This is an excerpt from the Religion section of my book Nunc Dimittis.
What Is Religion?
It would be natural to assume that a simple and straightforward definition of religion ought to have existed since at least the Age of Enlightenment, when religion, like everything else, was approached scientifically, with the result being a supposedly complete clarity as to its meaning. This is not true, however, since even the most recent editions of Encyclopaedia Britannica are making the following point in their Macropaedic article on Religion:
“An acceptable definition of religion itself is difficult to attain.(!) Attempts to find an essential ingredient in all religions (the numinous, or spiritual, experience; the contrast between the sacred and profane; belief in gods or in God, etc.) so that an ‘essence’ of religion can be described [have been unsuccessful]. Objections have been brought against such attempts, either because the variety of men’s religions makes it possible to find counterexamples, or because the element cited as essential is in some religions peripheral. In practice, a religion is a particular system, in which doctrines, myths, rituals, sentiments, institutions, and other such elements are interconnected.”
Our other authoritative source fares no better on this subject. In Webster’s Dictionary, only three significant definitions of religion are noteworthy, showing a characteristic confusion:
---Belief in a divine or superhuman power(s) to be obeyed and worshipped as the creator(s) and ruler(s) of the universe. (Does this mean a personal belief or a collective belief? The Dictionary makes it clear that the answer can be both or either. I object to this ambiguity in formal contexts, preferring to distinguish personal belief, which I call faith, from collective belief, which I call religion. See my entry Separation Of Church And Faith.)
---Any specific system of belief, worship, conduct, etc., often involving a code of ethics and a philosophy, and loosely, any system resembling such a system, as ‘humanism is his religion.’ (Poor old humanism: once again somebody wishes to represent it as a “resembling” alternative to religion! See my entry Humanism As A Dirty Word.)
---A state of mind or way of life expressing love for and trust in God, one’s will and effort to act according to the will of God, especially within a monastic order or community. (Is it a personal state of mind, way of life, will and effort, or a collective one, such as the one collectively existing in a monastery, in which case, wouldn’t it be more proper to call it monasticism, rather than to overburden the usage of the word religion with totally unnecessary connotations?)
From citing these two authorities alone it should now be quite obvious that no one can possibly be surprised at the failure to arrive at a universal definition of the generic religion, where so much linguistic confusion is so unnecessarily at play. It is therefore becoming my first order of business now to simplify and rearticulate the word religion as a collective system of belief, distinguishing it from personal faith, and also vehemently separating legitimate great religions from bogus man-made cults. The reader will find elaborations of these principles throughout the rest of the section.
Too Many Truths Spoil The Cloth.
(I am very fond of this ingenious title, and even though I hate to spoil it by detailed explication, I cannot let its full appreciation be denied by missing any part of it; so, here is the chewed up cud: My entry is about the multitude of religions and religious denominations, each claiming a monopoly on truth, and resulting in too many truths undermining the credibility of each other. As to the meaning of the word cloth in this case, see its specific dictionary definition as the clergy, or things ecclesiastical. And for the overall effect, compare it to the familiar proverb Too many cooks spoil the broth, and then look at it again under Grigori Permyakov’s angle, for which also see my entry From Proverb To Greatness in the Sonnets section.)
There have been too many competing religions and denominations in the world, way too many! Far more, in fact, than there have been recorded revelations of truth anywhere at any time since the beginning of time. I suspect that religion as such has little to do with it, in most cases. The root cause of such diversity is the struggle for political control in church-centered communities of earlier times (note the Roger Williams controversy, for instance, to name just that one). And in more recent times it is also the special privileged status, which the churches are getting, providing an irresistible temptation to all sorts of crooks to take their con games to this incredibly fat pasture.
In dealing with this problem, the task is clear. We must first separate legitimate religions from illegitimate ones, discarding the latter as bogus. Then we must reconcile the former among themselves. This section, as I would hope, provides a few suggestions toward the resolution of both these challenges.
I said it before and I am saying it again, I would put no faith in any religion that is less than a hundred years old and has never suffered persecution. I would put no faith in any religion which is not directly connected to a distinctly identifiable and universally recognized world culture… All minor religions and religious cults are illegitimate.
…As for the great world cultures and their religions, none ought to have a monopoly on truth. Each of these great religions is true, but only within the limited context of the great culture, which it is part of, and it is the universal truth, which all these great religions have in common. Otherwise, too many truths spoil the cloth, necessarily leading to cynicism and apostasy.
God-Seeking And The Epiphany.
God-seeking used to be a peculiarly Russian preoccupation in the times of yore, namely, during the religion-thirsty decades of the later Tsarist Empire when Russian Orthodoxy suffered from too much recognition and too little appreciation, amounting to a derisive atheism among the nobility and a sense of spiritual emptiness among the Russian Intelligentsia, hence the God-seeking quest, to fill the painful void.
I should say that this was not exactly a purely religious quest. There was an urgent need to somehow bridge the growing chasm before one’s individuality and one’s sense of Russianness, that is, the failing connection of the person to his or her national, cultural, historical, spiritual roots, traditionally embodied in the Russian Orthodoxy, which had, at that time, been reduced to shambles.
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 solved at least one great problem: it restored the lost respect for Russian Christian Orthodoxy, reuniting the Russian nation with her God. The quest was over. The seeker had found what he had been looking for. This was the epiphany.
…The reason why I am writing this, and particularly, so early in the section, is that I am thus registering the arch-leitmotif of this section, namely, that the most effective role played by a great religion is when it goes hand in hand with the concept of nationhood (statehood), together forming, as it were, an unbreakable bond.
Union Of Church And State.
Generally speaking, it is a great advantage for both the nation and her citizens when nationhood and religion become inseparable, and thus complement and invigorate one another. Examples of religious uniformity can be found of course in predominantly Catholic countries (predominantly Protestant countries are notoriously less religious), in those Islamic countries which are not divided by the infamous internal religious dispute of Shiah versus Sunni, and in the overwhelmingly Buddhist Thailand, among others. But in all these instances the country’s religion is necessarily much broader than her specific nationality, and the case of x«y cannot be established, to make the church and state bond especially significant to the extent that it presents itself in Russia.
Thus Russia is a unique case of a great power which has an unbreakable union of church and state, like it exists nowhere else. Needless to say, this union accounts for Russia’s very special Third Rome superpower destiny and determines her global role for the future. If only this historic union would endure and eventually triumph over the post-Soviet transitional stage of an in-your-face money orgy of the rich amidst the abject misery of the poor, which, to a considerable extent, is still allowed to persist and thrive.
But, luckily, there are good grounds to project that the church and state union is bound to prevail, for which extraordinary victory the incredibly revitalizing and invigorating Soviet experience (sic!!!), which had given Russian Christians a taste of the pathos and passion of Early Christianity, must take the full credit.
Separation Of Church And Faith.
Before we proceed with the generalized entry on Religion And Culture, which flows out of our discussion in the previous entry of the advantages of a certain Union Of Church And State, existing in today’s Russia, we must first tie a few loose ends, and this entry ties one set of them.
I am asserting from general broad considerations that even in the perfect situation earlier described as x«y, we must not automatically identify a person’s religion with personal faith, although in this perfect situation personal faith is a natural extension of the religious affiliation, and thus, may appear indistinguishable from religion to the believer himself. However, by virtue of its being an extension, it cannot be logically identical with it.
This matter and the philosophical necessity to separate religion from faith becomes particularly important in situations which are far from perfect. But even in the perfect one, as I shall explain below, the separation of church and faith is essential to intercultural compatibility, or, religiously speaking, to global Interfaith.
The word faith, unfortunately, has been too frequently equated with the denominational identification of the believer to take the meaningful distinction between church and faith for granted. It is my demand that we do make this distinction through the clarity of the term’s definition. In other words, what is faith?
Webster’s Dictionary amply illustrates my point, perpetuating the confusion by the unyielding ambiguity of its own definitions. It defines faith as (1) unquestioning belief, (2) unquestioning belief in God, religion etc., and (3) a religion or a system of religious beliefs; as the Catholic faith. (all other definitions are derivative and unimportant in our context.) As we can see, not only the same word faith is allowed to stand for belief (Webster’s does not use the word personal in its definitions of faith) and religion as in (1-2) as opposed to (3), but in (2) it casually says “belief in God” and in “religion” in one short breath.
There is a historical-cultural explanation for the ease with which we are so ready and eager to identify our faith with our church: for most of us they seem like the same thing. But they are not. God is one, and He is Absolute. Religions are several, and they are mostly related to national or social cultures, and therefore, by no means Absolute. By equating church and faith, we are destroying the Absolute nature of the core of our belief, open ourselves to the charge of bigotry and make our goodness incompatible with the goodness of all others, who happen to belong to different cultural and therefore religious traditions.
There is another danger in the confusion of our belief in God and our belief in religion. Our belief in God is steadfast, and not subject to change. Religion is subject to change under certain circumstances, and it makes our belief in God more akin to the belief in an Authority, be that of the Pope, or of a charismatic cult leader, or even of a Führer. Transferring our faith from God to Authority, we are abandoning our faith in God, and thus make ourselves vulnerable to manipulation by man, whether that man is after our wallet, our obedience, our vote, or our soul.
How should a philosopher approach this subject? In my Allegory Of A Two-Storied Temple I have offered my best answer. I believe in the philosophical separation of church and faith, rather than in their fusion. In spite of my respect for the philosophical astuteness of St. Augustine, his remark on this subject is virtually soaked in expediency and quintessentially unphilosophical: He cannot have God for his father who refuses to have the church for his mother. (De Symbolo, xiii.)
