From an outsider’s perspective, the sibling rivalry between Christianity and Islam is a fascinating slice of religious and cultural history. Though the propagandists of both faiths tend to deny this heatedly, they have many more points in common than differences, especially when compared to religions elsewhere in the world. Both developed in the eastern penumbra of the late Classical world, where Hellenic and Semitic cultural currents tangled and blended; both took the basic principles of Judaism as a starting point, while rejecting a great deal of Jewish teaching and practice; both are militant faiths whose followers like to think of them as religions of peace; both have an extremely checkered history that combines great cultural and humanitarian achievements with all too frequent outbursts of horrifying violence.
Both religions have also spent most of their history caught up in an intricate dance of interaction with each other, in which competition, murderous conflict, and peaceful coexistence have all had roles to play. The Mediterranean has always formed the main geographical divide between Christendom and the Dar al-Islam, though that boundary has always been contested: swinging north, for example, with the Arab invasions of Spain and Sicily or the Turkish invasion of the Balkans, and south with the Crusades or the European colonial conquest of North Africa in the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire. Subtler modes of interaction have also seen plenty of play.
What makes this all the more interesting is that the two faiths, and the cultural and political spheres that they define, have risen and fallen in alternation over the centuries. Christianity had its first great period of political power in the centuries just before the birth of Islam, seizing control of the entire Roman world and using mob violence and legal penalties to suppress rival religions. Islam took the lead from it in the early 8th century, invading and conquering half the Roman world and extending its power to include Spain, Sicily, and nearly all of the Middle East. The 11th century saw the pendulum begin to swing the other way, with the Norman conquest of Sicily, the growth of Christian kingdoms in the north of Spain, and the audacious project of the Crusades.
The high Middle Ages thus saw Europe in the ascendant, but that changed as the Ottoman Turks emerged as major players in the Dar al-Islam in the 14th century. In 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, and the Balkans were overrun over the decades that followed; in 1529 and 1683 Ottoman armies besieged Vienna. All through these years Christendom was racked by savage internecine wars and had little ability to exert its power outside its own boundaries. Then the tide turned again; in 1571 the Ottoman navy had already suffered a crushing defeat in the Battle of Lepanto, and thereafter Europe used its control of maritime trade to fund an economic and military colossus that by 1900 dominated the planet.
All this is necessary prologue to the point I plan to discuss in this essay. A few years ago, in a discussion on this blog, I mentioned that in 1500 or so the Ottoman Empire, not any of the quarrelsome statelets of Christian Europe, was the dominant political, economic, and cultural force in western Eurasia. The Ottoman Empire in those days extended from the borders of Iran most of the way to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Horn of Africa to the southern steppes of Russia. It reaped massive wealth from its control over the trade routes connecting western Eurasia with India, China, and Africa, and deployed huge armies and navies throughout its entire expanse. So great was its cultural charisma at the time, I suggested, that the Protestant Reformation in Europe could be seen as an adaptation of older Christian traditions to fit the model of Islam.
It was a passing comment, and I’m not at all sure how many of my readers understood what I was suggesting. Nonetheless it attracted some interest, and began to field votes as a topic for months with five Wednesdays—when, as readers of this essay will doubtless recall, my commentariat gets to nominate topics for the month’s last post. At the beginning of this month, it won the vote handily. This week’s post accordingly will try to explain what I meant.
It’s going to be necessary to stray some distance from the obvious theme to make sense of what I want to discuss. The first thing that has to be grasped is what cultural anthropologists call “stimulus diffusion.” This is different from ordinary diffusion, which is what happens when specific practices borrowed from one culture are taken up intact by another culture.
Consider the use of the Latin alphabet to write the Vietnamese language. Until the French conquest of Indochina, Vietnamese was written using Chinese characters, but these didn’t really fit the Vietnamese language well. When the French conquest introduced an alternative that worked better, literate Vietnamese took up the Latin alphabet with enthusiasm, adapting it as needed to fit the distinctive qualities of their language. In due time, they threw the French out, but they kept the alphabet and still use it to write Vietnamese. That’s ordinary diffusion.
Compare this to the creation of the Cherokee syllabary by Sequoyah. The advantages of having some way to write their own language were apparent to Sequoyah and other Cherokees, but they didn’t just borrow the Latin alphabet from their English-speaking neighbors. Sequoyah’s creation wasn’t even an alphabet—it was a syllabary, in which each character stands for a syllable rather than a single sound. What he borrowed was not a writing system, nor the principles of a writing system, but simply the basic idea of a writing system. That’s stimulus diffusion.
Does this happen in religious history? You bet it does. One example more colorful than most is the mass production of new religions in modern Japan. That occurred in two great waves, in parallel with the two great waves of Westernization in Japanese culture: the first following the collapse of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1868, the second following the collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945. (The second has the endearing nickname kamigami no rasshu-awa, “the rush hour of the gods.”) In both cases the flurry of new religions borrowed heavily from Japanese folk religion but they also adopted core elements of Christianity—a great many of them, for example, are monotheistic, and many predict an imminent apocalyptic transformation of the world.
Another example, even more relevant to the theme of this post, took place in the Middle East during the sixth century BC. If history was a newspaper, the top story from that century would have been the defeat of the last of the ancient empires of Mesopotamia at the hands of a new great power, the Persian Empire. The Persians were monotheists; they followed the Zoroastrian faith, the oldest of the Middle Eastern monotheisms, while most of the nations they overwhelmed practiced Pagan faiths with roots dating back millennia to the mud-brick towns of Sumer.
The Babylonian Empire, the last of those dominoes to fall, had the habit of dealing with rebellious vassals by forcing entire populations to leave their homelands and go live somewhere else under the watchful eyes of Babylonian officials and soldiers. Seventy-odd years before the Persian conquest, they inflicted that penalty on a petty kingdom on the Mediterranean coast you might have heard of. Yes, that was Judah, whose people were the ancestors of today’s Jews. When the Persians took over, they decided to release the various populations the Babylonians had interned and let them go back to their homelands. The people of Judah took them up on the offer, returned to their city of Jerusalem, and became loyal vassals of the Persians.
As Raphael Patai pointed out quite some time ago in his book The Hebrew Goddess, and as other scholars have confirmed since that time, the people of Judah weren’t monotheists before the Babylonian Captivity. They worshipped a god and two goddesses, and temples to all three of them atop what is now called Temple Mount north of the Old City of Jerusalem. (The temples of the two goddesses are called “the house of the Cedars of Lebanon” and “the house of Pharaoh’s Daughter” in later accounts.) Their religion was very similar to that of their neighbors, most of whom also worshipped a small group of national gods. The one oddity about the god of Jerusalem is that it was taboo to speak his name or to portray him by any image.
All that changed in the generation or two after the exiles settled in Jerusalem again under Persian patronage. The goddesses got dropped like hot rocks. An assortment of legends, chronicles, and folk traditions got written down, revised, and codified into a set of holy scriptures, replete with dietary and behavioral taboos. Zoriastrianism had its own scriptures and taboos, its one god surrounded by a court of amesha spentas (that’s spelled “angels” in English), and a bevy of other features that seem to have popped up in Judaism about the same time.
None of this, please note, required any bad faith on the part of the Jews. The charisma of a dominant culture exercises a potent gravity on the human imagination. Just as the founders of Japanese new religions had religious visions that happened to incorporate features of the charismatic Western nations that pressed in on Japan so forcefully, the former exiles who returned to Jerusalem and had the task of reconstructing their religious traditions from the ground up saw those traditions in a Zoroastrian light because that cultural influence pressed in on them with overwhelming power.
That force determined how they interpreted the fragmentary records they had of the history and theology of their past. Of course the references to goddesses in the old records had to relate to evil Canaanite cults that good Jews had rejected all along, and of course the god of Jerusalem just happened to have most of the same qualities as the Persian god Ahura Mazda! It would have required an independence of thought very rare among our species to think otherwise. Yet the Jews didn’t convert to Zoroastrianism; they took ideas from the faith of their Persian liberators and applied those ideas to their own religious traditions. That’s how stimulus diffusion works.
Fast forward to the first few centuries of Christianity and you can see the same process in action. Here the religious modality that pressed in on the vulnerable young faith was that of classical Paganism in its mature form. That form had already begun to pick up a bias toward monotheism, and an equally significant bias away from the earthy, visceral, traditional forms passed down from ancient times. Quite a few of the most influential intellectual and spiritual figures in late Pagan society were acutely uncomfortable with traditional practices such as animal sacrifice, and also with the enthusiastic embrace of sexuality that had Pagan religious processions in Greece carrying huge wooden penises down the streets as emblems of the abundant fertility of the gods.
People with these attitudes were increasingly drawn to Christianity as the new religion grew from a fringe cult of social outcasts to a rising power in the Roman world. Inevitably, they brought their existing habits of thought and practice with them. Despite what you can still read in many books, for example, the closest equivalents to early Christian churches in the pre-Christian Roman world were not the basilicas where civil officials held hearings; they were Pagan mystery temples such as the Pythagorean temple at the Porta Maggiore in Rome. In exactly the same way, the closest equivalents to the Mass in Roman Paganism were the ceremonial sharing of sacred foods that took place in mystery celebrations.
The mysteries were very popular among groups dissatisfied with ordinary religious practice in the late Roman world, so it’s not surprising that stimulus diffusion inspired by them played a role in shaping Christian ritual. Notice here again that the emerging Christian churches didn’t borrow Pagan mystery traditions intact, any more than they borrowed Pagan architecture intact. Basic ideas rather than fine details were what made the jump from the old faith to the new.
Those same features didn’t make a comparable leap into Islam. One of the core differences between Christianity and Islam is precisely that Christianity rose within the Roman Empire while that was still a going concern, while Islam rose outside it at a time when it was in a state of collapse. Christianity, like the classical Pagan mysteries that influenced it so powerfully, had sacramental rituals and a priesthood set apart from the laity; Islam went out of its way to have neither. What it had instead was holy scriptures that took precedence over everything else, a clergy whose role was simply to interpret and teach from the scriptures, and religious services that consisted of group prayers rather than sacramental rites.
All those things, in turn, appeared in Christendom all at once with the rise of Protestantism in the sixteenth century, just as the Muslim Ottoman Empire appeared to be sweeping all before it. I think it’s worth considering the possibility that it was another product of stimulus diffusion.
The impact of three centuries of European global dominance on our present sense of history is overwhelming enough that it can be difficult to remember that in 1500, nobody thought of Europe as the focal point of history or the most important part of the planet. In 1500 the history you learned in European schools all took place in the Middle East or the Mediterranean basin; the thought that France or England, say, had histories of their own worth studying didn’t occur to anyone until the seventeenth century. Education in Europe consisted of learning and commenting on what Greeks, Romans, and Arabs wrote about any subject that mattered; the great quarrel between “Ancients” and “Moderns” that reshaped the Western intellect was still in the future.
In 1500, for that matter, nearly all the centers of global economic power and influence were found in a band of ancient cultures extending from the Middle East through India to China; the great exception wasn’t in Europe but across the Atlantic in Mexico, where the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan was the center of the world’s most populous (and one of its most prosperous) urban areas. Europe was peripheral. Its people were tough and resourceful, as the Turks found out the hard way when their armies left the safety of the Balkan mountains and found out what Polish hussars could do on Eastern Europe’s open plains. In Spain and England, shipbuilders were busy tinkering with technological innovations that would revolutionize the world system, but in 1500 nobody realized what would come of that; it wasn’t until half a century later that John Dee, Elizabeth I’s court wizard, started promoting the concept of something he called the British Empire, and he was as usual well ahead of his time.
It’s relevant here also to notice that it wasn’t the people who had to deal with the Ottoman Empire up close, at the distance of a cavalry saber or a boarding pike, who discarded all the features of Christianity that differentiated it most sharply from Islam. To the peoples of the Mediterranean shores of Europe or the countries within an easy march of the Balkans, Islam was the religion of their would-be conquerors, and they clung to everything that differentiated themselves from the Ottomans. It was those who lived further off, and didn’t have to worry about the imminent threat of Ottoman invasion, who could let themselves be dazzled by the cultural charisma of the great empire of the East, and be drawn into a reinterpretation of their own religion that shows the signs of stimulus diffusion from the Muslim world.
Were there other causes at work in that process? Of course there were. No event anywhere ever has a single cause, and great historical transformations in particular have many causes, large and small. Yet it’s worth noting here that all the other causes that have been proposed for the Protestant Reformation had been in place for centuries before that time. It’s been argued that the Reformers were motivated by those same Zoroastrian-influenced Jewish scriptures discussed above, or that people who spoke Germanic languages were somehow more susceptible to the arguments of the Reformers, but these weren’t exactly new influences in the 16th century.
It’s also been suggested that the rise of printing and the mass literacy it made possible was the cause of the Reformation, but that wasn’t new in the 16th century either, and there’s no geographical correlation between the concentration of printing presses and Protestant sympathies—Italy and southern Germany had an abundance of printing presses and stayed Catholic, for example, while the Scandinavian countries had far fewer and went Protestant. I think, therefore, that a case can be made that while plenty of other causes contributed to the process, stimulus diffusion from the Ottoman Empire may have played a triggering role.
I’m not going to draw any grand conclusions from all this. Again, my view of Christianity and Islam alike is that of an outsider; I don’t see religion, as most Christians and Muslims do, as something handed down once and for all by the one and only one god, but as something that human individuals and cultures create in response to their own inevitably limited and partial experiences of a transcendent Divine. What you make of it, dear reader, depends accordingly on your own view of things—and that, of course, is your business.
A little bit back, a blogger named Cremieux noted that the Protestant Reformation may never have happened without the Ottoman incursion into Europe as it diffused the resources that otherwise could have been used by the Catholic powers to suppress heresies. In the ensuing Catholic-Protestant fights, the Protestant nations eventually came out ahead not necessarily because their interpretation of scripture was less dogmatic (see for example Calvinist Geneva and the Salem witch trials) but because unlike the post-Counter-Revolution Catholic world, there was no monopoly on coercion in the Protestant world. As a result, they evolved to be more tolerant while the largely Catholic Mediterranean world underwent a brain drain.
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-ottoman-origins-of-modernity
Even as late as the 15th and early 16th Centuries, Italians considered other Europeans to be barbarians.
https://x.com/LandsknechtPike/status/1838402512941965490
I would also add that the Islamic world fell behind to a large degree as they mainly used the Arabic script which although beautiful particularly in caligraphy, was not well-suited to the printing press. Meanwhile, more hardline clerics were rising in influence compared to the “Islamic Golden Age” who did not premit deviation from what was after all the script of God’s messenger.
Speaking of Zoroastrianism and Islam, it is worth noting that Islam would probably have been a relatively minor local religion in the Arabian peninsula had it not been for a largely forgotten but profoundly influential conflict between the Eastern Romans and Sassanian Persians between 602 and 628. This conflict is sometimes called the “Last War of Antiquity” as it permanently exhausted both of the traditional powers of region at the worst possible time, when an obscure prophet in the Arabian desert was bringing an unusual amount of cohesion to the usually fractious Arabs.
https://www.amazon.ca/Last-Great-War-Antiquity/dp/019883019X
Even so, had the Eastern Romans not had a leader as capable as Emperor Heraclius, the outcome of that conflict would have been a strong Persian superpower dominating the Near East as virtually everyone at the time expected (https://www.amazon.ca/Decline-Fall-Sasanian-Empire-Sasanian-Parthian/dp/1784537470). Here is an amusing meme that illustrates the shift of fortunes between the mighty Persian Empire under Zoroastrian leadership and an obscure cult in Mecca.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/14wccpg/620_ad_the_persian_empire_is_the_largest_in_the/
Then still, the Eastern Romans might have re-conquered Egypt and the Levant under Constans II had he not been murdered in a bathtub:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203917304574412984059644024
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May Ron M’s friend Paul, who passed away on April 13, make his transition through the afterlife process with grace and peace.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, and who is now able to be at home from the hospital, be healed of throat cancer. Healing work is also welcome. [Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe]
May David Spangler (the esoteric teacher), who has been responding well to chemotherapy for his bladder cancer, be blessed, healed, and filled with positive energy such that he makes a full recovery.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be quickly healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery and drugs to treat it, if providence would have it, and if not, may her soul move on from this world and find peace with a minimum of further suffering for her and her family and friends.
May JRuss’s friend David Carruthers quickly find a job of any kind at all that allows him to avoid homelessness, first and foremost; preferably a full time job that makes at least 16 dollars an hour.
May Princess Cutekitten, who is sick of being sick, be healed of her ailments.
May Pierre in Minnesota be filled with the health, vitality, and fertility he needs to father a healthy baby with his wife.
May Viktoria have a safe and healthy pregnancy, and may the baby be born safe, healthy and blessed. May Marko have the strength, wisdom and balance to face the challenges set before him. (picture)
May Liz and her baby be blessed and healthy during pregnancy, and may her husband Jay (sdi) have the grace and good humor to support his family even through times of stress and ill health.
May 1 Wanderer’s partner Cathy, who has bravely fought against cancer to the stage of remission, now be relieved of the unpleasant and painful side-effects from the follow-up hormonal treatment, together with the stress that this imposes on both parties, and may she quickly be able to resume a normal life.
May Jennifer’s newborn daughter Eleanor be blessed with optimal growth and development; may her tongue tie revision surgery on Wednesday March 12th have been smooth and successful, and be followed by a full recovery.
May Mike Greco, who had a court date on the 14th of March, enjoy a prompt, just, and equitable settlement of the case.
May Cliff’s friend Jessica be blessed and soothed; may she discover the path out of her postpartum depression, and be supported in any of her efforts to progress along it; may the love between her and her child grow ever more profound, and may each day take her closer to an outlook of glad participation in the world, that she may deeply enjoy parenthood.
May Other Dave’s father Michael Orwig, who passed away on 2/24, make his transition to his soul’s next destination with comfort and grace; may his wife Allyn and the rest of his family be blessed and supported in this difficult time.
May Peter Evans in California, whose colon cancer has been responding well to treatment, be completely healed with ease, and make a rapid and total recovery.
May Debra Roberts, who has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, be blessed and healed to the extent that providence allows. Healing work is also welcome.
May Jack H’s father John, whose aortic dissection is considered inoperable and likely fatal by his current doctors, be healed, and make a physical recovery to the full extent that providence allows, and be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Goats and Roses’ son A, who had a serious concussion weeks ago and is still suffering from the effects, regain normal healthy brain function, and rebuild his physical strength back to normal, and regain his zest for life. And may Goats and Roses be granted strength and effectiveness in finding solutions to the medical and caregiving matters that need to be addressed, and the grief and strain of the situation.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
May Peter Van Erp’s friend Kate Bowden’s husband Russ Hobson and his family be enveloped with love as he follows his path forward with the glioblastoma (brain cancer) which has afflicted him.
May Scotlyn’s friend Fiona, who has been in hospital since early October with what is a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, be blessed and healed, and encouraged in ways that help her to maintain a positive mental and spiritual outlook.
May Jennifer and Josiah and their daughters Joanna and Eleanor be protected from all harmful and malicious influences, and may any connection to malign entities or hostile thought forms or projections be broken and their influence banished.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
“In 1500, for that matter, nearly all the centers of global economic power and influence were found in a band of ancient cultures extending from the Middle East through India to China; the great exception wasn’t in Europe but across the Atlantic in Mexico, where the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan was the center of the world’s most populous (and one of its most prosperous) urban areas. Europe was peripheral”
Nicholas Taleb has noted this.
https://x.com/nntaleb/status/1079537894086361088?lang=ar
For that matter, the very concept of “Europeans”, the notion that the peoples of the Western peninsula at the Western end of Eurasia form a distinct grouping of peoples at all (let alone a distinct “continent” of its own) only came about as a result of the conflict between the new forces of Islam and the holdouts of Christendom in what is now France!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicle_of_754
Over time, thanks to the conquests of Islam, the Classical notion of a world divided between (civilized) Mediterraneans and (less civilized ) non-Mediterraneans gave way to the idea of Europeans vs non-Europeans (or “white” and “non-white”).
https://x.com/ByzRomanLevant/status/1706703952475988059
Christianity, when it began to grow in Rome, was a religion of the poor, many of the converts were slaves or former slaves. Maybe as a result of this, eventually, after many centuries, slavery and serfdom were abolished in Europe (although not in its colonies, where it was economically very profitable). Conversely, Islam was, originally, a religion of free warriors, who enslaved the vanquished.
This had consequences. In the Muslim world, slavery was abolished only recently, under Western influence. Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962 (!). The last Saudi slaves were liberated the year when you were born, Mr Greer…
The first printing office of France was created in Paris in 1470, by three German printers (Gutenberg, who died in 1468, was German), at the request of two Parisian scholars. In Morocco, the first printing office was created in 1866, almost four centuries later. In my opinion, it doesn’t mean that the Moroccans were less capable than the Europeans, but, for centuries, Morocco had developed slavery as an industry, raiding European coastal villages and cities to capture slaves, and Christian printers traveling in Morocco would have been at a great risk of being enslaved.
In our quaint local dialect, it’s “Kill ’em all, God’ll sort ’em out.” Say that, and you’ll get booted from the jury pool on a death penalty case.
Huh, while i was kinda skeptical of the influence of the ottoman on reformation, now it seems sensible. Poland had lively reformation, there were even thought of the national church, but it just so happen that XVI century was free of wars between Commonwealth and Ottomans(just ocasional raiding by tatars and cossacks between the two). XVII century of constant wars with the muslims(turks and tatars), protestants(swedes) and orthodox(russians) and counterreformation killed polish protestantism as a movement. The most popular movement among nobility was calvinism, but we also had some lutherans in cities and polish brothers who were unitarians(though they were hated by all and were banished after deluge for collaboration with swedes)
The first time I ever entered a Catholic church (for a wedding) I was blown away by the pageantry; the smells and bells, statues and symbols, candles and gold leaf everywhere, it was CLEARLY a pagan temple to my (Baptist raised) young eyes. And what I was left with was a sense of impoverishment; the blank walls, hard pews and plain wooden cross of the Baptist churches that Grandma dragged us off to had a monomaniacal severity that was deeply unwelcoming. At six years old I decided that it was the lair of a death cult and I wanted nothing to do with it. Even the cookies and kool-aid after sunday school were flavorless and lame…
To this day, I see the Roman Catholic Church as a fascinating window into the possible practices and imagery of ancient mystery traditions from the Roman, Hellenic, Mesopotamian and Egyptian eras. The mainstream Protestant churches with their single effeminate god feel like small beer to me in comparison… They kept the Baby and threw out the Mother with the bath water!
Any thoughts on stimulus diffusion up through the current crop of religious movements? The pastor-centric evangelical protestant churches that have popped up like toadstools after a rain over the last century or so seem to be much more aligned with the sturm and drang of the old testament Yaweh than with the preacher of Galilee’s teachings.
I think you’re right on the money on this one, John. For Catholics and Orthodox, the Church is the authority. The protestant project was designed to sever the control that the Church had over society, so it makes sense that it transfers authority from the Church to the scripture (which actually just ends up in endless debates over interpretation and infighting). When I hear fundagelicals talk about the inerrancy of the Bible, how the Bible is the most unique book, and how it should be the guide for every kind of issue I am reminded distinctly of how Muslims talk about the Quran.
Extremely interesting, thank you.
Would history say that Islam is/will be in ascendancy now that Europe/Christendom seems to be in decline?
I also wonder if China increases its role as a world superpower how/if it will affect religions in other places?
A while back I heard a talk by an Orthodox priest who was discussing sola scriptura and why it isn’t part of his tradition. He was one of the new generation of Anglo-American converts to that faith, and I’m afraid I’m not a very big fan of that crowd. Nevertheless, he captured the point in a few words better than anyone else I’ve ever heard: “Our Bible is not a Koran; our Word is a man.” He then said, “If I had time, I could prove to you that the doctrine of sola scriptura comes directly from the encounter with Islam” (or something to that effect). He didn’t have time, and I’ve lost the lecture somewhere on the internet, but the words stayed at the back of my mind until I saw your comment on the subject a few months ago.
It is a hard thing to demonstrate– though apparently possible for at least one English Orthodox priest– and it’s true that the Reformers were consciously trying to Judaize their religion. Nevertheless, it makes sense of a number of features of Protestantism, including sola scriptura, the attack on sacred images, the lack of a priesthood or sacraments, the subjugation of women, and the prohibition of alcohol and dancing in some denominations.
It also makes sense of the strange Magian undercurrent to the culture of the United States, in particular our Bibliolatry. Worshiping documents and getting saved by books is as American as apple pie, even when the Good Book is Atlas Shrugged or On the Road. Or, for that matter, the Constitution. The current of transmission would go from the Ottomans through John Calvin to Massachussets (etc), where it became nativized and is now endemic. And also how we managed to produce our own homegrown imitation of Islam in upstate New York, and why it quickly migrated to the deserts of the Southwest.
And here I thought stimulus diffusion had something to do with those checks we were getting from the U.S. Govt.
This makes me wonder if there is anything from Islamic mysticism that the protestant groups could borrow to get some of their mojo back. Or from some other culturally diffused source. That book on the Hebrew Goddess has been on my get-to list for awhile. The time might be a bit sooner. One of the Christian esotericist’s I knew always stressed the word Elohim was reffering to a plurality of gods/godesses and that it was also a gender neutral term.
What is the relationship between stimulus diffusion and pseudomorphosis? (Besides being a topic for meditation?) I find the concept to be fascinating.
David, that blogger was wildly inaccurate to say that there was no intellectual monopoly or coercion in the Protestant world; he should talk to some Catholics about the persecution of members of their faith in Protestant England under Elizabeth I, just to start with. Nor were the sciences persecuted in Catholic Europe after the Counter-Reformation got going — check out the number of Jesuits who have lunar craters named after them because of their contributions to astronomy, just for starters! We have a lot of Protestant propaganda in our educational system, even now. Your comments about the Roman and Persian situation, though, are spot on; the cascade of oddities that made it possible for Islam to carry out its first great age of conquests are remarkable enough that I don’t blame them for thinking that something supernatural was involved.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Horzabky, are you suggesting this as a primary difference between Christianity and Islam, or what?
Nemo, I’ll keep that in mind!
Katylina, interesting! Thank you for this; I don’t know as much about Polish history as I probably should.
Ken, to my mind a Baptist church is just a mosque without the pretty calligraphic decorations, but that’s me. As for the current crop of evangelical pastorolatries, there’s certainly some influence from Judaism, but I suspect the main influences are the modern cults of celebrity and political leadership. The pastors are substitutes for movie idols, rock stars, and charismatic political leaders, and what goes on at those churches is a lightly veiled anthropolatry.
Enjoyer, I ain’t arguing.
Edward, yes, it does look as though Islam is in the ascendant as European Christendom declines. As for China, it depends greatly on what happens to it culturally and spiritually. Marxism is simply the far end of Protestant social-gospel theology, and until China discards it and either returns to its historic spiritual roots or comes up with something uniquely Chinese, it’s not going to regain its place as a major cultural force.
Steve, that is indeed a neat phrasing. The thought of the Latter-Day Saints as our Muslims, though, works only if you see them as the American Shi’a in contrast to the Protestant Sunnah.
Warrior, no such luck!
Justin, if Protestantism borrows any more from Islam they might as well just start saying prayers five times a day. My take is that if they want their mojo back they need to get it from Jacob Boehme, Emmanuel Swedenborg, and the old Lutheran Rosicrucians. Elohim — yeah, it’s a plural noun, and as I was taught, it’s a masculine plural of the feminine noun Eloh, “goddess.” (I’ll gladly accept correction on this from Hebrew scholars — this is what I learned from goyische Cabalists.) As for stimulus diffusion and pseudomorphosis, the latter is what happens when the former becomes the keynote for an entire culture.
This is a fascinating walk through the history of one particular family of religions!
One lesson that I think is embedded in this is that if you’re going to start a new religion – even if you’re pretending it’s an old one – you really should be mining other faiths for good ideas instead of trying to cast it all off in the name of authenticity. I suspect this is a bigger aspect of neopaganism’s failure to launch than many suspect. Ironically, the refusal to do this is something that was borrowed from Islam through Protestantism.
“ The thought of the Latter-Day Saints as our Muslims, though, works only if you see them as the American Shi’a in contrast to the Protestant Sunnah.”
For what it’s worth, I think this is dead on. The really striking thing about Mormonism is that the official narrative of how the LDS church was founded is strikingly similar to Islam’s official narrative, down to some of the unsavory details about the founders.
“ the cascade of oddities that made it possible for Islam to carry out its first great age of conquests are remarkable enough that I don’t blame them for thinking that something supernatural was involved.”
This makes me wonder if Islam isn’t Christianity’s nemesis in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Perhaps once Europe is finally effectively all converted to Islam, it will begin its own decline simply because its work will be done.
(Sorry for the multiple posts; I’ll slow down now!)
I was thinking of the Rosicrucians as well, and even had the shoemaker mystic in my mind as I typed, but kept mum about that possibility. I was also thinking of texts like The Cloud of Unknowing, the Interior Castle of Teresa Avila, and the mythos of William Blake… for starters. I certainly hope so. I know that @Roy Smith was talking about hermetic Christianity in the open post. It seems like a good, and hopefully more tolerant, more curious and less judgmental, direction. A hermetic Christianity would also allow for a bit more eclectic influences to come in, as is the case with hermetic traditions. Here the work we just did studying Eliphas Levi and a symbolically based interpretation of scripture would also be helpful, in departing from the strictly literal interpretation.
Thanks for this insightful article, JMG!
I love the Cherokee Syllabary! I needed a magic language for my webcomic Etherwood, something connected to North America (Alleghenia specifically) rather than anything Old World, like Latin. I also needed it to be not easily google-translatable, and I didn’t want to use a conlang. While it takes more effort on my part to us it, I think it lends the right mixture of alien and deeply familiar. I hope others get the same feeling.
The difference between the pre- and post- exile jews is very clear even in just the text of the Old Testament. I find it especially clear in Maccabees, where you see Jews killed for not eating pork and losing battles by not fighting on the Sabbath for the first time. The Israelites/Hebrews fought wars before, but somehow the issue of being repeatedly attacked on the Sabbath never came up until then – clearly the earlier Israelites didn’t have the same attitudes.
The connection between protestant Christianity and Islam seems obvious to me, too, even as an insider. I grew up as a relatively hardcore fundamentalist evangelical Christian (becoming Catholic in high school), and when I later read Al Qaeda’s Inspire magazine (for work research), I found that they were intuitively easy to understand, much more so than, say, an American leftist-communist magazine does. The AQ and ISIS types take exactly the same attitude to the Quran as I was raised with in the Protestant Bible. Other people might say they are not ‘real Islam’ but I sure couldn’t argue with their interpretations of their scriptures.
