One more thesis that might deserve being tested is that the Christians–at least originally–were themselves tribalistic in their charity: Christians helped other Christians, their fellow brothers in Christ, but as Christianity spread through society, that came to approximate more and more closely charity to the general population.
We see hints of this attitude all over the earliest sources:
John 13:35; Acts 2:44-45. And Paul’s collection was for the benefit of not the poor in general but the Christians in Jerusalem (1 cor. 16:1).
When we read in James 2:15-17 that we are to do good to our “brothers”, does that mean all men, or our brothers in Christ; the “saints”; one’s fellow believers? (See Rom. 14:15, 21; Rom 16:23; 1 cor 5:11; 1 Cor. 1:-6; and many others).
Yeah, I’ll admit my heart sank a little bit when I first heard the subject of Prof Ehrman’s new book. Not that there isn’t a good bit to be said about how the succss of the Church changed the classical world. But one of the very few things that can really set me off is the tendency on the part of the pious to take credit for all good things. Not that I expect Ehrman to take a simplistic course certainly (I suspect he will spend some time on how modern Christians don’t really apply Jesus’ actual ethics) but I have heard so many false claims over the years about how Christianity “saved” civilization.
There’s an old adage-
First the Church opposes it.
Then they tolerate it.
Then they take credit for it.
Cynical perhaps but there is more than a smidgeon of truth there. A few years after I moved to DC I attended a lecture/book signing at a local bookstore (back when such things existed) featuring an author/commentator who was quite well known on the political TV talk shows and a regular contributor to the Post editorial page. (For some reason I am totally blanking on his name.) He had a reputation as a “liberal” Catholic and had written a book about the influence of relgion on the civil rights movemeent. I was content to be an observer until he came out with the statement that the Abolutionist movememt and by extension the Civil Rights movement were the strongest “faith-based” social movements in history. Meaning of course that Christianity was responsible for them both.
I honor the people of faith who have contributed to civil rights. And I acknowledge the central role the Church had and has in the Black community. But, really? With just as many Southern ministers defending slavery by recourse to the Bible? They’ve been carefully excised from the record. I pointed this out during the Q&A period. I also pointed out that a perfectly reasonable intepretation of Paul’s letter to Philemon is that he’s asking Philemon to give Onesimus to him as his slave? I asked why it took the Church 1700 years to figure out that slavery was immoral? And pointed out that both abolition and civil rights were post-Enlightenment phenomena. And I challenged him to produce examples of such when the Church really was in charge. Well he dismissed my questions with a curt “Martin Luther King!” As if that settled everything.
Sooo…I will be very much interested in Ehrman’s anlysis of the linitations of the classical world, but I am even more interested in how he thinks Christianity really changed things.
Interesting. Why do you think that is? Is it because as you may intend to imply later that ethics was largely a casual exercise for the wealthy elite?
That is a really interesting question, that could birth a really interesting article or two.
Depending on what you mean, that might well, be part of it. If you have to motivate people to take ethics seriously, as a pagan philosopher would, emphasizing the eudaimonistic side of your ethical theory will be natural–people care about being happy–, unlike in a Judeo-Christian context, where you can literally just start by pointing to divine commandments that your audience already knows they are bound to fulfill.
If I were pressed to hazard a guess, I’d be tempted to locate the difference ultimately in the legalistic framework in which Jewish ethics was done. The Jews (and the Christians) started with an actual, written, divine law that they had then to interpret and live. There is something inherently legalistic about the exercise. I think that context of doing ethics lends itself to the sort of formulations we have in mind.
Pagans weren’t working in that context, with a law, authoritatively formulated as specific commands issued in human language. Things were a lot vaguer. True, long before the NT, the Stoics had a robust theory of “natural law” as the foundation of their ethics, but that was not a written law with specific formulations.
Similarly, Aristotle had a concept of legal justice, which was a “general virtue” in that it commanded the acts of all the other virtues and encompassed all facets of the moral life: so the whole moral life did take on a legal character for him. But again, his discussion of this particular virtue takes place at a pretty high level, and his ethical language isn’t usually legalistic. When he gets into details, his normal manner of speech is simply to describe the behavior and character of the man who has some relevant virtue–and even that discussion tends to take place in a pretty vague way that doesn’t attempt to fill in the details but leaves them to prudence to work out.
