Today’s Post

Having seen Teilhard’s unique insights into evolution and how it proceeds in the human person and his society, this week we will take a look at how these insights apply to the phenomenon of religion.

The Evolution of Religion

Teilhard’s approach to picturing evolution illustrates the evolutionary nature of belief.  Religion, like any other form of human activity, evolves.  Threads and streams of thinking branch off into new thinking, just as can be seen in the arms and branches of the biological tree of life.  However, as discussed last week, in human evolution these branches are not doomed to remain disconnected from each other.  As we have seen in the entwining of Greek and Jewish thinking which result in the new Christian stream, in human evolution each branch has the potential for reconnection.   In this particular mapping of modes of thought, we have also seen the double result of increased use of the neocortex brain:

Increase in the skill of using the left brain modes of understanding

Increase in the skill of thinking with the modes of both the left and right modes

The Evolutionary Perspective on the History of Religion

As we have seen here, an equally important measure of human evolution (in addition to the increasing skill of using the neocortex to modulate the stimuli of the ‘lower brains’) can be seen not only in the increase of right and left brain thinking but the use of them in balance.  For several thousand years, the religions of the world showed a preponderance of domination by right brain modes of thinking.  The skill of using the left brain increased more slowly, bursting into florescence with the flowering of Greek philosophy and science in about 500 BCE.

The convergence between Jewish thinking and Greek thinking in the new Christian religion in the early first century AD resulted in the first recorded synthesis between the two modes.   The right-brained thinking of the Jews began to be supplemented by that of Greek left brained thinking. We have followed Jonathan Sacks as he traced this thread through the evolution of language, thinking and the understanding of the increasing influence of the left hemisphere.

In the last post, we saw Teilhard’s observation that in the human, different branches of evolution are not doomed to the three options of continuing to evolve, stopping or dying, but are open to future convergence.  This observation is confirmed when we see the subsequent connection of the Hebrew right-brained modes of thought described above, and that of the Greek left-brained modes into the first human dual-brained mode of thinking, that of Christianity.

It should not be a surprise, then, that such a new connection of the two primary seats of consciousness would open the human person to a wider world of potential and thus result in the success which can be seen in Western civilization.  As Teihard remarks,

“The whole world is advancing through application of the thinking processes and ideas which took root in human enterprises as a result of this unprecedented turn of evolution”.

With the two hemispheres beginning to balance, the true potential of the human person increases from when one or the other was more influential.  Openness to the next step of human evolution becomes more assured.

The left brain influence in the new holy book of Christianity eventually resulted in the emergence of science in the seventeenth century.  That this rise of left-brained thinking, bolstered by the cohesiveness of society fostered by the Jewish right-brained precepts, should have continued into the flowering of Western science in the seventeenth century, therefore, should come as no surprise.

However, as Jonathan Sacks points out, conflict between this ‘new’ activity of the left brain and the traditional right-brained thinking as entrenched in institutionalized Western religion was eventually bound to happen.  The rise of empirical thinking slowly came in conflict with the old intuitive traditions marked by metaphors and myths.  Unfortunately, in his opinion, the emerging influence of left-brained empiricism ultimately opened the door to a materialism which denies right-brained humanistic values.  While resulting in a newer, stronger science, it also can be seen to attack the historical right-brain foundations of instinct, intuition and integration.

All 0f which leads us to the crossroad that we face today:  How can these two deeply rooted modes of thought be brought into better balance?

Teilhard addresses the need for balance between these two human modes of thought:

“To outward appearance, the modern world was born of an anti-religious movement: man becoming self-sufficient and reason supplanting belief.  Our generation and the two that preceded it have heard little but talk of the conflict between science and faith; indeed, it seemed at one moment a foregone conclusion that the former was destined to take the place of the latter.   But, as the tension is prolonged, the conflict visibly seems to be resolved in terms of an entirely different form of equilibrium- not in elimination, nor duality, but in synthesis.  After close on to two centuries of passionate struggles, neither science nor faith has succeeded in discrediting its adversary.  On the contrary, it becomes obvious that neither can develop normally without the other.  And the reason is simple: the same life animates both.”

