The Great Divide

by Peter Watson

  Hillel maintains further that the precarious life of pastoral nomads, in which any surpluses could not be stored, compelled them to be constantly on the move, in search of pasture and water, and it may well have been this which induced them to enter Egypt. Here, they found a stable society, with plentiful water. But, to the Egyptians, they may well have seemed the quintessential ‘other’, and this may have given them the idea that they were special in some way, that they had a covenant with God, and that it was their God which was ‘other’.69

  Eventually the Hebrews left Egypt. Hillel calculates that the numbers must have been much smaller than it says in the bible, for the desert could never had supported large tribes. But the important thing is that they left Egypt with their sheep and goats and that, while in the wilderness, they established the calf god. This means that their time in Egypt, which lasted for generations, ‘had not destroyed the pastoral tradition’. They had maintained their ‘other’ status.70

  The Ten Commandments, which were acquired during their time in the desert, make no provisions for fixed ritual nor make any mention of sacrifice. Hillel believes that by this time the Hebrews wanted to give up pastoralism, and became farmers. Their labile environment made them distrust all others except themselves. But the synthesis of monotheism, he says, took place in the city, which was a symbol for them of national unity, where the new religion set them apart.71 The importance of the temple was to act as a focus of the nation’s religion, where commoners and noblemen and kings alike worshipped Yahweh. El was one of the original names for god, but it was, says Hillel, derived from ayil, meaning ram and implying leader or chief.72

  CHANGING BELIEFS ABOUT ANIMALS

  Two more profound changes were to overtake people in the Old World, especially the Mediterranean/Near Eastern region, either side of the birth of Jesus Christ. These were the end of sacrifice, blood sacrifice, and the advent of alphabet literacy, giving rise to religions of the book.73

  The end of public blood sacrifices mattered because it eventually brought about a full-scale reconstitution of religious ritual. There had been no (retainer) sacrifice in Egypt since the First Dynasty (3050– 2800 BC), there had been a gradual transition from human to bloody to vegetable offerings in India by the time of the Satapatha-Brahman (eighth to sixth centuries BC), and human sacrifice seems to have ended in China in 384 BC.74 In his well-known study of Near Eastern influences on Greek culture, Walter Burkett describes the growth of ‘substitute sacrifice’ via a series of Mesopotamian legends in which, for example, a goat or a ram would be dressed up as a human being as a sacrifice to lift a pestilence – the relevant god being successfully deceived.75

  The Israelites’ temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by Titus in AD 70 and it was this which finally brought an end to the practice of sacrifice. (Human sacrifice was outlawed in the Roman empire in 97 BC, but it hung on until roughly AD 400, according to Miranda Aldhouse Green, though it was always rare and the evidence for the later killings is often ambiguous.) With this caesura, the priests were marginalised.76 Ritual activity was also transformed. Blood sacrifice had been at the heart of ancient religions, as we have seen, both among Jews and pagans. But just as the ancient Near Eastern world was reconsidering its position on monotheism, so sacrifice was under review as well. Constantius II was just one who thought sacrifice was folly and focused on its end. There was, besides this, says Guy Stroumsa, a great debate in Hellenic thought about the value and necessity of sacrifice, as the writings of Lucian of Samosata, Theothrastus, and Porphyry show. The latter’s On Abstinence (from all meat) is the best known generally.77

  This was all taking place against a background when attitudes to animals generally and domesticated mammals in particular were changing fundamentally. In India, when the sacrifice of animals had been replaced by bloodless offerings, around 1000 BC, there had been a turn to vegetarianism and the doctrine of doing no harm to living creatures had been expressed in Brahmanical lawbooks.78 There was no turn to vegetarianism further west (not generally anyway, though it did happen here and there); instead, there was a more complex reaction. In Greece, for example, it was observed to begin with that both gods and animals have in common the fact that they were not human. At the same time, animals – domesticated animals anyway – interacted with humans and had animal societies. They shared many characteristics with humans – in the number of limbs, in their love for their offspring, the necessity for carnal union to bring forth new individuals.79

