Natural Religion 01
Chapter one — A brief history of religion
“We are, at the moment, in many different places, with many histories and hopes. But we are now called together to one place, to a shared history and to a common vision of enduring promise. If there are saints enough among us, we shall survive.”
Throughout the history of humanity, our ancestors appealed to mythological stories and religious traditions in order to make sense of the world around them and give to their lives a meaning and a purpose.
So, what is a “myth”?
In his 1999 book Everybody’s Story, professor Loyal Rue defines it as follows:
“We shall mean by myth a story of comprehensive scope that concerns itself with cosmic or geologic origins or with the origins, nature, or destiny of life. Myth would then mean a “big picture” kind of story that is told for the purpose of giving human beings an orientation in the cosmos.”
And what is a “religion”?
“Religion, then, is that which binds together, that which ties a community into a coherent bundle or unity, that which gives identity to a culture… Religion is a cultural mechanism that achieves a sense of solidarity between separate groups.”
Religions had the social function of providing the unifying narrative in which to weave together these two most fundamental aspects of our existence: cosmology (or how things are), and morality (or which things matter).
A brief history of religion
The first cultural patterns involving some kind of proto-religious behavior are burial rites. They reach back to the Middle Paleolithic, as early as 300,000 years ago, coinciding with the appearance of Homo neanderthalensis. Intentional burials, especially those with grave goods buried along the corpse, seem to indicate an early concern for the continuation of life after death.
But it is only during the Upper Paleolithic, as clans coalesced into tribes, that it became necessary to artificially reinforce the solidarity and cooperation within members of these larger social groups, no more bound by blood-ties:
“Suddenly, human existence — both personal and collective — became problematic in ways that were previously inconceivable. Questioning the meaning of life, once utterly unthinkable, now became inevitable, but it also became an essential part of the human strategies for pursuing personal wholeness and social coherence.
To have explicit concepts for these goals — to have a sense of the self as a moral agent and a sense of one’s group as a transcendent entity — changed everything about the way humans perceived possibilities for a full and responsible existence.
New cultural-symbolic means evolved to support these behaviours, including stories and rituals which described the common history and the customs of the tribe. From the perspective of group selection, these cultural means were adaptive since they enhanced the tribe’s fitness and helped it survive and thrive. In Rue’s terms, tribes wised-up to the means of promoting cooperative behaviour. The sum of these cultural-symbolic means is what we call religion:
“By introducing a variety of symbols, rituals, and concepts it became possible to manipulate individuals into cooperating more freely with others. […] The result of these new cultural means was to redefine the boundaries of social reality, such that those who could be symbolically identified as belonging to the tribe were regarded as kinfolk, and were thus deserving of one’s cooperation. In other words, symbolic markers have the power to create a virtual kinship, which is just as effective as the real thing.”
The late Ice Age was a tough time to be. Long winters and scarce resources kept our ancestors always on the brink of extinction, dependent on the whims of the weather and on the fortunes of the hunting parties. Constantly stuck in a survival-mode, it’s no wonder if some of the first symbolic artifacts they produced were related to fertility cults: hundreds of sculptures dating back to this period and depicting nude women with prominent sexual features were found by archeologists all across Eurasia.
The abstract nature of symbols — allowing us to talk about things also when they’re not immediately present — inevitably led our species to a trend of increasing abstraction until we started wondering about the original cause of everything that happened around ourselves. That’s how the concept of God, deity or spiritual being was born. Our ancestors started to attribute the awe-inspiring natural phenomena such as thunders or lightnings to the power of some supernatural force which had to be worshipped. “Primos timor fecit deos” — as famously stated by Lucretius — it was fear to devise the first gods.
As they became aware of their collective identity, our ancestors also perceived their precariousness in a largely hostile environment, and got frightened. This primordial feeling of cosmic fear is a trauma that we inherit from the dawn of our species, and that tends to reemerge every time the symbolic casing inside which we’ve confined chaos rips apart, leaving us to face once again the primordial dismay. Deep down, each one of us is still that ‘lost gypsy’ who, generation after generation, has tried to tame the wilderness of Nature by inscribing it into some kind of overarching intelligible order, and for whom myths and rituals were the magic keys to lock and contain the adverse forces.
