Krasylov, 1997. Metaekolohiya-08. Holofora. Metafory. Zavyazky

Odyssey. Abraham.

V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology.
M.: Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997. 208 pp.
Part 8.

Golgotha. Metaphors. Testaments.

Testaments (conclusion). Miracles. Chapter 4. THE STRUGGLE. The Superhuman.

Golgotha
The influential prophet John the Baptist courageously denounced those who broke the law, including King Herod - for his relationship with his brother's wife Herodias (in the covenant: “Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother's wife, it is thy brother's nakedness”), for which he paid with his head. Less clear is another side of John's activity - the rite of baptism, evidently derived from the rite of initiation and given the additional meaning of purification from original sin, that is, from bodily birth, as in animals, granting the subject a second - spiritual - birth already as a human being. The baptized person thereby received a second (godly) father.
The striving to have more than one father (in women - more than one husband), expressed in the notions that have come down to our days as “godfather” and “spiritual father”, goes back to polyandry (having many husbands), when all potential fathers jointly looked after the child (as is the case in some species of monkeys). In the ancient world it was considered a great honor to call one of the immortals one's second father. Even in a relatively late period, Alexander the Great, having a renowned earthly father, considered it necessary to also style himself the son of Ammon. To this day women secretly dream of a second husband: this is one of the reasons for female promiscuity (discussed in more detail in Chapter 5).
The God of Abraham had good reason to warn so insistently against the influence of the gods of neighboring peoples, forbidding mixed marriages as a preventive measure. Nevertheless, Jewish nobles, and above all King Solomon, took for themselves numerous women and concubines from the Moabites, the Sidonians, and others, and these women turned their hearts to their own gods and drew them into forbidden rites. In particular, purification by water was practiced among many peoples, including the Persian followers of Zoroaster, whose rite included a second stage as well - purification by fire, which John the Baptist mentions in passing (Matt. 3:11). The Philistines worshipped the aquatic deity Dagon, half man, half fish, who as a result of purification may likewise have become their second father.
Among those who underwent the rite of purification at John's hands was a full-grown thirty-year-old Galilean who, unlike the stern desert-dweller girded with a leather belt, had no inclination toward asceticism (Matthew: “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He hath a devil.’ The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber’”).
He was reproached for not keeping the fasts and not washing his hands before eating. But he was not an opponent of the Laws of Moses. What troubled him was only the automatism incompatible with true spirituality. The new ethical teaching was maximalist in character and did not abolish, but only tightened and clarified, the norms of the Old Testament. However, quantity turned into quality, and a new system of values was born.
By offering a voluntary sacrifice, Jesus affirmed a human being's right to dispose of their own fate; by preaching love for one's enemies, he opened up the prospect of ending the eternal struggle that had driven the world through the early - primitive - stages of its development, the cessation of the eternal conflict between doubles. Total love, as the supreme task of spiritual development, requires endless perfection, and this path must be traveled by all humankind, not only the chosen. So far is it from its end that inequality recedes into the background as insignificant. After all, God is now not so much a father as a brother. The poor and the lost are given special support, so that all may arrive together, withstand selection, and preserve the diversity of people.
Ceaselessly moving from a donkey to a boat and back, Jesus effortlessly combined the adventurism of Odysseus with the conformism of Abraham, the Epicurean thirst for pleasure with the Stoic pull toward suffering. The years spent in the desert were not wasted: in the Qumran caves all the treasures of human thought had been gathered. Christian teaching testifies to the broad philosophical erudition of its creator. The Greeks called Jesus a Jewish sophist - a high compliment.
However, for the sermon to be heard, “one must teach as one having authority, and not as the scribes and Pharisees.” Here the ancient techniques of Zoroastrian and totemic magic could come in handy (for he grew up in Galilee, until recently pagan, surrounded by tribes that had not yet parted with the cult of animals), walking on water, raising the dead - long before him the influential prophet Elijah had done the same. The exaltation of the humble and the broken in spirit, the humbling of the proud and the excessive, had been prophesied by Isaiah, who likewise, during a period of foreign captivity, subjected himself to voluntary suffering. And the prophet's fate is predetermined: he will be seized and passed from hand to hand (from the high priests to Pilate, from him to Herod and back), as the guardians of the gates do on the way to the other world, and his flesh will be separated from its twin.
Once, firstborn sons were replaced by firstborn donkeys, and these in turn by lambs: let us recall in this context the careful choice of the unblemished young donkey on which the solemn entry into Jerusalem took place. But it is not the donkey that will be the victim here. Here the human sacrifice will be restored in full. All the metaphysics of the ancient world will be gathered on Golgotha, from which a new era of human evolution will arise.

