Original Sin
Lying buried in the subconscious of Western mankind is a cistern of
inherited guilt from which we drink daily, and which--for better or
worse--we replenish with our regrets, our real or imagined shortcomings,
our disappointments, our lost opportunities, but most of all our dreams.
It is a cistern filled not with rainwater from the heavens but with the
tears of our souls. Let us recognize it for what it is: a cultural Tar
Baby implacable and immutable, as infinite and as unavoidable as
eternity. And yet it is an aberration--as the Oxford English Dictionary
defines the word, a defect of focus, a departure from the normal. No
other religion in the world, except the Judeo-Christian, suffers from
it. It demeans man, defining him as stupid and selfish, and it demeans
God as vengeful, bloodthirsty and paranoid. It is Original Sin.
It shouldn’t take a Hebrew scholar to understand the basic story of
the Creation in Genesis. The English language is clear enough, and we
have heard it all a thousand times. But what is interesting is that
there are two versions of the Creation in the first two chapters of
Genesis, passed down through oral tradition from old scrolls and
documents separated by centuries. Dates are important because they
reveal the audience to whom the stories were told, and the cultural
necessities of the time. Oddly enough, Chapter One is the younger of the
two. Called the P source (for Priestly Document), it appeared after the
fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar (586 B.C.) and the subsequent
exile in Babylonia, which ended in 538 B.C. Even more importantly, it
was not written down until the fourth century B.C. To place it in
context, Pericles died in Athens in 429 B.C., in the fifth century. The
Parthenon was finished. Pre-Socratic Greek philosophy, which began on
the shores of the Aegean in Ionia (now western Turkey), had migrated
across the Near East, and was already spreading across the known world
under the conquests of Alexander the Great, who died in 323 B.C., toward
the end of the fourth century. We should not be surprised to find some
Greek influence in Chapter One. And we do. Chapter One is pure poetry.
There is a hushed reverence in the words of Chapter One, an awe. One
senses in the rhythm the ebb and flow of life, in the seas, the grass,
in all "creeping things." God has created the heavens, the earth, and
the waters between. Day and night, light and dark. And all the animals,
creeping, walking, or flying. And it was all good. Then God said, "Let
us make man in our image, after our likeness." PLEASE NOTE that only
after forming the animals He creates man in Chapter One--"male and
female created He them"--as if mankind is the epitome of his created
creatures. What a typical Greek idea! ALSO NOTE that God uses the plural
"us" and "our," when He says "Let us make man in our
image." Are we dealing with multiple gods here, as on Mount Olympus?
After that momentous announcement, He gives man dominion over
the fish ,the fowl, the cattle, over all the earth and creeping things.
We must remember that the word is dominion, not "domination." A
dominion is a self-governing nation or state, for example,
the dominion of Canada. One has dominion over one’s property,
with the implication of "caring for." On the other hand, domination,
according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is the exercise of ruling
power. One can argue, with much justification, that the line between the
two is very thin, and that we are arguing about angels dancing on the
head of a pin.
Yet this discrepancy may be significant. If the Hebrew god Jehovah
has given man domination—control over nature, He has separated man from
Nature. Joseph Campbell, in the Power of Myth, makes a good case
for his belief that the Jewish religion is the only one that separates
man from nature. Could this separation be the Tar Baby in our
Judeo-Christian culture that has led to our environmental disasters? One
wonders how different our treatment of the world--of the elephants, the
buffalo, the rivers, the oceans (not to mention the occasional unwanted
cat)--would have been if we had heard "dominion" and not "domination."
Because I tend to be pessimistic, my guess would be not much. Still, it
is interesting. Those angels continue dancing.
Where were we? Oh, yes, God is plural, and has just, mysteriously and
miraculously, created both male and female, as if Pouf! out of the head
of Zeus. No Eve from a rib yet. Just the animals, and man. By now we
realize that this fourth
century B.C.creation story in Chapter One of Genesis is very
Greek--or Hellenistic, since we are dealing with the time of Alexander
the Great. Now, to continue evidence of Greek influence, we read that
sex is the next order of the day. God says, "Be fruitful, and multiply."
So sin here--just plain, natural old sex in a garden. So it was there
even before the Serpent slithered onto the scene! God has created
everything--night, day, animals, mankind (with sex) and all the herbs,
plants and trees (even the fruit trees have seeds in their fruit)--in
six days. It’s time for a nap.
Now something strange happens. We go to Chapter Two, the older of the
two chapters. The tone changes. We thought everything on earth (via the
Greek P-for-Priestly source, Chapter One) was good. Now we find (via the
Hebrew J-for-Judah source, Chapter Two) that certain fruits are
forbidden—with terrible consequences. And that the Serpent (that ancient
symbol of sex and creativity) is the great Anti-God, the opposing force
in the universe, having his home within Nature. Nature is, in this older
version of the Creation, our enemy.
The J (Judah) source of Chapter Two has been dated before 850 B.C.
How much before we have no idea. We do know that the Hebrews left Egypt
during the reign of Rameses II, about 1200 B.C. Whether they were
construction workers disgruntled because their overseers were refusing
to provide straw to make bricks (and who left voluntarily for their
promised land) or slaves (as in Exodus) depends on who is telling the
story. It does seem strange that in Exodus God tells them to take their
flocks and herds with them (Do slaves have flocks?) and to borrow from
their Egyptian friends "jewels of silver and jewels of gold" (Do slaves
have rich friends?). Then we are told (Exodus 12: 36) that they obeyed,
and "spoiled the Egyptians." Well, so much for friendship.
When these Hebrew nomads entered Palestine they found a resident,
urban population of Canaanites (Phoenicians) and along the coast Aryan
"sea people" (Philistines) with a culture much more advanced than their
own. After they finished their conquest they had time, under the rule of
Kings David and Solomon, to record their history in the books of Joshua,
Judges, and Samuel. Then, after the death of Solomon, when the kingdom
was divided, the scholarly work continued in the South (in Judah where
we get our "J" scroll), adding the story of the Garden of Eden, of
Abraham, Jacob, Joseph and the saga of Exodus, with its escape from
Egypt into the Wilderness. These stories had been passed by word of
mouth across generations before being committed to writing between the
ninth and seventh centuries B.C. (as opposed to the "P" scroll, with its
Greek 4th century flavor). One thing is certain: it will not
be surprising to discover in the older J source of Genesis (Chapter Two)
some attributes of God which, if we can keep a non-biased perspective,
we might find sadly amusing, if not revolting.
In Chapter One we thought that we had the herbs and fruit trees. Now
in Chapter Two we learn that we have only (in the King James Version)
"every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every
herb of the field before it grew. Why? Because God had not yet
created rain. Now, besides rain, God realizes that something else is
missing. Man. Not just man, but Man-the-Farmer. "There was not a man to
till the ground." So God forms man "of the dust of the ground." He
breathes into him the breath of life, and "man became a living soul." No
longer do we have that joyous, instantaneous Greek creation of "he" and
"she" (with no discrimination between the genders) as the epitome of
creation, but a calculated, plodding need. In this older version we have
unplanted plants and "every herb before it grew" needing rain, but there
is no rain. Then we have rain, but no man to till the ground. We’ll fix
that. Pick up some dust and make a man. A reader is now convinced,
beyond a doubt, that this version comes from the older, "J" scroll. No
Greek influence here, but plenty of nomads wanting to be farmers.
Now we can get to the garden. East of Eden we can put the man just
formed from dust. But he looks lonesome. God says "I will make him an
help meet." So "out of the ground God formed every beast of the
field"--and all the birds, fish, etc.--and "brought them unto Adam to
see what he would call them...." But, we are told, "for Adam there was
not found an help meet for him." In other words, Adam did not get
enthusiastic about mating with an orangutan. So, God made woman, not out
of dust, but, since Adam was obviously egotistical and would not be
satisfied with anybody but himself, out of one of Adam’s own ribs. Now
we are told that they were both naked. (What else were they supposed to
be?) And--wonder of wonders--not ashamed (of what?). In this older J
source God (or the male-dominated nomad/ herder society which produced
this story) there is a peculiar silence about sex. In Chapter One, on
the other hand (like a good Greek), God actually orders it ("Be fruitful
,and multiply!"). In Chapter Two He is not only reluctant to mention sex
but seems to have decided that sex is a tainted thing, almost outside
the bounds of his creation, as it were. Adam and Eve are not bad for
lacking shame--just stupid, for when they do exhibit an awareness of
themselves that fact becomes evidence of their disobedience. No longer
do we have man as the Greek epitome of creation. Man is now, because of
natural curiosity and natural sex, a deceitful, groveling coward. There
is no pleasing this God.
