|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
THE DRAMA OF THE HOLY
CHAPTER FOUR
TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE GOD CONCEPT
INTRODUCTION. In human history, the concept of God have undergone many transformations; in this essay, I will speak of some of these transformations. Since most of human history has yet to be writ, I speak of those that have gone before and those which now we dimly see. With the aid of cultural anthropology, sociology, and, of course, theology, one can begin to adumbrate that which is, otherwise, surpasses human understanding. All this is prior to and bases for a postmodern reconceptualization of the god concept in a form that might suffice for most human purpose.
Exploration of the god concept in a postmodern mode requires a use of language otherwise forbidden. One is to worship the Gods; not to study them. In a sense, we shall do both in order to resanctify and to recover the realm of the Holy to the human project since, in postmodern theology, the challenge to religious sensibility is to help protect and to cherish, first, the good earth in all its interconnections and, second, to help sustain the human project. In that project premodern understandings, insights, goals, and pathways to the Holy have been and remain essential. Religious endeavor requires a faith, belief, trust and hope for the future that neither modern nor current expressions of the postmodern permit.
The most controversial part of this essay for many people within a modernist modality of thought will be the assertion that there are empirical grounds for belief in a god concept. I want to be understood carefully. I am making a case that, given folk standards of proof, there is an ontological process that answers to the name of god. This case parallels the one made earlier in the lead essay on the drama of the Holy; social facts, including the facticity of the god concept, are just as real as any inorganic structure; an atom, a molecule, a mineral or an ocean. The facticity of the god concept, understood as process, depends upon the way in which people chose to interpret the data of everyday experience.
I take as valid and depart from the Meadian point that all sense data are interpreted; no one experiences raw facts. Money is only paper or metal until it is interpreted as money. Women are only physiological entities until they are interpreted as daughters, wives or mothers. The data of everyday life which we actually experience and interpret as evidence of the god concept are, in fact there. What is at issue is the validity of the interpretation. A postmodern sensibility does not presume to prefer modern science interpretations above those of ordinary folk since both are, equally, interpretations. In the case of social facts, such interpretations return to construct and reproduce the ontologies which provide the data in a self- fulfilling process not found in physical science.
The empirical grounds for this facticity centers around special kind of data interpretation which are dismissed by modern science. Indeed modern science makes several questionable but strategic methodological assumptions that tend to overlook what ordinary people perceive and conceive. I place this indictment of modern science at the end of the essay; not because it is unimportant to postmodern theology, but because it tends to distract from the centrally important case for the god concept; that on the terms of proof used in premodern societies, the god concept is real.
It is possible to fashion a postmodern consciousness which centers and sanctifies the human process and the natural environment which it requires. This is true only if we accept the sanctification process as a human process. If social scientists continue to view sanctification as a supernatural process complete with pre-existing gods absolute in being and power, then we accept the god process as it is understood by premodern sensibility. Such an interpretation takes one down the road to nihilism--one tends to go beyond good and evil to one's own private struggles for survival.
If social scientists want to come back to questions of good and evil; if we want to set standards for interpersonal conduct and for respect of the eco-system upon which we all depend, then we must have a philosophy of life that sanctifies the human process and the good earth and which views the sanctification process as quite a natural and human process.
The engagement with the drama of the Holy; this goal, this endeavor requires quite different uses of the knowledge process born in the long centuries of doubt, trouble and fear that marked the prehistory of the human race. Premodern knowledge processes, by themselves, are not enough. Modern knowledge systems, by themselves are not enough. Together they offer a wider vision and a higher project than, on the one side, tribal solidarity and on the other, prediction and control.
We will begin our venture toward postmodern theology with the social history of the gods in this essay. Understanding the social history of the gods makes it easier to see the human hand in the god process. Seeing that human hands built, choose and reject one god concept after another; remembering that people in the thousands and millions gave of themselves completely to those god concepts now discarded; imagining that, a thousand years from now our god concept will be, equally, a part of history--keeping all this in mind, we can begin to build, as Harvey Cox put it, a credible theology of citizenship which respects the citizenship of others living in other social life worlds.
In the next essay in the series, I will review modern understandings of the god concept and then continue with an essay on postmodern understandings of the Holy. This trilogy of essays stand, together with the earlier essay on the drama of the Holy, as a bases for a postmodern expression of the Holy. As a set, all the essays in the book present the drama of the Holy with respect, admiration, and optimism for the ability of theologians of every station and sophistication to contribute to that drama; it is the stuff of which the most compelling of all human drama is made.
Knowledge and the God Process All human societies need a system of knowledge by which to understand the origins of life, the purposes of life, the tragedies and destinies of life. Absent modern explanations of nature and society, and in the face of great duress, the knowledge process became oriented to the generation of knowledge from the gods. Such knowledge is surely forthcoming. The Torah, the Koran, the Upanishads and Vedas, the Christian scriptures and the teachings of the Buddha all provide knowledge about the contingencies and many of the exigencies of life to a desperately curious people. Neither modern nor postmodern readings accept the existence of an actual supernatural being from whom the knowledge comes directly, ipsissima verba, from the mouth of god.
Modern and postmodern interpretations of the source of such knowledge assigns it to the particular genius of an person intelligent enough to sense the logic of a culture, to gauge the course of a given solution, to weigh the advantages of differing courses and to chose wisely between courses. When one speaks for god, one is really speaking from a holistic grasp of a way of life not readily transmutable into religious canon but still adequate to guide and to create. Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Gotama, and many other prophets read the ethos of an age well because they live it and grasp it holistically. Out of their mouths come the wisdom of an age oriented to the Drama of the Holy in which wisdom is embodied.
It is no mere accident that theology and science has been at war and continues in mutually destructive antagonism to this day in the high schools and colleges of America. Modern scientific explanations of origins and of destinies rob a society of its moral bases for supportive interpersonal relationships--and deprive it of its rationale for the exploitation of minorities or other peoples. The god process is a most helpful religious activity--and activity which binds and guides both society and individual--in a time of trouble and doubt.