The sympathy goes beyond theological arguments. Depictions of what I’ll call ‘not Islam’ always had my sympathy back in the day. Halo’s covenant might be weird bad aliens bent on the extermination of the human race as they wrongly seek a rapture-like ascension, but their actions and attitudes always made more intuitive sense to me than those of the ‘not USA’ humans.
After over 15 years of being Catholic (and nearly a decade with this community), I’m still struggling to unlearn those habits of thought from my fundamentalist days.
@ Edward #10
What I’ve heard from within the Islamic world suggests that it’s going to go through massive changes as a result of its exposure to Western thought; the stimulus diffusion could be happening in the opposite way. Muslims have flooded into Europe and bragged about taking over, but beneath that facade I’ve heard there’s a widespread but secretive dropoff in religiousity among the youth. Salafism and other extreme forms of Islam that have been in vogue lately don’t do a good job of answering teenagers’ questions about the world and it’s hard to enforce such beliefs in the middle of a Western liberal society. Ex-Muslim groups have been springing up all over social media.
I’ve also heard reports out of Turkey that the Islamism that was so strong 10 years ago is now in tatters as Erdogan’s only political strategy has been to appeal to religion to distract from his failures. Political Islam in Turkey is now synonymous with corruption and economic crisis and this seems to mirror trends in other countries, where the more religious the government is the more the country declines. There have been reports of secretive atheist book clubs springing up in Iraq in the wake of ISIS. And speaking of such radical groups, a big part of their recruiting strategy was to claim that Judgment Day was imminent and that their members were destined to fight in the last battle. Now those groups are gone and Judgment Day hasn’t come, further discrediting their ideas.
As for China’s influence on global religion, it seems to come mainly in the form of their promotion of Marxism, the latter-day secular eschatology. The CCP barely heeds Marx’s actual principles but promoting them seems to be its most reliable avenue to build soft power.
Many of my Neighbors are Hindu’s from India. I recently. made the acquaintance of a young fellow from India up the street a block or so and we have been exchanging labor on each others yards. Two days ago he was somewhat distraught as he had discovered a mouse in his garage rummaging among the boxes and supples he had stored there.
I offered to help him make a live trap for the little beast as I assumed he was Hindu due to his accent, clothes and wifes clothing. As we discussed the live vs spring type traps i found out he was muslim as the spring trap was no problem. I had no idea that the number of Muslims in India ( not Pakistan) was almost as large as the number of Hindus.
As per the discussion here it seems that his familie’s version of Islam has been very heavily influenced by Indian and Hindu culture and in many outward ways different than what I was expecting.
As a Hindu living in India with 200 Million Muslims living in India and Christianity still strong in India with most of our educational institutions the entire thing seems so fragile that the ceasefire between the religions will one day will destroy so much in India that because of that our Constitution has made us the Hindus which are the majority in our own country a threat on it’s own right. And all this propaganda about all religions being one. How can we get out of this stupid notion before *** hits the fan?? I am not able to convince anyone from my family that religions are different and really cannot co-exists with one other without the threat of violence hanging over our heads. Due you believe that the fall of Industrial Society over the next 100-150 years will help in destroying this ridiculous propaganda??
“David, that blogger was wildly inaccurate to say that there was no intellectual monopoly or coercion in the Protestant world; he should talk to some Catholics about the persecution of members of their faith in Protestant England under Elizabeth I, just to start with. Nor were the sciences persecuted in Catholic Europe after the Counter-Reformation got going — check out the number of Jesuits who have lunar craters named after them because of their contributions to astronomy, just for starters! We have a lot of Protestant propaganda in our educational system, even now…”
Fair points. Still, there is a one theory that a state of polycentric fragmentation is far more favourable to greater innovation and freedom than large land empires are. This is perhaps most persuasively articulated in Walter Scheidel’s “Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity “:
https://reason.com/2020/02/24/good-riddance-to-the-roman-empire/
Scheidel’s main interest has been in what some scholars call the “Sui-Justinian Divergence “, why the Mediterranean world really fragmented after Justinian failed to re-conquer the lost Western Roman Empire (thanks in large part to a climactic event and a plague) by the Sui Emperor succeeded in China. In essence, it was because there was no successful attempt to restore a large state on par with Rome in Europe and the Mediterranean (except maybe briefly under Napoleon and Hitler), that Europe was able to advance ahead of the rest of Eurasia (this is often called the “Great Divergence”).
It was not the case that the other polities lack the ability to build trans-oceanic empires like Western Europeans. They just had little incentive to due to already large amounts of territory and resources being available to them coupled with strong central authority figures often influenced by landed elites who were wary about the prospect of a more innovative mercantile elite potentially gaining more power.
For example, in the 1420s (three generations before Columbus), Ming China sent out a massive fleet under the command of a Muslim admiral named Zhang He to go as far afield as possible. They went as far as Africa, even bringing back giraffes, and possibly beyond that. Each of these ships was so large, all three of Columbus’ ships could fit snuggly on one of its docks.
However, a series of misfortunes back home lead to the rise of figures who were suspicious of contact with all foreigners leading the Middle Kingdom to begin one of its recurring periods of isolationism. The fleet and most documents were burned and destroyed.
In Europe, back contrast, there was no central authority to call in all ships even if they wanted to but instead a series of rival kingdoms constantly trying to get a lead over each other. “Western Civilization” zoomed ahead in large part precisely because there was no equivalent of the Chinese Emperor, Ottoman Caliph, and after the Reformation and Wars of Religion, there wasn’t even a Pope!
A melding of sufi style Islam and Orthodox Christianity seems to occur in Gurdjieff. He, himself, was Orthodox, yet his writings are full of Islamic influence, mostly sufi. Some of his students were involved in translating the Philokalia. During my rather brief time with the Gurdjieff Foundation, I thought the “mood” was mostly Christian. I attended a couple of Orthodox services some time later. I mentioned the Philokalia to the priest and he replied, “Oh! So you want to go right to the good stuff.” It was a snarky reply, but not unfair. I sort of hate to admit it today, but I read Gurdjieff’s “All and Everything” nine times back in the day, including once out loud to myself.
I am not Polish even by by descent but a recent twitter interchange with a Polish woman has me fascinated with Polish history. So much action that is left out of the history that I had read. I did see Poland mentioned somewhere as the one country that turned Protestant, then went back to Catholicism.
The history I learned in school has Poland as eternal victim, always either being partitioned or overrun by its huge neighbors. Kind of the guy in the red shirt in Star Trek. But the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania was the strongest European state in its day. (Also interesting that for much of its history, Lithuania was a conquest state ruling mostly non-Lithuanians (and a target of crusades), not a tiny Baltic state.) And Poland is one nation that did manage to march on Moscow and win. I think you will find the run up to the partition fascinating. Has to be a leading candidate for most dysfunctional government of all time.
About persecution by dogmatic English Protestants, one could argue that this happened precisely because the Anglican Church was as Catholic as a church could be and still claim to be Protestant. My Irish ancestors would not be interested in any excuses for Protestant perfidy in Ireland though.
About the Mormons, they did wander around the Midwest from one pogrom/mini-war to another until their founder was lynched (allegedly at the connivance of the federal government). My guess is that Great Salt Lake City area was selected not because they were drawn to the desert, but partly because it was outside the US when the Mormons arrived and partly because it was easily defended. Utah was included a few months later in the territory annexed by the US from Mexico at the end of the Mexican War. Mormon sources say that getting out of the (for them lethal) US was not a motivation, but they would pretty much have to say that, so it is hard to say. Utah did after all fight a successful war against the US government in the 1850s. The first of our great science fiction religions.
“Your comments about the Roman and Persian situation, though, are spot on; the cascade of oddities that made it possible for Islam to carry out its first great age of conquests are remarkable enough that I don’t blame them for thinking that something supernatural was involved.”
Yes. I have recently read a book titled “The Great Arab Conquests” by Hugh Kennedy.
https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Great_Arab_Conquests.html?id=DWRKDgAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y
Apparently both the victors AND the losers saw the extraordinarily rapid pace by which the Muslim Arabs made what was then the biggest empire yet seen in history as a source of divine intervention (divine punishment for those Christians or Zoroastrians in the new Caliphate).
If I were a Muslim, historic or contemporary, and wanted to point to the strongest evidence for what could be seen as the divinely ordained truth of my faith, I would point to the fact that God sent his Holy Prophet to exactly the right place (the desert sands of Arabia) at exactly the right time (when the two traditional powers of the region, Rome and Persia, were bleeding themselves to exhaustion in a particularly nasty war).
I’m wondering if the gods arrange such religious stimulus diffusions in order to retire and get replaced by other deities, or to get experience in guiding humans using a different framework than the ones they’re accustomed to.
The religious stimulus diffusions themselves seem to me to be broadcasts from extroverted, vigorous Culture-souls and can probably be initiated by deliberate magical workings.
See? JMG always does his homework.
Christianity and paganism are inseparable. Take that, Luther. And on the flipside, how often do we hear about what neopagans have borrowed from Christianity, or from eastern religions?
Slithy, Neopaganism is just another radical Protestant offshoot. It has all the usual hallmarks — the priesthood of all believers; the fixation on leftward politics as a substitute for spirituality; the linear sacred history with exact equivalents of Eden, the Fall, and the Second Coming, and so on down the list. Its unique features are that it puts Jehovah in drag (“the Goddess”), it goes further in the direction of enthusiastic sexual expression than most (though there are equivalents), and the usual fixation on sacred scriptures got tangled up with the priesthood of all believers to create the Book of Shadows phenomenon, in which every participant wrote their own personal scripture. That last point seems to have fallen by the wayside in recent years, about the time Neopaganism peaked and began its current decline.
Justin, well, The Cloud of Unknowing and The Interior Castle are both from the Catholic tradition. William Blake, on the other hand, is a fine example of Protestant mysticism, strongly influenced by Swedenborg. Take a moment, or more than a moment, to think about what it would be like to see a future Protestantism that worships Jesus the Imagination, as Blake did!
Sirustalcelion, hmm! It’s certainly a fine elegant script, and it’s got deep roots in the southern Appalachians. As for Protestant Islam, I’m glad not to have been raised in that tradition…
Clay, that’s India for you. A million years after they’ve died out everywhere else, Christianity and Islam will still be practiced by small communities in India, and you’ll have to work very hard to tell the difference between them and their Hindu neighbors. Habits concerning mousetraps are about the distinctions I’d expect.
Arnav, I’m not sure the alternative view offers any better prospect; the Muslim armies that Mahmud of Ghazni led into India in 1001 certainly didn’t believe all religious were one, but that didn’t provide much benefit to the Hindu community then. The great problem is that the alternative to coexistence is mutual mass slaughter — you can see how that worked out if you have a look at West Asia and the European subcontinent.
David, polycentric fragmentation didn’t cause Japan or the kingdoms of Southeast Asia to outstrip China in the maritime field, even though both had access to the whole suite of Chinese maritime technology — Japanese pirates were the scourge of the East China Sea all through the period when Chinese fleets sailed to East Africa. The quest for simple explanations for historical change is to my mind mistaken; Spengler’s decision to focus on the morphological description of what happens, rather than trying to come up with theories about why it happens, strikes me as very sensible.
Phutatorius, it’s struck me more than once that Gurdjieff may have been a kind of foreshock of the religion of the future Russian great civilization: the Volga basin, which I suspect will be the heartland of that civilization, is exactly such a zone of cultural fusion between Sufi-influenced Islam and Orthodox Christianity.
Jessica, Eastern European history generally deserves more attention than it gets. As for Mormonism as a science fiction religion, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it called that before, but you’re right, of course!
David, granted; it’s just that since then, the Divine doesn’t seem to have favored Islam to anything like the same degree.
Patrick, that wouldn’t surprise me at all.
JoustAGuy, not often enough. As a rule, the more loudly a religious movement insists that it’s utterly different from the established religion of its culture, the more details of that established religion it’s copied wholesale or simply stolen and filed off the serial numbers.
“Ken, to my mind a Baptist church is just a mosque without the pretty calligraphic decorations, but that’s me. As for the current crop of evangelical pastorolatries, there’s certainly some influence from Judaism, but I suspect the main influences are the modern cults of celebrity and political leadership. The pastors are substitutes for movie idols, rock stars, and charismatic political leaders, and what goes on at those churches is a lightly veiled anthropolatry.”
Yes, whatever one wants to say about Protestantism, when it comes to aesthetics, they are definitely towards the rock bottom among pretty any religious sect that I can think of. This is certainly true within Christianity.
https://www.churchpop.com/catholic-vs-orthodox-vs-protestant-how-to-tell-the-difference-in-10-hilarious-memes/amp/
Apart from Salafist Islam and maybe some Orthodox branches of Judaism, I can’t think of any other creed whose aesthetics are more flat, dry, or arid.
I have watched an online documentary showing places in Mexico and I am astounded how even medium-sized cities have churches that often rival St.Peter’s in terms of elegance and beauty. The Hapsburgs themselves were pretty ugly but it seems like almost everything they built was beautiful whether in Latin America, the Danube region of Central Europe or elsewhere!
“David, polycentric fragmentation didn’t cause Japan or the kingdoms of Southeast Asia to outstrip China in the maritime field, even though both had access to the whole suite of Chinese maritime technology — Japanese pirates were the scourge of the East China Sea all through the period when Chinese fleets sailed to East Africa. The quest for simple explanations for historical change is to my mind mistaken; Spengler’s decision to focus on the morphological description of what happens, rather than trying to come up with theories about why it happens, strikes me as very sensible”
Fair point.
I would say that Japan had the potential to have lead a trans-oceanic empire but after a failed invasion from the Mongol Yuan Dynasty in China due to a storm, the Japanese developed an intensely nationalist, isolationist conception of themselves. Scheidel does actually cite Southeast Asia as the one region of Eurasia most similar to Europe in terms of geography and political formation. According to Scheidel, Southeast Asia suffered from the opposite extreme. It was too fractious to enable the formation of stable states or societies out of which one could safely innovate. Also, no overarching “ecumeme” like Latin in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire or overarching religion like Christianity. Hence, the communication enabling any equivalent of the “Republic of Letters” in Europe would have been grossly inadequate.
Thanks, this was very insightful and inspiring post! Also, I wonder if there could arise some synthesis of Christianity and Islam, especially in future western Europe, patronized by its (then again) autocratic monarchy, especially as it might save those lands from a long centuries of communal violence? Of course neither of those religions would like their bastard child, but … new prophets and new religions like Sikhism and Baha’i-ism still happen now and then.
And then to quite off-topic idea (I missed the Open post, but here I throw it anyway):
I started to wonder about all this deindustrial fiction genre (having read none, unless “A Canticle for Leibowitz” is counted as such), and it occurred to me that in the far future, we will almost certainly not return to medieval / antique worldview with just four elements. Instead, whatever alchemy will rise then, it will be based on folk-memories of our current chemical and physical knowledge.
E.g., (some) people will know that water is a combination of something called hydrogen and oxygen (marked with “H” and “O” in ancient letters), and that “oxygen” is also the magical part of air that is needed for keeping us alive, thus a part of general ambient life force. The other part of air is “nitrogen”, which is also known to exist, mysteriously, in beans and urine.
Et cetera: that the table salt could be decomposed by the ancients to something called sodium and chloride, that helium was mysterious gas, lighter than air, which the ancients used to make their ships fly, but it is not known where it could be found now. And the secret why the best ancient steel didn’t rust is that they mixed some other metal called “chromium” into it.
Probably they would have some version of the periodic table at their disposal, and would be able to place most of the common metals and elements like carbon, sulfur and arsenic to their correct positions there. Also, that a metal called “uranium” had great power in it, with which the ancients were able to destroy whole cities, but nobody knows anymore how to release that power, even if they were able to find uranium in the nature.
And especially, that almost all the magic of the ancients was based on that elusive thing called “electricity” that flowed in those copper filaments. And together with “silicon”, which the ancients separated from ordinary quartz, they could even make their machines to “think” and play games.
“Horzabky, are you suggesting this as a primary difference between Christianity and Islam, or what?”
Not a primary difference, because both religions tolerated slavery in the past, but rather a different history. All Muslim countries have made slavery illegal in the 20th century (except, in the last decade, for Daesh in Irak and Syria — I guess that everyone remember the horrific fate of Yezidi women — and, also briefly, some Islamist groups in Libya after the fall of Gadhafi), but the fact is that Mahomet, who owned slaves, regulated slavery, thus preventing its worst abuses, but also making it legal.
Jesus seemingly ignored slavery. The Old Testament regulates slavery, it doesn’t outlaw it. The Buddha forbid trading in human beings as an obstacle to spiritual enlightenment, which implies that people who don’t care about spiritual enlightenment and being excluded from the Buddhist community can do as they see fit.
Everything I know suggests that the great spiritual leaders of the past were like the Greek and Roman philosophers: slavery existed in the societies they lived in, had always existed, and they didn’t expect that it woudn’t exist in the future.
Here in France I had a discussion recently with a neighbor of mine, a socialist woman. She spoke to me about the horrors of French colonialism in Algeria, and I told her that the French colonization of Algeria hadn’t been all bad, because it led to the suppression of slavery there. She told me that what I said couldn’t be heard (“c’est inentendable” she said, which was doubly baffling to me, because the correct French adjective is “inaudible”, as in English). I think that she meant that such an inconvenient fact cannot be stated in polite society.
Michael Servetus is a good example of this process, as the proto-Unitarianism that he promulgated is actually indistinguishable from Islam. His native Spain, and Hungary/Romania, where early Unitarianism flourished, were both on the shifting borders of the Islamic world. So I’m in full agreement with your excellent thesis.
I would add that the Babylonians deported the Jews for a specific reason. The one feature that distinguished them from other Near Eastern tribes was their religious militancy, which brought them into frequent conflict with the authorities. So they were actually deported to the Mesopotamian heartland in order to acquire civilisation, by a comparatively kindly Babylonian governor. In exile they were compelled to learn a variety of economically beneficial trades, such as goldsmithing. So when they finally returned to the Levant they had become quite culturally distinct from their Semitic relatives, who are now called Arabs.
My only quibble is with the description of Zoroastrianism as ‘monotheism’. In fact it’s a kind of weird dualism. Ahura Mazda is the supreme deity in this religion, in opposition to Satan like Ahriman, but neither of them are considered creator deities nor are they seen as eternal. Standing above both of them, in true command of the universe, is the abstract principle of Zurvan (time). This is much the same as the overarching Goddess Necessity in the Pagan Greek religion. In Zoroastrianism there has always been a heretical tendency to recast Zurvan as a monotheistic deity, which has been repeatedly suppressed by mainstream Zoroastrianism. So it is quite possible that this obscure Iranian heresy was the real inspiration for early Judaism. In the present day many Zoroastrians will assert that they are actually monotheists, but this is really a survival mechanism, because they have largely escaped persecution within the Islamic world by being (monotheistic) ‘peoples of the book’. In the same way Zoroaster is portrayed as a Judaic style prophet, when in reality he was a (rebel) magi and reformer.
Lastly, I must confess that as a Buddhist, I can’t personally make any sense of the Abrahamic religions, and it’s been decades since I studied Iranian religion, so I could be completely wrong. 🙂
@23 Arnav Jindal
I see the notion that all religions are the same as ridiculous. In America, many Christians believe that non-Christians & heretical Christians will be eternally punished. But they know that people will not freely convert to their religion, and they do not have the power to impose their beliefs on everyone, and that imposing the correct faith on all would be messy. So we tacitly agree to disagree to keep the peace– and our rights.
Also, in practice, most Americans currently believe more strongly in secular political ideas, whether conservative or liberal, than they do in religious ideas and are more passionate about converting others to them.
Since I was raised protestant (if you can call World Wide Church of God that) and had six years of Catholic school, whilst becoming a teenage Thelemite, those lines between Catholic & Protestant tended to blur. Another way of saying it would be, half my family was Catholic and half hillbilly, and I opted for Crowleyean rebellion and heresy, at least for a little while.
Blake & Swedenborg… I like that vision. Throw in some Diggers, and I’ll at least come hang out.
(“I Was A Teenage Thelemite” strikes me, though, as a potentially lurid pulp novel in the old beatnik paperback vein.)
Jessica, the Polish diaspora in the USA has been playing that Poland as eternal victim movie for it must be a century now. It is becoming tiresome, especially as that particular diaspora is among those who never cease promoting Russia hatred which they expect the rest of us to share.
JMG, as you know, there were many heretical social movements during the European Middle Ages. I once asked myself, why did this particular one, post-Luther Protestantism, take hold when so many others did not. The answer I came up with was that this time, in the 16thC, rulers supported the dissenters instead of the established church. In Islam, as I understand it, there is no separation of church and state, the Caliph was Commander of the Faithful. So, I am wondering if the Protestant princes saw that the Ottoman sultan had no religious authority over him and could, for example, set aside and take news wives just as he chose? Also, that among the Ottomans, there were no consecrated religious, and therefore all good land could be taxed and given to a ruler’s faithful friends.
JMG, great essay and food for thought. One insight of mine that matches yours – I will have to meditate on it – is that the Leviathan, that is, the state as seen by Thomas Hobbes, is an adaptation of Islamic statehood.
“the fixation on leftward politics as a substitute for spirituality;”
Hmm. The embrace of (neo)conservatism by Evangelics from the late 1970’s to early 2010’s really was an aberration, wasn’t it? I’m reminded of the fact that in the 60’s and earlier, American Evangelicals tended to be theologically conservative but socially liberal on most of the relevant cultural issues — including civil rights and abortion.
The switchover happened in the 1970’s primarily due to prominent Evangelical theologian Frank Schaeffer’s embrace of the pro-life cause at his son Francis’s urging (something Francis later came to regret when he switched politically to the left and then IIRC lost his faith), and the Southern Baptists splitting from the American Baptists over segregation. Before that, being anti-abortion had been “a Catholic thing” that few Protestants wanted to touch, and most Evangelicals were egalitarians when it came to race.
Since the mid 2010’s we’ve seen a reversion to the historical norms: mainline Protestant churches have embraced the lion’s share of the Left’s various causes.
“the usual fixation on sacred scriptures got tangled up with the priesthood of all believers to create the Book of Shadows phenomenon, in which every participant wrote their own personal scripture.”
I honestly never thought about this — this is a really interesting point I’ll have to give some thought to. Hmm.
Thoughts of Yeats’ A Vision swirling in my head these past few weeks now mingle with the drama of Medieval Christianity and Islam’s widening and narrowing gyres, cultural and religious streams intermingling, alternating, waxing and waning, stimulus diffusion acting its part in the play of forces. Tracing the subtle patterns of necessity and will, time and tide, “I have been part of it always…”
Thank you.
To be overly cynical for a moment, it’s almost like when one music band makes a new sound that takes off and gains popularity and then all the other musicians go “Well, I can sound like that too”, and then shortly thereafter you get all the music sounding the same as they all start copying each other, I mean all the songs just start to merge into each other as they get played on the radio. And then it all crashes and some new band takes a risk and then things sound different for a while. Or at least that’s how it went before the Great Stagnation started after 2008.
Except it’s religions that are doing this instead.
I suspect if the doo-dads and decorations in Catholicism started to take off, you’d see all sorts of other churches going “Well, we can decorate too”.
A pedantic quibble:
The Vietnamese alphabet came from Portugese missionaries, not the French.
Some of the marks designate tone (the ones that look like accent marks, foward and backward, plus the dots and the wee questionmark looking one and the tilde– five marked tones, plus the neutral tone which is not marked), and others tell you how to pronounce the vowels (hats, and whiskers off the side of O and U).
That said, I totally realize that these facts do not affect the gist of your argument.
David, no argument there. A few Protestant offshoots figured out how to make simplicity beautiful — I’m thinking here especially of the Shakers, whose crafts rival Zen Buddhism in their elegance — but most Protestant sects act as though they saw something pretty once and hated it on sight. (Unlike the Habsburgs, who were astoundingly ugly and decided to make up for it with arts, crafts, and architecture.) As for Japan and southeast Asia, it’s precisely the idiosyncrasies in these cases — and Europe’s — that make history what it is, and confound any attempt to set up general laws.
A, Karhukainen, oh, it’s quite possible that five centuries from now the Islam practiced in the European subcontinent will be heavily larded with Christian influences, to the point that more orthodox Muslims will regard their European brethren with the same suspicion that many Arabs today direct toward Iranians. As for the rise of science-flavored mythology, no doubt — and yes, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a classic work of deindustrial SF. You might like Edgar Pangborn’s Davy, in which the reigning church of deindustrial eastern North America has forbidden the faithful to have anything to do with anything that might contain atoms, since everyone knows that those blow up.
Horzabky, I rather like inentendable, as it suggests “can’t be understood” as well as “can’t be heard.”
Tengu, oh, granted, Zoroastrianism is philosophically dualist, but there’s only one god you’re supposed to worship, and everything else (including competing religions) belongs to Ahriman.
Justin, or a fine tacky movie —
— and the thought of Michael Landon playing the lead role is tempting.
Mary, that may well have been on Henry VIII’s mind, certainly! I could see it as a general rule, though it would require more study of the biographies of Protestant princes than I’ve done.
Bruno, that makes a great deal of sense. Hobbes’s concept of the social contract is basically a Westernized equivalent of the Sunnah, the body of teaching and practice accepted by the consensus of Muslims as binding.
Slithy, the interesting thing with Protestantism is that you often get situations like this, in which what counted as radicalism in an earlier generation has become reactionary, but still has a robust constituency. Think of the rejection of evolutionary theory — in the late 19th and very early 20th century, that was a radical Protestant thing, which is why the far-left radical politician William Jennings Bryan spoke for the prosecution at the famous “Scopes monkey trial.” Evangelical conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s was simply repeating most of the ideas of radical left-wing Evangelical Christianity circa 1910.
Goldenhawk, a Yeatsian analysis of Christianity and Islam as interpenetrating gyres has a lot to commend it.
Other Owen, that’s exactly what it’s like — and it wouldn’t surprise me for a moment if, now that old-fashioned sacramental Christianity is rising in popularity, some of the dying mainstream Protestant sects were to start copying them in an attempt to win back market share. (If any Protestant clergy are reading this, a word to the wise: it won’t matter a bit unless you go back to actually believing in the real existence of God, unfashionable as that may be.)
Methylethyl, hmm! I was misinformed. Thank you.
(This was to Justin, not me, but:) “Take a moment, or more than a moment, to think about what it would be like to see a future Protestantism that worships Jesus the Imagination, as Blake did!”
If I may, this sounds like you’re suggesting Protestantism become a kind of esoteric New Thought. If so, I like it.
Related: New Thought writer/lecturer Neville Goddard quotes Blake quite a bit in his books and lectures, especially after his mystical experience in 1959. Whether Blake meant his idea of Jesus the Imagination literally, Neville certainly did: his philosophy is based on the ideas (a) that each person individually is God, (b) the world is nothing but an objectified form of consciousness, and (C) Christ is our imagination through which we “crucify” old states of being (including those we conventionally think of as external) and “resurrect” new states into being. We are here to experience various states of consciousness and to individuate so that we can one day be gods — individualized aspects of God. (Compare Vishishadvaita Vedanta, though I don’t think Neville ever directly encountered that school since it’s never made many inroads into the West.)
He’s got a lot of eccentric and radical ideas — in some ways he epitomizes the radical end of New Thought that promises you can have everything for free — but I appreciate how often he distills down some of the standard ideas in New Thought, draws the obvious conclusions, and then states those directly rather than hemming and hawing about them to make them more respectable. (Also, his eccentric interpretations of Bible stories and symbolism as actually being about manifestation are kind of fun.)
Funny coincidence that today I would be reading IMPERIAL CHINA 900-1800 and come to a discussion of the mix of both ordinary diffusion and stimulus diffusion in how the Khitan of the Liao Dynasty adapted to ruling part of China during the 5 Dynasties period (between Tang and Northern Song) and during the Northern Song dynasty. For example, they copied writing with characters as the Chinese do but did not use the Chinese characters themselves, rather making up their own (unlike the Koreans and Japanese).
I think there is something beautiful about the white clapboard churches you see in the hills of the south. Coming around a bend, and seeing one on a hill or next to a creek, I like them. The nicer stone Presbyterian buildings often look nice, mistly thanks to the stone (thats the Druid in me). One thing I’ve noticed though is that the Catholic churches, and especially better funded cathedrals (two in my area) can just be walked into and explored. Thats because of the daily sacramental aspect, and they know people might be coming in to light some candles at a Marian shrine, or at a saints. Plus they have a bit more robust liturgical calendar… anyway, the big Presbyterian churches, that Id like to see inside of are always locked. But I used to go into the cathedral fairly often when I still worked in walking distance to it. The open door policy has a lot to commend it for a faith that wants to attract people. (Fish frys help too.)
This topic was not the least bit interesting to me when I saw it for vote the past few 5 week months, but even though I shouldn’t be surprised, I am.
The post is timely for me. Thanks for making me realize there is nothing wrong with having an interest in multiple religions and seeing the values they have. Further, it’s a bit freeing to think one can combine them and create their own, personal worship.
I suppose that point has been one common, underlying theme in many of your posts, that each of us experiences the world in different ways, and therefore we often express that experience in personal ways.
Perhaps because of my Christisn upbringing, it only made sense to me to think a religious practice had to be uniform with one, and only one that currently exists.
Thanks once again JMG! I appreciate your thought provoking essays.
@JMG,
I’m glad that this topic finally won out. And those other examples in stimulus diffusion – Vietnamese vs. Cherokee alphabets, the early Christian church as mystery cult, etc. – are also fascinating.
