Notes on Philosophy of Religion

1. The Nature of philosophy: Philosophy is an attempt to justify one’s world view. A world view corresponds to a way of life, to certain basic values and ideals and certain institutions and practices that attempt to realize those values and ideals. Its function is to justify that way of life. A world view typically consists in:

(1) Notions about what constitutes a justification of an action or policy, an attitude, or a belief, that is, about what is rational;
(2) Notions about the world in general and how we can know it, showing how one can justify the world view and the way of life it is supposed to justify (metaphysics and epistemology);
(3) Beliefs about the world entering into the justification. In the end, these beliefs concern the Self and its World. One’s world is a stage on which one acts out a rationally defensible life. So they include:

(a) notions about human nature, for instance, about freedom of will, or an immortal soul, and human psychology, for instance, what motivates action, what people are capable of, and what makes people happy or satisfied with life.
(b) notions about the world, in particular, cosmology (which deals with the overall structure and nature of the world), cosmogony (which deals with the origin of the world), fundamental natural law, and, if one is assumed, the nature of the supernatural realm above natural law.

A central topic in philosophy is the status of ideals. Our justification of any particular set of practices is likely to argue that some rationally commendable ideal, say, happiness, wisdom, knowledge, justice, moral rectitude, fairness, and beauty, is best pursued by following those practices. A religious person might seek faith, holiness, enlightenment, or piety. A way of life can be specified only by describing the ideals aimed at within it, the practices and institutions by which it is hoped to accomplish or approximate to those ideals, and the beliefs supporting all this in its associated world view. It is as important to understand what people aim at and fall short of, as it is to understand what they actually do.

There are some important metaphysical questions about ideals: Are ideals real things that somehow drive events in the world, or are they only pictures people have of how things ought to be? Is there a person in control of the world who shares our ideals (God), or does nothing other than us in the world care about our ideals?
Rationality itself seems to be an ideal, and commitment to it seems to involve commitment to other ideals, such as knowledge and rational autonomy. So, is rationality rational? A ‘no’ to this question would result in a radical philosophical stance—one might suggest holding to a world view, perhaps relying on faith, that could not be justified. A ‘yes’ raises typically philosophical issues about circularity—“so rationality is rational. So what? Of course it is rational to be rational. I want to know if I ought to do it, and why!”

There may be a clash between philosophical and religious ideals, for one possible religious ideal is faith, which involves reliance on the divine, not one’s own intellectual resources. But it would seem that a philosopher should take rational autonomy, a kind of self-direction, relying on one’s own intellectual resources, as her ideal. So if faith is extended to matters of belief, so that the religion takes it that it is reasonable to believe divine revelation from some source (oracles, prophecy, sacred scripture), no matter what our own investigations and reasoning might say about the reliability of that source, it would seem that one could not be a good philosophers and adhere to the religious ideal of faith at the same time. It is conceivable, though, that a bit of philosophical research might lead us to conclude that it is best not to rely on our own intellectual resources, but to adopt a religious faith, and that would perhaps reconcile the conflict between the two ideals.

2. The Nature of Religion: A religion is surely a part of a way of life, and a religion may well dominate the whole way of life. But which part is it? We might look at particular religious beliefs and practices, religious institutions, religious writings, religious art, and try to identify religion by these more or less external indicators, so that religion is whatever involves prayer, priests, sacrifices, sacred texts, icons, and so on. But this relies on external indicators, without telling us what makes these indicators, these beliefs, institutions, writings and works of art, religious in the first place. The problem becomes clear when we consider difficult cases. For instance, take the Beatles song, “Let it be”—when it was introduced there was some discussion whether it was a religious song. Some people argued it was, since it refers to “Mother Mary” and speaks, it seems, of a certain peace and acceptance that we might gain through prayer to her—“Mother Mary come to me, let it be.” Moreover, it has some of the musical qualities of a hymn. But others suggested that it was actually an ironic imitation of a religious song, and “Mother Mary” was the name of a drug. The message might be that some people treat this drug as though it provided religious solace. Perhaps the song could even be taken to be critical of religion, implying that religion itself was like a drug, “the opium of the masses,” as Marx put it. The general tone, and the central references to religious aims and a religious figure, which are still there under all these interpretations, are not enough to establish that it is a religious song. We have to go deeper, and ask what motivation lies behind it. What is the song trying to say, and what attitude is it expressing? If the song expresses approval of reliance on divine help, and accepting what evil may come trusting in a divine being to preserve us, then it is religious, and it doesn’t matter whether it is sung by a choir in a chapel or a rock band in a concert hall. If it is intended ironically, it is not a religious song, and it doesn’t matter if someone, unconscious of its irony, sings it in church.

Religion is best defined as that part of one’s world view and way of life that responds to a certain problem, the problem of cosmic evil. The core belief in the religious world view seems to be that things are all right, despite appearances to the contrary. There is some justification for evil, and the world is at root a place friendly to human beings. Some people are just quite sure that things are all right, and William James calls these the “once-born.” Others worry that things are not all right at all, that there are irredeemable and senseless evils, absurd evils, that the universe doesn’t care, that there is no purpose to life, that human beings have no standing in the world and are here by accident, or that human beings are evil and estranged from the divine, and then they discover that they were wrong, and are converted—they are the “twice-born.” The religious world view, then, tells us that things are all right, and explains why they falsely appear not to be—it saves us from despair.
This definition tries to identify the central function of religion. Now whatever we identify as its central function, we will have to recognize other, possibly very important functions, that are also served by religion. If it turns out that the performance of one function somehow leads to and controls the performance of the other functions internal to religion, then that one will be the central function. Of course, one may use religion for any number of functions that are not in themselves religious, and these functions should play no role at all in our definition.

2.1 What is a particular religion? Even if the central function of religion is to deal with the problem of cosmic evil, one still cannot specify a particular religion simply by laying out its solution to the problem of cosmic evil. It is perfectly possible that two different religions would have the same solution. What would make them different religions, in that case? When we imagine such a case, we find ourselves thinking of two historically unconnected entities. A religion seems to be something like a nation. Two nations may have precisely the same form of government, and be otherwise very similar, but be different nations because they are located in different places, and have different histories. If we look at the institutions of one nation at different times, and ask where the later institutions came from, the answer is that they are continuations of the earlier institutions, just as the state of a coffee cup is explained from its earlier states and what has happened to it in the time between. (It was green, and nothing has happened to it, so it’s still green. It was red, and has been sitting a long time in strong sunlight, and so now it has faded to pink.) So the institutions and beliefs of Christianity at a given time are explained by its beliefs and institutions at earlier times and what has happened between. We could imagine a religion with the same solution to the problem of Cosmic Evil arising in a different time and place, the institutions and beliefs of which cannot be explained by reference to the institutions and beliefs found in the history of Christianity, and if this happened, we’d have a second religion like Christianity, the same kind of religion, but it would not be Christianity. So a given religion is a connected historical entity, the later phases of which are explained by its earlier phases. If we say that a religion is part of a way of life, with a connected world view, that deals with the problem of cosmic evil, then we should take a “way of life” here to be a particular historical entity, not a sort of historical entity.

2.2 Is a religion separable from its culture? Some have suggested that a religion is an expression of its culture’s world view. This is not enough to define religion, of course, since we need to know what part of its culture’s world view it expresses, but it does raise some questions. Does one have to adopt an entire culture to adopt a religion? Can one become a Buddhist, and not be Chinese or Indian? American Zen Buddhists often collect Japanese art in their homes, eat Japanese food, go about barefoot or in slippers in the house, and so forth. But surely this is because one who adopts a religion is likely to want the art of that religion about, and most such art will be from its culture of origin, and anyone interested in a foreign religion will probably be interested in the foreign culture as well, and so on. One can, it may seem, adopt a religion without its culture of origin, if one accepts the doctrinal side of the religion, their story about how it’s all right and why it doesn’t look like it and what we can do about that, and its essential historic practices, the practices needed to pursue the central religious goal, omitting those practices that are more peripheral and culture-bound. So an American Zen Buddhist will adhere to Buddhist ethics, the ethics taught by the founder, and meditate in the traditional fashion, but might not celebrate the same holidays in the same way that a Japanese Buddhist would, and he might wear his shoes in the house, or sit in a different posture in meditation. If we are to practice a religion, work needs to be done, we need to conform ourselves to some religious ideal, and we will adopt traditional institutions and practices from that religion that help us do this work. But we might develop new institutions and practices within our own culture, as American Buddhists, and reject some Japanese practices. The same religion might be attached to different institutions and practices in different cultures, as long as those differences don’t affect the main point, and there is a historical continuity present. Indeed, Buddhism, Christianity and many other religions view themselves as potentially universal, adaptable to any culture that is not downright evil. Note, by the way, that it is arguable that there is much in Western culture that is incompatible with Christianity, so merely pointing out that Buddhism advances ideals which are not generally recognized or followed in the West, or compatible with common Western customs, is not enough to establish that one cannot be a Western Buddhist. These ideals are incompatible with culture in the East, where Buddhism is native, as well. A religion often poses a challenge to the culture it is in.
Still, some religions make a lot of one cultural element or another, and they will be less exportable to other cultures. An extreme example is Hinduism, which may view adherence to the Caste system as essential, which means, of course, that it cannot be exported, except as superstition, to a European culture. Many, more liberal Indians argue that the Caste system is a mistake, and is not a necessary part of the Hindu religion, for it seems to them that their religion will eventually have to be given up entirely otherwise. Some philosophers have argued that Christianity, in a similar way, is male chauvinist—after all, God is supposed to be a male, priests and such are traditionally male, the letters of St. Paul assert that a woman should be obedient to her husband and cover her hair in church, and so on. Others argue that these elements of Christianity are accidental, not essential to the religion, and even contrary to its central ideals, so that Christianity in its highest development should be non-sexist—it should eventually outgrow its sexism, as Hinduism might eventually outgrow its caste system. Again, consider the relation of Christianity to homosexuality. More conservative Christians argue that there is no room at all for homosexuality within the religion, and liberals often go the other way. The conservative often tries to establish that the ethical ideal would enforce the traditional prohibitions, so that, for instance, it is argued that it is a violation of ethics for a woman to ‘display herself’ or for anyone to engage in homosexual sex. Liberals argue that these customs are not rooted in the ethical ideal, and may even be contrary to it (if they involve the oppression of women, for instance).

Religion is often part of one’s cultural, national or personal identity, and so people often think it would be disloyal to their culture, nation, or parents not to follow their religion. If that is one’s chief motivation, and one does not think that all other cultures are debased and evil, then one may be quite tolerant of other people following different religions than one’s own, since, after all, they have duties of loyalty to their parents and culture. The religions of minority and oppressed peoples, such as Judaism, often become focused on this function, and so they prescribe all sorts of peculiar customs and behavior designed to set their adherents aside from other people and keep them in mind of their own peculiar identity. Groups that find themselves at odds with the culture at large will often follow a religion that expresses this opposition. So people who dislike modern developments, and wish to hold on to older ways of life, often express this in terms of religious conservatism or fundamentalism, which becomes part of their identity. (Here one might consider the Amish, and Islamic fundamentalism, which is directed against Western modernization, and Western forms of government and culture which would supplant the traditional Islamic forms.) For those who see their religion as part of their identity, the prospect of losing the religion is like the prospect of death, and they generally emphasize faith and loyalty as a foundation of belief, and avoid rational justifications, which give too much leverage to opponents. This role of religion, however, might be argued to be accidental to it, since some religions seem to be universal (that is, adaptable to different cultures), and to aim at forming an ideal human type that is not culturally defined. (If it seems that Judaism, say, would cease to be Judaism without this sort of function, perhaps Judaism is more than a religion. To explore this we would have to imagine how Judaism might develop so as to become a culturally dominant religion, and evolve a new cultural background, and ask ourselves if such a development would permit us to regard the outcome as a later form of Judaism, or would instead for us to speak of the rise of a new religion out of Judaism.)

2.3 Religion is not ethics. A religion usually seems to advance an ethical vision (that is one of its functions), and it seems that commitment to an ethical vision could be a part of the resolution of the central religious problem of cosmic evil. If the world is fundamentally good, then the world would surely demand that we be ethical, and unethical people would put themselves at odds with the world. Indeed, in a good world, unethical people would be justly punished for their transgressions of the moral law, and the appearance that one can benefit from unethical behavior is one of the reasons we find ourselves doubting if the religious picture of the world can possibly be true. Some view ethics as the center of religion, take it that following their religion is the best, or only, way to live an authentically ethical life. This, I should say, is a religious reason to be ethical only to the extent that it is thought that leading an ethical life is essential to salvation, that is, to reconciling one’s imperfect self to the perfectly good world. If one does view this as the center of religion, it may lead one to be tolerant of adherence to other religions, as long as the ethical principles supported by the religion seem to be adequate.

There is a tendency for those who view ethics as the center of religion to drift toward a naturalistic religion. This is because there seems to be a justification for adherence to the ethical ideal quite independent of belief in a supernatural realm. Kant even argues from an independent justification of the ethical ideal to the necessity of belief in the supernatural, so that the belief in ethics, not the belief in God, comes first. Thus the differing supernatural metaphysics, and the cultural complexes, found in the various religions come to be seen as non-essential and false, and are treated as metaphor and myth, suitable for the instruction of those who are not up to understanding the philosophical justification for adherence to the ethical ideal. This would mean that all religions have the same fundamental aim, the realization of an ethical ideal.
Many religious people are quite suspicious of this approach, for they think ethics does not by itself sufficiently address the central concern of religion, and that it may actually substitute something else for religion. I would agree—the supernatural elements of belief in religions such as Christianity are, I think, essential within that religion if it is to serve the central, defining function of a religion, to address the problem of cosmic evil, in the way it does. If these beliefs are removed, whatever is left is not enough to do what religion is meant to do. I do not think that all religions postulate a supernatural realm—some accomplish the central religious function without doing this—but those who do postulate such a realm have almost all selected a way of accomplishing that function which requires the supernatural. As for all religions having the same underlying aim, while it may be true that they all aim at the fulfillment of an ethical ideal, this is not enough to make the case, for they have other aims, and more fundamental aims, which seem to be at variance with one another. Perhaps they all have the same underlying aim of resolving the problem of cosmic evil. This is what makes them all religions. But part of what makes a particular religion the religion it is and not another religion is its particular solution to this problem, which may differ from another religion’s solution, and may entail different aims to be followed by its adherents. A Buddhist does not try to reconcile himself to the God against which he has sinned, and a Christian does not attempt to recognize the truth that there is no Self.

2.4 Nor is religion superstition. Most (not all) religions involve belief in the supernatural, generally a God who is above natural laws and perfectly good, who guarantees that good wins out in the world, by designing natural laws to bring this about, or by producing miraculous exceptions to natural law to straighten out difficulties. (For instance, God may miraculously make the soul immortal.) Superstition is belief in the supernatural, but without a coherent overarching world view or cultural complex attached to it, and without a clear or sufficiently sophisticated connection between the supernatural and the solution to the problem of cosmic evil. Sometimes the word ‘superstition’ is used to mean irrational supernatural beliefs. That is not my use here, though I would agree that in my sense of the term supernatural beliefs are usually irrational. Often we view as superstition religions alien to our own, but that may be mere prejudice. We don’t know much about the highly coherent world views associated with them, or understand or appreciate their solutions to the problem of cosmic evil. Our prejudices are confirmed by people who adopt lower forms of these alien religions, the exoteric, popular forms, or beliefs from these religions piecemeal, without the more advanced and insightful philosophical side of them that gives a higher meaning to it all. So a lot of people believe in reincarnation in the United States, identifying their belief as Hindu, and drawing some solace from it. Nonetheless, they have very little notion what it really means to be a practicing Hindu, what the other beliefs in the religion are, what justifications have been advanced by Hindu philosophers for it, what work one has to do to be saved under the Hindu view of things, and so on. Such people have a superstitious belief. This means that a belief in the supernatural which is not religious (or part of a religion) is perfectly possible, though it may be that such superstitious belief typically functions as rather low grade religion, providing some sense of meaning and solace in the face of evil. So superstition is perhaps religion done poorly, rather than no religion at all.