  The Mediterranean economies depended on animal labour and resources and a hierarchy had emerged based on the perceived affinity that animals had with humans. This involved an important element of reciprocity: agricultural animals were given protection in exchange for their services. At that time they were used mainly for their power, their hides, their wool and their milk – meat was still of minor importance. In sacrifice, they were supposed to be led to the ritual by a slack rope (i.e., not pulled against their will), and a cup of water was thrown over their heads, causing them to nod, and therefore ‘assent’ to their killing. This would appear to be a dim memory of the hunter-gatherer’s reciprocal relationship with the animals he or she kills.

  During the first millennium BC, however, attitudes towards animals began to shift. The turning point appears to have come with Aristotle and the Stoics. According to the Stoics, animals are aloga, creatures without reason or belief. The Greeks reanalysed animals’ psychological capacities, Aristotle concluding that tame animals are superior to wild ones. Since animals had no reason, the Stoics concluded that they were made for the use of humans, a view that was taken over by Jews and Christians and finds expression in the bible.80

  There was more to it than that, however. Certain animals, it was believed, were capable of acting morally: some, for instance, showed modesty in their sexual life and some did not eat flesh. It followed that if animals were capable of behaving morally, they should be treated with justice. Gryllus observed that ‘lions and horses are never slaves to other lions and horses, as man is to man’, while Apollonius made no blood offerings and chose not to wear clothes fashioned from animal products. He and others believed that animals were ‘ends in themselves’ and not, as the Stoics insisted, made solely for the use of humans. Others asked different moral questions, such as: does brutality to animals make men brutal to each other?81 It was clear that animals had the capacity for suffering, so it was unjust to harm them, especially as the domesticated animals did not harm humans. This caused a big difference to be made in Greece and Rome between tame animals and wild ones.

  At the same time, humans began to distance themselves from animals, so as to move closer to the gods. This was one reason why the Romans sometimes looked down on the Egyptians, who worshipped animal gods, a practice they may have adopted because they were frightening or strange or had qualities not found among humans. (The crocodile was worshipped because it had no tongue and in that way was an example of the idea that the divine word does not need a voice. The scarab was worshipped because it rolled its ball of dung similar to the way the sun daily moved across the heavens.)82 Another reason animals were worshipped may have been because they seemed more mysterious (and therefore wiser) than humans. Moreover, they don’t change and so became symbolic of eternity. Ovid asked in Meta-morphoses what does it mean to be a beast? But even he saw it as a move down to be turned into a beast in metempsychosis. In Rome the arena brutalised the difference between humans and animals.

  This all amounted to a change in man’s relationship with animals, from reciprocity to domination, which was further reinforced by the introduction, in Mithraism, of the taurobolium. Here the animal was killed over a pit where the priest was placed so that gallons of blood showered on him, the idea being that contact with so much blood made the priest even more divine.83

  Porphyry famously argued, in On abstinence from animates (animates being creatures with a soul), that it was not necessary to eat sacrificed animals, that compassion should be shown towards them – the dom
esticated variety at least – and that material gods want material sacrifices whereas non-material gods want spiritual sacrifices. Animal sacrifice was now defined as the custom of peoples – barbarians – who lacked spiritual insight; in fact, this became a cultural dividing line. To treat animals justly, Porphyry said, improves human nature. (At the same time he defended people’s right to kill dangerous wild animals.) Unlike the Stoics or Aristotle, Porphyry conceded to animals both rationality and language, but he insisted that humans were more rational than animals and that the latter were not capable of salvation. The pig, for instance, could ‘never look up at the sky’. For him spiritual sacrifice – as practised by the Christians, say – was less barbaric, less degenerate, than animal sacrifice.84

