Sadra’s mystical experiences convinced him that human beings could achieve perfection in this world. But, true to the conservative ethos, the perfection that he envisaged was not an evolution to a new and higher state, but a return to the original pure vision of Abraham and the other prophets. It was also a return to God, the Source of all existence. But this did not mean that the mystic abjured the world. In The Four Journeys of the Soul, he described the mystical journey of a charismatic political leader. First, he must journey from man to God. Next he travels in the divine sphere, contemplating each of God’s attributes until he arrives at an intuitive sense of their indissoluble unity. Gazing thus on the face of God, he is transformed and has a new perception of what monotheism really means and an insight that is not unlike that enjoyed by the Imams. In his third journey, the leader travels back to humankind, and finds that he now sees the world quite differently. His fourth and final quest is to preach God’s word in the world and to find new ways to institute the divine law and reorder society in conformity with God’s will.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was a vision that linked the perfection of society to a simultaneous spiritual development. The establishment of justice and equity here below could not be achieved without a mystical and religious underpinning. Mulla Sadra’s vision fused politics and spirituality, which had become separate in Twelver Shiism, seeing the rational effort that was essential for the transformation of society in the mundane world as inseparable from the mythical and mystical context that gave it meaning. Mulla Sadra had thus proposed a new model of Shii leadership, which would have a profound impact upon Iranian politics in our own day.
The mystical political leader of Mulla Sadra’s vision would have divine insight, but that did not mean that he could impose his own opinions and religious practice on others by force. If he did that, in Sadra’s view, he denied the essence of religious truth. Sadra was vehemently opposed to the growing power of the ulema, and was especially disturbed by a wholly new idea that was gaining ground in Iran during the seventeenth century. Some ulema now believed that most Muslims were incapable of interpreting the fundamentals (usul) of the faith for themselves; because the ulema were the only official spokesmen of the Hidden Imam, ordinary folk must, therefore, select a mujtahid who had been deemed capable of exercising ijtihad (“independent reasoning”) and model their behavior on his legal rulings. Sadra was appalled by these claims of the Usulis, as the proponents of this view were called.
(#litres_trial_promo) In his view, any religion that was based on such servile imitation (taqlid) was inherently “polluted.”
(#litres_trial_promo) All Shiis were quite capable of understanding the traditions (akhbar) of the Prophets and the Imams, and could work out solutions for themselves, based on reason and the spiritual insights they derived from prayer and ritual.
As the seventeenth century progressed, conflict between the Usulis and their opponents became more heated. Safavid power was beginning to decline, and society starting to fragment. People looked to the ulema as the only authorities capable of restoring order, but they differed among themselves about the nature of their authority. At this stage, most Iranians opposed the Usulis and followed the so-called Akhbaris, who relied on past tradition. The Akhbaris condemned the use of ijtihad and promoted a narrowly literal interpretation of the Koran and the Sunnah. They insisted that all legal decisions must be based on explicit statements of the Koran, the Prophet, or the Imams. If cases arose where there were no inspired rulings, the Muslim jurist must not depend upon his own judgment but should refer the matter to the secular courts.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Usulis wanted a more flexible approach. Jurists could use their own reasoning powers to reach valid decisions, based on legal principles hallowed by Islamic tradition. They thought that the Akhbaris would get so enmeshed in the past that Islamic jurisprudence would be unable to meet new challenges. In the absence of the Hidden Imam, they argued, no jurist could have the last word and no precedent could be binding. Indeed, they went so far as to say that the faithful should always follow the rulings of a living mujtahid rather than a revered authority of the past. Both sides were trying to remain true to the conservative spirit at a time of social and political instability, and both were principally concerned with the divine law. Neither the Usulis nor the Akhbaris insisted on intellectual conformity; it was only in matters of behavior or religious practice that the faithful must submit to either a literal reading of scripture or the rulings of a mujtahid. Nevertheless, both sides had lost something. The Akhbaris had confused the primordial divine imperative symbolized by the law with the historical traditions of the past; they had become literalists, and were essentially out of touch with the symbolic religion of the old Shiah. In their vision, the faith had become a series of explicit directives. The Usulis had more confidence in human reason, which was still anchored in the mythos of their religion. But in demanding that the faithful conform to their judgment, they had lost Mulla Sadra’s belief in the sacred freedom of the individual.
