I wanted to stress in Parts 8 and 9 of this series that philosophy for the ancients, and theology for the early Christians, while it was an exercise in theoria, which in Greek means nous-awakened contemplative seeing, it was not 'theoretical' in our modern sense. It was first a praxis whose objectives were to transform the soul. Or to use a word that has pejorative connotations for most moderns, it was a mystical exercise. But I would like to clarify that there are two broad categories of mysticism that often co-existed in post-Axial societies that must be distinguished from one another: the Mysticism of the Heath, which is the continuation of pre-Axial Revolution religious practices, and the Mysticism of Transcendence, which is post-Axial.
The Mysticisms of the Heath were mostly concerned with managing a spiritual economy of malign and benign local gods and spiritual forces to prevent and mitigate misfortunes and to promote ordinary human flourishing--long life, bounteous crops, healthy children, victory over one's enemies, etc. This is the world of shamans, sorcery, and ritual sacrifice. The Mysticism of Transcendence is what we've been talking about regarding the praxis and theoria of the Greek schools whose primary objectives were to ascend to a union with the One and to know the Good, to do it, and gradually to become it.
This pre-Axial/post-Axial distinction is important to keep in mind. Most people who don't know much about religion tend to lump the two together. Nevertheless, the popular practice of many Christians, Jews, Buddhists is often more pre-Axial than post-Axial, at least insofar as it is transactional: "Lord, if I win this battle, I will build a cathedral to honor your Holy Mother." Or in a more contemporary idiom,"If I get this promotion or win this game, I won't miss church on Sundays anymore." Central here is the quid pro quo. If there's no payoff, what's the point of religion? If God isn't going to help me get what I want, then who needs him? This is pre-Axial religious thinking. [See Note 1]
The post-Axial Mysticism of Transcendence is about redefining true human flourishing. In part it's about rising above mundane concerns of the Mysticism of the Heath, but also to be a presence in the world that seeks to undermine or subvert the regime of local gods. Christians pray "Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven", and it's so familiar to us that we rarely think about its implications. It defines an aspiration that is at the heart of the Axial revolution--the idea that the local cultural operating system can be subordinated to another OS that operates above and outside it, and which can break into and reconfigure local, sublunary systems. This introduces the idea that things don't have to be the way they are now because that's the way they've always been. Things can change for the better. Progress--a dream of better future--becomes a possibility. This possibility is implicit in Greek thinking [See Note 2], but it is a more dynamic element in Jewish eschatological thinking and imagination.
This idea of progress has come to mean different things to different people, and it has often led people into delusional, destructive political projects. But that doesn't mean that all such attempts to 'immanentize the eschaton' are misguided. As I said in a post last week, a reactionary politics is rooted in a reactionary religion; a progressive politics must be rooted in an eschatological mythos. That it is even possible to think about a possible positive future is largely a product of Jewish thinking in the later Second Temple period about which I write below. But the important caveat here is that politics flows from culture. The transformation has to happen first in the broader culture so that the culture moves toward a true progressive politics without it being forced on it. The worst thing that ever happened to Christianity was its having become the official religion of the Roman Empire after Constantine.
So in societies in which post-Axial religions took root, they lived side by side with pre-Axial customary practices. This was true in the Hellenic-Roman world; it was true in medieval Christianity, and it was true in Buddhist societies, and others. And so in such societies, an interesting split develops between a small spiritual elite that aspires to spiritual transformation--and everybody else. These elites see spiritual transformation as a possibility for themselves and their brothers and sisters who are likewise engaged in the spiritual practices of the Mysticism of Transcendence--usually in monasteries. Those outside the monasteries, generally speaking, have no such spiritual aspirations; they expect that their lives will follow the pattern established by their ancestors, and in the West their religious practice owes more to Celtic, Germanic, and Mediterranean Mysticisms of the Heath than to the Mysticisms of Transcendence.
I think it was St. Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) who said that few will be saved and most will be monks. But this problem of elitism is a tension in Christianity from the beginning, and it motivates a reform movement in the late medieval period whose objective was to export the Mysticism of Transcendence from the monasteries into the world. This is a story we'll tell in more detail in future posts, but these reform movements culminate in the the Protestant Reformation. The Reformers'--particularly the Calvinists'--objective was to exterminate any vestiges of the Mysticism of the Heath as they persisted in Catholic practice. And they also rejected institutions committed to the Mysticism of Transcendence, at least as it was pursued in the monasteries. The Reformers saw monasticism as promoting a spiritual elitism they thought to be un-Christian. In doing so, they proscribed the pursuit of an itinerary of spiritual transformation that was central to Greek, Jewish, and Christian practice that has been the focus in recent posts in this series--and posts to come.