St. Augustine ought to have known that Aristotle, for instance (“He was a man of excellent genius, though inferior to Plato,” The City of God, viii), and yes, Plato too, were men who may both be undeniably said to have had God for their father, yet, had no mother in the polytheistic mythology-based Greek religion. The great philosophers of the pre-Christian world all knew the difference between faith and religion, and they have showed the world the light, in that sense, only the world of competing religions did not want to see it. The result was a philosophical rejection of all religions perhaps best summarized by Napoleon I during his last exile to St. Helena:
“I would believe in a religion if it existed ever since the beginning of time, but when I consider Socrates, Plato, Mahomet, I no longer believe. All religions have been made by men.” (1817)
It would be completely wrong to surmise, on the basis of the preceding argument, that I am advocating the churchless approach to faith. In fact, in my Temple Allegory, the philosopher’s faith is to be found on the upper level, while the different religions occupy the bottom floor. Now, I do not have to explain what is to happen to the Temple, if the ground floor should be suddenly removed: it will surely collapse, burying all, the philosophers and the sheep together in the same rubble.
In fact, church is to society what faith (in my specific definition distinctly separating it from religion) is to the individual. To summarize my idea still more clearly, Church is a social-cultural faith; people will have their own personal faiths, as individuals, but they will most likely also have their own churches, as society members. Simple? Yes!
My later entry will address the question of religion and culture, where the point of this one will be further clarified.
Faith And Religion At Odds?
Considering all that we have said about the unbreakable bond between religion and culture, can faith and religion be different in one person, yet coexist without hypocrisy and without causing a split personality? Yes, as long as they are understood for what they are: a personal philosophical belief in God, on the one hand, and an adherence to a certain, by and large culturally and socially predetermined, system of collective worship, on the other.
Personal faith does not have to be some superbelief in the philosophical Absolute. A Catholic by birth and cultural tradition can privately come to believe in consubstantiation rather than transubstantiation, which, nonetheless, does not change him into a practicing Protestant, but does produce a non-offensive disconnect between his collective religion, which he is not willing to repudiate on account of such trifle disagreement. It is also possible for a citizen of a Christian nation to have a difficulty with, say, the basic Christian concept of Trinity (which, to be honest, does pose a serious challenge to philosophical monotheism), yet to remain a loyal and sincere member of his Church. To be sure, personal belief hardly ever perfectly coincides with the dogma of one’s religion anyway, but this is really a trifle matter, which ought not to be allowed to become a determining factor for either accepting or rejecting the Church link binding the believer to his home-base community, to his nation, and to his cultural roots.
Once again, this is not hypocrisy, and it does not lead to the curse of leading a double life. But our refusal to recognize its existence and to come to terms with it--- is.
Atheism As Extreme Fear Of God.
Here is one of those previously mentioned “loose ends,” discussing some causes of atheism where there had been no personal faith to begin with, or where a previously strong personal faith degenerates into atheism under certain conditions.
There are actually at least four types of atheist, in the broadest sense of the word. The most common type is a person raised in a religious environment, and rebelling against all religion after confronting the endemic religious hypocrisy within that particular environment. Added to the same type can be a previously religious person who becomes averse to religion intellectually, having observed and read how religious practice falls short of declared faith, and making the erroneous conclusion of equating personal faith to public practice.
There are also two types of passive or concealed atheism. One makes God irrelevant to the person’s life: too busy or too comfortable to pay attention to spiritual matters. This is probably atheism in its linguistically narrowest sense, which is “living without God.” Another type trivializes God, when a person can well be a church-attending citizen, yet religion to him, or to her, is nothing more than a social event, where God has no value independent from the person’s attendance of the church and church-related activities, as the church itself is nothing more than a social club: a place to meet people and seek help from when one is in trouble.
It is however the fourth type, which I find the most interesting, and on whose account I am writing this entry in the first place. It is the person who believes that he or she has committed such a grave sin in their life that this sin cannot possibly be forgiven by God… if He exists. It, therefore, feels psychologically safer (in terms of what happens after death) to deny His existence altogether, so that one’s life would--- mercifully--- end in nothingness, which alone forgives all sins, than to suffer the wrath of God at the end of the earthly life.
Thus, I believe that it is the extreme fear of Divine Dies Irae, which turns a person into the most committed type of atheist, the one who denies God out of fear of God’s Judgment.
Religion And Culture.
By the same token as faith in my restrictive definition denotes individual belief, religion refers to the faith of a nation, or of a social or ethnic group.
To each culture its own religion, as I put it. Whether in reality it does hold true or becomes overburdened with so many exceptions that it becomes silly, my main point is that it should be taken axiomatically, and, in that case, the following must be taken as true, that where there is no religion, there is no culture.
Multiculturalism would mean the existence of several religions under the auspices of one state, which then becomes a federation. Whether these religions are compatible among themselves is a matter of importance as their compatibility is not a matter of religion per se, but of political stability and of eventual viability of the state as such. How this thought translates into the historical reality of the past, present, and future map of the world is an exciting explorative adventure, to which I invite any open-minded reader who can easily come up with lots of practical applications on his or her own. Remember, use this principle as an axiom to arrive at the most interesting conclusions and predictions.
“A nation must have a religion, and that religion must be under the control of the government,” Napoleon observed in 1801. He was in good company of some brilliant statesmen, who unlike him followed this rule to the letter, such as Peter the Great of Russia, for instance, who abolished the Patriarchate in Russia and put the Church on a very short leash, held by the bureaucratic civil government institution, called the Holy Synod. As a result, the nation’s reverence for the Russian Church plummeted for two centuries and it took the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 to restore both the respect, and the Patriarchate as well. Today’s Russia has finally learned a world-historical lesson about the ideal relationship between the Church and the State: let it become a healthy alliance of God and Caesar, on behalf of the many against a common enemy within and without. That populistically denounced enemy are the Russian rich, cautiously enjoying their precarious curse of wealth in Russia, and the nationalistically magnified international evil of capitalism, epitomized by the United States.
As I have stated categorically, there is no separation of Church and State in today’s Russia. Her ‘minority’ religions are officially and factually protected, to show respect for all religion (the strictly selective choice of allowable religions in Russia is limited to the legitimate main religions of legitimate minority cultures), other nations’ official religions are respected only inasmuch as they stay with those nations without efforts on their part to proselytize on foreign territory. The Russian Orthodox Church is now recognizing itself as a Global Church, on account of the Russian populations around the world forming themselves into proper dioceses. It is essential to state that the Church-State duumvirate as it is practiced by Russia has a distinct political dimension, which, being empowered by the authority of religion as-such, provides Russia with an international political clout that, no matter how subtle and often elusive, must never be underestimated.
Having talked for a while about Russia’s secret weapon, what counter-weapon has America to offer on her own behalf? The famed separation of Church and State gloriously embedded in the American Constitution and so wonderfully practiced by several successive generations has apparently failed the legal challenge to the authority of religion in general, posed by an iconoclastic Democracy, which is obliged to accommodate under its big tent not only the scores of sects calling themselves religions, but also an explicit denial of all religions allowing the presumable blessing of religious tolerance to become contaminated with the germ of anti-religious intolerance. It turns out that Democracy and the Separation have a tendency to form a lethal combination, with regard to religion, as soon as the historical cultural tradition of a great nation wears out in a climate of multiculturalism.
A lot more can be further said on this provocative subject, but what has already been said should suffice at least for the purposes of this entry.
Allegory Of A Two-Storied Temple.
The world with its many nations and religions can be compared to a two-storied temple, where each great culture, inseparably identified with its predominant historical religion, has a private room of her own, on the ground floor, partitioned from the rest by sturdy walls belonging to the structure of the whole building. In order to communicate with the rest of the world they cannot tear down the walls, because such an effort at ‘interfaith’ would lead to the building’s collapse, burying them all in the rubble. The only solution is to use their individual sets of stairs to walk up to the upper level, where there are no partitions, and where it is possible for all of them to mingle the smart way, without bringing the temple down.
This allegory works both in its application to normal international relations, the enlightened way of doing business with each other, but also in finding the only solution to the complex dilemma of common ethical denominator, where the discovery of common ethics is complicated by the apparent incompatibility of their respective religions and denominations. See my other entries on the subject of transcending from the Gods of religions toward the One Absolute God of the Philosophical Abstraction, that is, ascending to the upper floor of the same temple.
Religion And Philosophy.
The key point of my Allegory Of A Two-Storied Temple is that the main prerequisite to the achievement of a lasting peace on earth is the will on the part of the world’s nations to ascend from the ground level of their religious and cultural differences to the upper floor of philosophy, where the walls of separation have given way to the commonness of the absolute ethical standards, shared by all major religions.
Thus, to philosophy is assigned the crucial role of the uniter in this great effort. Now the key question to be addressed is whether religion and philosophy are sufficiently compatible, to work as a team?
Thinking philosophically, there shouldn’t be a problem. After all, religion creates social ethics, and ethics is the mother of philosophy. Comparing different religious ethics with philosophical ethics, their similarity (or should I say virtual identicalness?), is unmistakable.
The reality, however, defies both logic and common sense. In reality we see religion and philosophy not as a team, but as irreconcilable enemies, battling each other for supremacy over the question of what is truth, what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong.
In the course of this resentful clash over the ethical territory, religion and philosophy are habitually trying to undermine each other, as if conspiring together to defeat the devil by making him laugh to death.
“Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ,” writes Apostle Paul in Colossians 2:8, equating wisdom with deceit, and allowing a caricature representation of philosophy to become its defining characteristic within the ensuing Christian tradition. “What excellent fools religion makes of men,” writes Ben Jonson in 1603, well before Voltaire would express similar feelings, equating faith with stupidity, and making it fashionable to ridicule religion as the first rule of intellectual sophistication.
Foregoing a myriad examples all proving the same thing, and therefore unnecessarily redundant, we now arrive at the anticlimactic foregone conclusion that, indeed, religion and philosophy appear to be at such insurmountable odds vis-à-vis each other, that any attempt at their reconciliation should be demonstrably hopeless. While it is possible to harmonize even the antipodes by the great power of reason, these two are made irreconcilable not by reason, but by the brute force of tradition and prejudice, which makes all such efforts a sorry waste.
Yet, it is vital that they not only be reconciled, but attain a state of mutual acceptance and interdependence. There must be some way to defeat the mutual bias. Schopenhauer may have suggested such a way, pointing to one interesting aspect of their commonness.
