12000 years ago... (and the tectonic shift that occurred 2025 years ago)

 Thinking on religion and religious thought whilst NOT paying attention in church this last Sunday.

Our religion is very, very, very old.

The signs and symbols in the current Christian churches, Catholic, Protestant, Eastern & Orthodox, though altered slightly in outward form, have remained unchanged for over 12,000 years. They echo & still proclaim the same thing our ancestors at the end of the Younger Dryas period were proclaiming. They share this echo with every other religion on the planet; Judaism, Buddhism, Jainism, Islam, Hindu, Shinto, and native pantheism.

What is that proclamation?

Something, something, something, the pattern. There is an order to the universe; an iron law to which every thing in the physical and spiritual world of necessity must give obedience. It is an exquisite order, crystalline, breath-taking, immense and unpredictable. It has been, is and always will be, saecula saeculorum. It is an order expressed through the idea of the LOGOS; a mathematical precision emanating from the One, extending and encompassing every thing including humanity. We are “one with the universe.” It is glorious, beautiful, multi-faceted, carbuncular, ineffable and inexpressible and (up to a point in history) utterly unconcerned about you and I.

There it is. This ancient pattern of the universe in almost every other religion, from Weneg-Nebty to Alan Watts, lived and moved and had its being with little to no consideration for you or any other person. The individual in this vast, celestial pattern, was nothing but a speck, a straw, a thread and the great web of the matrix. The necessity of every religion was always for the individual to conform to the pattern; to recognize their own nothingness and insignificance, their transience and mortality and pettiness & to submit to the inexorable law of the pattern. The pieces that had fallen from the pattern had to be returned - would be returned will they or nil they.

There was no such thing as “free will” in this schema; such a thing would be an illusion concocted by the demiurgic aspect of soul to think it had any choice over its own fate, rather than simply repeating what others had before them repeated.

There was no such thing as the individual “you”, the personality, the id or the ego; such a thing would be again, merely the lie the stray piece told itself in rebellion against the pattern into which they inevitably would be refitted.

“Soul”, in such a vision of the universe, would merely be “life force”; the temporary investing of the spiritus mundi in this veil of tears; the trapping of the eternal fire in cloying clay by the impish demiurge; the puppetry of the sleeping god talking to himself.

The pattern, though exquisite, was distant, inexorable, cold.

CROM! DAGON! BA’AL!

But think about that, again: 12,000 years! That’s a loooong time! Your ancestors and mine were running about Doggerland reflecting on the eternal movements of the celestial lights in the same way that their ancestors reflected before the great floods from glacial lake Missoula; in the same way their cousins in Dwarka, or in Mongolia, or in the grassy valleys of what would become the Mediterranean Sea reflected. “What is man in this vast pattern? Is there choice? Are we free beings? Where in me is this thing we call self?”

Or perhaps they didn’t reflect at all.

Perhaps the thoughts didn’t even enter their minds!

A man who lives only with the idea of the eternal repetition of patterns doesn’t think of anything beyond the pattern anymore than a fish thinks about the water it drinks.

So 10,000 years bundled along.

Then something remarkable happened. It happened in two places almost at once.

A small group of people, nomads from Mesopotamia perhaps (though perhaps a splinter of Egyptian princes exiled into the Levant area from the richness of the Nile valley) encounter a something that dissuaded them from thinking of the One as distant and cold. “I will be your God and you will be my people.” This god, Elohim (later YHWH), though simultaneously the pattern maker and one with the pattern, takes a loving paternal interest in a certain set of Semitic human beings and creates the group of people called “the ones from over the river” or “the strangers” or eber nari; the Hebrews. They called themselves “יְהוּדִי” the sons of Judah, or “Jews”.

And their god was The God, with no other gods before Him. He who had set the very pattern of existence itself, scooped out of the eternal light of his own Ein Sof the hollow place of the Tzimtzum, in order to spark the wheels of time into turning, in order to set the sun and stars in the sky, in order to separate the waters from the waters of Tehom, in order to place the trees, birds, animals to be hunted, all in order to make the individual dirt guy, Adam, and breathe into his nostrils the ruah of His own breath. All to make the individual mother of all, Eve, from the rib of a rational being.

