Saturday 2 June 2018

The Tangled Thread: Universals in History




[This is a draft version of 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]


This piece of text was the original (and short) opening chapter to the draft of The Sacred History of Being which was on my desk in 2004. I was toying with a number of possible titles for the book at the time, and the favoured title of the moment (June 2004) was The Shrine in the Sea. This was because there was a large focus on the Mesopotamian idea of the Abzu, home to Enki/Ea at the bottom of the sea. Ea was the broad-eared Mesopotamian god of wisdom, and all important things were understood to point back, in the end, towards the Abzu. Hence, the inauguration of divine statues required that the Abzu be closely referenced in liturgy and ritual, and the inaugurations took place where there was physical proximity to objects with symbolic connections to the Abzu, such as quays and river banks (all rivers in Mesopotamia being considered divine [DINGIR.ID]), and the thresholds of temples. These details (and the rituals themselves) are discussed in detail in the closing chapters of The Sacred History of Being.

The liturgies and the description of the rituals have been published and translated, and their signifcance and meaning have been discussed by scholars. But they make difficult reading for the reason that they involve a different set of preconceptions from those understood by Mesopotamian scholars. It is hard to break through to an understanding of what was understood to be going on. Given the enormous passage of time since these rituals were devised, that is perhaps not surprising. 

But there is another level of difficulty which we have created for ourselves, and in relatively recent times. The Mesopotamians employed ideas which they considered to be universally valid, such as all wisdom being present in the Abzu, and that the acquisition of knowledge depended on some kind of ritual engagement with Ea and the Abzu. And that the good order of the world depended on man's relation to the world of the divine. 

Since the European Enlightenment, we have adopted another set of universal notions, which do not depend at all on the reality of the divine and the gods. In fact it pushes such notions into the shadowlands of unreason. So there is little inclination among scholars who specialise in Mesopotamia to spend time trying to makes sense of things which are intrinsically unreasonable in nature. 


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In an age where both ideas of realpolitik and the centrality of ideology and different varieties of determinism (philosophical and economic in particular) are assumed by professional historians to be the constants in history which eluded our predecessors, it is easy to introduce suppositions into historical analysis without any sense of violating the proper context of the evidence. I will deal some of the difficulties in the course of this book. For now it is enough to mention the difficulties which stand between us and the use of evidence which does more than fit the pieces crudely into a pattern of meaning conformant with expectation, or at least fits within the parameters of what we are prepared to countenance as a credible model of the past.

More significant than individual difficulties however, is the complex interaction of one with the other, and the successive layers of these interacting obstacles to our understanding. Any age has a body of beliefs, sometimes contradictory and multiple, and differing across social groups, societies and nations, which are essentially assumed. They are not often examined closely (if at all) because they have the special status of commonly held truths. Not common in the sense that they are base or full of superstition, but common in that they are either tacitly agreed, or it is agreed that it is permissible or even desirable to hold these beliefs. These beliefs vary from age to age. These patterns of belief change – sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.

We have, since the enlightenment in Europe, created a body of ideas which is designed to support  our world and its perspectives with a theoretical underpinning. That underpinning is, in broad terms, rationalism. We are by and large so sure of the rightness of our ways of thinking, particularly in the modern Western world, that we have now elevated rationalism to a place above all other perceptionsof the world, in the whole of history*.[i]

This can be understood as the culmination of the rationalist and humanist agenda of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rationalists and humanists understood themselves to be struggling under the deadweight of accumulated belief and superstition, as well as the institutions and powers which drew their authority from the religious structures dominating the intellectual landscape. Drawing on the intellectual models of nature which developed during the seventeenth century, the rationalist perception of the world constantly sought to describe reality in terms of the laws of physics and mechanics. Nature became something which could be the subject of operations, rather than an outward expression of the mystery and character  of the divine. The latter construct was ignored. Descartes picture of the world shut this aspect of reality out as unneccessary for the analysis of the world, without significant argument in favour of this beyond the assertion that the world of the divine need not be invoked in order to explain the physical world.

The severing of this link had enormously beneficial results in terms of the development of the sciences in general – matters were simplified enormously if all that was being considered was what could be measured, counted and weighed; and there was no imponderable interference from the intrusion of the divine.

However it was not the case that the world of the divine had been shown to be of no account in the development of an understanding of nature – the exclusion of this aspect of reality was simply decreed, since it had been decided that it was unnecessary for our understanding of the natural world.

As the sciences progressed, the quality and power of the descriptive models of nature created supplied, for all practical purposes, the proof that a knowledge of the world of the divine was unneccessary for an understanding of nature. Thereafter, the divine became, in the world of the sciences, something to be scorned, as a relic of the days when the human race lived in a state of irrational superstition. The scientific and rational model of understanding nature then clarified its identity partly in opposition to the patterns of thought which it sought to escape. The next logical step was to try to supplant the models of the world in which the divine was deemed to function as creator or agent. This was in essence the eighteenth century enlightenment agenda.

After the eighteenth century, the idea of the divine and its associated technicalites became less and less interesting to study. In the early twenty-first century, it is a matter for the philosophical specialist working principally with materials created during the Christian era, or for the credulous. And within academia, the consideration of the divine outside this is verboten in close detail - though it may be studied in anthropological terms, in terms of social dynamics, or in terms of human pathology - for the simple reason that it is axiomatic that a philosophically grounded theology of the world dates only from the application and adaptation of Greek philosophical concepts in the creation of Christian theology in the first centuries of the modern era.

Christian theology has always appeared weak to the rationalist world by dint of its appropriation of Greek philosophical ideas for its intellectual support, since the enlightenment enterprise itself traces its own foundations to the Academy and the Lyceum. It is hard therefore to defend Christian theology against an argument coming from specialists in its own intellectual background.

However, a sophisticated, technical theology arriving from beyond the cultural arc stretching from Ancient Greece to the parlours and salons of the eighteenth century would be unwelcome to both rationalists and Christian theologians, since it might reframe the origins of both the rational world view and of Christianity. The hypothesis explored in this book is that just such a philosophical theology existed in the ancient world, and that it is, by close analysis of the evidence, possible for us to understand many of its details, as well as the intellectual background it provided to both the development of philosophy in Greece, and the origins of Christianity. 









[i] in a manner reminiscent of the elevation of the Roman Republic above all other constitutional forms by Polybius, so that the Republic was not subject to the forces (it was understood) other states were subject to [the ancient world understood several models for state constitutions, and Aristotle had arranged them into a cycle. Rome fitted into this, but at some point they decided that they had transcended that cycle, and that (essentially) both Rome and its constitution were eternal].



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