By the end of the seventeenth century, it had become crucial to establish a legal authority that could compensate for the weakness of the state. Trade had declined, bringing economic insecurity, and the incompetence of the later shahs made their state vulnerable. When Afghan tribes attacked Isfahan in 1722, the city surrendered ignominiously. Iran entered a period of chaos, and, for a time, it seemed that it might even cease to exist as a separate entity. The Russians invaded from the north, the Ottomans from the west, and the Afghans consolidated their position in the south and east. Tahmasp II, the third son of Sultan-Husain Shah, however, had survived the siege of Isfahan, and, with the help of Nadir Khan, a chieftain of the Iranian Afshar tribe, he succeeded in driving out the invaders. In 1736, Nadir Khan dispensed with Tahmasp Shah and had himself acclaimed as monarch. He ruled the country brutally but effectively until he was assassinated in 1748. A dark anarchic interregnum then ensued, until Aqa Muhammad Khan of the Turcoman Qajar tribe seized control and managed to consolidate his rule in 1794.
(#litres_trial_promo) This new Qajar dynasty would remain in power until the early twentieth century.
During these grim years, there were two important religious developments. Nadir Khan had tried unsuccessfully to reestablish the Sunnah in Iran; as a result, the leading ulema left Isfahan and took refuge in the holy shrine cities of Najaf and Kerbala in the Ottoman region of Iraq. At first this seemed a setback, but in the long term it proved a gain for the ulema. In Kerbala and Najaf, they achieved still greater autonomy. They were out of the shahs’ reach politically, and financially independent, and gradually they became an alternative establishment, superbly placed to challenge the court.
(#litres_trial_promo) The second major change of the period was the victory of the Usulis, achieved by the somewhat violent methods of the eminent scholar Vahid Bihbehani (1705–92), who defined the role of ijtihad with great clarity, and made its use obligatory for jurists. Any Shiis who refused to accept the Usuli position were outlawed as infidels, and opposition was ruthlessly suppressed. There was fighting in Kerbala and Najaf, and some Akhbaris died in the struggle. The mystical philosophy of Isfahan was also banned, and Sufism was suppressed so savagely that Bihbehani’s son, Ali, was known as the Sufi-slayer. But, as we have seen, coercion in religious matters is usually counterproductive; mysticism went underground and would continue to shape the ideas of dissidents and intellectuals who fought the status quo. Bihbehani’s victory was a political victory for the Iranian ulema. The Usuli position was popular with the people during the turbulent years of the interregnum, since it provided them with a source of charismatic authority that brought some measure of order. The mujtahids were able to step into the political vacuum and would never lose their power with the people. But Bihbehani’s victory, achieved by tyrannical means, was a religious defeat of sorts, since it was far removed from the behavior and ideals of the Imams.
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By the end of the eighteenth century, both the Ottoman and Iranian empires were in disarray. They had succumbed to the inevitable fate of an agrarian civilization that had outrun its resources. Ever since the Axial Age, the conservative spirit had helped men and women to accept the limitations of such a society at a profound level. This did not mean that conservative societies were static and fatalistic. This spirituality had inspired great cultural and political achievements in the Islamic world. Until the seventeenth century, Islamdom was the greatest world power. But this political, intellectual, and artistic endeavor had been conducted within a mythological context which would be alien to the values of the new Western culture that had been developing in Europe. Many of the ideals of modern Europe would be congenial to Muslims. We have seen that their faith had encouraged them to form attitudes that would be similar to those promoted by the modern West: social justice, egalitarianism, the freedom of the individual, a humanly based spirituality, a secular polity, a privatized faith, and the cultivation of rational thought. But other aspects of the new Europe would be difficult for people shaped by the conservative ethos to accept. By the end of the eighteenth century, Muslims had fallen behind the West intellectually, and, because the Islamic empires were also politically weak at this date, they would be vulnerable to the European states which were about to make their bid for world hegemony. The British had already established themselves in India, and France was determined to create its own empire. On May 19, 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte set sail for the Middle East from Toulon with 38,000 men and 400 ships to challenge British power in the Orient. The French fleet crossed the Mediterranean and on July 1 Napoleon landed 4300 troops on the beach at Alexandria and took the city shortly after dawn the following day.
