Heidegger and Being: (Writing to @SemprePhi)

Hi. I read some of Heidegger’s Being and Time when I was around twenty, not realising that it was only the first third of a much larger projected volume. His essentially existential approach to gaining a theoretical grasp of ‘Being’ left me cold. This is because even then I didn’t think there was an existential approach possible, since, by definition ‘Being’ by itself is beyond actual existence.

Or at least by my definition, which was fuelled (at the time) by the sort of thing Plato said about it, and some of the statements by the presocratics. We might imagine that it exists, as all things must do, somewhere in space and in time. This Plato said was an illegitimate way of thinking about ‘the one true thing’. By its nature it cannot have its reality and nature in space and time.

Heidegger is aware of this of course, but nevertheless deflects from the consideration of Being as Being (the presocratics Aristotle described as the first philosophers to consider the question of Being qua Being). He looks leftwards again and again at existential and phenomenological approaches to questions of Being.

In the end, he argues, in a manner similar to Sartre later on when talking about meaning (in Existentialism & Humanism, which is the slightly inaccurate title his book is given in Britain), that existential experience, however imprecise and however poor it is as a process,  is the way in which to gain an understanding of what is difficult to apprehend.

In short, for me, Heidegger is not actually talking about Being at all, but the Being of living beings, and occasionally looking upwards at more abstracted and transcendent conceptions of what Being itself might be, though it is an unattainable concept.

Heidegger was a pupil of Edmund Husserl, who has been a major influence on me, also, though it a different way. Many of my essays on subjects start off from one place, and end up in another. Occasionally I follow the line of an established author or authors, and as the essay goes on, I start to deconstruct the elements which hold their argument together. After that, I may entirely reverse the premises of their argument, and go off in another direction. I was doing this before I had my close encounter with Husserl, but learning to see all information as elements which might be capable of being read and constructed in entirely different ways, and breaking down conventional narratives into their components, was a key part of my intellectual development.

I also had the advantage of having read widely in philosophy and ancient literature before I began formal study of the ancient world. So there was much more going on in my head than a direct interaction with texts as themselves. There were always other possible contexts, and other ways of understanding what their actual concerns might have been (this widened to an interest in iconography and ritual texts – no one treats the latter seriously (in their own terms), outside of a purely anthropological interest. Wittgenstein thought this was a foolish approach by the anthropologists).

One of the first things which set me on my current path was noticing (as I’ve mentioned elsewhere), that some equivalent technical terms in ancient Egypt were used in the same way as Aristotle did. But the Egyptian evidence was nearly a thousand years older (the concept of ‘completion’ for example). So it occurred to me that both the established history of philosophy (i.e., invented by the Greeks in the 5^th century BCE), and that the idea that philosophy was the successor to religious thought (considered scarcely rational), might be components in a false narrative. So I started to move the building blocks of the conventional narratives around, to see if they made more sense when looked at from a different point of view.

I’ve mentioned Aristotle referring to the presocratics as the first philosophers to consider Being as Being, meaning in all the abstracted glory of the concept (Aristotle made an important distinction between the actual and the potential infinite, and the latter is still the basis of most mathematical work on the infinite. Why? It is hard to do mathematics and geometry with the actual infinite. The modern assumption is that nobody before the Greeks ever conceived of a direct engagement with the infinite (or with Being).

Yet the prosocratic concern with Being qua Being is in the wrong place. If it was in the right place, it would follow on from the kind of discussion we get from Plato and Aristotle, when contemplating various intellectual puzzles (the aporia). Yet there it is at the beginning of the Greek philosophical tradition. It is in fragments only, many of which were used by Aristotle in his Metaphysics. Could it be that these fragments were the product of a sophisticated discussion of philosophical questions in the Eleatic school and elsewhere, much earlier, and that such discussion has just dropped out of the record? Or perhaps was never committed to writing at all?

I know the answer to that question now, which is that the Greeks did indeed get their philosophical ideas from elsewhere, which is not to say that they did not do philosophy themselves before this (I’m in the process of writing up the evidence and case for the Greek close encounter with Ancient Assyria in the seventh century BCE.)

I’ve been reading an extensive paper on Heidegger, and his uncompleted project of Being and Time. The latter half of the proposed book was actually looking to a deconstruction (or even destruction) of the history (and modern understanding) of philosophy. That was a big surprise, since it is essentially what my overarching project is about. For me, it is largely a necessary task because the Enlightenment placing of the first sophisticated discussion of philosophical questions in Greece between the seventh to the fourth centuries BCE entirely obscures the relevance of philosophy to the history and development of religion, both in the ancient Near East, and in ancient Greece. That false narrative needs to be fixed.