2.5 Belief in the supernatural is not essential to religion. What explains the fact that most religions involve supernatural beliefs is their central function of dealing with the problem of cosmic evil. The most obvious way to do that is to postulate a supernatural being who is perfectly good, and controls the world subject to natural law in such a way as to insure that everything is for the good. If the postulation of the supernatural does not seem to perform this job (or perhaps does not seem to do it very well) we regard it as superstition instead of religion. It isn’t serious enough to be religion. If religion serves some function that is not related to this job, such as fostering an ethical life-style for its own sake, then we tend to sense something missing—this does not address our deepest religious concerns—unless this function is joined to the central religious function of addressing the problem of cosmic evil. But the problem can be addressed without postulating a supernatural realm, and some religions, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, for instance, are not supernatural religions. To support this view, one would have to show that our religious concerns are addressed by such religions, so that Buddhism, for instance, does not turn out to be nothing more than a form of therapeutic psychology, or ethics.

2.6 Nor is religion essentially political. Nearly all religion supports the political ideals of its culture, and Marxism has argued that this is the central, defining function of religion. A religion advances a world-view (perhaps, but not necessarily, one addressing the cosmic problem of evil) that provides support to a given economic and political system. On the Marxist view a religion could not be successfully exported to another culture at a different economic/political level of development. A political ideal is often implicit in a religious world view for something of the same reason that an ethical ideal is. If the world is good, then it is just, and God is just, and only just government will be consistent with God’s wishes. Perhaps government of the right sort is essential to making the world right, and so religious sanctions will be brought to bear in the way Marxists suggest. One can see the political element in religion in particular in the Ancient polytheisms, and in modern Islam.

3. Comments on the Definition of Religion: There are two things especially to be noted about the definition I have proposed. The first is that it is a “theoretical definition” (sometimes called a “real definition”), not a “definition of usage.” There are a number of sorts of definition that can be given for a term. The easiest to understand is a “stipulative definition,” which simply states how one will use a word. A stipulative definition cannot be objected to, except insofar as one might object to an inconsistent use of the word. After all, he can used words any way he wants to as long as explains himself. A definition of usage explains how people actually use the word, and so it must be in agreement with ordinary usage. That means one cannot simply stipulate it, but has to look at how the word is in fact used. One can given such a definition of usage in various ways. The two most common are an ostensive definition, in which you point out a clear example of the thing (dictionaries sometimes include pictures of the thing defined), and an analytic definition, in which you supply a synonymous phrase with the same or approximately the same meaning as the word defined. So a “bachelor” is “an unmarried male who is marriageable.” A theoretical definition is an attempt to say what the thing defined really is, what it is about it that as a matter of fact makes it belong to the sort being defined. This is the sort of definition given by a scientist. For instance, water is H2O. This is what the stuff in the glass really is, and its being H2O is what makes it water. Notice that one could use the word “water” perfectly correctly, and be able to point out water or otherwise defined its normal usage, without knowing this about it. (One might also know the use of a word perfectly without being able to give, or even recognize, a correct analytic definition of it.) Knowing a theoretical definition is scientific knowledge, and the definition has a theoretical function, and is generally part of a larger explanatory theory. From this definition, one hopes to explain why it is that water has the various characteristic properties it has, for instance, why it is liquid at room temperature, why it dissolves things, and so forth, and the definition enables us to do this only if we accept the theories of modern chemistry. A chemist can predict a compound’s properties from its chemical formula, since that formula tells him how it is put together, and theoretical definitions often are made in terms of the real structure of a thing.

The definition here developed for religion is a theoretical definition. You don’t have to know it to be able to tell when you’re dealing with religion (to tell when “religion” is the right word to use), but you need it to understand why religion has the various properties it does, particularly those properties that enable us to identify it as religion. So in giving my definition I am proposing a theory, which identifies some elements of religion as more fundamental elements, from which other things follow and can be explained. Religion is something human beings have invented, of course, and so the theories applicable to it will be theories about how it fits into human life, and above all, about what purpose human beings have for it. It is like defining “toaster oven.” A theoretical definition of the term would have to identify the purpose of the thing, why human beings made it, and once we knew that we might be able to explain why it is put together the way it is, why it is found chiefly in kitchens, and so forth.

One might agree with me on the usage of the term “religion,” so that we are talking about the same thing, but disagree on the theoretical definition, particularly, if we have some fundamental disagreements on the workings of human society. Sometimes our theories lead us to revise our usage. So, for instance, when people first saw what a whale really is (a warm-blooded mammal) and what fish really are (cold-blooded etc.), they stopped calling whales “fish.” (Melville, speaking in the character of a practical, down-to-earth, 19th-century whaler in the beginning of Moby Dick, makes a big point of insisting that whales are fish, whatever the fancy-pants university professors might say.) Our theoretical commitments might lead us to stop calling Buddhism a religion, if we think supernatural belief is at the center of religion. Just as whales are in some (more or less superficial) ways similar to fish, so Buddhism, perhaps, is in some (more or less superficial) ways similar to religions, but it is a mistake to call it a religion, for Buddhism and real religion such as Christianity are more fundamentally different than we had thought when we used the world “religion” for both of them. Notice that we might argue that people are inclined to call Buddhism a religion when they don’t know a lot about it, since it is superficially like religions (as whales are like fish), but as we learn more about it we come to recognize that it is, at a deeper level, not at all like a religion (as whales are unlike fish at a deeper level).
The second comment to be made here is that my theoretical definition of religion is made within the discipline of philosophy. A certain style of explanation is typical of philosophy, and other fields, such as anthropology and psychology, have other styles of explanation. If one is seeking a theoretical definition of religion in terms of its function in human life, one might focus on a political function, a psychological function, a cultural function, and so on, and this will lead one to different definitions, simply because one is trying to explain different things with the definition. An anthropologist, for instance, might not be interested in the political uses of religion, but focus on the way in which it realizes and defines a culture, instead. A psychologist might have little interest in culture, but great interest in the way it meets psychological needs or expresses certain neuroses or character traits. A philosopher is interested above all in why religious people accept the metaphysical (sometimes supernatural) beliefs that they accept, and how those beliefs justify their way of life, and so they approach the task of definition by identifying a problem that is solved by adopting these beliefs. An anthropologist, or a Marxist political philosopher, might regard beliefs as secondary, and wish primarily to explain the customs and practices of the religion, or the societal roles served by the religion. This is not an entirely intellectual problem, for it has extremely important emotional and practical elements, but religious doctrine is the key to its solution, and a philosopher wants to understand what these beliefs are supposed to accomplish, not only intellectually, but emotionally and practically as well. A philosopher tends to think that the explanation of human customs and behavior should identify why human beings think they have good reasons for those customs and that behavior. As a result, a philosopher takes religious persons’ own explanations and the belief system they bring forward in making these explanation more at face value than an anthropologist or psychologist would. They also take the aims of the individual more at face value than a Marxist would, for Marxists are inclined to see the needs of the community in which the individual was raised behind all her aims. The philosopher’s approach is less dismissive of religious beliefs and practices than those of an anthropologist or a Marxist, since she is not trying to “explain away” what they believe as mere window dressing for deeper, perhaps unconscious, motives. On the other hand, a philosopher tends to see religious thought as a branch of philosophical thought, and takes very seriously the task of determining which religion, if any, is true by looking at evidence and arguments. 4. Varieties of Religion: Diagnoses of the problem of cosmic evil, conceptions of salvation from evil, religious practices, and metaphysical pictures are all mutually adapted to one another within any particular religion. Religions that have been invented to date seem to fall roughly under the following sorts, corresponding to the various solutions to the problem of evil that have so far been proposed. Most actual religions actually merge a number of these sorts. The religions are briefly characterized here, then described in more detail below.

I. Pre-literate, pre-civilized religion: The evidence for religious belief and practice before the first civilizations, that is, before about 3000 B.C.E., is thin, but suggestive, and if we interpret it in terms of what we know of later Ancient religion and present-day pre-literate religion outside the centers of civilization, we can make some sense of it. The earliest sign of religious belief and practice is probably to be found in prehistoric burials. These were often oriented to the East or West (to the rising or setting Sun), and the body was often buried with what were presumably favorite possessions of the living person, as well as cowry shells and other images of female fertility, and smeared with red ochre. All of this suggests that a rebirth and afterlife was expected. There is also much evidence in cave art that magical or religious practices were used, in particular, fertility rituals to increase game, and rituals to assure taking the game. The fact that cave art was often placed in very deep, inaccessible chambers suggests that the chamber was viewed as a kind of womb. Or perhaps something else was in mind. In Ancient Greece, for instance, caves were sometimes viewed as roads leading to the underground dwelling of the Sun, from which it issued in the morning in the East, and to which it returned in evening in the West. The rising Sun is a very potent image of rebirth in all cultures, and one might seek the aid of the one who can be reborn to gain rebirth for oneself, or simply to seek fertility and birth for game animals. But historians of religion tend to think of Sun cults as associated with civilization and central government, and fertility cults to a mother goddess as more characteristic of pre-civilized cultures (particularly late pre-civilized cultures with agriculture).

Modern pre-literate religion: The evidence of anthropologists concerning modern pre-literate religion is much more full. The central and universal belief here is that everything that happens in the world is due to the action of a personality or spirit. It is assumed, generally, that personality is provided to a being by a breath-soul of some sort, and different breaths or spirits are assumed to be responsible for various quasi-independent aspects of personality. So an individual person is often conceived to have a number of different “souls,” one responsible for its drive and will, another for its intelligence, another for its ability to command and impress other, another responsible for its being alive, and so on. The basic assumption seems to be that any action must be due to desire and awareness in some way or other.

This aspect of pre-literate thought is particularly well preserved in the ancient Egyptian religion, which assigns a multiplicity of different souls to a person, but traces of it also remain in early Greek thought, and even in the Christian distinction between mind and Spirit. It plays a major role in the eschatology (that is, the account of salvation and the last days) of some religions, and the question which of these souls is most truly one’s self is a very important question, for if one’s true self is one of the souls that are immortal, rather than one of the souls that break up at the death of the body, then one should identify oneself with that soul to be saved, or to realize that one is saved, from death. In Greek philosophical/religious thought (see Type IV Religion), Plato set the tone by distinguishing three parts of the soul, the rather divided part responsible for one’s bodily desires, the part that is responsible for reason and knowledge, which is immortal, and perhaps even an aspect of the soul of the universe itself, and a third part which binds the first two together, the “part that loves honor,” so-named because it seeks to be as good as it can, controlling the lower soul’s bodily impulses, and looking to the higher, rational part for an indication of what is in fact honorable and good. The soul as a whole, Plato identifies with the psyche, which is mentioned in early Greek literature as a part of the soul which survives the death of the body, though it is not psyche, but nous = intellect, which is responsible in the older literature for thought and reason. It is because the highest part of psyche, nous, can carry out its activities without a body (unlike the two lower parts), that the soul survives the death of the body. Without the body one has only his love of theoretical knowledge, for the senses and bodily desires are lost with the body, and the two lower parts of the soul become inactive. So “heaven” for Plato is the pure activity of the understanding, aware of the Good Itself (the good as theoretically understood). This involves the enjoyment of the beauty of what is understood, and in this life the mathematician’s joy in the intellectual beauty of his subject is taken as an image of what we shall enjoy in the afterlife. Plato follows traditional beliefs in saying that one’s soul eventually gains a new body (after it has been punished or rewarded for the ethical quality of its last life), and so goes through an apparently endless cycle of rebirths.

The most important relations among spirits in pre-literate thought, and between human beings and spirits, are kinship relations (these are the most important relations in these pre-literate societies between people). Among the Australian aborigines and a number of other groups, it was conceived that the various kinship groups each have ancestral spirits who will help them, so that the turtle-spirit may be the ancestor of one group, the deer-spirit the ancestor of another, and so on. If one needs help from the deer-spirit, say, to kill a deer for food, one will prevail upon a member of the deer clan to intervene with his ancestor. This practice is called “Totemism.”

The notion that various, often half-conscious, spiritual powers enter into a single human being suggested to some cultures that these various sorts of power or soul might be instinctively inimical or friendly to one another. Thus an elaborate set of notions about what is “taboo” arose in the Pacific, and one way of avoiding problems was to avoid bringing hostile powers into contact with one another. So a man would avoid contact with a menstruating woman, for instance, for she contains a power which is taboo for a male, that is, hostile to the spiritual power in a male that makes him male.

This sort of belief can be applied to the central problem of cosmic evil in a number of ways. First off, the fact of death can be denied, by claiming that one’s spirit migrates elsewhere to continue its life, in a spirit-world, or in a new body. It is often thought that some spirits, those of more powerful people or the spirits of people who have been murdered, are capable of hanging around and causing trouble, or helping the community. Often, it is thought that the departed spirits should be supported by regular small sacrifices by their descendants, and that they may return once a year, when they feast with their families. To alienate the ancestral spirits is generally considered to lead to all kinds of trouble. The spirit-world is assumed to exist because we visit it, our souls traveling abroad, in dreams and trances, and some religious specialists train themselves to serve as emissaries to the spirit-world, so they can go there and intervene with powerful spirits on behalf of human beings. In the second place, it is assumed that any evil that arises for us is due to the actions of other spirits inimical to us. Such spirits presumably benefit, and so nothing that happens in the world is simply senseless. Rather, it is a matter of conflicting interests among the spirits that live in the world.

This suggests a way of dealing with evil, namely, learning to get along with the spirits. Thus interpersonal relationships become the key, and the craft of dealing with other people, showing them respect, negotiating, pleading, and so forth, all enter into the profession of the Shaman, whose job is to deal with the spirits. It is generally assumed that there are wise spirits who are perhaps older and more powerful, who perhaps gave birth to the other spirits, and whose help can be invoked. There are generally stories about the origins of death and other evils, all rooted in the notion that stupidity, jealousy and the like among the spirits underlies evil in the world. Such stories survive in the myths of ancient civilizations. It should be noted that it is not assumed that the world is as perfect as it could be. Spirits bring evil on themselves and others which need not occur. Wisdom in this sort of religious culture is considered to be a matter of knowing how to get along with people and avoid conflict while getting (most of) what you want. Wisdom does not envision higher, unworldly aims. So Plato’s Type IV approach, regarding pure thought and awareness of the Good Itself as the aim a wise man will pursue, abandoning worldly goals for these higher aims, is quite alien to the spirit of Type I religion.

A Shaman, that is, a religious specialist, would seek to get to know the spirits, generally with the help of one special friendly spirit in particular, in dreams and perhaps in trances, and would generally practice the art of persuasion, since he has much less power than the spirits he wants to deal with, but sometimes would use magic to force spirits to do what he wanted. (Most scholars consider such magic as non-religious. One does not force a god to do something, and the thought that one could do that seems to involve a failure to recognize the problem of evil. Our weakness demands explanation, but it is not a very good religious move simply to deny it. But it is probably more reasonable to regard magic as part of Type I and II religion, even if it is considered immature in ‘higher’ religions of Types III through X. If one cannot force a God to do something, then we should perhaps classify Type I and some Type II religions as atheistic—they believe in Spirits, but not Gods.) A Shaman would often be somewhat unstable emotionally (and so subject to the meaningful sort of dreams required), and would go through an initiation and training period, involving ascetic practices, the cultivation of trance, and the like, in which he would experience a crisis and then a reintegration of his personality, interpreted as death and rebirth. That is, the Shaman was the original “twice-born” individual. The wisdom he acquired in this process would often be seen as the deliberate result of his special friend-spirit’s training. The first task of a Shaman is often to acquire a guiding spirit who will lead him to wisdom and introduce him into the spirit world. This wisdom would reconcile the Shaman to the evil in the world by suggesting to him that other people count too, and we must suffer some evil ourselves in order that others may get along in the world. It recommends ethical behavior on pragmatic grounds—an ethical person lives a better life (in worldly terms) because he does not come into conflict with his fellows. A life in isolation from others is not a good life, and a life together with others requires sacrifice on everyone’s part. Shamanism seems to have arisen first in central Asia, and to have spread from there, most significantly, with those settling America, so that it is the basis of American Indian religion, and into India and China, the Near East and the Mediterranean. The Shaman is the ancestor of the religious ascetic, the Saint who communicates with God and his angels, and the meditating sages who seek enlightenment of various sorts in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist traditions. Shamans are often thought to be able to heal the sick by going into a trance- or dream-state in which their soul travels to the spirit realm and finds the soul of the patient, which has left its body for some reason, defending it against attacks from the spirits in the spirit-realm, and guiding it back to its body. If one does not have the training of a Shaman, it is very dangerous and confusing to wander about in the spirit realm. (Of course, a patient might well recall being in the spirit realm and being helped by a Shaman or the Shaman’s friend-spirit, since that will be the shape his fever dreams take, particularly if the Shaman is present when he experiences the dreams, performing his dances and other rituals to communicate with and aid the spirit of the ailing man.)