Your prompt about hell is also provocative; I’ll have to answer it later.
I do very strangely admire one aspect of this belief. It can place a great deal of emphasis on personal identity and the importance of our actions. . . . I suspect the Christian belief in heaven and hell did contribute to the importance of personhood and ethics in society. And I think this was, at least in part, a good thing or at least an important part of our current modern view of personhood.
That the doctrine of heaven and hell placed a heavy emphasis on the significance of our actions is, I think, indisputable. But I think there is a flip side of this.
First, it risks making ethics self-serving and undermining the very concept of self-sacrificial charity in the first place. If the ultimate reason for being moral is hope in your own eternal happiness, is any charitable action ever actually done out of genuine love of neighbor? And yet, that selfless love is what is required to attain heaven and avoid hell. It is an old paradox, and it leads directly to the Christian doctrine of grace–no, you can’t actually love as required unless God gives you the grace to; without God’s grace you will always be acting out of self-interest, thus meriting condemnation. So it is sort of a poison pill.
Second, I think that the doctrine of hell tends to lead to an unsustainable legalism. If you think individual choices can merit eternal punishment, then it becomes natural, even pressing, to specify precisely where those lines fall. Even if you aren’t trying to do the bare minimum, it is a matter of eternal consequence, so knowing precisely the minimum you need to do to avoid damnation is important. If I give you a target to hit, and tell you that if you miss the bullseye by a lot, you will spend eternity in unimaginable pain, even if you are trying to hit the bullseye, it is still natural for you to want to know just how far from the bullseye counts as “missing by a lot”. Taking that route–which tended to be the Western way in Catholicism–leads to all the caricatures of Jesuit legalism: What is the last moment you can walk into mass and still fulfill your Sunday obligation? Precisely how much money can you steal without it being a mortal sin?
There is also the Eastern route, which very deliberately avoids thinking in such black-and-white terms; they avoid distinguishing sins into mortal and venial. They tend to think more in terms of an ideal that no one will live up to fully; some will miss it in big ways, and others will miss it in smaller ways, but we all need to try to live it. That seems a lot more human. But it seems there, DBH’s universalism is the natural outcome: if sin is a matter of degrees (a true continuum of how far we missed the mark), holding that some sins, but not others, merit eternal punishment ultimately makes no sense.
As to whether it contributed to the notion of personhood. I don’t know. Both the afterlife and the trinity did lead to a lot of metaphysical discussion about what it means to be a person, but the results aren’t always what we might expect, e.g., Aquinas denies that the separated soul (that is, the soul as it survives death) is a person.
If we are considering the ethical implications of our metaphysics of personhood, I think the Buddhist idea of no-self has a lot to recommend it. What better way to induce people to act selflessly than to convince them the self is an illusion? What better way to have them love their neighbors than to convince them they really are their neighbors? That said, I don’t like letting the ethical tail wag the metaphysical dog.
Growing up I heard my share of hellfire & brimstone sermons. Alas, as an apologetic strategy, fear works all too well. Like you Robert this never made sense to me. Eternal Conscious Torment isnt punishment. Its sadism. Torture. But the problem with Universalism is that if in the end all will be saved whats the point of all this suffering? Why not make an end of it, be done with it?
I think there is a fundamental difference between the classical pagan attempt to define right action and the just society, and the Jewish apocalyptic goal of salvation from the destruction of the demonic world system. In my view the latter is vastly inferior, not only to pagan ethics, but to the Jewish wisdom and prophetic traditions.
I’m not sure if I’m driving wide of the topic, but the thread seem to have died out, so I’ll risk it.
I said above that Christian art is the one thing that still keeps its hold on me. I was reading something today that occasioned my expanding that thought: Christianity is incarnational. The material world matters. Things have meaning and even power.
I was a pretty conservative Catholic, so some, many, of my examples won’t be universal to the Christian experience; but I think you get some of this in all liturgically and theologically conservative versions of Christianity.
Things (e.g., relics and holy images and sacred vessels), space (consider pilgrimages and shrines), time (seen in the liturgical calendar, which gives meanings to the cycle of seasons), motions and rituals and muttering (or just hearing) the words–even without understanding them, genuflections, signs of the cross, they all matter. Even the very physical act of singing; Augustine, “he who sings prays twice.”
