Telluris theoria sacra
This is the title of a book by Thomas Burnet, who also wrote a famous book called Archaeologicae philosophicae, which is where Coleridge got the epigraph for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
Facile credo, plures esse Naturas invisibiles quam visibiles in rerum universitate. Sed horum omnium familiam quis nobis enarrabit, et gradus et cognationes et discrimina et singulorum munera? Quid agunt? quae loca habitant? Harum rerum notitiam semper ambivit ingenium humanum, nunquam attigit. Juvat, interea, non diffiteor, quandoque in animo, tanquam in tabulâ, majoris et melioris mundi imaginem contemplari: ne mens assuefacta hodiernae vitae minutiis se contrahat nimis, et tota subsidat in pusillas cogitationes. Sed veritati interea invigilandum est, modusque servandus, ut certa ab incertis, diem a nocte, distinguamus.
The other book, Telluris theoria sacra, means "The sacred theory of the Earth" -- it's a book of natural history from a supernatural perspective. The theory is sacred because it is religious (like the NMH "Sacred Concert", where the music is all of religious origin); so the title means something like "What religion tells us about where the world comes from", and it could be contrasted with a book called Telluris theoria profana, although Burnet never wrote such a thing.
So Burnet gave some influential theories about the history of the world, himself influenced by Christian scripture and theology. He argued that the Earth used to be very smooth, in the old days, and its surface has become rougher over time. ("Antiquitas mundi iuventus saeculi: nostra profecto antiqua sunt saecula non ea quae computantur ordine inverso initium sumendo a saeculo nostro." Francis Bacon.) The very first geologists agreed with Burnet that mountains had been formed over time, and hadn't existed at the creation of the world.
A strange idea, really, because the more common religious theory had been that the physical features we see in the world today had been created this way; Burnet's account of the true religious theory was that the world actually changes over time, as it ages.
Geologists nowadays don't usually quote scriptures. But it's interesting that Burnet thought that there was a "sacred theory of the Earth" and tried to find it. Obviously, his attitude was that, because religion is true, facts about it can serve as evidence or as hints about other aspects of the world; religious evidence will be admissible, in this view, because the religious evidence is true. (On the other hand, scholars who are not Christian will not necessarily be expected to believe the sacred theory.)
It's interesting to consider where in life religious belief or disbelief shows up. I remember always going to synagogue when I was young on Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana. (My father also took me at other times, and I went voluntarily by myself at other times when I was preparing for my bar mitzvah.) The rabbi's sermon on Rosh Hashana always, every year, included a plea that people in the audience should come to synagogue at other times of the year, not just on the high holidays. (I'm fairly sure that Easter sermons in Christian churches often suggest that it's good to come to services more regularly.) So the phenomenon was that people identified in a way that seemed to me to be superficial with Judaism (and I think this would not happen in an Orthodox Jewish congregation), enough to want to go for "family reasons" or from a sense of guilt to services at the high holidays.
But at the same time, it wasn't clear that Judaism (at least Jewish liturgical worship) was integrated into their lives very much. I mean, it's a common statement that you can't tell "what religion someone is" by looking, or even by observing the person for a while. (I've often gone months without hearing about someone's ideas about religion -- a situation I hear is more common in the U.S. than many other places, where people feel more comfortable discussing religion with one another, or where religion is more thoroughly integrated into popular culture.) So there was a point that people shouldn't compartmentalize religion and shouldn't make it something they "only do on Saturday" (heh!) or only on certain holidays and only at certain events. It should be taken seriously if it is believed at all, and this means that it affects every part of one's life. Concretely, the rabbi would suggest that regular participation in community prayer services was important for people who took their religion seriously.
Jesus, we hear, didn't see a problem with Jews whose practice of religion was private:
And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.
(Matthew 6:5-7 (NIV))
But elsewhere he says to be evangelical and tell other people about the news:
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.(Matthew 28:19-20 (NIV))
(This is called the Great Commission.)
Clearly there is a difference between public prayer and evangelism, although I think that distinction has blurred and plenty of evangelists have been accused of ignoring Matthew 6:5. But possibly these two instructions are compatible.
So religion can show up or not show up in many different places in a person's life. It's most evident if someone is wearing an "I agree with Paul" shirt or asking us if we're saved, or handing out Jews for Jesus flyers in the subway. And some people are professional evangelists or professional clergy, and we know (supposedly) how they think about things and how their lives are affected. But other times things show up only in unusual circumstances -- for example, during the Vietnam War, a lot of religious people who had rarely had occasion to talk about their beliefs felt an obligation to criticize the war, or to assert their beliefs so as to obtain C.O. status.
And others, like Daniel Berrigan, for whom we had that birthday party not long ago, felt compelled to make a whole career out of religious opposition to wars.