 As can be seen in the social experiments of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and the Korean Kims, science and society without religion can become very anti-human, but as can be seen in the case of religious fundamentalism, religion without science can become, in its own way, antithetical to the human spirit.

The Next Post

If this blog is to address a secular approach to God, such a synthesis as proposed by Teilhard must address religion in its secular context.  Next time we will take one last look at the phenomenon of religion, and attempt to answer the question,” What is Religion?”

Today’s Post

This week we will continue to address religion in the context of evolution as understood by Teilhard, focusing on what’s unique about human evolution.

Modes of Human Evolution

So what happens in humans that constitutes continuing evolution?  As Ian Barber points out in last week’s post, culture, combined with the human activity of choosing begins to effect changes much faster than evolution at the genetic level (natural selection combined with chance).

As we postulated in the March 5 post, Looking at Evolution, Part 4: Evolution Through Human Neurology, it is probably not an oversimplification to trace the evolution of the human person in terms of developing the skill of using the neocortex brain (reason) to modulate the more primitive and instinctual stimuli of the limbic brain (emotions) and the reptilian brain (aggression).

But as we saw in the post of October 29, The Evolution of Religion, Part 5- The Neurological Perspective (which addressed the joining of Greek and Jewish thinking), evolution is also in play in the emergence of another skill, that of ‘left-brained’ thinking to objectively observe our surroundings and make secular sense of them.  As we saw, this was the beginning of the increasing skill of not only using the ‘right and left brain’ modes of thinking, but using them in balance.

For several thousand years, the religions of the world showed a preponderance of domination by right brain thinking.  The skill of using the left brain increased more slowly, bursting into florescence with the flowering of Greek philosophy and science in about 500 BCE.  With the later interconnection between Jewish thinking and Greek thinking in the new Christian religion in the early first century CE, from the standpoint of neurological evolution, the first attempt was made to supplement right brained thinking with that of the left brain.

Human Evolution Differs From Biological Evolution

Teilhard points out a third aspect of human evolution that is suggested in the last two posts: that of recombination of the branches.

As Teilhard notes, the first manifestation of each new wave of evolution is initially camouflaged by the appearances of the previous wave, such as the early cells more closely resembling (and responding to the laws of) the highly complex molecules from which they sprang.  In the same way it was difficult to distinguish early humans from the advanced animals which preceded them.  It was not until early man began to use the unique functions of his neocortex brain, and began to leave traces of his existence for paleontologists to uncover, that we begin to have evidence of humans as distinct from their predecessor.

Teilhard, however, notes a major difference between the process of evolution before and after the appearance of man.

Before:  In biological evolution, the ‘tree of life’ as drawn by biologists, anthropologists and paleontologists clearly shows a trunk with branches leading to a nearly endless array of living things whose ontology can be traced to the fork in the branch that separates them from other forms of life.  ‘Tree’ is a good analogy; as with very rare exceptions each limb ramifies into new limbs which stay separate from the parent, evolves on its own, and doesn’t reconnect with other limbs.

Branches of the tree of life ramify, in which the new limb can either continue to evolve, slow to a stop, or wither and die.  Whichever path is taken, it is done so in isolation.

After: Early in human history, these three options can also be seen to occur, but to a lesser degree.   As humans evolve, new aspects come into play, such as the increase of retention of learned behavior through oral traditions, then written documents, then deliberate education.  With each of these new human skills, communicated and supported through culture, the branches of the human evolution tree acquire more potential to re-engage after separation.

Often this is just the result of one civilization conquering another, in which the characteristics of each society influence another.  It can also be the rediscovery of lost lore at a later date through a third party, such as the West’s rediscovery of the great Greek thinkers through the documents preserved by the Arabs, or the discovery of an ancient civilization’s writings and beliefs through the results of archeology.  Many other methods open this door of confluence after florescence, such as intermarriage, international education, and most recently, the internet.

With the human, this is one of the ‘laws’ of evolution which changes.  Certainly the ‘tree of thought’, or the ‘tree of civilization’ can be mapped from early times to the present.  Most modes of thought, ideas, styles of society, governments and beliefs can be woven into a picture which shows precedents and antecedents, like the tree of life.

