The true religion
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion - june 07 ]
That which is called the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist, from the planting of the human race until Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion, which already existed, came to be called Christianity. -Augustine, ca 410 AD, Sermo 10, De Sanctis
Before all the fuss about creation by design, Creationism, that is, and the existence of God and "the gods" who made the world, the ancients knew quite well what the hot-shot atheists, Dawkins, Dennett et al have recently learned: theism is, strictly speaking, only a meaningless concept, as meaningless as atheism, as Luis Bu ñuel said, "I am an atheist still, thank God."
Augustine (354-430), the revered master of theology and expositor of Christian doctrine, followed Constantine (288-337) and the great ecumenical council of Nicaea (325) in clarifying Christian doctrine, and he also had the wisdom of the Fourth Century teachers of oratory, action, and thinking in Cappadocia, those saints of the Eastern Roman Empire, to teach him. The Saints Gregory, Basil, and Macarina, in their voluminous writings, give support to Augustine's teachings. St Basil the Great of Caesarea (330-379), his brother St Gregory of Nyssa(330-390), and their older sister St Macarina (324-380), along with the renowned preacher St Gregory of Nazianzus (d394), all together known as "The Cappadocians", argued that the Gospel is true and the old, traditional knowledge does not contradict it. The "Cappadocians" were wealthy clerics in Asia Minor, in Anatolia, the Western Asian peninsula we call Turkey, then mainly Roman provinces previously integrated by the Greeks just before the rise of the Byzantine Empire, and long before the Ottoman Turks came west in the 14th Century. Scholarly studies by Jaroslav Pelikan (1923-2006), Sterling Professor of History at Yale, explain the Cappadocians' writings at length. [1]
The Cappadocians recognized the absurdity of the Resurrection, the rising of Jesus Christ and all believers from the dead, and so they were quick to connect the new faith to the perennial wisdom of Rome, Greece, and Jerusalem by means of their apologetics, their attempts to justify faith over reason.
From before classical times the knowledge had persisted that ultimate reality is beyond our understanding, inaccessible to human comprehension. The ancient philosophers tell us that there are no gods, and they tell us that no philosophy will clear up the mystery of Being. We have been brainwashed by madmen to think otherwise. The uttering of religious bullshit might just be the Original Sin.
The Fourth Century CE was a time of great concern about how God was imagined to affect mankind. Emperor Constantine convened the first ecumenical council at Nicaea in 325 to get things straight. A result was that the ideas of Athanasius (295-373) were approved and were carried on to become the basis of Roman Catholicism. In effect God the Father and God the Son were agreed to be consubstantial, that is, one homoousion (same substance). However, some disagreed, arguing that the Son, the Intermediary, is separate from the Father, and that the Christ came into being before the world, and then He created the world ("Before Abraham I am" John 8:58). God, being "unbegotten" and ever being, as the ground of all Being begot the "begotten" Son. This "Arian" heresy persists: Jesus loves me, but His Father doesn't seem to give a shit. [2]
The "true religion" Augustine refers to is the faith that Christianity is built upon. It is the ancient knowledge Jaroslav Pelikan calls the "counterpoint" to the Middle Eastern Religions [Judaism, Christianity, Islam] with one melody playing against another, harmonizing with it while moving away from it with variations before ending in a sort of agreement.
Augustine's assertion that Christianity, the "true religion", has always existed deepens the mystery presented by the birth of the child in Vergil's Fourth Eclogue, the child in Isaiah 7:14, the first-born in Exodus 4:22-23, and the prophecies of the Sibyls.
In the Aeneid Vergil writes, "The last age of the Cumean [Sibyl's] prophecy comes now... Now a new offspring is sent from deep heavens... the child from whom... a golden race will arise in all the world." [trans. Ulysses Vestal, 1998]
Exodus 4:22-23: "Thus says the Lord: Israel is my first-born son."
Isaiah 7:14: "the virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel."