So a more nuanced discussion of these developments lies ahead of us, but for how I can say that it is obvious to me that they threw out the baby out with the bath water, and their doing so led to unintended consequences that contribute significantly to the crisis of meaning through which we are suffering now. Nevertheless, after the Reformation the hope for progress still ran deep, but it was imagined instead primarily in terms that were cognate with the concerns of the Mysticism of the Heath. In other words, progress after the Reformation was framed as a means to secure ordinary human flourishing--long life, bounteous crops, healthy children, victory over one's enemies, etc.--but now without the mysticism or any aspirations to divinization.
Or so I'll argue in future posts in this series. But I want to remind the reader from time to time why it's interesting and important to understand where these ideas originate, why they were significant at the time, how they evolved and were adapted to different historical circumstances, and why they still remain consequential for us today.
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Back to the ancient Mediterranean world:
One of the most important characteristics of the Western Mysticism of Transcendence is the role of Love--both for the Greeks and for the Jews, and later for the Christians. The main texts here are Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium, which lay out an eros-driven itinerary that leads the soul upward toward union with the transcendent One--the source of all Goodness, Beauty, Wisdom. For Christians this love of the One is central, but also comes to emphasize a love of the neighbor--even of the enemy--in a way that is not found in the Greek tradition. Indeed the eschaton referenced above is imagined as the communion of saints at a banquet in the New Jerusalem to which all are invited but only those transformed by Love will be admitted.
The point is that the goal for both Greeks, Jews, and Christians in this early post-Axial era is an interior moral transformation that is effected by this transcendent force whose main characteristic is Love. This love, as we'll see, has both an erotic and an agapic dimension to it. I will let scholars argue about the precise meanings of these terms, but for our purposes Eros is about deeply felt connection and communion with everything--nature, other people, beings in the spiritual world. Agape is about overflowing compassion. Both are first and foremost divine activities, but they become possible for humans by virtue of their communion with the Divine.
So, again, post-Axial philosophy and theology were first grounded in experience; they were not an abstract exercise. The quality of one's thinking was directly related to the quality and depth of one's experience. Wisdom is about the integration of experience and one's reflection about its significance, but in the light of the inherited wisdom of the ancestors. The sacred texts--both from the pagan philosophers, the Bible, and the early Fathers are part of an ongoing reflection, and our reading of them has value primarily as they afford occasions for inspired exegesis.
So reading the text is not an intellectual exercise, at least 'intellectual' in the sense that moderns mean it. It was a spiritual exercise, a way of becoming transformed by one's encounter with the text. This was true for both the pagan philosophers who read Plato and Aristotle as it was for the learned Jews who read the Torah, the Prophets, or the Wisdom literature. From early on Jewish exegetes encountered the Bible not just as history and law, but as having deeper mystical meanings that were not available to the superficial or uninspired reader. This kind of reading was adopted later by Christian exegetes who saw at least three levels of Biblical interpretation--Literal/historical, Allegorical, and the more deeply mystical/Anagogic.
In Part 9, I talked a little about Gnosticism as arising out of Jewish interactions with Greek thought and practice, but I wanted to say a bit more about what was happening in Judaism in the later Second Temple period, which ended with the Roman destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE.
McGinn spends most of his Chapter 1 "The Jewish Matrix" in Foundations (See Note 2) focusing on the two primary forms of literature that came out of Jewish culture at this time--the aforementioned Apocalypses and Wisdom literature. The second of these we know most familiarly as the Psalms and the Song of Songs, both of which would be central to Christian mystical thinking and practice:
"If the purest of wisdom had ancient roots in Israel, it is nonetheless true that it became an ever-growing force in Jewish intellectual life during the years of the direct contact with Hellenism," James Kugel reminds us. The Wisdom of Ben Sira (or Ecclesiasticus, composed early in the second century BCE) the Psalms of Solomon (first century BCE), and especially the Wisdom of Solomon, dated as early as the second century BCE by some more likely written ca. 40 CE, are primary examples of this tendency which has close ties with the philosophical tradition in Hellenistic Judaism evident in such figures as Aristobulus and especially Philo. . . . If the concern for cosmic secrets in the otherworldly apocalypses brings them close to the ambit of the developing cosmic piety of Hellenistic tradition, this proximity of interest is heightened in the wisdom literature, where, as in Greek cosmic piety, the experience of God reaches the believer through meditation of the order of the universe. Elements of a more personal relationships to God, or at least to a divine power, are also discovered here. (Foundations, p. 19)
The Song of Songs isn't mentioned in this paragraph because it's not clear when it was written, but best guess is in the early 100s CE--so very late.