However, unlike the biological tree of life, each new branch, new idea, new way of thinking and writing, new social structure and style of government, are seldom completely new.  Ideas are borrowed from other cultures, styles of government.  While perhaps inherited, they still show the impact of separate styles.

The evolution of religion can be traced in such a way.

The Next Post

Given the perspective offered by Teilhard on the continuation of evolution through the human person and his society, next time we will apply this perspective to the unfolding of religion itself.

Today’s Post

Religion, as a reflection of man’s attempt to make sense of his surroundings and understand his potential, is one manifestation of the way the process of evolution unfolds in the human.  The unfolding of science and philosophy are others.  Today we will begin to take a final look at the evolution of religion in the context of Teilhard’s insights into the continuing evolution of the human person and his society.

The Continuation of Evolution in the Human

The central theme of this blog has been and continues to be the perspective on evolution as developed by Teilhard de Chardin.  This perspective not only connects the three major phases of evolution,

• physical, as seen in the evolution of matter to complex molecules
• biological, as seen in the many branches of the tree of life
• personal, as seen in the appearance of consciousness aware of itself

but, more important to the objectives of this blog, it provides a context for understanding the continuation of evolution as it proceeds through the human person and his society.

As we saw in the February 19 post, “Looking at Evolution, Part 3: Continuation of Evolution Through the Human Person”, there is a tendency to see the process of evolution as coming to a halt in the present day: that humans have “arrived”.  The process of evolution seems to have stopped, or slowed to a snail’s crawl, and it is difficult to detect any further substantial changes.  Indeed, viewing evolution from the perspective of biological “Natural Selection”, shows only the slightest rate of change in our physical make up.

As Teilhard points out, it’s much more probable that the process of evolution which got us here isn’t going to stop, but will instead continue.  This shouldn’t be a surprise: if you plot the continuous rise of complexity in the past, the continuing increase in the future is expected unless something drastically changes in the underlying process.  Therefore, we can expect the process of evolution to continue through the human person and the energies which unite him.

Ian Barber echoes Teilhard’s thinking in his book, “Religion and Science”, in which he recognizes both the continuation of evolution through the human person as well as the “change of state” that was addressed in the above referenced post:

“Today we can see that in the long history of the world, the emergence of humanity marks a genuinely new chapter- not one disconnected from previous chapters and yet one that involves factors not previously present.  Something radically different takes place when culture rather than the genes becomes the principal means by which the past is transmitted to the future and when conscious choice alters that future.”

If we see the evolutionary unfolding of entities and energy through Teilhard’s eyes, leading from more simple things to more complex things which have more capacity for interconnection, then we can extrapolate this continuation of evolution to ever more complex human persons and more conscious and skillful cooperation with the energies of human connection.

This ‘skillful cooperation” is the cornerstone of basic religion, one among the other skills that humans develop to continue to actualize their human potential: the skill of using the human brain to make sense of things and the acquired wisdom of doing so.

The Advent of the Human Person

So, what’s really different about the human person?  Considering the materialistic belief that “we are all molecules”, and the atheistic belief that “there’s nothing special about humans, they’re just a different form of animal”, what really changes (if indeed anything does) in the transition from ‘pre-human’ to ‘human”?  Are not animals conscious?  Are they not aware?  Do they not have feelings?  And if so, how can it be said that humans are different?

Teilhard observes that the single most important characteristic which separates humans from their non-human ancestors is their ‘redundant awareness’, which he refers to as ‘reflexive consciousness’.  In simpler terms, humans ‘know that they know’; they are aware of their awareness.

His use of the word ‘reflexive’ also carries a deeper meaning: the ‘rebounding’ effect that such consciousness has on the human person.  Knowledge of one’s knowledge contributes to personal growth, enhancing capacity for relationship, which enhances knowledge.  “The knowledge of knowledge builds knowledge”.  This iterative process can best be understood as a ‘spiral’ in the maturity of human persons in which each loop leads towards increased consciousness (a measure of increased complexity), and adds to the potential for the next loop of the spiral.

