A Tale of Two Gods

This is the Roman Empire by 138 C.E at the time of Emperor Hadrian. If you were to take away Britain, this was the size of the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus Christ and Augustus, who was the first Roman Emperor.

“Twice within a hundred years, on different shores of that cruel and beautiful Mediterranean Sea, a man was acclaimed son of god when alive and, more simply, god when dead. Octavius (Augustus), however, stood at the height of the Roman aristocracy, Jesus near the bottom of the Jewish peasantry.”—John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography

™“And the Angel said to her: ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name, God Saves (Jesus)…the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and of his kingdom there will be no end….for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”—Luke 1:31-35 and 2: 10-11

Jesus asked the Pharisees, “What do you think about the Messiah?  Whose son is he?”

“The Son of David,” came the reply.

Jesus replied with authority, “How is it, then, that David, speaking by the Spirit, calls him ‘Lord’? For surely David said “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.’”

If then David calls him ‘Lord,’ how can he be his son?–Matthew 22:41-46

In this brief article, I would like to show that two decades before Jesus was born (sometime near 4 B.C.E.), a man named Gaius Octavian, who was the adopted son of the deified Julius Caesar (d. 44 B.C.E.) was proclaimed by the Roman Senate to be divi filius, or “God’s Son.”  This was not a new claim; the cult of the ‘god-king’ is as old as ancient Mesopotamia (c. 4000 B.C.E.).  Most recently, Alexander the Great, who conquered the known world at the time of 331 B.C.E., proclaimed himself to be the divine son of Zeus.  This claim has always baffled historians and students, and there is still no consensus about what it meant precisely.  More than likely, it was a title conferred on those who accomplished what no ordinary mortal man could typically accomplish.  In Octavian’s case, he had liberated the Roman world from non-stop civil wars that erupted as far back at 89 B.C.E. in Rome that only stopped in 31 B.C.E. with his defeat of Marc Antony and Cleopatra.  This accomplishment was not only embedded in the collective Roman conscience, but in two important Roman sculptures: Augustus of Primaporta and the Ara Pacis Augustae.

Augustus was just another pagan tyrant, however, from the Jewish point of view.  Like the Greeks, Persians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Egyptians before them, Rome was just another foreign power occupying the land of the Chosen People; and there was only one God, and Augustus was not him.  But that this claim came first into the 1st century B.C.E./C.E. world and not Jesus’ is supremely important. Why?  Because if Augustus was already the divine manifestation of Jupiter, Apollo, Venus, or whoever on earth, then who needed another?  In this sculpture, Augustus is flanked on his right by a dolphin and Cupid, both of which symbolize his divine origins. Their presence also demonstrates Augustus’ belief that he is the descendant of the first Roman, Aeneas, who settled in Italy as the last Trojan refugee as far back as 1100 B.C.E. Virgil, who was Augustus’ court poet, penned the Aeneid c. 31-19 B.C.E.  which was a work of blatant and brilliant cultural propaganda. In it, Virgil traces Augustus’ lineage back to Aeneas, whose mother was Venus, and thus makes quite a statement about his patron. Cupid is the symbol of Venus’ power of love (which the Roman world desperately needed) whereas the dolphin stresses her physical origin Greek creation myth; she was the offspring of the castrated testicle of the sky god, Uranus, and the sea.  The title of Augustus (“revered one”) was conferred on Octavian by the Roman Senate in January of 27 B.C.E. after his false modest attempt to turn in his control of the Roman military and republican power of dictator.  Impressed, the old men of the Senate gave Octavian this sacred title. On a marble stele in Anatolia (Turkey), this is what was said of Augustus:

™“Providence has adorned our lives with the highest good: Augustus…and has in her goodness granted us and those who will come after us a Savior who has made war to cease.”

It is clear that Augustus was god-sent.  Attia, Augustus’ mother, also spread a story of the night the young Augustus was conceived: she was “visited” by the god Apollo, who came in the form of a serpent.  The dolphin may also symbolize the story of Apollo in an obscure Homeric Hymn where he transformed into a dolphin to recruit sailors for his sacred sanctuary at Delphi.  Furthermore, the connection to the pagan gods of ancient Greece and Rome continues on Augustus’ breastplate where he is receiving from a Parthian (Persian) a Roman legionary standard that had been previously captured in battle c. 53 B.C.E. while the sun god Apollo/Helios flies overhead in his chariot, blessing the encounter.

The Ara Pacis Augustae was a monument built in 19 B.C.E. to consecrate the Pax Romana, or the “Peace of Rome,” that Augustus ushered in after his victory over Antony in 31 B.C.E. It depicts the imperial family in procession to perform a sacrifice to the Roman gods, and perhaps to the genius or “manifestation/spirit” of Augustus, the ruler of Rome.  During his long reign and lifetime, Augustus himself was not directly worshiped (this begins later in Roman history), but instead, his genius was venerated and prayed to by the people he ruled.  The Ara Pacis has a rich sculptural program that conveys feelings of peace, plenty, and service, one of the sacred virtues (pietas) of the Roman people.  

What we have for Jesus is not quite as substantial.  We have the Dead Sea Scrolls found in the 20th century at Qumran; we have the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul and other early Christian authors (almost all of which are written 30-60 years after his crucifixion); we have a turncoat Jew named Josephus who mentions Jesus; we have other obscure references from early Roman authors like Tacitus, too.  The Jews were forbidden to carve any likeness of God, so we–understandably–do not have any images of Jesus; and we don’t need them. Augustus was the sacrosanct, divine (?) ruler of the unofficially dubbed Roman Empire (the Romans didn’t like talks of “kings”) who lived by the Roman creed found in Virgil’s Aeneid (written at the time of Augustus and for Augustus) Book 6: “Remember, Roman, to rule the people under law, to establish the way of peace, to battle down the haughty, to spare the meek. Our fine arts, these forever.” Any look at the Roman occupation of Israel during the 1st century B.C.E./C.E. will show you that Rome honored these words.

So how shall we understand the relationship between Jesus’ claims and Augustus’?  Well, first of all, it is important to understand that people at that time only began thinking on these two planes during Jesus’ public ministry (c. 27-30 C.E.)  Take, for example, the famous story of paying the imperial tax in Matthew’s Gospel, 22:15-21 where Jesus essentially says to those trying to ask if it is appropriate to pay the imperial tax, “Hey, you can’t fool me! I know you’re trying to trick me. You fools! Give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what is God’s.”  When the people heard Jesus say this, they were amazed, naturally, at his tactful evasion of his opponents snare. There is another layer to this, however.  Jesus was not concerned with aggressively defying Augustus and his future successors (the Roman emperors), he was interested in prioritizing.  These and other passages in scripture are dense with detail and allusions to Jewish hopes and expectations and Roman pressure, but suffice to say that the Jews expected a conquering hero like David or Solomon to come in and sweep the Romans out of the Holy City (Jerusalem).  Jesus did come to do this, but not in the way everyone expected; God’s way was not Rome’s way, as Jesus clearly demonstrated in the above passage.  Neither was God’s way Israel’s way; God was not going to fit into human expectations, but rather, he was going to create a new plan that would surprise everyone. The verse at the beginning of the article from Matthew 22:41-46 sums this up nicely: the Pharisees are asked whose son they think the Messiah is, to which they reply “David’s, of course” (see 2 Samuel 7:12-14 for why).  Jesus responds, “Aha! We’ve encountered a little problem here in the scripture you claim to know so well: if it is written here (see Psalm 110) that David calls God “Lord,” how can the promised king (Messiah) be David’s son, if David isn’t really the one who is in charge?  That was also Jesus’ sneaky way of telling his audience who he really was. It was perhaps more importantly Jesus’ way of saying, “Hey, you don’t have your priorities straight: a man like David (human-being) cannot fix your issues anymore: you need God himself. So stop idolizing David, because David is not the Lord and David could be just like Augustus. You’ve already had enough of those kinds of rulers. Look at your long history since Saul and David were anointed the first and second kings of Israel, respectively.”  Jesus’ listeners were absolutely stunned after this statement because they could not understand it; how could God come in the form of the expected “Son of David” yet actually be….God? The answers are all in the Story of Israel: look at Ezekiel 34:2-6, 11-12, and 14-16, for example.  In these verses, the 6th century B.C.E. prophet Ezekiel says that human shepherds have failed Israel, and that “I [God] myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out.” But no one truly understood what that looked like! They probably thought it looked like David or Augustus, even, but without all the pagan trappings and religion, of course.  This helps us later understand why Jesus did not fail in his ministry because he was killed; you only kill someone who is truly an absolute threat; you only label someone a sorcerer who is performing stunning miracles–and that’s precisely how Jesus’ enemies treated him.  Just look at Luke 19:42-44, as Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey on Palm Sunday, crying over Jerusalem and its people: “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace–but now it is hidden from your eyes….they will not leave one stone on another because you did not recognize when God was visiting you.” Jesus, not Augustus, was king of the world, but how could people choose Jesus, a non-violent leader over someone like David, a warrior who drove out Israel’s enemies and made them a kingdom?  Furthermore, how could people choose Jesus’ “Kingdom of Heaven,” in all is parabolic forms found in the Gospels, over the flesh and blood, daily reality of Roman occupation?  In the 1st century B.C.E./C.E., it is a tale of two gods. The rest, as they say, is history.