THE BIRTH OF GOD There is evidence that the earliest civilizations came out of central Africa. Stringer, (1990:98) reviewed models of human evolution, using mitochondrial DNA (molecular clocks) to date the divergence--and similarities-- of genetic material. He concludes that the data support a monogenesis model that the modern varieties of human beings came out of Africa some 100,000 years ago. Stringer proposes that Homo habilis (Lucy and her relatives, c. 3.7 million years ago) gave rise to Homo erectus in four sub-species; three of which died out without interbreeding with H. sapiens. All four sub- species engaged in behavior that one could well argue were religious.
The most ancient religious practices were associated with the cult of the dead and the use of skulls for magical purpose. The Dragon-bone caves near Peiping are dated around 500,000 years old. Bodies in those cave were decapitated and the skulls emptied of brain matter. Skull cups for drinking...and thus for the magical transfer of mana. In the drinking of infused or fermented beverages from a cup, one gains the wisdom, strength, cunning and long years of knowledge of one's predecessors. Such cups have been found across the millennia. Religion, understood as a system by which knowledge is gained, has been around a long, long time.
Bone whistles, flutes, and drumsticks found in graves, caves and the tells of Paleolithic societies bespeak a concern for ethics and aesthetics which, in turn, presume some systematic thought about the origins of life, the purposes of life, the tragedies and destinies of life. These human artifacts reach back more than 500,000 years if the dragon bone caves were, as I presume, indicative of the religious impulse.
If the Dragon-bone caves mark the span of human knowledge processes at its most tentative beginnings, the earth goddess at Willendorf (c. 30,000 B.C.) and the cave paintings at Lascaux (c. 15,000 B.C.) most certainly establish institutionalized efforts to sort out religious questions; questions of origin, of purpose, of connection and of destiny. However, 105 centuries is too short a time and 300 centuries not enough time to start or to end such a venture. The need continues.
Mother Earth; Mother God The first gods were, arguably, female deities which embody abstract principles of birth, life, sharing, compassion and rebirth. There are a vast number of earth goddesses, known as the Venus figurines, that have been found early on across Europe, into the Mideast and far into what is now the Soviet Union near Lake Baikal. The age of the figurines reach from that of the Willendorf Venus (c. 300,000 B.C.) to a whole series dated around 20-30,000 years ago to those as late as 10,000 years ago. These figurines, along with early stories, paintings and current practices argue for the primacy of female gods early on. Postmodern theologians, especially feminist theologians, argue for the transformation of earth mother gods into sky-father gods.
In Jericho, Iraq, Iran, Elam, Anatolia, the transcaspia, Baluchistan, the Sind, Punjab, and Egypt, the earliest gods were female. Kenyon found two female figurines at Jericho; similar to the female fertility gods found in numberless count around that region. E.O James (1960:46) emphasizes that these gods began to appear at the transition from hunting and gathering life to agriculture and herding.
Kathleen Kenyon directed the excavation of Tell es-Sultan in the mound of ancient Jericho that dated between 5000 and 8000 BC. Carbon dating of such sites give evidence that this area, this period, this culture had gods and had religious practices by c. 5000 BC. Her team found a pre-pottery village containing mortars and grinding stones, an elaborate architecture, communal buildings, private houses, town wall, ditches cut through rock around a spring that delivers a thousand gallons of water per minute. More to the point, the team found shrines, religious objects and human skulls plastered with mud.
It appears that the god concept began to take on human
shape and solid form with this new way of life.
The Sky Gods The understanding of the God concept as God to all tribes probably came as the early sky gods were merged and reemerged with each other. Dyaus Pitar (also known as Jupiter or Zeus), a very ancient indo-european god, was primarily the nature god of sky and weather who assimilated the functions of other gods (James: 70). In Egypt, the falcon-god, Horus was god of rain and heavenly fire; as well as the source of life and death. The Sun-god Re [Ra] was also known as Harakhte, the Horus of the Horizon.
There were four sky-gods called the four Horus in Egypt, one of whom was Atum who, at one time represented the Sun in decline and was seen as an old man. Later, Atum became the primordial Father of the gods. Then Atum merged with Re to become a self created God and dominate over the other gods (James: 71). Thus was the concept of a dominate God head introduced to the Judeo- Christian religious heritage.
Seth was the son of Geb, the earth-god and Hut, the sky- goddess who was widely worshipped in Egypt. First seen as part of the family of other tribal gods in Egypt, Horus and Osiris, Seth became evil-incarnate after war broke out between the various tribes. Seth came to be identified with Typhone, the Egyptian devil and then with the Semitic god, Baal. To the concept of the universal creator and all powerful sky God-Father, the concept of the devil was added.
The Egyptian Pharaoh, Amenhotep IV, (c.1375 B.C.; variously called Amenophis, Ikhnaton or Akenaten) tried to replace polytheistic nature worship with the one god, Aton (or Atum), in a solar monotheism. That attempt failed. Instead, Re the sun- god, and Ptah, the great-one of Memphis, and Aton were three independent deities with the same nature (James, p.73; see also Parrinder, 1971; Reese, 1980). From Babylon, Abraham brought another trinity: Anu had authority in the sky; Enlil was a very old deity who ruled on earth and Enki (Ea) ruled in the depths of the ocean...these gods were the source of all wisdom and of human civilization itself. Thus was added the concept of the trinity to the birth of God.
Varuna, the sky-god of the Aryans, was brought from the Danube and Oxus rivers into India. Ouranos, his Greek equivalent was also a sky-god. There names are derivative and mean 'sky.' Behind Varuna, Ouranos, Zeus, Jupiter, Anu, Mitra, Indra-the mighty god of thunder, Agni-the god of fire, was the ancient Indo-European god, Dyaus Pitar (James:75). God became a sky overlord; the other sky gods became retainers.
The re-Gendering of God Another major transformation of God came with Abraham and the generations of his seed. The Judeo- Christian God was created out of the parts of many other more ancient gods. That god became a self creating universal god with a sky home; with dominion over all lands and creatures; with infinite wisdom and an orderly plan for nature and society.
Abraham brought with him to Egypt, the warrior god of his ancestors. Coming out of Mesopotamia with his family into the land of Canaan, which is now called Israel, Abraham took with him the story of Marduk and the Mother Goddess. He transformed these gods of nature into the God of Moses; transformed the gender of God into God the Father. The story is interesting and has been the subject of a Discovery program, Testament.