I’ve beaten over a thousand words in about an hour, so I will break off here. If you are interested the essay (actually seminar notes) on Heidegger’s Being and Time is at: https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/campuspress.yale.edu/dist/8/1250/files/2016/01/Heidegger-Being-and-Time-1qtvjcq.pdf . By Karsten Harries, from 2014.

I’ll write about Parmenides and Heidegger’s discussion of Plato’s Sophist later.

Hope you have had a great start to the year!



Best, Thomas

Wearable Fictions, Phenomenology, and the Grammar of Human Thought

'Fish Magic' (Paul Klee, 1925)

Some notes on The Shrine in the Sea, which eventually became The Sacred History of Being, written while waiting for a delayed flight to Bristol from Edinburgh, 3rd March 03 (four hour delay in total). Not everything which is scribbled during an airport delay is perfectly coherent by itself, so I've introduced some qualifications and expansions in square brackets, where necessary. There is more scope for writing about Robert Graves' White Goddess, but that is for another time.

I’m now approaching this [project] as something like a grammar of human intelligence. This is because I backed away (around two or three years ago) from starting from where I started – which was from a study of ancient philosophy. [It is hard to establish parallels using materials which appear to have no exemplars in other cultures. Which is one of the reasons this comparative and anthropological work has, so far at least, not been undertaken with any degree of seriousness].  Instead I decided to approach the question of how people used to think in antiquity on the basis of a phenomenological study. As if I didn’t know any of the things I already knew about the ancient world – both historical and prehistoric. [I.e., there are many obvious parallels between the culture phenomena of Greece, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levantine civilizations, but these are, as yet, largely un-anchored in an underlying substrate of what might be sophisticated patterns of thought.] 

This way of tackling the problem has turned out to be very successful. Unfortunately I’ve written very little down about this, beyond a couple of lists of phenomena which repay closer study because they illustrate the characteristic grammar of the human intelligence [if the scholar looks hard enough]. Essentially these lists form the backbone of the study – it was and is my intention to use these lists as the basis of the books structure.[There was a series of lists entitled 'Topics', added to over time. One of these has been posted - Topics 5. The point was not to assume that all of the post-Enlightenment constructs which we use to interpret the ancient world, and which are less than three hundred years old, are correct. I know what I have been taught, and know what the assumptions are. But I chose to proceed as if these constructs were invisible, for the purposes of separating the actual evidence from what might be convenient presumptions,  including ideological and political judgements]. 

I backed away from the original approach for a number of reasons – partly because it was a very technical approach – but mainly because I didn’t think that attempting to infer common ways of thought on the basis of philosophical writings was a good idea, despite the fact that there are lots of clues in ancient texts to support such inferences. Better I thought to establish a good case on the basis of all available evidence for patterns of thought in antiquity outside philosophical texts, and then show how these texts build on these patterns, since, to some extent at least, this is likely to be what actually happened. The technical apparatus then becomes the principal corroboration of the thesis, rather than the point of entry into the argument.

In effect I’ve established [a process for dealing with] the case[s] twice, from different points of view, which represents some kind of check on the use of the evidence to support the hypothesis. This is as important to me in developing this case as it is in making the case to a more casually interested reader. I’m not interested in creating a weak and scarcely wearable fiction. I want a more coherent armature for the evidence that we currently have, which does less violence to that evidence.

In many ways the book is no longer about ancient history, though that remains the place where I started, and the home of the question I wished to solve.

It is now (as a book) a phenomenological study of human culture, and more particularly of its various levels of articulation. Essentially it is about establishing a coherence and continuity in human cultural production. Not by cutting down the evidence to fit, but by looking for the levels which make this cultural production hang together.

Of course this means that the book is a 21st century stab at the “key to all mysteries” [in that it proceeds on the basis that there is the possibility that there is a coherence in the body of ancient thought, expressed in art, literature, poetry, liturgy and ritual, which we have missed. With the intention of establishing whether or not a coherence of that sort exists, or once existed in some form.] On that account alone the thesis of the argument will be dismissed by those for whom synthetic arguments are not possible. Where they are found they are ipso facto false (itself a synthetic proposition, which doesn’t seem to be an objection to those who hold such an opinion). However I don’t see that a coherence in the cultural production of the human mind is a priori not to be found, and I do not find it to be very scientific (if that is to be valued) to presume that it cannot be found because it is [simply assumed that it is] not there to be found. 