II. Ancient Polytheism: The early civilizations make the assumptions made in Type I religion, but they see the spirits as organized politically in the same way their own societies are. So the rather chaotic batch of spirits, whose social structure is patterned on that of the believers in them, is replaced by a strongly hierarchical organization with a King, commander of the armies, and so forth, and the most important spirit (now god) for any group is that god or goddess who owns the city in which one lives. The king is assumed to be the consort of the goddess, or a deity’s viceroy, and so the gods become the source of law and order in the community, and take on a martial aspect. The current ruling gods, so the myths run, are late-comers, who conquered this world in a pitched battle with the earlier gods, their parents. The Mesopotamian story has it that the earlier gods were killed and the world was made from their bodies. This is all due to the fact that these civilized states were held together by military force, and were in the habit of conquering one another, so that the later states, at least, were all of them the results of conquest of earlier states. The nobles were military specialists who lived off the labor of the peasants, and full citizenship, even in the most democratic states, required that one serve as a soldier.
The high God was generally taken to be just, and to have provided the legal code under which people live, for which one can see the Code of Hammurabbi. This God (very often a Sun or Sky God) will punish a bad king who does not care for his people properly, but will punish even more anyone who rebels against the king. When a palace revolution succeeded, it was generally explained as a matter of the God shifting his favor from the old king to the new because the old king was not just, whereas the new one is.

Equally important to the community was the worship of gods and goddesses responsible for fertility of the crops, a custom that had begun around 6000 B.C.E. with the beginning of agriculture. Here a typical story was that a goddess associated with sex and springtime for some reason descended into the underworld, and was held there by the god or goddess of that region. When all things withered and it began to appear that winter would never end, a bargain was struck with the underworld powers, to the effect that the goddess must remain in the underworld half the year, but is free to return to her parents and relations above ground for the other half. Her departure from the underworld represents a rebirth of nature in the spring. In Egypt, the god Osiris was supposed to have been killed by his brother, but then magically resurrected from the soil by his wife and sister, Isis. Rituals to insure the fertility of the fields typically involved sex, and the temple of the relevant goddess often maintained a corps of sacred prostitutes. In Babylonia, as in many other places, the annual spring festival ran on for more than a week, and the myths of the beginning of the world were re-enacted (spring is a repetition of the birth of the world), the whole thing culminating in intercourse between the king and the Goddess of the city. Sacrifices, sometimes of animals, sometimes of flowers or honey cakes, or libations of wine or honey poured into the ground for underworld deities, were part of every ritual. When animals were sacrificed, the god was given only a small portion (that is, a small portion was burned at the altar so the smoke could carry it to the god), the rest being eaten by the priests and those offering the sacrifice. So a sacrifice involved a meal with the god. In the big temples where many sacrifices were performed, the excess meat was sold, and perhaps most of the meat eaten in the cities came from the temples.

The great gods of the state were worshiped in public ceremonial, but each family had its own household gods, to which they made small sacrifices daily. So there was a goddess of the hearth to which each Roman family sacrificed every morning in their homes, local minor gods of the fields, and so on. Often the state ritual was reproduced at the family level. The King would sleep in the New Year’s Festival with the Goddess in the great temple, and the peasant would sleep in the field with his wife. In every contingency there was some minor god whose help could be sought out, and outside the official priestly order supported by the government there were many healers and soothsayers that made a living by serving the commoners. So the old Shamanistic practices, and the Shamans, lived on at the edges of the established religion.

The festivals and sacrifices to the gods were only part of a religious specialist’s work. They also served as healers (the Ancient hospital was a temple to the god of healing, to Asklepios in the Greek tradition), and undertook to the determine the will of the gods, through oracles and prophecy. Thus the temple of Apollo, the god of prophecy, at Delphi, was the chief oracle among the Greeks. Among the Mesopotamians, astrology developed, since the gods were identified with the planets, and so one could divine what the gods had in mind by observing the movements of the planets and the stars. (We still call the planets by the names of old Roman gods, Venus, Mars, Mercury and so on.) The small fry also performed a lot of oracular prediction and prophecy, and one could make a living as a soothsayer.

The religion provided justification and support for the social and political order, then, and the state practiced an elaborate and impressive cult as part of its propaganda to keep the peasants in line. The older, Type I religion persisted in the practices of sooth-sayers, healers and the like among the general population. A very fine document from this ancient pattern of religious thinking is the Epic of Gilgamesh, a story that was preserved and repeated from well before 2000 B.C.E. to around 800 B.C.E. in Ancient Mesopotamia. Here is the outline of the story. (Adapted from course notes by Diane Thompson, North Virginia Community College, downloaded 2003 from http://novaonline.nv.cc.va.us/eli/eng251/gilgameshstudy.htm)

THE STORY OF GILGAMESH

Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, has a mortal father and a goddess as his mother. [This might be pretty normal for a king whose father was King, for the King is expected to take on the goddess owning the city as his consort.] Since he is part mortal, Gilgamesh must eventually die, as he discovers and comes to accept during the course of the story. He Gilgamesh is a bad ruler, sleeping with all the women and taking children away from their families, so his subjects ask the gods for help. The gods have the goddess Aruru create a man, Enkidu, who will be almost Gilgamesh's equal.

Enkidu comes to life in the wilderness, covered with hair, shaggy, wild like the wilderness. He eats grass with the gazelles and drinks water with the animals. A trapper is frightened by the sight of Enkidu and asks his father what to do, because Enkidu is freeing animals from the traps. His father advises him to go to Uruk, find Gilgamesh, and tell him of the wild man. Then he should ask for a harlot from the temple and bring her back with him. She will seduce Enkidu, and then the wild animals will reject him and he can be lured to civilization. The harlot does just that, and then teaches Enkidu some of the ways of civilization—wearing clothing, eating bread and drinking wine. Then she tells him of the strength of Gilgamesh and how Gilgamesh is sleeping with all the women of Uruk, and Enkidu is shocked. He challenges Gilgamesh to a contest of strength, hoping to overcome him and force him to behave properly. They struggle like equals in a wrestling match, but finally Gilgamesh throws Enkidu, who loses his anger and recognizes Gilgamesh as a true king. They embrace and become best friends.

Gilgamesh longs to perform great deeds, so his name will be remembered. He wants to go to the cedar forest and slay its guardian monster, Humbaba. Enkidu is terrified, because he knows Humbaba, but Gilgamesh insists, and they prepare for the journey. Enkidu's hand is paralyzed when he touches the cedar forest gate, but Gilgamesh helps him to continue. They have disturbing dreams, but nonetheless cut down a cedar tree. Humbaba approaches and they fight, the pair of heroes gaining the victory. Humbaba begs for his life, but they cut off his head. (This seems to reflect a war in which the King of Uruk gains control of cedar forests to the northwest, so that he can import cedar, which does not grow in the swampy regions of his own country.)

Gilgamesh washes himself and puts on clean clothes and his crown. He is so attractive that Ishtar, the goddess of love, wants to marry him. He refuses, quite rudely, pointing out how she had ruined the lives of her previous husbands. Ishtar is hurt and furious and she goes to her father, Anu, demanding that he send the Bull of Heaven (drought) to punish Gilgamesh. She threatens to smash down the gates to the underworld if her father does not comply. Anu sends the Bull of Heaven, but Enkidu catches it by the horns, and Gilgamesh kills it. [The refusal to sleep with the Goddess may represent an act of political revolt, which would certainly go beyond what is proper for mortals like Gilgamesh.]

Enkidu discovers in a dream that the gods are holding a council to determine who should die for these attacks on divinity: Gilgamesh or Enkidu. Since Gilgamesh is part divine and part human, while Enkidu is part human and part animal, the judgment falls on Enkidu, who sickens and dies, at first cursing the harlot who led him to civilization, Gilgamesh and death itself, but then blessing the harlot for the joy of his friendship with Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh is distraught with grief. He refuses to relinquish Enkidu’s body for burial, but after a week it becomes wormy. So he has him buried, and wanders in the wilderness as a wild hunter, dressed in animal skins. Gilgamesh despairs for the loss of Enkidu, but also for his own death, which he now understands must come some day. Seeking to avoid death, Gilgamesh looks for Utnapishtim, the only human being who was granted eternal life by the gods. He wants to learn how to avoid death.

Eventually, Gilgamesh comes to the entry to the land of the gods, an other-world, which is under a mountain, guarded by a Man-scorpion and his mate. Gilgamesh gains entrance to the mountain and travels for leagues in the dark until he arrives in the jeweled garden of the gods. He meets a divine wine-maker, Siduri, who gives him shelter and advises him to accept his human fate and enjoy life while he can. But he insists that he must find Utnapishtim, so she tells him that the boatman Urshanabi can take him across the Sea of Death to the place where Utnapishtim lives with his wife. After a complicated boat-trip, Urshanabi brings Gilgamesh to Utnapishtim, who tells his story. It is the story of the Flood (remarkably similar to the Flood story in Genesis). The point is, the Flood was a one time ever event, will never occur again, and the only reason Utnapishtim and his wife are now immortal is because the gods chose to make them so after they survived the flood. The final blow occurs when Utnapishtim relents to the extent that he promises to help if Gilgamesh will stay awake, watching, for seven days and nights. Accepting the challenge, Gilgamesh immediately falls asleep. At the end of the time he claims he stayed awaie, but Utnapishtim points to seven loaves of bread his wife had made, one on each day that Gilgamesh slept. The oldest loaf is moldy and corrupt. He could not even stay awake for seven days; how could he ever hope to live forever?

Utnapishtim's wife takes pity on Gilgamesh and asks her husband to tell him about the plant that can make him young again, even if it cannot make him immortal. Gilgamesh dives into the sea to pick the plant, but loses it later, while bathing, because a snake slithers up and eats it. (Thus snakes can become young again by shedding their skins.)

Gilgamesh returns to Uruk with the boatman Urshanabi, and points out to him the mighty walls; this is the proper work of a human being, not the search for eternal life.

The final segment of the story tells of the death of Gilgamesh and the mourning for him of all the people of Uruk.

In this story Gilgamesh is taught by the gods how to live. First he is provided with a friend, an equal, so that he can come to learn something of the value of social relations, and then his friend dies, and so he becomes acquainted with the way in which one becomes vulnerable, as well as being enriched, when one has a friend. Gilgamesh, seeing that death is his lot as well, seeks out immortality, but discovers that even when he is given the means to be restored to his youth, he has not the wisdom to use it properly, and so he becomes reconciled to his place in the world, and seeks henceforth to live his life as best as he can, given that place. He becomes a good king, and perhaps the political lesson is that the King must recognize his own humanity, and so, seeing himself and his subjects as sharing a common lot, treat his subjects with respect and work for their welfare.

In this style of religion piety and wisdom consists above all in recognizing one’s limitations, avoiding the pride that would lead one to claim privileges unsuited to one’s place. Just as a peasant should not claim a right to great wealth, so a human being must not claim immortality. It just isn’t our place, and so it isn’t our just right. But if we observe our place and are suitably humble, we will find that a good life can be lived, and that those higher than us may be generous and helpful, up to a point at least. This is social wisdom, suitable for most people in a strongly hierarchical society such as these ancient people lived in, applied to the general problem of getting on in the world. The suggestion is that it is not unjust that we suffer the evils we do. Some of them are simply our lot, the result of our place in life, and others, the worst ones, are due to our rebellion against our just lot. So Zeus suggests in Homer’s Iliad that mortals claim their evils come from the gods, but by far most of them come from our own bad behavior and lack of wisdom. Someone is occasionally just luckless and miserable, but most of us can lead a decent life if we set our minds to it and don’t demand more than is our lot. Sometimes it is suggested that our lot is just simply because we are born into it, but there are also myths explaining how human being came to be in the position they are, sometimes involving actual incompetence and conflict among the gods who made human beings, and sometimes involving bad or threatening behavior on the part of human beings that led the gods to limit us as much as they could. Particularly in the Mesopotamian myths, it is often suggested that human beings were a threat to the gods. One can see a lot of this in the tales in Genesis in the Old Testament, for instance in the stories of the tower of Babel and the Garden of Eden.

You will notice that a somewhat different notion of fairness or justice than we have is at work here. The important thing was to prevent the state from falling into disorder, from returning to the pre-civilized chaos in which each individual or small group operated independently seeking its own aims. One must respect the laws of civilized society, and accept one’s assigned place within it. This style of religion may seem inadequate to us, for we are heirs of the Jewish tradition, which postulates an ideally just arrangement intended by God but often ignored by the existing state. So we ask first whether it is just that we should be assigned to the place we are. Type II religion, at least in its earlier forms, for the most part does not do this.

Death was viewed throughout the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia as a matter one of one’s souls or a portion of the soul descending into the underworld, where it lived a half conscious life as a powerless shade. A shade could be brought back temporarily by providing it with the blood and missing spirit elements it needs to become conscious and active again, through a sacrifice. Sacrifices to the ancestors (as well as underworld deities) were generally “libations,” in which something, blood, wine, honey, was poured into the ground, often at the grave of the deceased. It was perhaps thought that the liquid in question provided consciousness and power temporarily to the deceased. Ancestors conceived to continue as powerful, conscious beings in this world were generally thought of as half-god, that is, the result of the union of a god and a mortal (the word for someone half-god in Greek is “Hero”). This picture of the afterlife (without Heroes) was characteristic of the ancient Hebrews, and the notion first appearing in Ezekiel that people are resurrected apparently was adopted from Zoroastrianism.

It should be noted that the religion of the Egyptians, who were somewhat isolated from the rest of the Mediterranean world, differed in important respects from that of the Mesopotamians and the Greeks. For one thing, the Egyptians came to believe that a positive afterlife, living in a paradise with the Sun-God, was possible, if one went through the right ceremonies at death and preserved the person’s body as a mummy. (The body is needed to provide the elements of life that keep the departed soul conscious and active.) This happened because they thought of their Pharaoh (the king) as a god himself, not merely the consort of a god—indeed, he was an incarnation of the Sun-God. When the Pharaoh died he went to join his father, Osiris, the re-born Sun-God, and it was thought he might take some of his favorites with him. Over time the privilege of re-birth in the realm of the Sun-god (below the earth, where the Sun goes at night to rest) was extended to more and more people, until finally it was available to anyone who could pay the priests for the appropriate ceremonial. The basic notion here, that the resurrected divinity of the grain, who comes back from underworld every year in the Spring, can somehow adopt a person and enable them to share in his resurrection, took on many forms in private cults throughout the Mediterranean. Typically one would become an “initiate” by paying a fee and going through a certain ceremonial, and thus would be identified with the resurrected god, or brought under his or her protection. It was not generally conceived that an ethical requirement had to be met for a favorable resurrection. It was a matter of the right ceremonial, of magic. In Egypt, people had to avow their upright behavior, and would be destroyed if they swore falsely, but even here there were apparently ways around the requirement. The requirement held, by the way, because Osiris had a personal fondness for upright behavior, not for any other reason, and even among the gods it was conceived that one could employ bribery or take advantage of personal favoritism, at least if one’s infractions were relatively minor.

One point very clear in Egyptian beliefs is that the gods were conceived as present wherever their peculiar powers were present. So any clever act might be attributed to the presence of the god of wisdom, Ptah. This means that the gods tended to merge and separate, and go through multiple lives and incarnations in a way disconcerting to us. The king was Horus, the son of Osiris, and himself became Osiris (or, sometimes, an Osiris) when he died. The lower gods were often seen as pieces of the higher gods, so that any power or even thought that a higher god enjoyed might become a god in its own right, as it took on the power characteristic of the god in the world. So a kind of monotheism emerged in Egypt, in which all the gods were merely aspects of Amon, the “hidden one,” or, in the brief heresy of Akhenaton, of Aton, the Sun-disk. This means that it was possible for a philosophical thinker in a polytheistic environment to adopt monotheistic views. One finds the same thing in Indian polytheism, and in the Upanishads, the result of philosophical reflection on the religion, falling under Type IV religion, one character asks repeatedly how many gods there are, and is told that there are thousands, or hundreds, or 30, or 3, and finally that there is really only one, Brahman. Note, however, that the gods were conceived as part of the world, they embodied natural forces and were not conceived to stand outside the world. So this type of religion is consistent with a naturalistic approach to the world, and was actually combined with such an approach in some schools of Greek philosophy.

