba7T3miLvL

The Divine and its aspects does not have to be represented in the form of images, but can be represented in terms of abstract ideas (the end, the limit, the completed, etc).

**** 

The Esoteric Conception of Divinity in the Ancient World https://t.co/zA6vAWRTEX

 #Assyria #Limit #Reality pic.twitter.com/WKGMVKDvbZ

How knowledge of the Divine was understood and represented in ancient Assyria (this extract points to the whole article which appeared in the Ritman Library Newsletter for December 2015. The article is freely available).

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Understanding Ancient Religion: Cultural Parallels, and False Narratives https://t.co/w2fVnj1S9t #Hindu #Rome #Janus #Religio #Temple

Is ancient religion in general about knowledge and observance, rather than belief? If the history of the meaning of the term 'religio' is explored, our modern understanding of it falls apart.

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Mesopotamian Polytheism, and the cult of Monotheism: Knowledge and Belief in Israel  https://t.co/nQMHZ1BQAt #Israel #Mesopotamia #Politics

It is possible to read the emergence of monotheism in Israel as a prolonged theological and philosophical controversy, in which the nature of a deity without form, colour, and shape, similar in nature to ‘the one thing’ that we should look to, as referenced by Plato, is debated.

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Post-Enlightenment Plato, and That Which Cannot Move. #Plato #Gottingen #Reality #Philosophy #Universe #gods https://t.co/UUhCycddjX

How we have misunderstood the real history and function of philosophy, which had its origins in the 'cultus deorum', and which was based on the idea that man should strive for an understanding of the Divine. Post enlightenment philosophy is about an understanding of the world apart from knowledge of the Divine.  Which is why the ancient world is so hard for us to understand.

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How Egypt lost Philosophy - in 'The Sweet Song of Swans' https://t.co/LdXfVSRIgG #AncientEgypt #Gottingen #Philosophy #Enlightenment

Egypt used to be regarded as the home of philosophy and the knowledge of Divine things. Not any more. Extracted from the chapter 'The Sweet Song of Swans' in The Sacred History of Being, published in November 2015. 

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Logic, Sophistry and the Esoteric in Ancient Education #Aristotle #Plato #Logic #Sophistry #Esoteric #Philosophy https://t.co/htJH3jMn0z

Truth and fiction in the education of the young. Finding those who could think for themselves.

TY, May 5, 2016

Cultural Parallels, and False Narratives

Brilliantly written ! Convincing & well argued. A must read for all students of History https://t.co/cz2TgjlVbu

— Beena Raza (@razabeena) November 20, 2015

I treat much of our intellectual and cultural baggage as contingent, meaning that it can and should be questioned. It isn't necessarily real, or grounded, and it may be as mythical as the main subject in question. So it is necessary to look at that too, because it may be part of a supporting narrative, without which the main subject may have a quite different meaning.

For example, when looking at ancient societies such as Greece and Assyria, we talk about their culture in terms which make sense to us. So for example we may talk of Greek Religion, and be entirely unaware that the concept is problematic. It is problematic because the Greeks did not have 'religion'. The term acquired its current usage through the writings of St. Augustine, around the time of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. To talk of Greek cultic life in terms of 'religion' is therefore to be using a problematic notion which took form around nine centuries after the high point of Greek civilization.

Gilbert Murray wrote a famous work called 'The Four Stages of Greek Religion'. Some time later, and after much further thought, the book was revised with an extra chapter, and titled 'The Five Stages of Greek Religion'. So not only is the entire analysis based on a subjective and conceptual retrojection of a much later idea, the meaning of the evidence has been divided in two different ways according to what was in Murray's mind at different times in his scholarly career.

What Murray was trying to do was to put his concept of ancient Greek religion into a framework of historical and intellectual development, and to provide a narrative for its progress. That's what historians did with their materials in 1925, and a glance at modern histories of human cultural and intellectual development will show that not much has changed. There are pitfalls that have swallowed the reputations and reliability of earlier historians, and modern historians cautiously avoid these. But they are playing essentially the same game. It can be argued that it is hard to avoid constructing such narratives when dealing with the evidence. It is indeed difficult to avoid this. But the difficulty involved in dealing with the evidence and its context is not an excuse for superficial and largely subjective analysis.

It can also be argued by historians that 'we know what we mean' when terms such as religion are used in the analysis of earlier contexts. They may well know what they mean, in terms of how the word might be used in the context of modern European culture and modern history. The assumption is made that using it to analyse what is understood to be a parallel cultural phenomenon in the ancient world is therefore legitimate, and not hazardous.