Here is a remarkable distinction between religion and philosophy made by Schopenhauer’s Demopheles in his Dialogue On Religion, from the incomparable Parerga und Paralipomena:
“Founders of religion and philosophers come into the world to rouse him from his stupor and point to the lofty meaning of existence; philosophers, for the few, the emancipated; founders of religion, for the many, for humanity at large.” (As a note to myself, I may want to find out whether this perfectly simple expression of a fundamental distinction has ever been made similarly by any of the preceding thinkers.)
This splendidly straightforward distinction opens with a splendidly straightforward connection. Founders of religion and philosophers have a common mission and a common task but plainly different audiences. There is no sense for a philosopher par excellence to try winning over the crowds. This is not even his mission. As for the crowds, they are hungry to be roused by a religious leader whose pulpit eloquence unleashes a power which can literally perform miracles of instant persuasion, not so much thanks to exceptional powers of the speaker himself, as to the exceptional powers of his pulpit, such awesome power invested in the pulpit by a collective electromagnetic stress of the supercharged audience.
So, let the last vestige of logic speak up right now. Suum quique. May our preachers keep on preaching to their choirs, a few to the many. But let the enlightened philosophers enlighten those preachers with the wisdom of the ages. A handful rousing the few “to the lofty meaning of coexistence.”
Religion and philosophy thus rediscovering their common ethical roots and learning to walk hand-in-hand: the philosopher and the preacher, the preacher and the masses. How wonderful would it have been had this idea been able to make just one small step beyond wishful thinking…
(The last sentence, not coincidentally, points to an organic link between this Religion entry and my upbeat futuristic Section One Step Beyond Wishful Thinking. That counterpart entry will most appropriately have the parallel title Philosophy And Religion.)
Religion And Homeopathy.
Homeopathy is a science of curing the sick patient not by an antidote, as in allopathy, but by the poison that is causing his disease. The great homeopathic physicians, from the creator of homeopathy Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843) to James Tyler Kent (1849-1916) recognized the risks of aggressive homeopathic treatment, essentially subscribing to the Nietzschean dictum That which does not kill us, makes us stronger. In other words, unless the medicine has an ability to kill, it cannot cure. (The first enunciation of this rather shocking principle is usually attributed to Hippocrates, which may not be technically true, but the truth of it is true.)
Homeopathy, in this sense, can be compared to religion. Genuine Christian morality, as opposed to its fake double, Tartuffery, is a very potent poison indeed, in the Nietzschean sense: if it does not kill us, it makes us stronger… Come to think of it, this goes for all religion in general.
In support of my analogy with homeopathy, there are numerous famous instances of religion being referred to as either a drug or a disease. The first thing that comes to mind is Karl Marx at his best (as the coiner of a perennial aphorism), and at his worst (if he said it with a straight face, as, I am afraid, he did!), in his much-quoted adage “Religion is the opium of the people” (in Criticism of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law, 1844). And then, well before Karl Marx, was Heraclitus, who wrote in one of the fragments that have survived the fuga temporum: “Religion is a disease, but it is a noble disease.”
What makes these dicta so pertinent to the poison theme is their striking similarity in their common manner of pointing to the unnatural nature of religion. Marx sees it as a drug, that is, an external substance which is introduced into the mind and the body of the individual. Heraclitus also sees it as an abnormal state of mind, or body, a deviation from the norm. Considering that the norm is not a philosopher’s virtue, Heraclitus can be merited with a generally positive attitude toward religion, while the polarity of Marx’s valuation entirely depends on his personal attitude to narcotics.
Now, the history of religious wars tells us that religion can too often be a deadly poison and a disease which tears nations apart, resulting in unspeakable bloodshed. Is there a possibility of a cure? Of course. But there is no antidote to religion. The cure has to be extracted from within religion itself. As long as we are ready to view our particular religion not as a universal truth, to which all others must bow, but as a particular cultural inheritance, which one comes into the possession of both with his mother’s milk and genetically.
The key here is to recognize that religions are fused into their particular cultures and cannot be transplanted to a different soil, which carries its own cultural “virus” and would react violently to any effort to administer an antidote. Such is the premise at the core of my treatment of world religions, and my understanding of the Absolute nature of the one and only God, accessible to us via our cultural religion and philosophy, standing above all His cultural and national interpretations as the God of this or that religion.
Only under such conditions of recognizing the limiting principle of non-absolute religious heredity is peace on earth at all possible, as the following reflection of Lichtenberg begins to ring and resonate as profoundly true: “All the different religions are only so many religious dialects.”
Religion Versus Sovereignty And Statehood.
The old Tsarist Russian national motto used to be For (Our) Faith, Tsar, and Fatherland. The word ‘Faith’ precedes the other two not accidentally, but to emphasize that it is the primary function of national religion to give moral legitimacy and a proper foundation both to the Sovereign and to the nation as such. Morality, therefore, constitutes the underpinnings of all organized societies.
This fact transfers fairly simply onto the reality of a society where a single faith dominates. It does not work however in multi-religious societies, such as was Germany of the Third Reich. It was therefore necessary to have a different national formula in Germany than the one so easily adopted in Russia. Being both Catholic in the south and Protestant in the north, Germany had to drop the appeal to religion in her own motto. Thus it came up with Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer, where ethnic nationalism had taken the place of religious identification.
It is my firm belief, not just from the sad experience of Germany of the Third Reich but mostly from general philosophical considerations, that all societies must place religion (and thus their specific religious morality) at the top of their national motto. Otherwise, their inevitable desperate search for a common national ethics would bring them to the doorstep of ethno-nationalistic exclusivity, and thus, ethno-chauvinistic bigotry that is far more dangerous and essentially intolerant than anything today associated with religion.
Freedom Of Religion And State Control.
The role of the great philosopher is to speak to all nations and for all time, but this does not mean to speak in ‘timeless’ generalities. The philosopher should not be afraid to talk of such specifics where the prospect of his ideas becoming obsolete overshadows his legacy to the reader of the future, like it is so obviously the case in the following passage from the 39th Chapter of Hobbes’s Leviathan. Here is what he says:
"I define a Church as company of men professing Christian religion, united in the person of one sovereign; at whose command they assemble, and without whose authority they ought not to assemble. And, because in all Commonwealths assembly without warrant from the civil sovereign is unlawful; Church also, which is assembled in any Commonwealth that has forbidden them to assemble, is an unlawful assembly."
It follows also that there is on earth no such universal Church as all Christians are bound to obey, because there is no power on earth, to which all other Commonwealths are subject.
Having the freedom of assembly constitutionally protected in this country for well over two hundred years, and universally taken for granted in all existing democracies, the passage appears hopelessly outdated and even undeserving of contemporary notice, except to reiterate the historical truism that modern democracy is still less than three hundred years old. However, additional observations can also be made. Considering that Hobbes never was a conformist, and even occasionally got in trouble with the authorities on both sides of the political spectrum, he cannot be denied the courage of asserting his convictions. Therefore, the fact that state control of religion appears to him such a natural philosophical concept leads us to two very natural conclusions. One, that state control over “Christian religions” in this country may exist in various subtle, “constitutional” forms, while non-establishment religions are naturally subject to government anxiety and indirect control. Two, that Western Christian missionaries in foreign countries establishing their churches there, no matter of which denominations, are naturally suspected of working as agents of their respective governments, trying to influence the social and political scene in these target nations.
Proselytizing As Anything But Religion.
Of proselytizing I have often thought that this missionary activity, especially in modern American society and among the Evangelicals, serves them more as an ego trip, a projection of national and personal power, rather than as a genuine religious experience. Had the latter been the case, why would they have to go half around the world to places they know absolutely nothing about, whose languages are foreign to them, when right here, under their noses, in their own back yard, in communities populated by people they personally know, where they themselves live, and should care the most about, there is such a dire need of a religious miracle, a revolution, a victorious revival of neighborly souls that are now, right in front of their own eyes hopelessly drowning in consumerism, secularism, nihilism. These also need to be saved, don’t they, and perhaps, even much more than those ‘others,’ far away. Why leave them behind in their dire spiritual need and go somewhere else? After all, charity begins at home, and I might add that everything begins at home. So, they have no reason to do it, unless there is a selfish reason behind it. At home you are a homebody, extremely undistinguished, but out there in the jungle of abject poverty you stand out as the benefactor of humanity, US dollars in the pocket and a Bible in hand… “Vanity is my favorite sin,” Al Pacino’s Devil gloatingly remarks in Devil’s Advocate.
I do not wish to sound unkind, but not only the logic of saving souls by reaching out over the heads of the needy completely eludes me, but this missionary activity is demonstrably unproductive and oftentimes just counterproductive and even destructive, turning religion into a marketplace commodity, the natives eager to buy the Gospel as long as the dollars are free.
And as far as the philosophical significance of the missions is concerned, what is often being promoted in those faraway lands is religious strife and bigotry, glaring disrespect for the native cultures, which usually have religions of their own, lingering suspicions among the natives of some cynical manipulation, playing politics, promoting ulterior motives. There will be no peace on earth without the reaching out of culture to culture, religion to religion, not imposing one culture on another, one religion on another, one way of life on a different way of life, the one being imposed on not necessarily inferior to the one imposing itself…
In my personal experience, I have seen another problem plaguing the missionaries. (When I pointed it out to them, their usually sunny demeanors never failed to turn strained and sour.) After the dissolution of the Soviet Union countless thousands of missionaries saw the unfolding bonanza and rushed straight on into the lair of godlessness, trumpets and all, never for a moment suspecting that the savages they were about to baptize happened to be some of the staunchest Christians anywhere on earth. They brought them some three million Protestant Bibles, clumsily translated into Russian, with heavily overdone commentaries and condescending didactics reminiscent of the literacy project textbooks for beginners. “How many books are there in the Holy Scriptures?” was one of their innocent questions, and if you happened to guess right, it meant that you have learned your lesson and deserved a prize. The correct answer was of course not even a Christian answer, but the Protestant answer. The Catholic answer would be different of course, whereas the Russian Orthodox Bible had, in fact, even more books than the Catholic Bible, and most Russians had already learned their very own Orthodox lesson, namely, that the reason why those Protestant missionaries were giving them a wrong answer was that the Protestant Bible was from the Devil. The so-called teachers of the Bible, naturally, had no idea as to what this thing was about. Their own uneducated, self-important ignorance of I-know-it-all-at-my-church-and-that’s-all-that-matters, was giving them no clue with regard to what was going on beyond the doors of their churches, in that great outside, which they were now bent on bending, in their provincial god’s crooked image.