So, given the fact that evolution continues in the human person, how does religion come into play?

The Next Post

Next time we will continue our examination of religion through Teilhard’s perspective of evolution.

Today’s Post

Last week we addressed the issues which arise when translating from a language rooted in one brain hemisphere to one rooted in the opposite.  Jonathan Sacks suggests that these issues arise from the influence of the thinking that goes into the translation.  Today we will continue to follow Sacks as he identifies some of the differences between the Greek and Jewish concepts found in the confluence of thought which resulted in the new religion of Christianity.

Contrasting the Concepts

As Sacks points out, a simple observation on this unprecedented new religion is that “Christianity got its religion from the Hebrews and its rationale from the Greeks”.

The Christian New Testament consists of the Jewish teachings of Jesus as translated into the Greek language, under the Hellenic influences of Paul.  As the new church grew, and continued to be explained and interpreted by early Christian ‘Fathers’, such as Irenaeus and ‘Doctors’, such as Augustine and Aquinas, the influence of Greek thinking continued to increase.

As Christian theology began to develop, much of the thinking of the great Greek sages, particularly Aristotle and Plato following their rediscovery by way of the Arabs, came into play as the original sacred books were interpreted according to the Greek masters.

Sacks sees many strands of Greek left-brained thinking in the development of Christian theology which contrast with the way the right-brained way that the Jews read the Hebrew bible:

Universality: Jews combine the universality of God with the particularity of the ways that we relate to God.  Christians, however, stress that Christ came for all but have historically denied any other route to salvation.  Sacks sees in this the legacy of Plato who devalued particulars in favor of the universal form of things.

Dualism: Much more so than Judaism, Christianity divides: body/soul, physical/spiritual, heaven/earth, this life/next life, evil/good, with the emphasis on the second of each.  Sacks sees the entire set of contrasts as massively Greek, with much debt to Plato.  He sees these either/or dichotomies as a departure from the typically Jewish perspective of either/and.

The tragic view of the human condition: Jews do not believe that we are destined to sin.  Sacks sees this belief as leading to the concept of ‘inherited sin’, which is unique to Christianity.  Unlike Christianity, the concept of ‘existential deliverance from the grip of sin’ does not exist in Judaism.

Separation of ‘faith and works’:  Jews believe that faithfulness is a matter of how you behave, not what you believe.  Jews, according to Sacks, see faith and works as part of a single continuum and have equal weight.  Sacks sees the Greek influence of fate, and the futility of fighting against it, leading to the Christian primacy of acceptance over resistance, the characteristic stance of the Hebrew prophets.

God’s nature: the Greek translation of God’s identification to Moses is, “I am who am”.

• The Christian understanding is that God is “Being itself, timeless, immutable, incorporeal, and understood as the subsisting act of all existing”.
• Augustine interprets the statement ontologically. He sees God as “that which does not and cannot change”.
• Aquinas sees God as “true being, that is eternal, immutable, simple, self-sufficient and the cause and principal of every creature”.

Sacks see these interpretations as the “God of Aristotle, not Abraham and the prophets”.  The Jewish translation of God’s identification to Moses is, “I will be where or how I will be”, adding a ‘future tense’ omitted in the Greek translation.

God’s Relationship with Man:  Far from being timeless and immutable, Sacks sees the Jewish understanding of God in the Hebrew bible as active, engaged, in constant dialogue with his people.

Sacks sees Aquinas’ God of ‘pure being’ as being so remote- the legacy of Plato and Aristotle- that the distance is bridged in Christianity by a figure that has no part in Judaism, the ‘Son of God’, a person who is both human and divine.

Sacks understands Judaism as seeing all human persons as both human and divine, and sees its contrast to Christianity as an issue of ‘immanence’.

Sacks also sees the influence of Greek thinking in the writings of the ‘Doctors’ of the Church, such as Augustine and Aquinas, many years later, such as:

• The philosophical proofs for the existence of God, derived ultimately from Plato and Aristotle
• The concepts of ‘Natural Law’, derived from the Greek Stoics.
• The idea that ‘purposes are inherent in creation’, that nature is ‘teleological’, derived from Aristotle

So, according to Sacks, in Christianity we see an unprecedented merging of the right-brained teachings of Jesus with the left-handed rationality of the Greeks.  However, as Sacks observes, this merging was not accomplished without contradictions between the essentially Jewish tone of the gospels (the base of religion) and the Greek influences (the base of reason) on the theology which continued to evolve from it.