The Apocalypses are significant for two main reasons. They articulate a shift in the understanding of history, and, second, they articulate an aspiration to see God face to face, as in the famous passage from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. This was a vision afforded to certain important Jewish figures--Abraham, Jacob, and Moses. But it became something available to the writers of Apocalypses in a visionary experience where they ascended into the heavens where they had this encounter. These texts became a key resource in their adapting Greek theoria, the contemplation of the One, to Jewish thinking and practice. Jews aspired to an encounter that was more personal, i.e., face to face--not as a merging of one's identity into the Infinite Divine. Judaism is a personalistic monotheism in a way that Greek transcendental philosophy is not. The Greek schools were closer to Buddhism in this respect.
This personalism is abundantly evident in the overtly erotic language of the Song of Songs, which in an interesting way reverses the dynamic of ascent that we see in Plato's Phaedrus and Diotima's discourse in The Symposium. The Lover is not the human who ascends, but God who descends, who reaches out to his beloved. The initiative lies with God who seeks to bring us to him. In the Greek imagination, the One is just up there doing his thing without much interest in human beings. If humans are motivated to go and pay him a visit, that's fine, but their doing so is of no concern to him.
McGinn:
Building on the work of Gershom Scholem and Saul Lieberman, Joseph Dan argues that the rabbinic evidence suggests that [Rabbi] Akiva [who flourished in early 100s CE], the great hero of early Merkavah mysticism, was also the source for a new understanding of the Song of Songs based on three elements: (1) that the book was given to Israel on Mount Sinai; (2) that it is the holiest of all the biblical books; and (3) that its author was not Solomon but "the King who owns peace," that is, God himself. In other words, the book is a divine self-description, the kind that seems expanded upon in the unusual Merkavah text known as the Shi'ur Qomah. In Dan's words, "A new concept and meaning of the Song of Songs emerged in rabbinic academies and transformed esoteric homiletics [e.g., midrasnhic speculation on Ezekiel 1] into mystical activity.
...The early rabbinic commentaries on the Song make it quite clear that the Bride is to be identified with the people of Israel. This corporate and historical allegorical reading of the Song of Songs was influential on Origen, the first surviving Christian mystical commentator on the book, who knew the that the rabbis placed it among the four esoteric texts reserved for advanced students. (Foundations, p. 21)
We'll get to Origen in a future post, but first we need to spend some time with the great Jewish thinker, Philo of Alexandria, whom McGinn describes as the
"first figure in western history to wed the Greek contemplative ideal to the monotheistic faith of the Bible, a union since applauded by many but condemned by others, both Jews and Christians, as a form of miscegenation." (Foundations, p. 35)
Lest there be any question, I am not in the anti-miscegenation camp.
Philo was an older contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth, born around 20 BCE and died 50 CE. McGinn says that "Although his most avid readers were Christians insofar as he foreshadowed an exegetical method for joining biblical revelation and Greek philosophy in the service of a mystical Ideal. . . .His goal was to show that Judaism was the true religion and to draw out the inner meaning of the biblical narratives and ritual practices that formed the heart of Judaism" (Foundations, p. 36)
Let me start with this long excerpt from McGinn Chapter 3, "The Greek Contemplative Ideal" where he discusses Philo, and then we'll unpack it:
If the story of the Fall signifies the disordered soul which has forgotten its true nature as image of the Logos, the hidden message of the other books of the Pentateuch, especially the histories of the patriarchs and the story of Moses, presents a typology of those souls who have regained their true nature by following the path to mystic conemplation. Like Plato, Philo holds that ultimate bliss resides in the vision of God, or "knowledge of him who truly is. ...For the beginning and end of happiness is to be able to see God".
Thus Moses,"entering into the dark cloud, the invisible region, abides there while being initiated into the most holy mysteries." He becomes, however, not only an initiate, but also a hierophant and instructor of divine rites, which he will impart to those clean of ear.
The power that motivates the contemplative life leading to the vision of God is a divine eros, but Philo makes it clear that this love is not a native gift of the soul but is rather an inspiration by which God calls us upward to himself. Philo gives greater emphasis than Plato to the role of ecstasy "standing outside" [the self] in the upward path:
...escape also from your own self and stand outside from yourself, like persons possessed and corybants seized by Bacchic frenzy and carried away by some form of prophetic inspiration. For it is the mind that is filled with the Deity and no longer in itself, but is agitated and maddened by a heavenly passion drawn by the truly Existent and attracted upward to it. (Her. 70)
....the Jewish thinker holds that the soul is only a created image of the Logos, not a part of the Logos itself, to come to know one's inner self on the journey up to the Existent is to gain an awareness of the "absolute nothingness of created being". "And the man who has despaired of himself is beginning to know him that is." Divinization for Philo thus implies a self-naughting absent in much pagan mystical tradition, though we shall see an analogue in Plotinus.