Cross-Cultural Conversions In Afterthought.
This entry at least for now will immediately follow the one on proselytizing. Whether or not a third entry, titled Politics of Religious Conversions, needs to be separately written, is still unclear to me at this time. I may eventually be satisfied with writing a comprehensive essay on the subject, where all these aspects will be covered, but this is a thought for the future, if there is a future.
My strongly negative attitude toward the practice of proselytizing and cross-cultural religious conversions is by now well-known both from the previous entry on proselytizing, and by inference. However, the matter is by no means simple and one-dimensional, and neither is my attitude, although I am now expressing my reservations about an unequivocal condemnation of all such conversion motives more as a nuance than as a major caveat.
I must develop a thought, very important in its social implications, about the converts to foreign religions inside particular cultures, such as, for instance, the case with the Christian converts inside Oriental cultures, and the question why they convert outside their own culture. There are several possible explanations, with the political one (religious imperialism and the fifth column) conspicuously among them, but there is also another one, which I might call Kierkegaardian-Russian, the inside meaning of which is obviously clear to me, but I need to elaborate on it for the sake of my reader. What if these converts are indeed sincere and do find true religious excitement and exaltation in the fact of being under persecution from their own culture, where their “normal,” traditional religious identifications had failed to offer them a spiritually gratifying experience? Considering that the world of all true religion is supposed to be in conflict with the life of the rest of the world, these converts may have been dissatisfied with the very fact of acceptance by this secular world of their own of the culture-friendly religion, and might have simply and innocently concluded that the Christian religion may indeed be the true religion, after all, for the simple reason that they are at least being persecuted for it. This does not change the fact, of course, that the ulterior motives of the proselytizers may be quite different from the previously made reasoning, caused, in their case, by either excessive zealotry or calculated political expedience.
Humanism As A Dirty Word?
Twenty-plus years ago when humanism became a particularly dirty word to the American Evangelical ear, courtesy of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Falwell, who had just equated humanism with “secular” (read atheistic) humanism and anathemized them both, I registered my passionate protest with the not-so-captive audience at the Valley Baptist Church in San Rafael, California, member of the Conservative Baptist Association of America.
I made the case that humanism was a beautiful word, historically related to the Graeco-Roman roots of our Western Civilization, that it was foolish to allow a bunch of American Atheistic philosophers, who, in 1933, created the so-called Humanist Manifesto (sounding suspiciously like the notorious Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and, indeed, having much more to do with their Communism than with genuine Humanism) to steal the word Humanism from benign Christian usage, and then, that yes, Virginia (as in Lynchburg, Virginia), there was such a thing as Christian Humanism. The great Karl Barth, who is considered the most profound Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, wrote, and I quote, that “there is no humanism without the Gospel,” which means that, according to him, there is no other humanism, but Christian humanism. Furthermore, Catholic theologians (alas, I did not realize then that the Evangelicals do not consider Catholics Christians) have called Christianity humanistic, in the sense that it is highlighting the uniqueness of man being the only creature made in the image of God…
My argument was invincible, but it fell on deaf ears, or, perhaps, even worse, was considered a blasphemy against the Reverend Tim LaHaye, against the Reverend Jerry Falwell, against the whole leadership of the Evangelical Christian Association of America, and, ergo, against their God!! Today, I recognize my lethal mistake: I should not have talked to the sheep about matters philosophical. The best I could have done was to try to sway the shepherds, which, as I was to learn later, was also a Mission Impossible.
My experience, however, has given me something to write about, as well as the ephemeral consolation that at least I tried. The following is a little additional thesis on the subject.
According to Webster’s Dictionary (once again used not as an authority, but for a short general reference), Humanism (with the capital H) is “the intellectual and cultural movement that stemmed from the study of classical Greek and Latin culture during the Middle Ages and was one of the factors (according to most of the encyclopedic sources, it was the main factor) giving rise to the Renaissance.” Unnecessarily and rather misleadingly, the Dictionary adds the following sentence: “It was characterized by an emphasis on human interests rather than on the natural world or religion.” Humanism was, undoubtedly, an enlightened revolt against the prevailing narrow-mindedness of the Dark Ages, its worldview was much more comprehensive than before, but religion and the natural world were never excluded or discriminated against, in it, even if the last sentence in the Webster’s entry may suggest something like that. Perhaps, as I suspect, the entry’s author was an American Unitarian trying to promote, with some measure of subtlety, his own skewed idea of the so-called nontheistic humanism, passing it off for the real thing.
But even we accept the humanist emphasis on man as a given, there is no disagreement and even a certain affinity between the much maligned saying of Protagoras that “man is the measure of all things” and Pope Sixtus I extolling the value of man in the year 120 AD: ‘Man is more precious in the sight of God than the angels.’ After all, God is the Creator of all things, and as such, rather than Himself becoming the measure for His creation, it is only natural that among all things He also created their measure, which ought to be the most precious item of His creation, and, according to Saint Sixtus I, (whose theological credentials are supremely authenticated by his Sainthood) such item has to be man.
Perhaps, God was the first Humanist, and I am sure he could have been given this title, except for its mild irreverence, the only disqualifying factor.
Ironically, the title of the “first Humanist” goes to the greatest scholar of Northern Renaissance Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, himself an ordained priest (later in life receiving the Pope’s dispensation to live in the world), the much-acclaimed New Testament scholar, translator-editor and publisher of the first printed edition of the New Testament in the reconstituted original Greek and with a parallel translation into Latin, which is considered far superior, both in accuracy and in literate quality, to the previous Vulgate version.
(There is another view with regard to who was the first Humanist, giving the laurels to Petrarca, who lived almost two centuries before Erasmus, to which I reply, why not Dante who lived before Petrarca, then why not somebody before Dante, etc., but, in all seriousness, this technical matter is of very little importance.)
What is of importance, however, is the following description of humanistic scholarship in Encyclopaedia Britannica, as “scholarly efforts through the past two thousand years to work up and develop the cultural tradition emanating from two classical focuses in the pre-Christian Era: the age of Pericles in Athens and that of Augustus in Rome, that eventually merged with the Judaeo-Christian tradition to form the spiritual foundation of Western civilization.”
Goethe expresses the same idea with greater elegance and also straightforwardness: “May the study of the Greek and Roman Antiquity always remain the basis for all higher culture! The antiquities of China, India and Egypt will never be more than curiosities (to European scions of Western civilization); they will never bear a great deal of fruit for our moral and aesthetic culture.”
Only a malicious enemy of our history, our culture and tradition, one who is plotting to kill our distinctive spirituality, rooted in both classical antiquity and two thousand years of Christianity would assail the glory of humanism, the primary source of our celebrated democratic tradition of social fairness and justice. And only a bigoted ignorant fool would so easily become an eager aider and abettor of that enemy, who appears to have been so remarkably successful in purchasing the crooked souls of our American Christian leaders, for the greater glory of Satan.
In the conclusion of this entry, it can be summarized again that Humanism is not an alternative religion, it is an enlightened state of mind, a spiritual attitude which characterizes all our Western civilization, and by no means a dirty word. But who will deliver this good news to the American Evangelicals?
Great Religions.
Great Religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc.) are basically not so much about religion, as about national culture, history, tradition, and they always ought to be seen in that light.
Foreign Religions To The Rescue Of Philosophy.
A client comes to Perry Mason to seek advice about her friend’s problem. The extraordinary attorney turns her down: he instantly recognizes that she is talking about herself and resents such upfront disingenuity as a sign of lies to come. In the course of the developing plot, however, he ends up representing her…
The psychology of transferring the first person to a third person is a very natural thing in general, whether Perry likes it or not. There are too many inhibitions to problem-solving at close range when the problem is literally invading our space. It is a common philosophical tool to distance ourselves from the problem that we are trying to solve.
This entry is not so much about actual problem-solving, as about the distance. In addressing a wide range of ethical issues, delving into the concepts of good and evil and, generally speaking, in all philosophizing, our religious reverence for the Bible enormously constrains our philosophical capacity.
“Doubt everything at least once, even the proposition that two and two are four,” writes Lichtenberg in his Reflections. “A philosopher is one who doubts,” says Montaigne, and both of them, with Descartes and his De Dubitandum to expound on it, go to the core of the matter. But perhaps the best expression of the point of my present entry belongs to Coleridge:
“Whenever philosophy has taken into its plan religion, it has ended in skepticism; and whenever religion excludes philosophy, or the spirit of free inquiry, it leads to willful blindness and superstition.” (Allsop’s Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge.)
One of the easiest ways to overcome the philosophy-religion bias is by distancing oneself from one’s own religion and all its inhibitions, and by looking at your “problem” as another person’s “problem.”
Foreign religions are enormously helpful in interpreting some finer philosophical points and basic ethical principles of our own religious tradition. Quite often, our inbred cultural reverence toward traditional faith and practice gets in the way of our inquisitive mind and hinders our understanding and appreciation of the treasure which is our own. Sort of reverse variation on the prophet in his own country theme, in this case, having too much honor, perhaps.
In concluding this entry an important point needs to be made. The well-recognized preoccupation of many great philosophers, such as Schopenhauer, with foreign religions, has in my view no religious significance whatsoever, in the sense of the philosopher’s religious preference. On the contrary, they see these foreign religions not even as religions demanding as such from their adherents blind faith and reverence, but only as philosophical tools, allowing them to investigate the exciting philosophical aspects of religion without the unwelcome admixture of cultism.