One interesting feature of this sort of religion is that the Gods are not so much loved as respected, and perhaps feared. Many gods are recognized to be rather unpleasant, for every natural force has a god behind it, including aggression and violence, lust, and so forth. (Here Type II religion is like Type I religion, for many of the spirits in Type I religion are quite unpleasant to deal with.) So the Greeks have a god of war, Ares, who is not much liked by anyone, and a goddess of sex, Aphrodite, who is widely recognized to be a total slut. Even the gods who are admired, such as Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom, are not loved, for that would be inappropriate. A Goddess is so far above us that if she takes an interest in our welfare and seems to like us we should be grateful and respectful, but it would be entirely out of place to show anything like affection.

For another text expressing this sort of religion well, you can consult the Odyssey of Homer, a Greek work, which is in many ways parallel to the Gilgamesh. The main plot of the Odyssey concerns Odysseus s loss of self-restraint and justice in the course of the fighting at Troy. This leads him to an act of piracy which is punished by a storm from Zeus that drives his ships from their course. Further piratical attempts entangle him with the cyclops Polyphemus, who calls down a curse from his father, Poseidon, god of the sea, when Odysseus pridefully, and foolishly, reveals his name in a boast of victory over the one-eyed giant. Even after he has relearned justice and self-restraint, his dependence on his crew, who do not learn their lesson so readily, creates yet more trouble for Odysseus. In particular, Odysseus is provided with help by the God of the winds, who ties up all the winds except the one favorable for reaching home in a bag for him. Odysseus does not tell his crew what is going on (a case of pride, again), and they, thinking there is treasure in the bag, open it, and are blown hopelessly off course. Even when everyone seems to have learned their lessons, the ship is cast up on a coast where the cattle of the Sun graze, and despite Odysseus’s warnings, his crew, overcome by hunger, slaughter one of the animals to eat. As a result the ship is wrecked, and Odysseus alone survives, cast up on an island where he dwells for a while with a Goddess who falls in love with him. She finally releases him, when she sees that he cannot stop pining for his wife, Penelope, and he is cast up on the island of the Phaeaceans, naked and without ship or men, to find his way home once more to Ithaca. He has finally fully recognized his vulnerability and dependence on others, and learned genuinely to mourn the deaths of the heroes at Troy, both Trojan and Greek, and so he is finally brought back home by his friend, Athena, Goddess of wisdom. Not only Odysseus suffers from an overweening sense of his own prowess. In the Iliad Achilles, the most powerful warrior in the Greek army, overreaches himself when he refuses to make up a quarrel with Agamemnon after that leader offers amends for the insult he has inflicted on the Hero. Unlike Odysseus, Achilles is invulnerable to direct damage, but he suffers even so, because of his attachment to his friend, Patroclus, who is killed by the Trojan Hero, Hector. Achilles s anger now exceeds all bounds and he kills Hector, mutilates his body, and refuses it burial. In the climactic scene of the epic Priam, the father of Hector, comes to Achilles s tent to beg for the body of his son. Achilles, reminded of his own father, finally forgets his anger and recognizes the perilous contingency of human life. Even the invincible warrior is vulnerable, for he must have friends to lead a good life, and he cannot always protect his friends. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey concern the problem of the war veteran, unsuited by the brutality of his experience for civilian life, who must learn to be human again. Of course, at the end, his humanity is much more fully established by the experiences he has gone through. He now appreciates and understands what before he took for granted.
Another theme in the Odyssey is the hostility of nature, as represented by the sea and its god, Poseidon. It is the self-assertion of man that brings about this hostility. Odysseus represents that human self-assertion and knowledge (his patron goddess is Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and he is known as the wiliest of the Greeks). Odysseus is repeatedly tempted to become like an animal, as in the land of the Lotus Eaters, or when living with one or another Goddess (and consider the story of Circe, who turns his men into pigs), but always chooses to be a man, opposing himself to the natural world and using his craft and knowledge to win his way. This has its drawbacks, but it is admirable and even the Phaeacians, the favorites of Poseidon, give honor to Odysseus and aid him in getting home (which earns them punishment from Poseidon). Note how the gods include in their number those inimical to man (Poseidon, Hades and the like) and those who favor man (above all the gods of wisdom and the crafts, such as Athena and Apollo, and the high gods of Justice, such as Zeus). Human beings have a place in the world, but it is one which puts them, due to their knowledge of themselves, into conflict with others, even with gods. Human beings can only exist if they enter into this sort of conflict with nature and one another, and from this conflict so necessary to their existence, arises the evils they are subject to. One might compare here our own view of society, which runs on conflict (the free enterprise economic system, democratic institutions), and assigns honor and position to the fellow who can compete well. We assume that the evils of the free enterprise system are worth the trouble. Our views here actually go back historically to the Ancient Greeks.

III. Philosophical Paganism, for instance, Stoicism: Ancient philosophers in Greece and Rome provided philosophical defenses and interpretations of Pagan practices in the same way that our modern philosophers provide defenses and interpretations of Christianity. The resulting religion was somewhat different from the popular religion, and the philosophers held that it was what was really intended in the popular religion. They tried to show this by providing allegorical interpretations of the popular myths.
That this was what was really intended is an interesting claim. It suggests that the popular religion has a function in guiding our lives, and if we allow our lives to be guided by it we will develop and change over time, and as a result of this maturation, we will come to a different understanding of the doctrines and myths, and the purposes of the rituals and other practices of the religion, and this mature understanding gets it right, the less mature understanding being useful as a way onward, but not strictly correct. Philosophers often approach religion in this way. The alternative is to say simply that the popular religion is wrong, and to offer one’s own views as an entirely different religion or world view. Philosophers friendly to their native religions don’t generally see themselves as doing that. They are trying to make sense of something they are committed to but find difficult to understand rationally. So when they do make sense of it, their new views are seen as the fulfillment of the popular religion, not a replacement for it.

One feature of the philosophical religion was an emphasis on ethics. So Plato and the Stoics, when they talk about the after-life, argue that it will be a place where those who are ethically upright will be rewarded, and the others will be punished. They emphasize that the Gods regard this matter very seriously and cannot be bribed, or prevailed upon to loosen up the rules for their favorites. It was generally imagined that these sanctions would be temporary, and eventually a person would be reborn as a human being, the rebirth being in keeping with the ethical character of their last life. Many of the myths attributed unethical behavior to the gods (so Zeus was a great womanizer, and had killed his own father), and these had to be given allegorical interpretations, and their literal truth was denied.
The philosophers tended to be monotheists, and to think that the one highest god, of whom the lower gods were but aspects, had produced the best possible world. They did not agree with the popular notion that many Gods were simply unpleasant fellows unconcerned about human welfare. This world falls short of perfection, however, because the god was limited in what he could do by the fact that he had to make the world from matter, which would not take on just any form, and tended to decay into disorder if left to its own devices, and because the world had to contain many competing beings, who made trouble for one another. Moreover, they generally regarded the natural laws that governed matter as eternal and unchangeable, even by God, so that God was limited in how he could design living beings. The Epicureans, for instance, thought that no living being could be made entirely proof against damage and destruction. The Stoics thought that a virtuous soul would survive until the end of the current world cycle, when all things are absorbed into the one World-Soul or God. The soul is not exactly destroyed here, but it loses its individuality. They thought less virtuous souls tended to fall apart, since they lacked the necessary strength to hang together, vice leading to internal conflict in the soul.

Later Ancient Pagan philosophers critical of Christianity considered its greatest absurdity to be the notion that God could set aside natural laws and perform miracles. To their mind this was a belief only prevalent among the ignorant and superstitious. Natural laws could not be avoided, and God in his wisdom was concerned for the welfare of the whole, and this is why he often seemed unconcerned for the welfare of the individual. He certainly would not set aside the wisely contrived natural order for the sake of benefit to an individual, any more than a wise civil magistrate would set aside the law of the community for the benefit of an individual. Natural laws, they thought, enjoyed an absolute necessity, and were not contrived by God, and so the Christian/Jewish notion of a supernatural God that made the universe, along with its natural laws (Religions of Types VII through X), seemed to them simply an impossible absurdity.

The general approach to the problem of cosmic evil found in Type II religion is followed here as well. The key to salvation is to recognize one’s place in the world and become reconciled to it, because one sees that one’s own suffering is necessary for the sake of the good of the whole, and to accept one’s civic and ethical duties. The system of nature which makes it impossible for people to be immortal, to avoid old age and disease, and so on, is accepted as something neither the gods nor anyone else can do anything about, so that it makes no sense to get upset about what cannot possibly be changed.
Thus, for the Stoics, for instance, the world is seen as a natural order which gives rise to a universe that has a soul which animates it and makes it work always toward the best, but which also limits what can be accomplished by the world-soul in this direction. The natural order behind the world-soul is non-personal, and neutral towards good and evil. It is simply necessary natural law.

It is pointed out here that as long as one does not get upset by what cannot be changed, she will be free of self-inflicted psychological pain, and will receive due rewards for her ethical behavior in the afterlife. It was generally held that evil-doing was due to a corrupt or diseased personality, so that even in this life the evil-doer was dominated by passions that made him miserable, by anger and insatiable desire and the like, while the good person, enjoying true mental health, lived a happy life even in this world, despite the fact that he might be taken advantage of by the evil-doer. In particular, a good life is possible only if one identifies with the communal good, and gives up selfish desires, replacing them with a reasonable love for all rational beings.

It should be noted that critics of Type II religion were to be found among Greek philosophers (and in India, and no doubt everywhere else, too). There were even a few pure naturalists who rejected the existence of the Gods and the rationality of religion. But most philosophers recognized something right in the religious impulse, and tried to give an account of it which would purify what was right from the contamination of superstition.

IV. Monistic Idealism: The Greek and Roman Neoplatonists, in later Antiquity (after 200 C.E.), held to views very like those of the more intellectual sort of Hindu religion. In both cases these views developed out of a polytheistic background through philosophical reflection, probably independently. The key idea lying behind this view is that the soul is actually made up of a certain kind of stuff, say fire, which is the same stuff the World Soul is made up of. Indeed, the individual human soul is a bit of fire broken off from the world soul, and living well consists in maintaining the fire of one’s soul in as pure and hot a form as possible, and maintaining contact with the world soul, which is the fire pervading and directing all things, which is at its purest in the heavens. (For the earliest example of this sort of view in Greece, see Heraclitus, a philosopher of the sixth century B.C.E.) This view, in all essentials, was adopted by the Stoics in their philosophical reading of Paganism.

Not everyone accepted this view. The Epicureans, for instance, rejected it, holding that souls were made up of fire, but denying the existence of any overarching world soul. The fire in individual humans disperses when we die, it is not rejoined to God. They held that their view was much closer to common sense, and traditional religion (which it was). They thought the Gods were admirable beings that lived in the vast empty spaces between worlds, and so were very long-lived, since they encountered nothing else that might destroy them. We know about them because images of them are emitted from them, which our souls detect sometimes in dreams or in trance. But the Gods, if they are admirable, do not take care of human beings, and care nothing for the good of beings in this world. This, the Epicureans thought, was not a traditional religious view, and so they took their philosophical religion to involve a flat rejection of traditional Greek religion, though it is to be noted here that they tried to explain why people might have believed this traditional religion, referring to the visions of the Gods, and people’s natural wishful thinking and desire that the supernatural would help them, as well as the profits to be made by a charlatan playing on the fears and desires of others. The one element they wanted to retain from traditional religion was the admiration for the Gods, and they thought it not unreasonable to maintain a religious cult, in particular because one reminded oneself in the performance of the cult duties what a truly admirable life was really like—it was a matter of independence from pain, so that one who kept this in view would avoid entanglements with others, or the development of desires, that would likely bring them pain in the future. The Epicureans are not very attractive to someone raised on the ideal of Christian love and involvement, but Christians also hold that a certain emotional distance should be maintained from others, even when we love them, for in the end, we should love God above all, and this means we should trust God and be happy in his love no matter what happens to our friends. So perhaps the Epicureans had something.

The next step in the development of Monistic Idealism was the introduction of Idealism, which is the view that everything that is real is somehow mental, either itself a mind, or the action or thought or awareness of a mind. When we speak of physical things, according to an Idealist, we never actually encounter such a thing in experience, but only conscious states, sense impressions, by which we make judgements as to what statements about physical things are true. So, if I say the cat is in the living room, I really mean only that certain cat experiences are to be had in the living room, but not elsewhere in the house. If I say the cat is a Siamese, I mean that these cat experiences will be of a certain sort. Ordinarily we suppose that our sense experiences are caused by physical things, but the idealist argues that this cannot be, that the mind must somehow be producing it itself. The Monistic Idealist will argue that there is one world of physical objects and an objective truth about it because there is only one mind, producing all the sensory experiences anyone might enjoy. This can be adapted to Christian views, and so Bishop Berkeley, a notable Irish philosopher of the 18th century, argues that God produces sense experiences in our minds, and does so according to a regular plan, producing a kind of virtual reality, and this is what the creation of the world amounts to—God’s decision to produce these sense impressions in our minds. But Berkeley was not a Monist. He does not think that the minds in which God produces sense impressions are part of God. These Monistic Idealists do. They take it that one’s mind is a part of God’s mind, or is somehow the same as God.

Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, claimed that everything that is is mind, and the same mind, so that everything is, in the end, identical with what he called the One. The lower beings arise from the One (through “emanation” in Plotinus’s metaphor) when the One becomes aware of itself. The primal split into multiple different (and so partly negative) beings is the split into the subject that thinks and the object of thought. (In reality, I guess, all there is is the thinking, and to view it as subject or object is just to look at the process of thinking from different angles. By the way, the One is aware of, or thinks, itself in a way that does not result in its bifurcation (as does everything else that is self-aware), but this thought is not in terms of concepts, but is a bare, immediate awareness of self. The One next sees itself as Good, so that the Form of the Good arises (it just is the thought of the Good), and Mind arises, contemplating the Form of the Good, and all the various ways in which a thing can be (partially) good. In effect, it is looking at aspects of its own thought of the good, and each aspect is another Form. So there is a form of donkey (one kind of good life is the donkey’s life), the form of pine tree, and so on.

In this way the Intellect arises below the One, and is distinguished from the one because its intellectual activity consists in an immediate and eternal awareness or understanding of the Forms, not in an immediate awareness of itself. It is aware of itself only as Good, as One, etc., that is, through the Forms, by means of concepts. Somehow this manner of thinking cannot identify itself, or be aware of, the higher manner of thinking of the One, and so it is other than the one, though really it is just the one thinking of itself. In the next stage Soul arises. Here the new sort of awareness involves not the intellectual understanding of the various Forms, but rather the identification of oneself with the Form of the Good. But once this identification of oneself with a Form is made,

PLOTINUS’S WORLD

it is possible for Soul to split into many different individuals, for there is also a way of thinking which cannot grasp the Form all at once, eternally, but must grasp it through activity in time, that is, as one grasps mathematical Forms such as the form of triangle through proofs (which take time to execute and present), or the form of an animal by understanding its life history and activities. Moreover, such beings can only be themselves through activity in time (one is oneself by contemplating the Form of oneself, i.e. through self-awareness, and these beings must receive the thought of their own Form stretched out in time, as it were). So such Forms become gradually what they are through development, that is, they have a life history.

The highest of such Souls found in time is the World Soul, which identifies itself with the Form of the Good. But some of these souls are such rudimentary thoughts of the world of Forms that they identify themselves with some single Form falling under the Form of the Good, and so we have turtles, who know nothing except turtle (“every thought of turtle is turtle” as the poet said), and all the various particular things in the world.

The best way to understand this, I think, is in terms of multiple personalities. That is, a person is sometimes aware of certain facets of what he has done, and sometimes of others, and to some extent his mood determines what he is aware of. So a person may not be able to recall any of her good thoughts about a friend while she is angry with her, and recall what it is that is nice about her friend only after she cools down. If this sort of isolation of some of the things we know from others by our mood is pushed to an extreme, we can get multiple personalities that are (some of them at least) unaware entirely of what is done when the other personalities are running the show. By a kind of selective attention to oneself, a limited awareness only of certain aspects of one’s feelings, beliefs, memories and the like, one actually splits up (nearly) into several persons. It is that sort of thing that happens here. The things that are lower on the scale of being are really just the One as it is aware of itself in some very limited way. We are little splintered pieces of mind, then. Not that our final bliss consists in merging with the One. Rather, we must remain our individual selves, and we would not if we re-entered the One. (Consider the fear the multiple personalities might have of a cure being effected. They would see the re-integration of personality as their own deaths.) What we do to attain bliss is to become aware of our connection to Mind and the Forms (we can think all the Forms, if only one by one, so we can become aware of the whole), and see how we figure in the universe, which is a perfect expression, in finite terms, of the perfect Goodness that is the One.