But the Serpent, with his shedding skin, that symbol of creativity
and reincarnation of the ancient world, will soon educate them. He has
persuaded them to eat of the tree of knowledge, that tree in the middle
of the garden which God has forbidden them to even touch-- "lest ye
die." ( Does this mean that they were already immortal? What if they had
obeyed, and not eaten of the tree, would they have lived forever?) There
is another "taboo" tree in the Garden--the Tree of Life. If they eat of
the Tree of Life they will "be as one of us" (i.e., gods, i.e.,
immortal). There is that problem again: Does this mean that they were
NOT immortal after all? That they would have died anyway? There is some
confusion here. We must remember that we are in the old J scroll,
written down in the ninth century B.C. by those whose loyalty belonged
to the culture of their fathers, those hunting nomads, that
male-dominated marauding warrior tribe who will, after Eden, roam the
desert looking for a homeland to conquer, a tribe with the terrible
inheritance of a jealous god with as much sensitivity and predictability
as a volcano, a god whose marching orders (against the Canaanites in
Deuteronomy) will be vengeance, rape and murder. That "lest ye die"
connected with tasting the Tree of Knowledge was no empty threat. Now,
an even worse fate will result if they taste of the Tree of Life. The
King James version is very clear here. It reads: "Behold, the man is
become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put
forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and
live forever....." Well, we just can’t let that happen! They must
remain mortal. They must be driven
from the Garden. It is interesting that Adam and Eve lost paradise
not because they tasted of the tree of good and evil but because God is
afraid that, if they taste the Tree of Life, they "will be as one of
us’---i.e., immortal!
Similarly, it was not the prospect of Adam’s sudden education that
worried God, but the fact that, as the Serpent tells Eve, "your eyes
shall be opened, and YE SHALL BE AS GODS, knowing good and evil." The
Serpent knows that it is the
power of knowledge, and not just knowing, that arouses the wrath
of an insecure Jehovah. Was that "lest ye die" a threat or a bluff? The
Serpent doesn’t care. He uses it to lure Eve into satisfying her
curiosity and her taste buds: "Ye shall not surely die." The
story goes on: "And when the woman saw that the tree was good for
food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to
make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also
unto her husband with her, and he did eat."
(Genesis 3:4-6)
A tree to be desired to make one wise. THAT is the crux of the
matter, and not the minor snickering over being naked, which tells God
that they have disobeyed. Did God really want them to remain ignorant?
Without such knowledge there can be no morality. The whole story seeks,
in Milton’s words, "to justify the ways of God to men." But does it?
Adam must sweat now while he works (He didn’t sweat before?). Nothing
will come easy. Thorns and thistles will thwart him. As for Eve, she
will bring forth her children in pain and sorrow. And be under the
domination of her husband. BUT PLEASE NOTE: There is nothing,
absolutely nothing, mentioned here about the inheritance of this sin
onto their progeny. Absolutely nothing. And yet the idea of Original
Sin has become our first Tar Baby, the one we carry around with
us--however unconsciously--telling us we are not quite good enough for
Paradise. One wonders, under these circumstances, why God created man in
the first place. Oh, I forgot: to till the Garden. But, ironically
enough, the need for a farmhand to till the Garden would not have lasted
long anyway. In the history of the desert peoples of the Middle East,
agriculture would soon give way to the breeding and herding of sheep and
goats. Cain, the farmer, will become the bad guy and Abel, the herder of
flocks, will receive God’s blessing. Cain’s murder of Abel may symbolize
the change from farming to wandering. When you need to justify
something, you can always create a story within a story. And a
scapegoat. (Even that word comes from the herding culture.)
Still, the central problem of Genesis remains. Why is this God so
insecure? Why does he fear the loss of worship in favor of other gods?
(Evidently He believes
in other gods, since he is so afraid of them!) Why shouldn’t his
followers abandon him--especially when He treats them so shabbily?
William James, in his THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, quotes
Henry Wood, who wrote in 1899:
Man often has fear stamped upon him before his entrance into the outer world; he is reared in fear; all his life is passed in bondage to fear of disease and death, and thus his whole mentality becomes cramped, limited, and depressed, and his body follows its shrunken pattern and specification....Think of the millions of
sensitive and responsive souls among our ancestors who have been under the domination of such a perpetual nightmare! Is it not surprising that
health exists at all? Nothing but the boundless divine love, exuberance, and vitality, constantly poured in, even though unconsciously to us, could in some degree neutralize such an ocean of morbidity.
That last sentence is critical. It gives us the reason for mankind’s
dilemma. We are made to suffer so God can help! We are made to feel
guilty so we will need somebody to comfort us! The early Church was not
unaware of the opportunities. Why are we cursed with this Original Sin?
Create a need, and then fill it. For the priests and preachers, original
sin may be the best job security of all.
As I have said, I can’t find anywhere in Genesis a mention of this
sin being hereditary. I do find in Exodus, Chapter 20, Verse 5, a threat
of hereditary sin connected with God’s own fear of other gods:
Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth
generation
of them that hate me.
But even this vengeance is reserved "for those who hate me" and not
an entitlement program for being human. It is interesting to note, here,
that Jewish doctrine does not teach that the guilt of Adam’s act is
eternally transmitted to all men. Genesis Chapter 3, Verse 17 quotes God
as saying to Adam: "Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy
wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying Thou
shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt
thou eat of it all
the days of thy life." But in Genesis Chapter 8, Verse 21, after the
ordeal of the Flood, when Noah in thankfulness for his survival built an
altar and sent up the scent of burnt offerings, God seems to forgive
Adam, and even expresses regret that He cursed the ground, implying that
man is naturally evil, anyway, and doesn’t deserve special punishments:
"And the Lord smelled a sweet savor, and the Lord said in his heart, I
will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the
imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth: neither will I again
smite any more every thing living, as I have done." Wow. Quite an
admission of remorse from Yahweh, letting man off the hook. With a
rainbow thrown into the bargain, as a token of His good will--a
"covenant which I make between me and you, and every living creature
that is with you, for perpetual generations." So in Genesis there is
nothing to suggest that
Adam’s sin is inherited, but this covenant of a forgiving God is! How
strange, after all the threats, the thorns and thistles. Then we learn
that this chapter is from the P, or Priestly scroll, with its
Hellenistic Greek influence, which solves the mystery of an
uncharacteristic kindness from Yahweh. It also shifts the attention from
"man" to "mankind"--another indication of the later date.
But this reconciliation proves to be a brief respite. In Exodus, we
return to a vindictive God displaying a paranoia bordering on psychosis,
using any excuse to establish his POWER. First, he appears on Mount
Sinai "in a smoke." Was Sinai a volcano in those days? Geology experts
say it was not, but I wonder. Sinai was Yahweh’s mountain, and we have
already noted the volcanic qualities of this God of the Hebrews. We read
in Chapter 19, Verse 18:
And Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the
smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.
In Exodus, Moses seems to have more sense than God. When God orders
Moses up through the smoke and tells him to "charge the people, lest
they break through unto the LORD to gaze, and many of them perish" (because to look at God’s
face is instant death), Moses has to remind God that He has already
forbidden the people to come up (Ex. 19:23). When the people worship the
golden calf, God sends Moses away:
"...now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against
them and I may consume them." Again, Moses has to remind God that He has
just saved these people from the Egyptians, that the Egyptians will have
the last laugh when they hear that this same God who has parted the Red
Sea has destroyed the people He has saved (Ex. 32:11). So, we are told
three verses later, "the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to
do unto his people."