I have a few points of quibbling, though. First, I think you’re oversimplifying the situation with Judaism and Zoroastrianism when you say that the Jews weren’t monotheistic until after their contact with Persia. There is actually a lot of textual and archeological evidence for religious conflict all throughout the seventh century BC between a monotheist faction, championed by King Hezekiah and later by Josiah, and a more “traditional” party (the biblical narrative deems them heretics but modern archeologists and scholars consider they’re version of the religion to be older). Over and over a “reformist” king would arise, destroy the worships sites outside of Jerusalem, and purge the temple of the “idols” like the Asherah and the Brazen Serpent (since people had been burning incense to it.) Then there would be a king who “did evil in the sight of the LORD,” as the biblical narrative puts it, and he would restore the idols. The Babylonian captivity and eventual return made the monotheists the winners of the conflict (and also gave their religion new Zoroastrian elements like the tempter figure and individual judgment in the afterlife) but the struggle over how many gods the Jews should worship had been going on for quite a while before all of that. (Here is a link to a good online article about the archeological evidence for Hezekiah’s altar-smashing: https://biblearchaeologyreport.com/2019/10/04/king-hezekiah-an-archaeological-biography/)
Second point: I think your essay is incomplete without mentioning the fact that, from the point-of-view of Luther and the other Protestant reformers, the Catholics were the real Islam-enviers. Luther looked at the elaborate Catholic ceremonies, calendar of fast days, worship hours, rote prayers, and other such disciplines, and basically saw a watered-down version of Islam with its Ramadan fast and Salah prayers five times a day. He wrote extensively about how Catholicism and Islam were both religions of works that fooled people into thinking they could earn their salvation, and he argued that Catholicism’s failure to resist Islam was due to its having too much in common with Islam. (Here is a link to an article summarizing what Luther had to say about “the Turks.” https://www.zwemercenter.com/martin-luther-on-islam-and-the-turks/)
This take seems first cousin to Henri Pirenne’s “Mohammed and Charlemagne.” See also: Byzantine iconoclasm (definitely influenced by Islam, and subsequently deemed heretical).
The Reformers were diverse. Luther’s theses were fairly narrow in scope, and aimed at indulgences and papal power–he was not an iconoclast, and did not have strong views about church structure. As events got out of control, though, everybody with an agenda tried to further it. Calvin ran a police state, Menno Simons became a kind of cult leader. In England you had back-to-the land types (“diggers”) and nudists (“Adamites”), among other colorful radicals. How much of this was influenced by Islam, or the idea of Islam?
The Cree syllabary has been adopted by all kinds of First Nations groups, even for languages very far removed like Inuktitut. I think the driving force was that it looks cool, and very different from the Roman alphabet.
JMG: “Though the propagandists of both faiths tend to deny this heatedly, they have many more points in common than differences.”
In Islam, there is the whole “People of the Book” thing. Jesus is considered a prophet, whose teachings got distorted somewhat by Christianity (whence the Trinity etc.), but would have taught the same things as Muhammad and is equally holy.
JMG: ” the closest equivalents to the Mass in Roman Paganism were the ceremonial sharing of sacred foods that took place in mystery celebrations”
Now I have to ask which century you’re talking about. First-century Christians would have met for formal meals in private homes. Such meals came with established social conventions (similar, perhaps, to the dinners held nowadays by fraternal orders). Bread and wine were ordinary, basic foods. The meal was a full meal, not purely symbolic, and would have been accompanied by other items like fish or olives. The change may have come as a result of congregations growing too large to feed and house this way. Yes, the mysteries did have a big influence, but so did civil culture (ecclesia means a civil assembly).
Thanks for this, which contains a lot of material for reflection.
For the moment, I’ll mention a few points, some of which may seem to be ide issues; if I have time, I’ll continue on.
First, the surge of new religions in post-Tokugawa Japan. A substantial part of the initial surge should be attributed to the end of energetic suppression of new (or unorthodox) religions that had been in place throughout the Tokugawa shogunate, during which state-sponsored Buddhism was used to control or eliminate other forms of religion (leading to the anti-Buddhist developments in the Meiji restoration).
In addition to such currents as “hidden Christianity”, Shinto, and so on, there was also the very old tradition of mediumistic revelation (shared with China, Korea, Vietnam, etc). (Some of the elements of Christianity may have come from the hidden Christian tradition, or from rumors of what it was supposed to have been.) A close analogy is the Cao Dai religion of Vietnam, which clearly has Christian (and simply French) elements. But the tradition, and technique, of these mediumistic revelations goes back very far: the Shangqing Daoist tradition goes back to Wei Huacun, who not only received scriptures mediumistically, but also transmitted more scriptures — a century or so after her death. Similarly, the stimulus diffusion that led to the formation of the Taiping Rebellion was received by and adapted to the existing context of scriptural revelation and messianic revolution that had been a cultural constant from at least the Yellow Turban movement to the foundation of the Ming Dynasty.
So the key question is not whether there are similarities, or plausible candidates for diffused stimuli, but why and how certain aspects of the stimulating source are appropriated by people in the receiving culture, and why they prove viable.
The scripture-teacher-congregation model, after all, could have been familiar from Jewish congregations, where they existed. (Or, for that matter, schools and universities. If one follows Christopher Beckwith, European colleges could have been based on Buddhist models.)
There was a certain “Judaizing” tendency, at least among intellectuals, as a kind of theological model – but perhaps the overt, public adoption of Jewish ecclesiastical forms would have been a bit infra dignitatem. But perhaps for rulers who really wanted to be free of meddlesome priests, the idea that the clergy were subordinate to the ruler may have been pretty attractive.
Of course, all of these influences may have been at work! As you point out, monocausal explanations don’t work very well in history.
Hi John Michael,
And western Europe is sinking into a quagmire – they just lost their prize, to the US.
I still can’t quite comprehend how our leaders are backing Europe.
Cheers
Chris
Slithy, I suspect New Thought has blazed some of the trail that Protestantism will follow if it survives, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Jessica, hmm! I wasn’t aware of the origin of Khitan writing. Japanese is a (typically) weird example, because they use Chinese characters but they also have two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, which were created (like the Korean Hanggul syllabary) by stimulus diffusion from Sanskrit!
Justin, one of the reasons I’d like to see Jesus the Imagination get a foothold is that those white clapboard churches could evolve an austere beauty of their own. Since they’re locked most of the time, though, there are hard limits.
Prizm, you’re most welcome. That point — that religion is a much broader and more flexible phenomenon than recent ideological faiths have tried to make it — is an important one for me.
Sandwiches, I’m far from sure I buy the claim that Hezekiah and Josiah were what the scriptural writings claimed they were. There was certainly conflict between centralizing and decentralizing forces in Israelite religion, but was that a matter of monotheism vs. polytheism, or simply whether the central government kept control of worship? As for the Reformers, that doesn’t surprise me — look for a preacher these days who rants about the evils of homosexuality and you know he has a boyfriend on the down low. We reject most heatedly what we are…
Ambrose, thanks for this. The centuries I’m talking about are the third and fourth, as Christianity stopped being a fringe cult of social outcasts and turned into a major force in the ancient world. That’s when, for example, incense stopped being something that only Pagans burnt and found its way into Christian ritual, and the communion ceremony stopped being a community meal and took on the characteristics of a mystery rite.
LeGrand, oh, granted. I don’t know a lot about the mediumistic traditions in the Sinic sphere, not having access to any of the relevant languages, so I’ll ask you: in your knowledge, was a monotheist view with a single creator god common in those traditions, and if so, when did it find its way in? (I know the apocalypse meme goes way back — cough, cough, Yellow Turbans, cough, cough.) It’s the way that so many Japanese new religions postulate a single creator deity in place of the crowded pantheons of Buddhism and Shinto that leads me to suspect stimulus diffusion.
Chris, our managerial classes here in the US are still on Europe’s side. I’ll discuss that in a future post.
Hi Other Owen,
Kuato the Martian mutant might suggest to you: “Open your mind!
People have been making that observation to me about music since the 90’s. As a suggestion, it may not be the music of today, it could well be your perspective. But then, we’re a long way from anywhere down here and may have a livelier music scene as a result.
Listen to Kuato. Hear Kuato! 😉 Good luck.
The federal government down here has a platform for new youth music and anyone can put up pretty much any genre, and the best gets played on the air – all commercial free. What you’re seeing may be a dilution of culture by invested interests seeking safety and a return? Dunno.
Cheers
Chris
Apparently Protestant Christianity got mojo in China . 1,000,000 in 1950 now around 40,000,000 https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/09/15/protestant-christianity-is-booming-in-china, may be quite a bit more according to other sources I have run across. All achieved with out pretty churches, Hermeticism, vestments, ritualistic liturgy. Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox left quite in the dust. Miraculous phenomena were apparently a part of the mojo.
This sentence saves your hypothesis, in my opinion: ” To the peoples… within an easy march…, Islam was the religion of their would-be conquerors, and they clung to everything that differentiated themselves from the Ottomans. It was those who lived further off, and didn’t have to worry about the imminent threat of Ottoman invasion, who could let themselves be dazzled”. It is in fact striking that Protestantism took hold in countries that were relatively far off from the Ottoman empire.
Not that the correlation is perfect – France, for example, was just as far away from the Ottomans as Saxony or Franconia were, and Catholicism won in France. Actually, maybe it is more fruitful to investigate why Catholicism ended up winning and reconquering certain areas than why Protestant sympathies sprang up initially in others. Hungary, Austria, Bohemia and Poland once had quite substantial Protestant minorities. As you say, there are many causes in play.
One argument of yours I didn’t understand was your affirmation that “rise of printing and the mass literacy it made possible was the cause of the Reformation, but that wasn’t new in the 16th century”. I do think printing was rather new in 1517, though I don’t know if literacy was any higher in the early 16th century than in earlier ones.
In any case, a very interesting and equilibrated essay!
The relationship between islam and christianity is even more complicated than that. Don’t tell the muslims, but islam is basically a christian heresy that was not adequately suppressed. Many of the early mosques were repurposed churches, and some other islamic practices may be relics of early christian practices. It’s possible that some of that came full circle and found its way back into christendom.
I’ve been reading up on Rosicrucianism, and like the theory that it was a sort of imaginary Protestant answer to the Jesuits. Yates thinks Dee was involved, but that’s speculative.
Slithy Toves: ” if you’re going to start a new religion – even if you’re pretending it’s an old one – you really should be mining other faiths for good ideas instead of trying to cast it all off in the name of authenticity.”
One common method is to start from within another religious group, then (perhaps as a result of losing a factional fight) hive off into a separate group.
Phutatorius, I notice that the Wikipedia entry for “Enneagram of Personality” connects that emblem to Evagrius of Pontus (who listed eight deadly sins, not just seven) as well as 1 / 7 =.1428571. and the enneagram is drawn by connecting points 1-4-2-8-5-7-1 (plus the triangle).
Very interesting JMG, whoever isn’t reading your blogs is definitely missing out!
May I just ask, Northwind Grandma, I haven’t seen any comments of late, if you’re reading this, can you just reply, so we know you’re still reading, if not commenting?
Regards, Helen in Oz
BeardTree, Christianity generally flourishes best under persecution, so that may be part of the mojo, too.
Aldarion, France is right across the Mediterranean from the westernmost provinces of Ottoman North Africa, so it’s considerably less sheltered than Saxony. Muslim pirates raided French commerce in the Mediterranean all the time, and the Ottomans besieged Malta in 1565; the pressure from the Ottomans was fierce enough that the French monarchy began cutting deals with the Ottomans in 1525. As for printing, it depends on what you mean by “new” — woodblock prints of single sheets date back in Europe into the 1300s, whole books were already being printed via woodblock in Germany by 1400, and movable type (invented in China in 1041) was in use in Europe by 1439 at the latest. By 1517, everyone in urban southern and central Europe but the very oldest had grown up with printed documents as an ordinary part of life. That drove a dramatic increase in literacy, since access to written materials was the main bottleneck in the manuscript period — once printing came in, hornbooks (the basic European tool for learning the alphabet) could be and were mass-produced, along with cheap broadsheets and other low-cost popular literature.
Weilong, funny. Muslims like to say that Christianity is a distorted version of their religion, you know.
Ambrose, Dee’s involvement is speculative, granted, but one of the original Rosicrucian manifestoes prominently displays his magical emblem, the Monas Hieroglypica, so it’s not baseless speculation by any means. One way or another, it didn’t stay imaginary for long!
“Islam went out of its way to have neither. What it had instead was holy scriptures that took precedence over everything else, a clergy whose role was simply to interpret and teach from the scriptures, and religious services that consisted of group prayers rather than sacramental rites.”
This also describes the first century Jewish synagogue, which had developed as a form of worship operating independently from the Temple in Jerusalem. The New Testament indicates that many worship practices in the synagogue were carried over to the early Christian church. Perhaps Jewish synagogue worship practices also influenced Islam. The Protestant Reformers viewed themselves as returning to the earlier synagogue-style worship that was present before the adoption of Christian sacramental practices in later centuries, not as copying Islam.
When I was in my mid-twenties, I became hugely influenced in my budding new spirituality by Wicca, both its theology and its trappings. Once I felt ready to outgrow the belief in a “Devil” who rebelled against Goodness and became the source of All Suffering and Evil in the Universe, I adopted the Wiccan faith wholesale. As I continued to grow and progress in my search for truth, I came to see the contribution of “Mother Goddess” to my spiritual understanding of the Universe as as the Feminine Polarity of the One Divine Spiritual Power. With that realization, I saw that my new spiritual dinner-platter looked a lot more like quasi-Catholic Church Christianity with some side-helpings from Wicannate neo-paganism and Buddhist philosophy instead.
In both Russia and China currently, neo-liberal progressive values have taken thorough root among young people. Russia positions itself as the defender of traditional Christian values, yet the divorce rate is above 50% and population decline is becoming a severe problem. In China the issue is similar, with the twist that traditional Confucian values of family and filial piety are being undermined instead. It appears most if not all historical religious and cultural traditions world-wide are succumbing and that this will become one of the major themes under discussion in future years as population continues to fall and civilization itself is threatened.
My personal layperson opinion is that during the late eighth century BC, an elite monotheistic priestly faction formed, getting support from Kings Hezekiah & Josiah. They claimed that the Israelites had turned away from the religion of their fathers. Almost no one outside the elite classes believed them, and continued following the traditional religion until after the exiles and their descendants returned.
Josiah’s reforms failed so hard that according to biblical archaeologist William Dever, there was a cache of idols in Jerusalem itself dating to the late seventh century BC.
Ken #8: “The mainstream Protestant churches with their single effeminate god feel like small beer to me in comparison… They kept the Baby and threw out the Mother with the bath water!” I think because Protestants don’t revere the Virgin Mary, their images of Jesus tend to be very effeminate. Catholic images of Jesus are more masculine, and Orthodox images strikingly so; some icons even show Jesus holding a sword: https://athosicons.com/product/jesus-christ-with-sword/
JMG #30: “Neopaganism is just another radical Protestant offshoot…” I’m always amused by moderns who put “Born-Again Pagan” bumper stickers on their cars, and then talk about the importance of “forgiveness.” You won’t find that concept in the Norse sagas where women calmly wash their hands and hair in the blood of their slain enemies. I had a supervisor who considered herself a pagan; she disliked Columbus Day because the Spanish colonists were cruel to the Native Americans. I thought of asking her if the Aztecs, or Vikings, were any less violent toward the people they raided and conquered, but of course I kept quiet since she was my boss.
“And also how we managed to produce our own homegrown imitation of Islam in upstate New York, and why it quickly migrated to the deserts of the Southwest.”
“Steve, that is indeed a neat phrasing. The thought of the Latter-Day Saints as our Muslims, though, works only if you see them as the American Shi’a in contrast to the Protestant Sunnah.” – John
I was raised Mormon. Joseph was compared to Muhammad in his lifetime, and he was proud of it. I can definitely see the similarities between Muhammad and Joseph Smith: the emphasis on prophets, the new scripture, the polygamy, the warfare, etc. One thing to note is that the split within Mormonism mirrors the split within Islam very closely. I would consider the mainstream ‘Brighamite’ LDS church in Salt Lake City to be the Mormon equivalent of the Sunni Muslims, because they believed Joseph left no successor and so the Quorum of the 12 chose Joseph’s friend Brigham to be the new prophet and the community put it to a vote.
On the other hand, the RLDS church (Now the Community of Christ) in Independence Missouri is similar to Shia Muslims, because they believed that the mantle of authority should be passed on through the Prophet’s family. One interesting thing to note is how the split was divided along the issue of polygamy as well- the Quorum of the 12 and Brigham Young were in Joseph’s inner circle and they were initiated into the secret polygamous order, while the RLDS church was mainly headed Joseph’s wife Emma and her son Joseph Smith III, both despised polygamy and even denied that Joseph ever practiced it.
When you think about it, the splitting mechanism makes sense. When a prophet dies, the two groups with the strongest claims to authority will typically be the prophet’s close buddies and the prophet’s family.
There are many other similarities between Islam and Mormonism: the self-serving nature of Joseph’s purported revelations, both faced persecution and were driven from place to place, both were assassinated, the militarism and conquest, the theocracy, the list goes on and on.
RUSSIA, UKRAINE, AND ISLAM
JMG, I hope all is well with you‼️
It has crossed my mind more than once, in the conflict of Russia vs Ukraine for the last couple years, that Russia, namely Putin, is petrified that Islam is coming Russia’s way in any serious measure. European NATO doesn’t seem to give two flying f___s whether Islam takes over Europe, evidenced by the way Islam is sneaking in by way of Islamic migrants. Unless European Christians en masse slaughter Islamic migrants within the next year or two, game over: Islam wins Europe.
On the other hand, Russians, at least according the vibes I get from Putin, care deeply that Islam not make additional inroads by way of Islamic migrants who are intent on inveigling themselves into Russian society (or by any other means). I think it bothers Russians a lot that they can’t make Europe care whether or not Islam inveigles itself into Europe. Europeans appear to not care if Islam is Europe’s regional religion by 2050.
I think that Americans THINK that Putin is solely focusing on thwarting the NATO coming from the direction of Western Europe. Rather than fearing NATO per sé, it is just as likely that Putin is trying to thwart Islam coming into Russia in the shadow caused by Western Europe. Putin’s buffer zone, formerly called Ukraine, is looking weaker by the minute. Thar ‘she’ blows, meaning “Thar ‘Ukraine’ blows!” If Putin were to put his Thinking Cap on, he would see that Ukraine’s Christians would do good to furnish the buffer zone against Islam and “save Russia.” Putin needs to keep Ukraine somewhat strong and somewhat Christian to be able to restrain or neutralize the Islam that is ever sneaking its way towards, and into, Russia. If Putin weakens Ukraine anymore than he already has, he opens wide the door where Islam simply walks in through the gates where Islamists rent a house and make themselves at home anywhere in Russia, thereby destroying Russia’s and Ukraine’s Christianity from inside out.
But Putin is not thinking straight. If Putin were thinking straight, he would see that making peace with Ukraine FAST is the order of the day🕊️— as in “Don’t delay!” — else his precious Russia will get switched into Islam and out of Christianity, probably within the next twenty years. If Islamic martyrs are anything, they are stealthy.
I recently got reminded of The Evil Eye. The longer Putin waits to make a deal with Ukraine, the more The Evil Eye has Russia in its sights.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🕊️
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
I realize this is not a very profound observation, but reading about the similarities between Protestantism and Islam just reinforced to me on a visceral level how devoid of enchantment they both feel: all Abrahamic religions really. From the stark buildings ( I hadn’t even known about the protestant locked doors) to the condemning of earthly life and the emphasis of it just being a trial for an eternal punishment or reward to nature as an opponent, it all feels so cold and life damning.
I suppose I am really agnostic, but with a strong leaning to polytheism and an enchanted, magic world. There is a particular Goddess, or spirit, whom I honor, and who I feel has helped me profoundly, not that she is the only spirit there is.
Sometimes the Abrahamic religions feel to me that they treat the earth as as much of a lifeless entity as the materialists do.
This is probably the wrong time/place to express this feeling. I am not here to rain on someone else’s parade, but the feeling just struck me so strongly. Please feel free to delete my comment if you feel it inappropriate.
Stephen
Yes,the Chinese Protestants endured and yet increased under intense oppression, multiplying in secret meetings and house churches, no beautiful buildings, elaborate liturgies, incense, art work, vestments, monasteries, esoteric higher teachings – just prayer, fellowship, simple singing, Bible, preaching, manifestations and gifts of the Holy Spirit, a living Lord and Savior Jesus, God the Father, the aid, comfort, love, and help of fellow believers., a reliance on the simple Christian basics by ordinary people who met the Living God.,by saying yes to the Lord Jesus..
An idea I have encountered in protestant circles is that Constantine’s legitimizing of and support of Christianity weakened and corrupted Christianity by giving it worldly power.
David Ritz #24, re the Chinese fleet of exploration–
That massively squares a circle for me. I’ve seen a couple of clues that strongly imply the Chinese made it as far as Mesoamerica and visited there for awhile:
1) My dad and I were visiting the Chicago Institute of Art a couple of decades ago, and there was an exhibit of Aztec ceramic pieces. These ceramics were clearly about Aztec subjects, drawn in the style of the codices and other art we’ve seen. They were also, quite clearly, made of porcelain in the quintessential Chinese style.
2) During my studies of the Maya (I was researching a novel about 12-21-2012 but never finished writing it), I discovered a mesoamerican gadget called the ‘nepohualtzintzin’. It’s an abacus, based on the base-20 numbering system.
The Mongols through mastery of a horse back based warfare built a huge land based empire. I once read a description of Europeans beginning in the 1400’s having mastered ship and gun powder based warfare being sea borne “Mongol”:conquerors. building huge sea based empires. In the following centuries.
This essay tracks with my own limited investigations. More broadly it always seemed to me that Protestants liked the hardline Levantine theology of the Old Testament but still had to keep Christ around. That Islam is theologically closer to Judaism than either are to Christianity (any Rabbi or Imam will laugh in your face if you insist that YHWH is really three separate beings that are also one as the majority of Christians are want to do, for example) also helps to explain why Protestant movements were primed to admire and emulate the Islamic world in their own way. That the Northern European protestant states are so ready to accept Islam in recent years is another example of this odd affinity I suspect.
Very good stuff.
Cheers,
JZ
The Iconoclasm of the Byzantium empire circa 700 AD came exactly with the high-water mark of Arab Islamic military success: second siege of Constantinople and the conquest of Hispania (Al-Andulus). The Iconoclasm of the early Reformation circa 1530 AD came exactly with the high-water mark of Ottoman military success: alliance with France, invasion of Hungary (first time ever that Catholic lands were invaded by Muslims armies) and a fleet that can hold its own with the European fleets. Both Iconoclasm movements abated as the the Arab and the Ottoman threat receded.
According to Western historians neither were influenced by the strict Islamic prohibition of pictures and statues…it was just all a coincidence 😉
One correction: Zoroastrian is NOT the oldest monotheism of the Middle East (where else have monotheism appeared??), the Assyrian clearly believed in only Assur whose symbol the Zorostrians appropriated, so that at least is older but Monotheism is an integral aspect of Semitic religion: each city in Sumer worshiped ONE god, only when these cities are gathered under one king do we see a pantheon in the capital, the same in the Nile river cities where they worship a SINGLE god in each city before empire builders gather all the gods under one roof (19th Dynasty dumped the silly Amun-Ra and went back to Ra only faster than a Greek priest painting an Icon!)…that’s different from worshiping multiple deities as other non-Semitic people do, something to think about 🙂
@Prizm #48
Recently I attended a conference of Buddhist and Christian clergy in memory of an eremitic nun who combined Buddhism and Christianity. I scoffed at the whole idea beforehand, but I was completely wrong. It appears that one may successfully combine any religious traditions and practices if they are genuinely beneficial for oneself and for the world. The nun took all the meditative and esoteric practices of the Orient and fused them with her Christian faith, with amazing results. Her remote hermitage was spectacularly beautiful, and all the wildlife in the area seemed tame, even the insects. The event itself was truly magical, and it reduced me to tears, in fact my eyes are moist now as I write. It was clear to me that this eccentric Christian hermit, who mastered Buddhist meditation, chi gung, and Chinese calligraphy, achieved a very high level of holiness in her life, and that she dwelt constantly in the company of angels.
@ Ambrose #58: I liked the scene at the end of Jodorowsky’s “The Holy Mountain” where he bowls the enneagram down a hill like a giant cheese-wheel.
Thanks JMG for another very interesting essay.
A couple of decades ago I heard the late sociologist Johan Galtung present more or less the same hypothesis, noting that Martin Luther himself was involved in producing the ever printed edition of the Qur’an, even providing the preface!
(JG was also an avid reader of Toynbee and, having grown up in Lutheran Norway, benefited from the outsider perspective of his Japanese wife. Ecosophians might find his 2008 article “The fall of the US empire — and then what?” interesting as well: https://www.transcend.org/tms/2008/10/a-must-read-the-fall-of-the-u-s-empire-and-then-what/)
On a related note, it seems to me there’s similar process of stimulus diffusion affecting Western Christianity today, from what can vaguely be termed the neo-religious landscape of the West. With so many people having had Buddhism/Hinduism/New Age/neo-paganism open their eyes to the reality and presence of spiritual entities other than the Trinity, scholarship showing that Judaism as late as the second temple period – and early Christians as well – had a basic world view chock-full not just of spirits, but even _gods_ other than Jahve, is breaching centuries of monotheistic dogma.
The other gods? Neither more nor less than the popular pagan deities of the time, considered by the Jews to be very real and quite powerful, having been assigned by Jahve to rule over the other peoples in the aftermath of the Babel event (Deuteronomy 32:8–9; the “sons of Israel” found in most translations should read “sons of God” according to the oldest manuscripts). ultimately subservient to Him, and destined to be destroyed by Him due to their misrule (see, most strikingly, Psalm 82: “God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods.”)
As for Christianity, there is a deluge of traditionally “puzzling” passages in the New Testament whose interpretation becomes rather straightforward if one allows the thought that Jesus and his disciples, not least St. Paul, were as steeped in this world-view as every other Jew at the time. Take, for example, the Great Commission of Matthew 28: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you”. Consider that the original audience might have heard this as something like “the authority of the other sons of God is no more – their nations have been liberated from their deities (in accordance with Psalm 82), and all the peoples are invited to join the new nation of God, ruled by the Lord Jesus Christ, through baptism and discipleship!“
That thought certainly blew my mind. Anyone interested can check out the books and podcasts of the late Michael Heiser (“Naked Bible podcast”) and Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick (“Lord of Spirits”).
Those interested can check out the books and podcasts of the late Michael Heiser (“Naked Bible podcast”) and Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick (“Lord of Spirits”).
Hi JMG,
A great essay. What do you think about Dr Jay Smith’s theory that Muhammad did not exist and was an invention of later Caliphs to justify their founding of a new religion. Dr Jay has an interesting theory that Muhammad (He who is praiseworthy) son of Abdullah (Servant of God) was originally a title of Jesus (and some Jewish Exilarchs). His contention is that Muawiyah and the initial Caliphs of the Umayyad Caliphate were non-Trinitarian Christians. (He uses coins struck by Muawiyah with crosses on them as proof of his theory). It was later misappropriated by the Abbasid Caliphate to create a new religion. This means that Islam was originally a Christian heresy before becoming a religion.
As someone living in an Islamic country, I see Islam as a very legalistic religion. Yes, I see a lot of parallels between Evangelical Protestantism and Islam.
JMG: What you said about Christianity and Islam reminded me of the Dark Twin/Light Twin you found running throughout the world’s mythologies.
“I don’t see religion, as most Christians and Muslims do, as something handed down once and for all by the one and only one god, but as something that human individuals and cultures create in response to their own inevitably limited and partial experiences of a transcendent Divine.”
The distinction you draw is a sharp one at first glance, yet the more deeply I ponder it the more blurred it seems. I expect we can agree that it’s natural to conceive of the Divine as somehow embodying a sort of summation of all positive qualities. Now, here’s where the blur starts: unless one views personality, agency and volition as negative qualities, they necessarily clamour for inclusion in the concept alongside those splendours that tend to be viewed as impersonal; and this in turn can lead to the idea of stuff being “handed down” by a volitional Divine. Whether one calls the result a top-down revelation, or calls it a bottom-up cultural creation in response to experiences of the Divine, depends in which direction one likes to look, and that, in turn, depends on one’s temperament rather than on one’s theology, but of course the view is bound, either way, to be limited and partial.
A marvelous essay, confirmed by the liveliness of the discussion it has sparked.
But one point puzzles me. The Jews in Babylon were immersed in an alien culture and saw the Persian takeover at first-hand: and upon their return, they were beholden to and on some level administered by the Persian empire. Early Christians lived among practitioners of the Mystery religions and took part in a civil life leavened by the cults’ ideas. All this “fits” with your thesis.
But when you get to the resemblance of Protestantism to Islam, you acknowledge that the societies which turned protestant were relatively far removed from contact with the Ottomans. What, then, was the vehicle of the influence? Is there anything in the writings of Luther, for example, which indicates he had any awareness of the tenets and practices of Islam? The kind of awareness, that is, that could actually affect him, as distinct from a few factoids about remote parts of the world. I am not asserting that he lacked such awareness but I am not informed about it, and would need to learn about it before concluding that the similarity of the faiths was the fruit of influence instead of the result of somehow parallel situations.
“BeardTree, Christianity generally flourishes best under persecution, so that may be part of the mojo, too.”
Christianity is apparently growing the fastest in Iran of all places, a Shia Islamic theocracy.
https://lightmagazine.ca/from-dreams-to-reality-the-miraculous-growth-of-christianity-in-iran/
https://medium.com/hope-youre-curious/iran-the-worlds-fastest-growing-christian-evangelical-community-9f887bacf13a
Ha, this was great, tracing the diffusion down to Ancient Babilon and Zoroastrian religion really shows how thin a veneer even some of the „traditional“ truths, are. Not to speak of the completely modern myths. As per the terminology; the Christian myths with serial numbers filed down.
Please excuse me, being raised as a traditional catholic, and lapping it up at the time, I absolutely love the perspective this gives. I am thinking about the communion, done right it is real. But am I also right, that it is firstly an invention, secondly it was adapted trough the ages. Surely translating it into modern languages counts as adaptation. There is a connection, and it is being maintained and has some good strength built up, but it is just a ritual that got adapted over time. A different ritual meant to build, maintain and use a connection could have as much power.
Oh, this gives certain passages in Dion Fortune‘s and Levi’s writings so much sense.
Best regards,
Marko
Wasn’t Sikhism a melding of Islam and Hinduism? If so, do you think there may be similar melding of diverse religions like a Monotheist religion and a Polytheistic one. I know about Roman Catholicism being Pagan and Christian. But I am curious if there are others, and how do they fare?
About Protestant churches -However, I have noticed with my husband’s Methodist church, they have more Catholic like rituals – such as weekly Communion. During Easter, they had the Stations of the Cross, Walking a Labyrinth, Holy Thursday with feet washing, and Lenten suppers. I asked my husband about that, since he comes from a Mennonite background, if that is usual in Protestantism. He said no.
Is there a movement in mainstream Protestantism for more rituals?
The United Methodist Church split last spring over Gay issues. My husband’s church has remained neutral on it, mostly. I have noticed the local Baptist church has festooned with the various versions of the Rainbow flag, and huge signs of Welcome, Inclusive.
It seems that Protestantism is transmuting into something else.
