For the first time, almost simultaneously, Chinese, Indians, Persians, Jews, Greeks and many others began to emerge as individuals seeking an ‘inner’ truth rather than looking outside to the landscape and the sky and a host of spirits and minor gods. It’s as if there was a new kind of consciousness. Although by no means all of the new faiths and philosophies were monotheistic, they all focused on a single being, whether human or divine. According to author Karen Armstrong, it was a reaction to the growing prevalence of war and conflict in early civilisations: ‘In every single case, the spiritualities that emerged during the Axial Age – Taoism and Confucianism in China, monotheism in Israel, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism in India, and Greek rationalism in Europe – began with a recoil from violence, with looking into the heart to find the sources of violence in the human psyche.’
Many historians question the idea of an Axial Age and trace the development of monotheism differently. They are sceptical of any connection between these developments, although there is no need to invoke some mass psychological sea-change as Jaspers did; a simple ‘viral’ word of mouth sharing of ideas might have been quite enough. Most Jewish theologians, for instance, believe that Judaism was the original monotheistic religion, and that the other main Abrahamic faiths, Christianity and Islam, followed suit. The Jewish tradition tells how Abraham banished the false gods and idols of his ancestors and made a covenant with Yahweh, the one true god. Christianity and Islam follow this tradition, which is why they are all known as Abrahamic religions. Sigmund Freud in his last book controversially suggested that Moses, the prophet who led the Jews from their exile in Egypt and gave them the Ten Commandments, was actually Egyptian. Few people agree with him, but Egypt is the setting, nevertheless, for what is the first known example of monotheism.
In 1824, one of the first British Egyptologists, the redoubtable John Gardner Wilkinson, stumbled upon traces of an ancient city in the middle of nowhere on the banks of the Nile at Amarna. Strangely, the ruins looked as if they had been systematically destroyed, with every decoration obliterated. Since then, the mystery of Amarna has been partly revealed.
Amarna is the story of the pharaoh Akhenaten, the father of Tutankhamun, who founded the lost city in the fourteenth century BC as the site of a religious revolution. In the pictures and texts uncovered by archaeologist Flinders Petrie in the 1890s, Akhenaten is shown addressing his prayers to one god and one god only, Aten, the disk of the sun, rather than the Egyptians’ multitude of deities.[1]
Akhenaten’s monotheistic revolution was brief, and rubbed from history by his successors the moment he died, but his vision of a different world and his motto, ‘Living in truth’, inspired Petrie to comment in awe: ‘No King of Egypt, nor of any other part of the world, has ever carried out his honesty of expression so openly. Thus in every line Akhenaten stands out as perhaps the most original thinker that ever lived in Egypt, and one of the greatest idealists in the world.’
Other historians trace the origins of monotheism back through another route to the Zoroastrian religion. No one knows exactly who Zoroaster was, or when he lived. The traditional view is that he lived around the tenth century BC, but it may have been up to 1,000 years earlier. In his famous Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra), Nietzsche identified Zoroaster as the first to divide the world into good and evil – it is this division that Nietzsche wished to end by killing God. Zoroaster’s vision was of a world shaped by the battle between light and dark, good and evil. This is not just a cosmic battle between the supreme god Ahura-Mazda, who may be the first example of a single and supreme deity, and his evil opponent Ahriman; it’s a battle in which every human is free to play his part. According to Zoroaster, we are all ‘angels’ descended to join the fight against evil and save the world. Yet we are not compelled to join the fight; we have free will. The drawback is that if we don’t live well, we will come to grief at the Final Judgement and may be sent to hell.