And for more of this, I would encourage all of you to read N.T. Wright’s Simply Jesus, a required book in the latter portion of my HUM 2270 (East/West Synthesis) class here at Saint Petersburg College, where we explore this in more detail.  Or just purchase the book and read it for yourself. I hope this brief article has piqued your interest in the subject of Rome and Christianity.

Tolkien: Allegory or Application?

 

Tolkien and His Religion

According to author Devin Brown, author of The Christian World of the Hobbit (2012), in 1953 at the age of 61 Tolkien wrote to a friend about how “deeply grateful he was for having been brought up in the Christian faith.” “A faith,” Tolkien concludes, “that has nourished me and taught me all the little that I know.”[1] Author Joseph Pearce said that for Tolkien, Christianity was not “an opinion to which one subscribed but a reality to which one submitted.”[2]  Further evidence that we are not far off from understanding the deep, spiritual, otherworldly, moving, transcendental feelings that we experience when reading Tolkien’s books is found again in Tolkien’s Letters, interviews, and in his good friend C.S. Lewis. “I am a Christian and of course what I write will be from that essential viewpoint,” Tolkien said during an interview with the American scholar Clyde Kilby.[3]  Friend and writer C.S. Lewis wrote an essay about Tolkien’s fiction called “The Dethronement of Power” and said: “Why, if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own?” Because, Lewis said, it allows us “to see them [the elements of the world] more clearly.”[4]  Finally, Lewis concluded that when we visit Tolkien’s mythic world of Middle-Earth, “we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.” So we are really experiencing a crisper, clearer vision of what’s right in front of us when we read truly good fiction.  The quotations above should encourage interested students and scholar to stop and understand that, for Tolkien, the possibility of the application of religious ideas to the ideas, characters, and themes found within The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is entirely acceptable. Furthermore, it is necessary for readers to understand that Tolkien, as he said himself, was writing from a Christian viewpoint, which means that it is entirely reasonable to expect that Christian readers in particular will be able to find some of Tolkien’s ideas applicable to Christianity and some of Christianity applicable to his writings. We do Tolkien a disservice when we dismiss this connection simply because we have an aversion in the post-modern world of the application of Christian ideas to anything.

Tolkien’s works “are fundamentally Christian,” plain and simple. They are not Christian allegories,” writes Brown.  But what is the difference between application and allegory?  Application is the reader’s tool not the author’s, first of all.  When a reader says, “Frodo resembles Jesus” or “Gandalf’s death in Moria and rebirth in Fangorn rsembles Jesus’ resurrection,” applications are being made by the reader, not by Tolkien—this is applicability.  The author has achieved what Lewis stated earlier about making the real world easier to understand by placing recognizable real world elements in a mythical world when he has made his characters or plot points resemble real-world individuals or events; but that doesn’t mean that the author intended a “this equals that” connection. And therein lays the definition of allegory. Some authors will come right out with it (like C.S. Lewis) and say, “Hey, this in the mythical world equals that in our real-world.” Allegory, then, lay in the hands of the author; we cannot say with conviction that an author meant or intended a “this” equals “that” equation unless they state it clearly (which many authors do in Introductions, besides).

The “basic operation” of allegory “is to start making connections” like Jesus’ parable of the Sower in Mark 4.  Allegories have nonsensical surface stories that are quick little anecdotes told to clarify a more difficult and subtle point (often called the subtext). But no one took the literal story of this imaginary farmer who went out to sow some seed one day seriously. In other words, no one said, “Hey! It’s my next door neighbor, the famous farmer!” Allegories point, or equal, something else.  To explain the psychology of the writing process is not within my ability, but suffice to say when anyone writes, it is almost impossible to separate oneself from one’s experiences or religious background if you have one.  So, if we are telling allegories we have the intention of saying this equals that, and allegory is in the authority of the author. We might as well just describe the thing we want it to equal if we are going to deal with allegories.

But if an author refrains from allegorical story-telling, then, the author must render something traditional and well-known in such an indistinguishable way as to make it look like, sound like, and feel like that “something” in the real-world but yet not.  Some authors, in other words, are better at concealing allegories than others; if an author cloaks or disguises something well enough, then it isn’t allegory and we cannot say he intended a “this” equals “that” conclusion.  The author can then cross his or her arms and say “Aha! So you think Sauron is Hitler and the War of the Ring is World War II, do you? Well, that’s one application, but not only what it is.”

Does Tolkien, then, admit to including allegories in his writings? Absolutely not. Tolkien strongly despised allegory and claimed that there “is no symbolism or conscious allegory in my story.”[5]  Well, he did say conscious, didn’t he?  Yes, then, we must suppose that it is possible for an author to unconsciously, or coincidentally, include some allegory in their works, but never with the intention, for example, to say “Sauron=Hitler,” as I mentioned above. Notice how defensive Tolkien is? That’s because he wants you to care about the specifics of what he’s writing and wants you to appreciate the merits of his story in its own context; if you just say, “oh, I figured it out,” then it’s a simple allegory that anyone can tell, and the fun is all over. But if it is a constant quest for the reader to pin the identity of something in the made-up story to something or someone in our world, then that is a well-hidden allegory indeed.

To conclude my point on allegory and application, C.S. Lewis said in his chapter “Second Meanings” from Reflections on the Psalms that “Apparently it is impossible for the wit of man to devise a narrative in which the wit of some other man cannot, and with some plausibility, find a hidden sense.”  Lewis, who was quoting Treebeard, one of Tolkien’s characters, said that we mustn’t be “hasty” in making “this equals that” statements about Tolkien’s stories because then we reduce a fantastical plot point or character to something we already know well and we shut ourselves out of discovering any other correlations–and that’s doing a disservice to ourselves as readers.  Lewis was right, however, to point out that it is nearly impossible for anyone to conceal a thing completely; sooner or later, a reader will begin making applications in the story trying to make sense of it.  But why do we need to have something in a fantasy world be like something or someone in our world? Lewis said above that it’s so that we can get a deeper appreciation of this “real world” we live in. Tolkien’s writings, then, have a universal appeal–not just to Christians.  There’s so much we can learn about ourselves and the world around us in his stories, but resist the temptation to make those “this equals that” connections because if you do, you will find what you’re looking for. Make your applications but resist asserting that you think the author meant “this equals that,” and you will find that you will see more clearly.

In conclusion of this section on Tolkien and Christianity, it is important to once again hear from Tolkien himself to hear what he had to say about his religion and his writings.  Tolkien wrote to his friend Father Murray, “I have purposely kept all allusions to the highest matters down to mere hints,” and that those hints are only perceptible to the “most attentive” of readers.[6]   Tolkien attests to concealing deeper meanings within the pages of his epics so that we can open our minds and embark on a quest to Middle-Earth and admits that we may find something familiar there after all; it’s almost as if he’s saying “good luck.”

Lewis and Tolkien often disagreed about the manner in which both men presented their Christian beliefs through writing, and in one particular correspondence, Lewis says, “Indeed, work whose Christianity is latent may do quite as much good and may reach some whom the more obvious religious work would scare away”[7]  Between these two letters, it is impossible now to argue that Tolkien excluded all references to Christ and his kingdom from his works. God is present but largely unseen almost as if Tolkien wanted prospective Christians to see Christianity in a different light and for dedicated Christians to discover a deeper love for their religion. But that’s just one part of the whole of Tolkien’s great epic. There is much more to be found than God within the pages of his books, but surely we should expect to find the imprint of the Creator somewhere while we read.