Yet, in this same chapter (Ex. 32:28) God orders every man who is on
His side to "go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and
slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man
his neighbor. And the children of Levi did according to the word of
Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men."
In other words, "I won’t kill them all, only 3,000. And even then, I
won’t do it--I’ll pass the buck onto the people, and let them do the
killing!"
Moses, in an attempt to assuage their grief, tells the people that
each one who has lost a son or brother has by that loss "ordained
yourselves for the service of the Lord...that he may bestow a blessing
on you this day." (What a price for a blessing!) Moses then tells them:
"And now I will go up to the Lord; perhaps I can make atonement for your
sin." His atonement is really a deal: realizing that the killing may
continue (for the wrath of Yahweh is great), Moses tells God that if He
cannot forgive the people who have sinned, He can blot Moses’s name "out
of thy book." But God does not take the bribe. He will still take
revenge on "whoever has sinned against me." The chapter ends with: "And
the Lord sent a plague upon the people, because they made the calf...."
Yahweh is not only vengeful, but stubborn.
We have noted that the belief in an inherited Original Sin is not
found in Jewish doctrine. Where, then, did the Christians get it?
Chiefly from the influence of Paul, specifically Romans 5:12 and 14:
Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have
sinned....
Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression....
(The italics are mine.)
This is an extremely interesting passage. We now have not only sin,
but death inherited, indeed caused by that one bite of an apple in the
Garden. Even those who have not sinned as Adam had (i.e.,
disobedience to God) will have to pay the price.
It does seem incredible that such a brief mention could influence
centuries of belief. The Catholic Church, faced with the necessity to
explain the humanity of Mary, promulgated in a Papal Bull as recently as
1854 the dogma of the "Immaculate Conception," which freed the Mother of
God from the taint of Original Sin.
The Founding Fathers-- Franklin, Jefferson, Adams-- did not believe
in the Fall of Man. My Christian friends take it for granted. Even our
newborns need baptism to keep them from, if not the fires of Hell, at
least Limbo. When did this start? Saint Augustine, who lived in the
fifth century of our era, and whose own battle against lust caused him
to be overzealous (to put it mildly), considered flesh evil. He is given
credit for adding the guilt of original sin to the newborn because
babies arrive on this earth through the nasty, depraved activity of sex.
His own famous sentence, "Give
me chastity--but not yet!" subtracts somewhat from his own sincerity,
if not from his saintliness. Equally disturbing is the advice of Martin
Luther: "Sin bravely, and see how much of God’s mercy you can invoke."
There’s that job security again! Luther was a preacher, with a vested
interest in recruiting sinners. And it all began in the Garden.
It wasn’t always so. The early Church squabbled over the nature of
Christ, God, and man. If Christ was truly God, did he suffer on the
cross or only pretend to? If God was truly omnipotent, why did He seem
surprised at Adam’s disobedience? Surely He must have known his creature
would be curious. And what of man? Was he no better than a dog to be
sent out of the Garden, never to return? (Was man the only creature to
leave? Are the tigers, the elephants and the orangutans still there? A
fatuous question, but remember, we are all amateurs here.) And
Nature--is it evil (the Snake) or merely the means now of torturing man?
(Did the thorns exist before the Fall?) Remember, man was put in
dominion (domination) over Nature--as if Nature was to blame. Who was to
blame? Eve, of course. An obvious answer for a male-dominated hunting
culture.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*
So this original sin business has led us into a quagmire (a Tar
Baby?) of questions. Let us begin with Nature. And for that we will have
to go back to the Greeks, to Plato, student of Socrates and teacher of
Aristotle (who in turn taught Alexander the Great). In his Republic,
Plato has that famous little story of a cave, where people sit chained
to their chairs, facing a blank rock wall (Perhaps they were the
original couch potatoes?). Behind them, a little distance from the
opening of the cave, a fire blazes. In front of the fire stand men
holding up wooden cut-outs depicting various objects and animals--chairs
and horses, pots, pans and pelicans. The fire throws shadows of these
images onto the wall, and the poor chained humans think that the shadows
are the real things. Then Plato goes one step further. He agrees that,
let’s say, the shadow horse is not real, but neither are the wooden
cut-outs--and neither is the horse in the field! What is real,
then? Why, the IDEA of a horse. Where is this IDEA? Certainly not out in
the field, for that is merely a horse made of flesh, the visible world.
Is the REAL horse in our minds, then? No, not even there. The real horse
is a an Eternal Form "in the intelligible world." How do we get to this
real horse, this Form? Through a vision of truth. How do we do that?
Through a study of mathematics, the only wisdom dealing with indivisible
numbers.
Wow. And we thought shrinks were limited to psychiatry. Let’s stay
with Plato a minute longer, since he is the most un-Greek of the Greeks.
With his separation of the real horse from the Idea of a horse (or the
touchable, visible world of reality from the eternal Reality--i.e.
Forms), he has enjoyed an amazing influence on Western thought, and
specifically, on the Christian Church, which added to his disparagement
of matter the idea that matter (flesh) is evil. Where did the Church get
this idea? In fairness to Plato, we must remember that he never said
that matter was bad, but for him it was definitely secondary, at the
bottom of his list. The Christian Church used his separation of matter
from form (flesh from spirit?) and added to matter the quality of
evil--based on, you guessed it: Genesis!
The early Church latched onto Plato like a drowning man clutching at
a lifeboat. And, in reality, perhaps that’s what it was. During the
first four centuries after Christ the Roman Empire struggled with decay from within
(bureaucracy and luxury--sound familiar?) and barbarian attacks from
without--Vandals and Germans and Gauls and Persians--and finally Alaric
the Visigoth, who sacked Rome in A.D.
410. Order was needed for the organization of this new religion, even
despotic order. Plato obliged them. We have called Plato unGreek because
of his rejection of nature. He was unGreek also because he was so
undemocratic, advocating in his Republic a despotic rule by his
Philosopher King, who would "bring compulsion to bear on the noblest
natures." In other words, a dictator. For the Church, Plato became the
High Priest of order, pushing logic into silliness, making a fetish of
Form. But Plato doesn’t stop there. He arranges, in his day-dream
"republic," to have breeding facilities for the more intelligent citizens--a kind of kennel reminiscent of
Hitler’s sexual experiments.
Athens would have no part of his theoretical solutions. So he went to
Syracuse, on the island of Sicily, where the tyrant Dionysius, an
unscrupulous despot if there ever was one, had enslaved the neighboring
Greek cities and was in the process of adding all of southern Italy to
his rule. Plato became great friends with Dionysius’s brother-in-law,
Dion. Ironically, Plato began to preach his own brand of despotism,
which was based on "justice," an idea that, according to Cephalus, an
old man and the only realist in Plato’s imaginary "republic," was
nothing more than simple honesty--paying one’s debts. But Dionysius,
having been told that despots lacked "the true qualities of manhood,"
was decidedly not happy with his guest.. We have the story from
Plutarch, the Greek historian who lived four hundred and fifty years
later. How much we can believe is questionable. One thing we do know is
that "Plato’s friends soon found it necessary to arrange for his
departure." On the way home he was captured, sold as a slave and
redeemed by Anniceris of Cyrene. The purchase money, refunded by friends
in Athens, was used to buy the land on which Plato’s Academy was
founded, where Plato would spend the rest of his life (He died in 347
B.C.) teaching the Royal Art of philosophical statesmanship.
It is an interesting--and tempting--thought to imagine that if Plato
had not been the world’s best PR man for his teacher, Socrates (who, as
the saintly victim of democracy, became the major character in Plato’s
book), we may not have included Socrates in every college curriculum, or
lifted him onto the podium of Great Thinkers. But then, maybe we would
have, for it is Plato, more than any philosopher in the ancient world,
who continues the myth of Genesis, the basic premise that man is
separate from nature. With apologies to Joseph Campbell, we will have to
admit that, although Plato was not a Jew, this unGreek Greek, in his
meandering search for reality, preached the separation of man from
nature so strongly that his philosophy maintained a stranglehold on
Christian thought until the days of Thomas Aquinas in the 13th
century. Aquinas taught that spirit could be in matter, that a
bird was not just a bird, but a creature containing spirit. At this same
time, Gothic architecture began. One of my students, a boy who sat in
the back of the room in a junior college in Florida, said it best: "Why,
fear was gone. Now the lines could go UP!"