Are we dealing with 'parallel cultural phenomena'? We understand what we already know, and this knowledge allows us to identify cultural parallels in other contexts and times, and therefore to explore the phenomena we are looking at in a rational way.

But sometimes there was no word for what we understand as the cultural phenomenon of religion in antiquity, and therefore there was, sometimes no understanding then, of what we think we understand now. It follows that, either the understanding of what we call 'religion' in the ancient past was significantly different from our own, or the terminology we use in our own culture is actually unnecessary.

So, if we did not use the term 'religion' to discuss 'religious' phenomena in our own world and time, such as the abrahamic religions, or Buddhism, Taoism, and Hindu patterns of understanding, what would or could we understand of these phenomena?

We could say quite a lot in fact. But it would start to paint for us a different picture of our world.

What we would be missing would be a formal term which we use to indicate that a significant cultural grouping is bound together or unified by a doctrine, a text, liturgy, a cult of worship of the divine, an organised understanding of the world, an affiliation to a body of belief, a shared faith in another world, an eschatology, an organised priesthood, and so on.

The term 'religio', can be traced back to the mid-first century B.C.E., in the writings of Cicero. There is no universally accepted definition of what it means, or even its derivation. St Augustine defined it differently, on the basis of an interpretation by Lactantius. Augustine's is the most commonly agreed derivation, from the Latin 'religare', which means 'to bind together'.

There is a Wikipedia page on the word 'religio' which is rather good (not by me!), and reveals just how much weight we put on the modern derivations from this word. I'm going to quote from it a lot. It begins with this passage.

The Latin term religiō, origin of the modern lexeme religion (via Old French/Middle Latin[2]) is of ultimately obscure etymology. It is recorded beginning in the 1st century BC, i.e. in Classical Latin at the beginning of the Roman Empire, notably by Cicero, in the sense of "scrupulous or strict observance of the traditional cultus".

On the etymology, the article continues:

The classical explanation of the word, traced to Cicero himself, derives it from re- (again) + lego in the sense of "choose", "go over again" or "consider carefully". Modern scholars such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell favor the derivation from ligo "bind, connect", probably from a prefixed re-ligare, i.e. re- (again) + ligare or "to reconnect," which was made prominent by St. Augustine, following the interpretation of Lactantius.[3][4]

The problem with these etymologies, regardless of whether one favours lego or ligo, is that the now-familiar prefix re- "again" is not attested prior to its occurrence in religio and is itself in need of an etymological explanation. For this reason, it has been suggested that this productive prefix originates in the very word religio, where it arose by dissimilation of an earlier reduplicated *le-ligare, thence as it were *le-ligio.

So, we find we are reading both backwards, and also forwards, into our own time, when we try to discover something like the original sense of the word. We can't easily understand the word at this immense distance, when the word was scarcely understood (it would appear) in Republican Rome.

As I've indicated in my post The Divine and the Limit, there was a body of ideas in Rome which associated properties and attributes of things in the physical world with the Divine. These were often reduplicated in the same place, as if by doing this the connection with the Divine would be reinforced. The Wikipedia article on 'religio' observes that:

Within the system of what we would now call "Roman religion (in the modern sense of the word), the term religio originally meant an obligation to the gods, something expected by them from human beings or a matter of particular care or concern as related to the gods,[5]"reverence for God or the gods, careful pondering of divine things, piety".[6]

In this sense, religio might be translated better as "religious scruple" than with the English word "religion".[7] One definition of religion offered by Cicero is cultus deorum, "the proper performance of rites in veneration of the gods."[8]

That shows some good understanding. The scholar Simon Price understood very well that it was the matter of observance which was the most important thing in Roman religion, not what people believed. The idea of belief is a retrojection into a foreign context, and is something which we assume was always present in connection with religion.

Religio among the Romans was not based on "faith", but on knowledge, including and especially correct practice.[9] Religio (plural religiones) was the pious practice of Rome's traditional cults, and was a cornerstone of the mos maiorum,[10] the traditional social norms that regulated public, private, and military life. To the Romans, their success was self-evidently due to their practice of proper, respectful religio, which gave the gods what was owed them and which was rewarded with social harmony, peace and prosperity.

Again, a good understanding. It is observance of the gods and their rites, and knowledge of their properties and attributes which serve the functions of the cult. Belief or faith serves no function.