Jesus’ message was strange and demanding for 1^st century Jews and Gentiles and remains to be demanding for the modern world. Cloaking and concealing Christianity (and other parts of the Bible) as mythopoesis (this means “a story that has been made,” literally from the Greek) was genius; Tolkien took his writings quite seriously and did not doubt for a second that the stories he told coming out of Middle-Earth were simply different “versions” of stories that you and I already know so well.  In other words, Tolkien believed that the stories of the Thirteen Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain and the War of the Ring actually happened so that you would believe that the story of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the Diaspora, for example, actually happened. Aha!

Tolkien’s stories often resemble Judeo-Christian allegories but they cannot be so easily pinned down as such.  They also resemble Norse mythology, Beowulf, and Greco-Roman mythology. For the present, since I am teaching a few courses here at Saint Petersburg College that discusses the story of Israel, my present topic will help students better grasp the “real-life” stories we’re learning about in class, such as the story of the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem and the scattering of the Jews from their homeland and how that resembles the wanderings and suffering of Thorin and Co. in the Hobbit.

So there we have it.  We have discovered the difference between allegory and applicability and something of Tolkien’s genius methods in “hiding” his Judeo-Christian background in plain sight.  In the next part of the article, I will discuss how Thorin and Company—and their expulsion from the Lonely Mountain (Erebor)—resemble the ancient struggles of the Israelites as they contended with the might of the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires between 730-587 B.C.E. In this 143 year period, the Assyrian then Neo-Babylonian empires wiped out Ten of the Twelve Tribes of Israel (Assyria) and sacked, destroyed, and deported the Jews of the city of Jerusalem (Neo-Babylonia) to Babylon.

 

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[1]               Brown, Devin. The Christian World of the Hobbit. Chapter 1.  2012. Also see Tolkien’s Letters edited by Humphrey Carpenter page 172.

[2]               Brown, Chapter 1.

[3]               Brown, Chapter 1 quoting Kilby’s “Mythic and Christian Elements in Tolkien” 1974.

[4]               Brown, Chapter 1 quoting Lewis’s “The Dethronement of Power” in Zimbardo and Isaacs Understanding the Lord of the Rings, 2004.

[5]               Tolkien, Letters 262.

[6]               Tolkien, Letters, 201.

[7]               Lewis, Collected Letters, 502.

[8]               Jonah 4:11

[9]               Armstrong, Karen. The Great Transformation. 2006.  197.

[10]             Jeremiah 17:1, 4

[11]             Strauss, Ed. A Hobbit Devotional. 2012. An d Jeremiah 51:34

[12]             Micah 5:2, 4

The Great Transformation Part V: Ancient Greece

Introduction

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. ² Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”—Genesis 1:1-2

“Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all.”—Hesiod, Theogony

“Then the son from his ambush stretched forth his left hand and in his right took the great long sickle with jagged teeth, and swiftly lopped off his own father’s members and cast them away to fall behind him.—Hesiod, Theogony

“Tiamat made weighty her handiwork,
Evil she wrought against the gods her children.”—The Enuma Elish, Second Tablet

In this, the second decade of the 21^st century, most of us seeking spiritual knowledge are aware that most civilizations possess a cosmogony, or a “birth story,” and realize that we are no longer limited to Genesis.  It should already be apparent, however, that Genesis evokes peaceful imagery when one compares it to the Enuma Elish of Mesopotamia or Hesiod’s Theogony (see above); but our discussion of the Judeo-Christian religion(s) will come in the next article. For now, make note of the quotation from Hesiod above,for it is to the Theogony that we now turn.

Today, I will briefly cover a small handful of the orthopraxic (“right-practice”) religious rituals and stories of the ancient Greeks and then cover Socrates and Plato and their philosophies in more detail.  Readers may find that the philosophical notions set down by Plato will be especially influential on early Christian thought.  I will conclude the article with a brief overview of the conquests of Alexander the Great and the legacies he left behind for the world.

Ancient Greek “Religion”

Prometheus at right and Atlas at left

The ancient Greeks did not care very much for personal conviction. Hamartia, the Greek word for “missing the mark,” was often wielded as a verbal weapon by the tight-knit city-states and hurled at an individual who thought himself beyond reproach; this was especially potent if that individual believed that they knew what was best for everyone else. Another word, hubris, meant “excessive pride” and was also used to the same end. Already we see two features of Greek religion: cautiousness and humility.  We should say that these were the ideal features of Greek religion, and that the reason we see words like hamartia and hubris was due to the fact that not many Greeks exhibited those virtues. Like Iran, Israel, India, and China before it, Greece began with superstitious, highly ritualized beliefs and practices that gradually became more moralistic and refined. In the beginning of time, there was Chaos and Gaia; then these gods produced their own minor gods because they were estranged and could not associate.  Even the Greek birth story was marked by strife, and as we shall see, hamartia and hubris. In order to explain the common “what goes around comes around” phenomenon, the Greeks conceived of the Erinyes, or “Furies,” who haunted and hunted a transgressor who was tainted with miasma, the Greek conception of “sin.” Through Hesiod, a 7^th century shepherd and poet, the Greeks conceived the gods—literally and figuratively.  In his Theogony, which literally means “birth of the gods,” Hesiod tells one story about the titan Prometheus which is of particular importance, both then and now. Prometheus’ story also exhibits the two qualities of Greek religion above: cautiousness and humility–or at least the need for them! Prometheus’s story may have brought about the words hamartia and hubris, in fact.   In Prometheus, bringer of fire and food, mankind saw its greatest model for what to do and what not to do. Prometheus challenged the established order for—what he thought—the good of all mankind, but the Greeks taught that we need to be cautious and avoid “missing the mark,” which is exactly what Prometheus ended up doing.  Even here the Greeks were critical of their savior Prometheus: he stood like a sentinel with an outstretched hand to all Greeks who wanted to challenge the status quo in order to bring some new cosmic order. Prometheus had shown hamartia—he had “missed the mark” in stealing the best meat for men and then fire from Zeus.  Prometheus had set aside the meat from a sacrifice between the gods and men in the Golden Age (the first age of mankind) and gave Zeus the bones wrapped in fat.  This forced Zeus’ hand; he took away fire to make us suffer for Prometheus’ act of hubris. So Prometheus stole it back, and for that, he was chained to a pillar and suffered an eagle to peck out his liver every day so that every night it would regenerate only to bring about the same punishment the next day—eternally. Did Prometheus “miss the mark” or had he hit the bull’s-eye?  The Greeks were ambivalent about Prometheus and wary of any that followed in his footsteps. Do we play it safe and accept our lot that has been meted out by the gods or challenge them, the Greeks asked. The story of Prometheus helped the Greeks understand the nature of the gods and mankind and helped them understand the mysteries of the human experience.

Other significant Greek heroes suffered the same fate.  Look at Achilles, Homer’s anti-hero from his Iliad, who sought personal kleos, or “glory,” and set it above the survival of the community.  Achilles pouted in a tent for some time and refused to fight for his fellow countrymen because Agamemnon seized a young woman, which was Achilles’ prize of war.  This was hamartia and hubris. A Spartan poet named Tyrtaios, writing c. 600 B.C.E. wrote “This is excellence, this the finest possession of men….when a man stands firm and remains unmoved in the front rank and forgets all thought of disgraceful flight steeling his spirit and heart to endure and with words encourages the man standing next to him” (Armstrong, 171, emphasis my own).  Here we see a break with the egotism of the past and begin to see the Greeks thinking about the community. We saw this in China and India with Confucius and Buddha and their teachings about ren and nibbana; Confucius had taught that in order to enlarge oneself, we must enlarge others, and Buddha taught his students to cultivate their mind to find friendship and love for all living things.  The Greeks, Chinese, and Indians share only the shift from individual–>community in common; how they expressed it was an entirely different story.