(#litres_trial_promo) He thus achieved a base in Egypt. Napoleon had brought with him a corps of scholars, a library of modern European literature, a scientific laboratory, and a printing press with Arabic type. The new scientific, secularist culture of the West had invaded the Muslim world, and it would never be the same again.
3. Christians: Brave New World (#ulink_5bb8a218-ac44-5530-9887-2bbcdfcee71c)
(1492–1870) (#ulink_5bb8a218-ac44-5530-9887-2bbcdfcee71c)
AT THE SAME TIME as Jews were struggling with the traumatic consequences of their expulsion from Spain and Muslims were establishing their three great empires, the Christians in the West were embarking on a course that would take them far from the certainties and sanctities of the old world. This was an exciting period, but it was also disturbing. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Black Death had killed one-third of the population of Christendom, and countries of Europe had been ravaged by such interminable strife as the Hundred Years War between England and France and the internecine Italian wars. Europeans had endured the shock of the Ottoman conquest of Christian Byzantium in 1453, and the papal scandals of the Avignon Captivity and the Great Schism—when as many as three pontiffs had claimed to be the successor of St. Peter at the same time—had caused many to lose faith in the institutional church. People felt obscurely afraid, and found that they could not be religious in the old way. Yet it was also a time of liberation and empowerment. The Iberian explorers had discovered a new world; the astronomers were opening up the heavens, and a new technical efficiency was giving Europeans greater control over their environment than anybody had achieved before. Where the conservative spirit had taught men and women to remain within carefully defined limits, the new culture of Western Christendom showed that it was possible to venture beyond the confines of the known world and not only to survive but to prosper. This would ultimately make the old mythological religion impossible, and it would seem that Western modernity was inherently hostile to faith.
Yet during the early stages of this transformation of Western society this was not the case. Many of the explorers, scientists, and thinkers at the cutting edge of change believed that they were finding new ways of being religious rather than abolishing religion altogether. We shall examine some of their solutions in this chapter and consider their deeper implications. But it is important to be clear that the men who became the spokesmen of the modern spirit did not themselves create it. By the sixteenth century, a complex process was at work in Europe and, later, in its American colonies which was transforming the way that people thought and experienced the world. Change would occur gradually and often unobtrusively. Inventions and innovations, none of which seemed particularly decisive at the time, were occurring simultaneously in many different fields, but their cumulative effect would be conclusive. All these discoveries were characterized by a pragmatic, scientific spirit that slowly undermined the old conservative, mythical ethos and made an increasing number of people receptive to new ideas about God, religion, the state, the individual, and society. Europe and the American colonies would need to accommodate these changes in different political arrangements. Like any other period of far-reaching social change, this was a violent era. There were destructive wars and revolutions, violent uprooting, the despoliation of the countryside, and hideous religious strife. In the course of three hundred years, Europeans and Americans had to employ ruthless methods to modernize their society. There was bloodshed, persecution, inquisition, massacre, exploitation, enslavement, and cruelty. We are witnessing the same bloody upheavals in countries in the developing world which are going through the painful modernizing process today.
The rationalization of agriculture was just one small part of the process, but the increased productivity and healthier livestock affected everybody’s life. There were other, more specialized improvements. People started to make precise instruments: the compass, the telescope, the magnifying lens all revealed new worlds and made for better maps, charts, and navigational techniques. The seventeenth-century Dutch microscopist Antony van Leeuwenhoek for the first time observed bacteria, spermatozoa, and other microorganisms, and his observations would one day cast new light on the processes of generation and corruption. This would not only have the pragmatic effect of eliminating disease; it would also divest these basic areas of life and death of much of their mythical content. Medicine began to improve; even though therapy remained a hit-and-miss affair until well into the nineteenth century, there was, during the seventeenth century, a growing concern for sanitation, and some diseases were identified properly for the first time. The earth sciences began to develop, and discussion of such phenomena as earthquakes and volcanoes would push mythological considerations of such events into the background. Mechanical devices improved. Clocks and watches became more reliable and this development would lead to the secularization of time. The application of mathematical and statistical techniques gave people an entirely new sense of the future: in the 1650s and 1660s, the word “probable” began to change its meaning. It would no longer mean that something was “supported by the authorities,” as in the conservative period, but “likely in view of all the evidence.” This independent attitude and confidence in the future would lead to a new drive for scientific proof and bureaucratic rationalization. The British statisticians William Perry and John Graunt were especially interested in life expectancy, and by the early eighteenth century, people in Europe had begun to insure their lives.