So in important ways, modern understanding of the idea of religion is a real hindrance to an understanding of the concept in its original context: we ought to be talking in terms of cult observance.

Of course modern religions have cultic aspects to them, and involve cult practices which are of great
importance. But imagine trying to explain something like the Church of England or the Roman Catholic Church in terms of their performance of cult action.

We are misled about ancient religion by our presumption of an understanding of our own, and this misunderstanding of ancient religion magnifies our difficulty in maintaining that they are parallel cultural phenomena. 

One of the ways in which we might understand something of the nature of ancient religions is to look at one which was around in antiquity, and which is still around. Hinduism has been around for a very long time, and its numerous sects and schools reflect something of the cultic organisation in both Greece and Rome.

The role of temples in Indian civilisation was explained by the Paramacharya of Kanchi Kamakoti Pitham, Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswati Swamigal, in an interview in 1959. I'm quoting from an excellent article in the magazine India Facts, 'Temples and the State in India: A Historical Overview', written by M D Srinivas, and published on the 9th of September 2015. Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswati Swamigal tells us that:

Our temples are not organised as places for meditation, nor for congregational worship. The purpose of a temple is different. We enjoy the goods of life, such as house, food clothing, ornaments, music, dance, etc. We pay a tribute in the form of taxes to the King – now the Government – for making it possible for us to enjoy them by giving us their protection. The King Protector is provided with a palace and other paraphernalia of royalty.

Even as we render homage to the kings for the enjoyment of these things, we are bound to tender our gratitude to God who has primarily given us the good things of life. We offer a part of these good things as a token of our gratitude to Him in the temple. We first offer to Him all that he has given to us, in the shape of food, clothing, jewels, music, flowers, lights, incense, and so on with the grateful consciousness that they are His gifts to us; and we receive them back from Him as His prasada.

The temple is the place where these offerings are made on behalf of the collective community where it is situated. Even if people do not go to the temple, it is enough that these offerings are made to God on behalf of the community. The duty of the people at the place is to see that these offerings are made in a proper manner. There have been people who would not take a day’s meal till the temple bell announced that the offering to God of food for the day had been made. Then only do they take their meal as God’s prasada.

He is also quoted as saying:

No other religion is known to have lasted so long. When I think of our religion I am reminded of our temples. They are not kept as clean as the churches or mosques…. Our sanctuaries are different because they are built of granite. Their foundations laid thousands of years ago still remain sturdy. … These temples still stand as great monuments to our civilization in spite of our neglect of them and our indifference. It is not easy to pull them down. Perhaps it is more difficult to demolish these edifices than it must have been to build them. Our religion, to repeat, is like these temples. It is being supported by something that we do not seem to know, something that is not present in other faiths… This something is varnashrama dharma.

He is referring to the Hindu model of the world, and specifically the duties performed according to the system of four varnas (social divisions) and four ashrams (stages in life).This system is imagined to be a natural part of the world.

M D Srinivas reminds us that,

From ancient times, the classical texts of India have enjoined that one should not stay in a place which is not sanctified by the presence of a deity.

Arthur Koestler, who was the original interviewer of Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswati Swamigal, published it in his The Lotus and the Robot, in 1960, (p.54-63). We get some crucial further details from this important interview. Koestler brought up the issue of “din and noise in Indian temples.” Koestler wanted to know whether this was the “reason why Indians with a meditative disposition had to resort to the solitude of the mountains or bury themselves in lonely caves.”

The Paramacharya begins his answer by saying, “The case is just the reverse. Because solitude and a secluded spot have been prescribed from the oldest times, for contemplation, the temples do not have to serve that purpose.” 

Now that is a good cultural parallel for ancient Greek and Roman religion. Faith is mentioned, but not belief (I've distinguished between these two things elsewhere on this web site). The reason it isn't mentioned is because belief serves no function. Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswati Swamigal tells us exactly what the temples are for, and they are places of observance of the rites proper to the gods, properly conducted, and that the buildings are the houses and palaces of the deities. The offerings are in response to the idea that all good things came from God. Note that he refers to God in the singular, and not as a plurality. God is accessed through the properties and attributes of the plurality of gods, and the rites and observances which are appropriate to them.