Sacks nonetheless sees Christianity as a “wondrous creation, a monumental step toward relating to reality with the ‘whole brain’ “:

 “Christianity combined left-hand brain rationality with right-brain spirituality in a single, glorious overarching structure.”

While identifying areas of what he sees as right-left brain imbalance in Christianity, Sacks does not address the potential of this ‘wondrous creation’.  With its resonance in both right and left modes of human thinking, Christianity carries within itself the potential for continuing to respond to the human need for actualizing its potential.   We will explore this in the third section of the blog as we look at the potential of reinterpreting the legacy beliefs of Christianity in the light of Teilhard’s insights into evolution.

The Next Post

Having looked at religion from the perspectives of history, modes of Western thinking, neurology and Christianity,  the next three posts will begin a look at the evolution of religion from the last perspective, that of evolution itself.

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the evolution of language was either precipitated by or led to increased use of the left brain hemisphere to make sense of things differently in Athens than in Jerusalem.

These two major modes of thought can be seen to re-merge in many ways with the advent of Christianity.  As Sacks points out, a simple observation on this unprecedented new religion is that “Christianity got its religion from the Hebrews and its rationale from the Greeks”.  Today we will begin to address this confluence by addressing the issue of language.

Why Greek?

The gospels, the stories of the life and teachings of Jesus, never appeared in the Jewish dialect, Aramaic,  that Jesus spoke.  They first appear in Greek, so would not have been understandable to Jesus.  Sacks considers this to be very important in understanding the unprecedented dual foundations of Christianity:

“Jesus spoke Aramaic and Hebrew, but every book of the New Testament was written in Greek.  Jesus wouldn’t have been able to read the New Testament”, therefore, “We have here a unique phenomenon in the history of religion: a religion whose sacred texts are written in what to its founder would have been a foreign and largely unintelligible language.”

Sacks sees the key influence here as Paul, who was not only Greek educated, but had the objective of carrying the message of the gospel to the Gentiles.  He saw Greek scriptures as more suited for dissemination into a wider non-Jewish, Greek-educated culture.

The story of how Paul succeeded in pursuing his objective is told in the Epistles of the New Testament.  These ‘epistles’ tell of the struggle with James and Peter, who considered the followers of Jesus to be a new Jewish sect.  Had Peter and John succeeded in this struggle, the Gospels would probably had been first documented in Jewish or Aramic.

As Sacks sees, using Greek translations of the gospels, Paul

“..found a ready audience among the Hellenistic Gentiles of the Mediterranean, especially those who had already shown an interest in elements of Jewish practice and faith.  It was the Greek- not the Hebrew/Aramaic speaking population that proved to be the fertile soil in which Christianity took root and grew”

The Issues of Translation

The resulting action of translating the Gospels into Greek thus reflected Paul’s goal of making them available to the world at large, but not without issues. As James Barr, Christian Biblical scholar (Biblical Faith and Natural Theology), remarks on the Bible in Greek:

“The attempt, at one time popular and influential, to argue that though the words might be Greek, the thought processes were fundamentally Hebraic, was a conspicuous failure.”

Sacks explains why:

“Had the languages in question been closely related, part of the same linguistic family, this might have been of little consequence.  But first-century Greek and Hebrew were not just different languages.  They represented antithetical civilizations, unlike in their most basic understanding of reality.”

Sacks agrees with Barr that you can’t translate a right-hand text to a left-handed one without changing some of the meaning.  The resulting translation will be different in small, but important, ways.  As we saw in an earlier post, many of the wonderful concepts developed by the Greeks have no counterpart in Jewish thinking, and vice versa; their different understandings of reality are, as we saw earlier, orthogonal.

The results are not necessarily contradictory, but effect new understandings of the original Aramaic gospels, and ultimately of the whole of the ‘Old’ Testament (also translated into Greek), due to the influence of the left brain as it reads the texts originated in the right brain.