But it took fifteen hundred years for those lines to go up, from
Plato’s death in the fourth century B.C. until Aquinas was born in the
mountains of Lombardy, in Italy, in 1225. When we consider those first
centuries after the death of Christ, when the Christian Church was
anxiously searching to articulate its doctrine and beliefs, as well as
to establish the hierarchy of its organization, we have to remember that
it had to
deal also with the loss of the Roman Empire, under the onslaught of
barbarian invasions. A civilization was literally crumbling around them.
It would be only
natural for them to turn to a Greek who offered a vision of law and
order under the wisdom of a Philosopher King. Rudolph Bultmann, in his
Primitive Christianity, says that for the Jewish religious
philosopher Philo (c. 25 B.C. - A.D. 40), who lived in Alexandria,
Egypt, Plato was the "greatest of the saints." During those first three
centuries of our era beliefs and cults, like the peelings of an apple,
curled and clung to the central problem of man and God, man and Nature,
man and his own soul. A mixture of Hebrew religious legalism,
imaginative Greek scientific naturalism, and the stultified
pronouncements of Plato vied for attention. All seemed to cry out for
survival by helpless victims of fate. Some of these beliefs, as we shall
see, were very imaginative, indeed. Others, like stoicism, discovered
strength in self-discipline.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*
The Stoicism of Epictetus (born c. A.D. 60) and the Roman Emperor
Marcus Aurelius (A.D.161-180 ), although basically a withdrawal into the
inner self of mind-over-matter, stressed the ability of the human will
to achieve virtue while still functioning in the world. It became a
positive manual of good conduct, with a pep-
talk quality about it, always stressing man’s natural goodness, which
could be the reliable, ever-present source of virtue. If external order
was vanishing, one could turn inward to one’s own self-discipline for at
least a modicum of control against the worst hell a philosopher (or
anybody else, for that matter) could imagine--nihilism. Where there is
nothing to believe, retreat into self is the last foothold of sanity.
But the
Stoics saved themselves from total isolation by insisting that, as
Epictetus says so eloquently in his Discourses, although Zeus
gives to each creature the selfish need to do everything for itself, he
has also arranged "that no one can attain its own good without
contributing something for the good of all." The community, after all,
was still out there, and man is a part of it. In his Meditations
Marcus Aurelius, in a soldier’s battle tent beside the Danube,
could insist that "Nothing happens to any man which he is not framed by
nature to bear." The solution to any problem, he insisted, lies within
ourselves. In his Meditations he writes that if you can be
"content with yourself, and serviceable to society, and at peace with
the gods, praising all they give and have ordained," you will have
attained the stoic’s paradise, which is not happiness so much as a quiet
contentment, earned through the exercise of forbearance and love for
your fellow men. Furthermore, this stoicism did not separate man from
nature. Writing of death, Aurelius advises:
"Thou hast existed as a part; thou shalt disappear in that which produced thee....This, too, nature wills...Pass, then, through this
little space of time conformably to nature, and end thy journey in content, just as an olive falls when it is ripe, blessing the nature that
produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew."
One feels a breath of fresh air flowing through this pagan stoicism.
Although it was always a secular philosophy rather than a religion, its
stress on virtue and the "divinity within" made it a viable choice for
those seeking something to believe in, without the negative fears of sin
and damnation. The more traditional believer might regret no mention in
stoicism of a hereafter. But perhaps this lack of reward and punishment
is the clue to its remaining a popular, uncomplicated code of conduct in
a world needing direction. Admittedly, virtue for its own sake becomes a
hard sell in a marketplace where the buyers are desperate for something
solid to hold onto, especially if other beliefs are offering heaven
everlasting. Still, in any review of early Christianity, stoicism
deserves consideration because its precepts influenced contemporary
thought, and any reasonable theologian must admit that it remains an
undercurrent of Christian values even today. I can remember, as a
freshman in college, browsing in a used bookstore in New Orleans and
finding a little leather-bound, gilt-edged volume of Epictetus. It
wasn’t a book so much as the man himself. I devoured him, and carried
him around with me like a secret friend when I would ride the streetcars
to class. Above all, I found it delightful because it avoided any notion
of original sin. The Christian Church could have taken a page from
Epictetus or Aurelius, but instead it concentrated on a stubborn
rejection of the world and produced some insufferably self-righteous
martyrs who invited--indeed, welcomed-- the jaws of the lions and the
sword of the gladiator.
An even crazier, way-out, "Star Wars" scenario was indulged in by the
Gnostics. The word in Greek refers to knowledge--one who knows.
Never, I think, has a word been more misused. To read a description of their beliefs
is to be transported, as a recent sect tried to do with suicide, into
the tail of a comet. Hold onto your hats (or your brain cells), while we review what the
scholars call Gnosticism, having, as some think, its beginning in Zoroastrianism.
Zoroaster (or, as Nietzsche called him, Zarathustra) , a Persian prophet
who lived from 660 until 583 B.C., withdrew from society to enjoy wisdom
and righteousness. The Devil tempted him by piercing his breast with a
sword and filling his entrails with molten lead, but he did not
complain, clinging to his faith in Ahura-Mazda, the Lord of Light, his
supreme god. Zoroaster’s religion was based on the dualism of light and
dark. The Gnostics took this idea and ran with it--in my opinion, over
the edge. For Gnostics, the soul of man had its origin in light. In
fact, it is a splinter torn from the heavenly light by demons who needed
to create a world out of the chaos of darkness. Then each soul fell, to
become an alien living on earth, imprisoned in a body. If these slivers
of light are ever removed, the whole world, the cosmos, will return to
primordial darkness. That’s why the demons jealously watch over these
splinters and sparks they stole. But they not only watch over them--they
devour them, they get drunk on them, so they can forget their heavenly
home. If they don’t, they yearn to return. When this yearning becomes
too great, too powerful, the God of Light sends his only Son down to
redeem them. He takes on an earthly body, to fool the demons. His chief
task is to pass on to his followers the magic words they will need for
the journey back. This Gnostic redeemer says things like "I am the
truth, the light." Once he makes everybody happy, he will return to
heaven to prepare a way for the "gnostics" to follow him.. When that
happens, the world will end.
Wow. Had enough? How would you feel, if you were a Gnostic?
Completely alone. Completely severed from nature, from the world, other
people. Truly an alien, alienated. The world is now not only
hostile, it is a prison, from which you long to escape. You are afraid
of everything, but most of all yourself, because you are now nothing but
a plaything for demons. You are no longer your own master--if you ever
were. Gone is any idea of transcendence, of a cosmos with order. Indeed,
the cosmos is a source of terror. The separation of God from the world
is complete. Liberation can only come through redemption, when one hears
the call, receives the message to detach oneself from the world.
Redemption is indeed the "knowledge" of the "gnostics" that this world =
NOTHING. The result of this knowledge is that the gnostics became a
version of early Christian hippies, like those delightful non-students
of the 1960's, liberated from any obligation to work, or to make the
world a better place (although in the ‘60's there was enough talk about
it) or, in the case of the gnostics, to belong to a human community at
all.
Some of them were very clever. According to Will Durant, in his
Caesar and Christ, a gnostic in Gaul named Marcus "offered to reveal
to women the secrets of their guardian angels; his revelations were flattering, and he
accepted their persons as his reward." For most, however, gnostic
ecstasy was attained through liberation from an oppressive world, the long-sought-for relief from being
human. In the final analysis the deepest fear of the gnostic--the
inescapable terror--was himself. Gone is any Greek idea of nature as
spirit. Poseidon is no longer in the sea, or Zeus in the sky, playing
with thunderbolts. The world is now completely "objective," an
indifferent, inert lump of matter ready to be analyzed and dissected by
modern science. Mythology, any hope, is gone, leaving religion as bare
as an uninhabited planet. The separation of man from nature in Genesis
has leap-frogged into a sophisticated nihilism. All mystery is gone--the
wonder of water, of air, of babies, of puppies playing. Indeed, where is
play? Have you ever heard of a more dour, sour, depressing fairy tale?