In that document, we are told that the story in Genesis is a major reworking of the struggle between six generations of male gods and the Mother Goddess. The six generations appointed Marduk their champion. He slew Mother Goddess and created the world with her remains. Her eyes were the mountains while the two rivers; the Tigris and the Euphrates, were her tears. Then he created humans as slaves so that the six generations of male gods could rest.
In a parallel story of genesis, God created the world in six days. It is not a coincidence that each day of the six, the story reports that God created the forms of nature which were precisely each, the six generations of gods which combined to destroy Mother Goddess! On the seventh day, God rested. Odd a god would need to rest but the story element is there; brought from Mesopotamia.
Rosemary Radford Reuther (1984:33) tells us of her understanding of the death/displacement of Mother God. Reuther assumes a primal harmony in early societies that underlay the primacy of the mother goddess. She says that the advent of the father (in agrarian times) broke that primal harmony and produced ideas of Ying and yang, of male and female, of spirit and flesh, of nature and the divine, all of which were seen to be in opposition with each other. Patriarchal theology, according to Reuther, resolved the contrarieties and dualities it invented by assigning to the female and to the natural, connotations of evil while it assigned authority and divinity to the male side of these dualities now in conflict.
The old Testament tells us that Egypt seemed a paradise to those who came from the Paleolithic places of Canaan with its mud-daub huts. The magnificent palaces, gardens, markets and provinces of Egypt came out of some mysterious order which the Israelites called God. The priests and armies of the Nile were a more direct source of the universal power and majesty of dynastic Egypt. The more indirect source of this order was the hydraulic society upon which it rested. Coordinated with the cycles of the Nile, dams, reservoirs, canals and fertile fields produced a surplus which provided the material bases for a complex society complete with cities, strata and deep structural processes not immediately visible to the human mind but assuredly there to give one pause and to demand explanation.
Religions oriented to hunting and gathering gave way to religions which focussed upon a complex, stable and static society. In agrarian Egypt, there was small need to know the ways of wild animals nor to placate their spirit. In urbanized Egypt, there was great need to justify stratification of society and to organize the worship of society embodied in monolithic gods.
Out of the travels, trading, wars, and victories of Egyptian empire, the concept of a universal God was born. It took long centuries with many amalgamations, transformations, rises and declines of various gods to build the one that now we know. Out of changes from hunting and gathering spirits to fixed agriculture came the transformations of god into the universal male sky-god which now we worship. While the authors of the Christian God lived in Egypt, they added omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence to the Father God they had brought from Syria to create Ra, the sun-god. They also merged the sky gods with Jehovah.
Out of this vast research comes the postmodern understanding that first there were female gods and, with the advent of settled agriculture and ideas of property rights, the earth goddesses were displaced, forcibly, by sky gods in the image of father.
PREMODERN PROOFS OF THE GOD PROCESS I have mentioned some of the empiric bases for conceding the ontological existence of the god process in previous essay. That interpretation came out of a postmodern understanding joined with the findings of modern science. In this essay, I want to change perspectives and examine the proofs of god in premodern understanding. Four such proofs are, it seems to me, important to premodern knowledge processes which gave rise to the god concept; order, power, wisdom and justice.
The fact of order in complex hydraulic society provides empirical grounds for attributions of omnipresence of the god concept. The fact of stratified power arrangements offers empirical grounds for the omnipotence attributed to the god concept; wisdom and justice ground the omniscience of the god concept. Together, these attributes provide proof sufficient to most people for the facticity of the god concept. From a purely phenomenological point of view, such proof is adequate to establish any social fact.
I have given much space to order and power in the earlier essay on the drama of the Holy but less attention to wisdom and justice as the empirical grounding in folk methods of knowledge for the god concept. I want to review the sources of order and power here and spend a bit more time on the deep structures of wisdom; unseen and unseeable yet experienced everywhere one turns. First, let us revisit the fact of order and power.
Order The origins of the God construct began as an acknowledgement of the order in nature and the powerful forces of nature. Scientists now have other names for these orderly processes and these most powerful forces...the early poets, priests and artists did not know these forces and features to be part of the larger order of nature. They had no way to know of the laws of motion, the laws of thermodynamics, the laws of genetic heritage or the laws of the marketplace; it is a fair guess that this naming of the unknown led to the many god concepts of animism; that each feature and force, (wind, snow, hail, sun, fire, thunder, rain, and cold) of nature was called, separately, god. As William Blake put it in his first principle of religious sensibility,
To be truly human, one must employ one's poetic genius. The
forms of all things are derived from that poetic
genius...which the Ancients called Spirit or Angel or Demon.
In the sacred writings of Jewish/Christian/Muslim traditions
over the past 12 centuries, these powers of nature became vested
in a sky god and joined with social power to give us the
omnipotent god which now we produce and reproduce in our songs,
our literature, our art and our social activities.
The first gods of which we know were gods of species; gods
of place; gods of cycles and seasons. The spirits of the Tree,
river and rock; of the Bison, Bear and Eagle; of the Mountain,
valley and of the Sea all embodied the majesty and mystery of the
unknowable sources and unsearchable powers of living creatures;
of moving places. The gods of sky fire, sky noise and sky fury
were given names and the respect that such awesome forces
deserve. Tornado, hurricane and the scorching sun were named in
fear and desire for surcease.
The orderly turn of the seasons from Spring to Summer, Fall
and then to Winter are remorseless in their rhythm. The rush to
join together and give birth in time follows the cycles of the
seasons is found among all animals whose food supply depends upon
the coming of Spring. The annual rains and floods, droughts and
drifts come apart from plan and purpose of human beings. The
rise and fall of the tides and coming of the mullet, turtle or
swallow testify to the order in nature. The rise and setting of
the sun as well as the flight and return of the stars are locked
in a pattern that assails the senses. The sweep of the trade
winds, the monsoons, and the currents of the deep move in slow
majesty. We still pay homage to the sun god and pray for its
return during the short days of December:
So the shortest day came and the Year died.
And everywhere, down the long white Centuries of Snow
came people dancing, singing
to drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the Winter trees.
They hung their homes with evergreens.
They burned beseeching fires
all night long to keep the year alive
And when the new day Sun blazed awake,
they shouted, reveling.