What Is Religion?
It would be natural to assume that a simple and straightforward definition of religion ought to have existed since at least the Age of Enlightenment, when religion, like everything else, was approached scientifically, with the result being a supposedly complete clarity as to its meaning. This is not true, however, since even the most recent editions of Encyclopaedia Britannica are making the following point in their Macropaedic article on Religion:
“An acceptable definition of religion itself is difficult to attain.(!) Attempts to find an essential ingredient in all religions (the numinous, or spiritual, experience; the contrast between the sacred and profane; belief in gods or in God, etc.) so that an ‘essence’ of religion can be described [have been unsuccessful]. Objections have been brought against such attempts, either because the variety of men’s religions makes it possible to find counterexamples, or because the element cited as essential is in some religions peripheral. In practice, a religion is a particular system, in which doctrines, myths, rituals, sentiments, institutions, and other such elements are interconnected.”
Our other authoritative source fares no better on this subject. In Webster’s Dictionary, only three significant definitions of religion are noteworthy, showing a characteristic confusion:
---Belief in a divine or superhuman power(s) to be obeyed and worshipped as the creator(s) and ruler(s) of the universe. (Does this mean a personal belief or a collective belief? The Dictionary makes it clear that the answer can be both or either. I object to this ambiguity in formal contexts, preferring to distinguish personal belief, which I call faith, from collective belief, which I call religion. See my entry Separation Of Church And Faith.)
---Any specific system of belief, worship, conduct, etc., often involving a code of ethics and a philosophy, and loosely, any system resembling such a system, as ‘humanism is his religion.’ (Poor old humanism: once again somebody wishes to represent it as a “resembling” alternative to religion! See my entry Humanism As A Dirty Word.)
---A state of mind or way of life expressing love for and trust in God, one’s will and effort to act according to the will of God, especially within a monastic order or community. (Is it a personal state of mind, way of life, will and effort, or a collective one, such as the one collectively existing in a monastery, in which case, wouldn’t it be more proper to call it monasticism, rather than to overburden the usage of the word religion with totally unnecessary connotations?)
From citing these two authorities alone it should now be quite obvious that no one can possibly be surprised at the failure to arrive at a universal definition of the generic religion, where so much linguistic confusion is so unnecessarily at play. It is therefore becoming my first order of business now to simplify and rearticulate the word religion as a collective system of belief, distinguishing it from personal faith, and also vehemently separating legitimate great religions from bogus man-made cults. The reader will find elaborations of these principles throughout the rest of the section.
Too Many Truths Spoil The Cloth.
(I am very fond of this ingenious title, and even though I hate to spoil it by detailed explication, I cannot let its full appreciation be denied by missing any part of it; so, here is the chewed up cud: My entry is about the multitude of religions and religious denominations, each claiming a monopoly on truth, and resulting in too many truths undermining the credibility of each other. As to the meaning of the word cloth in this case, see its specific dictionary definition as the clergy, or things ecclesiastical. And for the overall effect, compare it to the familiar proverb Too many cooks spoil the broth, and then look at it again under Grigori Permyakov’s angle, for which also see my entry From Proverb To Greatness in the Sonnets section.)
There have been too many competing religions and denominations in the world, way too many! Far more, in fact, than there have been recorded revelations of truth anywhere at any time since the beginning of time. I suspect that religion as such has little to do with it, in most cases. The root cause of such diversity is the struggle for political control in church-centered communities of earlier times (note the Roger Williams controversy, for instance, to name just that one). And in more recent times it is also the special privileged status, which the churches are getting, providing an irresistible temptation to all sorts of crooks to take their con games to this incredibly fat pasture.
In dealing with this problem, the task is clear. We must first separate legitimate religions from illegitimate ones, discarding the latter as bogus. Then we must reconcile the former among themselves. This section, as I would hope, provides a few suggestions toward the resolution of both these challenges.
I said it before and I am saying it again, I would put no faith in any religion that is less than a hundred years old and has never suffered persecution. I would put no faith in any religion which is not directly connected to a distinctly identifiable and universally recognized world culture… All minor religions and religious cults are illegitimate.
…As for the great world cultures and their religions, none ought to have a monopoly on truth. Each of these great religions is true, but only within the limited context of the great culture, which it is part of, and it is the universal truth, which all these great religions have in common. Otherwise, too many truths spoil the cloth, necessarily leading to cynicism and apostasy.
God-Seeking And The Epiphany.
God-seeking used to be a peculiarly Russian preoccupation in the times of yore, namely, during the religion-thirsty decades of the later Tsarist Empire when Russian Orthodoxy suffered from too much recognition and too little appreciation, amounting to a derisive atheism among the nobility and a sense of spiritual emptiness among the Russian Intelligentsia, hence the God-seeking quest, to fill the painful void.
I should say that this was not exactly a purely religious quest. There was an urgent need to somehow bridge the growing chasm before one’s individuality and one’s sense of Russianness, that is, the failing connection of the person to his or her national, cultural, historical, spiritual roots, traditionally embodied in the Russian Orthodoxy, which had, at that time, been reduced to shambles.
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 solved at least one great problem: it restored the lost respect for Russian Christian Orthodoxy, reuniting the Russian nation with her God. The quest was over. The seeker had found what he had been looking for. This was the epiphany.
…The reason why I am writing this, and particularly, so early in the section, is that I am thus registering the arch-leitmotif of this section, namely, that the most effective role played by a great religion is when it goes hand in hand with the concept of nationhood (statehood), together forming, as it were, an unbreakable bond.
Union Of Church And State.
Generally speaking, it is a great advantage for both the nation and her citizens when nationhood and religion become inseparable, and thus complement and invigorate one another. Examples of religious uniformity can be found of course in predominantly Catholic countries (predominantly Protestant countries are notoriously less religious), in those Islamic countries which are not divided by the infamous internal religious dispute of Shiah versus Sunni, and in the overwhelmingly Buddhist Thailand, among others. But in all these instances the country’s religion is necessarily much broader than her specific nationality, and the case of x«y cannot be established, to make the church and state bond especially significant to the extent that it presents itself in Russia.
Thus Russia is a unique case of a great power which has an unbreakable union of church and state, like it exists nowhere else. Needless to say, this union accounts for Russia’s very special Third Rome superpower destiny and determines her global role for the future. If only this historic union would endure and eventually triumph over the post-Soviet transitional stage of an in-your-face money orgy of the rich amidst the abject misery of the poor, which, to a considerable extent, is still allowed to persist and thrive.
But, luckily, there are good grounds to project that the church and state union is bound to prevail, for which extraordinary victory the incredibly revitalizing and invigorating Soviet experience (sic!!!), which had given Russian Christians a taste of the pathos and passion of Early Christianity, must take the full credit.
Separation Of Church And Faith.
Before we proceed with the generalized entry on Religion And Culture, which flows out of our discussion in the previous entry of the advantages of a certain Union Of Church And State, existing in today’s Russia, we must first tie a few loose ends, and this entry ties one set of them.
I am asserting from general broad considerations that even in the perfect situation earlier described as x«y, we must not automatically identify a person’s religion with personal faith, although in this perfect situation personal faith is a natural extension of the religious affiliation, and thus, may appear indistinguishable from religion to the believer himself. However, by virtue of its being an extension, it cannot be logically identical with it.
This matter and the philosophical necessity to separate religion from faith becomes particularly important in situations which are far from perfect. But even in the perfect one, as I shall explain below, the separation of church and faith is essential to intercultural compatibility, or, religiously speaking, to global Interfaith.
The word faith, unfortunately, has been too frequently equated with the denominational identification of the believer to take the meaningful distinction between church and faith for granted. It is my demand that we do make this distinction through the clarity of the term’s definition. In other words, what is faith?
Webster’s Dictionary amply illustrates my point, perpetuating the confusion by the unyielding ambiguity of its own definitions. It defines faith as (1) unquestioning belief, (2) unquestioning belief in God, religion etc., and (3) a religion or a system of religious beliefs; as the Catholic faith. (all other definitions are derivative and unimportant in our context.) As we can see, not only the same word faith is allowed to stand for belief (Webster’s does not use the word personal in its definitions of faith) and religion as in (1-2) as opposed to (3), but in (2) it casually says “belief in God” and in “religion” in one short breath.
There is a historical-cultural explanation for the ease with which we are so ready and eager to identify our faith with our church: for most of us they seem like the same thing. But they are not. God is one, and He is Absolute. Religions are several, and they are mostly related to national or social cultures, and therefore, by no means Absolute. By equating church and faith, we are destroying the Absolute nature of the core of our belief, open ourselves to the charge of bigotry and make our goodness incompatible with the goodness of all others, who happen to belong to different cultural and therefore religious traditions.
There is another danger in the confusion of our belief in God and our belief in religion. Our belief in God is steadfast, and not subject to change. Religion is subject to change under certain circumstances, and it makes our belief in God more akin to the belief in an Authority, be that of the Pope, or of a charismatic cult leader, or even of a Führer. Transferring our faith from God to Authority, we are abandoning our faith in God, and thus make ourselves vulnerable to manipulation by man, whether that man is after our wallet, our obedience, our vote, or our soul.
How should a philosopher approach this subject? In my Allegory Of A Two-Storied Temple I have offered my best answer. I believe in the philosophical separation of church and faith, rather than in their fusion. In spite of my respect for the philosophical astuteness of St. Augustine, his remark on this subject is virtually soaked in expediency and quintessentially unphilosophical: He cannot have God for his father who refuses to have the church for his mother. (De Symbolo, xiii.)