Plotinus takes it that the contemplation of the One is the end of human life, though this contemplation cannot be intellectual since the One does not conform to the Forms, but stands above them. To have this vision of the One, though, a person has to strengthen his intellect first, through a thorough knowledge of the Forms, and this means he must learn about eternal things, i.e. mathematics, and then rise to a contemplation of the Form of the Good itself, and then, after separating the soul from the body as much as one can through proper ethical behavior and a moderate asceticism, turn one’s souls to a contemplation of the one, which is a sort of meditative trance, it seems, in which no discursive thought occurs, and all awareness of the temporal world is temporarily lost. One’s real self is the One, and the One is, of course, perfectly blessed and perfectly good. So there is no evil, really, according to Plotinus. Evil is always a mere absence of what ought to be there, and in the end it is scarcely even that, but rather one only sees evil as long as he takes a partial view of things, thinking only of himself and not how he fits into the whole. From the view of God, or of one who has attained the vision of God, there is no evil in the world. This view of evil as unreal and arising from lack of connection to the whole is typical of Monistic Idealism.

Later Neo-Platonism, after Plotinus, dabbled a good deal in magic and such stuff in its more popularized forms. The idea was that all things communicate with one another more or less directly through the One, and so one could bypass physical law to accomplish an end through sympathetic magic. Sympathetic magic acts out ahead of time the thing desired, making sure that those who are to bring it about are somehow made present at the pre-enactment. Thus one might act out the shooting of a deer, and do so on a trail where deer are known to run, thus assuring success in the hunt. It is much older than philosophy, of course, but here philosophy provides a justification for the practice. This later popular Neo-Platonism ultimately lies behind most of the “ancient traditions of magic” and the like that one runs into today in things like astrology and magic, though, of course, today’s versions are much elaborated and developed over the intervening centuries. The Neoplatonists stoutly defended the traditional Paganism as a way of approaching the realization of one’s union with the One. (Notice how the many Gods are aspects and powers of the One God, and in a similar way everything now turns out to be an aspect of God.)

The Vedanta philosophy of Shankara in India (8th–9th century C.E.) does not work from the Platonic notion of the Forms. The Forms are thoughts in the mind of God which all things imitate, which makes things intelligible to us, since they are what they are only because they already correspond to a concept which we find within us as we search our deeper selves (for we are God). Shankara does not entertain such a theory, but considers instead the issue what it is that really experiences things. Whatever it is that does the experiencing, he argues, cannot be one of the experiences or one of the things experienced. But that means that it cannot understand itself through concepts at all. It is aware of itself in a kind of non-conceptual self-awareness. This is all rather like Plotinus’s One (or the description Aristotle gives of God in his Metaphysics, Book XII). Now Shankara notices that if we focus on this thing which is self-aware and is the subject of all other awareness, we find that what is aware of your experience is indistinguishable from what is aware of my experience, or what is aware of anyone else’s experience. If we try to make out a distinction, we always find that we are making a distinction in what is experienced, not in what does the experiencing. The “I” or atman, the self, is this underlying, pure self-consciousness. This self-consciousness is present in every other consciousness of anything outside the self, but is without content (else it would be a consciousness of that content, not of itself). In every case, the thing that is aware, the real self, fails to fall under any concept or description other that “subject of awareness”, and so all the different subjects of awareness are indistinguishable from one another—they are “non-different” as Shankara puts it. Perhaps there are a number of different such subjects because they are located in different places? But place belongs to body, which is an object of awareness, not the subject of awareness. One is aware where one’s body is in relation to other bodies, perhaps, but the center of awareness itself should not be identified with the body. So there is only one center of awareness. This atman, then, turns out be blissful, eternal, entirely unaffected by other things (free), and is the one thing that is truly valuable, for ultimately only conscious beings, considered as such, are truly valuable and proper objects of ethical, or any other, concern.

It is noteworthy that the three principal philosophers of the Vedanta (interpretation of the Vedas) tradition take three different positions on the relation of Brahman to the perceived world. Shankara argued that the perceived world is not real, since its “reality” consists only in its being perceived, and it is nothing over and above our perceptions of it. So it is precisely like illusion or a dream, except that it is more organized and coherent, and is a kind of dream shared by multiple centers of personality. These multiple centers are the only reality, though, and since the contents of their dream are merely dream, there is nothing in the dream that can distinguish them from one another. So they are, as we have seen, non-different, and the only reality is the one consciousness. He does not want to say, I think, that the subjective side of the experience of the world is unreal, but rather that there is no thing outside us which is experienced. If we treat our subjective experience (including our experience of ourselves) as though it was an experience of some reality, then we suffer from ignorance. (Note how close this is to Buddhism—except that Shankara refuses to go the last step, and reject even the experiencing self as “unreal.”) If one viewed one’s experience as something generated by Brahman (i.e. the experiencer), as the dream of Brahman, not as something produced by an external reality distinct from the experiencer, then one would be free of ignorance, and it is possible, through meditative practice, to arrive at this way of experiencing one’s own experience. Clearly, the reality, Brahman, will not be subject to causal laws, for they apply only within the illusory world of appearance, to the ‘virtually real’ objects of perception and thought. The experiencer transcends the natural world.

Ramanuja (11th century C.E.) objected against Shankara’s thought, claiming that Brahman is the one reality, but that he is identical to the world. This may look like a retreat to the Pagan view that God is the soul of the world, but it may also be viewed as an attempt to give the Buddhists their due. Either we have to admit that the Self is no more real than the experienced world, Ramanuja thinks, which means we become Buddhist heretics who reject the Vedas, or we have to admit that the experiencing selves and the experience experienced by them are equally real, equally Brahman. This latter view is consistent with the Vedas, and so must be adopted. As for the relation of yourself to the Brahman, he compares it to the relation between a person’s self and its body. Brahman is, as in Stoicism, the Self of the universe as a whole, and the individual self is a mode, a way of being, belonging to Brahman. Ramanuja holds that one’s individual self is real, then, not an illusion as Shankara said, but that it is not an underlying thing, but rather a modification or mode of such a thing, there being many other modes of the same thing which are other selves. Shankara insisted that the self was no mere mode of something else, but was a self-standing, independent thing in its own right, and since the only thing with that status is Brahman (= self-consciousness), that means that the individual self is an illusion, and one’s real self is Brahman. (In the West, something very like this is maintained by the Jewish philosopher, Benedict Spinoza in the 17th–18th centuries. These different positions are natural ones to explore, starting from the religious orientation, and people in different cultures hit on very similar views.)

A third school of Vedanta was begun by Madhva (13th century C.E., contemporary with Thomas Aquinas), who argued for a straightforward dualism, making Brahman a distinct thing from the world of individuals to which we belong, although Brahman “pervades” the world (is omnipresent). The most conclusive proof that we are not Brahman, Madhva thought, is the fact that we are subject to suffering, and Brahman, of course is not. Suffering is real, and at least one of the properties Buddhists identify with selves does not belong to us. In fact, he postulate a number of different things: Brahman, different selves, and matter. His view is in fact a Transcendental Monotheism of considerable philosophical sophistication, and falls under Type VIII or IX below, except that Madhva does not make the world something created by Brahman, or assert omnipotence of Brahman, for that is too close to suggesting that Brahman is part of the natural world of causally related things. Still, in some, non-causal, way, he holds, the world depends on Brahman, and Brahman depends on nothing. (Madhva was influenced by Jewish and Muslim philosophers.)

The doctrine of Shankara and Ramanuja is connected with a practice of meditation in which one sits quietly and attempts to identify one’s true self. One proceeds by recognizing every content of which one is aware as not one’s true self, since one’s self is the thing that is aware, not the content of the awareness. One recognizes after a bit that even the animal or mind we think of as aware of things is actually a content of awareness—I think of sensory awareness, say, and think of the body, with its eyes, as what is aware of visual representations. But this is wrong, of course. Every awareness involves a kind of primitive self-awareness at its core which is empty of content and is our truest self. Since this self is blissful, and eternal, the problem of cosmic evil is resolved. It should be noted that the Hindus thought that we go through endless reincarnations, at best attaining to heaven temporarily until our merit is exhausted and we are reborn in lower realms. As the Buddhist tradition puts it, “we have drunk already, whole oceans of mother’s milk.” This endless round of suffering with only temporary relief, always returning, is viewed by Hindus (and Buddhists) as something to be escaped from. We are accustomed to viewing death as the ultimate evil, but an eternal life always returning to suffering is viewed by the Hindus as the ultimate evil. The only way to escape from this life is to somehow escape from our individuality, Shankara thought, and we can do this if we recognize that our individual selves are unreal, our real self being the universal self that experiences all things. Ramanuja has a similar solution in mind, except that we recognize that we have mistaken individual selves for the true self, the ultimate reality which is Brahman, when they are really only an aspect of Brahman. By identifying with the world, rather than with something unknowable and not to be experienced outside the world, we are saved. Perhaps in practice the outcome of such a belief and the meditative practice associated with it is a certain detachment from the affairs of our lives. We see that they do not concern our true selves, and so it does not really matter, in the end, how they turn out. This will bring a certain peacefulness, and a life focused on experience of the beauty of the world and the like rather than activity (a “contemplative” rather than an “active” life, in accord with Greek terminology).

It should be immediately clear that these philosophical religions are difficult and complex intellectual structures, and I have only sketched an outline of them, without dealing at all with the philosophical arguments presented in their defense, or the various clever answers to the deep problems that arise in them.

V. Buddhism and No-Self: In the century or two before Buddhism arose in Northern India, the following views lying behind the philosophy of Shankara (who wrote in opposition to Buddhism after it had become established) had become orthodox among Hindus, and are reflected in the Upanishads. (1) Reincarnation: a person is reborn after a certain period of time in any given life. One is reborn as a human being, an animal, in a heaven as a god, or in a hell, depending on one’s karma, that is, on one’s actions in his previous lives. Even the gods, with the exception of Brahma, have finite life-spans, after which they are reborn. (2) Pantheism: Brahma, the highest God, who exists eternally, is actually identical with oneself, as well as identical with all other things, and realization that one just is Brahma, attained through meditation (an actual experiential awareness of the identity is sought), is the key to freedom (moksha) from suffering in this world. (3) One’s limited self in this world is in a way illusory, for one takes it to be one’s true self. So all the troubles and suffering in this world are illusory, and the world itself is. One’s true self, Brahma, in fact is in itself blissful, and entirely free, and one recognizes this in the deepest level of meditation.

Buddhism takes these views to be incorrect. First, there is no self to be reborn, the empirically observed self being a causal chain of events involving observable, passing things none of which lasts forever. This chain of causal events, involving the five aggregates (five sorts of existing things, i.e. body, feelings, perceptions, actions and tendencies to action, and conscious states) which makes up one’s self in this life, continues into further lives as long as one is subject to the illusion that there is a permanent self. When Enlightenment occurs, which is the recognition that there is no self, attained through meditation, one is no longer subject to this continuing rebirth, and upon death one is not reborn.

The chain of rebirths is turned into a psychological theory by Buddhists, rebirths as Gods, Demigods, Animals, Human Beings, Hell Creatures and Hungry Ghosts representing six states of mind reflecting different attitudes toward not getting what one wants. A god has everything he wants, and does not even envision a state of deprivation; a demigod has what he wants, but is aware he can lose it; an animal withdraws from the harsh world that would deny him into a kind of automatic, unreflecting activity, and is marked by a certain lack of intelligence in his reaction to things; a hell creature reacts with anger or despair at not getting what he wants, and is the most subject of all to illusion; a hungry ghost reacts with a certain helpless resignation, but lets the fact that he can’t get something that he wants wreck his whole life, so that he finds nothing at all satisfying; a human being reacts intelligently, making an effort and thinking through how to get what he wants where it is possible, and not allowing the fact that he can’t get some things to spoil the rest of his life for him, thought he still is subject ot grasping and craving. Only one reborn as a human being can attain enlightenment, for following the Buddhist way requires intelligent action. The Buddhist interprets these six realms as states of mind that a person may pass through even in a single day, as he responds differently to the various events of the day. So mythology is converted into psychology.

What about the end of this life? Perhaps the most interesting take on it would be that reincarnation is illusory, something that someone who believes in an eternal self would have to expect, but which there is no reason in experience to expect actually occurs. The traditional Buddhist line, however, is that rebirth actually does occur, carrying us over into new lives, as the mythology suggests, as long as we are subject to the illusion of a self. Again, this may be intended, in part at least, as psychology. The illusion of a self creates a persisting, complex sequence of mental events that is rather different from the series that occurs in an enlightened person, and this sequence passes through all the various, psychologically interpreted, rebirths of the six worlds. When one becomes enlightened, this puts an end to this process of ‘rebirth’.

In the second place, there is no God, for nothing is eternal at all, nothing is all powerful, nothing is outside of a world within which it acts and experiences. So the identification with Brahman is a mistake, and actually the meditation in which people claim this occurs is illusory, for what actually happens is simply that one achieves a certain unconsciousness. The arguments for such a God that are presented as part of metaphysics, are all based on general principles that go beyond any possible experiential confirmation, and so, as empiricists who accept no reality beyond what can be presented in experience, Buddhists reject all such arguments.

The self experienced in this world is not a Self of the sort that the Orthodox Brahman imagines, a self that is (1) eternal, (2) free (its actions not caused by its own nature or by external events), (3) blissful in itself (once it realizes its true nature), and (4) of ultimate, unconditional importance. The only self that exists is a self that is part of the natural world, and lacks every one of these four qualities. Thus life is necessarily involved with suffering, for everything one can have can be lost, and the enlightenment consists in recognition that there is no Self as imagined by the Brahmans. This realization leads to a kind of transmutation of suffering, so that it is no longer seen as ultimately important so that it wrecks one’s life.

In seeking release from suffering in meditation, the Buddha tried to find his true self, and ended up by concluding there was no such true self. He had, in his practice, followed the lead of earlier thinkers in persuading himself that only the true self was really of any importance, so that the affairs of the illusory self in the material world were of no moment at all. So when he finally saw that there simply was no Self of the sort he was seeking, he found himself free of any sense that there was an important self, and this proved to provide the peace for which he was looking. Suffering did not disappear, but it was transformed in his experience into something acceptable, since he no longer believed there was a self which it was important should not suffer. Especially in China, later, the Sage would be seen as a person who saw himself as of no importance.

Note the Buddhist rejection of the apparent knowledge of the Self obtained in the deepest levels of concentration. Buddhist meditation is not a matter of seeing into the ultimate reality of the self. The attempt to do this leads to a kind of cessation of experience which some interpret as a kind of wordless, experience-less, direct contact with reality, involving no images or thoughts. But the Buddha rejected the notion that such a knowledge is even possible. This is simply a peculiar state of mind that it is useful to enter into now and again if one can do it, to steady oneself, and gain a kind of rest from the world, but which conveys no special knowledge of anything. All knowledge arises from experience, and involves conception, names, images, consciousness of something other than the consciousness itself (it may involve consciousness of another consciousness). Thus knowledge occurs within the natural causal order, and always depends on its causes if it is to occur.

Just as there is no Self that is the ultimate subject of experience, so there is no Self that is the ultimate subject of action. In the case of experience, there are states of consciousness, like the consciousness of the taste of an ice cream cone, and perhaps also consciousness of that state of consciousness, and so on, but there is no state of consciousness which is conscious of itself. Such a thing would be indestructible (it would maintain itself in existence) but it simply is not there to be found in experience. We are never conscious of such a thing. Similarly there are events, which are always caused by other events and situations, but there is no agent that brings about things of itself. If an agent brings something about, it does this because in that situation, it is caused to do so. Ultimately causation is event to event, situation to situation, not thing to event. So there is no such thing as free will, if that is taken to be a person acting without being caused to do so.