HI JMG – Can you comment on the accuracy of the translation of King James version of the Bible? Several of my relatives are sure that the KJV is the only true word of God, they seem rather fixated, actually. I get that maybe they don’t, or refuse, to understand that there is a lot of symbolic content, they are a group of literalists. Thanks, Dana
An interesting and plausible argument… though one thing that would make it more convincing is evidence that the northern Europeans were dazzled by Ottoman charisma. The reformers certainly seemed to be aware of the Turks as a great power and an enemy of their enemies, but how much did they know about Islam? As you say, Protestantism took off at a conspicuous distance from the Ottoman frontlines, but I would expect that distance to also diminish Ottoman influence. At any rate, it seems like a different situation from Zoroastrian influence on the Jews – there the contact was direct. For that matter, it is also different from what seems like an almost undeniable example of Muslim stimulus diffusion – the iconoclastic movement that shook the Byzantine Empire, then directly engaged with the Caliphate.
Not to say that this discredits your suggestion, of course. I’m not sure what else explains the timing of the Reformation; if it were something intrinsic to either Christianity at sufficient distance from Rome or to northern European cultures, then it is indeed not clear why it did not happen much sooner. Still, I’m left wondering as to what northern Europeans at the time actually knew and thought about the powerful yet remote Ottomans and their religion.
I am reminded, by the way, that many medieval Christian stories depicted Muslims as idolatrous pagans. Surely that understanding would’ve sent a very different stimulus! But again, I’m not sure how influential that representation was, especially by the 16th century.
I always admired the Quakers. The ones I have met seemed connected in a way other P sects weren’t. Perhaps they retain their mojo by practicing the fourth power of the Sphinx.
An excellent article. The central thesis is quite astute and well supported.
However, I do wish to pick a few nits from some sections of your much abbreviated religious history. Summarizing so many centuries in so few words is no easy task, so in no way is this intended as an attack on your scholarship.
My reading of Patai et al has left me with the impression that the number of goddesses worshiped by the ancient Hebrews numbered not two but three, and that their shrines were originally located not on the peak of the Temple Mount but rather below, at the point where the Kidron valley intersects with the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives, the place called Gethsemane in the Christian gospels. The Canaanite-Hebrew triplicate goddess of Astarte-Asherah-Anat corresponded to the archetype of Persephone-Demeter-Hecate found in Greek myth and like those Greek three, the Hebrew triple goddess was also associated with the underworld – Sheol – which is why her/their shrine was below. YHWH is a solar god, which is why his shrine was located atop the Mount, aligned with the sunrise of the solstice.
While I differ on these minor details, overall I applaud your excellent thesis!
The time of the Rise of Islam was unique indeed. Not only did you have two long-lasting empires fighting each others to an especially bitter end (and all for nothing), but a Volcanic eruption in Iceland led to a couple of years of strange weather (The Sun shined, yet it gave off no heat and little light) and yersinia pestis ravaging both empires.
In addition, there were a couple of Arab tribes that were basically holding the border in The Middle East – the Ghassanids and the Lakhmids. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the two tribes got together, smoothed out their differences, and learned that their neighbors had become paper tigers. Add in the Ghassanids’ Monophysite heresy (tell that to the Copts), and all you need is a charismatic leader to come/be placed up front.
I think the enneagram is a useful tool for looking at human personality interactions. It’s helped me some anyway, whether it is from Sufi or Christian monastics. Or made up sometime thereafter.
Tortoise, yes, I’m aware of that. My suggestion is that the example of Islam was what sent the Reformers digging through the resources of their own faith to find something comparable.
Mister N, it’s a common discovery. Real originality in religious matters is exceedingly rare, and most people who think they’re being original are simply cobbling together a bunch of fashionable themes from pop culture. I don’t exempt myself from that rule, btw — I don’t claim to be original at all in my religious beliefs. I just choose older sources, some of which pop culture has never heard of.
Karalan, as the world’s first (as far as we know) global civilization slides further down the arc of decline and fall, expect more of that. It’s a normal part of the process.
Patrick, that’s at least possible, but I’d like to see some evidence. That cache of idols sounds like business as usual according to Patai.
Yavanna, exactly. It’s very much a Christian notion that being oppressed makes you morally superior to your oppressors. I recall the remarkable play by Peter Shaffer, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, about Pizarro’s conquest of the Incas; Shaffer describes the conflict, if I recall correctly, as “the collision of two vast and joyless powers.” It’s a phrase that could be applied to many such struggles in the real world.
Enjoyer, fair enough!
Northwind, I think it’s a little more complex than that, because Putin has more than one threat to deal with. Yes, he has to concern himself with Islam, but he also has to worry about NATO, and making peace with Ukraine now on any terms acceptable to NATO would leave Russia vulnerable to further NATO attempts at proxy wars and the like in the years ahead. He does have another option that would solve both problems: conquest. If he keeps on grinding Ukraine down, it’s quite possible that this summer or autumn Ukraine’s defenses will collapse, Russia’s army can push through all the way to the borders of Poland and Hungary, and Putin can install a government of his choosing in Kiev and invite a few million of his good friends from North Korea to settle in the more depopulated regions. I suspect that’s the endgame he has in mind.
Stephen, it’s a fairly common feeling these days in many circles, and may be pointing the way toward the new religious sensibility I’ve been talking about for a while now.
BeardTree, the interesting thing is that most of the esoteric Christians I know agree with that analysis, and hold that Constantine’s actions were the greatest disaster Christianity ever suffered.
John, it surprises me a little that more of the Reformers didn’t go Unitarian and reject the Trinity altogether — it seems logical enough.
Assurbanipal, hmm. So you’d consider the Enuma Elish, with its robust portrayal of a pantheon of gods, and the rest of historic Mesopotamian literature to be purely a late product, and would assign a similar status to the triads and enneads worshipped in individual cities in Egypt? That’s an interesting suggestion, but I’d want to see some evidence.
Eliot, I wasn’t aware of Luther’s involvement in the first Western translation of the Quran, but I just looked it up and you’re quite correct. As for the current round of stimulus diffusion, of course — the story of the immense impact of Asian culture and spirituality on the West has yet to be written, and of course the process is far from over. As a polytheist myself, of course, I tend to think of the god of Israel as just one deity among many, who was assigned the role of creator of everything via the sort of “metaphysical flattery” Alfred North Whitehead discussed, but your mileage may vary.
Felix, I’d have to look into it sometime. Until then, I don’t consider myself qualified to judge.
Patricia M, good! Each one is the other’s dark twin.
Robert, ah, but I don’t accept the claim that it’s “natural” to conceive of the divine along the lines of Anselm’s famous argument. That’s a learned habit in Abrahamic societies, but I don’t recall anyone ever claiming that Zeus or Woden was the summation of all positive qualities, say. Most of the world’s religions do not postulate this for their deities, and so the claim that it’s anything but a quirk among one particular group of faiths can’t be sustained. While it’s entirely reasonable to suppose that gods have volition or something corresponding to it, all one has to do is look at different religions claiming to worship the same deity to note the scale of the human contribution. For example, George Fox and John Calvin claimed to worship the same god, and established sects based on their religious experience, but it’s hard to think of any two descriptions of deity more different than those of the Quakers and the Calvinists!
Gray Hat, why, yes, there’s quite a bit of evidence that Luther in particular was powerfully influenced by Islam, and in fact he and Melanchthon played central roles in the first published European translation of the Quran — to which they each wrote a preface. (I didn’t know that until Eliot mentioned it in comment #76 above, or I would have made reference to it in the post.) So I think an even stronger case can be made for Muslim influence on Protestantism than I realized earlier.
David, well, there you are! Another good example — and also another good example of the fact that political power is a disaster for religions. It’s hard to think of a country that gives more support to its established religion than Iran, and yet people are flocking to Christianity instead…
Marko, the crucial point, when adapting and modifying a ritual, is to make sure that you don’t discard the things that give it power. Unfortunately the current Mass (the Novus Ordo mass) wasn’t created by people who cared about that, which is why so many people find it so unsatisfying.
Neptunesdolphins, the Sikh faith isn’t quite a melding — it’s a fine example of stimulus diffusion from two sources, drawing on both Islam and Hinduism to create a third thing that’s distinct from either. As for your husband’s Methodist church, hmm! That’s fascinating to hear. Does it seem to be increasing attendance?
Dana, it’s far and away the most beautiful translation, and of course it’s been hallowed by four centuries of tradition, but it’s not very accurate. Here’s an evangelical Christian commentary on them:
https://superiorword.org/errors-in-the-king-james-version/
Daniil, you might want to glance over the links I included in my response to Gray Hat above. The evidence is apparently quite strong that the Reformers, and Luther in particular, knew a great deal about Islam.
Justin, as I see it, their strength comes from their orientation to the ongoing presence of the divine rather than to a book.
Jeremy, interesting. I’ll have to reread Patai’s book; I may well have misremembered.
Dear Mr Greer
Do you think that something like the process you outline, which to some extent may be described as a kind of Islam envy could be behind western Europes current immigration policies? I know this is very different to the reformation, but the elites are behaving in a way that is difficult to comprehend. The population does not like it and they way they are going they could end up out of power.
>It’s hard to think of a country that gives more support to its established religion than Iran, and yet people are flocking to Christianity instead
Wait, what? What flavor of Christianity? Orthodox? Catholic? Protestant? Neapolitan?
@JMG
We don’t know all that much about Hezekiah’s beliefs (it could have been a religious centralization project), but I believe that Josiah was monotheistic because much of the Book of Deuteronomy was apparently written in the 520s BC, and the outspoken heno/monotheistic prophet Jeremiah became active shortly before the book of Moses was “discovered” in Solomon’s Temple, and died in Egypt decades before the Persians conquered Babylonia. I have trouble believing that the historical Jeremiah wasn’t an outspoken critic of polytheistic worship.
>in which every participant wrote their own personal scripture
Part of me would be amused and snickering while rolling on the floor at the opportunity to do that. Then the more cynical part of me would then tap me on the shoulder and say “Most people are at best mediocre at what they do and there’s a high chance that most scripture produced this way would be absolute manure, so get back up and stop snickering”
But you know, I’ve never thought about it – if I had the chance to rewrite the Bible what would a ground up rewrite of the thing look like? In general it’s a bad idea to rewrite from scratch, it’s better to take one module, look at what’s wrong with it, patch it and then do that module by module.
All the different threads you’re posting seem related to me. If decline of the west just means someone else will be top dog, while that is bruising to the ego, it doesn’t sound like what I always envision.—which is digging in the dirt with my bare hands for a turnip while avoiding the invading army who is trying to kill everyone.. iIn one of the threads you have going, could you describe what decline looks like please. No internet, fine. Being hunted down and killed, not so fine. I’d have to stock up on ammo in scenario two.
Upon thinking about it, the doors were probably locked to keep out the wolf man. (Of course that won’t stop a real lycanthrope.)
Agreed about the Quakers, orientation towards the ongoing presence of the Divine. That’s the way to do it.
Like @Stephen, I too get that same general feeling. In my experiences with Christianity, it seems we are supposed to adore the creator, but the creation itself is a second thought. At best it might be a source of wonder towards the creator, and we might be shepherds at best. But since we were given dominion (according to the theology) it leads to treating the world as a resource. This also ties into the enchantment and miracle continuum. A number of the people I know who have converted are cessationists. Basically, from what I gather, it means that people don’t receive the spiritual gifts from God very much anymore, and miracles are over. If that is the case, then why do it? It is why I don’t think that merely “accepting Jesus as savior” / baptism does much for a person, unless they follow through with some kind of program of spiritual development. The “read a bible, hear a sermon” approach doesn’t work for me. I’m not saying that to knock anyone. A lot of these people I really love. I’m close to my family, many of whom are religious in one way or another. The sacramental aspect is really a missing link, unless, as suggested the spirit of Boehme and Blake and Swedenborg can come through somehow. Man, I hope so. More imagination will pave the way for more gifts, miracles, i.e., enchantment.
Thanks for the reply JMG. I would also like to add a little anecdote if I may. My KJV literalists seem to be converting to Judaism, oddly. My SIL is an avid listener to a radio Rabbi, and last Yule season, the KJVs got together and lit a menorah. I have to admit to being somewhat mystified. – Dana
Regarding the Quakers, I’ll be brief; The local meeting of Friends (about half of whom were Phds employed by the nearby university) overwhelmingly supported Hilary Clinton in 2016. It wasn’t a hold you nose and vote sort of thing. So much for the Quaker peace testimony.
I had a history professor who once said protestantism was “throwing a man out of a tower and asking him to stop halfway down.” It seems to me that “sola scriptura” is a very shaky foundation to build a religion on. Without something like “holy tradition” to guide hermeneutics, you get either a fundamentalist reading where the text simply means what it says and thats it, or you get a liberal reading where it means different things to different people, which ultimately degrades into a loose anything goes spirituality where membership in religion becomes irrelevant. It just takes a couple centuries to get there (e.g why keep the nicene creed in a sola scriptura environment?). I believe this trend is reflected in modern american protestant movements, with evangelical churches preaching what i would call empty calorie spirituality on one side and churches that are essentially branches of the DNC with very little spiritual content at all on the other.
I do think there is and can be spiritual depth in protestantism, but ultimately it has to reinvent a kind of “holy tradition” because no one reads a text apart from social context. Theres also the major issue that the compilation of bible itself was done by the same “orthodox/catholic” church that protestantism rejects. Early Christianity doesnt look much like protestantism either. Perhaps this is my catholic sympathies, but things like marian devotion, use of images, veneration of saints, and strange sacramental type rituals (eating in graveyards – something pagans and jews frowned on to put it lightly) appear very early in the historical record. St. Paul clearly has influence from Hellenistic thought too. There are lines in his writings that are downright esoteric and “gnostic.” Talk of being caught up out of body in the third heaven and “spiritual bodies” which an occultist would likely recognize. Suffice to say, there isnt a “pure” bible that fell out of the sky with clear meanings in the 1st century.
Im certain that there are protestant thinkers who have addressed all this in very large books, but ive havent seen arguments from them yet that really get traction with me (its not something id seek out though either). Id be very interested to see a boehme/blake/henri corbin type protestantism would look like, but im not holding my breath. Outside the mystical Imaginal protestant Vision, It seems significantly more difficult to be a “scholarly” protestant after the critical scholarship and archeological discoveries of the last two centuries (much of which, ironically, was done by protestants) .To be fair, that probably hits all prophetic religions to varying degrees, but protestantism seems uniquely vulnerable given its insistence that it is a kind of refounding of an original christianity. Thats a lot easier to believe in 16th century germany than the 21st century! I feel like catholic orthodox churches on one hand and islam on the other have a more robust hermeneutical tradition that has more strength intellectually. As Origen said, referring to reading genesis without a hermeneutical background in his own time, “one must be rather simple to think there were days before the creation of the sun and earth.”
All that said, protestantism is surging in non western counties, and at the expense of islam and catholicism in some cases. Perhaps the critique i gave above of protestantism is an overly intellectual one, and the weaknesses i identified above are actually strengths in a social sense. A holy book that says what it means with a simple hermeneutics that isnt intellectualized may be powerful draws. This works better in the literate environment we have too. Some muslim thinkers in the past identified non-intellectual simplicity was a strength of their own religion. Ibn Rushd/Avveroes thought islam was Aristotle for thr masses. Maybe intellectual, sacramental, and theurgical persons such as myself are just tall blades of grass to be cut by the simplicity of prophetic religions of the book without any frills. One ‘catholic’ i know goes to evangelical services because they make her “feel better” than catholic mass. Maybe the intellectual basis of these things doesn’t matter much at all and thats one of the reasons why islamic-protestant type ideas have been so successful across the modern literate world. I feel like on a purely intellectual level the case for either is weaker than their large numbers of believers would suggest.
I would like to add my shallow thoughts on the causes of the reformation to the soup of ideas here:
I posit that the Protestant wave followed a transformation of economy. Technology, process and economic expansion in Germany and the Low Countries began to change. Part of the changes may have something to do with the absorption of expelled Spanish Jews, but certainly the human venture was in fast growth mode and the church, as it was then, would have been a governor, if not brake, on the arguably positive changes that were in the works.
I don’t disagree that the Ottoman expansion had its effects (it just occurred to me the question – is the footrest called an ottoman as an insult?) just that my own contemporary observations appear to reveal how techno-economic changes in society affect the religion(s) of the land.
Here in the US, Christianity or all flavors has become a farce of a farce. Full service coffee bars and sermons delivered from a full theatrical stage backed by rock bands typify rhe successful Protestant church. To my mind interpretation, the morality of religion is following the successful convenience, drive-thru “coffee and circuses” greater economic trends. Folk doesn’t even dress well to congregation.
Suck, slurp and snack through the service.
It all looks so much like the rest of the retail and entertainment landscape.
As rainbow theme promotion has increasingly become monetarily and status rewarded, some churches have oriented their doctrine to “queer inclusiveness.”
Maybe I am veering off into the weeds here, but what I see is that religion is a shape shifting landscape and one that follows social changes created by economic changes. I suspect many of the historical shifts also happened for economic shift factors.
I’m going to cogitate more on the topic. Thanks for introducing it.
@ JMG in a comment reply thread:
“You might like Edgar Pangborn’s Davy, in which the reigning church of deindustrial eastern North America has forbidden the faithful to have anything to do with anything that might contain atoms, since everyone knows that those blow up.”
Any resemblance to a currently reigning church of industrial North America and “the West”, which has forbidden the faithful to have anything to to with anything that might emit CO2**, since everyone knows that CO2 unnaturally warms the earth and attacks her climate… is, presumably, entirely coincidental…
** not forgetting this category includes every being on this earth that lives and breathes… 😉
In relation to your fascinating thesis, I might add that there is another layer that might be considered here.
The link below contains one treatment (of the many available) of the argument that the theory and practice of the free market originated in the Islamic world, long before the events detailed in the book Max Weber wrote, crediting “The Spirit of Capitalism” to “The Protestant Ethic”.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210717172042/https://areomagazine.com/2021/07/02/crescent-capitalism-islam-and-the-birth-of-the-free-market/
Chesterton often derided Calvinism’s predestination as a Muslim belief in fatality. He had a bigger point than he knew. That’s very big in his case.
@Northwind,
I don’t think Putin is as worried about Islam as you think he is. The Russian federation borders many fully islamic countries to its south, so islam potentially filtering in from Europe via Ukraine is of minor concern. On top of that the Russian federation has several countries within it that are primarily Islamic, these include; Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Dagestan, Adygeya, Chechnya, Ingushetia, Northern Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachayevo-Cherkessia.
From what I understand all these countries and populations are well integrated in to the Russia federation and there is a degree of mutual acceptance that we would do good to admire here in the US.
The last big problem that Russian ( and Putin) had with one of these islamic republics was back in the 90’s when the CIA cooperated with the Whabi forces and money from the gulf states to ignite an uprising in Chechnya. This resulted in 2 brutal wars that the Russians eventually won. Over time the Russian rebuilt Grozny ( the capital of Chechnya) and relations have improved to the point where the leader of Chechnya is best buddies with Putin and his special forces troops are at the tip of the spear in the Ukraine.
Many have speculated that if Persia wasn’t conquered by th Muslim Arabs in the mid-7th Century, it may have eventually become Nestorian Christian:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_East
In Hugh Kennedy’s “The Great Arab Conquests”, the author notes that on the verge of the Arab invasion of Iran, the capital Ctesiphon was already mostly Jewish or Nestorian Christian, not Zoroastrian.
Luther’s comments make the case this much stronger for me! And of course, he and Melanchthon would not have been alone in this. If enough wannabe religious reformers and their supporters feared that Islam might be in some way superior to Christianity as it stands, it makes sense that this would influence their thinking in how to purify their own religion, consciously or otherwise.
It occurs to me that stimulus diffusion of this sort makes predictions about cultural or religious history particularly difficult. After all, there was a lot of luck involved in the rise of the Ottomans. It seems far from a foregone conclusion that a Turkic power would have broken into the Balkans as successfully as they did and then decisively resisted every attempt to dislodge it. But take that away, and the Reformation may end up looking very different, if it even happens (sure, the Church had plenty of problems and internal opponents, but up until then it had been able to crush them). So in the future as well, the temporal success of some power could set off unpredictable cultural shifts in neighbouring regions.
@Northwind Grandma #67 At some point between 2014 and 2022, I saw a Russian-speaking Muslim group agitating online for Muslims to volunteer to fight for Ukraine. Why? Because they believed it was a matter of time before Russia would be taken over by its (supposedly) steadily growing and increasingly devout Muslim population unless it conquered Ukraine, thus absorbing a sizeable Christian Slavic population that would prevent or delay the desired outcome. (But presumably after the takeover has been completed, conquering Ukraine would be the next objective.)
I admit I thought this was a very far-fetched notion, but a takeover from within is perhaps a more plausible scenario for a Muslim takeover in Russia than infiltration from Western Europe. After all, we do already have a sizeable native Muslim population and numerous Muslim immigrants, temporary or otherwise, from Central Asia. I’m not sure Putin is all that concerned with this, however. After all, many of his most loyal supporters and domestic allies are Muslims, and the government line is traditionalist multiculturalism, not Russian Orthodox exclusivity (even though the Orthodox Church is privileged as the “national” religion). I don’t think he expects Islam to take over here in the future, though, or it might make him change his tack.
It occurs to me that the Cayce people offer another model of engagement with Christianity–small study groups that pray, meditate, and read set texts together. It’s basically a Pietist model. The early Methodists did stuff like, read each other’s dream diaries. At their best, you get close-knit groups that support each other; at their worst, some leader takes the group off into some weird direction. (I know of examples.)
Scotlyn, in our own time, I have heard of store customers asking for products that didn’t have any chemicals in them.
Munnin “you get either a fundamentalist reading where the text simply means what it says and that’s it”
And yet, not even the most literalist fundy will affirm that Jesus married a sheep. What’s going on, of course, is that they too have a kind of implicit “holy tradition” (whence their Trinitarianism). They eschew creeds and set liturgies,but publish “statements of faith” and bulletins showing the order of worship. Everybody is supposed to get their doctrines from the Bible, as long as they arrive at the same answers the group does.
Phutatorius, isn’t this a difference between the programmatic and non-programmatic Quakers? The first group is the one that holds churchy-type services, that Nixon belonged to; the second is the one that holds traditional Quaker meetings where they just sit there until the Holy Spirit moves somebody to say something about immigration or capital punishment.
Anon, no, I see the encouragement of mass immigration by European elites as an attempt to stave off economic contraction. Left to itself, Europe would undergo a relatively steep economic and demographic decline, and the economic systems of the industrial West can’t handle anything but growth without coming apart. Bringing in a steady stream of immigrants to maintain the illusion of growth is one way to counter that. I think it’s a severely misguided one, but the alternative isn’t one the existing elites are willing to contemplate.
Patrick, all we have are the heavily revised documents that Ezra et al. put together after the end of the Babylonian captivity, and turned into the first draft of the Old Testament. Any statement about what was going on in the Kingdom of Judah before the captivity is speculative at best, as spin doctoring was far from an unknown art in those days.
Other Owen, Books of Shadows were edited, rather than completely rewritten, by each Wiccan. Some of them came out tolerably well, others are impressively absurd. If any of them survive for future historians to read, though, I fear for our posthumous reputation as a culture…
Elizabeth, we’re going to talk about that in great detail. Not even australopithecines dug in the dirt with their bare hands, though — that’s what digging sticks are for!
Justin, I think it was one of Mark Rogers’ Samurai Cat books that was dedicated to a guy who founded the Lycanthropi Christi, an organization dedicated to the promulgation of theological orthodoxy at science fiction conventions. Instead of locking the door, why not encourage the wolf man to come to services? His howling would be more musical than some worship bands…
Dana, that makes a fair amount of sense to me. If you’ve already defined your spirituality in terms of the Old Testament, as so many Protestants do, why not finish the job and head on down to the synagogue?
Phutatorius, the Society of Friends has walked a long road from the days of George Fox, and not an especially good one. My late wife, who was a passionate reader of English 19th century novels, told me about the acid portrayal of Quaker mill owners in the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell, a minister’s wife who knew the Midlands working classes very well. According to Gaskell — and Sara looked this up in historical sources, and it’s apparently true — Quaker mill owners were notorious for paying their workers starvation wages and trying to make them work as much unpaid overtime as possible, giving as their excuse that this would keep the workers from sinning.
Muninn, once a religion becomes intellectual, it’s already dying. The power of any faith comes from the passions it arouses and the transrational perceptions it makes possible. As for Protestantism outside the West, I think it’s popular for exactly the same reason that Orthodoxy has become popular here in the US — it’s unfamiliar, so makes room for new and unexpected possibilities.
Zhao, that’s also a factor, of course, but I don’t think it’s the whole picture by any means.
Scotlyn, Pangborn didn’t live to see that latter church, but you make a good point. Thank you for the link concerning Islam and capitalism — an intriguing addition to the thesis.
Javier, Chesterton was no fool!
David, that would make for an interesting alternative history…
Daniil, there are certain things that can be predicted in history, but not many. Most of history testifies to the role of the accidental and the absurd in human affairs.
Ambrose, I wonder if the Home Church model is headed that way. It’s a very common model in alternative spirituality.
Dana: “Several of my relatives are sure that the KJV is the only true word of God”
Oh dear God, I suspect the influence of Pastor Steven Anderson of Tempe, Arizona. You might try showing your relatives the original preface, in which the KJV translators welcome corrections by future translators:
https://distinguishingtruth.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/kjvpref.pdf
“… we are so far off from condemning any of their [earlier translators’] labours that travailed before us in this kind, either in this land, or beyond sea, either in King Henry’s time, or King Edward’s, (if there were any translation, or correction of a translation, in his time) or Queen Elizabeth’s of ever renowned memory, that we acknowledge them to have been raised up of God for the building and furnishing of his Church, and that they deserve to be had of us and of posterity in everlasting remembrance.” (p. 280)
“Yet for all that, as nothing is begun and perfected at the same time, and the latter thoughts are thought to be the wiser: so, if we building upon their foundation that went before us, and being holpen by their labours, do endeavour to make that better which they left so good; no man, we are sure, hath cause to mislike us; they, we persuade ourselves, if they were alive, would thank us. […] Of one and the same book of Aristotle’s Ethics there are extant not so few as six or seven several translations. Now if this cost may be bestowed upon the gourd, which affordeth us a little shade, and which to-day flourisheth, but tomorrow is cut down; what may we bestow, nay, what ought we not to bestow, upon the vine, the fruit whereof maketh glad the conscience of man, and the stem whereof abideth for ever? […] For by this means it cometh to pass, that whatsoever is sound already, (and all is sound for substance in one or other of our editions, and the worst of ours far better than their authentick Vulgar) the same will shine as gold more brightly, being rubbed and polished; also, if any thing be halting, or superfluous, or not so agreeable to the original, the same may be corrected, and the truth set in place.” (pp. 280-281)
“A man may be counted a virtuous man, though he have made many slips in his life, (else there were none virtuous, for in many things we offend all,) also a comely man and lovely, though he have some warts upon his hand, yea, not only freckles upon his face, but also scars. No cause therefore why the word translated should be denied to be the word, or forbidden to be current, notwithstanding that some imperfections and blemishes may be noted in the setting forth of it.” (pp. 281-282)
“Yet before we end, we must answer a third cavil and objection of theirs against us, for altering and amending our Translations so oft; wherein truly they deal hardly and strangely with us. For to whom ever was it imputed for a fault (by such as were wise) to go over that which he had done, and to amend it where he saw cause?” (p. 283)
Here endeth the lesson; vade in pacem.
Neptune’s Dolphin: “Wasn’t Sikhism a melding of Islam and Hinduism?”
I think of it more as a Hindu response to Islam. Their book, the Guru Granth Sahib, includes poetry by Kabir alongside Hindu poets, and the Khalsa (an inner group of initiated warriors) seems an obvious imitation of Islamic militancy.
Nizari Isma’ili tradition features a different mix in which, for example, Ali is regarded as the tenth avatar. In times past, the same people in northwest India may have been considered both Hindu and Muslim–or they would behave either as Hindus or as Muslims, depending on the circumstances–but the British insisted on firmer communal boundaries for legal reasons. A number of saints tombs are venerated by both religions, and it is unclear which religion the saint belonged to!
Phutatorius (no. 75), oh, interesting! I, uh, didn’t make it that far.
Tengu, one of my professors told the story of a Buddhist Studies scholar who died, and at her funeral, it was discovered that she had been both Jewish AND Buddhist. There was a big group from both religions who seemed surprised to see the others there.
Cicada Grove: “I was researching a novel about 12-21-2012 but never finished writing it”
It’s not too late!
@weilong #57, @Felix #77: This goes in the direction of Patricia Crone’s famous Hagarism thesis. I don’t think Islam is derived specifically or exclusively from Christianism, though it probably took up a lot of influences. Islam seems nearer to Judaism or, like Patricia Crone hypothesized, the religion of the Samaritans, or simply came out of the whirlpool of mainly monotheistic religions that agitated the whole Levant. She told me late in her life that she didn’t trumpet the hypothesis as much anymore because there was so little evidence to confirm it, but that she still thought it was stronger than the alternatives.
The first caliphs kept on printing coins not only with Christian and Zoroastrian symbols, but also with the images of the last Roman emperors and Sassanid shahs to have ruled Syria, apparently to maintain the trust of the population in the coinage. Only in the 690s did Mu’awiyah start minting coins that might be called Islamic, at the same time as he build the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, which contains the first inscription of the Islamic confession of faith. It is hard to know what exactly the Arabic conquerors of the 630s and 640s believed in (Crone has several more theses in “God’s Caliph”), but it is unlikely to have been simply a form of Christianity.
I am curious as to the thinking that Europe is somehow destined to become Islamic? The PEW research folks indicate that about 6% of Europeans were Muslim in 2020. Given that Europe in general has steadily become one of the most agnostic/atheist regions of the world (second only to China), how do you go from where they are now to all bowing down towards Mecca 5 times a day?
Is it not also plausible that, as a whole, Europeans are done with organized religions and that any Muslim immigrants, being in a significant minority, will tend to move toward the dominant culture’s agnosticism?
>it means that people don’t receive the spiritual gifts from God very much anymore, and miracles are over. If that is the case, then why do it?
And you have once again summoned the cynic in me. Because to some people, church is primarily a social club with religious themes. A place to have dinners, a place to meet your friends, a place to go on trips to amusement parks, sometimes concerts are held at church, they may even have a movie night. The pastor, such as he is, is a glorified captain on a cruise ship, concerned with keeping the infrastructure going but also making sure the passengers are having adequate amounts of clean wholesome fun. He is also obliged to give a sermon but it’s usually something everyone’s heard a million times before, no surprises and definitely nothing thought provoking. At least the ones who know how it all works. Sometimes you get some earnest fresh face guy who takes the religion part of the job too seriously and then he is gently nudged out.