Through all across the ages you can hear them.
Listen, echoing behind them,
all the long echoes
sing the same delight this shortest day
as Promise awakens in the sleeping land.
They carol peace, give thanks,
and dearly love their friend
and hope for Peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
The gods of house and clan also were given a name and were held in awe and wonderment. The order of the household came from the invisible forces we now call norms...living embodiments of something called culture these past 150 years. Order was found in kinship patterns and in deference patterns deriving from the rules of marriage. Order was seen in station, degree and place. Order was buried in the deep structures of speech. Order was kept in every ritual, dance and poem. Order was part of age grade transitions. Order followed the path of trade, exchange, inheritance, and debt. Order lead the way to talk, to listen and to act on problems of the tribe and clan. This order, reified and deified was revivified in the person of the clan founder and protector.
If the order seen in nature and in society reaches across time and space as measured in human terms, should we not abstract, name and pay homage to that order? If we ignore the vast and varied order of the universe, we do so at our peril.
Power Twinborn with the patterns of earth and clan were their many powers. The wind could move trees and the waters roll boulders as large as a man stood high. The storm cloud could lift billions of tons of water and send it crashing down the mountain side. Lightening could strike down the largest creature. Tidal surges could sweep away thousands in a matter of minutes. Floods could rearrange rivers and fields overnight. Earthquakes could shake open the mountains and turn them inside out. Volcanoes could blot the sun for weeks and bury the trees for miles. The gentle rain could make the desert bloom with color and fragrance where before there was only dust and the dry wind to whisper danger.
The power of living creatures also complemented their ordered existence. Huge clouds of locusts could strip a field. The course of disease could not be stayed by human hand. King, Pope and Caliph lost their fragile powers to command. Migrations of wildebeest, geese and reindeer filled the air with their thunder. Nothing could turn the tide of lemmings on their way to new pasture. Armies of ants devoured everything in their path. Humans crept away when the lion roared or stepped aside the elephant passed. Piranha had pride of place in rivers and streams.
Social Power Within the circle of social power, brave men wept and bright women became mute. Proud warriors bent their knee and lively children held their spirits in check when social power is embodied. In the face of social power, reason and necessity were hurled aside. At times death paused and held its hand and drew back. An angry crowd could be tamed by the moral power of the preacher. A rebellious army could be pacified by the power of the word--or made to murder those who had done them no harm. The laughter of a father or the song of a mother echoes through the years. Social power led cowards to make brave sacrifice for a friend or kin. Social power gave strength to the weak to overcome the mighty. Unable to deflect bullet, social power restored the wounded to good health. A curse can destroy a whole family while a prophet can undo nations.
Social power lock people into unwanted marriage; into unprofitable labor; into degrading servitude at the same time it could ennoble an enemy and make lovely the face of a stranger. Elihu teaches us that social power can turn one from his evil deeds and lead him toward a blameless life. Social power can transform the choicest food into loathsome offal. Social power condemns tyrants and casts out demons from the soul. Social power can pluck the pillow from beneath the head of strong men and give the thief title, knee and approbation. It can, as Shakespeare tells us, make the wappened widow wed again and refresh the hoar leper to the April day.
If we must give such powers a name; if such powers are invisible but work everywhere we go; if there is a power which follows us through the corridors of time, should we not find a name that denotes its omnipresence? If such powers over-flood our reason and lead us to do things inimical of our welfare, should not we find a name for these powers that reflect their omnipotence and walk humbly. If such powers embody all the accumulated wisdom of the centuries buried deep in the folkways, mores, institutions, rituals, recipes and medicines of a people, should we not concede omniscience? If the overall effect of such powers is social justice, should we not honor it with the name of Lord God?
Wisdom Just as most human beings can understand the order that transcends the particular person as well as the powers that bend one joyfully or reluctantly to obedience and compliance, most human beings come to appreciate the vast wisdom that resides in nature and society. This wisdom, too, surpasses the genius of the individual person and serves as an epistemological grounds for attributions of omniscience since omniscience is, in the Christian theology, essential to judgment, justice, mercy and forgiveness.
The wisdom of field and forest; of sea and sky; of beast and bird is there for the looking. One can study the fields and note the harmonies of plant life that occupy differing niches and live in a larger harmony. Flowers bloom in season while plants protect the bud in winter. Seeds lay dormant for years until enough rain falls. Fire renews and plants thrive on the fire. Each flower has its own mechanism for distributing seeds abroad. Each plant has several backup systems for reproducing; seeds, bulbs, rhizomes, and the miraculous transformation of leaf and stem cells into root cells when pieces break off the main.
One can live in the forest and catch, in admiration, its many rhythms and solutions to the riddles of survival. Plants and animals live in a complex web of interdependency and mutual aid. This network cannot be seen directly but can be mapped in the memory of sentient human beings there given a form and a name. Ants use aphids to harvest energy and minerals from a tree while driving other predators away. Trees produce poisons that act selectively and quickly. Birds seeks nesting site, food supply, and protection from the noonday sun; in return, they bring supplies of nitrogen from field and sea to the tree which shelters it. Trees and plants move toward their own niche in sunlight and in shadow. Plants hoard the water and share it in return for services rendered.
In the great ecology and political economy of the forest, there is ample wisdom about mutual aid as well as insight about limitations on self and species. Predators and prey form great cycles of dance in which one now leads and then, the other. One species does not ruin the source of life and security of another species upon which it depends since birth rates and death rates depend, sensitively, upon predator/prey relations. There is a remarkable pattern to such relations only now being mapped by the changing ratios of such cycles.
One can learn from the beast how to survive the winter by digging deep into the heart of the hill; by building deep piles of fur and feather. One can learn from the beast how to hunt in ambush or in relay teams. One can learn from the beast how to hoard acorns in the top of a tree or bury prey in cool and hidden places. One can learn from the beast how to be heard across the valley or through the dense undergrowth of the forest. One can learn from the beasts how to survive heat, drought, and famine by migration. Protection and security problems can be solved by observing the beast and by learning their ways. Small wonder premodern peoples asked permission of the spirit of a species to hunt and kill.
