Is a god, or any divine power, only a mirage of the human-made political structures that oppress us? This understanding of religion, popularized by 19th-century thinkers like Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim, has become received wisdom among the anthropologists and sociologists studying the origins and functions of religious life. We sense that we live under forces of authority that constrain us, and yet we cannot precisely locate or understand them. Needing to give some shape or form to this coercion, we project it onto the clouds, fashioning heavenly beings...Yet the existence of societies without chiefs or kings, or any vertical political organization, challenges this picture. In communities that traditionally recognized no rulers or government, from Tierra del Fuego to the Central Arctic to the Philippines, we still find complex concepts of celestial hierarchies, metahuman authorities, and bureaucracies of deities and spirits with no correspondence to the human social order. Where do these ideas come from, which reflect no living conditions on the ground?
The stories in the essay are also noteworthy, but the basic question is striking. It seems as if our sense of hierarchy doesn't reflect social or material conditions. It might still be materialist in its origin -- perhaps it represents an inherited sense of reality as played out in the DNA or genes of our evolved bodies. If so, it ought to be a pretty basic sort of inheritance given that it is expressed by all human societies; but if that is the case, why are the expressions also so different and varied? Why do some believe in a heavenly father, but others in mercenary spirits that have to be placated to avoid bad luck?
In a sense the question is allied to another question, that of whether our attempts to track back the Indo-European language's evolution can similarly let us reconstruct an earlier proto-religion among the peoples who spoke those languages. I think it's well known that Thor looks a lot like pagan deities both Celtic and Slavic, just as one can find common ur-roots for Celtic and Germanic and Slavic words. Our words continue to evolve all the time, so perhaps it is no surprise to find Tacitus saying that he thinks of Woden as being the Germanic sort of Mercury, whereas to another Woden looks more like Bacchus. Just as words slip and change in meaning, perhaps so too the ideas speakers have about the divine.
Even today, how we talk about these things follows the pattern described here:
If “power descends from heaven to earth,” Sahlins writes, “human political power is necessarily and quintessentially hubris, the appropriation of divinity in one form or another.” The charisma of politicians is always given by the gods, such as the mana handed down to legions of Melanesian chiefs. In his essay, Sahlins touches upon the interesting point that hubris, or overstepping the boundaries between the human and the divine, also underlies structures of class, with elites often seen as possessing or appropriating spirit-power. In turn, any emancipatory movement must mobilize the metahuman as “the necessary precedent of political action.”
Quite so. The Communists, who followed Marx's misunderstanding of all this, nevertheless ended up appointing "scientific materialism" to the role of explaining the necessary, unavoidable workings out of a dialectic embedded in humanity's material evolution -- what our own political left likes to call "the arc of history." Thus History, and Science, become the metahuman powers watching over our destiny and motivating us along towards it.
If the exercise of political power is always hubris, then the mythic forms says that the exercise of power is always punished. More, that this punishment is a matter of divine justice, a restoration of the proper relationship between the human and the divine. Certainly as a matter of empirical fact all such human political powers collapse and are brought low. Christianity speaks of Christ the King, who will come and exercise such power directly and properly as a divine figure for whom it is not hubris, the only sort of rule that could even be imagined to last forever.
19 comments:
I was reading a biblical scholar's explanation of the story of the tower of Babel the other day. I don't remember all the details, but as I recall, he explained that in ancient times God would at times take up residence on a mountain and call people up to Him. (It wasn't always the same mountain.)
Then, in Babel they built a ziggurat, a man-made mountain, thinking they would call God down to them.
Just read the article itself, and the book looks to be fascinating.
I'm not sure what the author means by "immanentist" here. E.g.: "With each axial turn came a host of intractable theological dilemmas; throughout the book, the immanentist perspective emerges as the most intuitive, as it escapes the perennial problem of theodicy—of why an infinitely benevolent Almighty would cause so much harm to mortals, or even get involved in their minutiae—that plagues transcendentalism."