And of course the entire system of sacraments rests on this thinking–a visible sign of an invisible grace that effects the very thing it signifies: It really does matter whether the matter used and words actually articulated were correct.
It is, at root, magic thinking; inanimate, physical things have invisible spiritual power. And there are apologists who make that point; they hold that we are embodied minds, rational animals, and that it is good, even necessary, for an adequately human religion to answer to that. That need is what led more primitive religions to develop similar magical thinking–with sacred groves and holy springs and such.
Its antecedent isn’t just pagan: There is a lot of this in observant Judaism.
As in magic thinking there is a tension with the rational. There was always a certain discomfort when you started asking too pointedly what the effects are. Is there really a difference between praying on a blessed rosary and on an unblessed rosary? If there is benefit to each worthy communion, why is the frequency of communion limited by canon law to two times a day (aside from danger of death)? If every mass has an infinite value, so that repeating it is always worthwhile, why does the Church only allow trination one day a year? And if putting salt in a baby’s mouth does something, why was it removed in the new baptismal rite?
But on the other hand, it was justified theologically by the incarnation: The Logos took on flesh. And then he left himself en-fleshed among us in the Eucharist; And when he healed he used words and matter.
Anyway, if we take “ethics” in the broadest sense–how to live well–this is something I am inspired by: We are en-fleshed, and though faeries aren’t real, the physical world is still, frankly, magical. Indeed the more I’ve learned about the world, the more magical it has become. But it is something I don’t know how to live out.
So, in an abstract way, I can quite rationally recognize the odd fact that I am an embodied mind. I can recognize the mystery of the physical world–at least that it gave rise to us, self-conscious free and intelligent bags of meat, who can perform acts of heroism and discover elegant an universal mathematical truth and write poetry. I can acknowledge my need to engage in ritual acts and to mark out the seasons in my life, and to give meaning to things. But just like I noticed in Catholicism, as you descend to details and ask for the motivation of doing this particular thing in this particular way, the rational construction resists your probing.
That’s a great example, Robert.
Here are some more. I think we see the effect really clearly with all sorts of mementos: locks of a child’s hair or objects that were actually present at some event or touched by some person. It’s not just that they remind us of something; its that they seem to physically connect us to the thing.
You even get it with time: think of celebrating a birthday or an anniversary (of a marriage or a death or any other major life development): there is an element of haec nox est . . .” This is the very day that whatever important thing happened. Of course it isn’t the same day–we are years separated from it–but somehow we feel that we are somehow connected to that event in a special, almost tangible, way, and that event is made present again annually on that calendar day through the years, like a continuous thread running through the years that takes us back to the moment.
Dangit Porphyry, I was all ready to plunge ahead with Prof Walsh and you go and write such an interesting post.
Christianity is incarnational. The material world matters. Things have meaning and even power.
But in this view the material world only matters because of why lies behind it, right? After all, in the Eucharist, it is not the atoms and molecules of the bread and wine that are transubstantiated but their “substance”, their “essence”, non-material concepts. It is just this, the “substance”, the “essence”, that modern secularity has removed from “things”. Can we find an inherent value of “things” without them? Can we internalize the notion that we are, after all, not embodied but are in fact, bodies?
It is a prevalent prejudice that if one penetrates to the heart of things we must find it glorious and transcendent. But what if the “heart of things” is merely particles and empty space warped into form by magnetic fields? What if magical thinking is the only kind of thinking there is? Can we imagine a church whose eucharist is the formation of black holes? What if all artificial intelligences are born insane because they cannot be taught to dream?
But in this view the material world only matters because of why lies behind it, right? After all, in the Eucharist, it is not the atoms and molecules of the bread and wine that are transubstantiated but their “substance”, their “essence”, non-material concepts.
Yes, that is just my conundrum. Once you give up the dogma that makes sense of magic thinking (and magic practice) which sacralizes the material world, there is no good justification for it.
But the other pole of the problem is that I recognize that I need it.
Can we internalize the notion that we are, after all, not embodied but are in fact, bodies?
That’s the thing: there is so much of my own intimate experience that I can’t simply reduce to “particles and empty space warped into form by magnetic fields”.