There is much wisdom buried in the mores and folkways of a society that is seldom voiced nor, until recently, written down. Yet that wisdom waits for all to use and benefit. Marriage norms which require a man to live with the parents of his bride helps defuse old enmities and foreclose new ones. Marriage norms that send a woman out to another tribe brings not only new genes but vast reservoirs of knowledge about other foods; other ways of storage; other ways of healing; other ways of building houses and other ways of preparing fibers; all these are stored treasures awaiting a time in which existing norms fail to meet the survival needs of a clan in a time of flood, famine, or disease.
Deep in the wisdom of every society, there are rules for the husbanding of herds without exploitation or neglect; rules for the transmission of property without jealousy or quarrel; rules for the expression of sexuality without violence or hurt; rules for the rearing of children that helps them toward the fullness of their morality; rules for sports and recreation that bind and join together those who would otherwise fight over land, water, sexual access or hunting rights. Rules whose logic and rationale were never spelled out by logicians or ecologists teach a people how to sustain their fields; how to conserve their herds; how to think beyond the moment or the need. These ancient wisdoms help us deal with death and survive the loss of one we love beyond reason or words. In each cherished ceremony, there reside solutions to problems of communal life and individual desire that would otherwise destroy all. Truly, as the old testament teacher put it; such wisdom maketh a man's face to shine.
In the Christian tradition, the proverbs instruct us of that ancient wisdom we inherited; the seven things the Lord detests; pride, guile and deception, foul murder, false witness, wicked schemes, quickness to do evil, and strife between brothers. Justice is the central concern of the ten commandments; one honors one's father and mother since they have honored the child in the keeping of it safe, nourished and instructed in the ways of the Gods.
The practical wisdom and laws of Deuteronomy augment the ten commandments and the seven hateful things in the Christian tradition. They tell us how to prepare food that is clean and wholesome to eat; tell us to reserve our grain and oil and wine for another day; tell us to keep the firstborn of our cattle and sheep; they requires more than one witness to a deed; they require one feed the orphan and house the widow. The linear logic of price, cost and profit is replaced by the nonlinearity of need, love and compassion.
In such commandments, all spoke by a human tongue or writ by a human hand and attributed to a super ordinate god process offer distributive justice to those falsely accused; require one return a neighbor's ox or cow; admonish those who use flattery to 'spread a net.'
Proverbs speak of things unknown to man; the way of the eagle in the air, the way of the ship at sea, the way of the serpent on the rock and the way of a man with a maid. It speaks of small things wise beyond the wisest; ants that gather their food in the summer, rock-badgers that make their home in barren places, locusts that fly together yet have no king and lizards that live in the palace without deference or fear. It speaks of the good wife and those wives who are foolish.
The very nature of wisdom is set forth in the teachings of Jesus, son of Sirach known as Ecclesiastes in the Greek. He tells us that wisdom showers down knowledge and flowers with peace; it gives perfect health and long life. He speaks of a wisdom which gives honor and raises the wise to greatness. He speaks of the first of all created things whose intelligent purpose has existed from the beginning. He tells us that unjust rage can never be excused; that fidelity and gentleness is a delight; that one should honor those who parent and give charity to those who ask. He speaks of an ancient wisdom which instructs us to admit our mistakes and to put mercy before money. It is a wisdom which scolds one who would curry favor from the rich and powerful and urges us to seek and tell the truth. He tells us of good government and of the folly of superficial judgment. Truly one is happy who ponders on the ways of wisdom; who camps by her house and who reveals her secrets to those who will listen. Such are the words of this teacher.
Wisdom is embedded deep within the teachings of the preacher known as the son of David and called Ecclesiastes. in the Greek. The preacher names it folly where wealth is of more importance than the drama of the Holy; he speaks of the seasons and the work appropriate to each time under the sun; he calls for justice instead of wickedness; of comfort and aid for those oppressed; he warns of kings who become proud and foolish; he labels it futility when one does not cherish that which one has--security, children, and place; he speaks of that wisdom which causes a 'man's face to shine' and sets it above all else.
These teachings reside in the Christian testaments and have been there for over 13 centuries to give each new generation the benefit of the hard times and difficult problems faced by all the generations before them. Yet this wisdom is available to those who never read the Bible nor heard of the Preacher. Such wisdom is found in the wrap and woof of sayings, fables, anecdotes and other folk tales, fairy-tales, children's stories as well as the morality plays of every people. It is buried deep in the logic of the law and in the structure of social roles, relations, and institutions. It is there to be found by the anthropologist, the sociologist and the economist but, with or without the human sciences making these visible in what is called the human sciences, these are present to work upon the mind, heart and hand. As William Blake has truly said, mercy has a human hand and love a human face.
There is much wisdom buried in each tool, each implement, each machine and each piece of furniture. In the framing of a house, in the forming of a roof, in the joining of a timber, in the choosing of a site upon which to build, there is a vast reservoir of wisdom stored up from ages past. In the tilling of a field, in the sowing of each seed, in the care of each plant, in the gathering of the grain, there are the solutions worked out, saved, sanctified and stored in everyday practice handed down by word and by example from generation to generation.
Generations of breeding sheep, cow, horse and dog has been one long series of experiments where results have been observed, judgments made, genetic data discarded and new information sets created in the herds and flocks by selective breeding. The very wisdom of such naturalistic genetics is buried deep in the genomes of animals domesticated. Molecular biologists can now tell us about such genomes; we can now see DNA strands twisting and turning through electron microscopes. Molecular biologists can clone, splice and recombine parts of a gene to produce old species with new attributes but such cloning, splicing and recombining had had folk methods which served before such science existed. The simplest child could work the flock thus created by human hand.
The alphabet is a product of billions of efforts to store data as are cuneiform, ideogram and hieroglyphic. The pathway of each word and every meaning of each word can be traced through many societies and many centuries. The 360,000 words in the English language contain information bits in uncountable billions; each bit of information carefully weighed and retained for its service to intersubjective understanding. The long history of the evolution of numbers, arithmetic and algebra as well as modern mathematics provides more practical wisdom distilled from across cultures and across the ages. Surveying, engineering, architecture, logistics, and computer science come not full-blown but are built upon the efforts of millions of seeking, thinking, judging, working persons before them. The Dome at Florence, Italy with its crown, lantern, ball, and cross, subsumed the genius of a thousand generations over three continents and several great islands.