If anything, the case which the book will make is that there is a coherent synthetic argument which binds all the inconsistencies of human cultural production. [As well as arguments which render consistency in interpretation. In other words, we need to understand why things are apparently inconsistent, as much as those which appear to be consistent to us. That throws back the problem of interpretation on to the sometimes problematic nature of the paradigms, constructs, and mental processes of scholars from the Enlightenment onwards]. 

The key to the mysteries is not an intellectually satisfying single core of human genius, but, that none of it adds up to that – the key is that human cultural production is deeply contingent and consistent with nothing save its own context [both intellectually and in terms of expression], except when the phenomenon is examined for the signs of an underlying grammar – which may or may not be part of a body of intellectual ideas.

Is this structuralism? Certainly it is a form of structuralist analysis, but it isn’t the structuralism of Levi-Strauss – it is not connected with the architecture of human narrative, but rather all human constructs, in space and in time. And it certainly isn’t an attempt to bind together cultural production on the basis of similar content; rather the opposite – to find out how quite dissimilar things participate in the same underlying grammar of human understanding [I was thinking of Plato's discussion of the' Same and the Different' at this point, since it follows from Plato's ontology, as well as the ontologies of other cultures around the Mediterranean, that, if the experienced world actually resides in a place which is neither located in space or in time, the ontological model which is being employed is that of reality as a plenum].

I would not wish to give this kind of philosophical analysis a name of that kind. The argument is both analytic and synthetic, in that way that good historians proceed. Questions are asked, and data is ordered. And questions are then asked of the ordered data. That isn’t structuralism (at least not to me). 

[Those familiar with  the work of Husserl may recognise the process of bracketing in my description of the attempt to analyse evidence and data outside the paradigms which we normally use to understand the past]. It is the act of creating wearable fiction, as the poet Alastair Reid suggested recently, at a public lecture in the Playfair Library, in the University of Edinburgh. Or at least, more wearable fiction than those we are currently forced to wear. [Alastair Reid was a friend and associate of Robert Graves. I was particularly interested in what he had to say, because I once worked as a research assistant for the Robert Graves Trust in Oxford, and spent much time before and after that trying to come to grips with Graves' White Goddess, which is not an easy text. I wrote an analysis of the White Goddess Sigil (in 1999) which appears on the cover of the book. The sigil can be understood in terms of various parts of the text, and in terms of information which can be found in his Greek Myths]. 

A principal way in which this study differs from a modern historical approach is that it does not build on the assumption that economic forces dictate cultural production. Or even that economic forces shape men’s thoughts. Rather economic forces are seen as a level of constraint, defining a space in which cultural production is possible. The difference is that whereas historians tend to see economics as a cultural driver, I see them as a brake, principally on the human imagination. Once, as a student studying the career of the Gracchi, I expressed the view that I could not work out what was in the mind of the surviving Gracchi brother. The eminent historian in charge of the tutorial suggested ‘does it matter?’ Well yes it does, unless you think that what is in someone’s mind is of no account, and that the inner life of the mind is no more than a reflection of the economic pressures bearing down on the owner of that mind.

Which is not to say that the economic landscape is of no little account – just that it acts as both a facilitator and a brake on human action. What causes human action is more interesting than that, as we shall see. Understanding the phenomenology of human history and culture without taking account of the mind, and perhaps more particularly the human will, seems to me to be a very strange approach. An approach so strange in fact, that it may be possible to explain it only by reference to the same grammar of human thought which some historians purport not to need to know anything about.

Intentionality, Conjecture, and what is Holy

[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]

This was originally a suppressed chapter (to use the jargon) from The Sacred History of Being (2015). I removed it, together with some other chapters along the way, in order to focus the argument of the book more tightly. It looks at the role of intentionality in establishing commerce with the Divine, and the essentially phenomenological nature of how the Divine is both made and known by us. It draws parallels between the creation of gods in antiquity, and the setting up of saints in Heaven. Both represent instantiations of what is Holy.

***

It is unclear that the realm of the divine has reality. It is real, and at the same time it is not.  The only argument for the world of existence is that it is a poor copy of the divine world. And the divine world is uncertain. So how ‘real’ is the world of existence? What is the way out of this dilemma?

