Today’s Post

In the last post, we followed Jonathan Sacks in his mapping of the alphabet from the near-East cultures (Hebrew, Canaanite and Phoenician).  He traces the shift of their use of the alphabet and their modes of thinking to that which emerged in Greece about 500 BCE.

Today we will continue to follow Sacks into the new modes of thought which emerged in Greece as a result of this evolution.

The Rise of Greek Thinking…

Sacks sees the change in perspective which arose from the shift in order of the alphabet as giving rise to the unique thinking that appeared in Greece during this same time frame.  He observes that Greeks were the first to think systematically and objectively about nature, matter, substance, the ‘element and principle of things’, and the relationship between what changes and what stays the same.  He enumerates examples of the beginnings of western thought:

• Thales in the sixth century BCE, who, in seeing water as the fundamental element, gave birth to the scientific way of thinking
• Anaximander, Thales’ pupil, who understood all things as deriving from, and ultimately returning to, ‘the boundless’
• Heraclitus, whose understanding of the constant state of flux in nature contradicted the conventional belief that nature was ‘fixed’
• Pythagoras, who was the first to see the universe as reflecting mathematical harmony
• Parmenides, whose vision of reality as eternal led to the belief that the changes that we sense are unreal and superficial
• Democritus, who first understood that everything is composed of elementary particles that he called atoms

This same era (4th and 5th centuries BCE) also saw the birth of philosophy, with the ‘great triumvirate’ of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.  Plato in particular left his mark for future thinkers in his preference for the universal over the particular, the timeless over the time-bound, the abstract over the concrete, and the impersonal over the personal.  As we shall see in a later post, these perspectives were to hold great weight in the evolution of religious thinking.

As Saks sees it:

“It is impossible to overstate the significance of all this for the development of Western civilization.  We owe virtually all our abstract concepts to the Greeks.”

… From the Hebrew

Such basic Greek concepts have no counterpart in the Jewish thinking as represented in the Hebrew bible, which preceded this shift.  As the bible was written in the Hebrew manner of right-to-left, without vowels,  it represented a completely different mode of thinking from the Greeks.  Sacks lists some examples:

• The Hebrew creation narrative contains no theoretical discussion of the basic elements of the universe.
• There is not just one account of creation at the beginning of Genesis, but two, side by side; one from the point of view of the cosmos, the other from a human perspective. This is seen as an example of how Hebrew thinking as found in the Bible does not operate on the principles of Aristotelian logic with its ‘either/or’ and ‘true/false dichotomies. It sees the development of multiple, ‘open-ended’ perspectives as essential to understanding the human condition.
• As a result of the shift, the more inclusive Hebrew ‘either/and’ set of possible choices is replaced by the Greek ‘either/or’ hard choice. Inclusion is replaced by exclusion.
• The story of the birth of the Israel monarchy contains no discussion (such as found in Plato and Aristotle) of the relative merits of monarchy as opposed to aristocracy or democracy. This story is more a series of portraits of the people involved (Solomon, Saul, David) than an analysis of their actions with conclusions to be drawn.

Sacks points out that when the Hebrew bible wants to explain something, it tells a story.  Entire subjects are dealt with from multiple perspectives, at a level of subtlety and ambiguity closer to great literature than either philosophy or political science.  Hard stands are seldom taken, as can be seen in the story of Job in which several perspectives are offered as to the existence, nature and source of evil, but none are proposed as ‘correct’.

The biblical scholar, Bart Ehrman, in his book, God’s Problem, sees this ambiguity as a failure of Jewish scripture, and cites it as a factor in his own ‘loss of faith’.  In doing so, Ehrman reflects the Greek either/or influence in Western thinking, while Sacks sees merely the Jewish either/and approach to addressing a difficult subject.  On the whole, the Jewish bible offers more ‘either/and’ conclusions than ‘either/or’ ones.

Saks points out that Greece and ancient Israel were the first two cultures to make the break with myth, but that they did so in different ways: The Greeks by philosophy and reason and the Jews by monotheism and revelation.  As we shall see, these two different approaches were eventually to ‘remerge’ with significant consequences for Western thought.

The Next Post

The next post will take another approach to the evolution of religion, and that is from the perspective of neurology: how the Hebrew-Greek transition can be seen from the neurological understanding of the bicameral brain, how the brain works in the ‘left’ and ‘right’ hemispheres, and how this affects the evolution of religion.