  Genesis of course gives man ‘dominion’ over the animals. Indeed, animals in the bible are more like slaves than partners to man (only serpents and asses talk in the bible). Fishes and sheep were both seen as harmless and good. Shepherding was a lowly occupation but sheep were very important economically, the most favoured animals for sacrifice, and shepherds were used in the bible chiefly as metaphors – as teachers who oversee their flocks. Horses were expensive and identified with war and the aristocracy, whereas the sheep and the hen, taking her offspring under her wing, expressed the tenderness that many felt towards the animal world, a tenderness that Christianity would attempt to appropriate.85

  In Genesis, then, man is made in the image of God, and the boundary between humans and animals was strengthened with, in effect, the Christians ‘leaving the animals behind’. With Christianity and the end of sacrifice (see below) animals were excluded from sacred space. This was very different from the New World, of course, where, as we have seen, and as we shall soon see again, the boundaries between shamans and the jaguar, and other animals, remained fluid and ambiguous. In the Old World, St Augustine (354–430) made the irrationality of animals – and their separation from humanity – decisive.86 Outposts continuing the old ways endured, of course. Among the Slavic peoples, the sacrifice of young animals lingered as late as the twelfth century.

  THE PRIVATISATION OF RELIGION

  The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70 was a political/ military event and, strictly speaking, unrelated to these changing attitudes and beliefs concerning animals. But, as sometimes happens, context and catalyst coalesced neatly. The disappearance of the temple facilitated the spiritualisation of the liturgy by transforming the rites which accompanied sacrificial activity, so that prayers now replaced the daily sacrifices. This further brought about a shift to ritual without priests; worship without sacrifice became more spiritual, ritual could now take place anywhere: the rabbis were teachers but not priests and had no liturgical role. Instead of blood sacrifices, the Jews now made spiritual sacrifices, as reflected in prayer. ‘We see here the privatization of religion, a change from a civic religion to the quiet rituals of individual and family worship. The study of the Torah replaces sacrifice.’ Furthermore, prayer, fasting and charity became the three pillars after the fall of the Temple. ‘Judaism now became a religion of alienation from God . . . God is no longer evoked but invoked.’87 This too is an interiorisation of faith.

  Christianity of course overlapped with Judaism but it was not the same, even then. The appearance of the codex, which many Christians distinguished from the Jewish use of the Torah scroll, allowed the development of silent reading, another form of interiorisation which was an essential ingredient in the transformation of culture and in the practice of religion under the Roman Empire. Furthermore, unlike the Jews and many pagans, the Christians had in common neither land nor language nor clothing – all things that hitherto had defined collective identity. Thus Christians conceived a new sort of people unknown until then: ‘a people defined by their belief in a single myth, preserved in a sacred writing’.88 This was further reinforced by the idea that, in order to offer all people salvation through Christ, his revelation had to be translated. The first Christians, therefore, in marked contrast to earlier practices, proposed to translate the Scriptures into all possible languages. One effect of this was the emergence of literacy in languages that had previously been only oral, such as Armenian and Gothic.89

  Books played a rather different role among Christians than among pagans, though Guy Stroumsa says pagans did have the idea of sacred books. But the spread of Christianity brought in other developments. In the east and in the west, the foundation of monastic culture was the uninterrupted reading of the book. On the other hand, in the great cities of the east, Christians succeeded in Christianising Greco-Roman teaching, establishing what was in effect a double culture, embracing two totally different literary traditions, what Stroumsa calls ‘the double helix of European culture’: the bible and some of the great classical texts of Greco-Latin culture – especially the Stoic and Platonic traditions. ‘This ensured that theology became a part of Christianity and a turning point, decisive for the structure of western thinking, the “collusion” between philosophy and theology.’90 This important development is taken further in chapter twenty-two.

