[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.
***
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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