Pantheons of elemental gods remained the norm until the end of the Bronze Age. Then, during the Iron Age (14th Century BCE), an even broader concept referring to a monotheistic God began to emerge everywhere: Shangdi in China, Brahman in India, Aten in Egypt, Yahweh in the Middle East…
Gradually, the natural environment lost its chaotic and dreadful appearance and became a benevolent order conducive to human life; the random wandering of celestial bodies found its converging center (versus-unum) and became the universe. By turning chaos into a cosmos, humanity exorcised its ancient fear and stipulated with God an alliance.
As we settled into cities, our cosmology became the projection of our social experience as citizens within the newly articulated organization of city-life. Man started to see himself as the measure of all things, and the entire universe came to be seen as a shiny frame revolving around the single most important part of creation: planet Earth — and more specifically us — the Human Race, chosen by God to rule over the world.
With the Axial Age, between the 8th and the 3rd Century BCE, the objective and subjective realms that had been woven together in the same cultural package were now split apart, and started to be seen as pertaining to conceptually separate domains. Karl Jaspers described the Axial Age as “an interregnum between two ages of great empire, a pause for liberty, a deep breath bringing the most lucid consciousness”. Eric Voegelin (2000) referred to this period as The Great Leap of Being, a time of spiritual awakening and shift of perception from societal to individual values. David Graeber (2011), noting the synchronicity with the invention of coinage, argued that the Axial Age brings with it the “ideal division of spheres of human activity that endures to this day: on the one hand the market, on the other, religion.”
For professor Rue, the axial traditions can be seen as fundamentally dualistic regarding their cosmology, and individualistic in their approach to morality:
Axial Age religions:
- Cosmology/Ontology: dualistic (supernatural vs natural; what matters for religions is found in the supernatural realm).
- Morality/Salvation: individualistic (every human can save him/herself by behaving in accordance to God’s plan).
After the Axial Age, the empire struck back by reabsorbing all the new ideas and values in a renovated dogmatic framework. In India, the old Brahman of the Vedas incorporated some Buddhist concepts and became the Puranic Trimurti of Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu, while in Palestine the Lord of the Old Testament was reformed by a prophet and became the Christian Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But while these new religions and their symbolic narratives took hold and thrived all across the Middle Ages, the empire failed in the effort of rejoining the two spheres and eventually disintegrated.
The Middle Ages, much like the Bronze Age, was a period that philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1987) would call “molecular”, in the sense that power was more decentralized, as opposed to “molar”, when power is more centralized. Empires were basically an incorporation of different kingdoms and after their collapse humanity regressed to a fragmented feudal order of sovereign cities.
Then came Modernity, with its scientific revolution. Politically, this led to a new molar incorporation into nation-states. Economically, to the industrial revolution. And culturally, to the submission of the religious to the secular order, with Capitalism and its market economy which downgraded the spiritual/subjective sphere to a mere appendix (superstructure) of society.
Modernity described itself as the perfectly rational synthesis of the historical dialectic — in Hegel’s words — and every other cultural tradition came to be seen as a preliminary step in the universal path towards the “Absolute Spirit”.
The core myth or ideology holding together the modern paradigm was the faith in unlimited progress.
The fundamental points of this paradigm were:
- the progressive triumph of scientific reason,
- the subjugation of the planet to the rule of technological man,
- the end of the religious illusion to the benefit of a humanity fully satisfied with its mundane existence.
Today — at the start of the Third Millenium CE — we can say that the Modern Age represented both the climax and the closing chapter of this long self-aggrandizing narrative in which humanity would portray itself as the apex of evolution and the universe as a triumphant march of order over chaos.
The rational basis upon which humanity built its civilization is cracking: beneath it, dark and stormy waters are mounting, threatening to collapse the entire edifice. The cosmos has lost its foundations: after losing God, it lost the illusion of a perfect Order and now, with the discovery of quantum physics, it lost even the substantiality of matter itself. Chaos is back, and its return — in Heraclitus words — makes all our human efforts seem little more than a child’s play by the side of the ocean.