There is no separate SEP article on immanentism, and the Free Dictionary only says:
"a belief that the Deity indwells and operates directly within the universe or nature."
However, that would seem to be most religion throughout most of time, if I understand it correctly. Then, would transcendalism mean something like a deistic view of God?
Great link, and I will reread. Good commentary on all of this by you. This is one of the longest standing areas of fascination for me. So let me just upload a few thoughts for other readers, and I am likely to want to write on this myself.
Indo-Europeans: If you use that term you have my attention for as long as you wish. They believed (oversimplified) in a Sky-god (you might recognise Deu-pater in Jupiter, Zeus, Romanian Domnezeu, etc) and an earth-mother. Usually a mother. Sometimes the earth would be another male, and the female would get water, weather, love, or interestingly, warfare goddesses. Lots of mounds and fires and underworlds to contemplate in those pantheons. Because the Semitic peoples share many of these features, especially Sky-God and Earth-Goddess, the idea grew up that "everyone" must believe such things, and that held strong through the Enlightenment and into the foundings of anthropology and sociology (ummm...Englishmen and Germans, mostly, see the connections here?) in the 1800s. More likely, there was a deeper religious connection between those neighboring peoples. You could make a case that the giants of early modern western popular intellectual thought - Rousseau, Voltaire, Spinoza, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and a dozen others - are merely variations on rebellion against God-as-Father, trying to draw his fangs. But as the experiences of exploration and colonization sunk in, we learned that gosh-darnit, the rest of the world doesn't really think that way. The A) animism of propitiating dangerous spirits and relatedly, B) ancestor worship, are much more dominant throughout the world. And as we still see traces of that in both Indo-European and Semitic peoples, even as they have moved on, we can guess that A) and B) are the real originals, however much both believing and unbelieving moderns want to think otherwise.
Also, check out CS Lewis's concept of The Tao.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H78Mr1L7TLc Also, an excellent book by Michael Ward on the topic. https://www.amazon.com/After-Humanity-Commentary-Lewis-Abolition/dp/1943243778
I think Lewis misses a few tricks here, however, one of the few places where I believe that. Still, even though The Abolition of Man is mostly about defending objective value, there is a great deal here that I did not notice for years after first reading.
Tom,
I thought everybody on the Right knew that word from WFB, who had the famous dictum: "Don't immanentize the eschaton!"
The word shares a root with 'imminent,' and roughly means 'of the here and now.' WFB was calling on those of his era not to conceive of themselves as being in the end times -- thus taking steps that would be understandable if the end of the world was really upon you, but reckless in the extreme if we have to live with the consequences. This was meant as a caution not only to religious people, but to those who believed in Communist or Socialist theories of necessary, inevitable revolutions. The Final Revolution that brings about a world without nations, gods, or heavens was also not upon us, and one shouldn't act as if it were.
So here you can see this as a movement of the conception of the divine further and further from the 'here and now.' The metahuman is the flower that I might cut to make into food, to whom I must apologize; the metahuman is not the flower, but a kind of elvish guardian spirit of the forest who looks over the flowers; the metahuman is not in the forest, but in a heaven looking down on all forests; the metahuman isn't anywhere, but just an imagination of the human mind we can safely ignore as a part of our irrational unconscious.
That's the basic idea.
AVI,
"This is one of the longest standing areas of fascination for me."
Also for me.
"You could make a case that the giants of early modern western popular intellectual thought - Rousseau, Voltaire, Spinoza, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and a dozen others - are merely variations on rebellion against God-as-Father, trying to draw his fangs."
Yes, and that is the last 'axial' movement I just described to Tom: well, no, it's all just irrational imaginings in our mind. We don't have to fear it; we shouldn't believe in it at all. Rational men wouldn't.
I'll watch the video on Lewis.
