My previous post was about the short introduction to The Stillborn God. I've since read the first two chapters.
Chapter 1, "The Crisis" is largely about Christian political theology and its origins. I cannot comment on the accuracy of the history, but the insights provide some food for thought. He gets at the core issue pretty early, noting two things I've remarked on before. Page 22:
God's intentions themselves need no justification, since he is the last court of appeal. If we could justify him, we would not need him; we would only need the arguments validating his actions.
I'm not sure I completely agree with that, but I get the argument. I think there would be ways to say something about the importance of the final authority while hiding his rationales behind a veil of mystery. But maybe that argument just reduces to what I've said before about the need for a final authority so you don't have agonize over your postulates.
On pages 22-23, he makes an interesting comment about Greek political philosophy:
In ancient Greece, some imagined a first cause or "unmoved mover" without personality who embodied divine law, which philosophers could contemplate to understand the cosmic order and man's place within it. Other Greeks entertained thoughts about a panoply of deities with conflicting personalities but whose natures were still intelligible to human reason. Such gods were never thought by the Greeks to exercise revealed political authority because they created man and the cosmos--and perhaps that is why political philosophy was first able to develop in ancient Greece.
I've made the point before that pagan pantheons provide no moral authority because there is no power monopoly and no consistent behavior between the deities. There is instead strife, and most of the point of morality in society is to avoid or resolve strife.
He goes on to talk about the challenges facing Christianity, which has a 3-fold deity with very different roles in the world, and a history that started as a minority faith and then accidentally acquired an Empire. Christ was a hippie figure but his followers were running the Roman Empire. He over-simplifies when he occasionally contrasts with Judaism and Islam, but he isn't really writing about them. He's making the point that Christianity had a dilemma in constructing a political theology, but at least had a divinity with a monopoly on moral authority that could, in principle, provide the final axiom. I'm not sure that Christianity is as unique as he claims in having dilemmas around political theology, but he never pushes hard on the claim of uniqueness, so I guess I can let it slide. I'm sure that there are differences between Christianity's problems and other religions' problems.
Chapter 2 dissects the history and struggles around that. I like the point on page 59 about how Christian cosmology is a rather strange thing:
The Christian conception of the cosmos was always a patchwork affair. It had been cobbled together in the Middle Ages from biblical sources, the speculations in Plato's dialogue Timaeus, the systematic scientific treatises of Aristotle (filtered through Muslim commentators), and the ancient astronomical works of Ptolemy. Why it was fashioned at all is something of a puzzle. The Hebrew Bible does not engage in systematic speculation about the structure of the cosmos; it assumes that nature was created good but has nothing fundamental to teach us about how to live. The Torah is complete. The Christian New Testament takes a similar approach to nature: it is there, it is good, but it is not grace.
In The Meaning of Creation, Conrad Hyers argued that Genesis sought to demystify the world, treating it not as the playground of disparate pagan deities but a place that one God made with one purpose, and it is good. And the explanation of God's creation involves a work week ending in rest, just as a righteous adherent of the faith would work all week and devote the 7th day to worship and rest. Trying to tie this to some sort of natural science was never the goal, and if the Church had grasped that point the Galileo Affair might not have been an issue.
Much of the chapter concerns Hobbes. I am taking a big risk by offering summary of a summary of Lilla's Hobbes and his work Leviathan, but how else will I recall anything if I don't write about what I read? Hobbes argued that human existence is at perpetual risk of a state of war, and for fear of death and loss they hand power to a sovereign who can guarantee peace. This is the basic argument that an effective government basically has a monopoly on the use of force within its territory. Worse, people who look into the depths of their own souls will see dark desires, project their desires onto others, and see a need for violence because whoever moves first has the advantage. In Lilla's read, Hobbes reduces the problem of evil to game theory: Conflict is a natural state and you have to be aggressive. Forget demons and original sin and all of that, there's a much simpler explanation of the darkness of human existence.
Lilla also argues that while the task of a king is to keep peace in his territory, churchmen cheat by speaking directly to the people and offering messages that don't necessarily fit into the sovereign's plan.
Lilla summarizes Hobbes' proposal as being not to abolish the fears that drive humans, but rather:
...focus it on one figure alone, the sovereign. If an absolute sovereign could ensure that his subjects feared no other sovereigns before him, human or divine, then peace might be possible.
At the root of all power is fear and force, and the hope is that absolute power will bring absolute peace. Well, um, yeah, we know how well that works. But then again, no state has ever been truly effective, especially back then, so I guess I see the temptation.
But to Lilla, the most important thing in Hobbes is not his case for an absolute sovereign but that he turns political questions into questions about human nature and how people see the world. Everything is driven by human fears and how they project their own flaws onto others, so perception is ultimately everything.
Interestingly, Lilla claims that while Hobbes was OK with a state religion to help ensure compliance, he was not too concerned with whether people honestly believed, only with whether they demonstrated obedience. He reads Hobbes as being interested in vanquishing the interplay of church and state because it led to churchmen bypassing kings, and in this way Lilla sees some continuity between Hobbes and much more liberal thinkers that came after. If they were interested in taking away the power of churchmen and finding a better way to enforce harmony then Lilla sees them as being in some sort of continuity with Hobbes.
What I find interesting in all of this is how the problem of perception is tied in with the problem of power. It ultimately comes down to who the armed men will listen to. What they perceive and fear determines what they respond to and how they respond. In this regard there's some overlap with Plato, whose book The Republic is concerned with governance but goes deep into the allegory of the cave: How can we know if what we see is reality or something put there to fool us? We only know what we perceive, and that will affect our conduct, including the conduct of those entrusted with power. Just 9 days ago we saw how this plays out: A mob stormed the Capitol because they perceive an election as rigged, and armed men defended it because, whatever they might personally think about the particulars of whatever allegations, they were loyal to the system that certified Biden. Mind you, I have every reason to believe that Biden's win was legitimate, but the facts of legitimacy are less important than the perceived facts. How do I honestly know that it was legit? How do they honestly know it wasn't? We have our preferences that determine whom we trust, and a critical mass of people in the right places put their trust in the system and hence fought back against the mob, while a disturbing number of people put their trust elsewhere and stormed the building.
The roots of power are dark and fundamental stuff, and what I'm hoping to learn is what Lilla sees as the fallout from removing God from that equation. He says that a lot of political philosophy in Europe arose from religious wars, bloody battles between people who all believed in the God of Abraham, the Bible, and Jesus, but were loyal to different clergy. Before reading this I assumed that the problem of mixing religion and state was solely about the passions for control that come from religion, and the excesses that those passions can lead to. Most kings wind up being practical, hoping that they can get some tax revenue, keep the place running, and keep themselves running it. How a peasant prays is rarely their biggest headache. But neighbors and local clergy can be terrible. The take I'm getting here is that it's not just about them, it's about the fact that they are a separate center of power. That's interesting to me, because my liberalism leads me to believe that a society needs many centers of power. I've said much about how bad it is for economies and "the good jobs" to be monocultures. I still think that's true, but there are obviously more angles here. Take away religion and you take away its problems, but you don't take away the needs it fulfilled, and yet you do take away a center of power, with all of its advantages and drawbacks.
Food for thought.
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