Other times, people might be presented with something to eat and refuse for religious reasons. Dietary laws seem to be one of the longest-surviving aspects of religious practice among people who are otherwise completely disconnected from religious communities. Many people (including many believing Jews) say that Jewish dietary laws were constructed -- by God or by people -- to make Jews feel a sense of difference. (There are other theories, such as that they have a sanitary benefit or a nutritional benefit, that they are arbitrary and intended as a test of faith, or that they represent a hidden order in the world which is not yet intelligible to people.) And they've been remarkably successful at creating a sense of difference, so that today many assimilated and secular Jews who are not vegetarians refuse to eat pork, and practically their entire sense of being Jewish may well be "I don't eat pork". (I don't know why that corner of kashrut is more firmly entrenched than not eating shellfish or not combining milk and meat.)
We should not neglect (as Sumana pointed out in connection with the Annalee Newitz article I wrote about recently) that there are vast numbers of people who refuse to have sex before marriage for purely religious reasons, who otherwise might well behave totally differently. Newitz seemed to be totally uninterested in this phenomenon -- it seemed that, for her, the only interesting reason not to have sex was a lack of attraction or interest. (She did deal with the idea that people should only have sex with people they love, but Sumana noted that religious ideas about marriage can be quite different from this. For example, there are few religions which say that you have to love someone whom you will marry or whom you have married. For many people, whether two people are married is a far more important issue than whether they love one another in judging whether they should have sex.)
But these things are obvious and direct; nowadays, without a single orthodoxy in charge of a religion world-wide (even the papacy has gotten much milder about proclaiming doctrines and about dealing with dissenters), a lot of things about how religion works in people's lives, and how they think about it, have gotten really subtle. (It's not that religious belief wasn't subtle before, it's just that, until recently, orthodox organized religions had much more influence about how people talked about their beliefs -- that in many communities, expressing a variant view would have been seen as such a big deal, perhaps leading to excommunication and even wars. Don't forget that religious wars were the longest-lasting and bloodiest wars in European history until this century. "Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum." I think that people were much more afraid about "novelty" in religion in those days, and about preserving a claim to orthodoxy. They would try to speak of the sacred theory about a particular topic -- although the definite article isn't actually part of Burnet's title -- and there can perhaps only be one sacred theory about a particulartopic, the rest being heretical.)
What a change it is that heresy is treated so differently today! It sounds as though, at some times and places, calling someone a heretic was like calling someone a child molester today. But without this stigma, people really show the diversity of their thought, and life gets very confusing.
I was writing yesterday about religious belief and personality and the lack of a direct connection. I have a dear friend whom I met a few years ago. When we met, I wrote, she was a religious person who was a humanist at heart. I was an atheist who was a religious person at heart. In her personality, in the way she thinks about things, she was deeply involved in the secular, the here and now, the indepedence and critical judgment of the individual; she embodies many of the ideals of the Humanist Manifesto. (See Humanist Manifesto I, Humanist Manifesto II.) But she professed beliefs about how and why we exist that placed her in a church, and she was uneasy with the traditions and interpretations of theology that that church had often employed, and what people had done with their beliefs. I think a lot of her concerns were that the church had not been pluralist enough, had not been tolerant enough, had not been adequately and vocally concerned with the health and well-being of everyone in this physical world...
And I was an atheist whose personality turned toward the theoretical and the absolute, and toward reverence for impersonal law ("the law is not a respecter of persons"! "a government of laws and not of men"! "avia mens hominum audet insectas leges adamante perenni assimilare suas"!) and abstract principle. And I was known to say that organized religions were the great triumphs of human culture and effort except that they were wrong about all the facts, which was their great tragedy. And I was attracted to systematic philosophy, especially idealist philosophy, and I admired the efforts of systematic theologians except that I thought they were all wrong. Also I wanted things that were permanent, perfect, and complete -- and only religion and mathematics have made serious claims to possess truth like that. (Gödel eliminated the "complete" part from mathematics; there is a great interview with Chaitin about this.)
I was not a humanist at heart. I thought that we should live according to laws not of our own devising; I thought that we should wish for certainty. But I just thought that the religions of this world have never found what they claim to have found, that they were founded on historical errors and misperceptions, and they did a good job within the constraints of being wrong, and they made sense.
I think my friend and I admired, even chased after, one another's traditions, in the theoretical sense: maybe she wanted to be free of theology, and I wanted to be subject to it. (Mortimer Adler says somewhere that theology is the Queen of the Sciences -- which is what Eric Temple Bell said about mathematics -- and that one reason universities are in such a mess is that they've stopped teaching theology. And without theology, he says, nobody can really help to understand the unity of all other disciplines: so the universities have become fragmented this way. I think this is complete nonsense, but it's such attractive complete nonsense!)
I wrote in two works which I've mentioned in my diaries -- my essay "Romance and Failure" and my epic poem "Existence and Uniqueness" -- about the fact that I had explicitly religious conceptions of dating. I think I first noticed that when I was a junior in high school, that I had religious attitudes relating to dating, that I thought it called for religious faith, that I was comfortable thinking about romance in religious terms. But I didn't really have much to say about it until recently, when I wrote those two pieces and had lots to say.