This model from what I can tell is viable – some of these churches round my neck of the woods are huge affairs, would rival some of the biggest factories, if they were businesses.
There are some people who take it all a little too seriously (church ladies) but if you notice carefully, they are subtly shunted off to the side, given the equivalent of a containment board, the pastor is given the task of tanking the church ladies so their aggro doesn’t cause any real chaos.
Great place to hang out, if you’re a normie, I guess.
@Ambrose 109: the meeting I was referring to is a non-programmatic meeting. I know nothing about the programmatic Quakers — unless they’re called Unitarians.
One member of this particular meeting was a birthright Quaker and was actually in a heterosexual marriage(!) He told me once that his Quaker father had never forgiven FDR for getting us into WWII. These days I feel inclined to agree with his father.
>If any of them survive for future historians to read, though, I fear for our posthumous reputation as a culture
I think we have a sacred duty to preserve such things for posterity. Sacred, I tell you, sacred.
Fascinating! I never had oregano milkshake the first cluelet! Apologies AI bip! For the hiccups. It s likewise clear to me that pause Christianity, mostly Catholicism, had a big impact on the development of Fuji Shinko, which had messianic aspects, which had also been present, though not prominent, in Mahayana Buddhism. The founder Hasegawa Kakugyo, was born to a samurai family in Nagasaki. That was before Nagasaki became the sole port of trade with the West during the Edo period, but I think even in the late 16th century Christianity had a particularly strong influence in that area. It was a powerful enough force in Japanese society at that time to get banned severely. Kakugyo was hauled in by the Bakufu on suspicion of Christianity, which he denied and was released. They had their activities banned repeatedly. It was an extremely popular faith–enough to freak out the authorities. It promoted future hope, but at the same time emphasized Confucian virtues such as respect for authority and social harmony. Thus they simply complied with the bans and forged ahead more quietly.
>you get either a fundamentalist reading where the text simply means what it says and that’s it
The Bible, such as it exists, is not written in English or even Latin. It’s written in ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek. I’ve yet to find a fundie that has gone to the trouble of learning either. But it is a real prerequisite for following the text, exactly as it is written. Then you run into the ambiguity of reading something in a foreign language, where it’s not always certain what is was they actually meant. The opportunities for unintended chaos is always present. I wonder how fluent your average divinity student is, in at least reading the Bible, as it was originally written.
Following the scripture rigidly is always part of being a fundie but it’s not everything. There’s more to it than that. IMHO, it’s a desperate search for certainty, especially when chaos and ambiguity seem to surround. Like in this current era we’re in.
>Quaker mill owners were notorious for paying their workers starvation wages and trying to make them work as much unpaid overtime as possible, giving as their excuse that this would keep the workers from sinning
God always seems to be on your side, no matter what you do? I wonder though, is that really God on your side – or something else?
Ken, that 6% is an overall average, and is skewed by the fact that eastern Europe is less than 1% Muslim. In France, for example, the figure is 13% and rising. Muslims are also far more likely to have children than their non-Muslim neighbors, and so demographic forces are rapidly increasing the Muslim share in Europe. When you say “Europeans are done with organized religion,” for that matter, aren’t you simply taking what could be a temporary fashion and treating it as a permanent phenomenon?
Other Owen, I’ll let you handle it, then. I’ll contribute to the same goal in another way by making sure some of our cheesy fantasy fiction survives.
Patricia O, hmm! That makes sense; Nagasaki was the great center of 16th century Japanese Christianity.
Other Owen, if, as the guy from Nazareth said, you can’t serve God and Mammon at the same time, there’s not much room to question whose side those mill owners were on. That’s the problem with a religion that depends entirely on direct contact with the spiritual realm — not everything in the spiritual realm is good…
JMG: “I think it was one of Mark Rogers’ Samurai Cat books that was dedicated to a guy who founded the Lycanthropi Christi, an organization dedicated to the promulgation of theological orthodoxy at science fiction conventions.”
There have been at least half a dozen Christian Furry groups (including both pro-gay and anti-gay ones), as well as Jewish and Muslim groups. One activist in this area has been Ken Pick (“Headless Unicorn Guy”), who once proposed something called La Légion de la Licorne sans Têtes:
https://en.wikifur.com/wiki/The_Legion_of_the_Headless_Unicorn
(Check out his cartoon!)
Well in my Protestant neck of the woods here in the USA I the gifts and movements of the Spirit are alive and well.. I could relate many stories of my experiences and experiences of people I know. Visions, dreams, miracle healings, answered prayers, the felt life giving actions of the Spirit in your body, guidance and knowings from God, the felt presence of the Spirit in group prayer and worship, wonderful providential synchronicities. speaking in tongues with interpretation, These are the types of things that empower conversions in China and Iran it’s usually Protestant in nature in those places, not centered in orthodoxy or Catholicism. In the heat of persecution and danger the focus is the straight up knowing and help of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with assists at times from the angelic not a focus on the enchantment of nature. The Threeness of deity is a lively knowing and, yes, a scandal to Jews and Muslims
Apparently the Christian converts in Iran are more house church based which doesn’t jibe well with the liturgical, hierarchical, sacramental, priest centered model of orthodoxy and Catholicism.
One of the attractions of ‘Protestantism’ for the developing world is that there are no authorities other than the Bible – which effectively means that the only authority is yourself as the interpreter of the Bible. You do not have to tithe to anyone else or conform to their commands. As such there is no one Protestantism or Christianity – you can only really talk about ‘a’ Christianity or Protestantism, not ‘the’ Christianity or Protestantism. Islam does not seem to have gone as far down this track – possibly because it has stuck to the classical Arabic of the Koran as the official version and not had the impetus of translations to make the text more accessible to wider interpretations.
With regards to ceremony and trappings in Protestantism, this is the major part of the distinction between High Church and Low Church Anglicanism – I’m not sure if this feature of the Anglican Church ever made its way to American episcopalianism.
Karalan @ 63, you typed something like “as population continues to fall and civilization itself is threatened.”
Sophisticated civilizations have flourished for millennia when world population of homo sapiens was much smaller than it is at present.
Assurbanipal, about Sumerian deities, the way I understood it is that each city state was owned by one of the Sumerian pantheon. The CAH refers to a fascinating myth about the origin of civilization in which the goddess Inanna, “divine owner of Uruk” journeyed to the sea and brought back the various arts of civilization for her subjects. There might have been only one temple per city, but that didn’t mean Sumerians denied the existence of neighboring deities.
Elizabeth Owen @ 96 planning for decline at the present time would seem to include the following: first, don’t sleep in the nude and be sure all members of your household have robes or dressing gowns handy.
Second, have ID documents up to date, ready to hand AND have copies ready made which can be distributed as needed. Third, if you have cash in your house, don’t keep it all in one place. Fourth, if means allow, people might want to consider burglar alarms which make loud noises, instantly turn on lights and photograph intruders.
This is a VERY interesting post, John! I had no idea that the Israelites, returned from captivity, dropped their 2 female goddesses . I’ll be looking for more info on the house of cedars and the pharaoh’s daughter–
Pre-Islamic Arabia also had goddesses; Allat, Uzza, and Manet. Mentioning Allat in a fictional novel (The Satanic Verses) got Salman Rushdie a death sentence, so most don’t talk about them much– But that’s another great similarity between Judaism and Islam; goddesses in their roots.
It all makes me wonder about the role of the Archetypes and Spirits of the Land in these developments. You would probably have to triple the length of the essay to make a proper commentary on the effects of the underlying spiritual realities.
Along those lines, while Sequoyah developed a syllabary writing system in the early 1800’s for Cherokee, he did not know about the syllabary writing of the Mayans that was developed centuries before him, and not figured out again until the work of Yuri Knorozov in the 1960s and 1970s. I’m wondering if something in the American continents favors syllabary systems, or influences their development here.
Thanks for a very worthwhile read! For the interested, here are some weblinks;
https://www.mayaarchaeologist.co.uk/school-resources/maya-world/maya-writing-system/
https://whitsonkeith.medium.com/detailed-analysis-of-pre-islamic-arabian-goddesses-al-lat-al-uzza-and-manat-c359302c3828
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/sequoyah-and-creation-cherokee-syllabary/
Hi John,
Fascinating post.
Nigel Farage (who won big in elections last night in England btw) was quoted this week saying this:
In the future, he predicts a surge of support for Islamic independents, galvanised by anger at Labour’s equivocation on Israel: “We’ve sat down and looked at the demographics in those seats, the sheer number of people between 14 and 18 at the time of the last election. Where are they all going to go?” He reckons they could flip up to 36 seats next time.
Very much fits your longer term forecast.
To give you a bit of flavour….
Among those standing for office in Burnley, Lancashire, 18-year-old Maheen Kamran is an aspiring medical student who was ‘motivated to enter politics by the war in Gaza, where she believes a “genocide” is taking place.’ Kamran told PoliticsHome that she wanted to ‘improve school standards, public cleanliness and encourage public spaces to end “free mixing” between men and women.’
A very important addition i want to make is the political aspect of religion. Religion is not just a spiritual concept, but always has political implications and at this very point there is a big difference between christianity and islam, and an even bigger diffenrence between the reformation church on the one hand and the catholic church and islam on the other hand.
When christianity became the state religion of the roman empire, its nature changed dramatically. It turned from a grass roots movement to a state institution. The importance here is, that the state – the roman empire – already existed and was lead by an emperor whose power had not to be questioned by the new religion. The problem here was, that in traditional roman imperial cult the emperor had the status of a god, which was incompatible with a monotheistic religion. The solution to that problem was the division of church and state. Layed down in Romans 13 the emperor gets legitimization by god. The division of church and state resulted in parallel hierarchies with the emperor as a worldly leader of the empire and the pope as the spiritual leader of the empire. This seperaration was so consistent, that the religios inistitutions of the roman empire today still exist as the roman catholic church after their worldly counterpart is long gone (this is the reason why medieval emperors had to be crowned by the pope, because the pope was the last remaining government official of the roman empire).
Now islam on the other hand is – for political reasons – in this aspect the exact opposite of the catholic church. In contrast to christianity, islam was not the state religion of an already existing state, but the state religion of an empire that was being born in the very moment when islam came to life. Thus there was no concurrency between new and established institutions. Thus there was no division between church and state, but the opposite, church and state became the same. Mohammed was both the spiritual and the political leader of the emerging empire and his successors, the caliphs, also were both spiritual and political leaders. While christianity is a religion reduced to the relation between men and god and has to be complemented by a worldly state, islam is religion that does also regulate the political life of the people and their relation towards each other.
This is the major difference between islam ans christianity, while christianity is designed not to question political power, islam was designed to wield political power.
In this context, the reformation church is neither nor. In this context the roman catholic church and islam are much closer to each other then the reformation church is. While the roman catholic church and islam are top down government institutions, designed as centralized structures with political intent, the reformation church is a grass roots movement. While in islam and the catholic church the relation to god has to be guided by a priest class and is done in a language alien to most believers (latin and arabic) the reformation church gets rid of the priest caste by stating that every religious believer can practise his religion in his native language without priestly help. This is revolutionary.
And I think is the reason why protestantism caught on in northern europe. To understand that, you have to look at the time when these areas were christianized. While southern europe had been christian for an entire millenium, northern europe had been pagan just a few centruies before. While the people of southern europe had been living in centralized states for ages, the people of northern europe had been tribesmen a few centuries before. A bureaucratic centraized chruch just did not fit the culture of the northern europeans. From this viewpoint you can throw the catholic church and islam into one bucket and see, that the areas they cover are the areas that were covered by the ancient civilizations and people there were used to central control, while the areas of the protenstant church are the areas were the “barabrians” lived in ancient times, those people did not have a culture fitting to centralized religion.
You can see today this clash of concepts by the naivity which scandinavian countries like sweden showed when letting mass migration happen. Yesterdays barbarians, who lived without much central government are todays libertarians, minding their own business while leaving their neighbours alone. These people simply have no concept of social pressure, centrally organized religion and people acting against their personal interest because they are guided by a priest caste. In addition to that they have – like all christian nations – no concept of the idea of religion being a guideline for political life. They do not understand that islam is not just another way to worship god but comes with a complete set of rules and instructions how to organize society ans political life.
>I am curious as to the thinking that Europe is somehow destined to become Islamic?
If you can afford it, fly to say, Amsterdam and take an intercity to, oh, say Munich. Or Paris. Doesn’t really matter. Pick some city a few 100km away. The journey is the point, right, not the destination? While you’re on this journey, let’s play a game. It’s called Mosques and Churches. When you see a Mosque, you count it. When you see a Church, count it too but separately. If you’re having trouble figuring out which is which, ask the locals. At the end of your trip you’ll have two numbers. Compare them and then think about the future. Or don’t, doesn’t matter to me. Maybe it’s best not to think about the future. Makes you feel bad.
While you’re at it, note how many people are sunning themselves in just their underwear in full view of the passing train. You don’t need to compare that number to anything. It’s the journey that matters, right?
>As such there is no one Protestantism or Christianity – you can only really talk about ‘a’ Christianity or Protestantism, not ‘the’ Christianity or Protestantism
Eh, you can’t really talk about pizza either. You have to specify what kind of pizza – meat lover’s, sausage, pepperoni, margherita, etc. Although it’s interesting that when people depict or visualize a generic pizza, it’s always pepperoni and cheese.
” I don’t accept the claim that it’s “natural” to conceive of the divine along the lines of Anselm’s famous argument. That’s a learned habit in Abrahamic societies, but I don’t recall anyone ever claiming that Zeus or Woden was the summation of all positive qualities, say. Most of the world’s religions do not postulate this for their deities, and so the claim that it’s anything but a quirk among one particular group of faiths can’t be sustained. ”
Yes but I was responding to the adjective in your phrase “the transcendent Divine”. Zeus and Woden when considered as individuals don’t seem to me to be particularly transcendent – rather, their difference from humans lay in their preponderance of sheer power and immunity to death; stories about their doings were the science-fiction of their day. Whenever a more sensitive pagan worshipper did go further and achieve a vision which imbued these entities with something qualitatively numinous, this must surely have equated to an awareness (albeit inarticulate) of something over-above-beyond them, which after all is what “transcendent” means. (I say nothing about what modern polytheists think of ultimate transcendence; it’s a gap in my knowledge which I’d be glad to fill.)
> but because unlike the post-Counter-Revolution Catholic world, there was no monopoly on coercion in the Protestant world. As a result, they evolved to be more tolerant while the largely Catholic Mediterranean world underwent a brain drain.
More tolerant? The protestants were the most interolant, to the point of a few world wars, slavery, imperialism, rigid ethics, and a propensity for ideology and purism. Catholics might had more inherited tradition and rituals, but they were far more flexible and pragmatic in accepting the messy human condition.
> Even as late as the 15th and early 16th Centuries, Italians considered other Europeans to be barbarians.
And they were quite right.
Again just saying that the simple come to Jesus, New Testament centered spirituality can fall into the TSW (This Stuff Works) category and connect you in a real experiential way with loving life giving Deity or deity – giving you all the choice of monotheistic or polytheistic capitalization here. Countless people have known this over the centuries since the maligned by many Protestant reformation. Enough said by me at this point.
Praise music is indeed dreadful. Silence is beautiful. Yet, if Howling Wolf, Screaming Lord Sutch, and Screaming Jack Hawkins all played together in a worship band, I’d go to the service just to hear them play.
I’ll have to check out Samurai Cat, don’t know it, it looks fun!
I have a fairly academic background in religions and it’s perhaps an irony that the instinct to investigate the historical basis of religion could cut you off from seeing what gives it strength in the first place. As i realized while typing my critique, it’s possible that protestantism is as strong as it is in the modern world precisely because its central mystery is conveyed by a book. The modern world is much, much more literate than the medieval one and it makes sense that literate people would look to a book for guidance. It’s not lost on me either that protestantism probably played a large part in creating the conditions by which it spreads by encouraging mass literacy. Catholicism perhaps had a much easier time in less literate environments where the liturgy and sacraments took a much more central role. Charismatic Protestantism may have a leg up on both catholicism and islam by removing itself from complicated hermeneutics and traditions, even if that makes scholarly types like me turn sour.
I also realized that my instinct to check the historical basis of a religion is probably a protestant one. It was protestantism that provided much of the impetus for historical and critical scholarship to take root, as well as archeology itself in many cases. The insistence that God appeared in history as a historical figure has certain implications, and protestantism has a hard time separating itself from the idea that one must go back in time to a pre-mass apostasy moment. In Islam is perhaps easier to dispense with history, hence the wahabbi penchant for bulldozing historical sites. In Islam there is the Book. In Christianity there is the book about the Book.
I have heard stories of some impressive spiritual phenomena manifesting at protestant services, but im not aware of how common it is. Perhaps because those are largely closed off churches or home churches, or maybe im just ignorant of how common it is. None of them around here ive come in contact with has impressed me much, but i also find the historical case for protestantism even on its own terms to be lackluster and thus dont seek it out. I guess im not cut out for prophetic religions and should stick to my natural one.
KAN,
The fracturing of the Protestantism in the developing world into each individual’s personal interpretation of the Bible seems like that kind of Protestant Christianity is primed to succeed in the upcoming Age of Aquarius, since I remember JMG mentioning that spirituality / religion in the Age of Aquarius is all about finding your own spiritual path and not relying on blind faith in others / institutions. This is in contrast to those branches of Christianity, the Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and the High Church Protestants (Anglicans, Lutherans, etc) that invest a lot of effort in maintaining a church hierarchy, the creeds, and doctrines / dogma, who are probably going to die out with the end of the Piscean age.
On the topic of there being no simple causes for complex phenomena, I’ve recently bought a reasonably scholarly book on the topic of the emergence of post-Constantinian Christianity out of the stew that was present before the first Council. It is by Paula Fredriksen and is titled “Ancient Christianities: the First Five Hundred Years.” Princeton U. Press. It’s very clearly written from what I can determine so far. I’ve spent considerable time over the years pondering the near-simultaneous emergence of modern-style Rabbinic Judaism(s) and what we now (more or less laughably) call orthodox (small “o”) Christianity. From the little that one can sift from the first century BCE through the first century CE, things on that front were quite complicated. So the idea of stimulus-diffusion is quite appropriate. I expect to encounter symptoms of it in this book.
I would note that more than a few commenters here seem somewhat vague on the concept of multiple causes being at work with the emergence of the Christian Protestantism(s) in combination with various kinds of exposure to Islam. It’s a hefty topic. Seems we are at this current time simultaneously in a period of cultural disintegration and vast demographic changes. A sentiment JMG might endorse: “prediction is hard, particularly about the future.” Looking back on the past is also a difficult endeavor, and demands that we enter into the painful state of acknowledging the vast number of areas of knowledge about which we know far too little, or even nothing at all.
Myself, I adhere to JMG’s view that I see expressed so well in the WOH series, that the gods have purposes of their own that are utterly beyond our comprehension. Sometimes we cross paths with them, mostly to our bewilderment. While I am somewhat henotheistic, I’d be a fool not to acknowledge the vast ecology of spiritual beings out there and the mystery of why anything at all exists. Seems that unknowing is a crucial aspect of the path to wisdom. I never imagined this when I embarked on my journey so many decades ago as a youth. I’m reminded of the notation on early maps of the world: “Here there be dragons.”
@Dana (#85, #98):
The so-called “King James’ Version” usually sold in bookstores these days is not in actual text of the 1611 Bible, but a silently–and somewhat sloppily–revised edition of it made by two academics, Dr. Paris of Cambridge and D. Blayney of Oxford, in the 1760s. See the fine account of this in chapter 1 in H. F. A. Scrivener’s The Authorized Edition of the English Bible (1611), its Subsequent Reprints and Modern Representatives (1884), easily accessible online.
A more recent study that covers the same ground is Gordon Campbell’s Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611-20ll (2010).
Also, for whatever it may be worth to your relatives, the Protestants who first settled in New England regarded the KJV as an evil Church-of-England corruption of Scripture, and used the English translation that is now called the “Geneva Bible” instead.
@ Ambrose (#111):
Thank you for that link. The translators’ wise and humble preface deserves to be far more widely known. Alas, it is usually left out of modern KJV Bibles, though not always. I particularly appreciate their sage observation on the human urge to complain and criticize: “cavil, if it do not find an hole, will make one.”
Ambrose, from context, I don’t think Rogers’ friend was a furry. That said, thanks for the link; I have no particular interest in the furry scene, but it was an interesting glimpse inside a subculture as far out on the fringe (though in a different direction) as I am.
BeardTree, I’m glad to hear this. I’ve known Protestant Christians who had very active and vivid spiritual lives, but most of them were old when I was a lot younger than I am now.
KAN, I know Episcopalians who talk about the distinction, but they’re all nosebleed-level High Church, and most of them are Anglo-Catholics. Most American Episcopalianism seems to be fairly Low.
Emmanuel, I’ve never encountered any explanation of why Sequoyah settled on a syllabary. As for Mayan, I thought it was a classic hieroglyphic system, including phonetic and logographic elements — thus comparable to Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese characters.
Forecasting, I read about Reform’s election victory this morning — the two big parties took quite a thumping, didn’t they? As for Farage’s comment, I suspect he’s quite correct. He seems to have a much clearer sense of what’s happening in Britain than his rivals do.
Deedl, and yet in many Protestant countries the monarch became the head of the church, erasing any distinction between church and state; Britain was a good example, and of course the Anglican church is still a branch of the government there. In that way, Protestantism shows another angle of Muslim influence.
Robert G, “transcendent” is a very slippery word. Think of the bit in the Iliad when Zeus says that he’s so mighty that if he took end of a golden chain and all the other gods and goddesses took hold of the other, he could haul them all up into the air, plus Earth and Tartarus. That’s a kind of transcendence: Zeus transcends (goes beyond) all the other gods in raw strength. That still doesn’t make him the summation of all positive traits! As for “qualitatively numinous,” er, numen was the standard Latin term for anything even approximately divine; it was used, for example, of Robigus, the grain-fungus spirit who was placated during the Robigalia. All deities are numinous; that’s what sets them apart as deities. (Numen is remarkably close in meaning to the Japanese word kami, which has equal flexibility — a big rock can be a kami, if it has a numinous quality.)
BeardTree, duly noted. I don’t mean to malign the Protestant Reformation by the reflections in the post above, simply to relate it to its historical roots. I note also that a lot of Muslims also seem to have robust TSW experiences!
Justin, I have to admit that would be a band worth hearing. As for Samurai Cat, I have no idea whether the humor will make any sense to those who weren’t there at the time:
Muninn, I’m no great fan of prophetic religions myself, and it’s taken me a long time to get past the very sour taste that generic American Protestantism left behind. I wasn’t raised in it. When I was growing up in the Seattle suburbs, there was one family on our street that went to church at all, and everyone else thought that they were odd, My encounters with it during childhood and youth left me wondering what the point of it was; all I saw was shrill moral grandstanding, smug self-satisfaction, and astounding levels of blatant hypocrisy. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties and active in old-fashioned lodge organizations that I finally met people for whom daily prayer and Bible study were a vehicle for spiritual insight. I wonder if all those people who go around trying to convert other people as a way to avoid converting themselves realize just how much of an obstacle they are to the rest of us taking their faith seriously…
Clarke, hmm! Interesting. I may want to read that. As for the tentacled gods of The Weird of Hali, I’m delighted that you caught that! Lovecraft himself was very strongly influenced by a childhood fascination with Greek mythology — which he took to the extent of building an altar to the gods in his grandfather’s woodlot — and I tried to build on that in my topsy-turvy revisioning of the mythos by modeling the Great Old Ones on the gods of old Europe and the kami of Shinto.
JMG, Sequoyah probably chose a syllabary because humans, who live in cultures without writing, tend to see the consonant-vowel syllable as the basic unit of language, not the individual consonant or vowel.
@Robert Gibson #133
Surely all deities are transcendent in relation to this world? Why do pagans have to ‘go further’ to achieve something numinous? Perhaps their religious requirements and views are just different from yours? Polytheistic deities are not immune to death; that’s a specifically Abrahamic belief. Pagan religions have never represented ‘science fiction’ to anyone, apart from their detractors. Practising pagans have genuine faith in their beliefs, much like any other religion.
@Mary Bennet
I’ve wanted to ask you this for some time. I tend to read the comments in reverse order, so I find it quite confusing when someone uses exactly the same reply structure as JMG. Please would you add an ‘@‘ or even just a couple of spaces after each name. Thank you. 🙂
Count me as positivity impressed with your point on Islam affecting Protestant Christianity (although it helps to find out that Martin Luther translated a version of The Quran into Latin).
JMG, I didn’t think you were maligning the protestant reformation I was responding to other viewpoints I have run across. Obviously to a deout Catholic or Orthodox christian all the varied protestant groups and sects are an abberration instead of how I see them as an expression of freedom and creative life.
This is a really interesting discussion of the past and future evolution of Christianity JMG. Fascinating comments by Justin, Slithy, and BeardTree.
I had been imagining a future US Christianity based around the ideas of Carl Jung, possibly given a shove in a certain direction by the Gnostic Gospels. It hadn’t occurred to me that Blake and Swedenborg would be major influences going forward.
For some reason I had categorized Swedenborg as one of those visionaries who has interesting ideas, but who has a low signal-to-noise ratio, just as is the case with Rudolf Steiner. Am I off base on this? I noticed that Yeats seems to look to Swedenborg as a real authority, but he also seems frustrated with Swedenborg’s kind of clinical and taxonomic treatment of certain spiritual ideas.
@Samurai47 (#146):
Swedenborg and his books had a huge impact on the history of alternate religions in the USA well into the 20th century. Spiritualism was heavily influenced by Swedenborg’s ideas, mediated through Andrew Jackson Davis, as was the entire gamut of New-Thought religions, including (again, IMHO) Christian Science. (One of my own great-great-grandfathers, the painter Louis Olezerne Lussier, was baptized into the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem in Peoria, Illinois, along with his wife and children, in the middle of the 1860s.)
Swedenborg also (IMHO) somewhat influenced the early 20th-century development of few academic disciplines in the USA, including (IMHO) anthropology, which was singularly free from mainstream Christian prejudices on the subject of magic. One very influential early anthropologist, John R. Swanton, was a committed Swedenborgian, with an avowed interest in extraordinary phenomena. (See his Superstition–But Whose? published toward the end of his long life.)
Esoteric Christianity has been mentioned several times in this discussion. That arch-conservative Roman Catholic, J.R.R. Tolkien, used a very specific structure of “spells” in the Lord of the Rings, as discussed here with a lot of insight. Readers of this blog may feel some déjà-vu…
@deedl #130 Some points:
– The Christian Roman emperors were indeed considered to have a religious role, too. Starting with Constantine, they alone had the privilege to convoke ecumenical councils. The Eastern Roman emperors continued to wield that power – after the schism, the Eastern patriarchs, such as the one in Constantinople, had a hard time defending the religious sphere against the interference of the emperors.
– Charlemagne took advantage of the fact that the Roman emperor at the time was a woman, the Empress Irene, and therefore contested. He let himself be crowned by the pope because otherwise he could lay no claim to an emperor’s title. The emperors in Constantinople did not care at all about the pope when ascending to the throne. Even in the West, the Ottonian emperors had no scruples to manage the popes as if they were their vassals, and popes like Innocence VII. had no scruples to bully kings and emperors. No trace of a categorical separation between secular and spiritual leaders there, though by chance none of the two was able to subdue the other.
– While you may have a point that not only Muhammad, but also the earliest caliphs were considered supreme religious leaders (see Patricia Crone’s God’s Caliph), that power relatively quickly moved away from the caliphs to the community of legal scholars.
– Islam most definitely does not have a priestship, only scholars distinguished by their learning. Sunni laypeople are free to choose which of the four main schools of religious and legal thought to follow. The rule of the ayatollahs in Iran is an absolute novum in history.
– In Protestant countries including Scandinavia, like JMG commented, the monarch became the head of the church. Charles III. still is. In the German lands, cuius regio, eius religio, that is, whoever had the power got to determine the religion of his subjects.
All of which is to say I don’t nearly see such a clear-cut contrast between political Christianity and political Islam as you do. For what it’s worth, I agree with the opinion that Constantine’s conversion was the worst thing that ever happened to Christianity.
@Samurai_47 #145 And I thought I was done posting comments! “a shove in a certain direction by the Gnostic Gospels” Well the New Testament is utterly Gnostic as is, as in gnosis or direct knowing of the Spirit. It is assumed in the epistles or letters that the readers have met the Living God in an experiential way. This accessible knowing of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is presented all through the Gospels and the Book of Acts as a reality and possibility. I could easily quote a hundred verses from the New Testament showing this assumed tangible knowing of the Trinity in the here and now as being given through Jesus. And this knowing continues to this day in millions of yes, imperfect people around the world. Jesus had the bad habit of hanging out with lowlifes and continues to do so, for which I am personally grateful. I will share just one verse. – 2 Peter 3:18 “grow in the grace and knowledge (gnosis in the Greek original) of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”
Lets not forget Johnny Appleseed, the Swedonborgian.
Aldarion #148 – thanks for that link, it really does suggest a deep appreciation of the spiritual in Tolkein’s world building
Robert Mathiesen (no. 147). Also Mormonism (the whole “celestial marriage” thing).
Aldarion, I think Shi’ites are supposed to pick a marja-i taqlid (source of emulation). But I agree with you that Protestantism is not very Islamic. A lot of people point to sola scriptura, but “Qur’an-only” Muslims are a modern oddity (and get asked stuff like, how do you know when to pray?). Not that Protestants get their beliefs sola from the scriptura either..
A (putative) descendant of the Prophet Muhammad–a Sayyid–is not a priest exactly, but does get marked for extra respect by clothing (a green turban) and title.
Muninn: “I have heard stories of some impressive spiritual phenomena manifesting at protestant services, but im not aware of how common it is.”
Twice a week for the Pentacostals, never for the Episcopalians.
JMG: ” in many Protestant countries the monarch became the head of the church, erasing any distinction between church and state; Britain was a good example…”
Britain is a weird example. Nobody really expects King Charles to run the Church of England, and there’s a fuss whenever he voices opinions about it. He’s the head in much the same way that Mickey Mouse is the head of Disneyland. He does get to pick the Archbishop of Canterbury (from a list of three nominees), though.
Some of my Scottish ancestors apparently felt strongly that the head of the Church was Jesus, not the monarch–a view considered treasonous at the time.