The dozen or fewer sibyls known in Egyptian, Semitic, Anatolian, and Greek stories, the prophetesses portrayed on the Sistine Ceiling and alluded to by Vergil, are said to have foretold the Christ child.
The Tiburtine Sibyl upriver from Rome, where the church Santa Maria in Ara Coelis now stands, spoke to Emperor Augustus (63 BC-CE 14), presaging the Christ child. The Erythean Sibyl in Ionia, and the Cumean near Naples are said to have had a lot to say too.
The early Christian intellectuals turned to Lucretius (ca 99-44 BC), the Roman poet whose On the Nature of Things states what Ovid's (43-18 BC) Metamorphoses, and Plato's (ca 427-347 BC) Timaeus take for granted, that myth, in the form of once-upon-a-time stories, is what the old poets sang about, using language divorced from material fact. Myth is "removed a great distance from true reasoning... for there is no everlasting sun, no Omnipotent Father Helios, and no Phaëton," son of Helios, Lucretius writes. There are no material, physical gods. And no Santa Claus, one might add.
In Greek mythology Helios (Sol) is the life-giving, material sun that drives his horses across the sky every day while (Phoebus) Apollo is the spiritual sun, the source of intelligence and understanding. Helios governs physical life while Apollo governs light, music, poetry, healing, and prophecy. Phaëton, the son of Helios, tried to drive his father's fierce horses across the sky, but he couldn't handle them.
Zeus, the King of the Gods and father of Helios, was enraged when Phaëton's incompetent driving burned up the Sahara Forest, creating the desert, and blackened the skin of the Ethiopians, among whom was Helios' mother, Clymene. Zeus blasted him with a thunderbolt. Phaëton, like Jesus, died. Zeus had His reasons.
Isn't mythology more fun than theology? [3]
What do the Ancient Greeks have to do with Christianity? "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" Tertullian, the Roman theologian, the first important Christian author, asked in the 2nd Century: Quid Athenae Hierosolymis? His reply to his own question was "Not much, nothing necessarily." However, the Old Testament apocryphal book The Wisdom of Solomon was necessary to Tertullian. It gave him the received mythological knowledge about the beginning of the world from Plato's Timaeus and from Genesis in the Old Testament, from the Pentateuch, the Torah, from the Jews in Alexandria who wrote in Greek, and the scientific speculation of Lucretius (ca 99- 55BC), the Roman poet who wrote the famous De rerum natura [On the Nature of Things]. The first existentialist, Lucretius says that man is lord of himself, not a servant to gods or a slave to death. Our universe, we included, of course, is governed by natural laws, not hocus pocus.
So, what has Lucretius, who informed Tertullian, to say to us sophisticated moderns, to us atheists, humanists, heathens, infidels, agnostics, free thinkers, skeptics, non-believers, wanderers with no invisible means of support?
Lucretius cites Epicurus (341-270 BC) the first scientist as the first to explain the beginning of the world without superstition and to show what must happen without any "divine agency". The unhappy race of man is not at the mercy of malevolent gods causing natural disasters to punish mankind. Religion, as superstition, is a set of pious practices - vows and sacrifices - coming from an erroneous understanding of divine agency. The 'gods' really do not care about us. With serene minds, "placid with quiet peace", the gods do not meddle in human affairs (pace Jerry Falwell).
There exists no language fit to use in talking about the creation. Language gives a poor picture of what we can imagine. All the figurative dwelling places, the temples and groves of the gods in Heaven, must be painted with the black paint of negativity. Everything about the gods must be interpreted negatively. No one can "believe that the holy dwellings of the gods are situated in some parts of the universe:"...credere, sedes esse deum sanctas in mundi partibus ulli.
Because the universe was not created by divine agency, it follows that all explanations must not be in prose but in poetry, in an elevated sort of literary language befitting its mythical subject like the masterpieces Moses' Genesis and Plato's Timaeus. In the words of Timaeus, "the Creator brought the universe into order out of disorder." Wouldn't it be pretty to think so? Yes, it would, but these are mere words about inconceivable, inexpressible, ineffable notions about the creation of the universe, cosmogony, about G*d, the L-rd.