(#litres_trial_promo) All this was potentially subversive to the conservative ethos.
None of these developments seemed conclusive in itself, but, taken together, their effect was radical. By 1600, innovations were occurring on such a scale in Europe that progress seemed irreversible. A discovery in one field would often spark findings in another. The process acquired an unstoppable momentum. Instead of seeing the world as governed by fundamental and unalterable laws, Europeans were discovering that they could explore and manipulate nature to staggering effect. They could manage their environment and satisfy their material wants as never before. But as people became accustomed to this rationalization of their lives, logos became ascendant and myth was discredited. People felt more assured about the future. They could institutionalize change without fearful consequences. The wealthy were, for example, now prepared systematically to reinvest capital on the basis of continuing innovation and in the firm expectation that trade would continue to improve. This capitalist economy enabled the West to replace its resources indefinitely, so that it became impervious to the limitations of the old agrarian-based societies. By the time this rationalization and technicalization of society had resulted in the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, Westerners were so confident of ceaseless progress that they no longer looked back to the past for inspiration, but saw life as a fearless march forward to ever-greater achievement in the future.
The process involved social change. It needed an increasing number of people to take part in the modernization process at quite a humble level. Ordinary folk became printers, machinists, and factory workers, and they too had to acquire, to a degree, modern standards of efficiency. A modicum of education would be required of more and more people. An increasing number of workers became literate, and once that happened they would inevitably demand a greater share in the decision-making processes of their society. A more democratic form of government would be essential. If a nation wanted to use all its human resources to modernize and enhance its productivity, it would be necessary to bring hitherto segregated and marginalized groups, such as the Jews, into mainstream culture. The newly educated working classes would no longer submit to the old hierarchies. The ideals of democracy, toleration, and universal human rights, which have become sacred values in Western secular culture, emerged as part of the intricate modernizing process. They were not simply beautiful ideals dreamed up by statesmen and political scientists, but were, at least in part, dictated by the needs of the modern state. In early modern Europe, social, political, economic, and intellectual change were part of an interlocking process; each element depended upon the others.
(#litres_trial_promo) Democracy was found to be the most efficient and productive way of organizing a modernized society, as became evident when the eastern European states, which did not adopt democratic norms and employed more draconian methods of bringing out-groups into the mainstream, fell behind in the march of progress.
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This was an enthralling period, therefore, but also one of wrenching political change, which people tried to absorb religiously. The old medieval forms of faith no longer brought comfort, since they could not function clearly in these altered circumstances. Religion had to be made more efficient and streamlined too, as in the Catholic reformation of the sixteenth century. But the reformations of the early modern period showed that, despite the fact that the modernizing process was well under way in the sixteenth century, Europeans still subscribed to the conservative spirit. The Protestant reformers, like the great Muslim reformers we have considered, were trying to find a new solution during a period of change by going back to the past. Martin Luther (1483–1556), John Calvin (1509–64), and Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) all looked back ad fontes, to the wellsprings of the Christian tradition. Where Ibn Taymiyyah had rejected medieval theology and fiqh in order to return to the pure Islam of the Koran and the Sunnah, Luther likewise attacked the medieval scholastic theologians and sought to return to the pure Christianity of the Bible and the Fathers of the Church. Like the conservative Muslim reformers, therefore, the Protestant reformers were both revolutionary and reactionary. They did not yet belong to the new world that was coming, but were still rooted in the old.