The Greeks slowly began to externalize the suffering and tragedy that they suffered from their ancestors during the 6^th century B.C.E.  “Above all, tragedy put suffering on stage,” writes Armstrong of the playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—all close contemporaries living between 525 and 405 B.C.E.  She goes on to say the “Greeks firmly believed that the sharing of grief and tears created a valuable bond between people,” just as we had seen above with Tyrtaios’ poetry (Armstrong, 269). The Greeks will call the act of recreating suffering on stage mimesis, or “imitation,” and the release experienced after enduring this imitation catharsis, or “release/renewal.” Unlike the Buddhists who internalized their suffering and crafted it into love and compassion, the Greeks externalized their experiences through recreations in order to put the human-being on trial, in a sense.  How can we learn from our experiences? Why do we suffer? The Greeks accepted that life was suffering, and in that regard, they are aligned with Buddha’s First Noble Truth: all life is dukkha, or suffering.  The Greeks were more similar to prophet Isaiah: they saw the hand of god or the gods in the experiences of mortals and they accepted that there was a bequeathed law given by Yahweh or Zeus that to live was to learn to accept and cope with suffering. Yahweh punished the Northern Kingdom of Israel to show them that he was upset and wounded that after all he had done for them, they went back to worshiping false gods; god’s mouthpiece had been Isaiah for this. In Greece, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound and The Persians lamented the same loss of life for a easily remedied problem: “Zeus throned on high sternly chastises arrogant, boastful men,” wrote Aeschylus (Armstrong, 270).  Perhaps we’re witnessing that these civilizations were more alike after all. What we’re left with is a war-torn country seeking the best way to live with suffering. With the freedom to do as one pleases, how do the Greeks conceive a philosophy that allows them to embrace suffering as Confucius and Buddha had done in their countries?  In fact, Zoroaster, Isaiah, Confucius, and Buddha, the Axial Age philosophers we have already discussed, placed a high premium on correct behavior; doing was everything. Correct belief had gotten the Jews nowhere in the Northern Kingdom of Israel because in 722 B.C.E., their kingdom was destroyed despite the fact that they tried to worship Yahweh but failed and ended up worshiping false gods.  The Persians, Chinese, and Indians, too, understood that correct belief did not necessarily amount to correct action. Unfortunately, or somewhat differently, Plato reversed the Axial trend and placed his bets on correct belief rather than correct behavior, which had helped the others be a success.

Socrates and Plato

The Cave of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave from the Republic

After the Greco-Persian Wars (491-479 B.C.E.) had concluded, the Greeks experienced a brief but brilliant Golden Age in Athens.  Pericles funded the building of the great Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis and stabilized Athenian democracy, wandering philosophers known as the Sophists peddled their intellectual wares to enthusiastic students, and an “ugly man, with protruding lips” and “flat, upturned nose and a paunch” began to ask too many important questions around a very sensitive Athens (Armstrong, 305). The Athenians didn’t want to ask any more questions or philosophize about how they got to this peaceful golden age; they just wanted to enjoy it.  The problem was, Socrates would, and did, talk to anyone and everyone.  “During a military campaign, he once astonished his fellows hoplites by standing motionless all night long wrestling with an intellectual problem” (Armstrong 306).  Through the Dialectic Method, Socrates endeavored to expose false beliefs and presuppositions through rigorous, virtuous dialogue.  Socrates was not unlike his contemporary Confucius in China who constantly spoke about ren yet refused to define it.  Socrates constantly referred to “The Good” (Greek: agathos) and only spoke of it in parables to his fellow Athenians, who thought they knew what a “good” thing or person was.  Socrates was forced to commit suicide in 399 B.C.E. because of his controversial dialectic which estranged him from his fellow Athenians and this deeply affected his young student Plato, who would take over after his master’s death.

Plato inserted Socrates as a character in many of his treatises, “most memorably in the allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic” where Socrates envisioned a group of men who had been shackled their entire lives in a dark cave.  These men could not see the mouth of the cave wherein the light came through each day and thus could only see the shadows of things that passed by flitting across the cave wall which they faced.  This was how Plato devised his famous Theory of Forms in which he argued that we human-beings are living in a cave experiencing what we think are the originals but in actuality are cheap imitations of wonderful things like Love, Goodness, Beauty, and Courage (mainly abstract virtues).  Perhaps because these virtues were so abstract and were open to unique individual interpretations and definitions Plato imagined a world of Forms, or “originals” removed from our daily experiences but not unreachable.  The Forms were outside in the world of light whereas our “realities,” as we called them, were actually mere perceptions (the shadows) on the cave wallof the true realities we are meant to experience (Hey! Someone is holding out on us!).  Like Mahayana Buddhist Bodhisattva, who was an enlightened individual not unlike the Buddha himself who had achieved nibbana (“snuffing out” of desires) yet who stuck around to help the rest of us achieve nibbana, there were liberated men from Socrates and Plato’s cave that could help others, still in the cave, escape.  Socrates and Plato warned the men who were liberated, however, like Jesus would later on urge those who followed him, that you will now be misunderstood, mocked, and persecuted because of your enlightenment; those that do this to you are still in their caves chained and facing the wall (see Matthew 5:11 and Matthew 10:34).  In the end, Plato’s solution was this: “Either the stock of those who rightly and genuinely follow philosophy acquire political authority, or else the class who have political control be led by some dispensation of providence (highly unlikely, he is saying) to become real philosophers,” this world will not see an end to its troubles (Armstrong, 372-386).  Plato’s solution, in short, was to think really, really hard about such virtues as love, beauty, courage, and justice in order to experience them in our psyche, or “soul.”  Like Jesus’ Kingdom of Heaven, the Forms were “superior, numinous, and timeless” (Armstrong, 376).  There were other ideas of Plato’s, too.  Plato’s Laws took him “even further away from the Axial Age,” Armstrong writes, because his imaginary city in the Republic “was a theocracy”–an idea that would have appalled Zoroaster, Buddha, and Confucius, but perhaps not Isaiah, who argued that God was king and ruled through David and his descendants.  “Correct belief came first; ethical behavior only second. Orthodox theology was the essential prerequisite for morality…none of the Axial thinkers had placed any great emphasis on metaphysics’ (Armstrong, 386).  Plato asserted that it was through the mind and contemplation of the Forms that we would be able to experience them; to “know the good is to do the good,” his teacher Socrates once said in one of Plato’s smaller treatises.  Towards the end of Plato’s life, he neutered the old Greek religion that had put so much stock in the Olympian gods yet condemned Atheism, forbid prayers to the gods yet did not permit blasphemy against them, and vehemently pushed for the importance of justice within the city-state; Plato had completely intellectualized Greek religion and in so doing illustrates the shift from eastern, orthopraxic thought to western orthodoxic thought, from eastern philosophy to western–what will soon be–orthodox monotheism. Interestingly, however, we will see evidence of the influence of both eastern and western philosophy on Christianity; take James 2:17, for example: “In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead,” which seems to argue for a middle ground between the Axial Age teachings and Greek rationalism.  This is in line with modern thinking that Christianity was the fulfillment of all world philosophies; more on that later.

All of these Axial Age philosophers promised one thing: if you change your behavior and/or thinking you will genuinely improve the quality of others’ lives and experience a kind of personal transcendence that no one else (unless they do the same) will experience until they see the benefits of your “way,” whether that’s Greek rationalism or Confucianism. Subscribing to one of the Axial Age philosophies is like getting a backstage pass to get away from the crowds, it seems.   Zoroaster, Isaiah, Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, Plato, and later Jesus never promised a complete eradication of suffering—they promised a way through, not out. They encourage us to not abandon our fellow man or woman, which is ever so tempting for most.

In the wake of all of these religious transformations which began in the steppes of Iran c. 1200 B.C.E. and have continued to 360 B.C.E. in Athens, Greece, there will come a young man, born with prophecies of greatness surrounding him to avenge Greece’s near-defeat in the Greco-Persian Wars and to unite the entire known world–for better or for worse.

Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.E.)

Alexander the Great’s unique head tilt is a significant feature of Alexander iconography; it suggests, as most art historians believe, Alexander’s divinity which he introduced in 327 B.C.E. (see the article). Plutarch, a later historian of Alexander, tells us that he used to walk with this head tilt.

One day when a gleeful messenger interrupted Alexander in his study to bring news from abroad, the king replied by placing his hand on the man’s shoulder calmly, and smiling asked: “What can you possibly tell me that deserves such excitement, except perhaps that Homer has come back to life?”^[1] Alexander certainly possessed a sense of humor and had a way with words—he always did, especially among his soldiers.  Mary Renault, the great historical novelist of Alexander said that “Alexander, like his contemporaries, treated the Iliad as history; he probably delighted in visiting the reputed scenes of the heroes’ birth or exploits.”^[2]  For Alexander, there was no greater glory than chasing the shades of his ancestors Achilles and Herakles; Achilles on his mother’s side, Herakles on his father Philip’s.  But what were Alexander’s great achievements? For surely it is not because of his personality that we call him “great,” for here was a man who murdered his best friend, executed his generals without trials, burned the great Persian capital of Persepolis to the ground, and plundered many Indian cities.