St. Augustine ought to have known that Aristotle, for instance (“He was a man of excellent genius, though inferior to Plato,” The City of God, viii), and yes, Plato too, were men who may both be undeniably said to have had God for their father, yet, had no mother in the polytheistic mythology-based Greek religion. The great philosophers of the pre-Christian world all knew the difference between faith and religion, and they have showed the world the light, in that sense, only the world of competing religions did not want to see it. The result was a philosophical rejection of all religions perhaps best summarized by Napoleon I during his last exile to St. Helena:
“I would believe in a religion if it existed ever since the beginning of time, but when I consider Socrates, Plato, Mahomet, I no longer believe. All religions have been made by men.” (1817)
It would be completely wrong to surmise, on the basis of the preceding argument, that I am advocating the churchless approach to faith. In fact, in my Temple Allegory, the philosopher’s faith is to be found on the upper level, while the different religions occupy the bottom floor. Now, I do not have to explain what is to happen to the Temple, if the ground floor should be suddenly removed: it will surely collapse, burying all, the philosophers and the sheep together in the same rubble.
In fact, church is to society what faith (in my specific definition distinctly separating it from religion) is to the individual. To summarize my idea still more clearly, Church is a social-cultural faith; people will have their own personal faiths, as individuals, but they will most likely also have their own churches, as society members. Simple? Yes!
My later entry will address the question of religion and culture, where the point of this one will be further clarified.
Faith And Religion At Odds?
Considering all that we have said about the unbreakable bond between religion and culture, can faith and religion be different in one person, yet coexist without hypocrisy and without causing a split personality? Yes, as long as they are understood for what they are: a personal philosophical belief in God, on the one hand, and an adherence to a certain, by and large culturally and socially predetermined, system of collective worship, on the other.
Personal faith does not have to be some superbelief in the philosophical Absolute. A Catholic by birth and cultural tradition can privately come to believe in consubstantiation rather than transubstantiation, which, nonetheless, does not change him into a practicing Protestant, but does produce a non-offensive disconnect between his collective religion, which he is not willing to repudiate on account of such trifle disagreement. It is also possible for a citizen of a Christian nation to have a difficulty with, say, the basic Christian concept of Trinity (which, to be honest, does pose a serious challenge to philosophical monotheism), yet to remain a loyal and sincere member of his Church. To be sure, personal belief hardly ever perfectly coincides with the dogma of one’s religion anyway, but this is really a trifle matter, which ought not to be allowed to become a determining factor for either accepting or rejecting the Church link binding the believer to his home-base community, to his nation, and to his cultural roots.
Once again, this is not hypocrisy, and it does not lead to the curse of leading a double life. But our refusal to recognize its existence and to come to terms with it--- is.
Atheism As Extreme Fear Of God.
Here is one of those previously mentioned “loose ends,” discussing some causes of atheism where there had been no personal faith to begin with, or where a previously strong personal faith degenerates into atheism under certain conditions.
There are actually at least four types of atheist, in the broadest sense of the word. The most common type is a person raised in a religious environment, and rebelling against all religion after confronting the endemic religious hypocrisy within that particular environment. Added to the same type can be a previously religious person who becomes averse to religion intellectually, having observed and read how religious practice falls short of declared faith, and making the erroneous conclusion of equating personal faith to public practice.
There are also two types of passive or concealed atheism. One makes God irrelevant to the person’s life: too busy or too comfortable to pay attention to spiritual matters. This is probably atheism in its linguistically narrowest sense, which is “living without God.” Another type trivializes God, when a person can well be a church-attending citizen, yet religion to him, or to her, is nothing more than a social event, where God has no value independent from the person’s attendance of the church and church-related activities, as the church itself is nothing more than a social club: a place to meet people and seek help from when one is in trouble.
It is however the fourth type, which I find the most interesting, and on whose account I am writing this entry in the first place. It is the person who believes that he or she has committed such a grave sin in their life that this sin cannot possibly be forgiven by God… if He exists. It, therefore, feels psychologically safer (in terms of what happens after death) to deny His existence altogether, so that one’s life would--- mercifully--- end in nothingness, which alone forgives all sins, than to suffer the wrath of God at the end of the earthly life.
Thus, I believe that it is the extreme fear of Divine Dies Irae, which turns a person into the most committed type of atheist, the one who denies God out of fear of God’s Judgment.
Religion And Culture.
By the same token as faith in my restrictive definition denotes individual belief, religion refers to the faith of a nation, or of a social or ethnic group.
To each culture its own religion, as I put it. Whether in reality it does hold true or becomes overburdened with so many exceptions that it becomes silly, my main point is that it should be taken axiomatically, and, in that case, the following must be taken as true, that where there is no religion, there is no culture.
Multiculturalism would mean the existence of several religions under the auspices of one state, which then becomes a federation. Whether these religions are compatible among themselves is a matter of importance as their compatibility is not a matter of religion per se, but of political stability and of eventual viability of the state as such. How this thought translates into the historical reality of the past, present, and future map of the world is an exciting explorative adventure, to which I invite any open-minded reader who can easily come up with lots of practical applications on his or her own. Remember, use this principle as an axiom to arrive at the most interesting conclusions and predictions.
“A nation must have a religion, and that religion must be under the control of the government,” Napoleon observed in 1801. He was in good company of some brilliant statesmen, who unlike him followed this rule to the letter, such as Peter the Great of Russia, for instance, who abolished the Patriarchate in Russia and put the Church on a very short leash, held by the bureaucratic civil government institution, called the Holy Synod. As a result, the nation’s reverence for the Russian Church plummeted for two centuries and it took the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 to restore both the respect, and the Patriarchate as well. Today’s Russia has finally learned a world-historical lesson about the ideal relationship between the Church and the State: let it become a healthy alliance of God and Caesar, on behalf of the many against a common enemy within and without. That populistically denounced enemy are the Russian rich, cautiously enjoying their precarious curse of wealth in Russia, and the nationalistically magnified international evil of capitalism, epitomized by the United States.
As I have stated categorically, there is no separation of Church and State in today’s Russia. Her ‘minority’ religions are officially and factually protected, to show respect for all religion (the strictly selective choice of allowable religions in Russia is limited to the legitimate main religions of legitimate minority cultures), other nations’ official religions are respected only inasmuch as they stay with those nations without efforts on their part to proselytize on foreign territory. The Russian Orthodox Church is now recognizing itself as a Global Church, on account of the Russian populations around the world forming themselves into proper dioceses. It is essential to state that the Church-State duumvirate as it is practiced by Russia has a distinct political dimension, which, being empowered by the authority of religion as-such, provides Russia with an international political clout that, no matter how subtle and often elusive, must never be underestimated.
Having talked for a while about Russia’s secret weapon, what counter-weapon has America to offer on her own behalf? The famed separation of Church and State gloriously embedded in the American Constitution and so wonderfully practiced by several successive generations has apparently failed the legal challenge to the authority of religion in general, posed by an iconoclastic Democracy, which is obliged to accommodate under its big tent not only the scores of sects calling themselves religions, but also an explicit denial of all religions allowing the presumable blessing of religious tolerance to become contaminated with the germ of anti-religious intolerance. It turns out that Democracy and the Separation have a tendency to form a lethal combination, with regard to religion, as soon as the historical cultural tradition of a great nation wears out in a climate of multiculturalism.
A lot more can be further said on this provocative subject, but what has already been said should suffice at least for the purposes of this entry.
Allegory Of A Two-Storied Temple.
The world with its many nations and religions can be compared to a two-storied temple, where each great culture, inseparably identified with its predominant historical religion, has a private room of her own, on the ground floor, partitioned from the rest by sturdy walls belonging to the structure of the whole building. In order to communicate with the rest of the world they cannot tear down the walls, because such an effort at ‘interfaith’ would lead to the building’s collapse, burying them all in the rubble. The only solution is to use their individual sets of stairs to walk up to the upper level, where there are no partitions, and where it is possible for all of them to mingle the smart way, without bringing the temple down.
This allegory works both in its application to normal international relations, the enlightened way of doing business with each other, but also in finding the only solution to the complex dilemma of common ethical denominator, where the discovery of common ethics is complicated by the apparent incompatibility of their respective religions and denominations. See my other entries on the subject of transcending from the Gods of religions toward the One Absolute God of the Philosophical Abstraction, that is, ascending to the upper floor of the same temple.
Religion And Philosophy.
The key point of my Allegory Of A Two-Storied Temple is that the main prerequisite to the achievement of a lasting peace on earth is the will on the part of the world’s nations to ascend from the ground level of their religious and cultural differences to the upper floor of philosophy, where the walls of separation have given way to the commonness of the absolute ethical standards, shared by all major religions.
Thus, to philosophy is assigned the crucial role of the uniter in this great effort. Now the key question to be addressed is whether religion and philosophy are sufficiently compatible, to work as a team?
Thinking philosophically, there shouldn’t be a problem. After all, religion creates social ethics, and ethics is the mother of philosophy. Comparing different religious ethics with philosophical ethics, their similarity (or should I say virtual identicalness?), is unmistakable.
The reality, however, defies both logic and common sense. In reality we see religion and philosophy not as a team, but as irreconcilable enemies, battling each other for supremacy over the question of what is truth, what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong.
In the course of this resentful clash over the ethical territory, religion and philosophy are habitually trying to undermine each other, as if conspiring together to defeat the devil by making him laugh to death.
“Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ,” writes Apostle Paul in Colossians 2:8, equating wisdom with deceit, and allowing a caricature representation of philosophy to become its defining characteristic within the ensuing Christian tradition. “What excellent fools religion makes of men,” writes Ben Jonson in 1603, well before Voltaire would express similar feelings, equating faith with stupidity, and making it fashionable to ridicule religion as the first rule of intellectual sophistication.
Foregoing a myriad examples all proving the same thing, and therefore unnecessarily redundant, we now arrive at the anticlimactic foregone conclusion that, indeed, religion and philosophy appear to be at such insurmountable odds vis-à-vis each other, that any attempt at their reconciliation should be demonstrably hopeless. While it is possible to harmonize even the antipodes by the great power of reason, these two are made irreconcilable not by reason, but by the brute force of tradition and prejudice, which makes all such efforts a sorry waste.
Yet, it is vital that they not only be reconciled, but attain a state of mutual acceptance and interdependence. There must be some way to defeat the mutual bias. Schopenhauer may have suggested such a way, pointing to one interesting aspect of their commonness.
