The Cosmology of Ignorance

The late 15th century was an exciting time to be a Christian, especially if you were an intellectual. Erasmus (1466-1536) and Thomas More were exchanging letters across the English Channel full of exciting ideas about how to reform a religion bogged down in dogmatic overreach and massive corruption. They both saw a way forward for Christianity truer to its founder's intent, less in the thrall of the suffocating authority of Rome and its endless greed, which was sucking massive amounts of money out of ordinary Christians to build self-aggrandizing monuments like St. Peter's basilica in return for less time served in the flames of Purgatory.

And then came Martin Luther. The German monk didn't just agree with the ideas More, Erasmus, and other would-be reformers were talking about; he demanded them. For his pains he was officially condemned, then had to flee for his life. But first he appealed to Erasmus for support.

It's difficult to find a contemporary comparison between the two men. The closest we have to an intellectual who enjoys the fame Erasmus did in his time may be Noam Chomsky. Chomsky's name is known throughout the world, and his books, more than 100 of them, are continuously read and quoted. Erasmus's letters to other scholars were printed and circulated throughout Europe within a month of their writing at a time when the printing press was just a few decades old. Much of the income the new invention produced came from printing indulgence certificates, or get-out-of-purgatory documents issued in return for cold cash; the other big money-maker was pornography.

When the church turned up serious heat on Luther, he wrote to Erasmus, appealing for his support in a cause they both saw largely in the same terms. But Erasmus was already feeling pressure from Rome because of his own, more modest attempts to expose the church to some of the liberal ideas of what we now call the Renaissance. He had discovered mistakes in the Latin translation of the Bible St. Jerome had made from the original Greek. He also had some Pope John XIII-type ideas about the laity's participation in the rituals and other functions of the religion. Those letters between him and Thomas More read like the correspondence of men like Hans Kung or the Berrigan brothers in the 1960s when the Roman Catholic Church was undergoing the brief glasnost initiated by Pope John XXIII. They read like the correspondence of two faithful Christians excited about the possibilities of "throwing open some windows," as John XXIII described what he was trying to do.

The correction to Jerome's mistranslations must have seemed an easy request to Erasmus. No one who knew the two languages could doubt Jerome's gaffs and, though not a faith-shaking matter, they were significant enough to make right. But Rome declared the text would stand as it was. And the Vatican put Erasmus on notice that his other ideas about bringing the church into the modern era, i.e., the 16th century, would not be tolerated. The pope was already making that point in Germany with his handling of the aforementioned German monk at a time when the phrase "bringing up the heat" could mean real fire. Erasmus was confronted with censure, excommunication, and worse if he stuck to his guns.

He backed off. And More in Tudor England did the same. They subtly retracted their more ambitious plans for a reformed church and were allowed to keep their positions as leading lights of the faith. Thomas More even achieved sainthood for giving his life in defense of the primacy of Rome over that of his king, Henry VIII, in religious matters. Erasmus lived to die in his bed.

Luther held fast to his demands, was excommunicated, received protection from a German warlord, and there followed a century of mass slaughters throughout Europe unparalleled until the world wars of the 20th century.

In response to the loss of much of northern Europe to Protestantism, Rome began a counter-reformation, doubling down on its dogmatic and theological principles rather than extending itself to make the changes Luther and others had asked for. Much of the hide-bound dogmatism Catholics have subsequently been exposed to—usually presented as "traditional"—is the product of the Counterreformation.

John XXIII, successor to canon lawyer Pius XII who was himself the son of a canon lawyer and responsible for codifying in print (available on the Internet) the official teachings of Roman Catholicism, believed reform was overdue. Any Catholic who was old enough to see what was going on in the church in those heady days of the early 1960s could not help but be amazed, or sometimes distressed, by it. Not just the introduction of the mass being celebrated in the congregation's own spoken language and their participation in it, but less obvious but more significant alterations of thought. There was something called "the preferential preference" for the poor, derived from a reading of the Gospels that took seriously the Sermon on the Mount. A movement, religious in its roots but political in action, sprung up in Latin America and other places, challenging the encomienda—plantation-like rule by a small elite over a population of destitute peasants who were told by state and church alike that this was the natural, God-ordained way of things.

