Krasilov, 1997. Metaecology-06. The Crossroads. The Supertask

The Junction. Chapter 3. THE CROSSING. The World as Will. Dissolution. V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology. Moscow: Paleontological Institute RAS, 1997. 208 p. Part 6. The Crossroads. The Supertask. Odysseus. Abraham. The Crossroads Translating these general ideas into the realm of practical ethics was no simple task, if only because addressing not a select circle of the enlightened but the broad masses, one risked hearing at the most inopportune moment: "And who are you to instruct us?" Certain rules had to be observed, the violation of which could lead to a tragic end, as in the case of Socrates or Jesus — both of whom voluntarily accepted martyrdom. First, one must avoid direct communication with the masses, entrusting that to chosen disciples who, maintaining their distance, could invoke the authority of the teacher. Second, one must not preach in one's homeland. Siddhartha, born at the foot of the Himalayas, crossed the Ganges before becoming the Buddha (an act equivalent to a second birth) and gained renown as Shakyamuni, that is, the sage of the Shakya tribe (though was he considered a sage by the Shakyas themselves?). Diogenes became a sage only after his exile from Sinope. Laozi, during one of his crossings, was stopped by border guards who offered him, as a condition of entry, the written exposition of his views. This elaborate customs declaration became the primary source of Taoism. In bureaucratic China it was considered entirely natural for a government official to assume the role of moral teacher. In any case, the police magistrate Kung regarded moral instruction as part of his official duties. This highly educated man, probably owing to his supercompetence, early lost his position in the administration of Lu, but continued to teach, now as a recognized instructor. Kung Fu-tzu. He perceptively noted that the foundation of ethics lies in similitude: we behave morally toward ourselves and toward those whom we consider similar to ourselves, with whom we identify. And since the world is one and all beings are alike, there are grounds for not doing to others what one would not wish for oneself. Approximately the same conclusions follow if the unity of the world rests on universal attraction-love, which moves the sun and the stars. However, both Confucius and Plato were too worldly to proclaim undiscriminating love as the foundation of everyday morality. Only one who had lived for almost thirty years in the wilderness among beasts could do this. Palestine, the world crossroads between Asia, Europe, and Africa, was not by chance the birthplace of a new ethical teaching. On this long-suffering land all the great armies and all the great ideas of the ancient world have left their mark. Around 2000 BCE there arrived here immigrants from Chaldean Ur, whom local tribes called Hebrews, "people from beyond the river" (they had indeed crossed the Euphrates, but in the ancient world the crossing of a river carried symbolic significance — for the locals these were people from the otherworld). Since the Hebrews performed magical rites and did not venerate the Babylonian gods, it may be supposed that they descended from an ancient Sumerian tribe subjugated by Babylon. Their relationship with their god represented a mixture of familiarity and subservience characteristic of the magical stage of spiritual development. A personal god was expected to provide support both in righteous and in unrighteous deeds (although Abraham profited by presenting his beautiful wife to the Pharaoh under the guise of his sister, the Lord directed his wrath not at Abraham but at the Pharaoh). Palestine at that time represented a complex conglomerate of numerous Hamitic tribes. In geological terms it is a mobile section of the earth's crust, a conglomerate of small plates adjoining a meridional fault zone stretching from the Gulf of Aqaba along the Jordan valley. In this zone lies the Dead Sea, which did not yet exist in Abraham's time. Movements of the earth's crust were accompanied by volcanism. Oil seeped through fissures and filled sinkholes in which the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah perished during their flight. The sea penetrated into the fault zone, flooding the ruins of ancient cities. The people of Abraham's tribe survived, which could only have strengthened the authority of their god. Before coming to the promised land, the Hebrews lived in Haran among Anatolian tribes and, before settling in Palestine, spent some time in Egypt, fleeing from famine. A more powerful infusion of Egyptian culture, however, occurred four hundred years later, when the descendants of Abraham, during another famine, moved to that country. The six hundred thousand who, another four hundred years later (the 400-year climatic cycle is clearly manifested in ancient history), followed Moses called themselves the sons of Israel. They had to reconquer Palestine, a land entirely unfamiliar to them. These Egyptianized Hebrews may have brought with them a god who created by word, as distinct from the primordial Sumerian god who fashioned from clay. In any case there existed sacred texts of two types, and the god was named differently in each: in Judah Jehovah (Yahweh), in Israel Elohim. Their unification occurred in the fifth century BCE. Israel and Judah long served as a buffer between the eastern superpowers — Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon — and after their