The Faith Instinct (22 page)

 

 

 

T
here is, in a sense, only one religion. Or, to put it more exactly, all religions are related to one another because all belong to the same family. This is not a widely held perspective, because people are much attached to the particular features of their own faith and are more likely to dwell on its differences with other creeds than with its commonalities. The focus on differences is evident in the significance attached to the mere word
filioque
in the Nicene Creed, which ultimately split the Orthodox church from Rome, or the furious contests in fourth-century Christendom between the homoousians and the homoiousians, who differed as to whether Jesus was made of the same or a similar substance as God.

But a glance at the history of religions suggests that, as cultural forms, they bear several significant similarities with languages. And just as present-day languages probably all stem from the same tree of descent, so too may religions.

The ancestral human population at one time dwindled through some disaster to perhaps a mere 5,000 people,
¹⁵⁵
who may have spoken a single language. Since everyone in the world today is a descendant of that village
-sized population, all today’s languages are very possibly derived from a single language spoken by these early people.

If so, one could, at least in principle, draw up a tree of descent that included all the world’s living languages. Its trunk would be the mother tongue of more than 50,000 years ago. Its major branches would be the 14 or so language super-families now in existence, like Indo-European, Altaic or Afro-Asiatic. The twigs on these branches would be the 6,000 languages spoken in the world today.

Such a tree is generated by the fact that languages keep changing, but each is derived from a predecessor. It should be possible, again in principle, to draw up a similar tree for all the world’s religions, because religions too emerge by slow degrees from their predecessors. A totally novel religion has little chance of success. The easiest way for a new religion to start is as a sect of an existing one. Converts are most easily found among the members of the church from which the sect is seceding. The leader of the sect may evoke ecstatic aspects of religion and fault the established priesthood for having strayed from its founding precepts. He may base his teaching on a new revelation from the vantage point of which he offers a reinterpretation of the sacred texts. This is the approach taken by the followers of Jesus, by Montanus, by Muhammad and by Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon faith.

Such challengers, unless co-opted by the guardians of religious orthodoxy, either will be suppressed or will break away from the founding church and survive as a new sect. And if this is the general mechanism by which new sects arise, then every sect is derived from a predecessor, and all religions are branches of the same tree.

But religions are shaped not just by their path of descent; like languages, religions may borrow material from others, often quite heavily. The most important religious ritual of the Christian church is Easter, which celebrates the resurrection of Jesus. How surprising, therefore, that the word
Easter
should derive from Eostre, an Anglo-Saxon goddess of the dawn. The Anglo-Saxon word for April was
Eostur-monath,
a month which probably then started on March 25, a date that falls close to the vernal equinox. Spring festivals are ancient rituals, probably observed in all religions that have existed since the birth of agriculture. These festivals have been co-opted both into Judaism—Passover, or Pesach, marked the beginning of the barley harvest—and into Christianity.
¹⁵⁶
It is striking that these pagan festivals are not just minor items in the ritual calendars of Judaism and Christianity but in fact mark the date of their central rites, almost as if the two monotheisms had been constructed around them but with the imposition of different sacred texts to explain their importance. Judaism, it seems, seized the agricultural year’s spring festival and adapted it to a central religious tenet, the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt, while the Christians linked it to the principal focus of their religion, the resurrection.

In bringing heathen tribes into the fold, the early church foun
d it expedient to co-opt their temples and festivals rather tha
n force them to embrace an alien faith outright. An explicit statement of this polic
y occurs in a letter written by Pope Gregory the Great in 601 t
o the Abbot Mallitus who was en route to visit Bishop Augustine in Canterbury. Tell
the bishop, Gregory wrote, “that I have long been considering with myself abou
t the case of the Angli; to wit, that the temples of idols in t
hat nation should not be destroyed, but that the idols themselves that are in them
should be.... And since they are wont to kill many oxen in sacrifice to demons, they
should have also some solemnity of this kind in a changed form
.... For it is undoubtedly impossible to cut away everything at once from hard heart
s, since one who strives to ascend to the highest place must ne
eds rise by steps or paces and not by leaps.”
¹⁵⁷

Religions are composite cultural creations in that they generally consist of a core of beliefs or rituals derived from a preceding religion, combined with new material. The new component may be supplied by the founding prophet’s revelation, or by borrowing and co-opting material from the religions of neighboring or conquered peoples.

Religions can seldom, if ever, be entirely new because of the w
ay they are learned. People commit to religion during the forma
tive years of puberty, often during emotionally searing initiation rites. In these r
ites a young man is taught, says the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, “the
sacred traditions under the most impressive conditions of prep
aration and ordeal and under the sanction of Supernatural Beings—the light of
tribal revelation bursts upon him from out of the shadows of fe
ar, privation and bodily pain.”
¹⁵⁸

Modern religions have reduced the element of pain in initiation rites but their procedures ensure that the sacred texts and symbols that are taught at that time have lasting significance throughout a person’s adult life; it is this sense of emotional familiarity that makes one’s own religion feel so natural, whereas most other religions seem far-fetched or deluded. Although conversions do of course occur, though usually between similar religions, most people are very unwilling to abandon the religion they learned in childhood and adolescence. This is also likely to be the religion of their family and friends, another reason for regarding it with attachment, but the emotional tie to a religion learned at an impressionable age is probably even stronger.