Apple orchards, orange groves, grape vineyards, and wheat fields have been tailored by human thought and human hand; each seed was selected by eyes that see, tongues that taste, brains that wonder and brains that choose on behalf of us all. Who knows now the names of the people of Peru who gave us their accumulated knowledge of the potato or those in Mexico who selected seed and grew the maize over the long centuries before Columbus 'discovered' and brought them back to Europe; now we eat the fruits of their labor and view their uncrowned genius as commodity and technology stripped of the thought and decisions made that converted human judgment into mere science.
In the mining and working of each metal, there lay secrets and stories never told but still used. Who knows the name of s/he who first smelted copper or refined silver. What is the name of the one who met the darkness of the mine and lived with the danger of the tunnel. Who learned to cut the diamond and set gems of every kind. Who learned to cut galleries in the mountain or dam up the stream. When did we build the scales and decide the weights to use. If we see the wisdom therein and take stock of it, to whom do we give credit except a name which embraces them all and remembers them together.
Every science has its own long history of representing, decoding, inferring, indexing, predicting, observing, modifying and generalizing. Every science today consists of millions now dead who wondered, guessed, mulled and pondered unasked questions in the night. Unknown, unsung and unrewarded, millions of unnamed teslas, khayyams, turings, pasteurs, riemanns, mendels, and ashbys walked alone in the night finding answers to questions no one had asked and no one wanted, but everyone took and none paid in tribute or in treasure.
Each art form; painting, music, drama, sculpting, poetry, and gardening is a treasure-trove of wisdom accumulated, focussed and re-assembled in ever new format. In the smallest brush of the painter, in each note of a song, in every stroke of the sculptor, in all of the meters, rhymes and similes of the poem there lay the genius of the ages. Whole books, histories and libraries are not enough to retrace the pathways of knowledge that gave us Mozart, Goya, Michelangelo, Ellington or Housman. In the fingers of a sixteen year old Navajo woman weaving her forms and figures resides an equation more complex than any used by any sociologist counting crime or measuring marriage. In the dancing feet of a ten year old can be found the ancient wisdom of the Lakota or the Chippewa.
The long history of ceramics has build up a knowledge set that surpasses the knowledge of whole armies of scholars. The choice of clays to fire, of slurries to mix, of patterns to use all come from a long lost history the name of which we now call God. But the hand of an Aztec potter is a human hand. The skill of a weaver is a human skill. The mind of an architect is a human mind. As long as we sanctify the potter at the wheel, the shepherd with the flock, the weaver at the loom or the teacher in her wisdom, we produce and reproduce the god process.
Ignorant of those names, unaware of that long history, unable to see what each person gave to each concrete artifact over thousands of years, we look about us, intuit these improbabilities, then we understand, dimly, dumbly, that there is an intelligence that pervades our life of which we know nought. Such wisdom covers the earth like a mist. To that intelligence we give the name of our god. In naming these unnamed and unknown artisans with the collective name of God, we acknowledge them, we honor them and praise them fulsomely and collectively.
Social Justice Beyond narrow understandings of good and evil; of crime and punishment, there is mercy, compassion and social justice. We, each of us, know that we receive far more than we deserve; that we do harm to those around us and yet we are forgiven. We know that we did not tend the fields from which we eat; do not build the house wherein we live; did not lay the roads upon which we travel nor did we labor to make the clothes we wear or the lamps by which we read the books which give us pleasure. When we give pain and get love in return; when we bespeak ourselves and default upon the trust in which we rest yet are trusted again and again; when we take things that another needs yet are given more from that person, we know that there is something beyond formal, rule-driven justice. We name this something God and respect it for its mercy.
When we trust another and are not betrayed; when we believe and are not deceived; when we have faith and are confirmed in that faith, we know that there is a bedrock of social justice that frames and restrains the social process. When a stranger comforts us in our sorrow; when a passer-by stops to help us and then leaves us unencumbered by debt or claim; when a teacher welcomes us unknown to a new school or a competitor unthreatened to a new job or a neighbor as yet unneighbored by us to a new house, we sense the presence of an invisible spirit to guide the visible hand. This we call by the name of our god.
When we are oppressed and we have no one to comfort us, a Deborah or an Isaiah will come forward to take our hand and to speak for us. A Deborah will summon the people to fight oppression and will sing of the need for rebellion and resistance. An Isaiah will speak even to nations and demand justice for the oppressed, share for the fatherless, and right action for the widow' cause. The Isaiahs of the world tell us that all the wealth of nations will not protect them when they scorn the larger justice of sharing, mercy, and compassion. Today, in remembrance of Deborah and Isaiah, those who know not their names still step forward; for every Kitty Genovese who calls in vain for aid, there are a thousand unnamed women who are rescued from the thugs and ruffians who beset her. When most of us lack courage in the face of a mob, there is always one who will say No to them; will quiet them and will give them pause. When our child is lost, others drop what they are doing and search to know where she is.
In the Christian tradition much of the ancient justice that restrains the theft and forfends against fraud is written in Deuteronomy, in the book of Job, in the Psalms and in the Acts of the Apostles. The oldest testaments of Jewish, Muslim and Christian religion are shared and call forth justice that transcends personal interests and calls forth a fellowship of love and compassion.
The laws in Deuteronomy which call for equal weights in everyone's bag and equal weights measures in every house remain calls for honest dealing and honest agency. A curse for those who move a neighbor's boundary stone bespeaks protection from the collective to those who are poorer or weaker that the avaricious neighbor. A curse for those who misdirects a blind man extends to any who would mislead the innocent or the ignorant. Such justice is needed today as ever more. These transcend village gods and tribal deities. Making a joyful noise unto the Lord still warms the heart and touches unknown chords in our own soul; who can hear the Mormon tabernacle choir sing the Hallelujah Chorus without being moved to rapture.
