The Sacred History of Being.
by Yaeger, Thomas
eBook : Document10 of 10 people found this review helpful.
Seeing through Noise (2018-06-03)
by VenusPeter
Sometimes scholars do not see what is before their eyes, or they see what they are trained to see. The Sacred History of Being begins with an account of the author becoming aware - over many years - of the limitations of modern scholarship concerning the ancient past. There are so many unexamined assumptions in the relevant disciplines which make it nearly impossible to make sense of some of the evidence. The assumptions are a form of noise, which is hard to see through, and the understanding of most scholars is circumscribed by the din of that noise.
This is a book which discusses both the ancient past, and the modern post-Enlightenment world. The modern world comes off badly in comparison, since we now generally frame questions in terms which produce answers which make sense to us. What an ancient priest made of a question, for example, is often of no concern to us. We aren't dealing with rational thought in antiquity.
Yaeger's book is a sustained assault on this idea. It attempts to show that, long before the Greeks, the Mesopotamians explicitly understood themselves to be rational beings living in a rational universe. Their account of the creation of the world in which we live makes that very clear. That world is framed in their creation story as a descent into generated matter from an undifferentiated plenum. As a consequence, the Mesopotamians saw a connection between the plenum and knowledge far beyond human understanding. Yaeger argues that one of the functions of religion in Mesopotamia was to make connections possible between the transcendent world of the plenum (Being itself) and the secular world, and for man to gain access to knowledge of divine things.
Sound familiar? This is very similar to what Plato was discussing in the Republic in connection with the ascent of the philosopher to 'the Good' via the forms, and a return to the sensible world with beneficial knowledge. Yaeger does not rest on this simple comparison however, and digs deep into Mesopotamian ritual for the creation of divine images. The result of close study of these rare texts shows how thoroughly the parallels run between Greek and Mesopotamian thought. The Mesopotamian texts however date from a period before the rise of classical Greece...
The fifth century enlightenment in Greece therefore begins to look like a form of noise - a difficulty largely created during the European Enlightenment.
There are many good things about this book, not least of which is the quality of the writing and discussion. Once you have read the book, it is hard to look at the ancient world in the same way as we used to do. Much that looked like the result of a primitive stupidity (the practice of divination, sacrifice, etc), can now be approached in a different way, which presumes so much less about the nature of the ancient evidence.
***
[the review below is linked to from the WorldCat page]
GoodReads Reviews (1)
Review from goodreads.com
by Ben (GoodReads user published 2016-09-02 )
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
The Sacred History of Being
by
Thomas Yaeger (Goodreads Author)
Ben's review
Sep 02, 2016
it was amazing
The ancient Greeks didn't invent philosophy. They themselves acknowledged the intellectual debts they owed to older Egyptian and Babylonian thinkers. Yaeger's thesis in this book is that we actually have abundant evidence of the nature of ancient Mesopotamian philosophy - not in the form of written texts, but through artistic symbols and literary metaphors. Through these allusions, a picture of a rich Mesopotamian intellectual tradition emerges: a tradition that may be the common ancestor of many esoteric doctrines found throughout the ancient Mediterranean.
***
June 29, 2018.
Review of The Sacred History of Being at Google Books:
This is an unusual book. It argues that abstract thought was around long before the Greeks, and the supreme abstraction, the concept of Being, was a key element in ancient religion. The author (Thomas Yaeger) examines ancient texts which support this argument, mostly focusing on ancient Assyria and ancient Israel, and shows parallels with Greek thought, particularly in Plato's dialogues. It also argues that the idea of knowledge in antiquity was closely associated with the idea of Being, and that establishing a connection with Being was understood to offer the possibility of acquiring divine knowledge.
The author also argues that Mesopotamian polytheism owes much of its nature and ritual practice to this body of ideas around Being, and divine knowledge. Mesopotamian rituals for the installation of divine statues (some of which survive in whole or in part), are discussed in detail, which reveal the importance of Being and knowledge to the logic of these rituals.
The book is a fascinating read. It is properly referenced, and Yaeger writes clearly throughout. There is a substantial discussion of the modern ontological argument in part one, which you might want to skip, at least on the first reading. The reason it is present is because it shows that a number of assumptions are built into modern discussion of religion, and these assumptions were not made in antiquity. This makes it difficult for modern scholars to properly understand the basis of ancient religions, both in Mesopotamia, and in Greece. So far only available in eBook format.
***
[Review at WorldCat]
J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being.
by Yaeger, Thomas
eBook : Document | 21 of 1 people found this review helpful.
Frazer Writing Fiction? (several hours ago)
by VenusPeter
I read this book after reading Yaeger's Sacred History of Being. It is a more demanding text, since it concerns a number of arguments about ancient and primitive thought in the work of the classicist Sir James Frazer. But it casts a lot of light on the origins of the Sacred History of Being (it was formally published in 2016, but was written way back in 1993).
Frazer doesn't mention Plato much in the course of his later work, which was largely anthropological. He developed some views of his own about the nature of human thought, built on John Locke's principle of the association of ideas. This enabled him to build a theory about magical thought and practice, which argued that magic was based on ideas of sympathy and contagion. And no more. This is a key part of Frazer's monumental Golden Bough. Yaeger is aware however that magical ideas in the european renaissance were based on another principle (the establishment of contact with divine powers, or Being itself), which can be traced back to classical times (at the least), and found it puzzling that there was no discussion in The Golden Bough of what pre-enlightenment authors said about magic.
Frazer did write about Plato in a prize-winning essay when he was a student in the late 1870s, and the (extensive) essay was finally published in 1930 (The Growth of Plato's Ideal Theory). Yaeger's book is largely a critical deconstruction of that rarely discussed essay, in the light of Frazer's later work. Frazer was entirely dismissive of the idea of Being in his essay, writing Being off as something which 'could not have anything predicated of it'. He regarded Plato's work as a body of research, in constant development (as many did at the time), and so was interested in stylometric study of his works to establish the order in which they were written. It was hoped that this would throw light in particular on the development of Plato's idea of the Forms. It didn't. Scholars are still divided between those who think Plato was doing research, and the others who think he was expounding a body of doctrine which is still obscure to us. Frazer however declined to discuss Plato's Parmenides in the course of his essay, which, given the subject, is a little odd. His conclusion was nevertheless that the 'ontology' Plato was discussing was in fact not an ontology at all, but an epistemology transformed into a false ontology. Plato made a mistake.
Yaeger thinks that Frazer was wrong about Plato mistaking an epistemology for a genuine ontology, and he explains why. He also argues that he was wrong about both the principal basis of magical thought throughout much of cultural history, and about the impossibility of saying anything useful or interesting about Being. In which case, if he is correct, Frazer spent a long career writing fiction.
***
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