Here is a remarkable distinction between religion and philosophy made by Schopenhauer’s Demopheles in his Dialogue On Religion, from the incomparable Parerga und Paralipomena:
“Founders of religion and philosophers come into the world to rouse him from his stupor and point to the lofty meaning of existence; philosophers, for the few, the emancipated; founders of religion, for the many, for humanity at large.” (As a note to myself, I may want to find out whether this perfectly simple expression of a fundamental distinction has ever been made similarly by any of the preceding thinkers.)
This splendidly straightforward distinction opens with a splendidly straightforward connection. Founders of religion and philosophers have a common mission and a common task but plainly different audiences. There is no sense for a philosopher par excellence to try winning over the crowds. This is not even his mission. As for the crowds, they are hungry to be roused by a religious leader whose pulpit eloquence unleashes a power which can literally perform miracles of instant persuasion, not so much thanks to exceptional powers of the speaker himself, as to the exceptional powers of his pulpit, such awesome power invested in the pulpit by a collective electromagnetic stress of the supercharged audience.
So, let the last vestige of logic speak up right now. Suum quique. May our preachers keep on preaching to their choirs, a few to the many. But let the enlightened philosophers enlighten those preachers with the wisdom of the ages. A handful rousing the few “to the lofty meaning of coexistence.”
Religion and philosophy thus rediscovering their common ethical roots and learning to walk hand-in-hand: the philosopher and the preacher, the preacher and the masses. How wonderful would it have been had this idea been able to make just one small step beyond wishful thinking…
(The last sentence, not coincidentally, points to an organic link between this Religion entry and my upbeat futuristic Section One Step Beyond Wishful Thinking. That counterpart entry will most appropriately have the parallel title Philosophy And Religion.)
Religion And Homeopathy.
Homeopathy is a science of curing the sick patient not by an antidote, as in allopathy, but by the poison that is causing his disease. The great homeopathic physicians, from the creator of homeopathy Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843) to James Tyler Kent (1849-1916) recognized the risks of aggressive homeopathic treatment, essentially subscribing to the Nietzschean dictum That which does not kill us, makes us stronger. In other words, unless the medicine has an ability to kill, it cannot cure. (The first enunciation of this rather shocking principle is usually attributed to Hippocrates, which may not be technically true, but the truth of it is true.)
Homeopathy, in this sense, can be compared to religion. Genuine Christian morality, as opposed to its fake double, Tartuffery, is a very potent poison indeed, in the Nietzschean sense: if it does not kill us, it makes us stronger… Come to think of it, this goes for all religion in general.
In support of my analogy with homeopathy, there are numerous famous instances of religion being referred to as either a drug or a disease. The first thing that comes to mind is Karl Marx at his best (as the coiner of a perennial aphorism), and at his worst (if he said it with a straight face, as, I am afraid, he did!), in his much-quoted adage “Religion is the opium of the people” (in Criticism of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law, 1844). And then, well before Karl Marx, was Heraclitus, who wrote in one of the fragments that have survived the fuga temporum: “Religion is a disease, but it is a noble disease.”
What makes these dicta so pertinent to the poison theme is their striking similarity in their common manner of pointing to the unnatural nature of religion. Marx sees it as a drug, that is, an external substance which is introduced into the mind and the body of the individual. Heraclitus also sees it as an abnormal state of mind, or body, a deviation from the norm. Considering that the norm is not a philosopher’s virtue, Heraclitus can be merited with a generally positive attitude toward religion, while the polarity of Marx’s valuation entirely depends on his personal attitude to narcotics.
Now, the history of religious wars tells us that religion can too often be a deadly poison and a disease which tears nations apart, resulting in unspeakable bloodshed. Is there a possibility of a cure? Of course. But there is no antidote to religion. The cure has to be extracted from within religion itself. As long as we are ready to view our particular religion not as a universal truth, to which all others must bow, but as a particular cultural inheritance, which one comes into the possession of both with his mother’s milk and genetically.
The key here is to recognize that religions are fused into their particular cultures and cannot be transplanted to a different soil, which carries its own cultural “virus” and would react violently to any effort to administer an antidote. Such is the premise at the core of my treatment of world religions, and my understanding of the Absolute nature of the one and only God, accessible to us via our cultural religion and philosophy, standing above all His cultural and national interpretations as the God of this or that religion.
Only under such conditions of recognizing the limiting principle of non-absolute religious heredity is peace on earth at all possible, as the following reflection of Lichtenberg begins to ring and resonate as profoundly true: “All the different religions are only so many religious dialects.”
Religion Versus Sovereignty And Statehood.
The old Tsarist Russian national motto used to be For (Our) Faith, Tsar, and Fatherland. The word ‘Faith’ precedes the other two not accidentally, but to emphasize that it is the primary function of national religion to give moral legitimacy and a proper foundation both to the Sovereign and to the nation as such. Morality, therefore, constitutes the underpinnings of all organized societies.
This fact transfers fairly simply onto the reality of a society where a single faith dominates. It does not work however in multi-religious societies, such as was Germany of the Third Reich. It was therefore necessary to have a different national formula in Germany than the one so easily adopted in Russia. Being both Catholic in the south and Protestant in the north, Germany had to drop the appeal to religion in her own motto. Thus it came up with Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer, where ethnic nationalism had taken the place of religious identification.
It is my firm belief, not just from the sad experience of Germany of the Third Reich but mostly from general philosophical considerations, that all societies must place religion (and thus their specific religious morality) at the top of their national motto. Otherwise, their inevitable desperate search for a common national ethics would bring them to the doorstep of ethno-nationalistic exclusivity, and thus, ethno-chauvinistic bigotry that is far more dangerous and essentially intolerant than anything today associated with religion.
Freedom Of Religion And State Control.
The role of the great philosopher is to speak to all nations and for all time, but this does not mean to speak in ‘timeless’ generalities. The philosopher should not be afraid to talk of such specifics where the prospect of his ideas becoming obsolete overshadows his legacy to the reader of the future, like it is so obviously the case in the following passage from the 39th Chapter of Hobbes’s Leviathan. Here is what he says:
"I define a Church as company of men professing Christian religion, united in the person of one sovereign; at whose command they assemble, and without whose authority they ought not to assemble. And, because in all Commonwealths assembly without warrant from the civil sovereign is unlawful; Church also, which is assembled in any Commonwealth that has forbidden them to assemble, is an unlawful assembly."
It follows also that there is on earth no such universal Church as all Christians are bound to obey, because there is no power on earth, to which all other Commonwealths are subject.
Having the freedom of assembly constitutionally protected in this country for well over two hundred years, and universally taken for granted in all existing democracies, the passage appears hopelessly outdated and even undeserving of contemporary notice, except to reiterate the historical truism that modern democracy is still less than three hundred years old. However, additional observations can also be made. Considering that Hobbes never was a conformist, and even occasionally got in trouble with the authorities on both sides of the political spectrum, he cannot be denied the courage of asserting his convictions. Therefore, the fact that state control of religion appears to him such a natural philosophical concept leads us to two very natural conclusions. One, that state control over “Christian religions” in this country may exist in various subtle, “constitutional” forms, while non-establishment religions are naturally subject to government anxiety and indirect control. Two, that Western Christian missionaries in foreign countries establishing their churches there, no matter of which denominations, are naturally suspected of working as agents of their respective governments, trying to influence the social and political scene in these target nations.
Proselytizing As Anything But Religion.
Of proselytizing I have often thought that this missionary activity, especially in modern American society and among the Evangelicals, serves them more as an ego trip, a projection of national and personal power, rather than as a genuine religious experience. Had the latter been the case, why would they have to go half around the world to places they know absolutely nothing about, whose languages are foreign to them, when right here, under their noses, in their own back yard, in communities populated by people they personally know, where they themselves live, and should care the most about, there is such a dire need of a religious miracle, a revolution, a victorious revival of neighborly souls that are now, right in front of their own eyes hopelessly drowning in consumerism, secularism, nihilism. These also need to be saved, don’t they, and perhaps, even much more than those ‘others,’ far away. Why leave them behind in their dire spiritual need and go somewhere else? After all, charity begins at home, and I might add that everything begins at home. So, they have no reason to do it, unless there is a selfish reason behind it. At home you are a homebody, extremely undistinguished, but out there in the jungle of abject poverty you stand out as the benefactor of humanity, US dollars in the pocket and a Bible in hand… “Vanity is my favorite sin,” Al Pacino’s Devil gloatingly remarks in Devil’s Advocate.
I do not wish to sound unkind, but not only the logic of saving souls by reaching out over the heads of the needy completely eludes me, but this missionary activity is demonstrably unproductive and oftentimes just counterproductive and even destructive, turning religion into a marketplace commodity, the natives eager to buy the Gospel as long as the dollars are free.
And as far as the philosophical significance of the missions is concerned, what is often being promoted in those faraway lands is religious strife and bigotry, glaring disrespect for the native cultures, which usually have religions of their own, lingering suspicions among the natives of some cynical manipulation, playing politics, promoting ulterior motives. There will be no peace on earth without the reaching out of culture to culture, religion to religion, not imposing one culture on another, one religion on another, one way of life on a different way of life, the one being imposed on not necessarily inferior to the one imposing itself…
In my personal experience, I have seen another problem plaguing the missionaries. (When I pointed it out to them, their usually sunny demeanors never failed to turn strained and sour.) After the dissolution of the Soviet Union countless thousands of missionaries saw the unfolding bonanza and rushed straight on into the lair of godlessness, trumpets and all, never for a moment suspecting that the savages they were about to baptize happened to be some of the staunchest Christians anywhere on earth. They brought them some three million Protestant Bibles, clumsily translated into Russian, with heavily overdone commentaries and condescending didactics reminiscent of the literacy project textbooks for beginners. “How many books are there in the Holy Scriptures?” was one of their innocent questions, and if you happened to guess right, it meant that you have learned your lesson and deserved a prize. The correct answer was of course not even a Christian answer, but the Protestant answer. The Catholic answer would be different of course, whereas the Russian Orthodox Bible had, in fact, even more books than the Catholic Bible, and most Russians had already learned their very own Orthodox lesson, namely, that the reason why those Protestant missionaries were giving them a wrong answer was that the Protestant Bible was from the Devil. The so-called teachers of the Bible, naturally, had no idea as to what this thing was about. Their own uneducated, self-important ignorance of I-know-it-all-at-my-church-and-that’s-all-that-matters, was giving them no clue with regard to what was going on beyond the doors of their churches, in that great outside, which they were now bent on bending, in their provincial god’s crooked image.
