Book Review 2 – The Pagan Christ by Tom Harpur

Madonna with Child and Angels, Filippo Lippi
Originally uploaded by f_snarfel

I read this book a few years ago and was very surprised that a former Professor and Anglican priest would argue that Christianity is a synthesis of Ancient Egyptian and pagan mystery religions with a Jewish twist. It even reconciled me to Christianity a little, because I discovered that despite the overt suppression of Greek and Roman philosophy and the burning of pagan libraries by Christians, many of the ideas and myths of the ancient world in fact survived by being integrated into Christianity. It is a well researched book with good footnotes and an extensive bibliography that has provided me with lots of further reading by authors such as Bishop Spong, Robert Funk and the Jesus Seminar and Sir James Frazer (author of the seminal Golden Bough).

The theme of the book is complex but the main thrust is the incredible similarity that exists between Jesus and the many saviour gods that existed in the ancient world particularly the Egyptian God Horus, whom Harpur claims is the original archetypal Christos. The idea that a man-god who could be born of a virgin, perform miracles, suffer and die yet be resurrected to eternal life it seems did not originate with Jesus. Harpur believes that the truth and relevance of these tales have nothing whatever to do with actual happenings in history but everything to do with changing consciousness to “receive sublime truths accessible in no other way”. He means by way of symbols, allegories and myths.

Harpur believes Plato’s idea that we are all “sparks of divine fire struck off from the flint of the Eternal”, immortal souls clad in mortal bodies and that the divine is within all of us. He says that the ancient messiahs were symbolic sun figures who came not only each day with the sunrise and sunset, but were renewed through the seasons, the solstices and the equinoxes. Worshippers could take part in this renewal through mystery dramas and rituals and thereby awaken their own divinity. He believes that the sole and crucial difference between the ancient myths and Christianity is that Christianity eventually concentrated this endless universal concept into a single historical person, Jesus, and the unrepeatable events of his life.

In Harpur’s opinion, timeless myth had been misread as biography. Christianity took a tragically wrong turn at the end of the third century by denying and trying to destroy its pagan roots. People were then forced to look externally to a morally perfect and unreachable Saviour instead of looking within for the divine and understanding the true meaning of the cross as the symbol of spirit entering matter. Oddly enough, Jesus appears to says this in Luke 17:21 “for in fact the kingdom of God is within you.” It is fascinating stuff and I realised that in the end, perhaps it is just a matter of terminology that separates me from religion as I prefer to use the words nature, the universe and life-energy instead of the words god, divinity, and immortal soul.

Balancing reason with mythology

Dionís
Originally uploaded by Sebastià Giralt

It occurs to me that I may have unintentionally given the impression that I am some kind of modern day Aristotle wrestling with deep metaphysical concepts such as Truth, Justice and the meaning of life while leading a life of impeccable virtue and moderation under the grapevines. This is not exactly the case. I don’t think I practice what I preach any more than your average philosopher. I have to confess that the only thing that stops me giving in totally to the sins of the flesh is concern for my health, not classical ideals of self-control and restraint. My virtues only really consist of being kind to animals and small children. I thought it best to be up front on that point before continuing my exploration of the philosophy and religion of the classical world.

Greek and Roman philosophers discussed morality, ethics and how to lead the Good Life from an entirely human perspective because their Gods were by and large uninterested in questions of morality. The Gods were larger than life humans who happened to be immortal and seemed to spend most of their time quarrelling, chasing lovers and sulking. The concept of life after death was mostly confined to a ghostly existence in the gloomy Hades along with everyone else. Only special heroic individuals like Heracles could look forward to the blessed fields of Elysium wherever they were!

The Gods obviously began as nature gods who developed special attachments to places or to cities. Temples were the houses of the Gods not where a congregation met for worship. You could pray to a particular God for protection when travelling for instance but all Gods and humans were at the mercy of the blind, indifferent Fortuna or chance. Religion was part of the civic duty toward your country and honoring the Gods meant honoring the State and its institutions. (This is why the Christians were seen as a treasonous cult and got into trouble later)

There was no revealed scripture but stories of the gods and their all too human antics abounded. Greek dramatists used the myths about the Gods to reveal profound truths about what it is to be human. The Oedipus complex described by Freud took its insights from the ancient myth. Plays like the Bacchae by Euripides pointed out the danger of trying to suppress the irrational in humans, a tendency that the Greeks and some would say our own culture, had. As the play shows, the desire to forget moderation and reason and find transcendence in a frenzy of ecstatic worship of Dionysus, the God of the Vine, had become increasingly popular.

Logos or rationality led to some of the great developments in mathematics, science and philosophy yet the role of mythos or the irrational perhaps equally contributed to classical culture. Maybe it is too easy in a rational world to underestimate the importance of the imagination and the outlet or catharsis that stories, music, dance and art provide in expressing human emotions and anxieties.