Zoroastrianism is now an almost forgotten religion, practised by people such as the Parsees in India, but it was the root of many key Christian and Islamic ideas. Christians, of course, believe in the God of the Old Testament, the same God worshipped by Jews, but they temper their monotheism by the idea of the Trinity – the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Most Christians believe that the division of God into three parts doesn’t diminish his complete transcendence. Some critics argue that this makes Christianity a tritheistic religion, and a few insist that the inclusion of the Virgin Mary, Satan and the angels makes Christianity a polytheistic religion, but they are very much in a minority. Islam, however, is uncompromisingly monotheistic. The Islamic concept of Tawhid holds that God (Allah) is one and unique. Indeed, this is the central belief of Islam. This has very profound implications, which Islamic scholars have debated ever since the time of Mohammed.
The term ‘monotheism’ was coined in 1660 by Henry More[2] to show how it was the most advanced form of religion, following on from primitive animism and slightly less primitive polytheism. And many before and since have argued that monotheism is the most rational religious belief. It was felt to be rational because monotheism allowed the world to be a completely logical place. Because God was both internal to people and external to the reality of the universe, there was no need for superstition and irrationality in the real world. God could simply inhabit the inner man and be behind everything.[3]
The tenth-century Islamic polymath Abu ibn Sina (Avicenna) argued that it was illogical to imagine that existence popped out of nothing, so a belief in God was rational. Many Ancient Greek thinkers used logic to argue that the existence of a single divine principle was essential for the cosmos not to be utter chaos. Aristotle talked in terms of a Prime Mover. Otherwise how did it all start? Why does anything happen? Why does logic work at all?
All seem to be arguing, in their different ways, that without the presence of a God, things make no sense and seem almost irredeemably chaotic and meaningless. A whole panoply of divinities doesn’t offer this reassurance; a single omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent being does. It is this powerful reassurance that has drawn millions of people to the monotheistic religions over the centuries, providing an answer on both a profound intellectual and a simple personal level.[4]
On the other hand, monotheism has been accused of fomenting conflict in a way that polytheism never could. It has been argued that one key factor in the success of the Roman empire was the way it allowed conquered people to keep their local gods, because they presented no threat to the panoply of Roman gods. If you believe there is just one God, however, then you must believe that people who don’t believe in the same God are wrong. You might even believe you were failing in your belief if you did not assert God’s dominion over others. This is why, the argument goes, there have been so many catastrophic holy wars, and why there is still such potential for conflict between, for instance, Islam and the West.[5]
In the same way that monotheism might provoke conflict like this, however, it can unite people and create a sense of brotherhood of shared beliefs in a way that is far beyond either polytheistic religion or atheism or agnosticism. Monotheism has a unique power to sweep people up in an evangelising wave because of the sense of belonging it creates – which is why Christianity and Islam have grown to encompass so many billions of people. Whether you think this shared experience is ultimately a good thing or not, there is no doubting monotheism’s lasting power as an idea.
[1] Akhenaten’s experiment wasn’t just a change from many gods to one; it was a revolution in thought too. Petrie found art in Amarna that had a freshness, a love of nature and informality unique in Egypt – painted floors with birds flying over marshes, walls with animals gambolling in fields, and, most extraordinary of all, intimate, tender portraits of the deformed pharaoh and his wife, cradling their children on the lap or kissing affectionately. It was as if he had stumbled upon a pharaoh’s family snapshot album.
[2] Henry More was writing at a time when the notion of monotheism wa
s receiving particular attention from philosophers and rational theologians. The poet John Milton, a contemporary of More, had considerable problems with writing his great epic Paradise Lost in the style of a Greek epic – with its polytheistic conventions, divine councils and cosmic scope – and yet presenting a monotheistic God who is all-knowing and all-powerful and who has no physical image. The result was a unique and powerful creation.
[3] One argument for monotheism is that if there were more than one God, the universe would be in chaos because of competing deities, and it couldn’t be studied logically. Another is that since God is perfect, there can be no other, since any other would have to be different, so not perfect, so not God. A third is that since God is infinite and everywhere, there is no room for any other. All this shows the danger of arguing for or against God on a rational basis. The arguments sound like clutching at straws, pursuing the kind of logic that goes round in circles rather than convinces with its truth. Very few people have been persuaded to believe in a single God through rational argument.