The Next Post

Many issues arise in the translation from a left-handed language to one oriented on the right.  The larger issues arise from the coupling of Jesus’ Jewish right-brained thinking, to Paul’s left-brained, Greek thinking, and eventually to that of the ‘Fathers of the Church’ who followed him.  We will address this unfolding of thinking in the next post.

Today’s Post

In the last few weeks, we have followed Jonathan Sacks’ insights on the emergence of Greek thinking from Mid-East thinking via an evolution in the way written ideas were expressed, particularly in the evolution of the alphabet.  The alphabet, in its evolution from a right-to-left orientation to one oriented in left-to-right form opened a new mode of human thinking.  Further, the Greek introduction of verbs into their language rendered the text less ambiguous and more suited for expressing empirical thought.

Last week we followed Sacks into his insight of how these two changes influenced Greek thinking in ways that resulted in their radically new ideas of philosophy and science.

Today we will take a brief look at the way the human brain is understood to function to expand Sacks’ insights of the two distinct cognitive styles which emerged in the period in which the near- East language evolved from the Sinaitic  to that of the Greek.

The Two Brain Hemispheres

Over the past hundred and fifty years, since Pierre Paul Broca discovered that the language-processing skills were located in the left hemisphere of the brain, neuroscientists have explored the marked difference between the way information is processed in the two hemispheres.  Sacks lists a few of these:

   Left Brained Functions

• Thinking linearly, analytically, atomistically and mechanically
• Breaking things into component parts, and treating them sequentially
• Focusing on details
• Emphasizing objective observation
• Dealing with information empirically and objectively

   Right Brain Functions

• Thinking integratively and holistically
• Considering things in a context of the higher organization in which the thing is a part
• Focusing on the ‘big picture’
• Emphasizing empathy, meaning and emotion
• Treating information intuitively, instinctively, with ambiguity and metaphor

Sacks relates the two modes of human understanding, typified by the actions of the two hemispheres of the brain, to the manipulation of the alphabet:

“A language with vowels, where the words can be understood (unambiguously) one by one, can be processed by the linear, sequential left brain.  We read these languages from left to right, moving our head to the right, thus engaging the left brain.”

Languages without vowels (where words are more ambiguous) make demands on the context-understanding, integrative functions of the right brain, so we read them from right to left, moving our head leftwards and engaging the right brain”

So, the two hemispheres are thought to function in different ways.

• One is the ability to break things down into their constituent parts and see how they mesh and interact.
• The other is the ability to join things together so that they make sense as a whole. Sacks sees this ability as the one necessary to join people together so that they form relationships.

Sacks warns of over-emphasizing the distinctions.  He suggests ‘right’ and ‘left’ not be thought of as ‘precise neuroscientific descriptions’ of brain activity, but rather as ‘metaphors for different modes of the brain’s engagement with the world.’  He also sees a balance between the two types of activity as necessary for us tto be able to ‘think with our whole brain’.

From ‘Right’ to ‘Left’ Brained Thinking

The ideas of most of the thinkers of the Axial Age (September 17 – The Evolution of Religion, Part 2- The ‘Axial Age’), in general, represented ‘right brain’ thinking.  They took a less empirical approach to thinking about the universe and the place of the human person in it, and more about an intuition of how these relationships must take place for “enhancement of their humanity”.  The great body of thinking which began to lean in the direction of the ‘left brain’ was, as Sacks sees, that which emerged in Greece in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries, BCE.

Therefore, Third century Greek and Hebrew were not just different languages with different alphabets.  At the thinking level, they represented orthogonal civilizations, unlike in their most basic understanding of reality.  Greek philosophy and science- the Greece of Tales and Democritus, Plato and Aristotle- was a predominantly left-brain culture; the Israel of the prophets a right-brain one.  At precisely the time Greek came to be written left-to-right and Athens evolved to a literate from an oral culture, it became the birthplace of science and philosophy, the two supremely left-brain, conceptual and analytical ways of thinking.