The answer is intentionality. The objective world is subject to change, as is the understanding of men. We cannot know the full properties of God, because, among other things, God is transcendent of human understanding. How can mortal man then understand the properties and nature of the divine, and how can the gods have a genuine involvement in the world? The answer arrived at, it would seem, is that the human understanding does not need to encompass the actual nature of the divine in order to have commerce with it. 

This is an exceptionally important point, since, beyond legitimizing commerce with the divine despite the definition of God as beyond human understanding, it also provides the intellectual basis for the creation of multiple gods. Essentially therefore the idea of isolating the properties of God, insofar as they can be understood, was understood to be a way of accessing the nature of these properties, and therefore to allow operations to take place, establishing a commerce between the divine and the world of change.

Intentionality explains why the ancients created a multiplicity of gods. If the divine itself cannot by definition be completely defined and understood, at least certain properties and attributes can be understood. These can therefore be defined and named as ways of accessing the divine. This does not at all conflict with the idea that the reality of the divine is in question. Instead this view argues that there is in fact a subjective component in the reality of the divine, at least insofar as it is possible for us to have commerce with it. That is to say, some aspects of the divine are accessible to the human mind. We cannot prove that it is real or that it exists in any sense, but despite this uncertainty, there are certain properties of the divine which are indisputable. Proof of the whole nature of the divine is unimportant, since this cannot, by the definition of the divine, be demonstrated.. We might then say that all connection with the divine therefore is an act of faith rather than certainty. The nature and power of the divine can be understood, defined, invoked and accessed by man.

Viewed in this way, we can see that each of the gods we encounter in ancient accounts represents a slice through the nature of divinity, so that one god has a special interest in one thing as opposed to another, a special set of characteristics or attributes, which more directly can be understood than an abstract and indefinable numinous concept of divinity. However the underlying numinous concept, in fact the objective numinous reality itself, requires to be real and present as the ground of being behind the multiplicity of gods. 

This explains the phenomenon of henotheism, found in ancient polytheism. Pharaoh, for example, as the incarnation of the the divine on earth, could ‘appear’ as himself, or could appear in any appropriate form of the divine. When smiting his enemies for example, he might appear as ‘Montu, in his great form.’ He might be depicted on a temple wall as Montu, rather than in the form of the king. It might also be the case that a divine pronouncement might involve the speaker moving successively from the voice and vocabulary associated with one god, to the mode of speech associated with another god, as appropriate. This has been found in Assyrian records, where someone recorded in a state of divine possession, speaks successively as the voice of different gods.

Considered in this way, the divine world is filled with a variety of gods. Some of these have been defined, and subsequently invoked. Other aspects of the underlying divine reality have not been defined or invoked, and remain as possibilities. In the world of existence, the divinities which have been defined were given representation in the form of images and statuary.

None of this should be taken to imply that polytheism initially arose from such a complex and philosophically subtle theory as this. We have much information about the growth of local pantheons in the near east, and the way in which local gods were absorbed into state pantheons, given increased importance over time, or diminished in importance, according to requirements. They would be given family relationships which they did not possess when they first arrived, and gain attributes and characteristics which they did not have when they were first born in the smaller urban centres. 

We cannot easily know to what extent there was an intellectual model behind the creation of polytheistic belief and worship from its first appearance in the archaeological and textual record. It is likely that much of what has been written about ancient polytheism from an anthropological perspective is probably correct, and valuable to our understanding. It is just that the account is incomplete from this limited perspective, and anthropologists have hardly ever seriously considered the possibility that some intellectual ideas might underpin the phenomenon as well.  

Those notionally equipped to explore this territory, the specialists in ancient philosophy and perhaps theologians, have had many reasons to stay out of this territory. For them, the possibility of the ancient presence of a sophisticated intellectual model, based on logical argument, is not something which can be easily entertained. This is something which belongs to the Greeks. Though the Greeks were polytheists, their polytheism antedates the beginnings of philosophy in the historical record, and therefore polytheism has no bearing on philosophy, or vice versa. Many writers on both Greek religion and philosophy have found this arrangement to be conveniently tidy and a boon to scholarship. But it is not the case.

Shortly before I began this work, Pope Benedict visited the UK in connection with the Beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman. When I read the details of the process of Beatification (essentially of making saints), I was struck by the resemblance between the idea of this in the Catholic Church, and the idea of setting up gods in antiquity (which will be explored in more detail later on).  The idea is that someone has to request (in ancient parlance this would be to ‘invoke’) the assistance of a person, now deceased, who showed especial virtues in life, and has to receive a response to this request which amounts to a miracle.