fall came under the orbit of Aryan conquerors: Persians, Greeks, and Romans. Liberated by the Persians from Babylonian captivity, the Jews brought to Jerusalem the ideas of Chaldean theology, and perhaps more distant influences from India and China, with which trade relations had been established. The patronage of the Achaemenids facilitated the spread of Zoroastrianism among them. However, the Persian Empire, after two centuries of dominion, was defeated by Alexander the Great. Jerusalem was engulfed by a wave of Hellenism, in the path of which attempts were made to erect a dam of Jewish orthodoxy. These contradictions led to civil war, the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid successors of Alexander, and the restoration of the independence of Judea, which a hundred and thirty-five years before the Common Era annexed pagan Galilee. The ideological disarray in Judea was too great for the efforts of the Maccabean kings to create a monolithic state to succeed. The Jewish Protestant Pharisees rejected the sacrifices and formalism of the Mosaic laws. They waged struggle against the Sadducees, the guardians of temple traditions. Religious disagreements increasingly escalated into political ones and assumed the character of civil war, drawing in the legions of Pompey stationed in Syria. When the Sanhedrin demanded the execution of Jesus, threatening the arrival of the Romans in the event of civil unrest, it was these still-memorable events that were being referred to. A pro-Roman dynasty had established itself in Jerusalem, resorting to harsh repressive measures. But internal strife did not abate. A notable role in public life was played by the sect of the Essenes — the "simplifiers," who preached renunciation of worldly goods for the salvation of the soul and the imminent resolution, with the coming of the Messiah, of the cosmic struggle between the forces of light and darkness. This latter part of the teaching, as well as the procedure of initiation by water and fire, points to a connection with Zoroastrianism. Presumably the Qumranites and Nazarenes, who had broken off from the Essenes, did not cut their hair and were distinguished by extreme asceticism. These are the blessed poor (the word "in spirit" was inserted later) of whom Matthew says that theirs is the kingdom of heaven. The mendicants recognized John the Baptist as their prophet. Jesus, who succeeded John after his death, rejected the sectarian insularity and asceticism of the Nazarenes, without aligning himself with other religious currents either. The expulsion of the money-changers from the temple was directed against sacrifices (money was exchanged for pilgrims to purchase sacrificial animals) and against Sadducean ritualism. But that is where the rapprochement with the Pharisees ends. The Pharisees, like a dog in the manger, are capable neither of making use of their own knowledge themselves nor of sharing it with the people. In the episode with the alabaster vessel, Jesus — unexpectedly for his disciples — performs over himself the rite of preparation for sacrifice that had been rejected by the Protestant sects. At the same time the reminder about the "poor" evokes only a dismissive remark: "For ye have the poor always with you." One of the disciples may have seen in this an act of apostasy. Indeed, by making the secret teaching for the elect manifest to all and by replacing sacrifice with self-sacrifice, Jesus departed from the ethical canons of his time and made a breakthrough to a new level of spiritual development. The Evangelists shared his aspiration to rise above religious strife, imparting to the new teaching an enduring character. They were far more concerned with his carefully planned death than with his unremarkable life, from which nearly all political and philosophical realities had been excised. Of the canonical books, only the Revelation of John — the concluding episode of the cosmic struggle between good and evil — reveals an unmistakable connection with the Qumran texts and the Gnostic writings derived from them. In their desire to disclose what remained unsaid in the canonical Gospels and constitutes the secret meaning of the teaching of Christ (its philosophical underpinning), the Gnostic apocrypha cite Zoroaster (in John), speak of the salvation of the soul which "is not cast into another flesh" (ibid.), explain the birth of a virgin (from two virgins, since in Aramaic the spirit is of the feminine gender) as the guarantee of the wholeness of the Savior, for whom the inner struggle of masculine and feminine principles is unknown and whose kingdom is a bridal chamber. For he bequeathed: "...when you make two one, you will enter the kingdom." He is the unifier of all opposites, and not only will he make the last first (taken in isolation this sounds like social demagoguery), but also the inner as the outer, and the upper as the lower, and the male and female as one (from Thomas), and the harlot holy, and the wife a virgin ("Thunder"). And then light and darkness, life and death will merge in a hymn to the unity of creation, which sounds in Sanskrit, in Persian, in Greek, in Aramaic, in Chinese, in Coptic, and sounded long before Plato, to say nothing of Plotinus. The Supertask Alexander Men, in an essay on the apocryphal and novelistic interpretation of the Gospel, which often presents Jesus as a remarkable but entirely earthly personality, poses the following question: if the Good News was not divine revelation, then "whence came its power?... Was