In later Buddhism (Mahayana Buddhism) the doctrine that there is no Self is generalized to the doctrine that nothing is self-natured. That is, in general, nothing is eternal, since everything exists only so long as the causes necessary to maintain it in existence are present, and naturally ceases to exist once those causes are removed; nothing acts without being caused to act; nothing is valuable in itself, but things are only valuable when the causes of their being valuable are present, that is, there is something that finds them valuable, and the situation is such that they are valuable (say, useful to some end that a person actually has); and nothing is of itself happy, since things are only happy when the causal conditions are right, and happiness requires immersion in a world of other things, not an imaginary separation of the Self from the world—that is not even possible, since the reality of one’s limited self would simply cease to exist if all relations to other things were removed. The self is just a heap of other things. So given that there is always a cause for everything, and all things are conditioned by their causes, there is nothing with the characteristics of a self.

What we think of as our self, according to Buddhists, we tend to think of as having these four characteristics, as being absolutely important and valuable in every circumstance, as being blissful and content when it is not disturbed, as being immortal, and as possessing free will so that it is in control of itself and its actions are not caused by other things. It is this delusion about ourselves that produces most of our suffering. A Self is something toward which certain attitudes are to be considered reasonable, most especially, it is reasonable to regard it as of ultimate importance, as important from the standpoint of the universe, so that our lives are ruined or harmed irretrievably if it is somehow lost or damaged, or fails to be what it was meant to be. These attitudes toward the self and the things the self desires are summed up as "grasping." (Grasping is not the same as wanting or desiring, since one can want or desire without being desperate about it, without the view that something terrible is wrong if one's desire is not satisfied.) Given the facts that all things are impermanent and causally conditioned, there can be nothing towards which it would be reasonable to take grasping attitudes. If it is what one has, then one must inevitably lose it, and to take a grasping attitude is to condemn oneself to not even enjoying it when one has it; if it is what one is that is grasped (I must be a certain sort of person), then it must be recognized that what one is depends one the environment one is in as much as it does on one's own "will," that even one's own will is not "free" in a sense that gives one absolute control over oneself. The grasping attitudes and the metaphysical belief in a non-experienced self of absolute importance to the universe, indestructible and everlasting, with absolute control over itself, mutually support one another, and since grasping arises naturally, the false metaphysics of self-natures arises naturally. A Buddhist must commit himself to constant practice of meditation, watching his thoughts for the arising of these illusions, and when they arise he must recognize and label them as illusion, else one falls back into ignorance and grasping. So the practice of “awareness” is a part of the Buddhist way to salvation.

In the Western tradition Determinism is seen as possibly entailing the reasonableness of Fatalism—If it is already fated that I will die there is nothing I can do about it, if it is fated I shall live, there is no reason for me to try to do anything about that—The answer of Chrysippus, the Ancient Stoic, is that it is only fated that I will die given that I don't go to the doctor, and in fact I won't, since that is fated, but it is under my control to do so or not. Determinism does not rob me of control, it only suggests that it is causally determined how I shall exercise this control. But a more involved argument can be made—the state of the world in 1940, assuming determinism, is sufficient to insure that I won't go to the doctor, and so will die. I have no control over the state of the world in 1940, not even over any part of it, since I was not born until 1945. Observe that there are several sets of determining causes, one in 1940, one in 2000 B.C.E., one in 1950, and one holding this evening, just before I make the fatal decision. We might be inclined to say that the last is the real cause, but that is perhaps because we are used to dealing with causes that are conditioned by their environment, and so cannot even formulate what the causes might be in 1940, but can say that it is my masculine stubbornness etc. that will be the cause tonight. . . There is less of a chance for something to go wrong in the intervening mechanism. . . But a real determinist will set all this aside, and regard the cause in 1940 as just as necessitating a cause as the one tonight. But the cause in 1940 brings about its effect only by bringing me about, and the state of character in me that produces the fatal decision. So we might argue that the Stoics win again, and you can't remove my effect on events from the picture. In the Christian tradition, it seems that we view determinism as a threat to control, free will as giving as control, despite the arguments of the Stoics. Christians generally are not Compatibilists who hold that Determinism and free will could be true at the same time. (Some Christians, classical Calvinists, for instance, are Determinists, but they deny free will.) Notice that all of this seems to assume that causality depends on unconditioned causal laws, universal laws which make the universe as a whole predictable, despite the fact that we never experience the universe as a whole, and so can never be in a position to make the prediction in question, or see the absolute, unconditioned necessity that a given action occur.

The Buddhist goes the other way. Nowhere in his tradition is determinism regarded as entailing fatalism, but then his determinism is not the global determinism of the paragraph above, but a local determinism, asserting that every event has a cause which necessitates it given the conditions that held when the causes occurred, that is, given conditions that we can never entirely specify or entirely know. So, though it is argued that my eventual fate depends on what I do, and not on purely external causes, it is not suggested that a non-deterministic free will is necessary to give me control of my actions. Rather, it is argued that if causality (and so determinism) did not hold, then our hopes for salvation (enlightenment) would be dashed, since we could not then identify the causes of suffering, the causes of enlightenment, eliminate the one and establish the other. If our behavior is not caused, we cannot gain control over it, for controlling our behavior is a matter of bringing it about through our actions. If our choices are uncaused, they are chance events, and purely chance events are just as unavoidable and necessary as events already determined by causes we can't change—uncaused events cannot be anticipated or prevented, and so one is justified in fatalism with regard to them. So perfect global freedom of will, paradoxically, means that locally, within the limitations of our actual experience, our free acts have to be viewed as coming out of nowhere, and so not at all under our control!

Perhaps what is going on here is this: the Christian views Determinism and Free Will of the incompatibilist sort in the context of the Christian conviction that the natural course of events, following the line natural causation would impose, leads to sin and damnation (given the Fall and the corruption of nature). So, only the intervention of the supernatural, or an uncaused willing, leaves open the possibility of salvation. The Buddhist has a plan to get to salvation, rooted in an analysis of the causal antecedents of suffering, and a psychological technology for eliminating these causes. The Buddhist undertakes to use natural causation, rather than pinning his hopes on avoiding it, and she trusts natural processes to lead in the right direction. That is part of what is meant by saying all human beings have the Buddha nature—they all naturally tend to see the truth, and ignorance requires an active participation of the will to maintain itself. So the notion that her efforts at attaining enlightenment might be foiled because she later freely wills to do things that fly in the face of all her deliberate training of her character to virtue is reason for anxiety, not rejoicing. What is wanted is the causal continuity of personality, so that our meditation etc. will be seen to work.

Buddhist notions of virtue give a picture of how Buddhists think one should lead one's life. Many virtues on the Buddhist list are like Western virtues, so friendliness or good will, not harming others, faith (in the efficacy of Buddhist techniques for attaining Enlightenment), and so on. The Buddhist moral code is laid out in ten "precepts," which proscribe dehumanizing sex, killing (including any sort of violence, even "killing the other person's opinions"), theft (including theft of time from others, that is, laziness), the use of drugs that lead to delusion (including the use of escapist literature and the like, and the use of escapist fantasizing—but caffeine is all right), lying (including any form of self-deception or exaggeration), anger, boasting (bolstering one’s own self-image by comparing oneself to others, and so undermining others' images of themselves), slander (to support one's own self-image), and any activity that would discredit Buddhism in the eyes of the world at large. It commends giving and helpfulness to others. But several Buddhist virtues sound odd to the West, at least outside the Mystical traditions there. Two important virtues are mindfulness, that is, the continual practice of awareness of what is really going on right now and right here, which leads to a sort of self-control or centeredness, and flexibility and adaptiveness to whatever is actually going on. Rigidity is supposed to arise from grasping, which is, of course, to be avoided at all costs. Strong emotions are suspect, since they often are rooted in grasping, but not always rejected, especially if they are connected with a desire for enlightenment, so that they further the practice of Buddhism. Momentary emotional reactions are mostly considered all right, as long as one remains mindful. It would be long-term emotion that supports grasping. Another virtue that is recognized within the Christian tradition, but is not much valued nowadays, is humility, a just assessment of one’s self, recognizing all one's shortcomings, together with one's relative unimportance. Boastful, defensive, and over assertive behavior, putting oneself forward and talking oneself up, are all looked upon as furthering grasping after an image of oneself. We try to convince ourselves we are such and such by getting everyone to agree we are. It is a mark of an Enlightened person that she views herself as someone of no importance. This means that her faults are of no great importance, too, of course. Humility is not a matter of depression or a lousy self-image. It is in fact pretty cheerful and carefree. If I am of no importance, then I have little to worry about.

To act rightly, the Buddhist Sage relies on his innate (?) sense of what is best, which is developed (!) and honed by practice and instruction in dealing with various situations. To act rightly, one does not act by the rules, except insofar as one may, in training, follow rules, even rather strictly, to shape oneself into an expert. (In fact, rules are adopted only because they give, under the right conditions, good results. Every moral rule can and should be broken if the conditions are not right for it to take a good effect.) The expert does what seems right, trusting his expertise. What is needed, is to first see what is actually going on, from the points of view of everyone involved. Once this awareness is obtained, then one can see how one might help, at least if one’s training in dealing with this sort of stuff is sufficient.

Buddhism is a deliberately proselytizing religion. It seeks converts, and attempts to spread itself abroad, like Christianity, and unlike Paganism. One of its techniques for gaining adherents is to lay Buddhist interpretations on pre-existing non-Buddhist religious practices, so that a new adherent need not abandon his old customs entirely to become a Buddhist. (Christianity does something similar, and many Christian holidays are adaptations of old non-Christian holidays, so, for instance, a Roman festival on December 25 was taken over and reworked into Jesus’s birthday celebration. Many elements of our Christmas celebration were originally from one Pagan tradition or another. The Christmas tree was from Nordic Paganism, for instance.) This meant that the message of the Buddha came to be overlaid with thick encrustation of practices and doctrines from pre-Buddhist religions of Types II through IV. So you find innumerable Buddhist Gods, which are worshiped much as Pagan Gods are, a detailed account of heavens and hells and multiple reincarnations, and so forth. These practices and beliefs all receive allegorical interpretations at the hands of the Order of Monks (the Sangha) which maintains the Buddhist tradition and is considered its most authoritative interpreter, but the common people often know little of this, and regard it as almost incomprehensible anyway, and proceed very much as Pagans, while attempting to follow the Buddhist ethical rules in hope of attaining to a heaven in their rebirth, not in the hope of attaining to enlightenment. Enlightenment is better, but really hard, and hard even to understand properly, and they leave it to those who want to become monks.

But the most dangerous development was the invasion of Type IV religious thought, which infected the thinking even of the Monks. The idea in Mahayana Buddhism is that ultimate reality is Emptiness (sunyata), which is simply emptiness of self. That is, everything that is is a not-self. This is fair enough in terms of the Buddha’s own views, but the Monks tend to take this Emptiness as a kind of positive thing, which underlies the world. That is, they tend to turn it into the Brahma of Hindu religion, or the atman of Shankara. This is easy to do, because this Brahma/atman is supposed to have no positive characteristics at all by which it can be conceptualized, which fits emptiness. Emptiness is described as not-raccoon, for instance, because no raccoon is a self, so raccoons are emptiness, perhaps, but emptiness is not raccoon, as though it were essential to what is not-self to be raccoon! Rather, Emptiness is present as the underlying reality in all things, and is not itself any of them. If one pursues this, it looks as if emptiness is very like Brahma, indeed. Moreover, it is only when I realize that I am empty of self, that I am Emptiness, that I am saved and attain to Nirvana, and that sounds just like the Hindu, who says he must recognize that he is Brahma to be saved. Emptiness is, moreover, present in everyone, and considered as Emptiness, it cannot ever be distinguished from any other Emptiness, for each is empty of all self-nature, and that is it. So a kind of Monism or Pantheism arose within Buddhism. (I hope it is clear that Emptiness is not actually anything at all, any more than non-coke-bottleness is. Human beings and palm-trees do not enjoy some common underlying nature just because neither one is a coke bottle! But this is a difficult point for most, and it is considered by many Buddhist Masters a common mistake among Monks not to see it.)
Mahayana Buddhism can also be mistaken for a kind of Idealism, for Mahayanists do hold that there is nothing to be identified as real which is not experienced by us. If it is not such as to be experienced, it doesn’t exist. This is the Buddha’s original view, and underlies his argument that there is no self. It should not be read as Idealism, though. The Buddha thought that there were material things, but he thought we could know about them because they, under the right conditions, produced experiences of themselves, that is, states of consciousness of themselves. Moreover, and most important, the Buddha did not think that states of consciousness could exist without a material underpinning. For visual states, one needs eyes, and so forth. But Buddhists did talk about the world as commonly perceived as illusory, generated by the mind, and only the world as perceived by an enlightened sage was thought to be things as they really are. An enlightened sage, it might be reasoned, is one who sees Emptiness where others see the illusion of self-natured things. So the commonplace world must be an illusion produced by the mind, while Emptiness just is the mind of the sage, the Buddha-Nature, free of this illusion. That is a big jump in logic, and in fact there is no reason why Emptiness should not cover material things as well, which are part of the causal order (that assumption is part of the proof that all things are Empty). But it was made, and is, again, a common misconception, according to Buddhist Masters, among the less accomplished monks.

A modern Buddhist movement, sometimes called “Critical Buddhism,” among Mahayana Buddhists (i.e. all current Buddhists except those in Ceylon) has adopted a kind of “back to the scriptures” attitude, and rejects the Mahayana doctrines of the Buddha Nature (i.e. Emptiness) to be found in all beings, and the like as a false intrusion of Type IV religion, which any real Buddhist should utterly reject. People in theistic traditions often have a good deal of trouble seeing what all the fuss is here, of course. To them, given the way a sage in the different traditions turns out, Type IV and Type V religions are almost indistinguishable. But then, imagine how a Buddhist would react to an impassioned controversy between a Catholic and a Protestant.

VI. Naturalistic Paganism: This is the name I give to developments out of Paganism, particularly in China, in which the general approach to salvation is maintained, and various high level philosophical doctrines are adopted by different intellectuals, but in which the worship of deities more or less disappears. What survives is the ancestor cult. The prime example is Confucianism. Here a strongly ethical way of life, with an emphasis on playing one’s hereditary role in the community, and especially one’s proper role in the family, is argued for on the ground that it is beneficial to oneself and the community. Harmony within the community is aimed for, and is held to depend on a proper subordination within the established social order, to be maintained through the use of art (music and poetry) to train one’s emotions, and ritual to shape one’s habitual behavior. The old sacrificial ritual is maintained only in the form of state offerings to a very abstractly conceived supreme force or deity, “Heaven,” which is held to govern the destiny of the Emperor’s dynasty, and to send disaster when there is discord in the community. The idea is that discord and improper relations in the community will be reflected in the natural world. Punishment for ethical violations is held to occur by a kind of law of nature, but it is also argued that true peace of mind can only be obtained by being ethical and meeting one’s duties. The central problem in personal salvation is seen to be getting proper external behavior to mesh with one’s internal mental states, so that one does what is right and proper sincerely and with perfect naturalness, not merely because one knows one has to do it or because one expects to profit from it, and so sincerity is seen as a central virtue in the wise man. There is a strong emphasis on the proper behavior of government officials, who maintain the Confucian cults, and it is held that Heaven will “remove its mandate” from those governments that do not care for the welfare of the lower classes, but there is no hint of recognition that any government other than an aristocratic monarchy can possibly be natural. So the upshot is that this form of religion is quite similar to Type II Paganism, but it gets rid of the stories about supernatural beings, and converts the Gods into a single, very abstract deity, Heaven, which seems to be nothing more than natural law at work. This natural law, however, is such that if one lives rightly one can live well, so the world is not intrinsically an evil place, and all the worst evils are due to our violations of nature.

The problem of personal salvation is this: Human beings are very clever and tend to abandon their own nature, contriving artificial roles and artificial selves to obtain their often artificial desires through their cleverness. Taoism in particular emphasizes returning to what is natural and abandoning cleverness. In its more extreme branches it attacks the Confucians, and holds that it would be best if there were no states or rules at all, and everyone simply lived naturally and ignorantly. This is an ideal that could only be followed by a few individuals, of course, and the Confucians continued to run the community. Their view was that one inevitably drifted away from virtue due to one’s intelligence and cleverness, but then could make one’s way back again by proper training of the emotions and one’s habitual responses. The cultivated man who has attained to sincerity will act quite naturally in the right way after surveying the situation to which he has to respond, due to his long training. (There is a good deal of respect for old people in this religious culture, for Confucius himself claimed to have reached perfect sincerity only after a lifetime of training. About time we are retiring, the Confucian figures a talented and hard-working individual is reaching the point where they can really take on serious duties.) So there is a kind of fall from grace due to our awareness and intellect (as with Enkidu in the Gilgamesh story), but once one becomes a sage, he is far finer, due to his understanding of what is required and his deliberate efforts to acquire it, than any animal who never fell from grace in the first place.