These chosen people began to live a radically different life from the neighbors that surrounded them: they honored women more than other cultures; they cared for everyone in the community, even slaves; they followed seemingly obscure and complex laws rooted in ancient dietary customs and long forgotten culture; and they cut off the ends of their penises (the last of which must have been quite the sign of commitment! “Those Jews meant business!”)

But first and foremost, they thought of their people as chosen, special, important. Though this is perhaps not at first remarkable (all humans refer to their own tribe as “the people” and those outside the tribe as “not people”; the Diné and the Deutsch) the Jews claimed a particular and peculiar relationship with the pattern itself (and the Patterner). They could argue and remonstrate with Him;

Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?” And he said, “I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.”

• Genesis 18

they could laugh and joke with Him; they could rely on his guidance and protection even when they acted like buffoons and dolts. It was a particularly fatherly relationship with YHWH and the importance of this relationship cannot be stressed enough.

When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars which thou hast established;
what is man that thou art mindful of him,
and the son of man that thou dost care for him?

• Psalm 8:4

The other strain of shifting thought occurred in Athens during the Greco-Persian wars in the 5th century BC, though perhaps earlier during the golden era of Homer in the 8th century BC. Homer allowed his audience to laugh at the gods (witness Zeus, Aphrodite, and Ares in “The Iliad”. They are foolish and whimsical gods & most ignoble). By the 5th century during the great war with Cyrus and his successors, Darius and Xerxes, Athenian Greeks were already talking about autonomy, freedom from tyranny, and democratic self-rule. Philosophers of the era like Plato and Heraclitus were debating about the nature of the individual soul and its relation to the eternal pattern of the Eidoi (the Forms). Mathematicians like Anaxagoras, Archimedes, and Pythagoras were working out the nuances of this mathematical thing as it affected the individual. Cults such as the Hermetic cult at Eleusis were extolling the resurrection of the individual into the life of the LOGOS. There was a great surge of discussion about the individual in relation to this eternal thing that had been around for 10,000 years.

Then in the fulness of time, the two thought patterns converged.

The Incarnation, the phenomenon of the 2nd person of the Trinity descending from heaven and by the power of the Holy Spirit taking on flesh and becoming man, can be read in a number of ways. To suggest that it was the culmination of two great waves of human thought merging into one is but a single way of reading the phenomenon. The point is that it was FACT! Something occurred. God took on mortal flesh, the relation between the individual and pattern changed, human history shifted in a tectonic way.

This remarkable event, call it what you will (I say it actually happened historically as well as intellectually & spiritually & emotionally) changed everything (as Augustine suggests.) Quo itur Deus, qua itur homo. Admirabile commercium. For the first time in human history, so far as anyone knows, the pattern remained intact, but the shift of emphasis for God and for man became the individual.

The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

• Mark 12

Before you were insignificant and small, puny and pathetic, a smudge on the grand beauty of life. Your job was to know yourself, gnothi seauton, and submit to the inexorable yoke of fata, wyrd, moira.

After the Incarnation you can stand before the LOGOS and sing,

“Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.”

• Revelation 21:4

It is the tectonic shift of the Incarnation that grants to the individual person significance, importance, dignity and weight before the almighty being of the LOGOS. Upon such a Petrine rock is built the entire edifice of the church of law, human rights, government, scientific knowledge, individual property, peace and civilization based on mercy not brute power.

What now, then, is the worry? Has our 300 year old experiment in self - reliance reached its violent and bitter end?

Has the destruction of Christianity and the denial of the Incarnation eroded the dignity of the individual until there is no rock upon which to claim “rights” at all?

Are we witnessing with the triumph of scientific atheism a return to, not paganism, but something far worse, far more savage & bloodthirsty?

Are we experiencing a godless technology-created bestiality bordering on the demonic from which no much-lauded machine messiah can save us?

Are we seeing after 20 centuries of stony sleep some vast beast shuffling toward Bethlehem to be born?

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

• T.S.Eliot, “The Second Coming”

This individual hopes it is not so.