Greece, at the time the alphabet was changing from right-left to left-right, was becoming the world’s first, and to Sacks, its greatest, left-brain civilization.  It was not only left-brained.  As Sacks sees it, “There was greatness, too, in the more right-brain fields of art, architecture and drama”.  But, as we shall see in the next post, the later attempt to reconnect this great mode of thinking with its right-handed predecessor was to have significant impact on the evolution of Western thought.

The Next Post

Having seen the evolution of language which led to the two great cognitive processes found in Greece and Jerusalem, as a rise in the skill of applying left-brained thinking to the seeking of answers to the mystery of life, we can now take a look at their confluence in a third great expression of belief, that of Christianity.

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.

 Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the Axial Age ushered in a new, much more personal approach to understanding the human person and his place in the scheme of things.  The goal of religion had begun to move from propitiation of the gods and influence over nature.  It also had begun to move from a means of insuring stability in society to understanding the person, his potential for growth and his relationships with other persons.

As Karen Armstrong observes, there were many streams of thinking which developed during this brief period of time, concluding that,

 “The fact that they all came up with such profoundly similar solutions by so many different routes suggests that they had indeed discovered something important about the way human beings worked”.

Two of these streams would weave their ways into a common expression which would prove to be a major influence on the human perception of self, the understanding of human relationships and a rebound in the evolution of society.  Today’s post will begin a brief look at this weaving.

The Contribution of the Alphabet

Jonathon Sacks, in his book, The Great Partnership, Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning, sees the path of this weaving as well mapped by the development of the alphabet.

He sees the emergence of Greek thinking as rooted in the evolution from the historic near-Eastern cultures (Hebrew, Canaanite and Phoenician) to the thinking which emerged in Greece between the seventh and fifth centuries BCE.  He credits the major factor in this evolution as the birth and evolution of the alphabet which occurred during this same brief period.

Writing was invented originally in Mesopotamia more than 5000 years ago.  As Sacks sees it,

“The birth of writing was the birth of civilization, because it enabled the growth of knowledge to become cumulative.  Writing enables more information to be handed on from one generation to the next than can be encompassed in a single memory.”

Writing seems to have been invented independently seven times: Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Indus Valley script, the Minoan script known as ‘linear B’, Chinese ideograms and Mayan/Aztecan pictograms.  Writing first appeared in the form of pictograms, simple drawings of what the symbols represented. They evolved into ideograms, which were more abstract, then as syllables as people began to realize that words were not just names for things but also sounds.  The sheer number of symbols in these early forms prevented their wide spread, however, with 900 in cuneiform and 700 in hieroglyphics, for example, and restricted their use to the elite.

In the near-Eastern cultures (Hebrew, Canaanite and Phoenician), about 1800 BCE, the ideographic representation of ideas began to be replaced by the ‘alphabet’, in which the symbol set was reduced to a small enough number to be able to be understood by anyone.

The alphabet seems to have been invented only once.  The first alphabet seems to be the ‘proto-Sinaitic’ more than a thousand years BCE, and was used by the Hebrews, Canaanities and Phoenicians.  It was imported by the Phoenicians to the Greeks about 900 BCE, and became the basis for the Hebrew alphabet.

The Greek Alphabetic Evolution

The first four letters of the Greek alphabet are alpha, beta, gamma and delta, showing its evolution from the Hebrew aleph, bet, gimmel and dalet.  In the move to Greek, over time the Greek alphabet acquired vowels (not found in Hebrew), and evolved in its order of words:

• from the Hebrew order of writing from right-to-left
• through an intermediate order of right-to-left-and-back-again
• finally to left-to-right.

By the fifth century BCE it seems to have completed this evolution.

The inclusion of vowels was an important addition, in that it reflected a change in the way that the language was interpreted:

• Languages without vowels (right-to-left, as in Hebrew) require a greater understanding of the context of each word, and through this ambiguity offer the possibility of many meanings to the written statement.
• Those with vowels (left-to-right, as in Greek, Latin and English) are less ambiguous, and contain their own meaning.

Therefore, as Sacks points out, the significance of this evolution doesn’t lie in the simple physical act of the two different methods, but in the two different mental activities which are paramount in the two types of languages:

• serial mental processing in the vowelled languages
• holistic understanding in the vowell-less languages.