Cross-Cultural Conversions In Afterthought.
This entry at least for now will immediately follow the one on proselytizing. Whether or not a third entry, titled Politics of Religious Conversions, needs to be separately written, is still unclear to me at this time. I may eventually be satisfied with writing a comprehensive essay on the subject, where all these aspects will be covered, but this is a thought for the future, if there is a future.
My strongly negative attitude toward the practice of proselytizing and cross-cultural religious conversions is by now well-known both from the previous entry on proselytizing, and by inference. However, the matter is by no means simple and one-dimensional, and neither is my attitude, although I am now expressing my reservations about an unequivocal condemnation of all such conversion motives more as a nuance than as a major caveat.
I must develop a thought, very important in its social implications, about the converts to foreign religions inside particular cultures, such as, for instance, the case with the Christian converts inside Oriental cultures, and the question why they convert outside their own culture. There are several possible explanations, with the political one (religious imperialism and the fifth column) conspicuously among them, but there is also another one, which I might call Kierkegaardian-Russian, the inside meaning of which is obviously clear to me, but I need to elaborate on it for the sake of my reader. What if these converts are indeed sincere and do find true religious excitement and exaltation in the fact of being under persecution from their own culture, where their “normal,” traditional religious identifications had failed to offer them a spiritually gratifying experience? Considering that the world of all true religion is supposed to be in conflict with the life of the rest of the world, these converts may have been dissatisfied with the very fact of acceptance by this secular world of their own of the culture-friendly religion, and might have simply and innocently concluded that the Christian religion may indeed be the true religion, after all, for the simple reason that they are at least being persecuted for it. This does not change the fact, of course, that the ulterior motives of the proselytizers may be quite different from the previously made reasoning, caused, in their case, by either excessive zealotry or calculated political expedience.
Humanism As A Dirty Word?
Twenty-plus years ago when humanism became a particularly dirty word to the American Evangelical ear, courtesy of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Falwell, who had just equated humanism with “secular” (read atheistic) humanism and anathemized them both, I registered my passionate protest with the not-so-captive audience at the Valley Baptist Church in San Rafael, California, member of the Conservative Baptist Association of America.
I made the case that humanism was a beautiful word, historically related to the Graeco-Roman roots of our Western Civilization, that it was foolish to allow a bunch of American Atheistic philosophers, who, in 1933, created the so-called Humanist Manifesto (sounding suspiciously like the notorious Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and, indeed, having much more to do with their Communism than with genuine Humanism) to steal the word Humanism from benign Christian usage, and then, that yes, Virginia (as in Lynchburg, Virginia), there was such a thing as Christian Humanism. The great Karl Barth, who is considered the most profound Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, wrote, and I quote, that “there is no humanism without the Gospel,” which means that, according to him, there is no other humanism, but Christian humanism. Furthermore, Catholic theologians (alas, I did not realize then that the Evangelicals do not consider Catholics Christians) have called Christianity humanistic, in the sense that it is highlighting the uniqueness of man being the only creature made in the image of God…
My argument was invincible, but it fell on deaf ears, or, perhaps, even worse, was considered a blasphemy against the Reverend Tim LaHaye, against the Reverend Jerry Falwell, against the whole leadership of the Evangelical Christian Association of America, and, ergo, against their God!! Today, I recognize my lethal mistake: I should not have talked to the sheep about matters philosophical. The best I could have done was to try to sway the shepherds, which, as I was to learn later, was also a Mission Impossible.
My experience, however, has given me something to write about, as well as the ephemeral consolation that at least I tried. The following is a little additional thesis on the subject.
According to Webster’s Dictionary (once again used not as an authority, but for a short general reference), Humanism (with the capital H) is “the intellectual and cultural movement that stemmed from the study of classical Greek and Latin culture during the Middle Ages and was one of the factors (according to most of the encyclopedic sources, it was the main factor) giving rise to the Renaissance.” Unnecessarily and rather misleadingly, the Dictionary adds the following sentence: “It was characterized by an emphasis on human interests rather than on the natural world or religion.” Humanism was, undoubtedly, an enlightened revolt against the prevailing narrow-mindedness of the Dark Ages, its worldview was much more comprehensive than before, but religion and the natural world were never excluded or discriminated against, in it, even if the last sentence in the Webster’s entry may suggest something like that. Perhaps, as I suspect, the entry’s author was an American Unitarian trying to promote, with some measure of subtlety, his own skewed idea of the so-called nontheistic humanism, passing it off for the real thing.
But even we accept the humanist emphasis on man as a given, there is no disagreement and even a certain affinity between the much maligned saying of Protagoras that “man is the measure of all things” and Pope Sixtus I extolling the value of man in the year 120 AD: ‘Man is more precious in the sight of God than the angels.’ After all, God is the Creator of all things, and as such, rather than Himself becoming the measure for His creation, it is only natural that among all things He also created their measure, which ought to be the most precious item of His creation, and, according to Saint Sixtus I, (whose theological credentials are supremely authenticated by his Sainthood) such item has to be man.
Perhaps, God was the first Humanist, and I am sure he could have been given this title, except for its mild irreverence, the only disqualifying factor.
Ironically, the title of the “first Humanist” goes to the greatest scholar of Northern Renaissance Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, himself an ordained priest (later in life receiving the Pope’s dispensation to live in the world), the much-acclaimed New Testament scholar, translator-editor and publisher of the first printed edition of the New Testament in the reconstituted original Greek and with a parallel translation into Latin, which is considered far superior, both in accuracy and in literate quality, to the previous Vulgate version.
(There is another view with regard to who was the first Humanist, giving the laurels to Petrarca, who lived almost two centuries before Erasmus, to which I reply, why not Dante who lived before Petrarca, then why not somebody before Dante, etc., but, in all seriousness, this technical matter is of very little importance.)
What is of importance, however, is the following description of humanistic scholarship in Encyclopaedia Britannica, as “scholarly efforts through the past two thousand years to work up and develop the cultural tradition emanating from two classical focuses in the pre-Christian Era: the age of Pericles in Athens and that of Augustus in Rome, that eventually merged with the Judaeo-Christian tradition to form the spiritual foundation of Western civilization.”
Goethe expresses the same idea with greater elegance and also straightforwardness: “May the study of the Greek and Roman Antiquity always remain the basis for all higher culture! The antiquities of China, India and Egypt will never be more than curiosities (to European scions of Western civilization); they will never bear a great deal of fruit for our moral and aesthetic culture.”
Only a malicious enemy of our history, our culture and tradition, one who is plotting to kill our distinctive spirituality, rooted in both classical antiquity and two thousand years of Christianity would assail the glory of humanism, the primary source of our celebrated democratic tradition of social fairness and justice. And only a bigoted ignorant fool would so easily become an eager aider and abettor of that enemy, who appears to have been so remarkably successful in purchasing the crooked souls of our American Christian leaders, for the greater glory of Satan.
In the conclusion of this entry, it can be summarized again that Humanism is not an alternative religion, it is an enlightened state of mind, a spiritual attitude which characterizes all our Western civilization, and by no means a dirty word. But who will deliver this good news to the American Evangelicals?
Great Religions.
Great Religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc.) are basically not so much about religion, as about national culture, history, tradition, and they always ought to be seen in that light.
Foreign Religions To The Rescue Of Philosophy.
A client comes to Perry Mason to seek advice about her friend’s problem. The extraordinary attorney turns her down: he instantly recognizes that she is talking about herself and resents such upfront disingenuity as a sign of lies to come. In the course of the developing plot, however, he ends up representing her…
The psychology of transferring the first person to a third person is a very natural thing in general, whether Perry likes it or not. There are too many inhibitions to problem-solving at close range when the problem is literally invading our space. It is a common philosophical tool to distance ourselves from the problem that we are trying to solve.
This entry is not so much about actual problem-solving, as about the distance. In addressing a wide range of ethical issues, delving into the concepts of good and evil and, generally speaking, in all philosophizing, our religious reverence for the Bible enormously constrains our philosophical capacity.
“Doubt everything at least once, even the proposition that two and two are four,” writes Lichtenberg in his Reflections. “A philosopher is one who doubts,” says Montaigne, and both of them, with Descartes and his De Dubitandum to expound on it, go to the core of the matter. But perhaps the best expression of the point of my present entry belongs to Coleridge:
“Whenever philosophy has taken into its plan religion, it has ended in skepticism; and whenever religion excludes philosophy, or the spirit of free inquiry, it leads to willful blindness and superstition.” (Allsop’s Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge.)
One of the easiest ways to overcome the philosophy-religion bias is by distancing oneself from one’s own religion and all its inhibitions, and by looking at your “problem” as another person’s “problem.”
Foreign religions are enormously helpful in interpreting some finer philosophical points and basic ethical principles of our own religious tradition. Quite often, our inbred cultural reverence toward traditional faith and practice gets in the way of our inquisitive mind and hinders our understanding and appreciation of the treasure which is our own. Sort of reverse variation on the prophet in his own country theme, in this case, having too much honor, perhaps.
In concluding this entry an important point needs to be made. The well-recognized preoccupation of many great philosophers, such as Schopenhauer, with foreign religions, has in my view no religious significance whatsoever, in the sense of the philosopher’s religious preference. On the contrary, they see these foreign religions not even as religions demanding as such from their adherents blind faith and reverence, but only as philosophical tools, allowing them to investigate the exciting philosophical aspects of religion without the unwelcome admixture of cultism.
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