And I don’t mean “can’t reduce” in the pedestrian sense that I’m not smart enough to work up from quantum mechanics through chemistry, biology, and finally offer an account of human psychology. I mean that I have vivid experiences–often the most vivid of my experiences–that are in principle irreducible. I’m thinking of things like the awesome experience of wondering at a gorgeous mathematical proof, or the deep attraction that I feel when faced with an example of outstanding heroic sacrifice. We are in a completely different realm than that of particles and collapsing wave functions, but those thing are still very real to me.
Insofar as we are just bodies, just products of the blind evolution of a matter (and I *am* inclined to this answer), then I feel a need to fall down at the feet of the material order itself. For in that case, I can find no way to make sense of myself and my fellow men, without ascribing some sort of transcendent intelligence to the material order itself that was able to give rise to a self-conscious being like me that could wonder at the elegance of the laws that govern matter itself and drove it to make me.
So in my most materialistically reductionist mind, I end up back to magical thinking that sacralizes matter.
I hate to put it so simply, but yes, just so. Even if everything is just blind matter, there is–patently, manifestly–more to the world than just matter blindly bouncing about.
I have an affinity for Franz Brentano, but, of course, Brentano didn’t say much the medieval Christians hadn’t already pointed out.
I have a few questions, if you don’t mind. Do you consider that meaning to exist in the material even if there is no human observer? Is the particular meaning of particular matter viewpoint independent, or does that claim not even make sense?
I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, and never could see “communion” (in quotes because we didn’t call it that) as anything more than a usually stale cracker and a thimble full of grape juice. I intellectually understand what you are saying, and I am in awe of the size and complexity of the universe, as well as the complexity of even the smallest amounts of matter, but I can’t get from there to any sense of some transcendent being or ultimate meaning.
Do you consider that meaning to exist in the material even if there is no human observer? Is the particular meaning of particular matter viewpoint independent, or does that claim not even make sense?
I think I’ve been a little confused in expressing myself. I’m sort of flailing around here and don’t really feel like I can offer many well-founded answers; I can say my whole perspective presupposes humanity.
My main point was that there seems to be a pretty deep human need both to find and to place meaning in things and, especially, in actions; this seems to follow from our being both rational and bodily, and it can take on a wide variety of forms. You might think of it as having a desire to live out performance art. It is most readily justified by a view of the world I was calling “magical thinking”.
So that is the one pole: there seems to be a fairly basic human desire for this sort of meaning in stuff; we want (maybe even need) the world to be, in some sense, magical.
Now the other pole of the problem was highlighted by Stephen, once you lose the doctrinal system that gave stuff meaning, well, you lose the meaning, you lose the theory that justifies magical thinking. But it remains that I, being both rational and bodily, am still the sort of being that seeks that kind of meaning in things.
I also made a secondary point, which was that in some sense, even as you fully accept a thoroughly materialistic, reductionist, and scientific view of the world, it still really is magical–arguably more magical than it is to those who literally believe in faeries. I may here have sidetracked my own discussion. That I think is what you are asking about here:
I am in awe of the size and complexity of the universe, as well as the complexity of even the smallest amounts of matter, but I can’t get from there to any sense of some transcendent being or ultimate meaning.
My real concern, on that point, isn’t that the universe is awesome in its own right (though it is). My concern is more that the universe produced us, who are able to be in awe of it. It produced us, who are able to write the Iliad and Euclid’s Elements, who can discover general relativity and quantum mechanics, and who can sit around having discussions about how one should live life and whether the world has any meaning. Stephen Hawking said, “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.” And the more I think on that, the more profoundly it strikes me.
So it is really the human mind that I find so remarkable, inexplicable, and outright incongruent. And it is the fact that the universe produced those human minds that gives me the most awe at the universe. What short of magic conjures intelligence out of cosmic soup?
Arthur Clarke famously said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. We aren’t talking about technology, but I think the point is still relevant: Whether you want to ascribe it the laws of physics or magic, here we are, and our being here is no less remarkable.
Or again consider human reproduction. It is simply baffling that one day a guy . . . err, you know, . . . with a woman, and the next thing you know, you not only have an insanely complex living thing, you have a new self-conscious thing, capable of acts of sacrifice and genuine abstract thought. I don’t think knowing about gametes and genetics makes that any less magic.
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