[4] Sigmund Freud in Moses and Monotheism argued that monotheism played a central role in human intellectual development. The prohibition of worshipping idols was particularly crucial: ‘The compulsion to worship a God whom one cannot see,’ wrote Freud, meant that ‘a sensory perception was given a second place to what may be called an abstract idea – a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality.’ In this way, monotheism taught people to reflect on the symbolic – which was the spur to the great achievements of Jews, Muslims and Christians in mathematics, science and the arts.
[5] It may be, though, that the link between monotheism and conflict is more subtle – because it relies on revelation, messages direct from God, it encourages a certainty that you have the answers and others don’t. But this kind of delusion is not exclusive to monotheism; it could happen just as easily to polytheists and to atheists. Monotheists assert that God is behind them and them only; atheists and polytheists can be equally pigheaded.
#45 Honour
Honour is not something people talk a great deal about these days, yet for much of human history it was considered the highest human virtue, a virtue so far above all others that it was worth dying for. ‘Hold it the greatest sin,’ wrote the Roman poet Juvenal two millennia ago, ‘to prefer existence to honour, and for the sake of life to lose the reasons for living.’ And 1,400 years later, Shakespeare put remarkably similar sentiments into the mouth of Thomas Mowbray in Richard II: ‘Mine honour is my life, both grow in one. Take honour from me, and my life is done. Then, dear my liege, mine honour let me try; In that I live, and for that I will die.’ Both Juvenal and Mowbray make it clear that even life is worth less than honour; without honour, life is meaningless. About 3,300 years ago, the visionary Egyptian pharaoh, Akhenaten, explained it thus: ‘Honour is the inner garment of the Soul; the first thing put on by it with the flesh, and the last it lays down at its separation from it.’
What’s extraordinary is just how pervasive the concept of honour was. Just as it is embedded in Ancient Egypt and Rome, so too it is there in Ancient Greece, where Socrates writes in high praise of honour; in Ancient China, where the philosopher Laozi, the founder of Taoism, writes of the importance of honour for a leader; and in Ancient Japan, where the Bushido code of the Samurai warrior insisted that if you lost your honour, the only way to save it was to commit hara-kiri or seppuku – ritual suicide by slicing your belly with a sword. And it’s not just ancient history. When the Germans demanded that Belgium surrender at the start of the First World War, the Belgian Prime Minister, Charles de Broqueville, responded: ‘Our submission would serve no end; if Germany is victorious, Belgium, whatever her attitude, will be annexed to the Reich. If die we must, better death with honour.’ Honour has really mattered to many people, for a long time, in many places.
Of course, when people talked about their honour being lost or offended, they were often really talking about status. Status maintained your place in the world, so losing it could be calamitous. That’s why honour was crucial for leaders. To lose their honour could mean losing their power to command (unless they resorted to sheer brute force or low cunning), and it was worth fighting for.
This didn’t just apply to people, but to kingdoms and empires, who fought wars on the basis of offended honour. Sometimes, this was just a pretext to war for more basic reasons; sometimes it really was a matter of honour. Either way, honour was public justification enough. Similarly, those seeking to avoid war often looked for ‘peace with honour’. But, of course, this can be tainted with the implication that it wasn’t so honourable after all – an undertone of weakness or deviousness. Think of Neville Chamberlain returning from the 1938 Munich conference with Hitler, declaring that he had brought back ‘peace with honour’, or Richard Nixon broadcasting to the American people in 1973 that he had brought ‘peace with honor in Vietnam and South Asia’. These instances stick in the mind rather than the countless times, perhaps, when peace with honour was genuine.