  Christianity was of course at root based on sacrifice but on a reinterpreted idea of sacrifice. The horror at blood sacrifice expressed by the Christians, coming on top of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, was important in changing this ancient practice but we must not overlook the fact that martyrdom had elements of the idea of sacrifice. René Girard in his book, Violence and the Sacred, argued early on that Christianity ‘put an end once and for all to the sacrificial violence of all religions of antiquity’, but added that the idea of sacrifice did not die.91 In effect, he said, the soul became ‘the interior temple’.

  Another change implicit in all this was that sacrifices had been carried out in public, as expressions of collective identity. The end of sacrifice brought with it the end of civic (public) rituals. Temples had been built on central sites whereas, as Stroumsa points out, ‘The new religion had a new geography’, which reflected a new idea of the community, which was now much less centralised and more intimate, limited in this way because the new ‘text-based faith’ had to be heard and discussed. More than hitherto, therefore, beliefs in Christianity (and post-temple Judaism) were intellectual/abstract rather than based on ritual. Whereas pagan religion in Rome involved the observance of ritual, post-temple Judaism and Christianity were above all internal. This implied further, especially with Christianity, that the new religions defined themselves as lying outside political frameworks.92

  All this amounted to a great rupture in the way people defined their identity, whether personal identity or collective identity. In the Hellenistic world, identity had been conceived essentially in cultural terms, but by the fifth century AD, identity had become a matter understood almost invariably in religious terms.93 With this, went a profound change in the criteria by which identity was established: the wisdom teacher was replaced by the spiritual master. Whereas the Greek philosophers had offered explanations of the world, the Christian teachers were different from the philosophers, the teachers of wisdom, in that the Christian monk, for example, did not guide his pupil to the point where he could follow his own way (as Socrates, Plato, Gotama and Confucius did) but accompanied him on his ‘quest for salvation’ until he achieved his goal. ‘The goal of the spiritual master, then, is to prevent the spiritual disciple thinking for himself . . . The suppression of will and ignorance and obedience are praised.’94 Christianity proposed that there was to be no salvation ‘except through an intermediary, a master at once human and divine.’ Such structures and practices were virtually unknown elsewhere in the ancient world.

  THE IDEA OF THE ‘OTHER’

  Though long, this chapter has in all fairness only scratched the surface of the profound religious changes that occurred during the Axial Age. In summing up, we can say that each Axial civilisation was different, as you would expect, yet went through several similar transformations. Those elements consisted of the following inter-linked features.

&nb
sp; There was first a desire for compassion, justice, ethical advance which put the interests of the poor and weak on a par with, and even ahead of, those of the elites.

  There was an egalitarian spirit abroad, allied to the promotion of moderation, humility, quietness, intimacy and even silence, of putting others before oneself, all no doubt as a reaction to the great violence that raged across Eurasia in the Bronze Age/Iron Age transition.

  The new spirituality was cemented around a new kind of deity, or religious/ethical entity, which (or who) was essentially ineffable, unknowable, hidden, abstract, transcendent and wholly ‘other’ but which (or who) was equally available to all, as was the ‘salvation’ this new entity offered for those who passed the test of faith.

  The new transcendent entities did not require blood sacrifice, in societies where domesticated mammals were increasingly valuable, but instead public ritual was downgraded in favour of more intimate forms of worship, typified by prayer and the study of sacred writings.

  Writing itself, in allowing better codified translation, transformed religion too, changing the form of religious hierarchy, pushing it beyond narrow political boundaries and, via the monastic institution, as we shall see, allowed theological and other activities to flourish.

  Of all these changes and transformations, the greatest was the idea that God was transcendent, totally ‘other’, together with the spirit of egalitarianism that this idea allowed to spread. Egalitarianism is essentially seen as a political idea in the contemporary world, and it is an idea that never gained ground in the New World civilisations (though it existed of course in those New World societies at an earlier stage of cultural evolution). But egalitarianism began in the Old World civilisations as a religious idea before it found form in politics (just as urbanisation was a religious idea before it was anything else), though politics and religion overlapped much more in the past than they do now.