VII. Dualism: In Iran a new religion arose perhaps in the 7th century B.C.E., or as early as the 12th century B.C.E. Zoroastrianism, which became the religion of the Persian Empire, the Empire conquered by the Greek, Alexander the Great, in the 4th century B.C.E., and continued to be the official religion of the successor to the Persian Empire, which coexisted with Rome and then the Byzantine Empire, until it was conquered by the Muslims in the 7th century C.E. This religion was very different from Paganism, and, together with Judaism, introduced the notion of a supernatural God who transcends the natural universe, and indeed, created it, with its natural laws.
The religion was founded by Zoroaster. He was a worshiper of the Ahuras, a set of younger gods opposed to the Daevas, older deities who were their parents, and perhaps represented the deities of the indigenous population of Iran at the time of the Aryan invasion. In any case, the Daevas became the chief gods of India, and the Ahuras (Indians call them the Asuras) became a kind of powerful and mischievous demon. The gods of the Aryan herdsmen won out in Zoroastrianism, and the chief god of the religion is Ahura–Mazda, the sole creator of the world, and the only god worthy of worship. The Daevas were viewed by Zoroaster as evil beings that sought to destroy the good creation of Ahura–Mazda, the Wise Lord. There was also a worship of seven “bountiful powers,” apparently intended to represent more or less independent aspects of Ahura–mazda. Spenta Mainyu, the “bountiful spirit,” chose the truth in the beginning, while “angra–mainyu,” the corresponding Daeva and an evil spirit, chose the lie. Thus arose the battle that is ongoing in this world, which will end with Ahura–Mazda’s final victory after 12,000 years. The practice of the religion involved sacrifices to the pure fire (compare the Hindu Agni, fire god) and the use of pure water to cleanse oneself of filth and evil. Under no circumstances was one to harm a cow, and the ritual involved no killing. The Daevas demand sacrifices of animal life, and this is a sign that they are evil.

In the Achamenid period the Persians conquered Israel, and the Hebrews were exiled in Persia in accord with a standing policy of relocating subject populations that seemed likely to prove troublesome to control. The monotheistic character of the Persian religion appealed to the Hebrews, and they absorbed much from it, including strict dietary and domestic rules (keeping kosher) to preserve the ritual purity of every person in the population, and the notion of an evil principle opposed to God, the Devil, the world as an arena where the conflict between good and evil is played out, and the apocalyptic end of the struggle leading to a new heaven and earth and the resurrection and judgment of the dead.

Zoroastrianism changed somewhat over time, due in part to philosophical analysis and criticism. According to the Zoroastrian account in later times, the supreme God Zurvan (infinite time) sacrificed for a thousand years to obtain offspring, but doubted if it would work right at the end, and so his doubt gave life to Ahriman, the evil principle. At the same time, Ormazd arose due to the good work of the sacrifices. After three thousand years, Ahriman, jealous of Ormazd’s beauty and brightness, crossed the void to attack him, but the fight was equal, and Ahriman finally agreed to withdraw, exhausted. Ormazd foresaw a renewed attack, however, which came after another three thousand years, and created the world as a trap to bring about Ahriman’s final defeat. Meanwhile, Ahriman lay exhausted at first, and then created six demons to aid him in his attack on Ormazd’s creation. He managed to break through the sphere of the heavens, but was trapped within it after another three thousand years. At this point Zoroaster was born, and revealed the nature of this struggle to human beings, who must choose sides. Human beings who aid Ormazd will receive rewards in a new creation at the end of things, while those who oppose him will have to go through a purification, their evil dross before they, too, can enter this paradise. Ahriman will be utterly destroyed, or, by some more gentle accounts, will be put to sleep for all eternity. Ahriman’s failure is due chiefly to the demons he himself creates, for the chief of them, a kind of implacable desire for control and destruction of all that opposes it, will eventually run out of food in the world created by Ormazd, and turn
on her creator in her hunger.

Read this psychologically—Ahriman is, like Satan in the Hebrew–Christian tradition, a liar and the father of lies, because he will not admit that Ormazd is superior to him, and so turns away from goodness to the assertion of power as the center of his endeavor after excellence. He decides to destroy what he cannot have or be, all the while denying his own jealous hatred of the excellent. His chief weapon, then, is a kind of possessive desire that drives him to control a thing, or destroy it, while admitting the right of nothing aside from himself to any autonomy or excellence of its own. Ormazd defeats Ahriman not through violence, but by turning his violence in on himself, when at last he fails to control or destroy what Ormazd has created, and is destroyed by his own self–loathing at his failure. Ormazd sets a trap for Ahriman, who destroys himself. He then gives those human beings seduced by Ahriman an opportunity to be purified of their error and the Lie, and, restored to wholeness and health, to enter a new creation unspoiled by Ahriman.

Note that Ormazd, in this account, is perfectly good, loving and gentle, and entirely non-aggressive, and his followers are supposed to be the same way. This is a significant departure from Paganism, and very much in the line of the Christian message in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, that one is to turn the other cheek, do good for those who do evil to you, give your cloak also to the one who takes your coat, and so on. Indeed, ultimately the Zoroastrian view is the source of Jesus’s thinking here. The advice may seem unwise, but Zoroastrians, like Jesus, fully expect to be rewarded seven-fold for any sufferings they endure at the hands of the followers of the Lie for the sake of Ormazd, and so were willing to act with an unworldly gentleness and charity. The self-sacrifice of Jesus, the sacrifice of God’s own Son to frustrate the devil and obtain salvation for his followers, is rather the sort of thing one might expect a Zoroastrian to see as appropriate to his God.

This approach to ethics is well-entrenched in the Buddhist and some Hindu traditions (as the ideal of ahimsa, or ‘doing no harm’). It is not typical of Type II and Type VI religion, and is explicitly rejected in Confucianism (Type VI), though it is accepted, with a quite a different rationale, in Taoism (Type VI). There it is argued that one can deal with people most effectively by not arousing opposition, so that the advantages of the pacifist strategy are to be gained here and now, not in the afterlife. Perhaps it is a natural development of the “cooperate with nature for the good of the whole” approach, but this requires the additional assumption that nature does not work through competition, an assumption rejected in the Greek tradition, for instance. It may be that this approach was developed first in Zoroastrianism, and spread East and West to influence the Christian and Indian traditions. Or, perhaps somewhat more likely, it originated in Buddhism. (Much depends on the dates of Zoroaster’s life, which are quite uncertain.) Zoroastrian apocalypticism influenced Christianity very strongly (see, for instance, the Gospel of Mark, esp. Mark 13). But Buddhism sent missionaries abroad, and may well have influenced Zoroastrianism, and there are a number of Buddhist-inspired elements in Christian culture. For instance, there is the practice of religious pilgrimage, and much in the stories of Jesus’s life before he began his teaching mission—the temptation by the devil and the rejection of worldly power as a universal ruler is precisely paralleled in older Buddhist myths about the Buddha, and the use of the halo to mark a saint in Christian imagery parallels the use of halos to mark a Boddhisattva in Buddhism. Again, liked Jesus, the Buddha was supposed to have enjoyed a virgin birth, having descended into his mother’s womb from the Heavens. There are even some intriguing verbal parallels in the teachings of Jesus to those of the Buddha, though we probably should not make too much of this. So both figures say that it is what comes out of a man, not what goes into him, that is important, in criticism of a ritualistic obedience to religious dietary restrictions lacking in real charitable deeds. It seems more than possible that these and other elements of the Gospel stories of Jesus’s life are borrowings from Buddhism, which were added by some editor looking for information to fill in the blank spots in the story. (This was, unfortunately, rather a typical way of writing history in the Ancient world.) Given the dates of the Buddha, the influence cannot possibly have gone the other direction.

Like Christians, though, Zoroastrians had no problem with persecuting other religions within the regions they controlled, since it was so important that one see the truth and not ally himself with Ahriman. Indeed, despite their pacifist ethics, the black and white world view of Zoroastrianism has led to a great deal of violence and intolerance, for it introduces the notion that one can be allied to pure evil, and opposed to the good God who made the world and to whom we owe allegiance. People allied to evil in this way clearly must be opposed by every means possible. Christianity, especially in its earliest phases, was obsessed with this issue, and saw Greek and Roman Paganism as devil-worship. This is why, once Christianity was established as the state religion, the death penalty came to be imposed for the making of Pagan sacrifices (later survivals of Pagan practices came to be thought of as witchcraft, in which the witch has a familiar (a creature made by Ahriman to mess up Ormazd’s creation, for instance, a goat or a cat) to enable him to communicate with his master, a devil, to whom he makes blood sacrifices, just as blood sacrifices were made of old to the Greek and Roman Gods. Often the dualist world view is combined with nationalism, so that the Persian Empire sees itself as the nation favoring Ormazd, since it has Zoroastrianism as its established religion, and sees all its enemies as allies of Ahriman, since they have other religions. Note that Buddhism and Zoroastrianism, religions of Type V and VII, are protest religions, formed in direct opposition to pre-existing religious systems which the founders thought perverse in one way or another.

VIII. Judaism: Judaism developed a concept of a transcendent God who created the world, with its natural laws. This is the God most often discussed by Philosophers. Here is a brief list of his chief properties in the eventual philosophical elaboration of the concept of God within the Western tradition. In this elaboration Neoplatonism (Type IV) played a significant role, though its notions were adapted to a God who is not identical with anything in the world, but is utterly separate from it and unlike it. The new thing here is that God, though a person with will and understanding, is not part of the natural world, but its creator.

(1) God is the uncaused, self-existent first cause of all things. This arises from Aristotle’s writings, and, among Aristotelians such as Thomas Aquinas, it forms a counter-weight to the Augustinian God-as-Truth line. The idea is that there must be a cause for whatever exists, but that cause also exists (the cause is simultaneous with what it causes in medieval thought), and needs a cause, and so on, but it can’t go on this way indefinitely. So there must be a first cause that does not need a cause for its existence, which necessarily exists and doesn’t need to be produced. That is God, who contains the reason for his existence somehow within His own nature. St. Anselm tried to back this up by proving that God exists in a mathematical fashion, working from the notion of God as that than which no greater can be thought, but this “ontological argument” was justifiably rejected in later thinkers.

(2) God creates things, that is, brings about the existence of things (created things are “creatures,” and only God is uncreated). Creation is not governed in any way by natural laws, and is incomprehensible to men (Augustinians pointed out that creation falls under no Forms, and, indeed, that God Himself falls under no Form, since he is prior to forms). We know creation occurs because it must occur if any non-necessary things are to exist, and because scripture tells us it occurs, but it is impossible to understand its nature. God created the world freely, nothing forced him to do it, nor does the world necessarily “emanate” or evolve from God, as the NeoPlatonists held. Creatures are entirely distinct from God. (Rowe 12-13) This was emphasized by Christians as the central truth that differentiates their view of God from the NeoPlatonist view, i.e. (A) and (B) below.

(3) God is perfectly good, just, etc., but he is also Goodness, Being, Justice, etc. That is, he is identical with these things. So He is good not by having goodness, as creatures have goodness, but by being goodness. This means his goodness is unlimited and perfect. The notion is Neoplatonic, and does not sit entirely comfortably with the notion that God creates rather than emanates the world. One would like to say that my goodness is God’s goodness partially expressed in me, but that can’t be said if the doctrine of creation is true. My goodness is an expression of God’s goodness in part, but it is only similar to it, not the same identical goodness that is God’s. This is Aquinas’s (13th century) view, which became fairly standard. By it God is nothing like creatures because he possesses the properties he possesses in a different way than creatures, though the properties are similar. Thus we can know that God is good, and know that it is the sort of goodness we have that is at issue, but we cannot really understand the way in which he is good, since our minds understand only having properties, not being them. So we understand God “analogically,” that is, we understand that He is like creatures in a certain way, but also unlike them radically enough so that we cannot grasp His real nature as we can a creature's.

In the later Middle Ages some thinkers took a more Hebraic view of the thing, holding that God was not so much good Himself as the standard and source of all goodness. As the standard of goodness, it is impossible that God should be judged good or bad by some independent notion of the good. Rather, as William Ockham observes (14th century), whatever God is or commands, is necessarily good. So if God had commanded that people steal or murder, those actions would, ipso facto, be good. (Of course, he has commanded that we not do these things, so these actions are bad, but Ockham is not suggesting that God is capable of evil, but only that his incapacity for evil is not a matter of his living up to some external standard, but a matter of his being the standard.)

(4) God is pure act and pure being. That is, there is nothing the least bit unreal about God, nothing that God is not, or that he is only potentially. This makes God very unlike the Aristotelian notion of the substantial forms of natural things, which are marked by sets of potentialities (entelechies) which they only realize in part in their actual careers in the world. Earlier thinkers tend to see all reality as coexisting in God, making him a mysterious totality of all that could possibly be real, along Neo-Platonic lines. Later thinker, such as Ockham, held that this amounted to nothing more than God's being the cause of all things, and so containing them all “virtually,” in the way that a power contains what it produces. The picturesque qualities of the NeoPlatonic view are lost here, and God's being pure act comes to nothing more than his being omnipotent.

(5) God cannot will evil, even though He is free and omnipotent. The reason is that the “ability” to will evil is no real ability at all, but only a lack of ability, a failure of being. (So argued St. Anselm in the 11th century.) God can do whatever is real. God is free not only from outside interference, but also from any possibility of some lack or failure entering into his actions, from error or incomplete accomplishment of his aims. Ockham, as usual, reinterpreted this, suggesting that whatever God wills is ipso facto good (point (4) above), and his inability to do evil is not due to his living up to any kind of standard. God ‘s omnipotence means he can do anything that can be conceived, as long the conception of its doing does not somehow involve a contradiction. It follows that God is omniscient, i.e. that he knows everything that is true.

(6) God is perfectly blessed. His life is the perfect life that all creatures desire to know for themselves. That is one reason why knowledge of and friendship with God is so important for us, it enables us to participate in the perfect life.

(7) God is identical with Truth. The idea is rooted in Platonism and NeoPlatonism, and originates in views (B) and (C) below in Ancient Greek religion. A proof of God’s existence was spun out of this by Augustine in his On Free Choice of the Will (388–391 C.E.), like so: There is always something that is true (at least this, that there will be something true, is true), and things that are eternally and necessarily true (like the theorems of geometry), and for these to be true they must refer to some eternal and unchanging reality. But this can only be the Forms, in the mind of God. God is Truth, it is generally held, not in the sense that he actually is the truth that is in a proposition, but in the sense that he is that by which all propositions are true, the cause of all truth, so that He is Truth Itself = the Form of Truth (which is the truth in which the true sentence participates). Thus all things are what they are by participation, in the end, in God Himself, who contains all perfections in Himself.

The picture of God as Truth has one leg in Plato, but the other is in the transcendent God of the Old Testament Hebrews. Augustine argued that nobler things always act on less noble things, and are not acted upon by them. Thus we are active, not passive, in sensation, interpreting the images our souls view in the sense organs in light of the Forms which we recollect, and judging by the unchallengeable standard of our soul’s good the goodness of material things. But we ourselves are judged by the standards that God embodies, in particular by the standard of the Truth, to which our opinions are obliged to conform. So God=Truth is something nobler than we are, just as we are nobler than the physical world.

Aristotelians, hesitating to adopt the full NeoPlatonic picture of God as somehow being the universe, so that all things are simply emanations from God, took God to be Truth only metaphorically, because of His containing the “exemplary Forms” of things, to which he looked when he created the world. These exemplary Forms are standards by which the things created in accord with them are to be measured, so that the closer the horse comes to matching its exemplary form the better a horse it is, and the more real it is in the sense that it has actualized more of its potential being. But they are also God’s freely formed conceptions of things, his blueprints, produced (created) as he creates the world. They are not simply God himself, but rather more like God’s decisions what to create. Moreover, things do not depend on their exemplary forms to exist, or to be what they are (except insofar as they depend on God’s looking to the exemplary Forms in his creation), but only on their own “substantial forms,” which are distinct from the exemplary Forms even if they are made in imitation of them.