Humanism and the Enlightenment

Delacroix, Eugene (1798-1863) - 1830 Liberty Leading the People (Louvre)
Originally uploaded by RasMarley

It occurred to me on re-reading last week’s post that I was a little dismissive of Socrates. After all, he was perhaps one of the earliest documented sceptics. He was also unusual amongst sages and prophets that, instead of giving people rules to live by, Socrates demanded that people think for themselves and continually question the status quo. In Plato’s Euthyphro Socrates asks if something is good because God ordains it, or if God ordains it because it is already good. He was influential in the development not only of Ancient Greek rationalism but also that of modern humanism.

Humanism embraces modern science, democratic principles, human rights, free inquiry and the separation of Church and State. It rejects the notions of sin and guilt particularly in the area of sexual choice. I think it is a very liberating and joyful philosophy of life. It means taking control of one’s own life and finding your own answers to the great questions of life. It does not mean that anything goes or that all worldviews are equal, rather that there are objective criteria against which we should evaluate these views. Respect for the law and for human rights being amongst the most important.

The Enlightenment (1700-1800) had a profound effect not only on Humanism but also on law in the Western world with the idea expressed in the American Declaration of Independence “that all men are created equal” and deserve equality under the law.(It would take another century before these concepts would be applied to women, children and non-white people as well!) The Enlightenment was opposed to the arbitrary use of power by Monarchies and the Clergy and further influenced the American Declaration of Independence with the revolutionary idea that we all have a “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” regardless of social status.

At the same time, advances in science encouraged the idea that direct observation of nature rather than reliance on sacred texts could be the answer to some of the most important questions that confront humans. Ethics and values began to be discussed for the first time since antiquity in terms of a humanist world rather than one lived in obedience to God-given rules.

John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, famous philosophers of the Enlightenment, believed that humanity, in a pursuit of a better and more civilized way of life, has agreed to an implicit ‘social contract’ through which people grant certain rights to their neighbors in order to get the same rights for themselves. However with these rights come civic responsibilities. I think most people now accept that the rights of the individual sometimes need to be balanced by the greater good of society as a whole. But I will discuss the Utilitarianism philosophers John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham and their contribution to my Atheist view of the Good Life another time!

How to Live the Good Life

Plato & Aristotle
Originally uploaded by Muli Koppel

Ancient Greek philosophy is appealing to me as it is very much concerned with how to live the Good Life or how to achieve eudaimonia. This word is often translated as happiness but should be viewed as a state of mind rather than as a result of a particular pleasure. It is often described as ‘flourishing’ or the realization of human potential.

Greek philosophers also believed that virtue or arête was essential to happiness. Arête is not just about moral virtues such as justice, moderation, courage and wisdom, it also includes attributes such as beauty, good health and doing something well. Socrates claimed that a person who is not virtuous cannot be happy and that a person who is virtuous cannot fail to be happy. Different schools of thought grew up around the exact balance needed between virtue and happiness in order to lead a good life. Discussion on these issues was human-centred, often heated and independent of any super-natural law giver or deity which, in my opinion, makes it still relevant today.

Despite this, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle are not my favourite philosophers probably because I find them so hard to understand. I prefer my philosophy or guide to life a little simpler which is why I prefer Epicurus (although Socrates was good in encouraging people to think for themselves and be sceptical). However, a study of Aristotle’s book Ethics is useful, as he claimed that the natural function of humans was to reason and that to reason well is to reason in accordance with virtue. Epicurus agreed with him saying that of all the virtues, wisdom is the greatest, for through it we can learn which pleasures to seek and which to avoid.

Aristotle believed that we are driven by our natural instincts or passions and that we can achieve virtue if we seek the mean in the expression of these feelings. For example, for the feeling of fear, courage is the mean, rashness is the excessive expression and cowardice is the deficient expression. Virtues include generosity, prudence, patience and modesty. All the old biblical vices or sins such as envy, licentiousness, vanity and shamelessness are mentioned as either the deficient or excessive expression of human feelings or actions. Aristotle believed that virtue is not necessarily a capacity we are born with, we must develop it through practice and reason.

Unlike the Stoics who believed we should be indifferent to power, wealth and bodily pleasures and be happy with virtue alone, Aristotle was not so extreme and believed that friendship and good fortune in life and body were as important as reason and virtue in living the good life.

[I have found Philosophy: 100 Essential Thinkers by Philip Stokes (Arcturus Publishing, London 2008) and This is not a book: Adventures in Popular Philosophy by Michael Picard (Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest NSW 2007) and of course Wikipedia helpful for this post and for the post on Epicurus.]