KAN: “One of the attractions of ‘Protestantism’ for the developing world is that there are no authorities other than the Bible – which effectively means that the only authority is yourself as the interpreter of the Bible. You do not have to tithe to anyone else or conform to their commands.”
In Uganda, those same Protestants have made homosexuality a capital crime.
JMG, Don’t get the wrong impression–I’m not really a Furry either, I just go for the orgies, yiff yiff.
(kidding)
Hi John Michael,
It’s a federal election day down here today, and what a fascinating race it will be. In case you missed it, this is the first federal election where Millennials and Gen Z outnumber the Baby Boomers. Should be interesting to see what happens. Candidly, many (but not all) of the boomers are enjoying a lot of generational economic advantages which aren’t being shared equally with others, the cheeky scamps.
As a Gen X dude, nobody listens to us lot. 🙂
Oh well. What will be, will be. Hey, I made a short video on what I believe may have happened in the Spain blackout: Renewable Solar Power energy and the Grid are a volatile mix eg: Spain blackout ep 50 The time of day, and month of the year for the failure is very suggestive!
The weird thing about how solar photovoltaic power gets exported into the grid, is that it reflects the underlying economic desires of the population. It’s like what you have long suggested about alternative technological paths being blithely ignored. There is no reason at all why the grid tied inverter machines couldn’t instead interface with the grid in the same way a regulated battery charger interfaces with a battery – i.e. the export of electricity is throttled as the voltage in the grid circuit increases, as distinct from attempting to export the lot as happens now. Absolutely no reason at all why the devices don’t work that way. Oh! Except they’d cost a lot more to produce, that’s probably why. And doesn’t that then undermine the entire economic arrangement in the first place?
You’ve also mentioned before that a hard way to learn how to interact with technology, is to completely stuff things up – or that’s the gist of your concept. We might get to learn the hard way here. The whole mess is another of those pesky: energy returned on energy invested issues. Are you intending to talk about such subjects in the future?
Cheers
Chris
JMG: Can you recommend any sources regarding, in particular, the Zorastrianism / Persian period and its intersection with the early Jewish religion? You’ve written a lot of shockingly good pieces through the years. This sweeping overview of how all the religions and cultures intersected and evolved makes great sense. Shockingly great sense. I want to read more!
Justin Patrick Moore: And how many people, if asked to describe Helen Keller with two words, would pick “Socialist” or “Swedenborgian”?
It’s relevant here also to notice that it wasn’t the people who had to deal with the Ottoman Empire up close, at the distance of a cavalry saber or a boarding pike, who discarded all the features of Christianity that differentiated it most sharply from Islam. To the peoples of the Mediterranean shores of Europe or the countries within an easy march of the Balkans, Islam was the religion of their would-be conquerors, and they clung to everything that differentiated themselves from the Ottomans. It was those who lived further off, and didn’t have to worry about the imminent threat of Ottoman invasion, who could let themselves be dazzled by the cultural charisma of the great empire of the East, and be drawn into a reinterpretation of their own religion that shows the signs of stimulus diffusion from the Muslim world.
Going back a bit, the most obvious case of Islam shaping Christianity was eighth century Byzantine Iconoclasm. The Eastern Empire (or more specifically Leo III) decided that the seventh century arse-kicking they received at the hands of the Arabs must have been a loss of God’s favour. Islam took the prohibition on depictions of God seriously. Eastern Christianity less so. So Constantinople started aping Islam by destroying the icons in a desperate attempt to get back into God’s good books. And in a twist… the Iconoclasm was met with a period of Byzantine military success.
But it absolutely appalled those Christians in Western Europe, away from the front line.
“as I was taught, it’s a masculine plural of the feminine noun Eloh, “goddess.” (I’ll gladly accept correction on this from Hebrew scholars — this is what I learned from goyische Cabalists.) ”
Close. The feminine singular is Eloah.
“Then God said, Let us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness … So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” This is the new King James version.
If we replace “God” by Elohim, then the “us” and “our” are explained: it is a plural entity speaking. “His own image” is explained by the fact that Elohim is masculine plural in form but behaves as a singular noun, so the corresponding pronoun is “His”. “Man” is human being (anthropos), and grammatically masculine in Hebrew (adam, though interestingly adamah, the earth or ground from which Adam is formed, is grammatically feminine). So “He created Him” follows. But then we have “male and female He created them.” If male and female are created in God’s/Elohim’s image, then the obvious implication is that Elohim is both male and female, in other words, a congeries of divinities, both male and female. This is in accord with the second chapter of Genesis, where “Adam” is split in two, one half male, the other female.
JMG (and others)
Have you ever read Carroll Quigley’s work? His was the first books (The Evolution of Civilizations and Tragedy and Hope: A history of our Time) that I read which contained the idea of “diffusion” that you discuss, although I think he interpreted it in a slightly different way.
I hope I remember his argument correctly because I read it decades ago: Quigley basically states that all civilizations (including the religious institutions) develop as a balance between internal developments and external interactions–in fact, the external interactions are absolutely necessary in order to manage the complexity that a civilization faces as it grows, as any fast and sustained growth **must** be imbalanced (you can’t have smooth growth across every aspect of society simultaneously).
Diffusion tends to occur fastest at the society’s peripheries because the peripheries are always less encumbered by vested (and necessarily conservative) interests that are trying to maintain their power. Because technology often tips balances of power, it tends to diffuse most quickly, whereas religious beliefs, social norms, etc. are the last to diffuse because they represent a challenge to the status quo without conferring immediate benefits to the establishment.
Essentially, by the time religious beliefs are diffused, one society has more or less effectively “conquered” the other. However, diffusion does not occur in a vacuum–religious beliefs, etc. cannot diffuse in their unadulterated form because the cultures must adopt them to their own opportunities, constraints, and even traditions (perhaps explaining the Jews dropping their two female goddesses, for example).
Anyway, I really hope I got Quigley’s arguments correct–I remember being astonished at the level of thought it represented and how much superior it was to my high school textbooks, but I don’t remember the details as well..
Booklover, interesting. I hadn’t encountered that claim before.
Donald, thank you.
BeardTree, okay, good. Thanks for the clarification.
Samurai_47, here’s hoping! Swedenborg and Steiner really are peas from the same pod — great if you want a consistently worked-out system, not so good if you want room for your own experience. Both were genuine visionaries with a bit of a mania for systematization.
Aldarion, hmm! Thank you for this.
Justin, huzzah for John Chapman, Swedenborgian mystic and Druid saint.
Ambrose, the kings of England don’t run much these days. A few centuries ago things were different. As for furries, um, whatever. Ick.
Chris, we’ll be talking quite a bit about net energy, starting next week. As for learning how to deal with energy by getting repeated kicks in the groin, you have to admit, that’s how our civilization handles learning more generally…
Gnat, it’s been years since I read up on that. I don’t have sources handy, I’m sorry to say. Anyone else?
Strda, another bit of evidence that history doesn’t follow simple linear causality!
Asdf, thanks for the correction.
Wizard, it’s been a very long time since I’ve read Quigley, and I should probably revisit his books.
@Aldarion
Although Islam claims to not have an ordained priesthood – its Ulema or religious scholars are in effect a priesthood. It is only their Fatwas that matter. Ordinary lay Muslims have no say.
In Malaysia, Islam is effectively a state religion. Everything is controlled, from who gets to preach down to the Friday sermons – which come from the Federal Islamic Department and are the same throughout Malaysia – Mosque Imams are not allowed to preach their own sermons, they just read from a prepared text. It is a lot worse. In Malaysia, Imams need to be licensed by the State Islamic Departments. (Malaysia is a Federation and the powers are divided between the Federal and State governments(. These State Imams are employed as government officers and are considered civil servants.
While in theory, any Muslim male can be an Imam, it does not happen in Muslim countries. Everything is controlled by the state. Ironically to be a true Muslim, one would have to live in the West where there is no stifling government control of the religion.
Justin Patrick Moore @97
I am really lucky in that pretty much all of my family and friends keep their religious views, or lack thereof as a personal matter, and it has never been a source of conflict or judgement. I wish social and political views could be so easy, but even in that it hasn’t become the bitter division I have seen with some.
Stephen
>As for furries, um, whatever. Ick.
And that, is the correct response to furries. Glad you found it.
I remember that comment on Islam providing an impetus for Protestantism, which was intriguing, so it’s good to see this fleshed out. A convincing case for sure.
I’ve noticed this sort of stimulus/idea diffusion in various contexts, particularly in my studies of Japan, the case I’m most familiar with. They’ve been influenced by the West since the 1500’s to varying extents, but it was only during their ongoing post-1945 occupation that the gates were fully opened. I’ve noticed how they’ll take American concepts like cartoons, comics, video games, etc and put their own spin on it, generating something distinctly Japanese like anime, manga, Nintendo, etc. In addition to the Christian-influenced New Religious Movements you mentioned, another example is city pop, which blew up on Youtube in recent years for some reason — it’s basically 70s/80s Japan taking the funk/soul/R&B/disco that was popular here around that time, and turning it into their own thing. And of course, the citypop renaissance, along with the popularity of the rest, is Japan influencing us right back. It’s interesting to see an ongoing cross-cultural fertilization like this.
Speaking of which, regarding samurai cats: there was an old cartoon called Samurai Pizza Cats, pretty good stuff, which may be relevant.
Also, I remember Toynbee discussing cultural contacts in both time & space, ie between contemporaries, and past legacies influencing the future. I can only wonder what future civilization will borrow from us, and how they’ll adapt and mutate our ideas.
In our argument about transcendence, JMG, I’m trying to understand what a polytheist senses is the ultimate source of awe and wonder. You say, “Think of the bit in the Iliad when Zeus says that he’s so mighty that if he took end of a golden chain and all the other gods and goddesses took hold of the other, he could haul them all up into the air, plus Earth and Tartarus. That’s a kind of transcendence: Zeus transcends (goes beyond) all the other gods in raw strength. That still doesn’t make him the summation of all positive traits!” To which I say, quite so! For, whatever the inadequacies of my phrase “the summation of all positive traits”, or my choice of the adjective “numinous”, I was at least trying to indicate the inclusion of whatever may inspire to awe and wonder and a sense of transparency to the ultimate and the infinite. Rather like the domain of “Muspel” in “A Voyage to Arcturus”; notwithstanding my rejection of Lindsay’s dualism, I see that Zeus, or Shaping, doesn’t really cut the mustard! So, what does? (According to the polytheist view, that’s to say.) This isn’t a rhetorical question; I really wish to understand.
I have been reading about Christians converting to UFO religions. The most thought out one is Paul Wallis who was clergy of the Anglican Church in Australia. His first book of his ongoing series: “Escaping Eden” tells of his careful reading of the Old Testament, with his knowledge of Hebrew etc, and how he came to the conclusion that ancient aliens were a part of the original religion of the Old Testament. He does not discuss the usual stuff of astronaut Gods, etc, etc, but how reading the Old Testament gave him insights about the questions he had as a clergyman. (The rest of the Eden series slowly declines in quality resulting in ancient alien Gods, etc.)
I wonder if Protestantism is a springboard for alternative religions such as UFO religions, Neo-Paganism, and other ones. Does the idea of depending on “faith alone” or “God’s voice” present the idea of going your own way in thinking about prophetic religions?
It seems to me a lot of the alternative religions, i.e. UFO and Neo-Paganism, have elements of the prophetic religions in them. Listening to the Gods or rejecting the Gods, reading Scriptures for evidence of aliens, etc, and receiving news of their aims.
Re iconoclasm: apparently the anatolian christians on the front lines were not fans of it. The factions that liked it were largely in the Balkans or Constantinople.
JMG:
Neptunesdolphins, As for your husband’s Methodist church, hmm! That’s fascinating to hear. Does it seem to be increasing attendance?
—
The problem they have been having is that more members are dying off than are becoming new members. They have on average 5 funerals a week, and 10 new people a year. They bus people in from the local senior village (One of those vast retirement/ all in one places that warehouse old people from retirement to death.) The seniors enjoy the services and join, only to die a year or so later.
His Sunday School class average age is 80 years old.
Meanwhile, there is a missing middle to the church. Young families and old people but not people in their 30s or 40s are there. The missing middle is always a bad sign to me since it means people are not staying. But it could be that there are no people those ages about. When I take my long walks around the neighborhood, I see young families and old people. I do see people in their 40s, but they are few and far between.
His church does have a Spanish-speaking congregation, which seem to keep the church going. Locally, the churches are generally divided by ethnic groups. Koreans, usually Baptist, have their own churches. Spanish-speakers, usually alternative Protestant, have their own churches. The Ethiopians have their own Orthodox church, which have services in Coptic.
An assumed freedom in English speaking countries – a group of people get together to form a group with a religious or spiritual basis and then promote it or an individual gets a spiritual inspiration/ vision and spreads it. The roots of this freedom is in the 1600’s in the struggles of Quakers and Baptists to do just those things. They were beat, fined, imprisoned, exiled and wouldn’t stop. Bold victims of this persecution were George Fox (founding father of the Quakers),, John Bunyan (Baptist author of Pilgrim’s Progress), Roger Williams – who fled Puritan Massachusetts to found Rhode Island as an oasis of religious freedom, he even said he would accept Muslim mosques provided they would live in peace- this was before the Ottoman Turks had ceased slave raiding of European Christians and their final attempt to conquer Vienna in the name of jihad.. There was even a Quaker martyr, Mary Dyer executed by the Puritans of Massachusetts in 1660 for insisting on preaching her beliefs, returning after banishment to Massachusetts. The persistence of these people over time brought freedom for all. The concept that religion was to be regulated from the top down by a central authority died a slow death in the British culture, a hangover from medieval Catholicism. I honor these pioneers of freedom., by products of the Protestant Reformation.
Dear JMG and commentariat:
As I thought about this post, the phrase “sick man of Europe “ came to mind (the description of the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century). Now: the UK, Germany?
Times have changed, for sure!
Cugel
I have some thoughts on modern Islam
1. Islam in the early 21st century, especially the part called “fundamentalism”, is largely a Faustian ideology. Like Catholicism or Communism, it requires the obedience of all mankind in principle. This is a different world from hundreds of years ago, when Muslims’ overwhelming response to vastly different groups was to separate rather than assimilate.
2. “Fundamentalism” Islam has replaced communism in the 20th century’s ecological niche, that is, the ideology that is undergoing a world revolution. Wokeism only wants the West to die. The various progressive ideologies that exist in Europe have long been like the Comtess. It would be great if their remnants could put together a separate small house as an office. This gave “fundamentalist” Islam the power to infiltrate Europe in a world-revolutionary way.
3. Currently, there are two ideologies in Europe that are capable of resisting “fundamentalist” Islam. The first is secular nationalism, which is a remnant of the last century. It is most prevalent in countries like France. The second is a civilizationalism based on European cultural unity. Both are anti-universalist. Although they are secular in form, they are also hostile to the universalism of the secular left in the past.
4. The relationship between “fundamentalist” Islam and local Arab and Islamic governments is similar to the relationship between communism and Protestant governments in the late 19th century, except that the line between today’s world revolution and the old Islamic state religion is more blurred.
5. Since the world revolution in the Middle East has either failed (ISIS) or succeeded (Syria), the boundaries of this round have begun to solidify. In the next round of evolution, revolutionary organizations will spread or move to areas where they are more likely to succeed. Anyone who has doubts about this can compare the lives of Chevagra and Bin Laden, who spent their entire lives changing their nationalities for the sake of world revolution.
6. In the evolution from the 19th to the 20th century, communism was considered a mental illness unique to Protestant countries in the first round of its spread, and was considered a mental illness that only Christianity and Christianized Jews were infected with in the second round of its spread. After the third round of its spread, even animists in China or Africa could not resist this mental illness. I think the current revolution in the Islamic world is probably at the end of the first round and the beginning of the second round.
7. Most of the revolutions in the Islamic world today originate from people whose parents are both Muslims, which is still a long way from the situation where most of the revolutions in the communist world originate from non-Protestant backgrounds. However, this distance is unlikely to exceed 60 years, and today’s young people may see in their old age that former polytheists or former atheists become Islamic revolutionaries conquer large countries with large populations and, like Mao Zedong, implement a (Faustian) Islamic version of the Cultural Revolution and reorganize the world’s cultural landscape.
I have been thinking about Protestants and Islam.
My husband comes from a Mennonite/Amish family. He became Methodist as some of them since the Methodist Church merged with the River Brethren and other similar sects to become the United Methodist Church. Most of those sects were mostly modern living Mennonites. By modern living, they drive very modest cars, usually dark with no extras, live very simple lives such as in small apartments, and use landlines.
Anyway, I am wondering if Old Order Amish, Anabaptists and the like could be like the strict Islamic cults in their own way. They seem to have the same level of fundamentalism and rejection of modernity to them. Of course, there are differences such as the Amish require people to choose to be Amish and do not promote their faith. However, other people’s reactions to the two groups seem to be similar – either the idea that they are harming women and not allowing freedoms or a wistfulness of wanting that life for religious reasons.
I wonder if Islam encouraged the more extreme Christian sects in rejecting modernity.
@Robert Gibson (#166):
Of course JMG can answer you for himself, but let me throw additional data into the pot you and he are jointly stirring. Fairly recent primatological research has suggested that some of our closest evolutionary relatives, chimpanzees and baboons, have numinous experiences like ours when they encounter awesome or awful natural phenomena in specific places or at specific times.
A primatologist, James B. Harrod, has even raised the question whether chimpanzees may rightly be said to have a religion [see his “The Case for Chimpanzee Religion,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture 8(2014), 8-45]. He summarizes his results as follows: “chimpanzees do perform ritualized patterns of behavior in response to birth, death, consortship, and elemental natural phenomena [emphasis mine]. ….. In the course of these performances, chimpanzees decontextualize and convert everyday communicative signals to express non-ordinary emotions of wonder and awe. The patterning of chimpanzee ritual behaviors evidences all the components of a prototypical trans-species definition of religion.”
Another primatologist, Barbara Smuts [“Encounters with Animal Minds,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8(2001), 293-309], recounts two occasions when the entire troop of baboons that she was studying, including normally restless juveniles, unexpectedly stopped their journeying across the landscape and spontaneously fell into what seemed to her to be still and silent contemplation, gazing at pools of water in a stream for a good half-hour. She came to think of this experience, which she witnessed only twice in all her years of closely observing that troop of baboons, as a sort of “baboon sangha.”
So apparently other species, too, have numinous experiences, both individually and collectively. This gives rise to the speculation that such encounters with the numinous in nature are the ultimate foundation of religion. Also, such encounters seem linked to specific natural phenomena, located at specific places and/or times or linked with specific life events (birth, death, etc.); and they call forth what in humans would be ritual behaviors. So “maps” of numinous places and “calendars” of numinous times emerge, along with rituals in response to numinous places and times.
The numinous is not always experienced by humans as personal encounters with Divine beings. That is merely one possible response, natural enough in humans (but what about baboons and chimpanzees?), but definitely not the only possible or reasonable one, to numinous encounters. Perhaps Deities, Spirits, Kami, and so forth are not an essential part of religion as it is experienced by living creatures, but merely a (purely human?) attempt to make sense of numinous experience. (Again, do baboons and chimpanzees conceive of Deities or spirits, if any, along baboon-or chimpanzee lines?)
I find much excellent food for thought in the work of these primatologists.
@ Horzabky #5
Regarding the printing press, there is one other angle to this. Most hand-written systems of writing have traditionally been cursively written, which has made it very difficult to print. Printing presses used detachable types, each containing a separate character. While this was easy enough in the Roman script, it was much harder in Arabic. Arabic letters are not physically distinct from each other, but sections of one looping curve that goes from right to left.
I know this because I am an Indian. Our writing systems use diacritics for vowels, and combines vowel diacritics with consonant characters to create letters. Each letter represents a complete syllable. There are also “hybrid consonants” which are formed by merging distinct consonant characters into the space of one character. The total number of possible syllable letters that results from this is over fourteen thousand. Preparing that many distinct type-faces is not easy.
The first Devanagari typeface was create very late, as late as 1786, by the cooperation of Charles Wilkins of England and an Indian blacksmith named Panchanan Karmakar. It required skill, geometry, and sheer creativity to overcome the challenges involved. They had to find a way to attach type components to create types, in a way that would produce legible Devanagari characters.
I can only imagine that it is even harder in Arabic, since the entire script is cursive. There are also diacritics like zabar, zer, pesh, and tashdeed. It is quite a challenging work to design detachable metal types for this script.
TLDR: Printing press was designed for the Roman script. Technical challenges were involved in porting this technology to other writing systems.
“It is also apparent that 17th century Friends shared with other Christians a firm belief in the unique, messianic nature of Jesus of Nazareth. What Quakers labored against was a prevalent unbelief in the immediate presence of Christ. They labored to show that the universality of Christ is coherent with the particular historical incarnation, that Christ was not encapsulated within priestly ritual nor within the Scriptures that testified of him.” https://www.quakerinfo.com/quak_jc1.shtml
In a way the early Quakers were the Pentecostals of their time expecting and experiencing the present reality and action of the Spirit. George Fox did a large number of miraculous healings. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1286180.Book_Of_Miracles
@Felix #162: Thanks for your clarification, I can’t claim any deep knowledge about Islam. I do note that in the Anglican church or the various Northern European Lutheran churches of the 17th to 19th centuries, a pastor or vicar was in a way a government official, too (they could read their own sermons, though!). The office of pastor tended to run in families. Still, I hesitate to call a Lutheran pastor or a Sunni imam a “priest”.
Other Owen, I found it around the time the furry subculture became a matter of public knowledge. Mind you, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised, and indeed would have no complaint, if furries have the same reaction to me; we all have our boundaries.
Xcalibur/djs, Japan is one vast playground for the aficionado of stimulus diffusion. The Japanese do amazingly odd things with the creations of other cultures; the famous photo of a Japanese Christmas store window with a crucified Santa is par for the course.
Robert, that’s not a question with a simple answer, because to ancient Greek thinkers, the infinite was by definition evil, and finiteness was the principle of goodness. To the Greeks, the infinite and ultimate was a source of terror, not of wonder; it was primal chaos, “unluminous, formless, and void.” What displayed the greatness of Zeus was precisely that he imposed limits, imprisoned the vast shapeless monsters of the limitless void, and established a space in which life could flourish. That’s what inspired the ancient Greeks with awe and wonder. The same is true, interestingly enough, in the Norse tradition: the gods slew infinity (in the person of the primal giant Ymir), and chopped up the corpse to build a stockade they could defend against the hostile powers of the limitless. CS Lewis got the flavor of it right:
“Think, then, that under heaven-roof the little disc of the earth,
Fortified Midgard, lies encircled by the ravening Worm.
Over its icy bastions faces of giant and troll
Look in, ready to invade it. The Wolf, admittedly, is bound;
But the bond wil1 break, the Beast run free. The weary gods,
Scarred with old wounds, the one-eyed Odin, Tyr who has lost a hand,
Will limp to their stations for the last defence. Make it your hope
To be counted worthy on that day to stand beside them;
For the end of man is to partake of their defeat and die
His second, final death in good company. The stupid, strong
Unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last,
And every man of decent blood is on the losing side.”
Lindsay almost got that right, in his own way: Muspel in Norse tradition is the realm of the fire-giant Surtr, the ultimate enemy of the gods whose flames will devour all the worlds. When you speak of “transparency to the ultimate and the infinite,” in other words, you’re speaking of a sense that’s highly prized in Western cultures, detested and feared in others, and absent and indeed unthinkable in still others. Where you long for the infinite, the Greeks and Norse and many another Indo-European people longed for finite stability and security in a universe that provided damn little of either, and they turned to Zeus and Woden (and Indra and Perun and Lugh and many more) in the hope of receiving as a blessing the thing that you want to escape. Take from that some measure of the space separating different religious sensibilities!
Neptunesdolphins, what a fascinating idea. I’ll have to look into the evidence and do some thinking about that. Thanks for the demographics about the church; interestingly, that’s also the case in many Masonic lodges — lots of old guys and a growing number of very young ones, but not that much in between.
BeardTree, a case can certainly be made!
Cugel, these days Europe is the sick man of Eurasia…
林龜儒, interesting. Yes, a case could probably be made for equating Muslim fundamentalism with Communism.
A personal theory of mine is that the initial islamic invasions were responsible for the transition from antiquity to the medieval era. The european/Mediterranean world in 600 C.E. is vastly different from the one in 800 C.E. The roman world had a centuries of experience dealing with barbarians and persians. Barbarians tended to assimilate as often as not, and the “fall” of roman in 476 was seen more as of a changing of the guard in provincial leadership at time. Even the final persian war where Persa took Egypt looks like a repeat of prior wars with persians, and the sassanids didnt interfere too much with the imperial provinces they conquered. Islam changed all that. Suddenly there were people on top in the levant with a fundamentally different attitude of how the world should work. There is significant archeological evidence of islamic raids on the south coast of the Mediterranean including a sacking of Rome itself. There was a prophecy that islam would conquer the two great cities of Christianity, Rome ane Constantinople, leading to repeated Islamic military advances into imperial territory. All of this forced the Eastern Roman empire to completely reorient itself to defending the eastern frontier, largely letting go of its western provinces by necessity. The layouts of cities were changed from large open ancient cities to what were essentially fortresses. On the coast of southern europe, towns moved inward from the coastline away from raiders. The only true ancient city that remained was constantinople itself. Provinces were reorganized into military fiefdoms the church unified itself to counter the threat. I have a pet idea without much evidence that this is when ancient paganism truly disappeared. Any heresies or polytheism would have been viewed as particularly disloyal this time, but there isnt terribly much documentary evidence – except a mention here and there of crypto pagans put on trial.
What became western civilization was born out of this cradle. Its hard to imagine it developing independently from byzantium with the opening provided by islam. Muslim travelers in Britain called it “the furthest lands of Rûm” (the greek empire). Islam also had ended up having enormous influence on catholic theology in the high middle ages as catholicism defined itself against it. If Islamic influence is responsible for protestantism, it may re responsible in a way for western civilization itself
林龜儒 s @ 167 That is an interesting set of theories. I do have a few small quibbles.
The “wokist” faction is in fact rather small in the USA and can’t win elections without alliances. It appears larger than it is because of strategic placement in media and some branches of government. It has little or no support among American voters of all or no ideologies, and subsists on money from foundations, which naturally have their own agendas. That is a fact which the wokists consistently downplay, but one which explains why they ignore simple, basic reforms which are doable and would immediately improve the lives of ordinary working Americans. Reforms such as expanding mass transit, forcing landowners to permit their tenants to have gardens, and reviving commodity price supports for agricultural products. Wokism is essentially what MAGA is: both factions are gangs of grifters allergic to hard work and effort, clinging to what they can keep or grab of privilege and comforts paid for by others.
I was surprised to learn that Communism was ever thought to be a mental illness. A pernicious ideology and secular religion, to be sure. It was always hated by the capitalist countries because communist governments expropriated private property. I remain convinced that the best explanation for the spread of communism was provided by the Yugoslavian dissident, Milovan Djilas, who wrote, back when he was still #2 in Tito’s govt. that communism provided the means of rapid industrialization for poor countries like his own. This was accomplished by harnessing the efforts of entire populations, which is why communist govts. were totalitarian, and why they insisted on women as well as men being among the workers.
I don’t, myself, see Islam itself having any similar appeal. The wonton destruction of historic monuments which are rightly the common heritage of all humanity has permanently alienated much of the educated classes of the west, as well as Asian Buddhists. Jewish Israel welcomes Christian pilgrims at Christmas and Easter (and benefits from their spending of course) and permits excavation and study of Christian archeological sites. KSA bulldozes such sites. There is certainly a great deal of Islam envy among the RW Christian Right, who see angry Islamic militants tearing down Western allied governments and keeping women confined to quarters. However, the Christian Nationalists are yet another faction who greatly exaggerate their numbers and influence. They are one faction among several groups of useful idiots who elected the present administration, which admin. so far hasn’t given them much of anything but photo ops.
A young Hispanic man of my acquaintance, unencumbered by the need for political correctness, said of the ME migrant populations “Those guys are lazy!” I would say that the North American continent itself is inimical to idleness; that is one of the reasons why East Asian migrants do so very well here. You can’t be sipping mint tea and discussing philosophy when a tornado is bearing down on your house.
Observation by an orthodox Jewish commentator I read – David Goldman, stimulus diffusion from Judaism?
“Modern (as opposed to ancient Greek or Roman) democracy stems from the Protestant motto “solo scriptorum,” “only the Bible,” by which every man must interpret scripture for himself. To begin with, Protestantism was unimaginable without Jewish theologians (who exposed the incompatibilities of free will and original sin), not to mention Jewish bible translators. In such a world, congregations must elect their church elders (Presbyterians) or even their pastors (Congregationalists), rather than accept church hierarchy. If democracy rules ecclesiastical affairs, why not then secular affairs as well?
Only Anglo-Saxon Protestantism had the opportunity to take on a political form, thanks in large part to the colonization of America. America’s so-called revolution was in fact a second English civil war, in which the Whigs supported the American rebels against the Tory government. England’s democratic impulse came from the extreme wing of its Protestants, from such sects as the Separatists who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, or the Quakers who founded Pennsylvania. Only on American soil did radical Protestantism flourish unimpeded by monarchy and established church.“
@JMG @Robert
Hmmm. For me, the vast is a source of awe, but the truly limitless is scary.
David Ritz #24 and Cicada Grove #70
I have a book, “1434” by Gavin Menzies that is about Admiral Zheng He’s travels to Italy, the Red Sea, Africa, and, according to Menzies, to the Western Hemisphere. The book has copies of maps of North and South America dating back to the early 1500s. Critics have called this pseudohistory for Menzies lack of adequate proof and I found some of his findings to be a bit sketchy. But, on the other hand, I think there may be a bit of racial bias on the part of the critics. My own opinion is–maybe, maybe not. How much evidence would there be after all these centuries.
I noticed a few mentions of John Dee in the comments. I’m throwing his name out as a possible topic for a fifth Wednesday. I’ve always found him a fascinating person
“What displayed the greatness of Zeus was precisely that he imposed limits, imprisoned the vast shapeless monsters of the limitless void, and established a space in which life could flourish. That’s what inspired the ancient Greeks with awe and wonder. ” I can well understand that, JMG, and it provides another example of how unfortunate my choice of vocabulary has been throughout this discussion: for “infinite” was not a word I intended to use to signify vast chaotic boundlessness; it was rather (here I make another attempt) a shot at denoting a qualitative independence, that is to say, something that cannot be understood in, or derived from, or restricted to, physical terms; a non-spatial or trans-spatial beyond-ness that lurks in Goodness or Awesomeness or Wonder, since these aren’t physical things. The limits which you say the Greeks thought of as good are themselves examples of such non-spatial transcendence, because their virtues depend on the goodness of form. (By the way, my thanks also to Robert Mathieson #174 and Tengu #133 for their comments.)