One can hardly call it a religion. And yet these ideas influenced the
early Christian Church. Why? Maybe, since in Genesis God passed the buck
to Eve for Original Sin, the Gnostics passed the buck to demons. I
think, at this moment, I am losing my grip on reality, if not my sanity.
As I write, the news is coming onto the TV screen of hundreds of
suicides (or murders) in Uganda--poor, deluded people following
religious leaders who have promised them paradise. Perhaps humanity, in
its struggle toward serenity, has not changed so much after all.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Interestingly enough, it was not in Rome, with its catacombs and
coliseum, or in the imperial tents of stoic emperors on a battlefield,
that the most influential philosophical thought would develop during
those decades of chaos. We must turn to a busy Mediterranean port built
by Alexander the Great, and named for him, in Egypt. Alexandria, with
its great library and fortunate geographical position, had become the
cultural crossroads of the ancient world. There a philosopher, an
Egyptian with a Roman name and a Greek education, softened the harsh
logic of Plato and made Plato’s Absolute available to humanity via an
intuition that reached the beatific visions of mysticism. His name was
Plotinus (A.D. 205-270), whose philosophy would be called
"Neo-Platonism," although it was far from Plato, indeed. For Plotinus
Nature is the source of spirit, not something secondary--and certainly
not something less valuable than spirit (and certainly not something
containing sin). In fact, for Plotinus, Nature produces all the outward
forms in the world. Beauty is the unseen divinity in things, in animals,
in people, in all matter. Art can be the doorway, the avenue leading
from these material forms to the hidden soul in Nature, and finally, in
the words of Will Durant, to " the divine Unity that gathers all things,
even striving and conflicting things, into a sublime and marvelous
harmony."
One wonders what the Catholic Church would have been without
Plotinus. Would there be a blessing of animals? Or a Saint Francis of
Assisi? Would there be the mystery and miracle, the sense of wonder that permeates even the
strictest ceremony? Would its Latin ritual, which reaches beyond
language into spirit, and puts a framework around time, have been as effective, without that
atmosphere of mysticism? The Church has lost much, I think, since it
abandoned Latin, for that gave a universality (the name Catholic) to the whole experience. I
remember thinking, in that little town in North Mississippi, as I said
Agnus Dei or Et cum spiritu tuo, that I could have been in
Budapest or Buenos Aires--or anywhere, at any time, and it would be the same. I could be in the 13th century,
with St. Thomas Aquinas, or in France with the Little Flower. When my
mother was dying of throat cancer, a stiff, pasty-faced "reverend" from
some Protestant sect came into her room. He had a superior,
uncompromising way about him. His eyes were cold, his thin-lipped mouth
drawn into a grim line. He starting talking about salvation and
repentance of sin to the woman on the bed, who was staring at the
ceiling, hardly knowing he was there. Her father had come from Ireland
when he was a baby to escape poverty, and his daughter was starving to
death in the land of plenty, from enjoying cigarettes. There was too
much irony in that room already; and I didn’t need to hear about
Original Sin. Then an Irish priest walked in. Evidently he was on the
hospital staff, because he silently introduced himself with a nod and a
smile, and began singing Irish lullabies. He sang them with that pure,
sincere tone of an Irish tenor, and the song swelled past my mother’s
room, down the hall, to drift, diaphanous, past the windows into the
sunshine. Plotinus was in that room with us that day. Plotinus and all
the Irish priests I had known from my childhood. I remember one telling
me, when I was twelve and had just said that I couldn’t believe in hell,
"Oh, that’s all right--Saint Bridget cuddent believe in it
teether."
Plotinus has been called the last of the great pagan philosophers, a
Christian without Christ. One scholar claims that he has left a deeper
mark upon Christian thought than any other single man, and that the
Catholic Church, usually thought of as belonging to the middle ages, is
really the last creative effort of classical antiquity, which may have
died giving birth to it. I found Plotinus to be a barometer of the
general mood of a decaying empire. Where logic and reason and even
self-discipline had failed, a belief rooted in nature, and not just
"nature" but Nature-as-Spirit gave man more hope than a dozen
Platos. And with no mention of Original Sin--for, after all, Plotinus
was a pagan, without the benefits of a tribal god named "Yahweh." What a
relief to return to him, to Alexandria, where he went to school and
studied under a man named Saccas for ten years. Saccas, a
Christian-turned-pagan, was trying to reconcile Christianity with Plato.
Plotinus, with his earthy mysticism, turned Plato inside-out and gave
budding Christianity a sensuous, but at the same time ethereal, vision.
One wonders if St. Thomas Aquinas, with his spirit-in-the-bird, would
have felt the same without the influence of Plotinus. Plotinus left
Alexandria when he was 39, and, except for a trip to Persia, lived the
rest of his life in Rome.
One of his fellow-students in Saccas’s class in Alexandria was a
young man named Origen (A.D. 185-254). When Origen was seventeen his
father was arrested as a Christian and beheaded. Left with the care of
his mother and six siblings, Origen became a conscientious ascetic who
fasted, slept little on bare ground, wore no shoes and subjected himself
to cold and nakedness. A bit of a Stoic, a Platonist with a touch of
Gnosticism, by the age of eighteen Origen was the head of the
catechetical school, teaching Greek science and Holy Scriptures. Perhaps
a little over-zealous in his need for sanctity, he castrated himself in
order to instruct women--which turned out to be the supreme irony, since
he would later be refused ordination as a priest because emasculation
disqualified him! He worked at Alexandria for 28 years, and in his
lifetime wrote 6,000 books. Under his influence Christianity ceased to
be just a comforting faith, but a philosophy based on Scripture and
supported by reason. He traveled to Rome, Arabia, Antioch, and to
Palestine, where the bishops were somewhat more lax in their
expectations, and ordained him while the Roman imperial executioners
ravaged Alexandria. He settled in Caesarea, Palestine, established a
school, and soon became famous. For him the ideal life is a sorrowless
condition, reached through contemplative isolation and a self-knowledge
that allows man to enter into the likeness of God, which is divine
wisdom. His growing reputation disturbed Demetrius, Bishop of
Alexandria, who annulled his ordination and banished him. By the year
250, when Origen was 65, the Roman persecution of Christians under the
Emperor Decian had reached Caesarea, and Origen was arrested. He was
stretched on the rack, loaded with chains and an iron collar, and kept
in prison. Before his executioners could kill him, the emperor died, and
he was released. His own life ended three years later.
Called by historians the most distinguished and influential of all
the theologians of the ancient church, Origen, that sad mixture of Stoic,
Gnostic, and Platonic ideas--as well as an overdose of self-denial--
seems to represent the struggle of the early Church with the problem of Spirit vs. Flesh. Woman, of
course, was the culprit. Woman (Eve) was to blame for the expulsion from
the Garden, for Original Sin. Remembering his own castration, we are not
surprised to learn that Origen did not conceive of the end of the world as a transfiguration, but rather
as a liberation of the spirit from its "unnatural union with the sensual." It is
incredible to think that he had been in the same class in Alexandria
with Plotinus. How differently they turned out! God for Plotinus was not
a personal deity but an Absolute "beyond experience." He did not use the
word "sin," although there are those who "live unrighteously." For
Plotinus all nature is essentially good. A man for all times, for all
people. One can understand his prevailing influence. His philosophy was
like a yeast of unabashed emotional acceptance of the world which might
just have saved a more dour, hell-bent religion from becoming extinct.
