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Do Not Inquire About Their Gods - The One & Only - Alexandria, 415 AD - A Book of Many Books
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Do Not Inquire About Their Gods
In the Middle Ages the religion of the Classical Age remained largely intact in India and China. Yet in the Middle East and Europe, the monotheism of Israel swept away the polytheistic religions of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In the 4th century AD, Greco-Roman cosmology was fatally interrupted by Christianity, which borrowed the older Hebrew chronology and completely restructured the meaning of space and time: God's Meaning in space was the circling cosmos, and God's Meaning in time was the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation.
Despite reworking Mesopotamian stories and laws, the new Judaeo-Christian time-line presented itself as both new and absolute. The universe began around 4000 BC. It was, is, and always will be, controlled by God. With a capital G. It was also not subject to debate.
Take care that you be not ensnared to follow them, after they have been destroyed before you, and that you do not inquire about their gods, saying, ‘How did these nations serve their gods? -- that I also may do the same.’ You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way, for every abominable thing that the Lord hates they have done for their gods, for they even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods. Everything that I command you, you shall be careful to do. You shall not add to it or take from it. (Deuteronomy 12:30-32)
Like the Jews, the early Christians took a very negative view of the polythieistic world around them. One of the most influential writers in all of Christianity, Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430), ignored positive aspects of polytheistic spirituality so as to make Christianity look unique and superior — as Doug Metzger explains in Against the Pagans: Augustine's City of God, Books 1-10:
Adherents of Pythagoreanism and Platonism believed that mindful living and intellectual work were the keys to advantageous reincarnations. In mystery religions, like Orphism, and from what we can tell, the Eleusinian Mysteries, sacred rites and spoken words were the keys to blessed afterlives. The massive religious heritage of Ancient Egypt, typified during the imperial period by the cult of Isis, had always been rooted in salvific ethics – the Book of the Dead’s most famous and artistically rendered scenes show the weighing of the believer’s heart in one of the antechambers of the underworld. In Mithraism, a process of spiritual purification led believers up through seven grades of enlightenment, the religion’s ubiquity, a century before Augustine’s lifetime, being attested by hundreds of surviving mithraea all over the empire. Augustine writes two sentences about mystery and cult religions in the City of God, and they reveal his condescension, indifference, and ignorance about the broad course of pagan religious ideology that had led up to the fifth century. Those sentences are,
And we do not want to hear general assertions about whispers breathed into the ears of a chosen few, and handed down by a secret religious tradition, teaching integrity and purity of life. Let the pagans show, or even mention, places consecrated for such gatherings where what happens is not the performance of spectacles marked by lewd utterances and gestures on the part of the actors, with a free reign to every kind of depravity. (2.6)
So much, then, for the millions of faithful of adherents of the Ancient Mediterranean’s cult religions. Though they, too, pursued blessed afterlives through shared meals and drinks, and their ideologies, too, often emphasized self-regulation and reverence for the divine, Augustine dismisses their sacred gatherings as mummeries and orgies.
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The One & Only
Philosophical heir to the Hebrews, Christians inherited a very particular God from among the many on offer. They were also skillful at crafting and solidifying a very specific narrative which set them apart from the rest of the Classical world. Christianity was given official status by the Roman emperor Constantine in the Edict of Milan (313 AD) and the Council of Nicaea (325 AD), and in 380 AD Theodosius I declared it the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Church theologians chose Jesus over Jupiter, Ahuramazda, Ra, or Mithras. They also chose Plato’s idealism over Aristotle’s observation. Augustine was crucial here: he girded the topography of Christian metaphysics with the infrastructure of Plato’s ideal realm of Forms. Its apogee, the Good, had already been reinforced in the 3rd century with Plotinus’ addition of the One, an omniscient version of the Good. The Church also separated Christianity from thinkers such as Origen, who saw God as greater than Christ. Like Zoroaster, Origen imagined an eventual universal redemption. He also seems to have followed Plato into the realms of transmigration or reincarnation.
The philosophical superstructure of Christianity is impressive, but it can also be seen as disheartening in that it narrows religion to a single doctrine, as if multiplicity of belief were some sort of threat. Did it have to be Augustine over Origen, Christianity over Zoroastrianism? Agnostics would ask, Why couldn’t it be and?
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Alexandria, 415 AD
It was in this climate that the persecuted turned into the persecutors. An example of this, movingly portrayed in the Spanish film Agora (2009), is the case of Hypatia, a North African astronomer and mathematician who attempted to prove the heliocentric model of Aristarchus. In Alexandria, a centre of international learning at the time, Hypatia is striped naked and stoned to death by fanatical Christians in 415 AD. In the film her death is paired symbolically with the crashing bookshelves and the burning manuscripts of the famous library. The film may simplify the situation, yet the point remains: Christians went quickly from being the victims to being the victimizers.
In a wider sense, Christianity might be seen as a liberating secular force: Christians are free to follow the facts and necessities of this world — Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's (Mark 12:17) — and yet are also free to worship their God — and to God the things that are God's. Yet the beauty of this type of secularism took a long time to be realized. For over a thousand years the Church meddled in the material things that belonged to Cesar, putting barriers in the way of anyone who wanted to do Hypatia's type of research, that is, any type of research that challenged Church doctrine.
The Church superimposed Augustine’s spiritual City of God on the material cities of Jerusalem and Rome. Later, this spiritual City of God sprawled into the cloisters of Constantinople and Aachen, and into the classrooms of Paris, Oxford, and Bologna. After Luther and Columbus, this city sprawled further, from Madrid to Mexico City, from London to New York. Yet this geographical expansion didn't shake the old dogmas, established prior to the Middle Ages: 1) There is only one God, 2) God is superior to, and fundamentally different from, the material universe, and 3) Salvation can only be attained through belief in Jesus Christ, who is the only Son of God. The word only comes up often, while the word and is seldom used to provide alternatives. In this sense the apple didn't fall far from the tree.
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A Book of Many Books
Instead of seeing the Bible as a compendium of wisdom, as a book of books with various perspectives and debatable insights, dogmatic Christians turned it into a text that no one can debate. No one can question it. Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, they tell you that it’s fixed in stone and if you dare question its absolute authority, which comes straight from the mouth of God Himself, you will go straight to Hell!
What ridiculous rot! To turn a book of many moods and of changing theology — where gods give way to a single God and where stern judgment and brimstone give way to redemption and forgiveness — into a Rule Book and unalterable manual for the universe ignores the changing nature of both the world and the knowledge we can gain in it. Times change, we see that lightning is meteorological and not some thunderbolt from Zeus or Thor or Yahweh. We see that one tribe is not necessarily going to give the other tribe a fair review (especially if they're backward evil baby-eating Babylonians!) and that both tribes have almost nothing to do with tribes on the other side of Asia, in the Yellow River valleys or further afield over seas of rolling rye in the jungled waters of the Amazon.
How could these others live by the prescripts of a tribe that wandered from the desert to the oases of Canaan? How could a book they wrote cover the reality of those who sit on the banks of the Ganges and Yangtze, the Amazon and the Congo? Better to say with Langstoin Hughes that our blood flows with the ancient rivers and that these rivers are the Congo, the Nile, and the Mississippi, and remember Lincoln sailing down to New Orleans with his message of deliverance.
Deliverance is the key, not the river. Insight is the goal we want to reach, not the construction of an idol Book which doesn’t come from every people yet which pretends to be the key to all humanity. Why not just give up this universalist dominion, and open the Book up to history, contingency, multiple interpretation, and yes, fallibility. That would be the humble thing to do. And I read somewhere that the meek shall inherit the earth.
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