Muninn, while here again I don’t think any single-factor theory holds water, that was certainly a very important event.
BeardTree, it was certainly one factor, but the classical influence from Greek democracy and Roman republican thought was also a major force — that’s why our civic architecture looks like Greek temples rather than the Temple of Solomon.
Robert G, no, you’re communicating quite clearly. This thing that you’re looking for is a culturally specific desire, and it’s not present in classical Greek or traditional Germanic thought. They didn’t see form as a transcendent thing, not least because they didn’t have the same concept of physical existence that modern Westerners have. No matter how many times you rephrase your question, it’s going to get the same answer, because the ancients weren’t attracted by a beyond (however defined or undefined), much less turn to it as a source of goodness or awe or wonder. I know it’s a wrench to grasp this — it took me a long time and a lot of close study of classical writings and thoughtful commentaries on them — but it’s important to make the effort if you want to meet the ancients on their own terms and not just force them into the Procrustean bed of modern notions.
@BeardTree (#181):
Two trivial corrections of detail, not really affecting your argument:
The Separartists formed Plymouth Colony, not Massachusetts Bay Colony (which was formed by Puritans). Only as late as 1691 did Massachusetts Bay swallow Plymouth whole. Also, the motto is sola scriptura “by scripture alone.”
As for the huge importance of Jewish Bible translators, you’re right on target. Christianity could hardly have developed as it did without the earlier Jewish translations of their scriptures from Hebrew (and Aramaic) into Greek. The “Old Testament” scriptures of earliest Christianity were these pre-Christian translations into Greek, not the original Semitic texts.
Munnin @ 179, Your theory is similar to that advanced by the Belgian historian, Henri Pirenne. As I recall, he wrote something like Islam destroyed the unity of the Ancient Western World when it, in effect, cut the Middle Sea in half. You may know that there is a town in Southern France where the inhabitants built their village inside a Roman colosseum, probably for defense from raids. Marc Bloch’s theory, IIRC, was that Western Europe was beset by raids from Vikings, Hungarians, and Saracens–his words, or those of his translator–and developed the feudal system for mutual defense.
BeardTree @ 181, don’t forget that David Goldman has a habit of overstating his cases. I recall when he was trying to assert, using the research of Patricia Crone, referred to above, that Islam was a mere ‘cult’ which had arisen from one of the many Gnostic communities which flourished in Late Antiquity. OTOH, there is also the conspiracy theory that a group of Jews invented Islam to be a kind military arm of their faith. Mind I don’t say I believe that. I think Mohammad was a real person, a successful merchant who didn’t take kindly to trade bypassing his city, Mecca, and decided to do something about it. Protestantism “taking a political form”? What does that even mean, and what does Goldman make of the Scandinavian national churches? Strict separation between church and state doesn’t sound like any religion taking a political form to me. John Adams may have been a Congregationalist, but many of the Founders were Deists. When Jefferson was Ambassador to France after the Revolutionary War, he sent back boxes of books on history and politics to his good friend, James Madison, who really was a heavyweight intellectual. By all accounts, Madison did in fact read them. Our Constitution is an amalgam of English law and classical thought with the well known borrowings from the Iriquois. I don’t think it owes very much at all to the Old Testament.
@JMG agreed, it’s bad habit of intellectual types such as myself to shrink the complex world so it fits in my head and i can presume to control it.
All this discussion is making me think that a critical element in the history of western civilization has been almost completely overlooked in modern times – except by personas non gratas. The loosely “post colonial” narrative that casts western Christian or post Christian countries as the eternal big bad guys of history always oppressing or ignoring the poor defenseless Other completely obscures the fact that the (often justified) fear of islam on one hand and (also often justified) fascination of it on the other are both major threads in Western history baked fairly deep into its collective psyche. Medieval scholars gobbled up islamic thinkers, there were long lasting folk songs as far north as norway about crusading among the common people and things like the “arabian nights” circulated widely in europe when published. There was not nearly as much interest or fear going in the reverse direction before the early modern era. I recall that both the Abbasid and the byzantine court tried to impress each other, but cared not at all about impressing Western Christian diplomats and sometimes left them locked outside. Contemporary islamic writings on the crusaders were largely disdainful of the latins. It looks like 400 years of civilizational hegemony makes you forget what its really like to look at another culture with awe and fear.
I often wonder what will happen to western progressivism when perhaps an east asian country unquestionably has a much higher quality of life and technology advancement than western ones. Its strength ironically comes from the myth that the leftward end of western civilization is the bleeding edge of humanity itself. Its purported interest in other cultures vis a vis the west seems more like a cover for its desire to use western power to turn western civilization to year zero where it can do what it wants with it. Singing the praises of the other not to learn from the other but to spite the self. To truly learn from another culture and not just use it as drag requires a humility (fear?) rare in the elite end of western civilization
Addendum (merge with last comment if preferred)
To put it another way: “Sufi poetry is nice, i like to read it on my mindfulness retreat. We are all one” is a far cry from “what if the holy Qur’an is the actual Word of the creator of the universe”
Neptune’s Dolphin: “Anyway, I am wondering if Old Order Amish, Anabaptists and the like could be like the strict Islamic cults in their own way. They seem to have the same level of fundamentalism and rejection of modernity to them.”
Well, pacifism would be a difference, but the Amish are not necessarily anti-modern–they just, as communities, take their own sweet time deciding which innovations to adopt. In the case of telephones and computers, Amish businesses will typically use them, but there are restrictions aimed at keeping the technology from interfering with home life. Nor do they entirely shun motor vehicles, any more than their ancestors shunned ships (which are also examples of technology). They also understand their church services and communal customs to be the products of a certain history, and not to go back to the time of Jesus or anything like that.
“Fundamentalism” gets applied to a variety of groups whose “fundamentals” are very different. Somehow we avoid referring to “UU fundamentalism” (e.g. being pro-gay, using gender-inclusive language), or calling Tsongsar Khentse Rinpoche’s book “What Makes You Not a Buddhist” an example of fundamentalism (his fundamentals are the Four Seals).
JMG: “Surtr, the ultimate enemy of the gods whose flames will devour all the worlds”
Oh hey, I know this one!
https://www.marvel.com/comics/issue/11504/thor_1966_176
https://thefigureinquestion.com/2021/10/29/2937-surtur/
JMG: “The Japanese do amazingly odd things with the creations of other cultures; the famous photo of a Japanese Christmas store window with a crucified Santa is par for the course.”
Think of all those people who put Buddha statues in their gardens. There was this one guy who put one in a traffic median near his house, to discourage people from dumping trash there…and then this happened:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_Buddha
Neptune’s Dolphin: “I wonder if Protestantism is a springboard for alternative religions such as UFO religions, Neo-Paganism, and other ones. ”
Hmm. Congregationalism led to Unitarianism, which led to religious liberalism (think Transcendentalism), and by the end of the 19th c, these people are practicing yoga and meditation. State Protestant churches took their time in following settlers inland, and got displaced by more innovative and gung-ho churches like the Methodists, Baptists, and Churches of Christ. Oh, and then there’s New York’s “Burnt-Over District” which gave us Mormonism, Adventism, Spiritualism, feminism, and God knows what else. The first “flying saucer” sighting was over Mt. Rainier (unless we count Roerich’s in Tibet), but once they were decided to be aliens, early contactees came from a variety of places. Full-blown cults tended to be from England or California, and drew much of their theology from Spiritualism and Theosophy. Neo-Paganism was primarily British and Californian, and likewise drew from occult predecessors, along with a motley variety of antiquarians, eccentrics, and (as JMG points out) kinksters. Of course, a lot of the movers and shakers are Jewish, lapsed Catholic, or whatnot, but I assume you mean that Protestant *societies* are uniquely favorable to this sort of thing. (But…Russia!)
Sorry, I’m rambling–thinking as I write.
I wonder about those amesha spentas in what is supposed to be a monotheistic faith. Same with the catalogue of saints in Roman Catholicism that the old ladies pray to and especially Mary who has a big following as the bridge between the Old Testament and the New and also angels like Michael who is also revered in Judaism and Islam and let’s not forget the guardian angels.
The point is that I’m wondering if there’s an innate disinclination to accept a strict monotheism of One Deity because all this stuff looks like a hierarchy of divine beings capable of rewriting the Matrix on their own or maybe with clearance from Above.
I think I understand the idea of stimulus diffusion but maybe there’s a countervailing power in the peasant stubbornness in people out there is the countryside that look askance at city dwellers and their loose ways.
“Yeah? One God?” asks the incredulous farmer of his pious and virtuous wife when the bullies in the temple are done their bullying.
“Too much wine, they drink too much wine, ” proclaims his overly mouthy son whose mouth will get him in terrible trouble one of these days and who should be more diligent about his tasks. Less time talking, more time working. Not that the farmer disagrees. Yes, too much wine and too much lazing about on puffed pillows. And look at what happens.
More than one thing at work as you said.
I’m not sure if this is or isn’t a controversial take, or if comparative religion scholarship has addressed it. It seems like it might be pretty obvious that Protestantism is a Sunni-like, text-focused, internal revolt against the Roman Catholic Shi’te-like take on scripture and authority, with Anabaptists playing the role of Sufiism. Whether that is diffusion or just how two “peoples of the book” expressed similar internal splits over authority and interpretation, it’s hard to say. But I rather doubt the remote Protestant world took much from Islam as opposed to Judaism.
I only know of a few direct connections, which are all between Calvinism and Islam. But as I think back over the history I know, it seems to me that Jewish mysticism was the more significant force for cultural diffusion on Protestantism. That influence is well known in terms of political theology and early modern constitutionalism, but the esoteric influences are always a harder sell in academe, which will only tolerate a few standouts like Frances Yates, Gershom Scholem, and Amos Funkenstein.
Protestantism was massively influenced by Humanism, and the diffusion of Judaism and Hebrew in Europe shaped both. Humanist and Protestant historicism, text-criticism, linguistics, philology, and interest in translation to spread lay literacy have no analog. They’re rooted in Augustine and his direct confrontation of the mess of the Christians’ Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, and Greek canons and corpus, which were much less attractive than Mani’s self-written codices available in Syriac and many other languages. (Augustine explains in his Confessions this was why he never could intellectually convert to Christianity by reading its texts.)
The Catholic church officially doubled down on pretending the pope and Jerome’s Latin were the magical equivalent of Mohammed/Allah’s Arabic, and the Protestants fell into schism (made worse, not better) by their search for the true original texts and the true doctrinal formulations based on those texts. The Calvinists were most interested in systematic theologizing in this way, but they soon discovered it led to more schism, not agreement, and unity had to be enforced by the sword and fire when a rash of anti-trinitarianism broke out among their scholars. The group involved in creating the Heidelberg Confession was infamous for persuading themselves that Arianism, not Trinitarianism, was justified by the plain text of scripture, and one of them, Adam Neuser, ended up a Muslim convert in the court of the Sultan of Constantinople. He might as well have radicalized his Christology and converted to Judaism, which is kind of a contemporary trend for some post-evangelicals. Christianity’s major distinctive is its claim to a tri-partite monotheism that was constructed in the conciliar doctrinal disputes of the church centuries after its accidental founder died. “Magisterial Protestants” like Calvin realized this and their need to keep continuity with those councils but also find textual support for trinitarianism simply for political reasons. Today, almost no popular protestant believer knows anything about this, and if they say anything about the trinity, they will get it wrong. They are in this respect functionally and formally closer to Islam but not from any direct influence. If you have read a Jack Chick tract you know what I mean — the incredible logical literal reductionism in that type of fundamentalism is probably universal when people are merely functionally literate and disconnected from a hoary and decrepit tradition they have received through comic books and cartoons.
You are probably aware that Eric Voegelin didn’t like Calvinism and associated it with his whipping boy, “gnosticism.” This is interesting because Calvin was a lawyer, and Voegelin was trained as a jurist and legal philosopher who took a rather magical view of the relationship between law and reality. This is a thing — it was legal realists a century ago who realized the law was being treated as magic and ritual, which, in their view, needed a modern, rational theoretical foundation, which would support the blind proceduralism all mature institutions fall into, just as the Catholic church had. Luther was a kind of humanist quasi-legal reformer, and Calvin was a scholastic and actual lawyer who took Luther to a logical and literal extreme. Voegelin called Calvin’s Institutes a “gnostic koran,” for the way JC’s introductory letter to one edition (addressed to a king or prince, as I recall) really does seem to say the Institutes are an airtight legal construct that supersede the messy scriptures and provide a clear basis for theocratic empire-building.
Even John Dee (and later Athanasius Kircher) went down a weird path looking for a foundation in the original, angelic language of creation if the true scriptures were not recoverable. According to an obscure English Renaissance scholar who probably never got tenure for getting a little too woo in his study of Protestant occultism, the militant ultra-Calvinist Sidneys translated the Psalms into English with numerological structures and an accent on their apocalyptic resonances because they thought it might trigger the end times, envisioned as a battle against Rome. This desire to get beyond the text to a pure union of mind, creative will, and utterance is from the diffusion of a distinctly Judaic mysticism. The Psalms and various prayers and formulations, while written, encode turns of phrase that are from pre-literate people. As in Native American counterparts, all living things are creatures and have faces and voices that speak. Animism goes hand in hand with oral cultures and lives on in literacy’s extension of the even more telepathic qualities of written language. This is what Dee and Kircher got out of their Hebrew studies, for sure.
Muninn, that’s a valid point, and worth keeping in mind.
Ambrose, oh, granted — Americans also have a penchant for weird stimulus diffusions. I hadn’t heard about the Oakland Buddha; if I’m ever down there I’ll burn some incense.
Smith, well, yes, there’s also that!
Dan, I gather you didn’t read any of the discussion further up, where we talked about the fact that Luther and Melanchthon both wrote prefaces to the first European published translation of the Quran, and that Luther himself was also powerfully influenced by at least one other book on Muslim religious traditions. The Protestant world wasn’t all that remote. As for Dee, he certainly got a fair amount out of his Hebrew studies, but you can find the same principles in the Hermetic works he studied; my forthcoming translation of (and commentary on) the Monas Hieroglyphica will discuss the way he used a specific Latin isopsephy as a structuring theme throughout that book, for example, rather than Hebrew gematria. (The Monas had a lot less to do with alchemy and a lot more to do with planetary magic than the subsequent generation of occultists, and modern scholars after them, ever realized; approaching it without the preliminaries of the Propaedeutica Aphoristica is a trap into which too many people have fallen.)
Re: the Greek and Norse attitude to the gods: it seems that this worldview would cause a very different attitude to hardship and suffering than ours. In our (Western, prosperous) world, things mostly work and misfortune and suffering are a violation of the natural order. If your entire worldview is that the world is buffeted by chaotic forces, then I guess that suffering would seem a much more natural part of life and it is order and prosperity that are unnatural, that must be built up by people working alongside the gods.
Dan #193: “The Psalms and various prayers and formulations, while written, encode turns of phrase that are from pre-literate people. As in Native American counterparts, all living things are creatures and have faces and voices that speak.”
When I read that, I thought of Psalm 114: “The sea fled at the sight…the mountains skipped like rams, and like lambs, the hills.” (Jerusalem Bible) The use of active voice suggests that the sea, mountains, and hills have – well, minds of their own. Literally, “the hills are alive,” as Maria sings in The Sound of Music.
“Animism goes hand in hand with oral cultures…” That reminds me of going to the Royal BC Museum in Victoria and learning that indigenous people in that area would say “the thunder gods are angry,” instead of “I hear thunder.” The book “Orality and Literacy” has a lot of insights about oral cultures vs. literate cultures, but I never made the connection with animism, so thank you for that comment!
I always appreciated Tolkien’s way of describing nature in active voice, e.g., “the mountains towered over the plains…” Incidentally, Tolkien contributed to the Jerusalem Bible – a 1966 translation quoted above – by translating the Book of Jonah, noting that the “big fish” (not a whale) symbolized God’s mercy.
I think rather. According to the Christian perspective. Given Noah was the patriarch of all modern mankind. That the Persians and those steppe nomads that they are related to retained more of the original monotheism compared to the agrarian civilizations. And that the Israelites once they entered Canaan had their conception of God mixed up with the polytheism of the lands they conquered.
The exile by Nebuchadnezzar to Babylon which coincidentally God told the Israelites to surrender to. Also helped facilitate the return to monotheism that the prophets wanted for Israel.
There is also this interesting video on a study of aboriginals in Australia of which the tribes that remained primitive remained the most monotheistic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-bMgXQV7no
The hypothesis is that that cultural complexity enabled people to be more polytheistic. Their relationship to their gods is more transactional compared to the original monotheistic god.
“it surprises me a little that more of the Reformers didn’t go Unitarian and reject the Trinity altogether — it seems logical enough.”
The bible prohibits that by showing various proofs that Jesus is god. It is forbidden by the text itself unlike the Quran. Especially the Book of John and Hebrews. But also clues like simply commanding things to happen and it happens. Healings like in other religions are generally more elaborate in its set up. But a God needs to simply command something and creation obeys.
Another comment on Christianity. Is how this same God would set up his own context in which once he set up the framework like an oriental king with the Temple and everything else. Would then once he became a human being act more like a Trickster deity than one that simply issues decrees from on high and going on to conquer Rome violently by force.
>the Protestants fell into schism (made worse, not better) by their search for the true original texts and the true doctrinal formulations based on those texts
It is our sacred duty to popularize literacy of ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek. Sacred, I tell you, sacred. Someone should bug duolingo to make some teaching modules.
=)
>Amish businesses will typically use them, but there are restrictions aimed at keeping the technology from interfering with home life. Nor do they entirely shun motor vehicles
You can just say “pizza” but at some point, you have to specify what *kind* of pizza. Same thing with the Amish – there are a *lot* of different splinter groups and they all believe in slightly different things and have different practices. To the rest of us, all their names end in Troyer or Yoder 😛
There’s some natural law at work with fringe groups, something akin to the edge of a fractal. They have to differentiate and bifurcate endlessly, or as much as their resources will permit.
Speaking of the Trinity. The New Testament frankly comes across as Tritheistic in its descriptions and portrayals of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and as does my own experience of deity as a Christian. So I can see how the Protestant reformers carried on with the Trinity. However the objections to this by Islam and Judaism are quite understandable. The following are quotes from Bishop Kallistos Ware, an Eastern Orthodox prelate taken from his book The Orthodox Way. It has a splendid chapter entitled “God as Trinity”
“Why should God be a communion of three divine persons, neither less or more? Here again there can be no logical proof. The Threeness of God is something given or revealed to us in Scripture, in the Apostolic Tradition and in the experience of the saints throughout the centuries. All that we can do is to verify this given fact through our own life of prayer”
Yes! Three for the price of One and so much fun! God is love.
I can see how JMG can easily accommodate this Christian experience in his polytheistic framework.
Mary Bennet @180
As for the question of the expansiveness of fundamentalist Islam, you can refer to the evolution of communism in the twentieth century.
Around 1900, the academic community, including most Communists, believed that Communism was an idea that could only develop in a Protestant industrialized society. Polytheistic agricultural countries like China could not accept Communism. Guess which country most of the world’s Communists were located in 60 years later?
Fundamental Islamism’s contempt for culture and antiquities around the world is not an obstacle to its spread; the Communists’ destruction of Chinese and Russian cultural relics and their contempt for local culture are equally huge, but this does not prevent their temporary success in these two regions. There are many explanations for this, such as the cruelty of communism or the more real the paradise it promised, but in any case, these factors are also largely present in fundamentalist Islam today.
In human thought, all kinds of accidents can lead to further spread, especially ideas that have already adapted to circulation. What would happen if a fundamentalist leader decided to change strategy and lead his thousands of followers, who have fought dozens of physical and propaganda wars, to move to a country that is unprepared for them? Anyway, they had already carried out revolutions in West Africa and India, countries where Muslims were not in the majority, and many of them were first-generation Muslims. After all, when the Communists won in China and Russia, the number of people who could simply understand their ideas was less than 0.1% of the local people. As for the subsequent missionary work and forced indoctrination, it would not be too difficult.
They have been practicing for decades in Muslim-dominated countries since the middle of the last century, and for another decade after 9/11 in countries where Muslims have a sizable population but are not dominant.
Although most revolutionaries are still carrying out their revolutionary movement within the Islamic country, if one day they decide to go to a place that does not understand Islam at all to preach, like the general in the ancient Islamic story (actually adapted from the 20th century Leninist party revolutionary story, the character’s behavior has not changed, only the character’s clothing has been changed to Middle Eastern costumes, and the word “not” in “I do not believe in God” has been removed), and eventually overthrow the fragile and outdated government. The chances of them all failing are small, but if they succeed, it would open a new era of world revolution just like the Communist conquest of Russia. After all, just because the Aztecs were discovered as trophies by a small group of Spanish conquerors doesn’t mean that another small group of Spanish conquerors don’t have another simple gold mine to plunder.
I’m not a Christian but the Trinitarian doctrine is not the only way Christians have interpreted the relationship between the Father, Son, & Holy Spirit. Arians viewed the Son as the first creation of the Father, through which the Father created the world (John 1). He is not equal to the Father, and gets his divinity from the Father.
And some Christians subscribed to the modalist view in which there is one God who manifests in three different modes which only seem to us mortals to be three persons. It would be like steam, water, and ice, or like the personas we take up to fill different roles depending on the context.
@JMG
Since this essay is about religions, I just wanted to share a little-known example of “diffusion”: I’m talking about Zoroastrianism here. Contrary to what many people think, Zoroastrianism (called Z from now on to avoid long spellings) is not dead; in fact, it’s alive in India, which actually has the largest Z population in the world. Indian Zs are split into two groups, namely, the Iranis and the Parsis. The Parsis are the older and larger group, and have been in India since the 8th-10th century period. The name “Parsi” indicates that they were Persians, originally from the Fars region of Iran. The traditional account of their exodus to India is chronicled in a text called the Qissa-e-Sanjan – as per this text, the Zs, upon landing in Navasari in Gujarat, sent a delegation to the local Hindu king (called Jadi Rana in the text), asking his permission to seek asylum in his kingdom. The king, himself fond of poetry and riddles, sent his men with a glass filled to the brim with milk, indicating that his kingdom (the glass) was already full of people (the milk), and adding even a drop more (Zs) would cause it to overflow (social instability). The high priest of the Zs, known by the title of dastur, smiled and added a pinch of sugar into the glass, stirred it and sent it back to the king, indicating that just like sugar dissolves in milk and makes it sweeter without causing any problems, the Zs would retain their distinct identity without causing any trouble to the local Hindus and Jains, and also enrich their lives. The king was so happy that he immediately gave them full freedom and rights to settle down in his kingdom, with some caveats:
1) the Zs would speak in Gujarati in public and for all non-personal interactions, especially with locals.
2) the Zs were free to wear their traditional attire in their religious and cultural ceremonies, but would have to wear Indian attire, or at least a modified version of the same (applicable for both women and men), in public.
3) the Zs would not intermarry with the Hindus
The Zs readily agreed, and since then, we’ve had a thriving Zs population in our country. The Parsis became excellent at commerce, trade and industry; and after the British rule began, they started lobbying the British government to pressure the then Iranian government to allow the unfortunate Zs there suffering under Islamic religious persecution to come to India. Their lobbying was strong enough that the British agreed, and thus the second group of Zs came to India – they’re called “Iranis”; and a lot of them are famous people, including actors like Boman Irani, and Zubin Irani, who is the husband of the (rather controversial) BJP leader Smriti Irani (herself a practicing Hindu, BTW).
I have a close friend who’s a Parsi, and while he’s not religious, he’s a “cultural Zoroastrian” the way Richard Dawkins supposedly claims to be a “cultural Christian”. Parsi religious holidays like Pateti and Navroz are official holidays in India, and they celebrate them – in his family, they are all chocolate lovers, so they make fish-shaped homemade chocolates, in addition to their fabulous and unique cuisine, which includes dishes like patra ni machchi (pomfret stuffed with and covered with a nice spicy green paste, then covered in banana leaves which are then tied together, and then it’s steamed), dhansaak (a thick, nutritious and comforting stew made with veggies. lentils, and generous addition of cooked chicken or goat meat; best enjoyed with rice), salli boti (a thick curry made with chicken or goat meat, with fried potato slivers sprinkled on top), and so on.
In recent years, there have been multiple intermarriages between Zoroastrians and Hindus/Jains/Sikhs/Buddhists, which has led to a greater diffusion from Hindu culture to Z culture, which is in addition to the above cultural legacy of Parsis, which is obviously an adaptation of Hindu culture. The Indian government actually has an official scheme called Jiyo Parsi, which is aimed at boosting the declining population of both Parsis and Iranis in India. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’ve already heard of some famous Indian Zs – Freddy Mercury is one of them, his real name being Farrukh Bulsara.
A similar story can be said about the Jews in India, although the specifics of the story are of course somewhat different. But I can say with pride (not chauvinism) that both these religions and their followers have been granted refuge in India, and protected by Hindus and Sikhs, often at the cost of their lives; indeed, India and China are the only two countries in the world where Jews have never been religiously persecuted by native people, religions and kingdoms. There are a LOT of things wrong with my country, but hatred towards Jews and Zs by Hindus/Jains/Sikhs/Buddhists is not one of them, now or in the past, and probably even in the future. In fact, even the much-maligned “Hindu nationalist” parties (of which the BJP is the biggest but not the only big player) and supporters of said parties and organizations have a very positive attitude towards Jews and Zs.
Finally, there’s one last point I wanted to make: you mentioned in a reply to a fellow commenter that Sikhism was a “third thing”, which drew on Islamic and Hindu traditions to create something entirely distinct. I’m sorry but I think you’re wrong here: the “Islamic influence” that people identify Sikhism with, is actually found in many other Hindu sects as well (both traditional and colonial-era ones like the Arya Samaj) – this idea of “Sikhism is a completely different religion from the rest of the Hindu commonwealth” was actually a 19th-century British tactic to subvert Sikhs, as the latter were extremely brave and capable warriors, and were, according to one senior British officer, the “most resolute and courageous enemy that the British ever fought in India”; but looking at the great sympathy Sikhs enjoy among Hindu society (lots of marriages between Hindus and Sikhs), it seems that the British weren’t exactly as successful as they hoped to be. Sikhism is actually Hindu through and through – the founder, Guru Nanak, was a devotee of Shiva, and the tradition he started is one of the important movements in the bhakti movement, which focused on devotional singing and prayers over ritual worship, accelerated to a large extent by Islamic demolitions of temples. The Sikh holy text, called the Guru Granth Sahib, actually contains the compositions of many saints from all across India, and these saints are clearly Hindu saints. What distinguishes Sikhism from other Indic traditions is that Sikhi is the only Indic tradition which doesn’t bother, let alone focus on, things like reincarnation, the afterlife, and other concepts which treat human life as something to be less important than attaining moksha or nirvana or whatever; instead, Sikhi focuses on the “here and now” – this might possibly be a big contributor to the extremely helpful nature of Sikhs in general.
I like your idea of stimulus diffusion. Most historical explanations use fairly local events as causal explanations, because the explainer knows the local events but often doesn’t understand the broader historical sweep. Your explanation opens minds.
Printing presses were just a mechanism, a way to get information to many people faster. They needed other innovations too, such as higher literacy (30% in cities) and translations of the Bible into contemporary languages, such as Luther’s translation into German.
“There’s some natural law at work with fringe groups, something akin to the edge of a fractal. They have to differentiate and bifurcate endlessly, or as much as their resources will permit.”
Apparently: (and with the note that I live in LDS country, all of whom are heathens who will burn for eternity according to my Baptist mother (who was originally a Lutheran.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_denominations_in_the_Latter_Day_Saint_movement
“Following Smith’s death, the movement underwent a leadership crisis which led to a schism within the church. The largest group followed Brigham Young and settled in what became the Utah Territory and is now the Utah-based LDS Church. The second-largest faction, Community of Christ, coalesced around Joseph Smith III, eldest son of Joseph Smith. Other would-be leaders included the senior surviving member of the First Presidency, Sidney Rigdon; the newly baptized James Strang from Wisconsin; and Alpheus Cutler, one of the Council of Fifty. Each of these men still retains a following as of 2014—however tiny it may be in some cases—and all of their organizations have undergone further schisms.[10][11][12] Other claimants, such as Granville Hedrick, William Bickerton, and Charles B. Thompson, later emerged to start still other factions, some of which have further subdivided.”
This has been an interesting topic though I personally don’t have horse in the race being a worshipper of Gravity, a tactic that works well to discourage missionaries.
I have worked with several Moslems in my life though; A Turk, a West Bank Palestinian, a Pakistani, an Iranian Kurd, a female Iranian engineer (she had lots of opinions on the leadership of that country), and an Iranian fundamentalist who fortunately never met the female engineer. They disagreed a lot more than I originally thought possible for a religion with a strict interpretation of their scripture.
@Patrick #203 I am familiar with the Arian and the modality views. I think the more quantum physics superposition view is better. After all I have had all three of them show up at the same time. The water metaphor I use is that if a gallon of water was like the Trinity all of it would be liquid, all of it vapor and all of it solid at the same time. There are nice action shots of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit being present simultaneously in the Bible. That the Son is simultaneously completely human, Jesus of Nazareth and Deity is another fun experiential superposition, both fully present in one person in the encounter.
Kfish, exactly. This is one of the things that makes the old Pagan faiths speak to me. To see the world as a fragile, limited creation brought into being out of raw seething chaos by the heroic labors of the gods and goddesses, who call on us to help them sustain it against the forces of chaos and old night, makes sense of our existence to me in a way that the teachings of conventional monotheism never have.
Info, well, that’s certainly one way to spin the data.
BeardTree, it’s actually very easy. From my polytheist perspective, we know about gods the same way we know about butterflies, or Antarctica, or sexual passion: people have encountered these things, and told others of their experience. A whale of a lot of Christians have had, and described, encounters with the three persons of the Trinity, and comparing their accounts to those of other people who’ve encountered gods, and to my own religious experiences, leads me to the conviction that those three persons are divine. Mind you, that doesn’t mean I accept the theology that intellectuals and religious officials have heaped up on top of those experiences, but the reality and divinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit? I cheerfully affirm that, just as I affirm the existence of platypuses and the island of Madagascar, neither of which I’ve seen.