Meanwhile, in Catholic schools, at least some of them, the priests and nuns stopped talking as much about "sins against purity," i.e., sex, and began to emphasize love as a major, even dispositive, factor in male-female relations (who knew?). Some sermons or spiritual talks in those days sounded more like New Age meditations than standard Catholic indoctrination. Even clergy caught the emancipating virus. Priests and nuns left their vows in significant numbers, sometimes as a result of falling in love with each other. My own most emblematic memory of those days is of three young nuns, residents of a small convent in the neighborhood where I lived, sitting in a nearby park smoking cigarettes, but doing so in such an excited way that you knew they were doing it as a small assertion of their newly-felt freedom, the very thing they had pledged to give up.

The ecclesiastical thaw did not last much longer than the Soviet Union one did after its military failure in Afghanistan in the 1980s. An organization like the Roman Catholic Church, the Soviet Union, or any closed body, including the human one, can not tolerate a serious rupture and survive. The Bolsheviks and the religions like Catholicism are not just dictatorial, they are totalitarian, meaning they insist on controlling not just behavior and self-expression but thinking as well. The Nazis' stated goal was to construct a society in which its members only thought their own thoughts when they were asleep. A simple dictatorship is satisfied with uncomplaining obedience. But in a totalitarian system, a pin-prick of dissension can open an artery, and an open artery can mean death.

The reaction to John XXIII was a second counterreformation, beginning with his death if not before. Succeeding popes put a lid on the spiritual effervescence he had stirred up. Priests and nuns who had been encouraging the poor to rise up against their oppressors were silenced and in some cases physically eliminated. The vernacular mass, never welcomed by some of the faithful, remained. But the core authority of Rome, established in the earliest days of Christianity, reasserted itself.

The reaction to John XXIII came too late, though, to repair much of the damage. The seminaries that had emptied out during the '60s either closed up entirely or became occupied more and more by homosexuals. Europe had already been lost to the church. Today a parish in rural France has to wait weeks before they can see a priest to say mass for them, and he is foreign-born, usually African. Meanwhile, Pentecostalism and other forms of Christianity have sunk deep roots into much of Latin America and beyond. Africa is the church's best hope, where it is holding its own against Protestant competition.

Today many of those who consider themselves to be Roman Catholic, like their Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim counterparts, do so à la carte. A Catholic may not accept the Vatican's diktat on abortion, though the pope's word on faith and morals has been an article of faith—a sine qua non—of Church dogma since the 19th century. What constitutes being a Jew can vary from believing that one's rabbi is the Messiah to a sentimental attachment to Yiddishkeit—the language and culture of one's grandmother, plus a belief that at least some of one's ancestors are descended from Judean Palestine. Muslims run the gamut, too. One may fast for an entire month every year and believe Muhammad ascended to heaven alive on a white horse, or simply observe the traditional holidays as nominal Christians do Christmas.

Most people—orthodox, middling, or atheist—believe without religion people will run amuck, stealing, murdering, and raping. The history of those who have subscribed to traditional religions seems to prove such a belief wrongheaded. The most moral Christians, Jews, and Muslims have often been the ones least tied to the most hide-bound versions of their faiths: Quakers, whose resemblance to traditional Christianity is barely recognizable but have an amazing record of supporting the right causes and following the compassionate teachings of the Gospels; Jews who heed the biblical prophets' call for justice and compassion; Muslims whose history is relatively tolerant at least of the two other "Abrahamic" faiths.

And yet much of Christian morality is derived from so-called pagans like Seneca, the Stoic of Stoics, regarded by the Christian church as an honorary church Father. And all three religions are products of their times and places: Christianity and Judaism from the early centuries CE, Islam from a few centuries later. They have common roots in Greek philosophy, specifically Neo-Platonist, along with the cosmology of those days.

In the case of Christianity, the Greek influence on the so-called Church Fathers who created the religion as we have known it for the last 1500 years is basic. The itinerant rabbi named Jehoshuah ben Josef, aka Jesus Christ, was transformed by that philosophy-theology into a God, his teachings subject to a strict interpretation put on them by the Greek-educated hierarchy (unless they disagreed with it and condemned it as heretical).

Judaism, after the destruction in 70 of the Temple in Jerusalem, underwent a similar and parallel transformation under the same Hellenistic influences. The rabbinical movement that had been assuming more and more influence in previous centuries became, after the fall of Jerusalem, the Talmudic Judaism of the last two millennia.

