Richard Tarnas

1991

Three major areas have traditionally been distinguished in Western cultural history -- the classical, the medieval, and the modern. [1]

We begin with the Greeks. It was some 25 centuries ago that the Hellenic world brought forth the extraordinary flowering of culture that marked the dawn of Western civilization… Our way of thinking is still profoundly Greek in its underlying logic, so much so that before we can begin to grasp the character of our own thought, we must first look closely at the Greeks. [2]

At its basis was a view of the cosmos as an ordered expression of certain primordial essences or transcendent first principles, variously conceived as Forms, ideas, universals, changes absolutes, immortal deities, divine archai, and archetypes.

For the Greek mind now strode to discover and natural explanation for the cosmos by means of observation and reasoning, and these explanations soon began to shed their residual mythological components. Ultimate, universal questions were being asked, and answers were being sought from a new quarter -- the human mind's critical analysis of material phenomena. Nature was to be explained in terms of nature itself, not something fundamentally beyond nature, and in impersonal terms rather than by means of personal gods and goddesses… a rudimentary naturalistic empiricism was being born. And as man's independent intelligence grew stronger, the sovereign power of the old gods grew weak. [20]

Paul of Tarsas… was Jewish by birth, Roman by citizenship, and Greek by culture. While on his way to Damascus to restrain further spread of what he viewed as a heretical sect dangerous to restrain further spread of what he viewed as a heretical sect dangerous to Judaic orthodoxy, was overwhelmed by a vision of the risen Christ. He had ardently espoused the very religion of which he had been the most forceful opponent, and indeed became its pre-eminent missionary and foundational theologian. Under Paul's leadership, the small religious movement rapidly spread to the other parts of the Empire -- Asia minor, Egypt, Greece, to Rome itself -- and began to constitute itself as a world church.

Precisely what the historical Jesus of Nazareth said, did, or believed himself to be cannot now be ascertained. Like Socrates, Jesus wrote nothing for posterity. [91]

It was not until the later part of the first century that the four Gospels of the New Testament were composed and foundations of Christian beliefs laid out by the the descendants of Jesus' immediate followers, and by then an elaborate and at times inconsistent belief structure had developed. The structure involved not only the remembered facts of Jesus's life, but also various oral traditions, legends, parables and saints, subsequent visions and prophecies, hymns and prayers, apocalyptic beliefs, the young church's didactic requirements, interpolated parallels with the Hebrew scriptures, other Jewish, Greek, and Gnostic influences, and complex redemption theology and view of history -- all unified by the biblical author's commitment of faith to the new religion. How much this final compound reflected the actual events and teachings of Jesus's life remains problematic. The earliest extant Christian documents are the letters of Paul, who never met Jesus. Hence the Jesus that history came to know is the Jesus portrayed -- recalled, reconstructed, interpreted, embellished, vividly imagined -- in the New Testament by writers within one or two generations after the period covered by their narratives, the authorship of which they ascribed to Jesus's original disciples. [92]

Significantly, it was not the Galilean Jews who had been closest to Jesus, but Paul, the Roman citizen of Greek cultural background, who effectively turned Christianity toward its universal mission. Although virtually all of the earliest Christians were Jewish, only a relatively small fraction of Jews eventually became Christians. In the long run a, the new religion appealed much more broadly and successfully to the larger Hellenistic world. The Jews had long awaited a messiah, but had expected either a political monarch like their ancient King David, who would assert Israel's sovereignty in the world, or a manifestly spiritual prince… They did not expect the apolitical, unmilitant, manifestly human, suffering and dying Jesus…

While the Jerusalem Christians, under the leadership of James and Peter, continued for some time to require the observance of traditional Jewish rules against common eating, thus circumscribing the new religion into the Judaic framework, Paul asserted, amidst much opposition, that the new Christian freedom and hope for salvation was already universally present, for Gentiles without the Judaic law as well as Jews within it… It was Paul's universalism that prevailed over Judaic exclusivism, with larg repercussions for the classical world. [98-99]

With the rise of Christianity, the pluralism and syncretism of Hellenistic culture, with various intermingling philosophical schools and polytheistic religions, were replaced by an exclusive monotheism derived from the Judaic tradition. It is also true that Christian theology establish the biblical revelation as absolute truth and demanded strict conformity to church doctrine from any philosophical speculations. [100]

Thus Augustine held that the Platonic Forms existed within the creative mind of God and that the ground of reality lay beyond the world of the senses, available only through a radical inward turning of the soul. No less Platonic, although thoroughly Christian, was Augustine's paradigmatic statement that "the true philosopher is the lover of God." And it was Augustine's formulation of Christian Platonism that was to permeate virtually all of medieval Christian thought in the West. [103]

The pagan deities were more explicitly antithetical to biblical monotheism, and thus more forcefully dispensed with… The old rituals and mysteries constituted a widespread impediment to the propagation of the Christian faith and were therefore combated by Christian apologists in terms not unlike those of the skeptical philosophers of classical Athens, but in the new context in with different intent. [108]

And so the old gods died for and the one true Christian God was revealed and glorified. Yet a more subtle and differentiated process of assimilation occurred in the conversion of paganism, for the process of the Hellenistic world's adoption of Christianity, many essential features of the pagan mystery religions now found successful expression in the Christian religion: the belief in a savior deity's death and rebirth brought immortality the themes of illumination and regeneration, the ritual initiation with a community of worshipers into the salvational knowledge of cosmic truths, the preparatory period before initiation, demands for cultic purity, fasting, vigils, early morning ceremonies, sacred banquets, ritual processions, pilgrimages, the giving of new names to initiates. [109]

Martyrdom, the ultimate surrender of the self to God, represented the highest Christian ideal. [115]

Yet on the other hand, by granting immortality and value to the individual soul, Christianity encouraged the growth of the individual conscience, self responsibility, and personal autonomy relative to temporal powers -- all decisive traits for the formation of the Western character. [117]

The potentially distressing ambiguities and confusions of a private philosophical search without religious guideposts were now replaced by an absolutely certain cosmology and institutionally ritualized system of salvation accessible to all. [117]

The shadow side of the Christian religion's claimed universality was its intolerance. The church's view of Christian conversion as a private religious experience fully contingent on individual freedom and spontaneity stood in stark counterpoint to not infrequent policy of forcibly imposed religious conformity. With the final ascendance of Christianity at the end of the classical era, the pagan temples were systematically demolished and the philosophical academies officially closed. Just as the strict ethical puritanism that Christianity had inherited from Judaism opposed the unrestrained sensuality and immorality it perceived in pagan culture, so too with equal stringency did Christianity develop a theological puritanism that posited itself against teachings of pagan philosophy and any unorthodox conceptions of Christian truth. [118]

The stern and often ruthless god of the Old Testament, Yahweh, was now embodied in Christ the Judge, who damned the disobedient as readily as he redeemed the obedient. And the church itself -- here understood more as hierarchical institution than as mystical community of the faithful -- took on that judicial role with considerable cultural authority… Christ's suffering and death were here often portrayed as further cause for human guilt, rather than sas effecting the removal of that guilt. The crucifixion in its horrific aspect became the dominant image, rather than the resurrection or the two together. [124]