The teachings of Elihu in the Book of Job also speak the deep structures of social justice that serve as the epistemological grounds for a supra-organic source of that justice. In answering the plaint of Job concerning the injustice of his God, after Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar failed to reconcile Job to his God, Elihu testifies to a larger justice than that of one person and thus gave him peace. Elihu notes that God speaks to those who would do evil and warns them away; he comes in dreams, slumbers and visions to instruct those who are tempted and stay their hand. Those who are near death are brought back; he brings those in the deepest pits back to enjoy the sun. He teaches that, even while God has given us the rain yet we want still more; in his own times, God repudiates the powerful and humbles the wicked; in this he teaches us that there is more to justice than a generous table or great wealth. When nations forget the ways of holiness, they vanish where they stand. God calls forth storms and ice to do his bidding and shelters humans and beast alike from the wind and cold. In the fear of the god concept, and in the aweful knowledge of these things, the evil find their own justice.
The Psalms tell us that the god concept will break the power of the wicked and will bring redress to the fatherless and the oppressed. The god concept works to weigh the just and the unjust; that it gives the laws along with the wisdom to understand the spirit of the law. Where Elihu spoke of a general concern for justice, the songs of David give it sharper focus and gave it a more human face. Yet the justice given to David extends to all those who are lonely, weary and downtrodden; they are given succor while those who lie, cheat, steal and murder will know retribution in public trial or in private anguish.
Beyond civil law and above technical rationality of modern societies we find a more generous, less rigid spirit that forgives and renews us to our full humanity. With that holy spirit comes an amazing grace that turns the theft from his work and stays the hand of the thug. There are many who go beyond good and evil to their own private hells but most come back when there is mercy and goodness.
There is much in the old testament that offends postmodern sensibility; the easy assumption of slavery and sexist privilege; the injunction to tear down the temples of other gods; the military strategy that presumes predatory economics; the genocide of towns far enough from home to set aside local commandments and local moralities; approval of rape of comely women in warfare; it denial of children out of wedlock or those who fathers committed sins long ago; the charging of interest to strangers but not to neighbors; or the cruel retribution visited upon those who violate these norms. David sees divine justice in his conquest of nations. All these speak to a time when the god concept was a tribal or clan deity; when patriarchy and slavery were given divine sanction. These speak against social justice as we know it in a world connected in ways that it was not 3000 or more years ago when this part of bible was developed.
Ancient wisdom that spoke to that which was just then becomes a burden now. There are new imperatives that fuel our sense of justice now but the larger point is that social justice and a religious sensibility walk hand in hand whatever the age or epoch. Deuteronomy makes visible these most ancient imperatives for justice that evolved out of countless millions of conflicts, crimes, quandaries and confrontations within household, village and tribe long centuries before men put pen to paper.
In the Acts of the apostles, after the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, the whole company of believers became united in heart and soul; not one of them claimed exclusive property rights--everything was held in common. There was never a needy person among them, since if there were need, one would share with another. When those who spoke Greek complained of injustice in sharing on the part of those who spoke the language of the Jews, the apostles appointed Stephen, Timon, Nicholas and others to look into the matter and see that justice was done. Stephen was, later, stoned to death at order of orthodox priests when Stephen charged them with failure to keep the law of their god written in the old testament.
Parallel and similar to the scriptures of Judeo-Christian social philosophy are the teachings of the four Vedas in Hindu tradition which call for ethical behavior as the bases upon which rebirth in future cycles of life is determined. Generally the teachings of the Hindi call for moderation, chastity, and abstinence and attention to social justice within caste lines. Those who would depart from the turmoil of everyday life could reverse these teachings in Tantric practice. By the use of wine, meat, fish, grain and sex, one could attain a 'higher' spirituality (Parrinder: 222).
Derivative from the Vedas are the teachings of the Buddha about the four noble truths and the eightfold pathway to nirvana which crossed and obliterated caste lines. If social justice is confined to caste and kin in the Hindu tradition, it extends to all creatures and peoples in the Buddhist. In the practice of the eightfold ways, faith transforms into wisdom and desire transforms into justice (Parrinder: 272 et passim).
Some 800 million or more people live in peace and justice within the teachings of their God, Allah. Islam is an Arabic word which means both submission and commitment but, more than that, Islam denotes both a community of believers and an inner attitude of one who is awakened by Mohammed to one's responsibilities for social justice (Parrinder: 462 et passim). In the verses of the Koran are found much of the same wisdom as is found in the holy writings of the Jews and Christians but have an integrity all their own (Parrinder, 475).
STANDARDS OF BELIEF These empirical expressions of that which is larger, wiser, more powerful and just than any one person or any subset of persons within a society meets, excellently well, postmodern phenomenological standards for belief. Husserlian phenomenology posited naturally existing categories which, somehow, people sensed and were able to grasp in a wide variety of concepts. Postmodern phenomenology gives little validity to preexisting categories apart from human imagination and action. Sanctification, in such a paradigm is neither natural nor artificial category. It is a human construct whose facticity depends sensitively, upon human activity.
The standards for belief in such categories rely in the first place upon a faith that people will perform as such prophecies require. If sanctification is prophesied, and if there is a performance in which people experience the wonder, awe, mystery, majesty and grace of the god concept, standards of proof, in a postmodern phenomenological paradigm have been met.
For the qualitative analyst, intersubjective agreement is the major social psychological grounds for both the origin and the truth value of any such socially constituted category. Subjective immersion in a drama of the Holy thus facilitates qualitative analysis for the research process. The more one is able to take the role of the particular other in such dramas, the more one is able to appreciate the social power of such assemblies to construct whatever form of religion they enjoy.
In more objective terms, postmodern phenomenology requires that some degree of coordinated behavior occurs in which performance matches prophecy. The test of the adequacy of performance has to be on terms set by the participants in such labor. Expectations of behavior matched with overt acts which are taken to be adequate instances of that which is expected suffices for immanent critique in postmodern paradigms. If one who is 'saved' does in fact act in qualitatively different ways from his/her prior behavior; and in ways which are normative within a religious tradition, then a certain truth value may be assigned to the analytic category in question...in this case, sanctification of person and of social relatedness.
There are still more objective tests for the drama of the Holy to be used in wider expressions of sanctification. A given drama of the Holy can be truly and assuredly constructed but, outside the boundaries of such situated occasions, the obvious elements of intersubjective activity: the joy and pain of testimony, the spirituality of a song, sincerity of confession and unity of spirit in a given service are not easily observable. Evidence of sanctification takes more concrete form. Within a community, poverty, homelessness, crime rates, suicide and daily reliance upon psychogens to get one through the day all bespeak the sanctification process.