Furthermore, we must put away all thoughts of the human-ness of the gods, which do not exist, anyway. They could not be at all like humans, neither in shape nor in sin, and the universe was not created by design. No thing is ever created out of nothing by divine agency. The idea is absurd. "Where did a creator God get the pattern for making things?" Lucretius asked. Where is God's mind's eye and the model for creation?
There was no mold, pattern, design, or plan. It just happened.
Pelikan explains Lucretius' reasoning (Athens, p.15 ): "...that an assemblage of matter established earth and sky and the ocean deeps, and the courses of sun and moon." That is, a single Supreme Being did not create our world, nor did a group of secondary gods working for a Big Boss. On the contrary, an assemblage of matter created our world randomly from the chaos, from "some sort of unusual storm... in which there was neither sun, nor star, nor sea, nor sky...trying out all kinds of combinations, whatsoever they could produce by coming together." And this did not happen instantaneously or overnight as in the Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian stories of creation, but through "vast time" [per aeoum]. "These great things, such as earth and sea and sky, had come into being by processes that ëoften happen" [saepe fiunt], not as the harmonious conclusion of a grand design and purpose that was immanent in them, much less of one that was transcendent and that was therefore the free and contingent choice of God the Creator."
Knowledge of God derived from the study of nature, that is, philosophy, without burning bushes, wheels in the middle of the air, or resurrection from among the dead, that is, without revelation, might be difficult for television watchers and true believers to accept. In a brief review of Jaroslav Pelikan's Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism [on Amazon] J Michael writes, "The deepest theological insights of the classical philosophers might be a stumbling block to those Christians (particularly religiously anarchic Americans) who think that the whole of Christian doctrine, history and devotion is, and was intended to be, contained in and clearly spelled out in the pages of the New Testament, which fell from the sky on Good Friday 33 AD leather-bound, annotated and translated into the King James Version, ready-made to be individually interpreted anew by every generation of average Joe-Christians."
A further stumbling block is the style of explanation a reader finds in the written studies of the connections between the ancient and modern worlds of faith. Theology is a lot of words, mostly, or mainly, as Huck Finn would say.
Indeed, the foremost scholar of the connections among the Ancient Greeks and the early Christians, Jaroslav Pelikan, in the first volume of his five-volume The Christian Tradition, makes the following point very strongly:
Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.
Notes
1 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, in five volumes, University of Chicago Press, 1971. Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism, Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen 1992-93, Yale University Press, 1993. What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem:? Timaeus and Genesis in Counterpoint, Jerome Lectures, University of Michigan 1996, American Academy in Rome 1997, University of Michigan Press, 1997. One anonymous, common reader [on Amazon] reviews Pelikan's Christianity and Classical Culture as follows:
"I know that Jaroslav Pelikan gives intellectual peak experiences to some people, but the fact is that he bores me terribly. There is no doubt in my mind that the man is a first-rate erudite who has read thousands of books, but he is a very bad writer, with no style at all. His prose is impeccable but the way he tells you things is dry, dry, dry, with never a note of playfulness, never an interesting anecdote. It's simply unbearable, or only bearable for monks who want to do penance."
Caveat lector, as Pelikan would say. [Back]
2 The reader should also be distrustful of the interpretations of the author of this essay. Professor Herbert Paper of the University of Michigan wrote in a margin of one of his doctoral examinations,"Your Greek is weak." [Back]
3 Myth, prophecy, and current events are often a jumble in our minds. In 1967 Apollo I burned up on the launch pad. In 1986 the space shuttle Challenger exploded within seconds of its launch; in 2003 the space shuttle Columbia fell apart as it was attempting re-entry. In Marlowe's play Dr Faustus (1593), the miserable Faust shouts to the horses figuratively pulling his last night on earth away from him before he is sent to Hell: 'Lente, lente currite, noctis equii!" Run slowly, slowly, Horses of the Night! [Back]