A few thoughts:
1) It's interesting to me that the professor (Preston Jones of John Brown University) omits Kant in his shift from the several ancient traditions to the several modern ones he considers (esp. Freud). Kant gives a rationalist account of the moral law that Lewis is talking about, which he thinks explains why you would have something like this 'Tao' (in Lewis' sense). Just as reason works the same way for all of us, so everyone from every culture can see that mathematical arguments and logical arguments follow, so too he thinks that our application of reason to practical problems of the world necessarily yields these very sets of truths that Lewis is talking about. We are moral because we are rational, and it is that reason -- which is the same for all of us -- that explains the universality of these moral judgments.
2) However, Kant's account of what it is and where it comes from is at odds with the discussion of the importance of 'chests' restraining the mind's decision to fall in love with itself and declare itself godlike. Kant is empirically wrong here, and Lewis right; but it would be hard to show that Kant is philosophically wrong and Lewis right, because philosophy is an exercise of reason. You'd end up competing on reason's ground, which is why Plato's account of the soul and Aristotle's end up asserting also that reason should rule both the appetite and the spirited ('chest'-like) factor, the thumos.
3) Indeed there is a problem with the idea that the solution to irrationality is not rationality, but intuition. The professor keeps returning to notions of 'how we should feel,' rather than 'how we should think' about these cases. But irrational emotion and intuitive emotion are both emotions, which unlike reason are not the same for all of us. Intuitions may have a semi-rational component, but they differ.
4) I love the excerpt from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, where it lists one of the key moral things a soul must confess as, "I did not pry." Along with the other ones, they shared my sense that "Mind your own business" was one of the key moral duties -- one that somewhere, somehow became lost to philosophy.
I thought everybody on the Right knew that word from WFB, who had the famous dictum: "Don't immanentize the eschaton!"
Well, my dad was a hippie and my unintentional movement from Romanticist hippie child to cynical middle-aged wingnut was based on a painful and lengthy series of experiences about each of which I concluded, "Well, that was dumb," instead of reading WFB or other such fare. So, I'm more of an experiential right-winger than a doctrinaire one, you might say, mugged by cheerful stupidity at irregular but frequent enough intervals to keep me moving dexterously over the decades.
If “power descends from heaven to earth,” Sahlins writes, “human political power is necessarily and quintessentially hubris, the appropriation of divinity in one form or another.”
That doesn't seem to be the Christian understanding. Although it was not His first choice, when the Israelites insisted on kings, God appointed kings, and at least King David was inspired to write Scripture. Religious power w/o God is hubris, but God did appoint and approve rulers in certain circumstances.
It's an interesting theme in ancient religion that many have a successful rebellion - e.g., Zues overthrows Chronos. In Jewish religion, though, the rebellion fails.
I meant, "political power w/o God is hubris", but it works w/ religious power w/o God as well, I suppose.
There may be a basic difference between the Semitic and Indo-European on this point, one that was only bridged after the conversion of the Roman Empire. "Hubris" is, after all, a Greek word; and the Greek gods may have been more jealous of their power given that there was more of an overlap between the human and the divine. Many half-gods are attested in their literature, like Heracles, and heroes could ascend to divinity on occasion. Thus, the gods had to fear a human revolution similar to their own against the Titans; and, thus, set Nemesis to policing human hubris.
The Jewish God describes himself as "jealous," but it's definitely not in the same sense. You may be right about the irritation provoked by the Tower of Babel, but as the book of Job points out, no man is even barely positioned to contest God as they conceived of God.
Indeed, it was not in the same sense- The roots of "jealous" are more positive than how we understand the word today.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/jealous
In a nutshell, Lewis believed that Reason led us to Truth, while Imagination led us to Meaning. I think substituting "Intuition" for that would not be far off.
A book I'm reading right now covers parts of this and so, instead of just bringing up a point here and there, I'll give it a recommendation and a brief summary so far (I'm only about halfway through) and leave it at that.
The book is The Religion of the Apostles: Orthodox Christianity in the First Century by Stephen De Young.
https://store.ancientfaith.com/the-religion-of-the-apostles/
He has an MA in Classical Philosophy and a PhD in Biblical Studies, and he's an Orthodox priest.