Let me say that I had an "Amoris theoria sacra", a sacred theory of love. And one of my main points here is that it's not really unusual to have a sacred theory of things that aren't subjects of traditional theology. It's not unusual to have sacred theories about the things that are most important to us: I had a sacred theory of love and a sacred theory of knowledge, and I think Bertrand Russell did, too:
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy -- ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness -- that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what -- at last -- I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
Isn't this obviously sacred theory, even though Russell doesn't care for scriptures? "I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined"?
(I haven't shared Russell's "unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind" all the time -- not to the extent that I have shared his other passions -- but perhaps I will when I'm older.)
I wanted things that were unique and permanent (as God is) and yet also really existed (as perhaps God does); I wanted to have perfect love and devotion (as religious believers are often told to do); I wanted to have purity. I wanted to have faith.
It seems that I am a very religious person, although I don't believe in God. ("Would you want to see it if seeing meant that you would have to believe?") I'm certainly very evangelistic; Sumana said I'm one of the most evangelistic people she knows. Evangelism just makes sense to me, although there's the funny question of why it's one particular person's job to convince another. The thing that most irritated me about talking to some religious evangelists was the sense that it was their social role to convince me; I was merely the subject of their evangelism and they would succeed if they convinced me and fail if they did not. There was no other possible outcome -- how different from an ordinary conversation this is. I wrote in an earlier diary entry that Linux evangelism normally assumes that people have never heard of Linux before, not that they have heard of it and rejected it. It seems that this was historically true of Christian evangelism -- the overwhelming majority of people had never heard the Gospel, the euangelion, at all! So it supposed to be this surprising thing, like "You have been living in ignorance all this time, but I'm hear to tell you the good news which you don't yet know about".
This was literally true of the famous speech on the Areopagos, in Acts 17, which I've been very interested in lately. The Athenians said to Paul: "May we hear what this new teaching is?" (Acts 17:19) -- in other words, they were actually asking Paul to evangelize because they didn't know what he had to say!
This is the classic paradigm of evangelism, that it's like teaching, because if you know about some good news that other people haven't heard, you want to share it with them. And this is why evangelists are angeloi, messengers: they have news which is actually news.
But nowadays, the Christian gospel has been preached almost everywhere in the world -- it's not news any more! So the role of evangelists changes in a strange and interesting way, because they go out and argue with people who have already heard them long ago. Once an evangelist in New York stopped me and asked me whether I had heard the gospel of Jesus. And I told her "Yes". Then she asked me whether I believed it, and I said "No". What a strange situation! What is an evangelist supposed to do about this? How can this be, that someone would hear the gospel and not accept it?
(But who today would not know what Paul had to say? What Athenian has never heard the Gospel?)
Someone once told me that the Great Commission is just supposed to mean that the Christian church should be international -- in other words, that evangelists are supposed to go out to all nations and find disciples from each one, but not that everyone is supposed to be a disciple. (So it would be translated "make disciples from among all nations", not "make all nations into disciples".) That interpretation allows for the possibility that some people who hear will believe, and others won't.
But to the extent that evangelists think that everyone is supposed to believe -- which makes sense if you're preaching an important truth -- the situation with regard to people who don't believe is very tricky! Most evangelists I've met have taken the position that it is their job to convince me and my job to be convinced; so they're content to keep on trying until I'm actually convinced. This is very tricky: there's clearly some difference between a person who has never heard news and a person who's heard it and disbelieved it, isn't there? Is a messenger's job to report news or also to advocate and to debate on its behalf?
If facts aren't self-evident, someone has to gather the evidence for them.
(And then "martyr" means "witness" -- do witnesses just testify or do they also argue a case? In some legal systems, they certainly do both at once.)
Getting back to my theme, since I've been such a religious person at heart, I should never condemn people for religious faith, although I'm happy to argue against them if they suggest that a religious belief is justified or that other people should believe it. But when someone says "Credo quia absurdum", I suppose I can only reply "Credis ergo absurdum".
In fact, I was in a cafeteria at Davis at the beginning of this year and I was telling my friend something about my theory of love and how things were supposed to work: and she burst out laughing and said "Seth, that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard!". Far from being offended, I was on the verge of saying "Credo quia absurdum" or, much more likely, "Certum est, quia impossibile est". And it was amazing that I (and I belong to JREF and to the 2000 Club) could have said that. But it's true. I almost did. I came so close. I could have said it.
What business do I have saying that? But there was nothing else that I could have said; all I could think of in reply was "This absurdity, this impossibility for you is the structure of the world in my mind".
So it's amazing how little connection, or how much connection, our stated religious beliefs can have with our personalities and with how we think about things. It's amazing to see what sacred theories there are and where they enter into life. The "religious" person defends humanist values, the "atheist" defends religious values. Or in some far corner of life which is actually very central and key to how we think, we discover who we really are and how we really think about things.
Everyone, go take a train across the country. Alone there by yourself, just after midnight, read "Surprise" by Martin Gardner. Who are you? Are you surprised?