not the Empire in those days rich with other influential doctrines and beliefs, which had to yield before the Gospel?" And further: if Jesus of Nazareth was merely one of the great moral teachers, why was he recognized as god, and not Socrates or Confucius? We are offered success as the criterion of truth, defined — quantitatively — by the mass character of a phenomenon. Even in pagan times a victorious tribe could consider that it had thereby demonstrated the superiority of "our god" over "their gods." Until recently, the spread of Marxist ideology in the countries of the Third World was considered confirmation of the correctness of Karl Marx. As the history of scientific ideas shows, the connection between truth and success can be either positive or negative. In any case, success is mixed with other causes beyond truth. Peoples who rose against Roman domination needed common ideological orientations. The syncretism of Christianity also played a role, absorbing the metaphysical ideas of ancient Greece and the East. Christian metaphysics was more readily assimilated by pagans than the alien Jewish variety. The chief reason, however, one may think, was not this. As a system of goal-setting, early Christianity satisfied the spiritual needs of its epoch to a greater degree than the preceding metaphysical systems. The ancient metaphysical teachings, projecting spiritual life onto the surrounding world, aimed chiefly at explaining the mystery of beginning and end. The path of self-knowledge ran through the celestial spheres and the underworld, the elaboration of which fostered the development of the inner world. The dialectic of the singular and the universal, painfully apprehended, the problem of the identity of existence in time (one can nevertheless in some sense step into the same river twice) gave rise to a host of gods embodying the essences of things. The astonishing vitality of ancient metaphysics is explained, first, by the humanization of creation, which thereby became intimate and filled with meaning (competing rationalist explanations, by contrast, distanced the phenomena of the external world from man, stripping the fall of a meteorite or the flight of cranes of their secret significance). Second, metaphysical systems absorbed social functions which enhanced their importance, thereby preserving intact even their most archaic elements. Such functions include, for example, the use of clan totems to prevent consanguineous unions, or adherence to rituals as a means of consolidating the tribe and, later, the nation. The ethical function also appeared at a certain stage as an additional one, though in time it acquired precisely that predominant significance. At early stages of social development, ethical needs were satisfied by unconscious moral norms inherited from animal ancestors, and by pragmatic ones worked out through intertribal selection. In the seventh through fourth centuries BCE all ancient civilizations — in parallel and independently of one another, or as a result of complex mutual influences — formed ethical systems appealing to metaphysical argument in varying degrees. In classical paganism, ethical norms derived from the overthrown Prometheus; their observance was overseen by lesser deities such as the Erinyes; and only a few, comparatively recent ones (for example, the law of hospitality, adopted among the Hellenes as a mark of distinction from barbarians) rested on the authority of the Olympians. To praise Prometheus was not without danger, as Aeschylus could attest from personal experience, when Zeus's eagle dropped a tortoise on his head. This situation may reflect the historical process by which the martial Aryans — whose gods knew no moral prohibitions — absorbed the ethical norms of subjugated peoples with their overthrown moralizing gods. In the symbolic language of the Bible, the history of ethics — from the first sexual restrictions to the developed system of norms governing social and spiritual life — appears as a series of contracts (covenants) between god and man. By the first covenant, the only restriction placed on the first man Adam was not to enter into an incestuous relationship with his wife-double — or, symbolically, not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge (in the language of the Bible the sexual act is knowledge). Not only did Adam violate this contract, but subsequently the angels also went in to the daughters of men, seeing that they were fair, and from these unions was born the tribe of giants who considered themselves more or less equal to the heavenly beings and acknowledged no contracts. They had to be drowned. With Noah, who survived the flood, God made a new covenant, the central content of which amounts to the commandment "Thou shalt not kill." This protective covenant obligated God himself not to resort to genocide. Neither men nor God observed the contract. Moreover, humanity had become divided and a universal human covenant had become inconceivable. Therefore the next contract was of an exclusive character and extended to those who undertook to honour a single god in exchange for his support in the struggle against the descendants of Ham (Canaan). In the critical period of universal moral decline, when Moses led his starving and half-savage people through the desert, a detailed contract was composed and inscribed on stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments, which became the foundation of the ethics of the Western world, along with many other precepts