Perhaps the most significant achievements of Alexander was the dissemination of the Greek language, called Koine (“Common”), the foundation of Alexandria, Egypt, and the building of roads that linked India and China’s commercial Silk Road with the Mediterranean’s sea routes. It was because of his great opening between east and west that Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Confucianism, and Greek rationalism were able to travel from their respective countries to foreign ones.  Alexander’s empire had a profound impact on the tiny, disheveled nation-state of Judah where some historians, such as the later Josephus (wrote during the 1^st century C.E.) believed he was shown the Old Testament and had it translated into Greek. Whether he ordered that directly or not, shortly after his death in 323 B.C.E. in Babylon, Hellenized (meaning to be made Greek) Jews began translating their Hebrew Old Testament into Greek, which would be called later the LXX or the Septuagint, “translated by 70.” Alexander even kept company with a Hindu brahmin named Calanus and probably met Buddhist monks in India between 328-326 B.C.E. “Alexander is still prayed in aid by fishermen in Greece, cursed as a ‘thief’ in Iran, and worshipped as a saint in the Coptic Church of Egypt.”^[3]  By other Iranians, Alexander was seen as a great man who incorporated them into his great army and culture through his conciliatory policy instituted toward the end of his life in 324 B.C.E. called homonoia, which means, in one sense, “being of like mind.” Though this latter policy has come under much scrutiny in 21^st century Alexander scholarship, it still is believable based on what we know of Alexander’s most times capricious yet some times sincere behavior.  That, and he instituted it in the last year (though he did not know that) of his reign after much controversy from 327 B.C.E. when he had not-so-subtly suggested he be worshiped as a god for his astounding accomplishments.  Actually, Alexander began a Persian practice in his Greco-Macedonian court called proskynesis, or “prostration/bowing,” where the supplicant came very low to the ground in a reverent position.  To the Persians, this was customary and was not at all associated with a notion of divinity, but to pious god-fearing Greeks, getting on the ground was only something you did for Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, and the rest of the Olympians. Here has been just a taste of the macrocosmic and microcosmic impacts that Alexander’s conquests had on the world, although we have yet to mention his greatest legacy, which was a posthumous one.

This is a map of Alexander’s empire. By 327 B.C.E., he had subdued all of this and believed he had conquered, and we must forgive their ignorance, the “entire known world,” which the Greeks called the Oikoumene. This is one of the largest empires the world has ever seen next to the later Roman and Mongol Empires. Unfortunately, as we will discuss in the next article, it dissolved after his death in 323 B.C.E. when he died in Babylon of a “fever.” His last words were “Hoti to kratisto”–”To the Strongest.”

Many historians have vehemently argued how Alexander’s conquests paved the way for the dissemination of the initially Jewish sect Christianity:

“It was this Hellenistic world that the Romans were to conquer between the late-third century and mid-first century B.C.E., and it was within the Hellenized eastern Roman Empire that Christianity was first to emerge.  St. Paul, a Hellenized Jew possessing Roman citizenship, came from Tarsus in Cilicia, not all that far from the site of the second of Alexander’s three major set-piece battles.”^[4] 

Alexander, at left, charges Darius III, Shahanshah (“King of Kings”) of Persia at right, who is fleeing. Alexander wears on his breastplate the apotropaic (Greek for “to ward off fear”) image of Medusa and is charging on his famous horse Bucephalus. This image is a mosaic and was made after his death. According to one historian, Alexander actually endured a stab wound to the thigh from Darius III in monomachia (“single-combat”), even though this image depicts the king fleeing in his chariot. Hmmm.

Indeed, the Battle of Issus was fought in 333 B.C.E. just to the southeast of Paul’s future city Tarsus, which because of Alexander was Hellenized.  The universal Greek language and the new translation of the Old Testament into Koine Greek permitted the rapid dissemination of Christianity, which was considered at first by the Romans a branch of Judaism.  Judaism was seen by the Romans as a religio licita, or “protected religion,” because of an alliance struck between 2^nd century (c. 167 B.C.E.) Jews and Romans made to oust the Greek successors of Alexander the Great who had settled in Israel after Alexander’s death.  Christianity is the subject of the next and last article in this Great Transformation series, so we will conclude here.  What happened between these great civilizations that we have discussed in the wake of Alexander’s conquests, and what in particular happened between the time of Alexander and Jesus in Israel? These are the questions that we will turn to next week.

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[1]                Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great, 2004,   67.

[2]               Mary Renault, The Nature of Alexander, 1979, 159.

[3]               Cartledge, 9.

[4]                Paul Cartledge, Alexander the Great: A Hunt for a New Past, 2005, 45.

The Great Transformation Part IV: China and India in the 6th Century B.C.E.

Editor’s Note: Today’s article deals with 6^th century China and India and Confucius and Buddha. I will discuss the great religious concept found within each prophet’s teachings and show how they are similar, when possible. At the end of the article, I foreshadow a little bit giving readers a taste of things to come in the next two—and final—articles on the Great Transformation series. 

This series has focused on an era called the “Axial Age” (roughly 900-200 B.C.E.) where a great deal of religious and ethical transformations took place around the world, sometimes contemporaneously. The series will conclude with a discussion of how these religious movements around the world, which are considerably smaller than the three monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, influenced these later monotheisms. I will only be discussing how the Axial Age religious movements (such as Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Greek Rationalism) influenced Judaism and Christianity, as they are closely linked with the Axial Age movements more than Islam, which is not revealed until 612 C.E. by Prophet Muhammad in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. I feel that Islam is detached and belongs to a different era of the world than those being presently discussed, and Islam will be covered at a later time and given the treatment it deserves.

Confucius

This “Oracle Bone,” as they are called, was used extensively during the Shang Dynasty (1700-1000 B.C.E.) to predict the outcome of battles, the weather, and even toothaches. This is how the Chinese performed “Li” or ritual, before Confucius came along and made it all about how an individual behaved–not what they believed or predicted would happen. Courtesy of Pearson Education.

“Behave away from home as though you were in the presence of an important guest,” said Confucius.[1]  When asked to define ren, which was his principle teaching, he refused to.  Some Chinese philosophers living later would attempt to define it, but he did not.  “In Chinese script, ren had two components: first, a simple ideogram of a human-being—the self; and second, two horizontal strokes, indicating human relations.”[2] Confucius lived during a time during the Zhou Dynasty (began c. 1045 B.C.E.) when it was beset on all sides by rival states.  Early Zhou China was vehemently ritualistic and ruled by a king who possessed the daode, or the “Power of the Way,” which tethered him to the cosmos.  Crops, weather, politics, and more were controlled by one man whose sole job was to find the will of the sky god Di and carry it out on earth without fail.  During different seasons, the king would wear different colored clothing, eat certain types of food, and ride different colored horses for the sole purpose of ensuring the proper length and magnitude of the seasons.  Li, or ritual, was the king’s responsibility alone.  As things got increasingly worse in China, the king’s influence waned.  By the 6^th century B.C.E., a man named Confucius would change the way people behaved and would encourage a strong sense of responsibility in all his students.  One of the ways he did this was by redefining Li.

“A reformed ritualism, which cut the old obsession with status and preeminence, could make the whole of China a humane place”; this was Confucius’ main goal. (Armstrong 246). In Confucius’ small circle of junzi, or “noblemen,” (and it wasn’t birth that made them noble) li “taught people to deal with others as equals” (Armstrong, 246).  Confucius’ teachings were interpersonal and were meant to be shared with others in order to maximize one’s potential as a human-being.  Shu, or “compassion/consideration” was another of Confucius’ very important teachings; some historians have called this Confucius’ Golden Rule.  The Analects have Confucius say, “Perhaps this is the saying about shu: Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you” (Armstrong, 247). Confucius taught that in order to make ourselves better, we must first make others feel better; putting this into context during one of the most belligerent eras in Chinese history makes his teachings that much more poignant. Confucius removed the ritualistic violence from the Shang and early Zhou dynasties (see the image) and shifted the focus from what you believed to how you behaved. To counteract the petty violence raging around him, he encouraged his students to abandon the old rituals that relied on the sky god and the daode of the Zhou King and challenged them to consider that they, too, could influence the events and people around them. It was no longer just the Zhou king and his manipulation of the daode that could alter the course of events, but the noble individual who sought to exhibit ren, a profound sense of compassion and equanimity. This teaching would reverberate with  one of Confucius’ contemporaries in India: Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha.