Saks places great importance on this shifted manner of thinking which resulted from the migration of the order of writing and the inclusion of vowels.  He cites the belief of Walter Ong, that “Writing restructures consciousness”, indicating that this shift of writing order either resulted from or precipitated the way that humans made sense of themselves and their environment.  This shift was to open new vistas for thinking, as we shall see.

The Next Post

As we shall see in a later post, this difference in approach to thinking is the result of the activities of the right and left hemispheres of the brain, but in the next post we will take a look at the unprecedented thinking that arose in the Greek culture as a result of this shift.

Today’s Post

Today’s post will continue to address the evolution of religion from the historical perspective, as it evolves from laws defining the behavior necessary for order in society to a focus on the human person, his potential and his relationships.

The Axial Age

Karen Armstrong’s study of the birth of the major religious traditions, “The Great Transformation”, addressed the ‘Axial Age’ (900-200 BCE), which she sees as “..one of the most seminal periods of intellectual, psychological, philosophical and religious change in recorded history”.  During this period, expressions of belief came to be expressed in terms that were equally applicable to both the common person and the elite.  They not only addressed those concepts which held society together, but also addressed both the nature of the individual himself as well as his potential for ‘fuller being’.   The integrated ideas of ‘person’ and ‘love’ began to emerge.

The Axial age saw the rise of many approaches to the understanding of the reality in which we live:

• Confucianism and Daoism in China
• Hinduism and Buddhism in India
• Monotheism in Israel
• Philosophical rationalism in Greece.

In this relatively brief span of time, six profound lines of thought emerged in four parts of the world.  This was the period which saw such Axial sages as the Buddah, Socrates, Confucious and Jeremiah, the mystics of the Upanishads and Mencius and Euripides.  Armstrong sees these great thinkers as those whose insights are still relevant because “they show us what a human being should be.”

She also saw the birth and articulation of basic and universal beliefs during this period, such as:

• The supreme importance of charity and benevolence
• Reluctance to be dogmatic about a transcendence that was essentially undefinable
• Recognition that the transformative effect of ritual was far more important than manipulation of the gods
• Belief that egotism is largely responsible for human violence
• A movement from sacrifice to a focus on the essential and eternal core of the human person, that which made him or her unique
• The further belief that this essential core was of the same nature as the ultimate principle that sustained and gave life to the entire cosmos. “This was a discovery of immense importance and it would become a central insight in every major religious tradition.”
• The further belief that this ultimate principle was an immanent presence in every single human being

She saw that during this formative era:

“…they (the Axial sages) all concluded that if people made a disciplined effort to re-educate themselves, they would experience an enhancement of their humanity.  In one way or the other, their programs were designed to eradicate the egotism that is largely responsible for our violence and to promote the empathic spirituality of the Golden Rule.”

“For the first time, human beings were systematically making themselves aware of the deeper layers of human consciousness.  By disciplined introspection, the sages of the Axial Age were awakening to the vast reaches of selfhood that lay beneath the surface of their minds.  They were becoming fully “self-conscious” “

“When warfare and terror are rife in a society, this affects everything that people do.  The hatred and horror of war infiltrates their dreams, relationships, desires and ambitions.  The Axial sages saw this happening to their own contemporaries and devised an education rooted in the deeper, less conscious levels of the self to help them overcome this.  The fact that they all came up with such profoundly similar solutions by so many different routes suggests that they had indeed discovered something important about the way human beings worked”.

The axial age introduced the concept that there were modes of human behavior which could lead to the fuller being of the individual person at the same time that his relationships were strengthened; even that the deepening of these relationships were key to such fuller being.  Armstrong sees this as the basic nature of morality.  Teilhard terms it the ‘articulation of the noosphere.”

The Next Post

While the Axial Age may have laid the foundation for the major expressions of belief, the transition to contemporary Western religious thinking would take two more major turns.  The next post will begin to explore the first of these: the evolution of Greek thinking from Near Eastern modes to that which was to be the foundation of Western philosophy and science.