of a more specific character. (The first tablets, delivered by Moses, may have contained loftier commandments, but seeing the abominations committed by the people in his absence, Moses dropped them — perhaps experiencing a subconscious Freudian desire to shatter them — so that God had to write them anew.) At the same time Confucius, formulating "rules of conduct" based on two principal virtues — justice and benevolence (including the "golden rule" — do not do to others what you do not wish for yourself) — invoked the "will of heaven" only for form's sake, while Socrates for the most part did without such references. For all their differences, Moses, Confucius, Socrates, and even Prometheus merely articulated and systematized ethical principles long established in society, which were merely awaiting normative formulation. Indeed, for this reason there was no need to declare these titans of thought gods — the authority of the teacher was sufficient. Jesus of Nazareth was another matter: ... But I say to you: Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; And if anyone would sue you and take your shirt, let him have your cloak as well; You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I say to you, Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who persecute you. No such moral experience had yet existed. These principles did not derive from human nature. The bar had been raised to a height unattainable for mortals. Jesus himself sees the fundamental distinction between his teaching and the preceding religio-ethical systems in the demand for an ethical feat that elevates one above ethical pragmatism: ... for if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? A religio-moral supertask cannot be justified by an appeal to tradition or practical utility, since it derives from neither. It therefore requires authoritative affirmation — a personal cult of the founder. The Evangelists provide some material for comparing the ethical norms being established with everyday morality. Instructive in this regard is the selection of disciples, who were to become the spiritual shepherds of humanity. Among them we find a tax collector — a representative of one of the most despised professions; a fisherman who failed to walk on water owing to insufficient faith and subsequently denied his teacher out of cowardice; and finally a thief who was entrusted with the common purse. The thief cast down his silver coins and hanged himself — an act evidencing more successful re-education than in the case of the fisherman. Was the strange story of his betrayal (practically meaningless, since Jesus taught in the temple every day and was well known) an attempt to personify evil, to find a concrete culprit — the same scapegoat? In the latter case one would have to admit that the Good News left a shallow imprint on everyday morality. In Buddhism the distinction between everyday morality and the moral ideal is drawn even more sharply. The moral ideal is so elevated that in Buddhist theology doubts exist as to whether the Buddha himself attained nirvana during his lifetime. At the same time practical ethics is so natural that each person can formulate the commandments for himself. For example, one of the Buddha's disciples (who made no distinction between the sexes in the matter of enlightenment — unlike the sexist attitude of the Christians, to whom it never occurred to regard Mary Magdalene as the thirteenth apostle), Princess Mallika, concluded with herself a contract containing the following ten commandments: 1) not to violate sacred vows; 2) not to be presumptuous in the presence of elders; 3) not to give way to anger; 4) not to be jealous or envious in either thought or deed; 5) to strive to make others happy by sharing with them all that I possess; 6) to show kindheartedness, to give people all that they need; 7) to be guided by the needs of others rather than by one's own interests, to strive to help everyone without exception; 8) to those in solitude, in confinement, suffering from illness and other afflictions, to bring relief by explaining the causes of their misfortunes and the (moral) laws; 9) those who hunt animals or display cruelty toward animals — to punish, if punishment is necessary, or to instruct, if instruction is necessary; to correct their errors as far as possible; 10) to keep in mind the true teaching, for one who neglects the truth stumbles in all things and will not reach the shores of Enlightenment. These commandments were regarded by her as temporary — for the period of learning. In other words, ordinary basic morality served as the point of departure for genuine self-perfection. The comparatively easy victory of Christianity over paganism was the triumph of metaphysical goal-setting — whose ideals lie beyond the bounds of lived experience — over a metaphysical system that set no task of infinite moral self-perfection. At the same time, in its collision with other religio-moral teachings of the same type — Mohammedanism, Buddhism — Christianity obtained no clear advantage. Classical Judaism was an archaic metaphysical system demanding more obedience than self-perfection. In the diaspora, however, the very preservation of the ancient teaching was itself transformed into a moral supertask. The Junction. Chapter 3. THE CROSSING. The World as Will. Dissolution. V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology. Moscow: Paleontological Institute RAS, 1997. 208 p. Part 6. The Crossroads. The Supertask. Odysseus. Abraham.