This is worth unpicking in detail, in order to understand the logic which is involved. It is not clear why someone would invoke someone less than the divine itself, if the divine is on offer, unless the virtues of a lesser being seem more appropriate. In other words, the prospective saint offers what looks like a channel which is more likely to be successful than the supplicant making a direct appeal to a God who is both difficult to define, and to know. 

The Catholic Church itself promotes the idea of sainthood, and unambiguously points at likely candidates. Newman has been one of those for quite sometime. Two miracles are required for the final elevation to sainthood. Why miracles? Because miracles are defined as things which cannot be accounted for in terms of earthly understanding. These may (in the extreme) be things which defy our understanding of physics, but ordinarily are occurrences such as unexpected remission from terminal illness, which ‘defies’ orthodox medical science. This was indeed the case for the supplicant who invoked the assistance of John Henry Newman.

The argument therefore runs as follows: Newman has special status in Heaven because an appeal for his assistance was answered. Because the assistance defied earthly understanding and expectation, the result was a miracle which otherwise could not have occurred. Therefore his status in Heaven is proved*[1]. Thus it is that the Catholic Church sets up saints on earth, and also in Heaven.

The Catholic Church is not based on polytheistic belief.  So it is rather surprising to find that it supports the idea that divine intervention can occur via the saints, rather than directly through the divine father, or his incarnation on earth.

The only significant difference between the Vatican’s idea of saints and the ancients idea of gods is that all of the saints are supposed to have lived human lives before being elevated to a divine status in Heaven. The ancients did not subject themselves to such an unreasonable constraint, and created gods who had never lived, and who could never have endured existence in the world. They could do this because they understood a formal and technical mechanics underpinning connection between the earthly world of existence, and divinity. The mechanics are still available to us in the records.   

It might be in order here to recap a little on the nature of the intellectual model of reality which underpins polytheistic belief, as we find it reflected in Greek texts, particularly those by Plato.

The most perfect entity it is possible for man to conceive is God. God is reality itself. The world of existence as understood by man is imperfect, and consists of imperfect representations of reality. The world of appearance as understood by man is subject to change and corruption, whereas the world of divine reality as conceived by man is eternal.

God is real. Existence is full of representations, more or less false, more or less true. Reality and existence are opposed. Man can apprehend that this is the case.

Since existence is suspended from reality, as a poor image of it, it is subject to change. Since man is an existent creature, man’s perception of reality is also subject to change. Both the nature of things which are existent, and man’s perception of these changeable things, are perpetually in flux.

Man cannot have full understanding of the nature of the divine, since, by definition, the divine transcends the world of sensible reality, and existence. It is in essence transcendental, and to the fullest extent.

However there are a number of ways in which the world of existence can access the divine reality. Several characteristic features of the divine remain in the sensible world, and retain their divine natures.  The connection does depend absolutely on the idea that the divine is complete, is total in its nature, is the ultimate limit of reality, and is the final end.  These things have analogues in the world of existence, and so there is a route of commerce open between the world of the divine and the world of existence.

Man has connection with the world of the divine through things and properties which are present in the world of existence which participate in the nature of the divine. These things include: completion, totality, the limit, the end, the perfection of a thing, a nature, a property, or an act, and so on. It also includes infinitive and superlative action, and also its extreme opposite, inaction. Greatness too, which we found to be an insufficient concept in the medieval version of an ontological argument concerning the divine, is also something which may open the way to the divine. The ancients also included ‘fame’ as one of the properties which connect man with the divine. We can explore the wide range of concepts and properties which can connect us with the divine along the way.  We shall find that justice, beauty, magnanimity, ethical and moral perfection, and honour, are also included in this list.

It is not necessary for us to have a complete understanding of the divine in order to access aspects of that higher reality. In fact a focus on particular characteristics, a ‘bracketing’ of the most relevant aspects of the divine, increases the efficacy of the commerce with the divine. Thus the intentionality of the supplicant is a factor in the opening of contact with the divine. There are other ideas associated with the strengthening of the connection with the divine which we shall explore. These include reduplication, the striking together of images and concepts, the collection or heaping up of things, especially where these result in reduplication of properties; the act of drawing near to the divine, or to the image of the divine, and so on. The deliberate opposition of ideas and images is also relevant to the business of establishing a commerce with the divine. For connection with the divine represents an alteration of state.