Too often, honour seems, with twenty-first-century hindsight, to be merely macho posturing. Too often, too, it is used to dress up violence and prejudice with respectable clothes. This is the kind of honour that the Mafia embraced as they embarked on bloody spates of revenge killings. It’s the kind of honour that fuels teenage gang warfare today, inspires terrorists to commit atrocities in the name of righteous anger, and drives families to kill their own daughters in ‘honour killings’. Again it’s about status, and calling it ‘honour’ is just giving an ugly deed a pretty face.[1]
Yet honour has another side. To talk of honour simply as a status symbol or macho posturing is to forget its powerful allure to the wisest and best minds, and its ability to inspire the most wonderful human lives and deeds. Some of the most appealing heroes place honour above all, and so do many humble, decent people. Dr Johnson defined it as ‘nobility of soul, magnanimity and a scorn of meanness’. Others would say it is the quiet determination to do what is right.
The concept of honour is so overlaid with cultural history that it’s hard to pin down. Yet most of us can recognise what is an honourable act and what is not. And almost all of us want people to behave honourably. We want our politicians to be incorruptible, our friends to be trustworthy, the people who affect our careers to judge us fairly, our teachers not to show favouritism.
Karl Marx insisted that honour is an aristocratic value, handed down from the feudal age and helping to keep the working class in their place.[2] Yet some of the most recognisably honourable people of the last century have been those bucking the system, like the first Labour leader Keir Hardie, or Nelson Mandela. Perhaps it’s the insistence on doing the right thing in the face of adversity that is the hallmark of the person of honour.
It’s about ‘integrity’ and ‘decency’ and knowing right from wrong, but it’s more than just morals; it’s morals in action. It’s what makes you hand in the cash-stuffed wallet you found on the train. It’s what makes the most admired sportspeople play in the right spirit before playing to win.
The conflation of the two sides of honour – between the urge to do the right thing regardless of cost and the protection of status, between the personal and the public – comes together tellingly in the New Year’s Honours List in the UK. In the list, many ordinary people are honoured for genuinely selfless works and their services to the community, alongside celebrities who have done little more than become famous.
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer argued that honour is within reach of us all, while celebrity is not. ‘Honour,’ Schopenhauer wrote, ‘means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is. Fame is something which must be won; honour, only something which must not be lost.’[3] He made a crucial distinction between a false idea of honour that is simply reputation, which when insulted can be restored only by inflicting a greater insult, and true honour, which is entirely internal and cannot be hurt by anyone else.
Some people associate honour with hot-blooded cultur
es, where people flare up at the slightest provocation. Others say honour arises in lawless tribal cultures, like the Bedouin and Scottish clans, where an honour code provides essential protection. Or that honour is essentially a martial code to instil discipline and loyalty.
All these things are true, yet only touch the surface. They don’t explain why Akhenaten thought it so important, why Socrates and Aristotle did, and why so many other thinkers have done. And it’s not simply in the distant past, either. Listen to the young American, Oliver Wendell Holmes, in 1866: ‘[T]he power of honor to bind men’s lives is not less now than it was in the Middle Ages. Now as then it is the breath of our nostrils; it is that for which we live, for which, if need be, we are willing to die.’ Or George Bernard Shaw: ‘The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honour.’[4] Even the acerbic Gore Vidal suggested in the 1970s that: ‘perhaps our schools should train a proper civil service. Train people who prefer payment in honor rather than in money.’
Our heroes remain men and women of honour, people who do the right thing whatever the personal cost. In almost every story and movie, any hero who is truly admirable has this core of honour. As the writer Michael Novak says: ‘Americans [and others today] love professionals, killers especially, ruthless investigators, determined secret agents, anybody who absolutely concentrates on proficiency, undistracted by human involvement.’ Yet there is a sense that this single-mindedness is a sign of honour, a dedication to duty that is ultimately admirable. Dr House in the TV series House may be a curmudgeonly misanthrope but he appeals because at his core he seems an honourable man. Indeed, it is the very difficulty of being honourable that is heroic. As Hemingway writes in Death in the Afternoon (1932): ‘Too much honor destroys a man quicker than too much of any other fine quality.’
The World's Greatest Idea Page 4