If the offerings are a symbolic return of good things to the God who gave them, then it is the case that the ritual activity in the Hindu religion is a deliberate recollection of the original creation and ordering of the universe. The activity and the meaning of the temples, the worship of statues of the Hindu divinities, and the temple system, are understood to function as a recreation of conditions close to the inception of the the world, when all good things were granted to the human race. By performing these rites and observances, the reality of the world and its proper order is upheld.

This is strikingly like patterns of thought which are found in ancient Sumer, Assyria and Babylonia. In the latter two cases the recollection of the conditions of the original creation is a key part of the installation of the gods in the temples, and can be seen to lie beneath the performance of the liturgy of the New Year Festival in Babylon (one of the chapters in the Sacred History of Being concerns aspects of this liturgy, the Enuma Elish). The important things which relate to the creation are collected together, and serve to establish the relationship with the Divine. By virtue of their collection together in the context of the temple, the Divine is brought closer, and into the physical world.

This pattern of ideas also applies to the cultic life of Greece and Rome, though it is not expressed in the same way as in India; and in the case of Rome, we have lost the reasons for some of its peculiarities (the role of Janus for instance, who seems sometimes to be the most important of the Roman gods).

But we are closer to understanding the problematic aspects of Roman religion, and the original meaning of the term 'religio', than we might think.

As already discussed, historians proceed by establishing parallels between cultural phenomena where they can, and build an understanding of a thing which might be quite different in detail from what is already understood. If what is known is actually understood. If it isn't understood, then confusion and misunderstanding will follow. That is what has happened with the understanding of 'religio' as anciently conceived.

Not understanding the concepts behind religious practice and observance, scholars fell back on what was, to them, the most likely meaning of the term. They assumed, as we have seen, that the meaning of the term could be understood in terms of 'religare', which means something like 'to bind again'. Despite the history of the Latin language making this understanding very unlikely, since the prefix 're-' is not attested in early writings as meaning 'to repeat'. So religare is, both in terms of definition and etymology, a poor candidate for aiding our understanding of 'religio'.

If they had possessed a better understanding of the concepts and reasons underpinning Cicero's 'cultus deorum' in the ancient world, (which in a sense is to beg the question) they would have spotted a similar Latin word, which retained something of the original meaning of 'religio'. That word is 'religere', which means 'to collect, or gather together'.


Thomas Yaeger,19-21 September 2015

Distinguishing Belief and Faith

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

I first found these passages by the writer on eastern philosophies Alan Watts, through reading an article on the Brainpickings site by Maria Popova. I've included the link to her original post concerning Watts book, The Wisdom of Insecurity: a Message for An Age of Anxiety, first published in 1951.

Watts points out (in his ideosyncratic way) that belief and faith can come to mean things quite opposite to each other:

We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Both belief and faith are states of mind. But they can represent quite different orientations of mind. The first is about what is held in the mind, and is treated as real, the second is about a constancy of receptiveness to the truth. Of course the believer will believe that what is believed is the truth, and will be persuaded that it is believed on that account. Those who have faith by contrast, do not have to hold anything in the mind, any doctrine, any preconceptions.

The believer may label his belief as his faith, and quite probably not distinguish the two. So much of history has been warped by such conflations. The modern religions (by which I mean those that have managed to survive into modern times, not that they are modern) invoke faith as part of the package which is offered to their members. Faith and belief are rarely distinguished, in part because of the social and political roles of these modern religions. The blurring is often useful.

We can often see this in practice, when a great quantity of doctrine has to be memorized by the believer, which is treated as a pillar of the faith. Or where strict patterns of behaviour and observance are demanded. Most of the major religions are guilty of this kind of imposition.

Modern scholarship has a track record of making easy assumptions about the continuity of religious ideas and patterns of practice, and the accompanying social compacts. So at the time the Assyrian palaces, temples and cities were being dug from the sand and soil in northern Mesopotamia, it was assumed that the relationship between the royal and temple establishments could be understood in terms of a modern division between church and state, in the way that the Church of England is separate from the English throne and government. This notion turned out to hold very little water on close analysis. And even now, around a century and a half later, it is still difficult to understand the relationship between the two establishments, though clearly the relationship was an important one. The king performed an important ritual role in the religious life of Assyria, as we can see from many of the palace reliefs, and this role is recorded in the surviving documents from the middle of the 1st millennium BCE. The priests performed an important role in the political life of the state as well as in the conduct of religious ritual.