And to reiterate a key point, none of this proves the reality of God. It merely establishes a range of correspondences between a concept of God and a hypothetical Being who might or might not have reality. Instead, the entire intellectual system underpinning polytheism, at least in its later stages, was rooted in the paradoxical and transcendent notion of the divine, which necessarily defied human comprehension. So, there was no proof available, but within this world view, ‘proof’ conclusive to the human understanding would have demolished the entire edifice.

---

[1] It is proved by the fact that it could not ordinarily have happened. This is a tacit admission that what is real, what is possible, at the level of divine reality, may be entirely contrary to what we understand as possible in the world of existence. 

Questions and Answers

The Sacred History of Being addresses many questions. Some of these have been puzzles over the centuries. What follows is a list of fifty of these questions (some of which are framed as proposals for discussion), all of which are given some kind of answer in the course of the text. Other questions are discussed, including the strange description of the Great Year in relation to the life of man, in the famous conversation between Solon and Croesus, recounted by Herodotus.

There isn't much about my use of methodology in the course of SHB. It would have been a tedious way of starting the book, and instead I chose to write about the development of my understanding of certain problematic questions during my formative years, and some of my reading, as a way to introduce the main subjects I wanted to deal with. But there is a methodology present. The text is the result of the application of a Husserlian approach to the study of ancient history. This approach has been refined over the years, and is capable of producing rich results, as I think SHB shows. I intend to write more about this methodology at some other time.

Here is the list.

1. Is Plato writing literary fiction when he talks about the Forms? 

2. The history of philosophy is old, and was understood in the 2nd millennium B.C.E.

3. Are there philosophical ideas in Homer?

4. How did scholars schooled in philosophy not notice philosophical procedures in texts from the Ancient Near East in the 2nd millennium B.C.E.?

5. What was Homer joining together? Literature and poetry in the Late Bronze Age.

6. The undiscovered philosophical underpinnings of the liturgy of the New Year Festival in Babylon (Enuma Elish).

7. How is it that statues of the gods are themselves divine in the ancient world?

8. How can you make gods, and why?

9. The significance of the Undefined Dyad in ancient thought.

10. When is polytheism actually polytheism, and when is it monotheism?

11. Why is the Ontological Argument such a disaster for our understanding of ancient philosophy concerning the gods?

12. Why was philosophy demoted from its original status by German scholarship?

13. Can the nature of Reality be accommodated by an Aristotelian logical model?

14. How and why did Egypt lose its reputation for philosophy?

15. What is the meaning and purpose of the Assyrian Sacred Tree?

16. When scholars blink: Not seeing what there is to be seen.

17. What aspect of philosophy did Pythagoras learn at Babylon?

18. How the kings of ancient Assyria could be gods.

19. Philosophical analysis before Plato.

20. The most secret and sacred of rituals: the setting up of gods in Heaven.

21. How old is Jewish mysticism, and what is its origin?

22. What aspects of the Divine have existence on Earth?

23. Why is the home of the Mesopotamian god Ea at the bottom of the sea?

24. Why Assyrian kings on campaign wished to touch the ‘Upper and Lower Seas.’

25. Why ancient cultic life is not best understood as religion.

26. Is the origin of the world always with us?

27. What did the European Enlightenment leave behind?

28. How man was instructed by the first sages in the art and science of civilization, and what the story means.

29. How much fiction is there in our rational understanding of the past?

30. The myth of Progress, and the power of Abstraction.

31. What theory of reality is present and cultivated from the 2nd millennium B.C.E., and can be found in the Nag Hammadi codices?

32. Why the Assyrian Court valued scholarship and excellence.

33. What is the True light of the gods?

34. How old is Abstract Thought?

35. Ancient Cult practice and the pursuit of Knowledge.

36. The necessity of knowing the mind of God, and how it is known.

37.  What is the Doctrine of Wholes and Totalities?

38.  Is Reality One or Many?

39. How 'God' is different from the gods.  

40.  What is the nature of Reality?

41. The properties and attributes of the Divine.

42.  What is the complexion of the Dead?

43. Why are rivers divine in Mesopotamia?

44.  What is the significance of Ocean?

45. Can holiness be conferred and taken away?

46. Why does Marduk carry a woven basket?

47. The meaning of the Mesopotamian interest in lists.

48. What is the Paradox of Knowledge?

49. What is the Sweet Song of Swans?

50. What is esoteric knowledge?


Thomas Yaeger, 22 September 2015

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