Metaphors
Christian philosophy is not identical to the Christian religion. After all, Jesus himself did not place an equals sign between them, speaking one language with the apostles and another with the crowd. The text of Jesus's first public appearance in his native Nazareth has not come down to us, but, judging by the result, it may, unlike the Sermon on the Mount, have been a straightforward exposition of his philosophical system. In the ancient world philosophers were most often driven out. So it was with Protagoras, Anaxagoras, Diogenes (in Sinope), Aristotle, and others. So it happened with Jesus as well. It is hard to be a prophet in one's own homeland, but it is even harder to be a philosopher. That is why Jesus, after an unsuccessful debut, changed his tone and began to speak not as the scribes and Pharisees (that is, as philosophers), but as “one having authority” (that is, as a prophet).
Prophets are not driven out. They are worshipped, they are killed. However, a certain carelessness in observing rituals - the Sabbath, dietary rules, hand-washing, and so on - suggests that the full transformation of philosopher into prophet never quite took place: perhaps he considered that a moral teaching is better the fewer prohibitions it contains. The theologian-‘scribes’ were outraged by such liberties, but in doing so they overlooked a more important difference between the new teaching and Old Testament ethics, namely its international character. After all, the God of Abraham, in saying “thou shalt not kill,” meant only Jews, and not, say, the Philistines. Even Jesus at first refused the Syrophoenician woman who asked him to heal her daughter, saying “... for it is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs.” She answered him: “Yes, Lord: yet the dogs under the table eat of the children's crumbs” (Mark 7:28). This humble reply, which moved Oscar Wilde to tears in prison (“De Profundis”), touched Christ as well.
At the basis of innate - instinctive - ethics in animals lies the identification of oneself with another individual of the same species, whose killing is almost tantamount to suicide. In human beings, however, owing to significant inter-population and individual differences, such identification is complicated not only with respect to members of other races and tribes speaking a different language (that is, belonging to the same biological species but different metaecological species), but also with respect to compatriots, for whose protection a law was needed that replaced the almost non-functioning instinct and led to its further degradation.
Since social prohibition is not as absolute as biological prohibition, groups of people can, if one wishes, be excluded from under it, so that killing them is not only not forbidden but even encouraged. Humans thus lag behind animals, whose instinctive ethics in any case extend to the entire biological species and to those with whom it identifies (we expect from a dog unquestioning loyalty and self-sacrifice, thereby assuming in it higher moral qualities than in the average human). Christianity was the first - and not entirely successful - step toward overcoming this lag and bringing the whole of humanity within the sphere of ethics. It radically changed (in principle; little of what was conceived was actually realized in practice) the relationship between man and God, who became the Son of Man, that is, the offspring of man - previously it had been the other way around. And the son, as it is said in the Gospel of Philip, “takes brothers to himself, not sons.” For a son is not the plenipotentiary representative of the father, but his negation. Celibacy fundamentally excludes for the Son of Man the possibility of becoming a Father of Man, an object of worship. The Son abolishes the hierarchy in the relations between God and humans, between the spiritual and natural principles of human existence, placing an equals sign between them.
The significance of this step has still not been fully appreciated even two thousand years later, just as the philosophical meaning of love for one's enemy is not yet fully understood. The original enemy of a human being is himself, and only the love of twins for one another can overcome the eternal enmity between them. In this context other metaphors expressing the idea of unity also acquire meaning: birth from a virgin (as a condition of wholeness, liberation from the ever-present struggle of the male and female principles), the dialectic of the righteous and the sinful, the first and the last.
The Greeks called Jesus a Jewish sophist, meaning the brilliant examples of dialectic that his teaching provides. Thus the metaphor “not peace, but a sword,” which has provoked a multitude of contradictory interpretations (in the most primitive of them justifying militant religiosity), offers a dialectical solution to the problem of the individual and society. Individuality can be defined as the capacity to occupy a special place within a system, to play an unrepeatable role in the drama of social life. The concept of individuality has no meaning outside the social system, which levels its influence even as it simultaneously stands opposed to it. A lack of individuality places a person among the undifferentiated extras, adding to the surplus portion of the human population. Only an individualist can contribute to the development of the system, but the development of individuality requires breaking systemic ties, above all the caste and clan traditions that constrain the development of the personality, directing it along a pre-prepared path. For this - the sword. However, philosophy found itself captive to its own metaphors, which became biography and, as such, were subject to canonization.