(8) God bears no "real relation" to any creature, rather the reality or characteristics that underlie every relation between God and His creatures are entirely located in the creature. This is because God is not capable of suffering any action or change from any source.

(9) God is a perfect unity. That is, he has no parts, and his different powers and other qualities are all of them identical to God, rather than merely belonging to him but being really distinct from him. This traces back to the one God of the Old Testament, but also to Neo–Platonic thought, which insists that the coherence and unity of the universe shows that the ultimate reality behind it is entirely free of any multiplicity at all.

(10) God is infinite. That is, God is in no way limited in any positive quality that he has, so that he is good without limit, powerful without limit, knowledgeable without limit, and so on. From this it follows that God is without a cause, and that there is no second God, who would, if He existed, necessarily limit the power of the first.

(11) God is eternal. That is, God’s life is not something that experiences the passage of time. Rather God experiences all times at one and the same time. God is unchanging, even if, from the temporal point of view of a human being, God may seem to be doing one thing at one time, and another later. This in part follows from God’s unity, which would be broken up if he had temporal parts. God exists at all times, but all at once, not successively, so that God’s “now” is stationary and all encompassing, and not a moving now. Similarly, God is everywhere, and entirely in each place, though this location is treated by some thinkers as a matter of his power being evidenced everywhere. (After all, God is a spirit, and a spirit’s location is due to the presence of its power, not, absurdly, due to the location of the matter making up the spirit!) (This view of God’s eternity is not universal. Some hold only that God always is and always was, and is ‘sempiternal’, everlasting, but temporal as his creatures are.)

How did this complex notion of God arise? About 900 B.C.E., the Hebrews had a fairly normal Type II religion, with one peculiarity, that being an insistence that there was only one God, and the other Gods of other people were not real at all. It is unclear how this view arose, but one thing that is clear is that the Hebrews thought of themselves as the conquerors of the land they inhabited, and thought it important that they be absolutely loyal to their own God, avoiding worship of the Gods of the peoples they had conquered. This requirement of faithfulness to one’s God was characteristic of the region, being found, for instance, among the Moabites as well as the Israelites.

The situation was intensified among the Israelites by the rise of guilds of Prophets, who claimed to transmit the words of their God to the Israelites, apparently words received in a trance, brought on by ritualistic dancing (rather like the Sufis among the Muslims). These Prophets were often critical of the King and his government because it was necessary to allow freedom of religion to the different peoples ruled by the Israelites to prevent revolts, and the King’s marriage with foreign wives who brought their own Gods with them was a commonplace and indispensable diplomatic practice. The United Kingdom under David and Solomon broke into two, often warring, Kingdoms quite early, and Israel and Judah were in a very unfortunate position geographically, being pressed on one side by Egypt, and the other by the Assyrians and other northerners, and it maintained its independence only by playing off these two powerful empires against one another. But eventually the Egyptians withdrew from the area, and then it was necessary to adopt the Gods of the Assyrians. The Prophets and their following, a significant group of fundamentalists, insisted that pure and perfect worship of their own God would bring their God to defeat the Assyrians miraculously, and King Josiah discovered an ancient book, Leviticus (or the core of it), in the Temple, which prescribed this pure and faithful worship, and claiming that the Israelites had been miraculously led out of Egypt by their God. But, of course, that didn’t happen that way, and in the end, even the Prophets began to waver in their trust that independence could be maintained. A final revolt led the Assyrians, in frustration, to round up and ship off to Babylon the most educated and wealthy members of the community.

This elite core of the community was no longer capable of making any trouble, but they held on to their identity by practicing faith to their God, which, after Ezekiel, included a faith that their God would someday restore them to their lands, and even make them the tool by which he would convert all peoples to his worship. They became convinced that their God, who had created the universe, was the only real god, and that everyone else was worshiping idols, stone and timber and other created things. All their troubles were blamed on their lack of faith in previous days, and it became a commonplace belief that the Messiah would come at the head of God’s armies and restore the Hebrew state, as soon as every single Hebrew acted faithfully toward God, keeping the commandments they had agreed of old to keep, worshiping him alone.

This was a new way of reading the problem of cosmic evil. It insists that we are entirely responsible for the evil in the world, for God is omnipotent, and can make the world utterly free of evil if he chooses. The problem is that we freely violated God’s commandments, and then he is required by justice to punish us, and does so. To punish the Hebrews, God often used foreign nations who would defeat them and hold them under subjection. But he also sent plagues, famines, and all the rest. The Jews (we can call them that now, instead of ‘Hebrews’) were robbed of the opportunity to sacrifice to their God like other people did, since they had no temple, but they tried to show their faithfulness by adopting, every one of them, the same standards of purity that had been considered in the past appropriate to the priests who made the sacrifices. Hence the dietary laws and all the rest became established. With the conquest of the Babylonians (who had overcome the Assyrians) by the Persians (those Dualist folks above), the Hebrews were returned to their lands, which were ruled as a Persian province. Probably sympathy of one batch of monotheists for another was involved, but it was also a standard policy of the Persians to gain the cooperation of their new subjects. But this partial independence was only temporary, the Greeks, and then the Romans moving in, the Temple being destroyed in 70 C.E. after yet another violent revolt in expectation of God’s help. Moreover, many of the Jews who had scattered abroad (the Dispersion) remained abroad, and lost the Hebrew language, but remained Jews, emphasizing the need for faith in and faithfulness to their God. Many now thought that individuals, not only the nation, could expect some sort of salvation, a resurrection from the dead in the last days when the new heaven and new earth were established, if they remained faithful (though some held on to the older view that the individual went down to a kind of eternal half-conscious life in the underworld upon death). The religion became a religion of the Book, then, in which the reading of the Sacred Scripture containing the Promises and Commands of God took the central place, sacrifice being impossible. Synagogues replaced the temple, and scholarship centering on the Scriptures became the occupation of religious specialists, Rabbis.

The contact with Greek philosophy was crucial to the development of the notion of God we have laid out. The basis of the notion is the Old Testament God, all powerful and King of the Universe, which he made. Philosophers, trying to work out what is involved here, asserted omnipotence of him, and denied that God was subject even to natural law. The miracles reported of God in the Old Testament (even to stopping the Sun in its tracks) were interpreted to fit this picture of omnipotence. The God the Neoplatonists, perfectly simple and eternal, was identified with the Jewish God, who was at least one and everlasting, and a critical (and ambiguous) Old Testament passage in which God identifies himself to Moses by saying “I am who am,” (maybe, “I am the same guy I always was, who talked to Abraham,” or “I am who I am and it is not for you to know or question”) was interpreted as a claim to be pure and perfect being, again, like the Neoplatonic God. One can see this development full blown in the works of Philo Judaeus, a Jewish-Platonic philosopher and scriptural commentator (who was enormously influential in the Christian tradition) in the first century C.E. But however much Neoplatonism might be taken on board, Jews always insisted (like Madhva in the Vedanta tradition) that God was in no way identical to the world he created, or to us, his worshipers. Unlike God, we can do evil, can be unfaithful, due to our imperfection, and we suffer as a result, and so clearly we are not God, even if we might perceive him in such a way that we almost become him in deep meditation and prayer.

IX: Christianity: Jesus, the founder of Christianity, was a Jew, who apparently identified himself as the “suffering servant” portrayed in a late Jewish Scripture, Isaiah. This suffering servant represented Israel, and makes a number of prayers to God in this writing in which he bemoans his suffering, but understands it as a suffering not because of his own sins, but for the sake of others. The apparent intention was that the Jewish people are continuing to suffer, not because of unfaithfulness, since they have passed that test, but because God intends to use them to spread his worship abroad (hence the Dispersion), and he will reward them richly in the end for their suffering on his behalf if they continue to maintain the faith. This, of course, would be a response to Jewish disappointment that, despite rather heroic efforts of faithfulness, God still has not rescued them. What could be going on? Jesus apparently identified himself personally with this figure, and these passages in Isaiah are later taken by Christians to be prophecies of Jesus’s death and resurrection.

Jesus managed to get himself crucified as a potential rebel leader by the Romans, and probably expected to return in glory, leading God’s armies, shortly after his death. This did not happen, and those faithful to Jesus had to rethink the meaning of what had happened. They decided that Jesus’s sacrifice was not to free them from this world, but to gain them forgiveness for their sins, which could not be forgiven without a divine being offering to pay for them, since their sins were of such magnitude that no mere human being had what was needed to make a proper penance. So the theme of Faith in Judaism was reworked, and now a personal faith in Jesus (= God) came to be considered the key to salvation. This meant believing a number of pretty improbable things, and so faith came to mean not only a trust in God and keeping up our end of the bargain he made with us, but also a trust that what the Scriptures and prophets have said is in fact true. It is incredible that God should have done this for us, but we believe it by faith, and if we don’t, we cannot be saved.

Like other religions, Christianity established itself by becoming the official religion of a state, namely the Roman Empire, in the fourth century under the Emperor Constantine. Buddhism established itself by becoming the official religion of northern India under the Emperor Asoka, Zoroastrianism was the religion of the Persian state, Judaism was originally the religion of the Hebrew state, and so on. Since Christians, like Jews, believed that the supposed gods of other peoples were all fakes, in fact, demons masquerading as God, they persecuted all other religions as devil-worship. The Jews, they thought, worshiped the real God, but they were nonetheless damned because they did not accept Jesus, and so fell short in Faith. They did not impose a death penalty on Jews as they did on Pagans, but they did make life pretty hard for them, and pressed them continually to convert. The Dualist element is strong in Christianity, but since Christians think the devil was created, they do not think he can stand for a second against the power of God. The devil has power over us only because we have allied with him, and God, rather than condemn the whole lot of us to Hell right away, is willing to wait, inflicting punishments, until we come round and convert. The Devil has power over good people, inflicting evils on them, because even the best people have sinned, and deserve punishment. At the end of time, when everyone has been saved who can be, the apocalypse will occur, as in Zoroastrianism or later Judaism.

Christian beliefs are quite complex, indeed, they are rivaled in complexity only by the beliefs of Mahayana Buddhists. As a result, innumerable variants on Christian believe have emerged over time, most of which have been rejected by the majority and labeled heresy. Once a belief is identified as heretical, Christians in most times have considered a death sentence appropriate for it, since anyone who is converted to such a belief by a heretic will be damned to Hell, and the faithful must be protected from these wolves who would ravage the fold. This extreme intolerance of other religions is a special quality of Western Monotheisms, Types VIII–X.

X: Islam: The Islamic religion is another descendant of the Jewish religion. In Islam faith in God is rather de-emphasized, for it is held that the truths of the religion are evident to reason, so that the Christian faith in the apparently impossible is not needed, and the Jewish faith that, despite appearances, God will eventually come through with salvation for the nation is also irrelevant. Islam holds that Allah is merciful, and so there is no need for the complicated Christian story of the sacrifice of his Son to accomplish salvation. God is always willing to receive back the repentant without requiring any satisfaction other than a sincere attempt to live well thereafter. The religion is therefore without the semi-magical element of the Sacraments such as Baptism and the Eucharist, in which one’s sins are atoned for or set aside. Only a sincere repentance and a turn to moral virtue and the worship of Allah will earn Allah’s forgiveness, and nothing else is needed. The religious duties in Islam include the giving of alms to the poor, a pilgrimage to Mecca once in one’s life, fasting during the month of Ramadan, and daily prayers. The reward for a holy life is an eternal Heaven in the afterlife.
Islam is an intolerant religion, like its relatives, Christianity and Judaism, and though it permits Jews and Christians their worship, since they worship Allah, the God of Abraham and Isaac, even if they don’t do it right, it persecutes other religions, and pretty much exterminated Buddhism in India.

Islam began as a religion providing laws and even political structure to groups of tribesmen who stood in need of both, and even now it is the general view of Muslims that the Q’uran, their sacred scripture, which the Prophet Muhammad dictated under the Inspiration of Allah, should form the legal basis of the community. Religious courts and judges following the Q’uran have always been recognized in Muslim countries, and it is the general view that good Muslims should be able to settle any disputes among themselves in such courts, without the intervention of secular authority.

4.1 In the accounts given of the various religions above, it has been assumed that the development of their beliefs and practices can be explained in natural terms, as the outcome of human thought in reaction to the situations they were faced with. Some religions (Buddhism) were described as reacting to problems that one might have with other, already existing religions, others (Judaism) as responding to special problems faced by their national groups. It has also been assumed that the various sacred scriptures of the different religions were the products of human beings, and not divinely inspired.

In most cases, the religions themselves would deny these assumptions. They would claim that their scriptures are the result of divine revelation and inspiration. So Christians have their Bible, a portion of which is the Jewish scriptures, the Hindus have their Vedas, the Muslims their Q’uran, the Ancient Greeks regarded the Iliad and Odyssey as divinely inspired by the Muses (a notion that became a mere poetic conceit later on), the Zoroastrians have the Zend Avesta, and so on. The Buddhist scriptures are regarded as authoritative, since they report the Buddha’s discoveries, but are not thought of as divinely inspired, and the same attitude is taken in China toward the supposed works of Confucius, but these naturalistic religions may be the only exceptions to the rule. If a supernatural is postulated, it tends to be assumed that it tries to reveal itself to us in inspired scriptures. Perhaps it can also reveal itself to us directly in religious experience, in which case scriptures written by those who have had the experience may be viewed as authoritative eye witness reports, as it were.

Many religions think that only their scriptures are divinely inspired, and regard the others as merely human products. Generally a non-skeptical account is given of one’s favored religion, and skeptical accounts are reserved for the others. So Thomas Aquinas does not hesitate to give a merely historical account of the origins of Islam in his Christian work, the Summa Contra Gentiles.

Several problems arise for the religious scholar trying to account for religions disagreeing with his own. First, why would only some people receive the true revelation, whereas most do not, and why does the true revelation come so late? Early Christianity held that the fallen angels gave rise to non-Christian religions, appearing to people as gods to deceive them into worshiping them, and get their souls damned. (Later Christians, too, so see Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which he gives the names of all the Ancient Gods to the demons following Satan.) So the original revelation to Adam was rapidly corrupted after the Fall. Hinduism gives a different account, holding that the other religions are partial and incomplete revelations by various Avatars of the Gods, suited to the level of understanding of those receiving them. So the other religions are divinely inspired, but the Gods did not tell their founders the exact truth, which was only revealed to the Hindus.

In the second place, if we explain away non-Christian religions without using the Demon hypothesis, making them out as due to various sorts of human error (the skeptical historical explanations above), then these explanations return to haunt us. We must somehow make it out also that Christianity (or Islam, or whatever our own religion is) is unique in a way that guarantees its truth. So it is argued that Christianity is unique because of the miracles that witness to it, in particular the miracle of Christianity’s successful spread throughout the Roman Empire to eventually become the official religion of the Empire, the claim is made that Christian Scriptures are unique and inexplicable historically, and so on. One problem is that these arguments are hard to make plausible, and are often made in ignorance of the facts about other religions. Another is that similar arguments are made in other, non-Christian religions (Islam argues for the uniqueness of the Q’uran, for instance).

One way in which a religious thinker approaches non-favored religions is to give an objective, developmental history of the religion, pointing out how earlier beliefs differed from the beliefs of later practitioners. This, too, may rebound on the head of practitioner, as it becomes clear that development is indicated by the historical evidence within the favored religion as well. This may lead to reform movements to get back to the origins, but the development may be radical enough so that the original beliefs now seem heretical or crude. So one defends against the developmental view in the favored religion, holding it to arise from a pure revelation which is never lost or significantly changes, and presses it in non-favored religions.

So Christians have been inclined to argue that originally, just after Adam and Eve, everyone knew there was only one God. This original pure monotheism was somehow lost (due to sin and the influence of the demons), so that the ancient polytheisms our historians know about arose, except perhaps in the line of Abraham. This view is presented, for instance, in George Horn, Philosophical Histories . . . (1645). Andrew Lang, in The Making of Religion (1898), and Wilhelm Schmidt, The Origin of the Idea of God (1912), pursued this view, attempting to show that primitive religions are inherently monotheistic. Of course, if one were able to establish this point, it would not do much to show that the Adam and Eve story is true, given the other information we have about Ancient history and Prehistory.