Yet they were also men of their time, and this was a time of transition. Throughout this book, we shall see that the modernizing process can induce great anxiety. As their world changes, people feel disoriented and lost. Living in medias res, they cannot see the direction that their society is taking, but experience its slow transformation in incoherent ways. As the old mythology that gave structure and significance to their lives crumbles under the impact of change, they can experience a numbing loss of identity and a paralyzing despair. The most common emotions, as we shall see, are helplessness and a fear of annihilation that can, in extreme circumstances, erupt in violence. We see something of this in Luther. During his early life, he was prey to agonizing depressions. None of the medieval rites and practices of the faith could touch what he called the tristitia (“sorrow”) that made him terrified of death, which he imagined as total extinction. When this black horror descended upon him, he could not bear to read Psalm 90, which describes the evanescence of human life and portrays men being condemned by the anger and fury of God. Throughout his career, Luther saw death as an expression of God’s wrath. His theology of justification by faith depicted human beings as utterly incapable of contributing to their own salvation and wholly reliant on the benevolence of God. It was only by realizing their powerlessness that they could be saved. To escape his depressions, Luther plunged into a frenzy of activity, determined to do what good he could in the world, but consumed also by hatred.
(#litres_trial_promo) Luther’s rage against the Pope, the Turks, Jews, women, and rebellious peasants—not to mention every single one of his theological opponents—would be typical of other reformers in our own day, who have struggled with the pain of the new world and who have also evolved a religion in which the love of God is often balanced by a hatred of other human beings.
Zwingli and Calvin also experienced utter impotence before they were able to break through to a new religious vision that made them feel born again. They too had been convinced that there was nothing they could contribute to their own salvation and that they were powerless before the trials of human existence. Both stressed the absolute sovereignty of God, as modern fundamentalists would often do.
(#litres_trial_promo) Like Luther, Zwingli and Calvin also had to re-create their religious world, sometimes resorting to extreme measures and even to violence in order to make their religion speak to the new conditions of a world that was unobtrusively but irrevocably committed to radical transformation.
As men of their time, the reformers reflected the changes that were taking place. In leaving the Roman Catholic Church, they made one of the earliest of the declarations of independence that would punctuate Western history from this point. As we shall see, the new ethos demanded autonomy and total freedom, and that is what the Protestant reformers demanded for the Christians of this altered world, who must be free to read and interpret their Bibles as they chose, without the punitive control of the Church. (All three could be intransigent, however, about anybody who opposed their teaching: Luther believed that “heretical” books should be burned, and both Calvin and Zwingli were prepared to kill dissidents.) All three showed that in this rational age, the old symbolic understanding of religion was beginning to break down. In conservative spirituality, a symbol partook of the reality of the divine; men and women experienced the sacred in earthly objects; the symbol and the sacred were thus inseparable. In the medieval period, Christians had experienced the divine in the relics of the saints, and had seen the Eucharistic bread and wine as mystically identical with Christ. Now the reformers declared that relics were idols, the Eucharist “only” a symbol, and the Mass no longer a cultic representation of the sacrifice of Calvary that made it mystically present, but a simple memorial. They were beginning to speak about the myths of religion as though they were logoi, and the alacrity with which people followed the reformers showed that many of the Christians of Europe were also beginning to lose the mythical sensibility.
Life was slowly becoming secularized in Europe, and the Protestant Reformation, despite the intensity of its religious drive, was secularizing too. The reformers claimed to be returning, conservative-wise, to the primary source, the Bible, but they were reading Scripture in a modern way. The reformed Christian was to stand alone before God, relying simply on his Bible, but this would not have been possible before the invention of printing had made it feasible for all Christians to have a Bible of their own and before the developing literacy of the period enabled them to read it. Increasingly, Scripture was read literally for the information it imparted, in much the same way as modernizing Protestants were learning to read other texts. Silent, solitary reading would help to free Christians from traditional ways of interpretation and from the supervision of the religious experts. The stress on individual faith would also help to make truth seem increasingly subjective—a characteristic of the modern Western mentality. But while he emphasized the importance of faith, Luther rejected reason vehemently. He seemed to sense that reason could, in the coming dispensation, be inimical to faith. In his writings—though not in Calvin’s—we can see that the old vision of the complementarity of reason and mythology was eroding. In his usual pugnacious way, Luther spoke of Aristotle with hatred, and loathed Erasmus, whom he regarded as the epitome of reason, which, he was convinced, could only lead to atheism. In pushing reason out of the religious sphere, Luther was one of the first Europeans to secularize it.
