(Conspiracy Nation, 1/20/05)
-- Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, confronted with the difficulty
of understanding how the simple unity of the divine First Cause, the
Deity, could have caused such an infinite variety, and how a
non-material Deity could affect matter, considered a "threefold
modification" of the Deity. Plato's "poetical imagination sometimes
fixed and animated these metaphysical abstractions; the three archical
or original principles were represented in the Platonic system as three
Gods, united with each other by a mysterious and ineffable generation;
and the Logos was particularly considered under the more accessible
character of the Son of an Eternal Father..." (Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, vol. 2)
Arguing the viewpoint of a reliance on Faith, Charles Freeman, in
his
enlightening book, The
Closing of the Western Mind, makes the point that "faith must
exist in any healthy mind. If we cannot trust anyone, have any optimism
that 'all will be well,' we cannot live full lives." Freeman traces the
evolution of Christianity from original philosophical speculations
about the Deity, through enormous disputes as to Its nature, a
clampdown by the Roman government and ascendancy of the views of St.
Augustine, up to a gradual rebirth of reason caused by the writings of
St. Thomas Aquinas. Freeman leaves it there, not noting the subsequent
ascendancy of a scientific orthodoxy, a faith in the god of science and
its priests.
Ancient Greek thinkers speculated on how reason occurs. Circa 500
B.C., Heraclitus theorized that the underlying order is sustained by
tension between factions. In the harmonious state, there is constant
debate. To prevent the state from being torn apart, at some point the
factions try to find a "just" solution. In this way, reason was born.
The Greek word, Logos, highly
complex, took on a meaning of "reasoned thought." Opposite to logos was muthos, in which reason plays no
part.
From muthos comes the word
"myth." To the Greeks, "the idea that anyone could insist that others
respect the truth of a myth was absurd, yet this did not mean that a
myth lacked power." [1] In Rome and Greece, speculation on the nature
of the Deity abounded. "So long as no ruler attempted to enforce a
definition of the supreme deity and his attributes, these fruitful
speculations could continue." [1]
For Plato, the real world was the noumenal world, the ideal world,
the world of the Forms. Ideals such as Beauty and Justice had a common
Form within them: the Good. The Good was therefore "higher" than Beauty
and Justice. These Forms, from the noumenal world, were distinct from
the phenomenal (material) world. So how would the noumenal manifest
itself in the phenomenal world?
"The distinction between God's fundamental essence (ousia) and his power as manifested
in the world was a crucial one." For Plato, the Forms could not
manifest in the material world. For Philo of Alexandria, a complex logos, a sort of directing force
for the Forms, could actually appear in the world (e.g. the voice
speaking to Moses from the Burning Bush). In the Gospel According to
St. John, the logos is seen
as "becoming flesh in Jesus, an idea unique to Christianity and deeply
troubling to traditional Platonists." [1]
The early Christian Church (circa 100 A.D. - 300 A.D.) refused to
pay homage to the Roman gods, and even considered the empire's gods to
be demons. This non-compliance was disturbing to the smooth functioning
of the Roman empire. How far ought religious freedom be allowed by the
state, especially if the Roman gods were being ignored and even
condemned by the Christians? The empire reacted with severe repression:
persecution of Christians. Yet the early Church withstood the crackdown
and so the empire arrived at a new strategy, "an alternative to
destructive and debilitating persecutions, and that was to absorb the
religion within the authoritarian structure of the state, thus defusing
it as a threat." [1]
Or was the Roman persecution of Christians more or less yet another
persecution of Jews, in this case a Jewish sect? Jesus, traditionally
seen as apart from Judaism, may have advocated rather a return to
traditional Jewish values, according to Freeman. A split between the
followers of St. Matthew and Paul of Tarsus is reportedly recorded by
Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (circa 180 A.D.), who notes a sect which
follows "Matthew only, and repudiate the apostle Paul, maintaining that
he was an apostate from the law."
In the view of Paul, not only did Jesus overturn the Old Testament
Law,
but Christ superseded the concept of rational argument. The "committed
Christian" began to identify with a rejection of reason and even of
empirical evidence. This was further codified by St. Augustine, who
questioned whether it was possible for one to ever truly and fully know
anything and concluded that some things have to be taken on trust and
that this trust means accepting the authority of others.
Contrary to the prevailing notions perpetrated through the biased
writings of Church historian Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, Christianity
was deeply divided until the time of the Roman emperor Constantine.