Philo was the first to introduce into mystical literature the famous oxymoron of "sober intoxication" to describe the way in which the mind is taken out of itself in the upward way. "It longs for the intelligible, and on beholding in that realm beauties beyond measure the patterns and originals of the sensible things in the world below it is possessed by a sober intoxication . . . (Foundations, p. 39)
Philo makes no reference to the Song of Songs (probably because it wasn't written yet), and so his idea of union with God follows more the Greek pattern of ascent, but an ascent that foreshadows the Song of Songs insofar as it is in response to a Love that reaches out to the human soul from above. Like Plato, Philo holds that ultimate bliss resides in the vision of God, or "knowledge of him who truly is. ...For the beginning and end of happiness is to be able to see God" as Moses did:
Making Moses the ideal mystic, the divinized man, marks an important moment in the history of mystical traditions, for both Jews and Christians, if only because it links the generalized and often abstract subjective apophaticism [See Note 4] of the Hellenic tradition with the personal life story that could, at least in part, be imitated--the account in Exodus of how Moses ascended to meet God in the cloud and darkness that hung upon Sinai. (Foundations, p. 38)
Philo's importance rests on the merger he effected between this form of Greek contemplative piety, with its growing emphasis on the transcendence of the divine First principle, and his Jewish faith grounded in the Bible and in the practices and laws of his people. This reconciliation was achieved not only by seeking a deeper and more universal meaning in the scriptures, but also by transforming Platonic contemplation into a more personalistic mode. (Foundations, p. 36) (See Note 3)
So Philo approaches Greek philosophy from within the Wisdom tradition in Judaism that was already heavily influenced by Hellenism. But his most interesting contribution for the purposes of this Genealogy series was his placing Plato's transcendental Ideas, not in some vague transcendental dimension, but in the Mind of God. This is a critical move that will profoundly influence Christian Neoplatonism:
Philo's Logos doctrine has deep roots in Hellenistic Judaism's speculation about the figure of Sophia, or Wisdom, as well as in certain aspects of Middle Platonism, especially in the gradually emerging intradeical interpretation of Plato's world of Ideas (i.e., the teaching that the Ideas are to be found in the mind of God). Aristotle's criticism of Plato's theory of Ideas had shown how difficult it was to maintain a separate realm of Ideas as in some sense a cause of the world. One solution first explicitly found in Philo but almost certainly something he inherited from previous Middle Platonists, was to move the Ideas into God, to identify them with the Divine Mind that causes the universe. (Foundations, p. 37)
But again there is a personalist character here that for instance is not found later in Plotinus, whose concept of the Ideas is as impersonal principles in the first emanation from the One. The Logos for Philo is conceived not as an abstract principle, but as son of God and the face of God:
The existence of the inconceivable God can be known through analogy because he reveals himself in two ways, first, through the intelligible Universe, or elder son, that is his Logos, and second, and derivatively through the sensible universe as through a younger son. . . .The Logos is "the Idea of Ideas, the first begotten son of he Father, a "second god."
To his chief messenger and most venerable Logos, the Father who engendered the universe has granted the singular gift, to stand between and separate the creature from the Creator..."And I stood between the Lord and You" (Deut. 5.5 ) neither unbegotten as God, nor begotten as you, but midway between the two extremes, serving as a pledge for both.
...he [the Logos] is a "vivid and living hypostatization of an essential aspect of deity, the face of God turned toward creation," as David Winston puts it. As the manifestation of the hidden God, the Logos reveals the two essential aspects of God's relation to the world, the creative power and the ruling or conserving power. (Foundations, p. 37-38)
I don't suppose it's so obvious that it needn't be pointed out that there is a proto-trinitarian theme introduced here, one that is further developed in Kabbalism--the Ein Soph in its three aspects Keter, Chokhma, and Binah. This Genealogy series is not the place to get into this, but maybe some time in the future it would be interesting to become more deeply immersed in understanding the continuous cross-fertilization through the centuries between Christian and Jewish mysticism. I don't know a lot about it, but I do know enough to understand how rich a vein this would be to mine. And in a very significant way, at least in terms of speculative theology/philosophy, this cross-fertilization starts with Philo.