On the other hand, his fellow classmate Origen led a life that seems to
have been a catchall for any popular belief or near-belief, even for the gimmickry of Gnosticism. Put into 21st century terms,
the difference between the two might be that of a sensuous visionary
(Plotinus) and a scholarly bureaucrat (Origen). But, in the case of
Origen, we must be careful when we speak of any theologian at that time
as being "the most distinguished and influential." Origen lived at the
end of the second century, and into the first half of the third century
after Christ. Rome was still an Empire, and the "church" did not yet
have a capital "C," much less official recognition (which did not come
until the reign of Constantine in the fourth century). For most Romans,
Christ was still a minor political rebel whose deluded followers made
entertaining scapegoats for gladiators and lions in the arena. Unknown
to many citizens of the Empire, the squabblings of synods in Antioch,
Jerusalem or Caesarea over Original Sin--or anything else--was
insignificant. For the presbyters and priests of the early church, these
arguments were very significant--even life-threatening, as Origen found
out.
A Christian named Mani, born in Babylon in A.D. 215, died for his
beliefs. He was brought up in a "Baptist" sect in southern Babylonia and
carefully educated in Ctesiphon, on the Tigris near Baghdad. A Persian
mystic, he called himself a Messiah sent to reform the moral life of
mankind. His name gave birth to the term "Manichaeism," whose followers
were ascetic vegetarians who not only refused to separate man from
nature (indeed, were not allowed to kill any living thing), but who
believed that religious knowledge is a knowledge of nature. Man
can be saved by gnosis, knowing nature. For them a distinction
between physical, ethical, natural
and spiritual beings did not exist. As a young man Mani spent five
years at the
Persian court, then left to preach a brand of Christianity free of
Judaism--in fact, Manichaeism has been called "Christianity without the
Old Testament." The Encyclopaedia Britannica calls it "one of the
great religions." Connecting knowledge with faith and reason with
authority, it must have satisfied new wants in an old world, for it grew
rapidly , spreading to Syria, across North Africa to Rome, where schools
were established. In North Africa it suffered under the Vandal
invasions, and in Rome by Valentinian III, who banished it, and by
Justinian, who pronounced a death penalty for its believers. . In 270,
six years before his death, Mani returned to Persia, where the
Zoroastrian Magi ("the Wise Men from the East" in our nativity scenes)
threatened him. He fled the country, but returned when a new king was
more receptive. The next king was not so accommodating. Mani was
crucified, and his skin, stuffed with straw, was hung from the gates of
Susa. This martyrdom inflamed his followers--and Manicheism survived the
persecutions of Diocletian, the conquests of Islam, a thousand years of
Western history until the coming of Genghis Khan in the 13th
century. Perhaps no other tortured life represents more poignantly the
soul-searching need of the early Church to accommodate itself to
reality, to Nature, or to struggling mankind, than this kindly
Babylonian.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*
The most challenging heresy to the Church occurred in Alexandria,
that Egyptian home of Plotinus and Origen, that hotbed of suppositions
and speculations.
A Greek deacon named Arius (A.D. 256?-336) started asking some
disturbing questions. (1) If Christ the Son had been begotten by the
Father, surely it must have been in time, and not before the beginning
of time, i.e., eternal. Therefore the Son cannot be co-eternal
with the Father. (2) If Christ was created, it must have been from
nothing, and not from the Father’s substance. Therefore, Christ cannot
be co-substantial with the Father (i.e., of the same essence).
(3) As for the Holy Spirit, it was begotten by the Logos, the Word, and
was still less God than the Logos. It is
clear, to any student of Greek mythology, that what Arius was dealing
with here was Christ and the Holy Spirit as demigods, semi-divine beings
less than God but more than man. When the young deacon persisted in
these beliefs, the bishop at Alexandria called a council and persuaded
it to unfrock Arius. The whole squabble centered on
the meaning of two words, homoousia (God and Christ sharing
the same divine substance) and homoiousia (God and Christ merely
similar). Note that the whole storm swirled around one letter--i--inserted
after "homo." The Eastern bishops were pro-Arius, while in the West
priests were exiled and excommunicated for being "Arian." One, a famous
bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, was even attacked by imperial troops
and fled into the desert.
Wind of the controversy reached Emperor Constantine, who saw these
new ideas as a threat to the stability of the empire. If Christ was not
God, the whole structure of Christian doctrine would crack. The
subsequent chaos might destroy the authority of the Church, essential to
the control by Rome of its far-flung dominions. Constantine immediately
called his own council, the first ecumenical, or universal, synod. The
result was the Nicene Creed, in which the Holy Trinity of Father, Son
and Holy Ghost became the incontestable, undisputed Eleventh
Commandment. What has all this to do, you may ask, with Original Sin?
Everything, once you realize that the rock-bottom problem was the need
of man to be redeemed. Redemption--the payment of that obligation
incurred in the Garden toward God because of Adam’s sin--requires the
Incarnation of God-in-Christ, of the Divine-made-flesh. Arianism joined
Manichaeism as the double-edged sword threatening the cornerstones of
Judeo-Christian theology, the separation of man from nature (challenged
by Mani) and the absolute divinity of Christ (questioned by Arius, but
which, more than any single belief, provides for the redemption of sin.)
All these squabbles were certainly not isolated. They permeated every
presbytery and monk’s cell, every cloister from Arles to Constantinople.
They certainly influenced St. Augustine ( A.D. 354-430). Perhaps the
greatest theologian of the early Church, Augustine is an enigma, sometimes infuriating in
his contradictions, if not in his insufferable "holiness." Born in
Numidia (now Algeria) in northwest Africa of Roman and possibly Punic blood, his strong
sympathy for Carthage is evidenced by the fact that, when he became
Bishop of Hippo he insisted that his priests speak Punic rather than Latin. His father became a
Christian late in life, his mother since girlhood. At age twelve he attended a school
of grammar run by Roman veterans. He disliked Greek, and at age
seventeen went to Carthage to study rhetoric. Evidently disliking the
sexual restrictions of Christianity, he fathered a boy by a concubine.
Then, as he would for the rest of his life, he struggled with the
tug-of-war between spirit and flesh. He found some relief in Manichaeism
(spirit and matter are one) for nine years; then he became a skeptic and went to
Rome, hoping to teach rhetoric. When that failed, he took a lecture job
at Milan. In the autumn of 384 he was joined by his widowed mother (he
was in Milan with the mother of his son). When the study of Cicero
turned him from skepticism to morality, his mother must have seen her chance, because she sent the concubine back to Africa
(where she joined a convent) and arranged a marriage for her son with a suitable
bride not quite of marriageable age. Augustine, however, was less happy. Realizing
that sexual restraint was not his cup of tea, he made the famous
pronouncement, "Give me chastity, but not yet!" and took another
concubine.
A visit from two soldiers (who had pledged themselves to austerity
under the influence of the hermit St. Anthony in Egypt) made Augustine
see the intellectual weakness of skepticism. He turned to Plotinus, and
was a Neo-Platonist (so he says) from that time forward. Then he read,
in the Epistles of Paul, a sentence that ended his chastity problem.
"Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in clambering and wantonness, not
in strife and envying: but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not
provisions for the flesh in the lusts thereof." That Easter Ambrose,
Bishop of Milan, baptized him, and he moved back to Africa unmarried. His mother died on the
trip, his
beloved son Adeodatus soon after, at age seventeen. The Church now
for Augustine became his preoccupation--one almost wants to say his
obsession. He became a priest in 391, Bishop of Hippo five years later. At age 42, he was set for
life. He never left Hippo, and began an intense correspondence with
other bishops of the Church. Two hundred and fifty letters of that time
are preserved. Twenty-two books of De Civitate Dei were begun
after the sack of Rome by Alaric the Visigoth in 410. Then there were the Confessions, the most famous confessions ever
written, in which Augustine insists that evil must be inherited from
Adam, that all humanity is in a state of moral death, to be saved only
through baptism. As for baptism, Augustine insists that it must be applied to the newborn, since the newborn is guilty via
association--via sex, that built-in demon, that depraved activity of
human nature. In my opinion, we have not come very far from the Garden, from Genesis. I find in all this a
pathos bordering on the obscene. For a man who loved his illegitimate
son when he died--who wept for him-- to regard all children as depraved,
is unconscionable. It is as if Augustine has taken that mutinous member
of his body and is beating us over the head with it—worse, blaming little babies for his own lust. Perhaps he would have
been better off if he had followed Origen’s solution. Augustine was
against marriage because he was against concupiscence, against flesh
because it was evil. He became Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, rival
of Saint Jerome in Bethlehem--two pillars of the Church who faced each
other across the Middle East--one (ironically?) who would become a
Champion of Chastity, the other, Jerome, the great scholar and author of
the Latin Vulgate version of Scripture, the official Bible of the
Catholic Church. The Middle East was fast becoming a Christian Holy
Land, and the Church a battleground for squabbles over Original Sin
(what else?), with POWER as the prize.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Now we come to the crux of the matter, the Super Bowl of the
argument. Now we come to an Irish monk (who else?) who would confirm all
those beliefs of my childhood. Some say his origin is unknown, but that
he was a Celt, and he did come from either Scotland or Ireland. In any
case, his name was Pelagius, and he lived from A.D. 360 until he
disappeared from view about 420. He was in Rome by 405, the date of his earliest writing. He rejected the "human weakness"
excuse for immorality. He argued instead for the powers of human nature,
insisting that man’s free will at each moment of life, no matter what the previous career
of the individual has been, is able to choose good or evil. He saw Augustine’s "total
depravity" of man as putting man in bondage, as cutting the sinew of all
human effort and throwing on God the blame which really belongs to man.
His motto was "If I ought, I can."
Succinct as a proverb, his commentaries might not have drawn
attention except for his student, Coelestius, a young Italian lawyer.
When Rome was sacked by the Goths in 410, he went with Pelagius to North
Africa, where Pelagius met with Augustine. It couldn’t have been a
cordial meeting, for Pelagius sailed almost at once to Palestine, hoping
for a better reception. In the meantime, young Coelestius stayed in
Carthage, hoping to be ordained. Here the "one-upmanship" of the
religious bureaucrats reminds me of some faculty meetings I have enjoyed
in the halls of Academe. The Bishop of Carthage listened to Coelestius,
then called a synod where Paulinus, a deacon of Carthage, charged
Coelestius with six errors. Here they are (with my comments in
parenthesis):
1. Adam would have died even he had not eaten the apple. (TRUE! Or else why was God so afraid that he would eat of the Tree of life and become a god--i.e., immortal?)
2. Adam’s sin injured himself, not the human race. (TRUE! Where in Genesis is there a mention of heredity?)
3. Newborn babies are in the same condition as Adam before the fall. (TRUE! Again, there is no mention of heredity.)
4. The whole human race does not die because of Adam’s sin, nor will it rise again because of the resurrection of Christ. (Again,
the absence of the heredity argument makes the first item true, and as
for the resurrection problem, it does seem a bit haughty of man to assume a resurrection for himself, as if he will piggy-back on the divinity of
Christ.)
5. The law gives entrance to heaven as well as the gospel. (TRUE! This gives the lie to those people of questionable sanctity who claim
to be "born again" simply because they go to church!)
6. Even before Christ there were men without sin. (John the Baptist was a good guy, wasn’t he?)
There was also mentioned a #7, "Unbaptized infants have eternal
life," which was perhaps the strongest item on the list because it
challenged Augustine directly, and opened a question upon which the
Church --with its "limbo" for unbaptized infants (like some half-way
house)-- had never satisfactorily settled.
Now the squabbling began in earnest. The synod condemned Coelestius,
then excommunicated him. After a futile appeal to Rome, this student of
Pelagius went to Ephesus, in Greek Ionia, and received ordination. In
the meantime his teacher was living unmolested in Palestine, until, in
415, a Spanish priest came from Augustine to warn Jerome against
Pelagius. So now we have the two "greats," Augustine and Jerome, in the
fray. Jerome cited Pelagius before John, Bishop of Jerusalem, with
Pelagius’s idea that man can be without sin, if only he desires it. In
other words, because man has FREE WILL. The result of this confrontation
was a deadlock. The prosecution broke down. A few months later another
synod was called, with fourteen bishops speaking different languages.
Jerome called it "miserable," but it gave him what he wanted: Pegalius
refuted Coelestius. Yet when Pelagius said that divine grace consists
only in free will, and that man is able to live without sin and keep the
commandments if God gives him the ability, the synod let Pegalius
off the hook. Augustine argued immediately that Pelagius had used
language that was "ambiguous."
If interpreted by Pegalius’s previous statement concerning free will,
it involved a denial of what the Church understood by DIVINE GRACE. The
result of this charge was another synod, which now opposed Pegalius, and
in 418 Bishop Zosimus of Rome condemned his opinions. Nineteen Italian
bishops refused to follow, but even their zeal could not help when the
Eastern Church agreed with Rome. Pelagius disappears after 420. His
student Coelestius was still at Constantinople in 428.
But the story doesn’t end there. Something had happened which could
not be ignored. A challenge had been laid down, with all the intensity
of a dare. Pelagius had insisted that, at each moment of life, no matter
what the history of the individual has been, the will is able to choose
good or evil. We are born with no bias toward good or evil (ut sine
virtute, ita et sine vitio). We are uninjured by Adam’s sin, except
as his example may influence us. "Original" sin DOES NOT EXIST, since
sin is the result of free will and not of nature. If it were of nature
then all sin could be blamed on God, who made our nature. But just here
is the major problem facing Pelagius: If man has the natural ability to
be righteous, what becomes of Grace, of the aid of the Holy Spirit, of
priests, of Christianity? Pelagius was challenging the raison d’etre
of the Church itself--indeed, of that old job security for its
clerics. Gotta need that Grace, can’t depend on yourself. Gotta need
that Church, to keep it in business.
Yet the synod’s arguments against Pelagius seemed valid, if academic.
Some argued that he confused the denial of original sin (in the sense of
inherited guilt) with the denial of inherited nature (since man’s nature
was purely natural, not necessarily inherited). Doesn’t this cause
Pelagius to vacillate in the use of the word "Grace"? In his most
careful statements he appears to allow to grace everything but the
initial determining movement towards salvation. He expects the
unassisted human will to have the power to accept the salvation of
Christ. HENCE (the synod said), HE DEPARTS FROM THE CREED, because he
implies that human will can take the initiative in a person’s salvation,
when the Church had always insisted that it is the DIVINE will that
saves man. But, one can object, isn’t this the real meaning of
Christianity--that the cross gave man the responsibility of choice? The
Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov--always the
cynic-- solves the dilemma when he says that, since man wasn’t
ready for such a burden as free will, he turned the job over to the
Church. Augustine had answered his critics with the assertion that when
God ordains an end He also ordains the means. The result of all this was
a split in the Church, sometimes called "Semi- Pelagianism," a middle
way between the harshness of Augustine and the free-will beliefs of
Pelagius, with monks arguing that God gives grace, but man keeps
responsibility. This belief that divine will and human will cooperate in
the destiny of man has quietly survived, even though Pelagius is all but
forgotten.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*
But not his ideas of free will, or his rejection of
Original Sin. Those ideas resurfaced in the philosophy of a Jew named Spinoza, who lived in
Holland from 1632 to 1677. His family had fled there in 1492 when the good
Christian monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, expelled the Jews from
Spain. Holland in those days was the closest thing to religious freedom
in Europe (the Dutch were more interested in making money than in burning heretics). In Amsterdam Spinoza must
have breathed the fresh air from the Zuider Zee, or watched the skaters laughing as
they sped down the canals. He would have none of this vengeful God separating man
from nature, much less burdening his creature with sin. For Spinoza God is
Casua sui, a spirit which is the cause of itself. God is certainly
not sitting on a cloud somewhere and for something better to do, decides
to zap matter into being. For Spinoza, that’s where the whole problem starts, because once matter is created apart from
nature, man must ask WHY. "Why did You create this universe in the first
place?" The minuteman asks WHY, he is asking for a REASON. Since God is LORD up there on a
cloud, the reason must be to serve him. The minute you become obligated
to serve, a great ledger appears in the sky, with two columns, like the profit/loss
record of any shopkeeper. Or the grade book of any teacher. Now, when
you make sales or grades, you need JUDGMENT. Who did well today? Who
obeyed? Who disobeyed? The minute you have judgment, you need REWARD AND
PUNISHMENT. You need HELL. It’s as simple as that. And you start with a
sin that can’t be gotten rid of except by some SPECIAL DEAL, either from
God or one of his shopkeepers.