Buddha

These pillars were built by the great King Ashoka c. 250 B.C.E., about 250 years after Buddha died. Ashoka was the first to make Buddhism the official religion of India and elevated it above all other philosophies. Sometimes the Buddha is called “The Lion,” and his teachings are often referred to as “The Lion’s Roar. Courtesy of Pearson Education.

 “In just the same way, monks, my teachings are like a raft, to be used to cross the river and not to be held on to” (Armstrong 339).  Siddhartha was a prince who lived in his father’s palace until the age of 29 when he experienced the Four Sights; an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a wise man; this last sight motivated Siddhartha to abandon his princely life and embark on a quest for enlightenment.  India, like China, was experiencing a great deal of change during the 6^th century; life was becoming increasingly mobile, social divisions were widening, and individuals were disillusioned with the old Vedic rituals of animal sacrifice and incantations.  Buddha said later “I am preaching a cure for these unhappy conditions here and now, so always remember what I have not explained to you and the reason I have refused to explain it” (Armstrong, 339). This sounds very similar to Confucius refusal to define ren in China at the same time, and anticipates Jesus’ famous saying 500 years later “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear” (Mark 3:9).  These prophets understood that not everyone would be enamored with their teachings, and that only those who did the seeking would understand ren, nibbana, and the Kingdom of Heaven. What is nibbana, and what did Buddha teach his disciples?

Nibbana, or nirvana as it is known to students in the West, literally means “snuffed out,” like the light of a candle.  This may refer to the individual’s ego which has been extinguished in cultivating the Eightfold Path (right thinking, right action, right speech, right understanding, and other teachings) and the appamana, or “Immeasurables,” or it may refer to the snuffing out of tanha, or “desire.” The appamana, is, by the way, a four-step program that first encourages the adherent to cultivate an attitude inclined to friendship for everything and everybody, then to cultivate compassion for the suffering of nature, then a “sympathetic joy” that delighted in the happiness of others, then finally to working out a feeling of complete balance and control towards others (Armstrong 332).  By following these steps and cultivating the Eightfold Path, Buddha’s students worked toward “snuffing out” their material, selfish, egotistical selves so that they could learn to help others.  This was very much in line with Confucius’ beliefs about the usefulness of ren and shu within the family unit and beyond, even though Buddha would have argued for the abandonment of family.  Confucius and Buddha were both, however, equally concerned with increasing the usefulness of their students for others without the expected gainful return that most people demanded when performing a good deed.

This also anticipates Jesus’ teachings five centuries later.  Jesus’ frequent use of hyperbole startled people then and now, but we miss the point if all we focus on is the supposed absurdness of his commandments: “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:33-35).  What about the ever misunderstood Matthew 10:34 proclamation: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household” (Jesus was quoting Micah 7:6). Jesus did not bring a violent message but a divisive one; he knew that some would see the merit in his words and others would not.  Jesus’s teachings, like Confucius and Buddha’s, were unpopular because they challenged the established norms of their respective time periods and were misunderstood because people were looking for the wrong kinds of solutions. In China, princes competed for control over the entirety of the Chinese states, in India, princes vied for military command and raided their neighbors while still maintaining the belief that they acted for the benefit of others, and in Israel later in the 1st century, priests and teachers wanted a military solution for a deeply spiritual problem.  The radical expectations of Confucius and Buddha were not popular during the 6^th century; both movements do not become preeminent in their respective civilizations until the 3^rd century  B.C.E. and even until the 1^st century C.E., alongside Christianity.

All three of these movements will spread rapidly because of the Chinese Silk Road and its connection with the roads of the Hellenistic Empire that Alexander the Great will create during the 4^th century B.C.E, right in between the founding of these movements and their ascension during the Christian era.  In the next article, I will discuss Socrates and Plato and their philosophies during the 5^th and 4^th centuries in Greece and Alexander the Great’s conquests and achievements.   When that is finished, I will conclude this series on the Great Transformation with an article tying all of these movements up and showing how they all evolved and traveled along the empire that Alexander created and even influence later movements such as Christianity. Above everything else, however, let us look on in awe at a significant period of religious upheaval in the ancient world and wonder what we can learn from the lessons of our collective human past.

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[1]               Armstrong, 248.

[2]               Armstrong, 248.

The Great Transformation Part III: India

Torso of a “priest-king” or “raja” from 2000-1900 B.C.E., Karachi, Pakistan

 

The Sanskrit Aryans

Historians postulate that between 4500-1600 B.C.E. a nomadic people called the Aryans lived in the southern steppes of Russia.  Little by little, some of the smaller tribes within the greater tribe of Aryans, meaning “noble” or “honorable,” migrated west toward Greece, Scandinavia, Italy, and Germany, later giving rise to those well-known civilizations.  “Because they spoke a language that would form the basis of several Asiatic and European tongues, they are also called Indo-Europeans,” writes Armstrong.[1]  The tribes that stayed behind on the steppes settled in Iran (Persia), whose religion was discussed in Part I, and India, which is our present topic.  The horse was not yet domesticated and the Aryans were not a visual people; they left behind no temples or artifacts.  Dyaus Pitr was their chief god and the creator of the world but this and other gods submitted to the “divine order” of the universe, so they were not all-powerful.  The ancient Egyptians, Persians, Indians, and Chinese shared this concept of “divine order.” Maat, Asha, Rita, and Dao (or the Daode=”Power of the King”) were religious concepts roughly translated as “order” or “truth” and it was maintaining this order that was chiefly important to the ancients. For the Sanskrit speaking Aryans who settled into India, rita meant loyalty, truth, order, and respect which was “embodied by Varuna, the guardian of order, and Mithra, his assistant.”[2]  The spoken word was sacred India, not the written word.  Agni, god of fire, also grew in importance; the Greeks will venerate fire, too, in their ancient cosmologies (“descriptions of the universe”) via the figure of Prometheus (more on that later). The Aryans had a very intriguing cosmogony (“birth story of the universe”): the universe originated as a result of a simultaneous triple sacrifice of a Plant, a Man, and a Bull, which brought forth vegetation, mankind, and animals respectively. Animal—not human—sacrifice will be an important part of the early Vedic traditions in India because it mimicked the act of the creation of the world.

India also has two of the oldest religious movements in the world, which I will restrain from calling Hinduism and Buddhism until we can properly do so.  These ideas are far-reaching, as we shall see, and they do influence other religious movements around the world.  Today’s article, then, covers a lot of ground and looks at the great transformation in India and looks forward to how these religious traditions influence contemporary and later religious traditions around the world.

The Invasion of India and Atman and Brahman

The Sanskrit speaking Aryans invaded the lands of the Punjab, also called Sapta-Sindhu, or “Land of the Seven Rivers,” c. 2000 B.C.E. and began to yoke (yoga originally meant “yoking”) their horses to chariots to compete with rival rajas (“tribal leaders”).  The cult of Varuna was declining and the god Indra, dragon-slayer and lightning-bolt wielding god became the people’s choice.  Around this time we see the Rig Veda (“Knowledge in Verse”) develop as the most “prestigious portion of the Vedic scriptures,” composed itself of 1,028 hymns divided into 10 books.[3]  Because the spoken word was valued in India, these texts were shruti, or “that which is heard” by select seers called rishis; these men did not invent the Vedas, they existed in the sounds of the universe.  Human speech was part of rita, or the divine order, and when the sacred text was read aloud or discussed, human-beings felt lifted out of their mundane experiences. Read the opening of the Rig Veda dedicated to Agni, the fire god:  “To thee, dispeller of the night, O Agni, day by day with prayer, Bringing thee reverence, we come Ruler of sacrifices, guard of Law eternal, radiant One, Increasing in thine own abode. Be to us easy of approach, even as a father to his son.”[4]  “The sacrifice reenacted, in a heightened, ceremonial setting, the glory and terror of the Aryan heroic code,” which the early Vedic peoples valued dearly because the sacrifice reminded them of how fleeting their lives could be on the plains.[5]  Fire symbolized the Vedic (meaning the Aryans who settled in India at this time) warrior’s code of ethics and fire was conceived of as his “best and deepest self” which they called atman. At this same time, the Vedic people also declared “Thou, O King, art brahman!”[6]  Brahman was not a god but the cosmic reality—it was bigger, deeper, and yet easier to understand than gods like Indra.  It could never be defined or described but it could always be experienced; this will preoccupy the Indians down until Siddhartha Gautama called the Buddha’s time c. 500 B.C.E. The rishis often participated in something called the brahmodya which was a competition held to find a “verbal formula that expressed the mystery of the brahman.”[7] Like in Socrates’ Greece later during the 6^th century, the Indians first understood the value of reverent, reflective, profound silence about what we think we know.

