Emperor Whisperers: the Religious Way Out for the West

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Like I said a few times before, my new “Emperor Whisperers: a Comparative History of Ancient Western and Chinese Philosophy,” published last year, is available at Amazon here and also at a much cheaper price and straight from the publisher, which you can contact here.

Just as a reminder, I’m sending a free electronic copy to all paid subscribers, existing and those who become paid subscribers throughout this year. Anyway, here’s another extract, this time from Chapter Nine, on the invention/discovery of Christianity by the Roman West.

A rare feature of stoicism is that it was a philosophical system closely based on morality. Stoics may have been hypocrites, but they did obsess about the moral side of things significantly more than any previous school of thought.

On the other side of the known world, something similar occurs with Buddhism and Jainism, an Indian religion built around non-violence, much like Buddhism, that slowly gained significant amounts of followers during this era[1].

Earlier religions such as the Greek, Egyptian or Mesopotamian cults, even to a large extent Chinese Taoism, were based on rituals to flighty gods and specific, often short-term rewards that were expected from them if the proper procedure was followed. A turn away from such ritual-for-reward approach and towards morality, with an associated focus on self-discipline and asceticism, was fairly well synchronized around Eurasia, a fact first noted by Nicolas Baumard, a psychologist at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris[2]. This insight was based on the previous work of German philosopher Karl Jaspers, who dubbed the time when these new religions arose “the Axial age.”

Jaspers' reputation has had his up and downs, but the expression has more or less survived among experts, at least in English and German. This is mostly because it helps to show how the groundwork was laid for the later success of Christianity and Islam. Baumard, meanwhile, coined an unexpectedly down-to-earth theory to explain why this was the case, why in this era and not before or later: that an increase in wealth, a consequence of technological improvements across the somewhat-pacified and somewhat-unified lands of the Mediterranean, India and China, led to cultural switches toward what modern psychologists call “delayed gratification”: the promise that, by giving up some of the presently available material benefits, loftier long-term goals can be prioritized.

Baumard's theory is based on the notion that the values fostered by affluence, such as self-discipline and short-term sacrifice, are exactly the ones promoted by moralizing religions, which emphasize selflessness and compassion. As most have their worldly needs attended to, religion could afford to shift its focus away from material rewards in the present and toward spiritual rewards in the afterlife. In societies where the well-off had a reasonable expectation of living a long, comfortable life, moralizing religions eventually arose to reflect new values[3].

Mediterranean market demand for this new cultural product, for example, may be said to have found an appropriate supplier of moralizing religion in one of several Jewish schisms during the long decades of political instability that led to the destruction of Solomon's Temple by Titus in AD 70, and the final expulsion of much of the Jewish population in Palestine after the rebellion led by Simon Bar Kokhba in AD 135.

To some extent, early Christians can be described as highly Hellenized Jews, adapting the Jewish religion for the use of all mankind. This was at the time less of a stretch than it would seem: Classical Jews themselves, never given to modesty, claimed that all of mankind descended from their beloved ancestors through the bottleneck presented by Noah's Ark, which is unique among tribal religions of the time, rarely – if ever – concerned with how other peoples showed up in the world.

At the same time, Judaism had already been plenty Hellenized before. In that context, Christianity appears as just one final step away from tribal tradition and closer to a cosmopolitan appeal: a step that many Jews decided to take, and many others didn't.

There's an absurd belief that ancient Christians and Jews tried to teach their exalted view of the one true God to ignorant polytheists, as they sought to rid them of their silly pagan superstitions. This makes no sense because, as we have seen time and time again, educated Greeks and Romans had been essentially atheists for centuries: it was rather the conventional construction of the Jewish (and later Christian) deity that was “so self-evidently primitive as to be embarrassing.”[4]

Educated Greeks hadn't accepted the reality of such familiar figures of popular religion as Zeus, Apollo and Dionysus for a long time, but they did argue that they were symbolic manifestations of the divine essence, and useful beliefs for the populace to fill its head with. Many of them came to understand, all too painfully well, that defeatism and atheism had driven Greek philosophy to a dead-end, where it was an encumbrance for the masses, and a mere fig-leaf for elite shortcomings.

There remained a big problem for upper-class acceptance of monotheism, a new religion of whatever kind that might imbue Classical civilization with enough vigor to overcome Barbarian and Sasanian Persian challenges: that cynicism and stoicism made it all but impossible to reconcile the transcendence of God, as they understood it, with a human-like deity who created and ruled the material universe, a primitive mover and shaker like that portrayed, for example, in the Hebrew Bible.

Plato had depicted the creation of the world through a Craftsman or Demiurge who shaped the material world, which doesn't quite rise to the level of an all-powerful god[5]. So it was the Platonist thinker Philo of Alexandria, a prominent member of the Jewish community there, who was most successful at reconciling the Semitic God of the Desert with the technocratic master craftsman of the universe – which he did by identifying divine knowledge[6], the Platonic archetype of all things, with angelic appearances.

Philo, who knew how to handle tricky encounters – in AD 38, when Jesus ben Joseph was already long dead, he was a member of an Alexandrian Jewish embassy to Caligula in Rome – was never able to complete his godly fusion; that could only work through a third figure, an earthly manifestation of God that, luckily for Christians, had already been spotted in Palestine.

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[1]    And remains alive, if barely, largely confined to India or to Indian diaspora communities.

[2]    See “Comment nous sommes devenus moraux: Une histoire naturelle du bien et du mal,” Nicolas Baumard (2010)

[3]    According to a 2014 article in New Science magazine, Baumard went as far as gathering historical and archaeological data on many different societies across Eurasia in the Axial Age and tracked when and where various moralizing religions emerged. He found that “one of the best predictors of the emergence of a moralizing religion was a measure of affluence known as 'energy capture,' or the amount of calories available as food, fuel, and resources per day to each person in a given society. In cultures where people had access to fewer than 20,000 kilocalories a day, moralizing religions almost never emerged. But when societies crossed that 20,000 kilocalorie threshold, moralizing religions became much more likely.” The article quotes Naumard as saying: “You need to have more in order to be able to want to have less.”

[4]    The quote (and argument) is Jenkins' (Op. Cit.)

[5]    See Ian S. Moyer's “Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism,” Cambridge University Press, 2011.

[6]    Which he calls “Logos” in Greek, following Platonic convention.