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Because, for Luther, God was utterly mysterious and hidden, the world was empty of the divine. Luther’s Deus Absconditus could not be discovered either in human institutions or in physical reality. Medieval Christians had experienced the sacred in the Church, which Luther now declared to be Antichrist. Nor was it permissible to reach a knowledge of God by reflecting on the marvelous order of the universe, as the scholastic theologians (also objects of Luther’s simmering rage) had done.
(#litres_trial_promo) In Luther’s writings, God had begun to retreat from the physical world, which now had no religious significance at all. Luther also secularized politics. Because mundane reality was utterly opposed to the spiritual, church and state must operate independently, each respecting the other’s proper sphere of activity.
(#litres_trial_promo) Luther’s passionate religious vision had made him one of the first Europeans to advocate the separation of church and state. Yet again, the secularization of politics began as a new way of being religious.
Luther’s separation of religion and politics sprang from his disgust with the coercive methods of the Roman Catholic Church, which had used the state to impose its own rules and orthodoxy. Calvin did not share Luther’s vision of a Godless world. Like Zwingli, he believed that Christians should express their faith by taking part in political and social life rather than by retreating to a monastery. Calvin helped to baptize the emergent capitalist work ethic by declaring labor to be a sacred calling, not, as the medievals thought, a divine punishment for sin. Nor did Calvin subscribe to Luther’s disenchantment of the natural world. He believed that it was possible to see God in his creation, and commended the study of astronomy, geography, and biology. Calvinists of the early modern period would often be good scientists. Calvin saw no contradiction between science and scripture. The Bible, he believed, was not imparting literal information about geography or cosmology, but was trying to express ineffable truth in terms that limited human beings could understand. Biblical language was balbative (“baby talk”), a deliberate simplification of a truth that was too complex to be articulated in any other way.
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The great scientists of the early modern period shared Calvin’s confidence, and also saw their researches and discussions within a mythical, religious framework. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) believed that his science was “more divine than human.”
(#litres_trial_promo) Yet his theory of a heliocentric universe was a devastating blow to the old mythical perception. His astounding hypothesis was so radical that in his own day very few people could take it in. He suggested that instead of being located in the center of the universe, the earth and the other planets were actually in rapid motion around the sun. When we looked up at the heavens and thought that we saw the celestial bodies moving, this was simply a projection of the earth’s rotation in the opposite direction. Copernicus’s theory remained incomplete, but the German physicist Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was able to provide mathematical evidence in its support, while the Pisan astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) tested the Copernican hypothesis empirically by observing the planets through the telescope, which he had himself perfected. When Galileo published his findings in 1612, he created a sensation. All over Europe, people made their own telescopes and scanned the heavens for themselves.
Galileo was silenced by the Inquisition and forced to recant, but his own somewhat belligerent temperament had also played a part in his condemnation. Religious people did not instinctively reject science in the early modern period. When Copernicus first presented his hypothesis in the Vatican, the Pope approved it, and Calvin had no problem with the theory. The scientists themselves saw their investigations as essentially religious. Kepler felt himself possessed by “divine frenzy” as he revealed secrets that no human being had ever been privileged to learn before, and Galileo was convinced that his research had been inspired by divine grace.
(#litres_trial_promo) They could still see their scientific rationalism as compatible with religious vision, logos as complementary to mythos.
Nevertheless, Copernicus had initiated a revolution, and human beings would never be able to see themselves or trust their perceptions in the same way again. Hitherto, people had felt able to rely on the evidence of their senses. They had looked through the outward aspects of the world to find the Unseen, but had been confident that these external appearances corresponded to a reality. The myths they had evolved to express their vision of the fundamental laws of life had been of a piece with what they had experienced as fact. The Greek worshippers at Eleusis had been able to fuse the story of Persephone with the rhythms of the harvest that they could observe for themselves; the Arabs who jogged around the Kabah symbolically aligned themselves with the planetary motions around the earth and hence felt in tune with the basic principles of existence. But after Copernicus a seed of doubt had been sown. It had been proved that the earth, which seemed static, was actually moving very fast indeed; that the planets only appeared to be in motion because people were projecting their own vision onto them: what had been assumed to be objective was in fact entirely subjective. Reason and myth were no longer in harmony; indeed, the intensive logos produced by the scientists seemed to devalue the perceptions of ordinary human beings and make them increasingly dependent upon learned experts. Where myth had shown that human action was bound up with the essential meaning of life, the new science had suddenly pushed men and women into a marginal position in the cosmos. They were no longer at the center of things, but cast adrift on an undistinguished planet in a universe that no longer revolved around their needs. It was a bleak vision, which, perhaps, needed a myth to make the new cosmology as spiritually meaningful as the old.