Internalizing the Sacred

Between 900 and 800 B.C.E., the Vedic people slowly began to internalize their experience of the sacred rather than externalize it through animal sacrifice and fire rituals (even though this still continued in some areas).  It had to do with violence on the steppes and between leaders, just as it had been with Zoroaster in 1200 B.C.E. in Iran.  Like in Iran, these anonymous pioneers of the internal sacred cultivated ahimsa (like Zoroaster had preached asha) which should be understood as “harmlessness”; later, when we discuss Buddhism, this was an indispensable concept.  To eliminate the violent death of animals and humans in sacrifice or in war, the religious pioneers of India bravely stated that an individual who wanted to experience the divine had to die unto himself by “becoming the sacrifice.” This was based on their understanding of the story of the creator god mentioned in the Rig Veda called Prajapati, who once held a competition with Death in the usual aggressive, competitive, Aryan manner; but something different happened this time.  Prajapati swallowed Death whole and declared that there was now no Death; Prajapati declared that Death has become my atman. Armstrong says that these new ritualists “were directing attention away from the external world and into the interior realm by making Death a part of himself…he did not need to fear [Death] anymore.”[8]  The old ways of antiquity were changing in India, just as they had in Iran and in Israel.

Interlude

This is the point of Armstrong’s book: all of the great religious traditions from Iran, Israel, India, China, and Greece began with the magical, superstitious, externally ritualistic and gradually transformed into ethical and behavioral philosophies and religions.  At the end of this five-part series, I will summarize the transformation that took place in each of these five geographical regions.  These initial articles are designed to show the antiquated parts of these religious traditions and their turning points.  For example, we talked about asha in Iran and the Suffering Servant in Israel, and now rita, atman, and brahman of India. These concepts and ideas transform gradually into principled, ethical, and behavioral religions and philosophies such as Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Buddhism.  That does not mean that the older parts of these religious traditions are the kinds of beliefs we should look down on. I want to show the beginnings of each of these traditions precisely because the ideas found in their respective antiquities form their later cohesive religions and communities.

Casting Off Society

By 700 B.C.E., some individuals were becoming tired of the world and its evils and donned the yellow robes of the samnyasins to embark on spiritual quests.  They lived holy lives dedicated to understanding the mysteries of the Vedas and perfecting the practice of yogic exercises such as meditation, concentration of a single point, and breathing exercises, as well as tapas, or exercises meant to test one’s endurance of extreme heat and cold.  This movement will strongly influence the followers of Buddha later in the 6^th century.

The Upanishads

Religion in India “came of age in the scriptures known as the Upanishads, also called the Vedanta or the ‘end of the Vedas.’”[9]  The Upanishads literally mean “to sit down near to,” telling us something of how these scriptures were disseminated.  The religious pioneers of the 7^th century B.C.E. were even more concerned now with a peaceful conquest of the inner man than any that had come before.  Here we see the religion of Hinduism developing in the minds of the sages of the Upanishads who were mainly interested in knowing one’s atman in relation to the brahman. They came to the conclusion that our atman is indeed identical withthe brahman! Self-discovery would mean a discovery of our hitherto “hidden” selves tucked away within brahman, waiting for us to come and find it. Walter Wangerin Jr., a Christian author has summarized this nicely in his book The Orphean Passages:

“In order to comprehend the experience one is living in, he must, by imagination and by intellect, be lifted out of it.  He must be given to see it whole; but since he can never wholly gaze upon this own life while he lives it, he gazes upon the life that, in symbol, comprehends his own…myth presents, myth is, such a symbol, shorn and unadorned, refined and true.  And when one who gazes upon that myth suddenly, in dreadful recognition, cries out ‘There I am! That is me!’ then the marvelous translation has occurred:  he is lifted out of himself to see himself wholly”.^[10]

 

Socrates and Plato will discover this in the Republic during the 4^th century B.C.E. in Greece through the Allegory of the Cave (more on this later).  It’s as if someone is holding out on us. Our true selves have been hidden from our daily mundane existence but are awaiting us to hearken to the spiritual quest which calls us.  Those moments when we just “get it” is what myth, religion, and philosophy attempt to help us arrive at, but we struggle (usually) because of logic, ignorance, and sheer laziness.  Back to India.

“This self [atman] is the brahman, that is the teaching. That you are!” These “apparently unrelated insights” are typical of the Indian sages during the 7^th century B.C.E.[11]  We’re playing hide and seek, he seems to say, with our atman and brahman. This is the brahmodya competition I introduced earlier in the article; like the later Socratic (Dialectic) Method, its intention is to help us arrive at a moment of profound ignorance of ourselves—we do not know what we thought we knew.  “You can’t see the Seer who does the seeing, you can’t hear the Hearer who does the hearing; you can’t think with the Thinker who does the thinking; and you can’t perceive the Perceiver who does the perceiving. The Self within the All [brahman] is this atman of yours.”[12]  Do not believe, the sage says, that you can understand the brahman, but, he says, you can experience it. In fact, in order to truly enjoy all life has to offer, we must embark on this inner spiritual quest to discover that our atman is actually the brahman. In other words, we are better than we think ourselves to be; this daily experience we call life–there is much, much more to it than meets the eye.  Our atman’s true form is the brahman. That does not mean that we are gods or even god-like. It seems to mean that there is, as I’ve already pointed out, a fuller version of ourselves that we can experience through seeking it out. If you’ve heard the saying “Life’s about the journey not the destination,” then it should make more sense.  Discovering that true self of ours is not an item or something we “get.” It is in the discovering–the gradual and continuing process of the word “discover”–where we will discover our true selves.  Nothing is as it seems. The prophet Jeremiah put it like this for discovering YHWH (God): “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13). Hmmm.

Conclusion and Looking Forward

In the next article, I will discuss ancient China in the same way as I have done Iran, Israel, and India. At the end of this main five-part series, as I’ve said, I will conclude with a summary of how each of these civilization’s older religious traditions transformed into the philosophies and religions we know them as today, and how some of them influenced the next great world religion in history: Christianity. Once we’ve finished with Armstrong’s book and that conclusion, I will begin to cover N.T. Wright’s books Simply Jesus and How God Became King, recently published in 2011 and 2012 respectively on the subject of Jesus, Judaism, and Christianity.  I hope that covering these religious traditions in Armstrong’s book will not only help students and other interested readers understand them and appreciate them for their own beautiful merits, but also see if any of their ideas influenced later religious movements such as Christianity.

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[1]               Armstrong,  3.

[2]               Armstrong, 5.

[3]               Armstrong, 17.

[4]               Consulted Sacred-Texts.com

[5]               Armstrong, 22.

[6]               Armstrong, 26.

[7]               Armstrong, 28.

[8]               Armstrong, 94.

[9]               Armstrong, 147.

[10]             Wangerin, Walter.  The Orphean Passages.  (Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 1986).  14-15.

[11]             Armstrong, 149.

[12]             Armstrong, 153 quoting the Upanishads.

The Great Transformation Part II: Israel

From c. 700 B.C.E., Ninevh, Assyria; After repeated forays against the Assyrian Empire, the Northern Kingdom, at that time called Israel, fell to the Assyrian armies in 722 B.C.E.; 10 of the 12 Tribes of Israel were destroyed and scattered. Prophets Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah were the prophets who repeatedly warned the kings of the Northern Kingdom to stop picking a fight with Assyria and to turn and worship YHWH (God) exclusively; it seems that they didn’t listen.
Image from Pearson Education

Israel: The Prophet Isaiah, c. 700 BCE

Editor’s Note: I will be developing this series past the original five-part series. Please be advised that we may see 6 and a 7th which serves as a conclusion.