In brief, De Young uses a lot of textual analysis of both biblical and non-biblical ancient texts to reconstruct Second Temple Jewish religion (roughly 500 BC to AD 70) and to place the writings of the Apostles in the New Testament within that framework.
Some of his more interesting material reconstructs the Second Temple Jewish belief that already, before Christ's birth, held that there were at least two persons of God, one of whom was the "Word of the Lord," and that for them this explained how Scripture could both insist that seeing the face of God was deadly and yet also claim that God visited humans, e.g., Jacob wrestled with God. God's non-deadly appearance to humans was as "the Word of the Lord" (Debar Yahweh). John's gospel, then, used "Logos" as the translation for "Word of the Lord" and identified Jesus as a new appearance of God as "the Word of the Lord". Thus, John's Logos was part of arguing for a strong continuity between Jewish beliefs at the time and Jesus, that is, as Jesus for the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy and belief.
More relevant to this thread, in exploring Second Temple Jewish religion, he claims that the Jewish scriptures were in a form of dialog with the nearby Mesopotamian and Greek religions, and that much of what may seem baffling can be explained by looking at both sides of that dialog. E.g., the Nephilim / giants, the Sons of God who had children with human women, etc., he explains as Jewish descriptions of and responses to other religions surrounding them.
Part of this response was a recasting, so, e.g., in Mesopotamian and Greek religions, rebellious gods defeated the original gods, but in Jewish religion this rebellion failed because the Jewish God could not be defeated or replaced. Other nations' god kings and demi-gods were re-cast in the Jewish faith as fallen angels, demons, etc.
The book gets into a lot of other things in developing what so far seems a good description of Jewish belief and Christianity in the time of Jesus and the Apostles, but the above seemed the most relevant to the topic of this thread. (So far; again, I'm only halfway through.)
It is written for the layman, so it's written as an explanation, not as a monograph that argues a position. (Related to that, my one criticism so far is that I wish it had a better bibliography and footnotes, but it's not an academic book, so I can't complain too much.) He reads the original languages, explains various terms in the original languages as part of his explanation, and refers constantly to both biblical and non-biblical ancient texts, as well as recent scholarship that has challenged a lot of older established scholarship. He got his PhD in 2019, so he's fairly current.
Well, if he wants to challenge established scholarship he's going to need footnotes. It's difficult to evaluate an argument that is merely an assertion. Perhaps he's right, and has written the formal version elsewhere: perhaps his dissertation was about that. Do you know where it was published?
Which, by the way, if you want to read mine I published it through a free-to-access site as I do all my research and nonfiction writing. I think of the academic model as a kind of evil racket, so I always put my work out free to anyone who wants to read it.
It's here if you're interested. It isn't relevant to the current discussion, though; it's about honor.
Well, he's not challenging here; he refers to other scholars who have challenged earlier scholarship and uses their work. He's explaining for the layman, not arguing for the academic. He has some footnotes and a bibliography, but I wish he had more footnotes and a bigger bibliography.
I've heard his dissertation amusingly described on a podcast as something like "200 pages about 5 words." I believe this link is the right one:
https://clusterparishes.org/component/fileman/file/documents/Not%20Only%20for%20Our%20Sins%20but%20for%20the%20Whole%20World%20Disertation.pdf?routed=1&container=fileman-files
I'm downloading your dissertation and look forward to reading it.
I am a big proponent of Open Access publishing myself and also plan to make my dissertation freely available. Of course, I'll have to write it first. I hope to start that next year.
AVI, thanks for the video link. I'm watching it now. I enjoyed reading The Abolition of Man, though it's been maybe 15 years since then. I think I'll order the book.
I am woefully behind on reading Lewis.
If you’re going to read it, read it like a monograph: the introduction and the conclusion first. Actually I think the most important part is the appendix, which is the only part that I didn’t have to run by the committee.
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