Islam, following the death of the prophet, also took its current form under clerics influenced by the philosophy of their times which helped create Muslim law and practice.

There are significant differences, of course, among those three religions. But what they all shared was a common cosmology, the elaborate configuration of the universe so different from the one we recognize today. In that cosmology everything extending from the center of the earth to the Supreme Being was arranged in concentric spheres—stars and planets, angels, daemons (godlings), and at the bottom humankind trapped and corrupted by the "material" world. Stars and angels were also material, but material of a more spiritual kind. The only pure spirit: God himself. We still use the phrase "seventh heaven," meaning a place or experience of intense joy. Everything below the level of that highest heaven is imperfect, even angels, due to some kind of offense they have committed. But even they are in the process of working their way back to the closest ring around the only one pure spirit.

The myth of Adam and Eve describes the original sin that got us humans into the material mess we are still in. Before that our first parents walked and chatted with God "in the cool of the evening." But their disobedience caused all our woes, imprisoning us in a flesh not only involving suffering and death but captive to the worst of the fallen angels, Satan (aka Lucifer in his better days, "Light-Bearer").

The inherent evil of everything material, which is to say everything not pure spirit, is basic to Christianity. It shows up most obviously in its obsession with sex, the root cause of even more materiality. The sphere of creation we inhabit is the most material of all the other worlds between us and the divinity. We are the nasty dregs of the celestial food chain. Paul of Tarsus preached that the saved would rise from the dead, but it was not in bodies of the gross matter they had occupied during their earthly lives. Their "risen" bodies would be more perfect, less material, like stars.

Most of us who believe there is a God still locate him (or, sometimes, her) high up in the sky. A Major League baseball player who has just hit a home run that wins the game for his team points his finger heavenward in thanks.

Astrology, the belief heavenly bodies affect human behavior and destiny at any given time, is also alive and well, preserving the cosmological order of thousands of years ago. Our personal character is determined at birth by what "signs" we are born under, and our daily lives are influenced by the changing configuration of stars and planets. I had a friend who interned in surgery at a reputable New York hospital. Some staff ate breakfast at a local diner, including the surgeon. He sat at the counter having his daily eggs and toast, reading his horoscope for that day in a daily tabloid.

Similar thinking in the form of strict religious formulas were an integral part of first-century Judaism and Christianity, and still are, though Christianity emphasizes dogma and Judaism ritual. But Christianity has formulaic rules as well. A priest changes a wafer of bread into the body of Jesus Christ only if he says the words of consecration according to a prescribed formula. Just a couple years ago, a Catholic bishop decreed all the baptisms a certain priest had been performing with the words, "We baptize thee..." were invalid because the correct formula is, "I baptize thee..." Not a minor glitch when you consider the fate of an unbaptized infant means no-entry to heaven in modern times and hellfire for all eternity for Augustine of Hippo in the 5th century.

In a novel by Lucius Apuleius, a contemporary of Augustine, the main character-narrator observes his landlady turning herself into a bird by chanting certain words. He tries to do the same thing, but gets the formula wrong and ends up becoming a donkey.

The past is always with us. It is, as someone pointed out, as much a part of the present as is the present itself. The same goes for the future. The world Erasmus lived in, which later came to be called the Renaissance, was still in the thrall of the cosmology Augustine, and before him Paul, the rabbis, and the Prophet took for granted. In The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Michel Foucaut lays out the complex, and to us bizarre, "science" of the pre-Newtonian world. Understanding that world well enough to be able to manipulate it required the same level of expertise we expect of our own best scientific minds. The confidence those earlier intellects felt about that cosmology and its effects here on earth should be a cautionary tale for us. We should not laugh at their absurdities without giving serious thought to how our own will be seen in the future.

Erasmus didn't want to upset the Christian apple cart. He only wanted to discard the bad fruit in it. He, like Luther who became just as intolerant as Rome, accepted the revealed truths of the Bible and the Church. He just wanted to bring them closer to their roots. But he was put in his place posthaste. Who are we treating in a similar fashion, forcing them to bend their wills to orthodoxies that one day (should humanity survive long enough) will be seen as the magical thinking of our own times?