During the 6^th century B.C.E. a series of poems about a Suffering Servant were written under the name of the 8th century BCE prophet Isaiah.  Chapters 42, 49, 52, and 53 describe a miserable individual? nation? that will bring about renewal to the divided kingdoms of the once united Israel through his gruesome suffering and sacrificial acts. Since the death of King Solomon c. 930 B.C.E., the United Kingdom of David and Solomon had been divided into two parts: Israel,  the Northern Kingdom and Judah, the Southern Kingdom (also where the Davidic monarchy continued). The Northerners worshiped false gods whereas the Southerners worshiped–or at least tried–YHWH (God) exclusively–but not entirely so.  If it had not been for the prophetic urgings of Isaiah, who was a member of the royal family of Judah, the southern kingdom would have probably thrown in their chips with the northern kingdom. But in actuality, Isaiah’s message was for the northern kingdom; he ordered them to stop worshiping false gods and to quit picking fights with Assyria. “When Isaiah had his vision in 740, the little kingdom of Judah was still too insignificant to attract the attention of Assyria, but that changed in 734 when the kings of Israel and Damascus organized a coalition to oppose Assyria’s westward advance,” writes Armstrong (Armstrong, 113). King Ahaz of Judah refused to join in the rebellion so the northerners besieged Jerusalem. Ahaz chose the greater of two evils to assist in this small matter: he chose to ask Assyria (doh!) for help in defeating Israel, and so they did, and in 722 B.C.E., the northern kingdom was wiped out. Judah, the southern kingdom was spared for now.

Two hundred years later, unfortunately, it was Judah’s time for foolishness. Isaiah died a little while after the Assyrians annihilated the northern kingdom of Israel and by 597 B.C.E., a new prophet named Jeremiah was warning Judah not to rebel against a new power: Babylonia. The kings of Judah had tried since 722 to get the Assyrian armies off of their backs, but when Assyria fell to the Babylonians, they now had double the trouble. By 586 B.C.E., the Babylonians invaded, destroyed, and deported thousands of Jews to Iraq; the Temple of Solomon was destroyed and all hope seemed to have been lost.  Whoever decided to write what historians call “Second Isaiah,” however, did so at a serendipitous time.  During the Jews time in exile, additions seem to have been made to the book of Isaiah; chapters 42, 49, 52, and 53 are especially symbolic and controversial.

The Suffering Servant

So Isaiah did not write them, but they were inserted into his book by a later author, for some reason. These four poems discuss an individual? a nation? who will suffer greatly on behalf of the Jews in order to…what? It isn’t clear.  If its a person, have they lived, are they alive, or is it someone who has yet to be born? If its the Jewish nation living in exile, then why does the anonymous author use words like “he” and “him?”  Jews and Christians have been debating this for centuries: was this “servant” a reference to the nation of Israel as a whole or to an individual person? Let’s let the evidence speak for itself.  Isaiah 42:1 says “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on him, and he will bring justice to the nations”; on the other hand,Isaiah 49:1-3 says, “Listen to me, you islands; hear this, you distant nations: Before I was born the Lord called me; from my mother’s womb he has spoken my name.He made my mouth like a sharpened sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me into a polished arrow and concealed me in his quiver. He said to me, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will display my splendor.”  Living in exile, the Jews developed the often misunderstood concept of a messiah, which simply means “anointed one,” meaning a king, such as David or Solomon.  “There was a longing to restore the united kingdom of David and Solomon, merging what remained of the kingdom of Israel with the resurgent kingdom of Judah,” writes Armstrong (Armstrong, 118). The Jews were building up expectations for a political and religious figure that would rescue them from suffering and obscurity to stitch them back together as a united nation that could rival other nations.  This expectation will build and build until the birth of Jesus c. 5 B.C.E. Later, we will examine the evidence and consensus as to whether or not he fit the zealous expectations of the Jews.

Only one person living at the time of the anonymous author of Second Isaiah may have fit the description of the Suffering Servant: Cyrus the Great of Persia. Cyrus the Great was a Zoroastrian who conquered the Babylonian Empire and decreed that all the Jewish exiles were allowed to return to Israel and even rebuild the Temple. He undid all the horrible wrongs wrought by Assyria and Babylon on the Jews. But Isaiah 49 seems to be referring to the nation Israel; hmm, well that can’t be Cyrus then, it must be someone from the nation of Israel. The popular scholarly consensus is that it was a prophecy for Jesus, who would live more than 500 years after these words were penned. What was the mission of this unnamed and undated servant?  “For he bore the sin of many,
and made intercession for the transgressors,” Isaiah 53: 12. Whoever it was or was supposed to be, the people who believe it was a prophecy for a future individual believe it culminated in the man Jesus, those that do not are Jewish and maintain that God will bring this Suffering Servant into the world at the time when he is needed most.

Zoroastrianism and Judaism

 Cyrus’ invasion also engendered cultural and religious interaction between Jew and Zoroastrian c. 530 B.C.E. The Zoroastrian Angra Mainyu or Ahriman (“Evil Spirit”) just might have influenced the author of the Book of Job which was written during this time period; and why, you ask, is the Book of Job important? Because this is where we see the first explicit mention of Satan, “the Adversary,” in nascent Judaism.  Remember, the book of Genesis was most likely written after the Book of Job c. 200 B.C.E., so the Book of Job, not Genesis, would have been the first mention of Satan.  The dualistic Good versus Evil, Light versus Darkness, Truth versus Lie principles of Zoroastrianism, then, influenced the newly united Jewish community of returning exiles who clearly needed a new scapegoat for explaining their recent rough (to say the very least) history. Other influences coming from Zoroastrianism could be argued, but this one has been the easiest for scholars to prove. In my next post, I will cover early Vedic philosophy in India c. 800 B.C.E.

 

 

The Great Transformation: A Five Part Series on the Beginning of Our Religious Traditions

Editor’s Note: The title of this blog borrows from the title of a book authored by Karen Armstrong which I will be using extensively during the next five articles.

Karen Armstrong is one of the leading voices in the Humanities and is the author of many books on religion. Arguably, her most efficient and entertaining book is the Great Transformation, a required text in my HUM 2270 East/West Synthesis class at Saint Petersburg College. In this edition of “Beyond the Classroom,” I will be comparing and contrasting for my students and others the great religious concepts of Persia (Iran), Israel, India, China, and Greece.  This will demonstrate what I believe the “synthesis” portion of the class is for my students and other interested readers.  I turn first to ancient Iran, called Persia by most, circa 1200 B.C.E.

“It’s not what you believe, but how you behave,” my students will tell you I often say in the first section of the semester in East/West Synthesis which deals extensively with religious traditions and their founders.  This is the saying that encompasses the main message of the sages Zoroaster, Isaiah, Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, and Plato. In the next five entries, I will show how these religious movements affected each other and how they share many similarities; that this was possible was largely through the conquests of Alexander the Great. In the final article when I discuss Socratic and Platonic philosophy, I will argue that many of these traditions influenced early Christianity.

Around 1200 B.C.E., a thirty year old priest named Zoroaster became deeply vexed by the increasing violence of his countrymen and set out to solve the problem.  At dawn, Zoroaster entered a river and emerged to see the god Mazda, called Ahura-Mazda, lord of wisdom, light, truth, and justice.  Zoroaster’s commission was to confront the mindless cattle-raids and violent retributive acts of his fellow Iranians.  There was no doubt that Ahura-Mazda was the chief god for an otherwise polytheistic country because of the authority of this commission. Was Zoroaster creating the first monotheism? This point has been fiercely debated in the Humanities field, but most scholars and educators say that Zoroaster created a religion with dualistic principles; that is a two-part cosmology in which human-beings are engaged in a daily war to either resist druj, or “the Great Lie,” and establish asha “Order,” or to bend a knee to druj. It was the first religion to conceive of a battle of good versus evil, light versus dark, but it was not monotheistic. Zoroaster did not insist on a belief in one god, because Ahura-Mazda had Seven Immortal Sparks (called the “Seven Immortals”) that helped create the world and sustain asha. These seven beings were contained in him, but they were also separate (similar to what we see in Christianity later with One God, Three Persons=Trinity).  The evil god was Ahriman or Angra-Mainyu, the “Hostile Spirit” who opposed Ahura-Mazda and seduced mankind with wealth and power.  The choice was either asha or druj, writes Armstrong; the whole “of life had now become a battlefield in which everybody had a role.”[1]  Zoroaster’s religious movement died with him but would be sponsored later by the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great c. 550 B.C.E. The concepts of good and evil, “life as a battlefield,” light and darkness, good god versus bad spirit would later influence the Jews in Babylonian captivity, and in turn the early Christians. In the next entry, I will discuss how Zoroastrianism affected Judaism during the 6^th century B.C.E.

 

 

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[1]                 Armstrong, Karen. The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions. Random House. New York. 2006. 11.