But modern science was beginning to discredit mythology. The British scientist Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) synthesized the findings of his predecessors by a rigorous use of the evolving scientific methods of experimentation and deduction. Newton posited the idea of gravity as a universal force that held the entire cosmos together and prevented the celestial bodies from colliding with one another. This system, he was convinced, proved the existence of God, the great “Mechanick,” since the intricate design of the cosmos could not have come about by accident.
(#litres_trial_promo) Like the other early modern scientists, Newton had brought human beings what he believed to be utterly new and certain information about the world. He was sure that his “system” coincided exactly with objective reality and had taken human knowledge further than before. But his total immersion in the world of logos made it impossible for Newton to appreciate that other, more intuitive forms of perception might also offer human beings a form of truth. In his view, mythology and mystery were primitive and barbaric ways of thought. “’Tis the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion,” he wrote irritably, “ever to be fond of mysteries & for that reason to like best what they understand least.”
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Newton became almost obsessed with the desire to purge Christianity of its mythical doctrines. He became convinced that the a-rational dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation were the result of conspiracy, forgery, and chicanery. While working on his great book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia (1687), Newton began work on a bizarre treatise entitled The Philosophical Origins of Gentile Theology, which argued that Noah had founded a superstition-free religion in which there were no revealed scriptures, no mysteries, but only a Deity which could be known through the rational contemplation of the natural world. Later generations had corrupted this pure faith; the spurious doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity had been added to the creed by unscrupulous theologians in the fourth century. Indeed, the Book of Revelation had prophesied the rise of Trinitarianism—“this strange religion of ye West,” “the cult of three equal Gods”—as the abomination of desolation.
(#litres_trial_promo) Newton was still a religious man and still, to an extent, in thrall to the conservative spirit in his quest for a rational primordial religion. But he could not express his faith in the same way as previous generations. He was unable to appreciate that the doctrine of the Trinity had been devised by the Greek Orthodox theologians of the fourth century precisely as mythos, similar to that later created by the Jewish Kabbalists. As Gregory of Nyssa had explained, the three hypostases of Father, Son, and Spirit were not objective facts but simply “terms that we use” to express the way in which the “unnameable and unspeakable” divine nature (ousia) adapts itself to the limitations of our human minds.
(#litres_trial_promo) It made no sense outside the cultic context of prayer, contemplation, and liturgy. But Newton could only see the Trinity in rational terms, had no understanding of the role of myth, and was therefore obliged to jettison the doctrine. The difficulty that many Western Christians today experience with trinitarian theology shows that they share Newton’s bias in favor of reason. Newton’s position was entirely understandable. He was one of the very first people in the West to master fully the methods and disciplines of scientific rationalism. His was a towering achievement and the result was as intoxicating as any religious experience. He used to cry out in the course of his studies: “O God, I think Thy thoughts after Thee!”
(#litres_trial_promo) He had literally no time for the intuitive mystical consciousness, which might actually have impeded his progress. Reason and myth were, for the first time in human history, becoming incompatible because of the intensity and dazzling success of this Western experiment.
By the seventeenth century, progress was so assured that many Europeans were already entirely oriented toward the future. They were discovering that they had to be ready to scrap the past and start again if they wanted to find the truth. This forward momentum was diametrically opposed to the mythical return to the past which was the foundation of the conservative spirit. The new science had to look forward; this was the way it worked. Once Copernicus’s theory had been proved satisfactorily, it was no longer possible to bring back the Ptolemaic cosmological system. Later, Newton’s own system, though not his methods, would be discounted. Europeans were evolving a new notion of truth. Truth was never absolute, since new discoveries could always replace the old; it had to be demonstrated objectively, and measured by its effectiveness in the practical world. The success of early modern science gave it an authority which was starting to be stronger than that of mythical truth, which met none of these criteria.