Venerable Church father Origen taught that evil was only an absence of
good, a distancing from God. In time, even Satan, the ultimate
evildoer, would return to God. God could never commit a soul to hell
because it would be an admission that God had been thwarted by a mere
human being. Followers of Arius considered Jesus to be divine, but
inferior to the Father, since as the offspring (son) of the Father,
there was a stage when Jesus Christ was not. This developed into a
furious argument within the early Church: whether or not the Son was
consubstantial with the Father. The difference hinged literally on one
iota: homo-ousios, God the
Father and God the Son of one substance, consubstantial, versus homoi-ousios, the two being of
distinct but similar substances. This may all seem quaint, until one
considers that one offshoot of the Arius "heresy," Islam (denial of
Trinity, "there is no god but Allah," Jesus not consubstantial), has
reverberations today.
Following the failure by the Roman state to crush Christianity, a
new
strategy for preserving the empire against internal dissensions
undermining its power was implemented: Christianity could be integrated
into the state. Constantine proclaimed a conference of bishops, to be
held at Nicaea in Asia Minor. The keynote speaker was the Roman emperor
himself. Constantine, to promote stability within the empire, was
determined that a consensus be established. The irony is that Christ, a
figure of peace, was incorporated into the military empire which had
itself crucified Jesus. As part of the new strategy for subsuming
rather than exterminating Christianity, Constantine gave tax exemptions
to Christian clergy and "immense
patronage" to the churches. Who decided the qualifications for these
benefits? Constantine
and the Roman government.
The Nicene Council became part of the official state religion. A
"truth" was now defined and enforced by law. All those Christians who
dissented from the Nicene formula "were declared to be heretics facing
not only the vengeance of God but also that of the state." [1]
The new merger between Rome and a virulent brand of Christianity put
that faction into the ascendancy. It proceeded to persecute and
obliterate the old pagan religion. "The elimination of paganism was
accompanied by a dampening-down of emotions, dance and song so
effective that we still lower our voices when we enter a church." [1]
The Christian crackdown reached some sort of apogee with the murder by
a Christian mob of Hypatia, a distinguished female philosopher and
mathematician. The situation seen by Freeman involves a subtle
distinction: the danger was not so much of the Church having superseded
the government, as of the government, by its patronage of "qualified"
Christianity, having thereby superseded the Church.
The inherently anti-intellectual nature of the now dominant
Christianity, based on perspectives from Paul of Tarsus, St. Augustine,
and others, is the root for the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages did not
mysteriously just spring up somehow, with people having inexplicably
grown stupid for some strange unknown reason. Books began to disappear,
both from censorship and from neglect. The Book, the Bible, was
interpreted to the people through experts -- the priesthood, early
progenitors of the professional class. "You couldn't understand all
this, so we'll explain it for you. Trust in St. Augustine, who shows
how we must trust the authority of others." Thanks in large part to the
Arabs, ancient learning did not entirely disappear. They "sustained the
Greek tradition by valuing the intellectual achievements of the past
without being overawed by them and in using empirical evidence and
reason to carry the understanding further." [1] Also keeping the lamp
of learning from going out were remote Irish monks, notably the
ninth-century Irishman Erigena. (See also, How The Irish Saved Civilization,
by Thomas Cahill)
At last, centuries later, a counter-spark appeared thanks to the
writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. Thomas re-allowed reason into a Church
which had become hostile to it. Yet "even Thomas Aquinas, one of
Europe's most outstanding champions of rational thought, had to suspend
reason when it conflicted with orthodoxy." [1]
Some further progress, of a sort, occurred with the Protestant
Reformation, when some Christians began reading the Bible for
themselves and thereby undermined the authority of the priesthood. But
the Bible read by these protestants was a Bible approved centuries
previously by the Roman amalgam. This Bible, besides being
Roman-approved, had also gone through translations over the years from
Greek, to Latin, to native languages, so subtle shades of meaning are
likely to have been mishandled.
Charles Freeman ends his book with an implicit message: that reason
and
science have prevailed. However science is only as good as the
scientist. The Roman government intruded into Christianity and subsumed
it. Do not current governments to an extent do likewise when it comes
to science? Also, as in the Roman amalgam, so too there is somewhat of
a corporate amalgam now, where scientists tend to find "truth"
according to the trail left by money from the corporations. The
struggle for truth is not over; truth is by no means now safely in the
hands of the current priesthood, scientists and experts. "Man is born
free, yet everywhere he is in chains." "Know you not that you are
gods?" is a statement attributed to Jesus. You have the choice: to
think for yourself, or to surrender your inherent dignity, your power
of thought, to someone who insinuates, "No need for you to struggle
through doubt. I've already done that for you."
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[1] Except where noted above, all quotes are from The Closing of the Western Mind
by Charles Freeman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. ISBN: I-4000-4085-X
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