Viduraawakened, I read many years ago about the Parsis, but I didn’t happen to know about the Iranis. That’s good to hear, and it also seems utterly typical of India, where ancient traditions thrive long after they’ve vanished everywhere else. (Years ago, when I was studying the old Western health system of the four humors, I was startled to learn that it’s still a thriving tradition in India, under the name of Unani medicine.) As for Sikhism, thanks for the correction — I don’t claim to know much about the faith and was going by what I learned in comparative religion classe back in college.
Tom, exactly. Human beings have always been fascinated by cultural inputs from far away — we know, for example, that in Neolithic times stone axes from a particular quarry in Ireland ended up as far away as Ukraine, and that one of the most lavish burials at Stonehenge was of a guy who was born in the Swiss Alps. Local explanations are not always the best!
@JMG #60: Fair points both about the sea connecting opposite shores (for good or for bad) and about the history of printing before movable type in Europe, which I didn’t know about.
From what I understand, you do affirm that literacy was much higher at the beginning of the 16th century than one or two centuries earlier, since printing had enabled mass production of hornbooks etc. So do we agree that higher literacy was one (though not the only and maybe not the main) contributing cause to the success of the reform movements initiated by Luther, Calvin and Zwingli, where John Wycliff, Jan Hus and Peter Waldo had seen only local and temporary success?
deedl at 130: “… that islam is not just another way to worship god but comes with a complete set of rules and instructions how to organize society and political life.”
Indeed, the arabic word “دين” (dīn) which is usually translated as “religion” has also many other connotations, including “law”:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%AF%D9%8A%D9%86
Yavanna (on Jonah): ” the “big fish” (not a whale)”
Jesus calls it a whale, though. From this, you can prove to biblical literalists that whales are fish.
Several people have spoken of the various editions of the Old Testament (OT) in use.
As anyone who has read the Gospels knows, 1st-century Judaism was not just “one religion.” The Scriptural canon at that time (what we call the OT), was not yet “fixed.”
As many here know, the OT writings were translated into Greek by bi-lingual scholars in Alexandria in what became known as the Septuagint (LXX). Here is an article about how the Septuagint came to be, and how it compares with other versions of the OT:
https://shrewsburyorthodox.com/introduction-to-orthodoxy/holy-scripture-in-the-orthodox-church-the-septuagint/
The Church in the East regarded the LXX as more authentic than the contemporary Hebrew books. Justin Martyr accused the Jews of altering their books to counter Christian claims, a view generally accepted amongst the Orthodox to this day.
To my surprise, the Latin Vulgate is not a simple translation of the Septuagint from Greek to Latin. Jerome translated some of the Hebrew language books of his time, for which he was heavily criticised by Augustine, among others. He also excluded a small number of LXX books from the Vulgate.
Here is a comparative table of the Rabbinical Jewish, Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant OT’s.:
https://catholic-resources.org/Bible/Heb-Xn-Bibles.htm
The Pharisees (modern Rabbinical Jews) closed their OT canon at the Council of Jamnia in 100 A.D. The Christians did not address the matter until Marcion forced the issue.
Among the Christians, it seems that only the Orthodox accept the complete LXX as canonical scripture. Everyone else has made subtractions and/or alterations, as you can see from the table cited above.
So! Have fun chasing down that rabbit hole!
JMG @141: ” I have no particular interest in the furry scene…”
No shoggoths allowed? 🙂
@JMG — I didn’t see the discussion of Luther in the comments, but if it is relevant, why didn’t you include it in your post? I’m unable to find any actual claim as to what in (very broadly) Protestant thought might be the result of “stimulus diffusion” caused by the Ottoman threat rather than a situation and pre-existing common ground in their enemies and iconoclasm.
Other commenters are being sloppy with regard to chronology. Luther did not significantly engage with Islam until well after his movement was rolling, in 1529. The preface to the Koran came out very close to Luther’s death. Luther first spoke against resisting the Ottomans since he saw them as a well-earned problem or “divine scourge” for the pope and potential allies against the Hapsburgs. A decade later, Calvin’s Institutes had been published, and Luther (nearing the end of his life) had changed his public stance about the advancing Turks and taken on a generally apocalyptic outlook. That is when European intellectual (and Protestant linguistic) engagement with Islam, the Koran, and Arabic began in earnest, but it was only a direct engagement in places like Poland, Hungary, and Transylvania where Protestants and Ottomans actively supported each other.
Luther’s early views turned out to predict how things would actually play out politically. The Ottomans encouraged Protestants where they met them (Hungary and Transylvania) since they did have the same enemy in the Hapsburgs. Apparently, this is a key reason some scholars attribute to the expansion of Protestantism and also the consolidation of European nation states. The Catholics accused eastern Protestants of “Calvino-Turkism,” and Polish nobles gifted with Ottoman clothing were attacked as Lutheran heretics. In France, late in the 16thC, Hueguenots wanted to fight with the Ottomans against Spain, and the St. Bartholomew Day’s massacre made the Ottomans more sympathetic to the Protestant minority and unhappy with their French allies.
If you want to argue for an Ottoman influence on “Protestantism(s)” it is really a matter of defining which protestants and when, and what kind of influence on what.
JMG, with regard to your following points: “This thing that you’re looking for is a culturally specific desire, and it’s not present in classical Greek or traditional Germanic thought. They didn’t see form as a transcendent thing, not least because they didn’t have the same concept of physical existence that modern Westerners have. No matter how many times you rephrase your question, it’s going to get the same answer, because the ancients weren’t attracted by a beyond (however defined or undefined), much less turn to it as a source of goodness or awe or wonder. I know it’s a wrench to grasp this — it took me a long time and a lot of close study of classical writings and thoughtful commentaries on them — but it’s important to make the effort if you want to meet the ancients on their own terms and not just force them into the Procrustean bed of modern notions.”
I get all that about the ancients – with the proviso that it applies only before Plato came along with the clearly transcendent “beyondness” of his Theory of Forms – but what about the moderns? Polytheists exist now – you yourself are one, I believe, JMG; please correct me if I’m wrong – and it seems you must somehow cope with what I may call the “background issue”, or the plurality-problem: that is, the gods, if really plural, can’t be ultimate (assuming ultimateness can’t be divided or shared around – it’s hard to see how it could be), and if there is no personal God with a capital G, then the medium in which the plural gods exist, and which sustains their existence, must be the ultimate. Perhaps it’s the astral light’s source? I’m floundering here. I want to understand what a modern polytheist believes or assumes; bearing in mind what you have said but also that we can’t un-think the thoughts that have been thunked since antiquity.
@ Michael Martin #212
ok, I went down that rabbit hole… 😉
and now I have a question for yourself, and/or any Orthodox readers in the commentariat…
Which is this. Which is the English translation of the Septuagent that you find most reliable for personal reading and use?
(Also, I had never known that there was a biblical text called “Bel and the Dragon” and now I need to read this.) 🙂
I spent a week with some American Sikh’s in New Mexico back in 1998, as part of a just-graduated-from-high school road trip. We went there for a yoga retreat, and three days of “white tantric yoga.” They were part of the late Yogi Bahjan’s “Sikh Dharma International” group and 3HO: Happy, Holy, Healthy. You can see Yogi Bhajan in the grocery store if you ever buy any Yogi Tea varieties. They make some good stuff and I enjoyed drinking their chai mix with them, but was sad they didn’t have any caffeine on the premise. I am not sure how different this group was compared to Sikh’s in India. There were also plenty of people there who weren’t Sikh’s but were just there for the yoga (like my group: which included my cousin (now an evangelical Christian), a girl I was having a summer fling with, and her old hippie yoga teacher who took us there, and to the National Rainbow Gathering after that.
It was cool hanging out in the desert mountains with all these robed dudes carrying around scimitars and chanting mantras with them. Quite an experience for 18 year old kid from Ohio! (Hang on Sloopy, Hang On!) I still have the copy of Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga I bought in red paperback on that trip. Obviously the Eastern stimulus diffusion is still ongoing…
It looks like the group is still having their annual summer solstice gathering:
https://www.sikhdharma.org/summer-solstice-2025/
JMG, I found this little piece on the intersection of Judaism and Zorastrianism, which very well supports what you wrote, and throws in a few other things: https://olli.gmu.edu/docstore/600docs/1403-651-3-Zoroastrianism,%20Judaism,%20and%20Christianity.pdf
I am feeling a desire to investigate the “prehistory” more. Zorastrianism I remembered a bit from a world religions class I took in college. But you previously mentioned Tengrism, the ancient “sky god” of Turkey, which I had never heard of prior to your mention. Have you ever considered doing a book on these ancient religions? Also, with you being a pantheist (at least I hope I have that right), have you ever attempted to get in touch with these ancient “gods”? Do ancient gods die or retire? Or would you expect there to still be a lot of power, and a story, there?
JMG 178 & 185: What you said here about the Greco-Roman world embracing the bounded, ordered and finite while rejecting the chaotic infinite, and how this clashes with modernity, directly relates to Spengler’s thesis of Prime Symbols. The Classical or Apollonian symbol was the idealized human form and nearby space, which framed all that they thought and did, including their view of the cosmos. The Modern Faustian symbol is zooming into infinity, which frames all that we do, which is why, despite the Classical pseudomorphosis during the Renaissance, there is a sense of alien difference between us and them, and having different, nearly opposite prime symbols is the reason for this. There’s alot more I could say on Apollonian versus Faustian: statues versus music, metal coinage versus fractional reserves, geometry versus calculus, and so on, but I’ll leave it at that.
Also, I’ve seen that display of Santa on the Cross, and thought it was a hilarious case of culture clash.
@Scotlyn #216
The most commonly available translation is Sir Launcelot Brenton’s mid-19th century translation “The Septuagint with Apocrypha.” NOTE: This is considered a “scholar’s edition” and is not all that easy to read.
The translation I use is my the late Michael Asser, who took the KJV Bible and reworked it to conform to the Septuagint text. You can get it in PDF format on Scribd here:
https://www.scribd.com/doc/98791612/The-Septuagint-Orthodox
I find this much easier to read (HINT: You have to subscribe to Scribd, but you can cancel your subscription immediately and escape being charged a fee).
@Michael Martin (#212) and Scotlyn (#216):
The table Michael linked to (at shrewsbury.com) is seriously incomplete with respect to Christendom as a whole. Only the Catholic and Protestant have fairly well-defined Canons of Scripture. In Eastern Orthodoxy there are six statements of the Canon of Scripture, and they do not all agree with one another in every detail. Moreover, Bibles printed by Orthodox presses for Greek Orthodox use and for Slavic Orthodox use do not entirely agree, either: the Slavic Orthodox printed Bibles include one book, 3 Esdras (called 2 Esdras by Protestant scholars, one of the apocrypha in English editions of the full King James Bible), which is not extant anywhere in Greek. (There is also the Georgian Orthodox Church, but I’m not sure whether its printed Bibles follow the Greek or the Slavic model.)
Things get even wilder with the Canon of Scripture in the other Eastern Christian churches, which reject the Council of Chalcedon and all its decrees. These are (1) the Armenian Canon of Scripture, (2) the “Jacobite” Syriac Canon of Scripture, (3) the “Nestorian” Syriac Canon of Scripture, (4) the Coptic Canon of Scripture, and (5) the Ethiopian Canon of Scripture. To go into the details would take up too much of the reader’s patience, I’m sure, fascinating as they are. I would note only that some of these Canons include, variously, more books of the Maccabees than just two, Paul’s Third Letter to the Corinthians (in Armenian), Clement’s two letters, the Apostolic Canons (or even the entire eight books of the Apostolic Constitutions), and the [First] Book of Enoch (in Ethiopic).
@Scotlyn (#216):
You can find Bel and the Dragon among the apocrypha in the original King James Bible. (Most modern printings of that Bible don’t include the apocrypha and also don’t reproduce the original 1611 text, but a revision from the 1760s instead).
>Which is the English translation of the Septuagent that you find most reliable for personal reading and use?
(whisper) Your own.
Interesting religious data here: The United States is More Religious than Europe but by How Much?
https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-united-states-is-more-religious
Hi JMG and friends,
In the comments I see mentions of Sikhism popping up, especially as a possible example of syncretization or JMG’s concept of “stimulus diffusion.” As a Sikh myself, I found the thread interesting to read, but there are a few misconceptions I see that I want to gently correct.
The concept of God in Sikhism is similar to that of “Brahman” (not to be confused with Brahma) in the Vedanta tradition of Hinduism, or perhaps to some of the more esoteric interpretations of the Islamic tawhid (although I suspect non-Sufi and non-Shia Muslims would disagree). That said the Sikh approach to life is something I think would be much more recognizable to followers of non-Indic faiths; we reject asceticism entirely, and idol worship is strictly forbidden.
The thing which is unique to Sikhi is a sort of mysticism which does not shy away from the material. The militarist foundations of the faith as well as the instruction to be engaged in worldly affairs echo the way our interpretation of spirituality differs from other Indic faiths. This world is temporary and illusionary, and yet Sikhs are to be engaged in it (even while being unattached).
Viduraawakened (204), I have to disagree with the idea that Guru Nanak Dev Ji was in any way a disciple of Lord Shiva. His son Baba Sri Chand Ji certainly was, but he would abandon Sikhism entirely and found his own sect, the Udasis. Vaishnavite names for God (Gobind, Ram, Hari, etc.) are frequently used in Guru Granth Sahib Ji, and I can see why someone might interpret that to mean Sikhism has a Vaishnavite leaning to it. (Such a claim would be incorrect; while we respect figures like Lord Ram or Lord Krishna as righteous/holy men, you will find again and again in Sikh scripture that such figures are stated to be mortal and creations of God). Of course there is a kinship between Sikhism and Hinduism, but I find that people sometimes think that means the two faiths align with one another more than they actually do.
The enigmatic Charles Thomson, Secretary of the US Congress under the Articles of Confederation and designer of the equally enigmatic Great Seal of the United States, also made and published the first English translation of the Septuagint in 1808 at Philadelphia.
Writing Hobbyist @ 224 can you explain what is the reason for rejection of asceticism among the Sikh? I take it there are no Sikh nuns or monks and no notion of consecrated life. If so, that is a characteristic shared with Islam, Judaism and most kinds of Protestantism.
Robert Mattheisen @ 221, extra books of the Maccabees would be of great interest for students of the Hellenistic period. I would venture to guess the Maccabean books were written much closer to the events they recount than were most of the usual sources, and also not written from a Roman point of view.
Hi John Michael,
Been keeping a low profile over the past few days. The Federal election down here was err, interesting, and had many similar shades to the Canadian result. My friend Simon wrote an excellent summary of the situation from a local, historical and world perspective. Thoughts on the Australian (and Canadian) election.
The flight to perceived safety in a time of turbulence does in no way make the underlying issues go away. Actually, the past three Federal elections have suggested to me that people are OK with increasing inequality, particularly in relation to the extraordinary housing bubble. Man, when that bubble pops, it’ll be an epic mess.
We’ve spoken about this for a long while, but the threat of hyperinflation, stagflation and currency devaluations just keeps getting bigger (and closer). So weird that we’d pursue policies of comfort which produce these outcomes, but I’ve been baffled by the goings on for a very long while now. Don’t you reckon the thing which trips up the current state of affairs will be some weird and inconsequential incident?
Cheers
Chris
Mr. Greer, This was a thoughtful piece that I enjoyed, as I always do when I visit your blog.
I stumbled over this claim, though: “The thought that France or England, say, had histories of their own worth studying didn’t occur to anyone until the seventeenth century.”
In England, I’m thinking of texts such as the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People) by Bede written in 731, Historia Historia Brittonum (History of the Britons) written by Nennius in 829, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle written at the time of Alfred the Great, the Annales Cambria (Annals of Wales) compiled in the 10th century, Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) written by Geoffrey of Monmouth in 1136, Gesta Regum Anglorum (Deeds of the Kings of the English) by William of Malmesbury in 1125, the Historia Anglorum (History of the English) by Henry of Huntingdon in 1130s, the Historia Anglicana (English History) by Thomas Walshingham around 1400.
In France, a similar and even longer list could be made, including among many others the HIstory of the Franks by Gregory of Tours in the 5th century, the Historia Regum Francorum (History of the Kings of the Franks) by Aimoin of Fleury c.1000, the Chronicles by Jean Froissart, c. 1400, the Grandes Chroniques de France (Great Chronicles of France) by monks of Saint-Denis in the 1300s, and many others.
The Gesta Danorum, Deeds of the Danes by Saxo Grammaticus in the 13th century, gave us the version of the Hamlet legend that Shakespeare based his play on.
All these historical works were written well before the seventeenth century. Doesn’t this speak against the claim that northwest Europeans weren’t interested in their own histories until later times?
Aldarion, the role of literacy in the origins of the Protestant reformation is complex; that it had some effect is certainly plausible, but I’d want to see more evidence — for example, data showing that Protestantism spread more quickly in areas with higher literacy rates. I haven’t seen that yet.
Phutatorius, er, there’s no small difference between a shoggoth in fiction and a human being dressed in a blobby shoggoth-esque costume of green fabric, lurching down the hallway of a convention hotel in search of casual sex partners…
Dan, I didn’t include it because I didn’t know it when I wrote the essay. One of the benefits of the conversations here is that I learn new things all the time. I also didn’t get into the kind of fine points you’re raising because this is a casual 3000-word essay and not a book. My blog posts are informal essays rather than scholarly publications, and very often reflect my current interests and incomplete research projects; that’s something newcomers to the blog often have to get used to.
Robert G, fair enough. I rather like the “thunk” of antique thought; it has a good solid resonance to it! As for your question, yes, I’m a polytheist, and I’ve reflected at rather some length on these issues, as I know you have; my conclusions differ from yours, but then that’s inevitable given the different religious sensibilities with which we approach the matter. I would say, first of all, that it’s hubristic in the extreme to think that human beings are capable of apprehending ultimates, or indeed, getting very far past the world as it appears to us; we can postulate a “beyond,” and reason about it to some extent, but this activity very quickly turns into the kind of chasing one’s own tail that puppies so often engage in, unless the hard limitations of human knowledge are kept in mind.
In the same way, but even more so, we have no way whatsoever of knowing the first thing about what the gods are in themselves, what medium or context they exist in, or what have you,. If gods are anything like what they appear to be when they are encountered by human beings, our chances of making sense of that rank far below the chance that a dust mite in Einstein’s jacket could have understood his theory of relativity. All we know about gods is what little we can infer from human religious experience. (I’ve argued this point at length in my book A World Full of Gods.) So the plurality-problem is simple tailchasing; it amounts to saying “Something we know nothing about, in a context utterly unknowable to us, did we know not what.” For that reason, trying to rely on such abstract considerations to make sense of human religious experience seems unwise to me.
Nor, finally, does the straining for infinites and ultimates that so often seems to shape the Christian religious sensibility have any appeal to me. When I think of the infinite and ultimate I think of the terrible lifeless voids of outer space; this is doubtless one of the reasons why I identify the current obsession about space travel with the Christian claim that we have to flee from the world to seek ultimate happiness in heaven. Do you recall the bit in John Crowley’s fine fantasy Little, Big, in which the main character dreams that he went to heaven and it turned out to be a tawdry little carnival with some booths to keep the faithful from getting bored and an iron ferris wheel creaking endlessly around? I found that immediately believable, because that’s what the Christian promise of heaven always felt like to me, from my first encounters with it in earliest childhood. What I seek from my religion is not beyond but within, not transcendence but immanence — not flight from the world to some hypothetical bliss outside it, but returning, belonging, and communion with the world in all its incredible richness and beauty.
Gnat, thanks for this. I’m a polytheist rather than a pantheist; I do have relationships with some ancient gods, but not all of them! I would say that the gods never die or retire, but the forms and images that human being build up around them are cast off from time to time, like the skin of a snake.
Xcalibur/djs, yes, and in fact Spengler helped me grasp that distinction.
Justin, interesting. Thanks for this.
Hobbyist, and thanks for this! I appreciate hearing from someone who’s part of the tradition; as I noted above, it’s not one I know a lot about.
Chris, it’s usually a weird little incident that sends history rumbling down each new path. Yeah, another of those is very likely now.
Carnelian, so noted. As I commented to another poster above, these are informal essays and not academic books with plenty of footnotes. If I were to write one of those latter on this subjects, I’d start with the medieval concept of auctoritas, and discuss which texts were considered to have it and which did not; I’d explore the differing medieval and Renaissance genres in which stories about the past appeared in writing and then in print; and I’d build a case that what we’d consider the history of European nations outside of Greece and Rome had a sharply different status among medieval and Renaissance intellectuals than what we’d call the history of the ancient world — noting always, of course, that every cultural narrative is contested and complex, and competing descriptions are always possible. Since I wasn’t writing an academic volume, though, and was aiming for the very modest length of 3000 words, I contented myself with the simpler description.
Carnelion @ 228 and JMG, there was indeed a wealth of secular writing during the European Middle Ages, poetry (Carmina Burana), chronicles, Lives of the Saints such as the Golden Legend, so much that even a non specialist like me has heard of them. I can’t help but wonder if the current trope about widespread illiteracy during those centuries is not greatly exagerated. Also, one remembers the copias, legalistic record keeping at every level of government, a mass of evidence which has kept generations of historians in employment and publication. Would it be at all fair to say that this vast secular literature is the mass media of it’s day? As to JMG’s point, I do recall reading a small amount from Acquinas, in which he refers only to The Philosopher, Aristotle, and I believe it was The Sage, or The Prophet, Augustine; if contemporary thinkers found their way into the Sumna, it was to be rebutted.
林龜儒 @ 292, I take your point about the destruction of antiquities, but I still am not seeing what Islam has to offer to non Muslim populations, other than, for men, you get to be The Man in your household, and women kept out of public life. Islam has benefitted in the West from having had the good luck to sit on top of oil fields, and from the misguided efforts of leftist multiculturalism. I can say that the ME diaspora has not made itself well liked in the USA.
@Robert Gibson (#215):
Several points occur to me while reading your last post.
1) The first stories about Gods that I ever read or heard, back in my childhood, were about the Old Norse Gods. As it happens, in these stories, the Gods do die, and are not eternal. (I am half Scandinavian by ancestry, so these stories were presented to me as part of my ancestral cultural heritage, not as any sort of sacred scripture.
So when I read the Bible for the first time in college, my first reaction to the Jewish and Christian accounts of God and his history made no sense whatever to me. It claims that God is immortal? And omnipotent? And wholly good, despite some of His abhorrent actions in history recorded in that same Bible. What arrant nonsense all these claims are! To be sure, I was enraptured by its language (I read the King James version, with the apocrypha), but rather turned off by its presuppositions.
2) When I was 13, I had a completely unsought, hours-long mystical experience of the entire universe, out and back and behind and ahead, to its furthest limits in time and in space. There are no words close to adequate to describe anything that I perceived during that experience, since these perceptions came not through any normal, physical senses, but by some other means, normally unavailable to human beings. Yet I will venture to say that the undivided whole of it seemed “alive,” “sentient,” and “fiery” — for lack of adequate words. There was also a gift of knowledge beyond those expanded perceptions: knowledge that this entire universe through all time and space was just a small part of something far vaster and more profound: only the children’s room, so to speak, in an enormous library. And any God there might be in that universe would be like a children’s librarian, far from the brightest bulb in the library’s chandeliers.
This experience probably influenced my reaction to the Bible (see #1 above) when I finally read it in college. And it certainly made every logical system of theology I ever encountered feel like arrant nonsense to me, simply because it had been worked out in words by means of logic.
3) So, as a result of the above experiences, all the thoughts you mentioned “that have been thunked since antiquity” remain forever unthinkable to me. I literally cannot make any sense at all of them for myself, no matter what words are used to express them.
Make of that what you will …
“What I seek from my religion is not beyond but within, not transcendence but immanence — not flight from the world to some hypothetical bliss outside it, but returning, belonging, and communion with the world in all its incredible richness and beauty.” As for me, JMG, I have never been able to believe in the validity of the distinction between immanence and transcendence; both terms are simply trying to convey the same idea using opposite spatial metaphors. “Beyond” and “within” are spatially opposed, but qualitatively identical, each equally saying, in effect, “a quiddity that is more than this”. Of course, habits of thought are affected by the choice of metaphor; but in our most truth-concerned moments we have to do better than that (I nearly wrote “go beyond that”! – shows how hard it is to shake off the spatial stuff).
That apart, thanks for your exposition in your latest reply, which goes some way towards enlightening me about your polytheism. I have found our discussion absorbing and important.
JMG – It was once explained to me that one trigger for the Protestant revolution was “a bad capital campaign for a big cathedral”. I don’t recall which one it was (maybe the Sistine Chapel?), but the Roman Catholic Church had set out to build a grand facility, but ran short of funds to complete it. The masons wouldn’t work without being well paid! So, they decided to press the people for money however they could, including the famous selling of Indulgences (the “get out of jail free” card; well, Purgatory). This was made more easy by the fact that “good priests” had cared for their parishes during the plagues, and died for it, while bad priests sequestered themselves in remote safety.
Mr. Greer, I really enjoyed reading your article!
An interesting aspect I noticed about the “nietzschean” modern far-right is their occasional musings that Christianity has failed and that Muslim forcefulness, violence and “warrior nature” is something that the far-right movement should be modeled around. I also recall the funny mustache man being known to occasionally praise Islam in private.
Reading what you have written, it seems to me that this aspect of the far-right might be edging towards doing what you’ve described – in a desperate attempt to reignite their cultures dominance, it praises and wants to adopt the Muslim “warrior culture” because of their praise and obsession with ideas of (total) dominance (in opposition to their own decaying tolerant cultures) while dismissing the actual religious details of Islam. A desire to create their own model of pseudo-Islam perhaps, albeit as always with these types they don’t actually have any beliefs or anything to offer beyond tired and eventually contradicting musings.
“Don’t you reckon the thing which trips up the current state of affairs will be some weird and inconsequential incident?”
‘A damn fool thing in the Balkans’ in 1914 comes immediately to mind as prior art.
This applies to economics too, in fact to lots of things.
https://www.mauldineconomics.com/frontlinethoughts/fingers-of-instability-mwo040706
“To find out why [such unpredictability] should show up in their sandpile game, Bak and colleagues next played a trick with their computer. Imagine peering down on the pile from above, and coloring it in according to its steepness. Where it is relatively flat and stable, color it green; where steep and, in avalanche terms, ‘ready to go,’ color it red. What do you see? They found that at the outset the pile looked mostly green, but that, as the pile grew, the green became infiltrated with ever more red. With more grains, the scattering of red danger spots grew until a dense skeleton of instability ran through the pile. Here then was a clue to its peculiar behavior: a grain falling on a red spot can, by domino-like action, cause sliding at other nearby red spots. If the red network was sparse, and all trouble spots were well isolated one from the other, then a single grain could have only limited repercussions. But when the red spots come to riddle the pile, the consequences of the next grain become fiendishly unpredictable. It might trigger only a few tumblings, or it might instead set off a cataclysmic chain reaction involving millions. The sandpile seemed to have configured itself into a hypersensitive and peculiarly unstable condition in which the next falling grain could trigger a response of any size whatsoever.”
This famous quote also applies;
“The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.”
Robert G, that’s fascinating. To me “beyond” and “within” are not merely distinct but impossible to confuse with each other — it’s like saying you can’t tell the difference between your belly button and the Moon. Still, I suppose that shows the gap between your religious sensibility and mine.
Lathechuck, I’ve heard that claim too, but only from Protestants! I don’t happen to know the facts of the matter.
Ambrosia, I wonder how much you’ve actually read from the far right. “Tired and eventually contradicting musings” certainly doesn’t correspond to what I’ve seen of their work. Problematic? Sure, and to me, unconvincing — almost as much so as the work of their equivalents on the extreme left — but one of the reasons I keep track of extremist thought on all side of the spectrum is precisely that they have robust beliefs and convictions. That’s in sharp contrast to the cultural mainstream, which increasingly just has empty corporate sound bites — and that’s what gives the extremes their appeal.
Siliconguy, thank you for this. I’m hoping that some damn fool thing in Kashmir hasn’t just done the equivalent.
JMG @236: “Ambrosia, I wonder how much you’ve actually read from the far right…”
Perhaps this is getting off topic and should be saved for an open post or not raised at all. What is it we consider further to the right currently: the (numerous) neo-conservatives or the (less numerous) paleo-conservatives? I suppose the latter would be further to the right, although it’s the neo-conservatives who are the interventionists. I want to say “warmongers” but “interventionist” may be more polite. So is it the paleo-conservatives who are “far right”? I think of Pat Buchanan and the late Russel Kirk as examples. Kirk would seem to me to have been a true Burkean Conservative, admirable in many ways. But is he really “far right” (aside from being dead)?
@Robert Mathieson #231:
Fascinating comments – thanks!
Rre your experience, most effectively described, of the alive, sentient, fiery whole: I am reminded of when at the age of six I first read the word “planet”. Indescribable, the effect of that. Suffice it to say that I can certainly relate to the phenomenon of a numinous place, situation, scenario, universe or whatever is the best word for it. Muspel in “A Voyage to Arcturus”, or the Island in C S Lewis’ “Pilgrim’s Regress”. Something to haunt one’s whole life.
Re “omnipotence”: just for the record, for what it’s worth, in my opinion a creator God, while necessarily transcendent, cannot be omnipotent because (note that this applies to all creators, including sub-creators such as human authors and artists) the moment creation is undertaken, the creator is limited by his choice of medium. Creation is a channeling of power into a defined, and hence limited, direction. Choose to create creatures with free will, and you must allow them the possibility of going bad… I reckon when the Churches go on about God’s “omnipotence” they aren’t thinking straight; they are clumsily attempting a description of qualities of majesty and splendour, and can’t really mean that He has the power to contradict Himself.
“To me “beyond” and “within” are not merely distinct but impossible to confuse with each other — it’s like saying you can’t tell the difference between your belly button and the Moon. Still, I suppose that shows the gap between your religious sensibility and mine.”
Well, suppose you were listening to two thinkers, one who talked about “profound” truths (i.e. using a “down” spatial metaphor) and the other who talked about “higher” truths (i.e. using an “up” spatial metaphor. The distinction between up and down, literally, is as clear as that between your belly button and the Moon. Yet you’d surely spot, immediately, that the literal is not the main point, and that really they meant the same thing, namely, “truths with more oomph”.
In the case of contrasting “beyond” with “within”, you can even reconcile them mathematically: a 4-D space must necessarily touch a 3-D space at all points, hence is “immanent”, yet also is not accessible in 3-D co-ordinates, hence “transcendent”.
“To see the world as a fragile, limited creation brought into being out of raw seething chaos by the heroic labors of the gods and goddesses, who call on us to help them sustain it against the forces of chaos and old night, makes sense of our existence to me in a way that the teachings of conventional monotheism never have.”
Nick Land calls this process “extropy”.