Except that there were no priests. At least not as such. There were many religious functionaries of course, which were initially described as priests by scholars. But in the cuneiform texts they were generally referred to in terms of their function. So the functionary involved in divination would be referred to as the Asipu, rather than the Asipu priest. A small seeming distinction, until you know more about the structure of the royal court and something of the Assyrian understanding of the world. One of the functionaries was referred to simply as the 'baker'. It is hard to imagine such a figure and status in any modern religion.

So it is unwise therefore to describe Assyrian religion as a belief system. Or indeed any of the pre-Abrahamic religions as belief systems, unless we can be absolutely sure that there is some level of comparability present with modern religions.

We know something of the stratification of Assyrian society in connection with religious ideas, partly from the colophons of liturgical texts. These were sometimes explicitly marked as not for the sight or discussion of  the uninitiated. One temple text which is discussed in The Sacred History of Being says that the initiated may read the text and discuss their understanding of its meaning among themselves. Others may read and know the names of the gods only. Nothing was explained to this second order of readers, at least not anything connected with the subsurface meaning of the text.

This of course refers to those members of the population who were educated enough to read, and of sufficient social standing to have access to the texts, usually in a library associated with a temple or a royal palace. The question arises therefore, what did the rest of the population know and believe? And what were they expected to know and believe?

We don't know the answer to that. Maybe very little. In the middle ages of the modern era, it was not uncommon for villagers in remote parts of a kingdom not to know the name of the current king, but society functioned anyway.

The historian Simon Price was one of the first to realise how misleading the filter of two thousand years of Christianity in the west actually was. He stopped talking about belief in connection with ancient religions, and instead talked about 'observance'. We can know about observance, because it is sometimes recorded. What people believed, or were expected to believe, most often isn't.

I think we can assume the ordinary population of Assyria understood very little of the complex structure of Assyrian polytheism, or anything at all about the intellectual arguments which underpinned it. But they could be taught easily about the importance of observances, and where and when these should take place. They would hear something of the most important gods, and might even have seen them when removed from the temple for a public festival. They would have heard stories about them. But they knew nothing of importance about theology. They didn't need to know anything about that.

The irony here is that the detail of what they would have observed, which would have included festivals throughout the year, marking key points such as the winter solstice, the beginning of spring (the start of the new year), the summer solstice,  the autumnal equinox; festivals associated with the gods of generation, and observances associated with the limits of things, and the passing of boundaries between one thing or state and another, was actually closer to the rational core of the religion, than any of the stories and liturgy which informed the higher level of the religion. They could (and did) observe various simple rites, but did not necessarily have any understanding of the logic underlying what they were doing.

An example of observance in faithful ignorance is an incident which is recorded in the Anabasis by Xenophon. The Greek army was in the presence of a Persian army, and effectively hunkered down until the Persian army moved on. During this time, a number of readings of omens were taken, none of which were proptitious. At the same time, they were doing what any army does, which is to scout out the disposition of their opponents. Eventually the Persians moved on, and the Greek scouts reported this.

But the Greek army did not move. They sacrificed further animals, and the omens remained negative. So they stayed where they were. Military intelligence by itself was not sufficient. After a period of time, the omens changed, and they moved.

I remember a tutorial at unversity where we talked about what people believed in daily life, and this instance came up.  There was a level of disbelief at how the Greeks behaved, and it is fair to say that it doesn't make sense to people in the modern world. But it made sense to those in the ancient world. At some level, even if they didn't understand the theoretical basis which supported the idea of omens: they observed the observances.

Is what the ancients thought about this of importance to us? I think it is, since they were focussed on knowledge, which is one of the themes of The Sacred History of Being. And supposedly it is what we are about too. But we don't seem to be focussed on knowledge in the same way. Watts writes that:

The present phase of human thought and history … almost compels us to face reality with open minds, and you can only know God through an open mind just as you can only see the sky through a clear window. You will not see the sky if you have covered the glass with blue paint

But “religious” people who resist the scraping of the paint from the glass, who regard the scientific attitude with fear and mistrust, and confuse faith with clinging to certain ideas, are curiously ignorant of laws of the spiritual life which they might find in their own traditional records. A careful study of comparative religion and spiritual philosophy reveals that abandonment of belief, of any clinging to a future life for one’s own, and of any attempt to escape from finitude and mortality, is a regular and normal stage in the way of the spirit. Indeed, this is actually such a “first principle” of the spiritual life that it should have been obvious from the beginning, and it seems, after all, surprising that learned theologians should adopt anything but a cooperative attitude towards the critical philosophy of science.

Maria Popova's original book review is here.