Testaments
The eclectic character of Christianity ensured its rapid spread in the Hellenistic world, which urgently needed an ethical synthesis and finally obtained one, though not in the form dreamed of by refined minds (in particular the Gnostics, whose attempt at philosophical synthesis did not succeed), then at least at the grassroots level.
Against the background of serious discrepancies between the Evangelists, one is struck by the verbatim coincidences, among which is, in particular, the purely Cynic musing on the bird of the air, which neither sows nor reaps, yet has everything it needs. Such quotations from Heraclitus or Dio Chrysostom could have been inserted into all four texts by a Greek copyist familiar with Cynic literature. This assumption is all the more likely given that at the start of the new era there were quite a few Cynicizing Christians, as well as Christianizing Cynics, who brought the cults of Christ and Heracles closer together (the emperor Domitian executed both these and others - there was no time to sort them).
Lucian tells of the Cynic Peregrinus Proteus who, having become acquainted with the astonishing teaching of the Christians, “soon turned them all into infants, becoming himself both a prophet and the head of the community and the leader of assemblies - in a word, he alone was everything. As for the books, he interpreted them, explained them, and composed a good many himself.” Such an infiltration of a philosopher, seductive in sophistic battles, into the flock of Christ's sheep was probably not an isolated occurrence.
In fact the ethical teachings of the Cynics and the Christians coincided mainly in giving preference to spiritual goods over bodily ones (and spiritual beauty over bodily beauty: both, in this sense, set themselves against classical antiquity). On the most essential point - the attitude toward human nature - they diverged diametrically. Antisthenes and Diogenes identified the good with the natural, whereas Jesus taught that if someone does good out of natural inclination, there is no merit in it, and that there is more joy in heaven over one repentant sinner than over ninety-nine naturally righteous people who need no repentance. Christianity likewise found it difficult to adapt Stoicism, which rejected compassion as alien to human nature. Thus the question of whether ethical norms correspond to human nature remained, and remains, central.
Ethics is formed in the process of evolution as a mechanism of normative regulation of interactions within a system, necessary for preserving its integrity, whether the system be natural, social, or metaecological. Summing up what has been said, we may assert that ethical systems arising at one and the same stage of the spiritual development of human communities (above we outlined three such stages - the magical, the fatalistic, and the theocratic) usually have much in common. However, in their further development substantial differences may appear, connected with the persistence of archaic notions, natural and social conditions, and, finally, the personal qualities of the founders of new faiths. As a result, a fundamental commonality is preserved, but the ways of goal-setting and of defining the highest moral values do not coincide.
Thus, at the magical stage, gods and other otherworldly beings acted as helpers or opponents of acts of will. Bound up with them was a system of taboos, which they upheld by means of their magical power. At the same time, taboos did not extend to the otherworldly beings themselves, who thus remained outside the sphere of morality. To imitate a god at this stage meant to borrow his magical power without regard for whether it was used for good or ill. In other words, to be like a god did not mean to be virtuous. Ethical norms not connected with taboo (which reflects instinctive morality) were set by reference to the customs of the ancestors, in which there was undoubtedly a certain logic: if the ancestors survived and left viable offspring, then observing their customs guarantees the same, at least as long as the conditions of existence remain unchanged.
It is easy to see that following the customs of the ancestors is, in essence, a transfer of the biological mechanism of genetic heredity into the sphere of metaecology. As in biological evolution, the rigidity of the mechanism of inheritance can prove harmful under rapidly changing conditions.
Metaecology, it seems, needed additional mechanisms that would ensure, similarly to biological mutations and modifications, the possibility of further development of the system of ethical norms. Instead, our ancestors sought to give ethical norms an absolute character, increasingly attributing to them an otherworldly origin.
In the fatalistic period the customs of the ancestors still served as the basis of ethics, to one degree or another (most of all in Confucianism), retaining their significance in subsequent religious-ethical systems as well. To these, however, was added an attitude toward fate as a moral criterion (following fate is a sign of wisdom and virtue, resisting it a sign of recklessness and vice). Fate, however, being faceless and blind, could not be an ideal of morality. Even further from this ideal were the gods, themselves subject to fate but, unlike humans, not subject to moral norms. Systematic violation of the latter was characteristic of both the higher and the lower gods of the fatalistic period, and for some of them (the Babylonian Enlil, the Hindu Shiva, the Greek Hermes, the Scandinavian Loki - all phallic gods of destruction) immorality became the chief trait. Those who, like Tantalus, sought to equal the gods, imitated them in their bad qualities rather than their good ones.
The god who initiated the universal flood, the destroyer of Sodom and Gomorrah, was, in essence, not much different from Enlil or Shiva, and did not even want to listen to Abraham's moral arguments. Over time, however, the relationship between him and human beings changed substantially, as attested by the series of covenants between this god and his chosen people, right up to the last one, recorded on stone tablets and regulating by divine authority every manifestation of life, from the dietary and the sexual to the political and the cultic. But even in this theocratic system, God, the omnipotent legislator in the sphere of ethics, himself remains unpredictable, unknowable, in other words, immeasurable by the moral yardstick he himself created. For Moses, submission to God becomes a sign of virtue, just as for Socrates it was following fate. But both God and fate are separated from humans by such an insurmountable distance that they cannot (and still cannot, with regard to the gods of antiquity) serve as an example to be imitated.
The religions of modern times, which grew on the soil of the religions of the magical and theocratic periods and absorbed elements of both to one degree or another, are characterized by a shortening of the distance between God and humanity by means of divine intermediaries - Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad - who, being sons of man, are simultaneously indissolubly linked to the otherworld in the role of sons, plenipotentiary representatives, or (in the Buddhist variant) reincarnations of the gods.