A community in which there is a certain comity, grace and sense of peace begins to serve as empirical grounds for qualitative analysis. In contemporary society, there are amenities which testify to the sanctification of social space in towns, cities and villages. A rich street life and a certain elegance of architecture in which one has a sense of place tends to serve as objective criteria for a qualitative understanding of the sanctification process.
Societies in which the drama of the Holy is enacted in public places are identified by the ways in which art and music are integrated. Museums which capture the art of an age and confine it to fortresses and palaces bespeak the sanctification process. Grand hotels surrounded by squalid stores and streets or great cathedrals surrounded by dilapidated dwellings signify the limited facticity of a drama of the Holy.
In a global economy, great equalities between trading partners, the subversion of the political process in dependent nation, the degradation of local cultural practices as well as the ways in which human sexuality is expressed between visitor and visited peoples indicate the degree to which each sanctifies the other. When one people export their problems and pollutions to another people, the first group may be doing it out of an intersubjective compassion for their own kind but, given a global economy, the facticity of the sanctification process can be seen to be but a fraction of what it could be.
What ever standards of proof, what ever tests of validity for truthful statements those in the human sciences use, there are standards which trump them. Long before social science became encapsulated and confined to the university, folk standards of fact and falsity were used to measure the truth value of a thing.
Folk Standards Order, power, wisdom and justice are everywhere there is a human society else human society does not emerge. The negative of such phenomena confirm the god thesis as well. Where there is only the physical imperatives of survival, the human being recedes to its animal nature and the god concept dies along with it. In concentration camps, in prisons, orphanages, in bureaucratic organizations, order, power and intelligence is felt but the spirit of social justice is lacking and the human spirit fades.
Folk standards of belief are predicated upon the everyday experience of that order, power, wisdom and justice. These data are not sense data of the sort that modern science prefers. They are the data of human intelligence, insight and understanding. In a previous essay, I pointed out that human beings have the intellectual capacity to see patterns; the more genius and the wider the experience of a person, the better able to see patterns such as omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience. Poets, novelists, singers of song and prophets see such patterns and tell us; when we look we can see those patterns. Pattern recognition is the basis of folk standards of belief. They lead to the paradigms of belief that we call religion.
Poets are especially valuable sources for testing the adequacy of the drama of the holy. A society which produces a Robert Frost is a very different society from that which produces an Alan Ginsberg. The music of young people tell us of the degree to which they fit into sanctification or degradation processes. One should listen to prophetic voices even if one does not like the message one hears. The voices of priests, ministers, Rabbis, Imams, and preachers are the voice of the people they serve.
Racists and radicals alike speak truth of a certain sort. If one would not hear racists, then one must look to see why racism has become resurgent. If one thinks that every radical is a paid agent of a foreign government or one frustrated in one's sexual life, one doesn't know much about the social history of rebellion and revolution.
The presence of underground structures in a society speak an aweful truth about the inadequacies of officially instituted practices. When one fifth of the economic life of a society is based upon theft, fraud, monopoly pricing, kickbacks, payoffs, and the exploitation of venality, there is something to criticisms of that economy. The presence of underground sexual practices bespeak an alienated sexuality in the forms of family life. Presence of underground churches and sects reflect upon the life and quality of orthodox religion. When students go underground in escape of the learning process, one can blame and punish students or one can re-examine the adequacy of the teaching process.
When mass migrations occur, one suspect the adequacy of the drama of the Holy in those countries from which they flee; unless, of course it is the wealthy and the privileged who are fleeing to escape the expansion of social justice demands by an oppressed people. One tenth of the population of the newly created United States fled to Canada and to Central American islands after the Revolution. That migration had quite a different meaning from the migration of Irish from Ireland 50 years later. Ireland was an occupied country, the foods of which were being exported to England leaving only a failed potato crop for peasants excluded from the food the land produced.
The growth of social control technologies and resources tell us of the ratio between profanation and sanctification in a society. People who are bonded to each other do not need watching. People for whom conflict relations exist need to watch each other closely. In a stratified society, the wealthy and the powerful allocate resources at work, in school, in marketplace, in restricted enclaves with which to shape the behavior of their class enemies, their ethnic enemies or their underclass enemies.
The number of civil suits and legal confrontations are a crude but important indicator of the failure of social justice among unknown others. When a society has millions of police, lawyers, jailers and high tech monitoring systems, then a society might want to re‰xamine its sanctification/profanation processes.
Mass media tend to mystify and to broadcast a distorted image of a society to its customers on behalf of its sponsors but there are data which tell of failure or success of sanctification in such media. More importantly, the topic undergoing mystification, either in the demeaning of an 'enemy' or in the celebration of a 'hero' help us know what is problematic to those who sponsor such media and preshape its voice.
Cinema tells one much about the quality of a society in terms of its promises and its failures. There is a certain truth in theatre and cinema to which one can look for the problems of a society. For those who want to think about them, Woody Allen serves as a postmodern prophet, confused and hurt by the many alienated relationships which his characters portray. Dustin Hoffman offers a very different look at America from that offered by say, a John Wayne or a Charlton Heston. If it's popular and if its critical of social institutions, it bears thinking about.
For persons situated in the middle of a given social form, standards of truth and value regarding sanctification are to be found in their joie de vivre, their love of life. Laughter, tenderness, good spirits, long life, unsolicited help, prosocial inventions as well as the duration of friendships testify to the efficacy of religious endeavor.
All these and more are qualitative indicators of the degree to which the sanctification process has been successful in a social formation. They include speeches, art forms, street politics, crime rates among the rich and poor, sermons, newspaper ads, stratifications and oppressions.
Modern science, in its tendency to look for ever more basic forces and facts, ever more impersonal and uninterpreted data is excellently well qualified to find and measure the four forces of nature but is poorly equipped to gauge the meaning of social life. It is the facticity of larger, more fractal structures created by interpretation and inspiration which escape the attention of modern science look as it may for proof of a superorganic entity. Sociology and other social sciences are well situated for such observation and such interpretations if they are able to expand the knowledge process beyond that of modern, linear, mechanistic science. The story of the romance of anthropology and sociology with modernism in its study of religion is the topic of the next essay.