Needless to say, Spinoza was excommunicated from the Amsterdam
synagogue. When Spinoza lived in Amsterdam Rembrandt was painting there.
Rembrandt often went to the old Jewish quarter for his Biblical models.
We have no likeness of Spinoza; nobody knows what he looked like.
Perhaps he exists in one of those paintings. I thought of him when I was
living in a pickup truck camper on an abandoned farm in Kentucky, where
my husband and I took down and reassembled three pre-Civil War log
cabins to make a house. Without electricity, we would listen at night to
the news on a battery radio. One night the announcer said that the
elders of the Amsterdam synagogue had just voted NOT to reinstate
Spinoza into their congregation. Outside the stars shone brighter, and
the incessant call of the whippoorwills rang clear. I was sure that
Spinoza, wherever he was, could have cared less. The rabbis were playing
their old job security game again.
No part of the Bible can be read apart from the history of its time.
The Book of the Prophet Isaiah (written down c. 700 B.C.) is no exception.
Isaiah lived in Judah, the Southern Kingdom. In 734 Judah was invaded by the allied
kings of Israel (the Northern Kingdom) and Damascus, who in turn were
conquered by the western march of the Assyrian armies. Then, on this
eternal chess board of the Middle East, Sargon II usurped the Assyrian
throne and completely destroyed Israel in 721 B.C.
Not to be outdone, his son Sennacherib devastated Judah eight years
later. What was Isaiah to do to help his people? He tried walking the
tightrope of neutrality, on the one hand blaming the sufferings of a
conquered people on their own faithlessness, which had caused Yahweh to
use the Assyrians as "the rod of mine anger" (10:5), but at the same
time promising them that Yahweh would never allow his Chosen People to
be destroyed (31:5), by allowing the forgiveness of at least a Remnant
of the people of Israel who "shall return...."(10:21-22). He will do
this by sending a "righteous king" (32:1) for a glorious future for
Israel.
It is well to stop here a moment and remind ourselves that there is
no indication that this future is anywhere but on this earth, and
specifically in the land of Israel. Nor is this "Righteous Leader" a
Messianic savior. Within him is the hard core of the old familiar vengeful Yahweh, with fire and smoke from
the volcano:
"...and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with
the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked, and righteousness shall be the girdle
of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins." (Isaiah 11:4)
There is nothing ethereal, metaphysical or other-worldly here. The emphasis, as the editors of
the Dartmouth Bible state clearly, is concentrated on concrete
immediacy, what "was in store for Israel and for the world." This righteous king would inaugurate on
earth a reign of justice and peace for all--answering the desperate
need of a nation struggling for release from bondage, of individuals seeking an escape from rage--in
short, this king would provide an antidote for revenge, a haven of hope
for this day, this moment.
Something happens in Chapter 40. Most scholars believe a change of
authors occurred, separated by two centuries. Assyria has fallen and
Nebuchadnezzar, the Chaldean, rules, and in 586 B.C. orders the
destruction of Jerusalem and the deportation of the Jews to Babylon.
Twenty-four years later, after Nebuchadnezzar’s death, the Persian king Cyrus conquered the Chaldean Empire and swept
westward to the Aegean Sea. Cyrus was more than a conqueror; he was a
statesman who allowed his subjects to have their own religion, and, in 538 B.C., permitted
the Jews to come home from Babylon. We have in Chapter 40 not only a
change of author but a change in climate--both political, emotional and cultural. Whoever
this anonymous author was--some call him the "Nameless Prophet," he
joyously joins the Israelis for their return to Palestine. The righteous
king of Isaiah stops smiting with his rod and becomes God’s "Righteous
Servant": "Behold, my servant shall deal prudently, he shall be exalted and extolled, and be very high." Some scholars think
that this servant does not refer to an individual, but to the whole
nation: "Thou, Israel, art my servant" and "Thou art my servant, O
Israel" (Isaiah II 41:8 and 49:3).
Yahweh is no longer a frightening, avenging force but a creator,
directing all events of past and future. The "nameless prophet" who
writes Isaiah II speaks of forgiveness and hope, courage and comfort,
and creates the most lyric, poetic book in the Bible. He prepares the
way for Zechariah, a priest who comes home to Palestine from Babylon to
find the ruined temple destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, and begins the
process of rebuilding. But the Book of Zechariah, like the Book of
Isaiah, is a puzzle, containing two parts very dissimilar, indicating,
perhaps, the presence of two authors. The first part is straightforward
and specific, the last becomes full of fantastic visions, almost
apocalyptic with mysterious symbolism. It is in Zechariah that we get
the King coming with salvation "lowly, and riding upon an ass." He
"shall speak peace unto the heathen: and his dominion shall be from sea
even to sea, and from the river even to the ends of the earth." Then: "
the Lord their God shall save them in that day as the flock of his
people....For how great is his goodness, and how great is his beauty?"
The Book of Daniel carries on this enigmatic vision. Pretending to be
an autobiography of a person living in Babylon in 605 B.C., when
Nebuchadnezzar became king, it mixes eye-witness accounts with weird
dreams. Four of its passages are written not in Hebrew but in Aramaic,
the vernacular of Palestinian Jews living at the end of the
pre-Christian era. Scholars date much of this story to the years 167-165
B.C., thus making Daniel the latest book of the Bible. Why is the dating
of Daniel so interesting? First, because it is the only place in the Old
Testament (Daniel 9:25 and 26) where the word Messiah is used, and
secondly, because the history recorded in the Old Testament extends only
to the re-establishment of the Jews in Jerusalem at the end of the fifth
century B.C. (That same century, remember, when Chapter One was written
in Genesis!) It would be four hundred years before Jewish history is
picked up again in the New Testament. Those four hundred years are
called "the silent centuries," although within that time the fourteen
books of the Apocrypha (called so because their authorship was
questionable for the scholars of the time) were written. So we have no
totally accepted biblical record of Judea from the end of the fifth
century B.C. until the writings of Daniel in that last century before
the Christian era.
Tremendous changes had occurred in Jewish history since the capture
of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C.and the 48-year bondage in
Babylon. First, when Cyrus permitted them to return to Palestine in 528
B.C., many remained in Babylonia and prospered, becoming known as part
of the "Eastern Dispersion," or Diaspora. The rest fled westward, to
settle in cities bordering the Mediterranean. A hundred years later
Judea was still a tiny part of the mighty Persian Empire, and it
continued to be a petty province until Alexander’s conquests in 332 B.C.
By then the Jews of the Western Diaspora were thoroughly Hellenized by
Greek culture spread by Alexander. After his death in 323 B.C.,
Palestine was under the control of Ptolemy in Egypt, and then by Syria,
under another of Alexander’s generals, Seleucus, until he was defeated
by the Syrian king Antiochus III in 198 B.C. These 125 years between
Alexander and Antiochus III were relatively peaceful for the Hebrews.
Then in 168 B.C. Antiochus III was replaced by Antiochus IV, who,
encouraged by the Hellenized Jews of Jerusalem, determined to do nothing
less than destroy Judaism. I defer here to the editors of The
Dartmouth Bible (p. 712), who tell this story so well:
In the year 168 B.C. he erected in the Temple an altar to the Greek
Zeus on which swine were sacrificed, and all over Palestine he enforced the same policy. His officers leveled the walls of the city, banned Scripture rolls and burned those discovered. Mothers permitting the circumcision of their sons were hanged with their babies dangling
from their necks. Thousands who refused to yield (though many apostates are recorded) were slaughtered or sold into slavery and others fled
the country. Such brutality at last led to revolt under the leadership of
a local priest, Mattathias, and his five sons. This