McGinn goes on:
The Logos is also central in the soul's return to God, both primordially and consequently. "For just as God is the Pattern of the Image [i.e., the Logos], which was just named Shadow, so does the Image become the pattern of others, as Moses makes clear at the beginning of the Law Code by saying, "And God made man after the iImage of God" (Gen 1:27); thus the Image had been modeled after God, but man after the Image . . ." (Legum allegoriae 3.96) (Foundations, p. 38)
This idea of humans being created in the image and likeness of God is articulated here in a way that will be central for defining the Christian spiritual itinerary. The human being in his fallen state knows not who he is until he rediscovers his deepest identity as created in the Image of God. This is key to both Jewish and Christian ideas about divinization.
But it's also key to what will become a Christian Neoplatonic participatory epistemology:
The Logos is immanent in all things but in a special way in the human mind. The presence of the Logos within the soul, that is, within the higher dimension of nous (Philo followed Plato in adhering to a tripartite understanding of the soul)...makes possible both knowledge of the existence of God and the return of the soul to God from its present fallen state. (Foundations, p. 38)
The world is intelligible because the underlying structure of the macrocosmos is the Logos, which also deeply structures the human Mind as microcosmos. Like knows like, but as the deep structure of the macrocosmos is mostly hidden from human awareness, so are the deep, inner capacities of the human mind hidden. To know the first requires the awakening of the latter, i.e. the awakening of the dormant 'nous'. [See Note 5] So I want to stress from the get go here that while there is a tendency to think of Platonism and Neoplatonism as having a rather static epistemology, that is, imo, a rather vulgar understanding of them. There is an inherent capacity within this transcendental framework for a continuously evolving process of learning and deepening of one's knowledge: as the mind wakes to its own unfathomable depths, so does it wake to the unfathomable depths of the cosmos. Depth calls unto depth.
But I think it is also critical to understand that the capacity for true participatory knowledge is a function of one's moral development and, as we'll see, of one's capacity for Love. The spiritual itinerary is not just to learn magical formulae and acquire cognitive superpowers, but to become the Self one was created to be. This is a moral project. The capacity for growth in real knowledge is a function of real moral development, if by moral development we mean becoming gradually transformed into the image in whose likeness we were created. The wisdom that follows from that is the only really important cognitive power that humans should care about. Whatever the range of one's cognition, one still needs wisdom to interpret and understand correctly what one cognizes.
So far, we've spent time with the two main streams that constituted the Western Axial Revolution. We turn in future posts to understand how these streams were adapted to and developed in light of the Christian revelation. I think it should be clear that I have no sympathy with efforts to try to isolate a pure Christianity from Greek or Jewish elements. I applaud miscegenation. Christianity at its best is small 'c' catholic. It must embrace the whole world with confidence in its capacity to find what is Good where there is truly good, and not be so fussy about its provenance as providing some criteria about what is truly Christian and what is not. This is not syncretism if it is done with arms spread wide in a broad, empathic, erotic embrace.
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Note 1: I'm not saying that all intercessionary prayer is wrong. A subject like this needs more nuanced discussion than I can give it here: clearly it is not wrong to pray for the deliverance from suffering for others or ourselves. Clearly Jesus made a point of delivering many from their suffering. But I would just say that Jesus's miracles were more than just his random administering supernatural medicine to the ailing, but rather infusions of liberating life that were proleptic of a life in which all will share in the coming kingdom, which was already taking root in the hearts of those who encountered and recognized him. The intecessionary prayer that is more deeply appropriate for us in almost all situations, then, is not something like "Cure my cancer," but "Thy kingdom come."
Note 2: Plato's Republic is an exercise in utopian thinking, even if it depicts a regime in which none of us would ever want to live.
Note 3: All the excerpts that follow are from Bernard McGinn, The Foundation of Mysticism: Origins to the the Fifth Century, 1991, Crossroad/Herder & Herder. I indicate locations in the text with the abbreviated (Foundations, p. xx.) I don't always include in the excerpt McGinn's references to primary sources. You can get the book and check those on your own.
Note 4: I don't want to get into the weeds about apophaticism now because we'll get into that in the future. But it's a key theme that creates a paradoxical tension between the idea of a theistic personal God who cares about humans and a God that is beyond all understanding.
Note 5: This is a theme I've talked quite a lot about, and is reflected in the quote from Max Scheler I posted the other day. It's also a theme that I relate to John Vervaeke's work as I discuss it in Parts 4A and 4B. Whether Scheler was aware of its similarity to Neoplatonic thinking I don't know.
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Ed. Note: This is part of an ongoing series entitled "A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity" that I first started posting in December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series.