Religion is a language of a special kind. It is a form of communication, expressed in the form of gestural or verbal symbols that register their meaning emotionally as well as consciously. If this special language changes and splits in much the same pattern as the ordinary kind of language, as is argued above, then it should be possible in principle to construct a tree of all the world’s religions, comparable to the tree one could in principle draw up for all the world’s languages.

A major recent branching of the tree is evident enough in the derivation from Judaism of Christianity, Islam and Mormonism. Judaism itself, as discussed below, developed from the religion of the ancient Canaanites, whose rites were centered around agricultural festivals. The specific names of religions that existed before then have been lost, but the general nature of the tree’s growth can be reconstructed. The tree would start with the religion of the ancestral modern human population that lived in northeast Africa prior to 50,000 years ago. Its trunk would be the hunter gatherer religions that endured until the first settled societies of 15,000 years ago and the institution of religious officialdom.

With the development of agriculture, beginning some 10,000 years ago in the Old World, the new hierarchical religions seem to have been focused on agricultural festivals, such as those of spring planting and fall harvest. Through the festivals, religion helped coordinate people’s activities and entrain them to the rhythm of the seasons, reducing the risk that crops would be planted or harvested at the wrong time. Early peoples developed a deep knowledge of astronomy and from Stonehenge to Mesoamerica oriented their temples on axes that marked significant events such as the sun’s position at the spring equinox.

These early agricultural religions would still have emphasized ritual over belief, but dancing and ecstatic trances were suppressed as priesthoods worked to make themselves the sole intermediaries between the real and the supernatural worlds.

With the advent of literacy some 5,000 years ago, the character of religion changed yet again. With the help of written texts, beliefs could be shaped to more specific purposes, like nation building. The sacred texts further increased the distance between believers and the supernatural. Direct experience of the interface with the supernatural world, as experienced by hunter gatherers in their trance dances, was long gone. The evidence of the supernatural world increasingly came from sacred texts recording revelations held to have occurred in the distant past.

Hunter gatherer religion sprang from a few behaviors, presumably genetically prompted, such as a belief in supernatural agencies which set rules of social behavior, fear of divine punishment for breaking these rules, and confidence that the supernatural powers could be manipulated through ritual and sacrifice. This relatively simple set of evolutionary behaviors proved capable, as settled societies grew larger and more sophisticated, of supporting the cultural development of more elaborate religions, such as the three Judaic-related monotheisms. The emergence of these religions is worth exploring in some detail because they demonstrate the power of cultural innovation to improvise systems of belief that transformed the dance and trance rituals of hunter gatherer religions into creeds that could bind not a tribe but a state or empire.

Judaism is a religion whose formation from roots in the agricultural past is now understood in some detail. The language, religion and culture of the ancient Israelites were derived from those of the Canaanites, the West Semitic peoples who inhabited the southern Levant, now Syria, Jordan and Israel. Hebrew is a dialect of Canaanite. The earliest known Hebrew inscriptions are written in the Old Canaanite script of the Late Bronze Age (1500—1200 B.C.). Several festivals of the Israelite and Jewish liturgical calendar are adaptations of Canaanite agricultural festivals. Rosh Ha-Shanah marks the onset of the fall rains, heralded in Canaanite mythology by the resurrection of the storm god Ba‘al. Sukkot is the Canaanite fall harvest festival, adapted in Judaism to commemorate the wandering in the desert after the exodus from Egypt. Pesach was a Canaanite spring feast at which young lambs, born the previous fall, were sacrificed; in Judaism Pesach has become Passover and historicized to mark the exodus from Egypt, with the lambs’ blood translated for the Israelites into a rite commemorating the sparing of their first-born children from the tenth plague sent against the pharaoh. Shavu’ot, 50 days after Passover, is a late spring festival that marks the conclusion of the wheat harvest.
¹⁵⁹

Canaanite texts of the fourteenth to thirteenth centuries B.C. from Ugarit in Syria describe the Canaanite religion in some detail, including its gods El and Ba’al and the tradition of animal sacrifice. The Israelites adopted animal sacrifice and their early name for the deity is
elohim,
the plural of El. The opening words of Genesis are customarily translated “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” but the Hebrew text says
elohim
—the gods created heaven and earth—and in verse 26 of the first chapter of Genesis it is the
elohim,
the gods, who say “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Though
elohim
can also be singular in Hebrew, its plural form may reflect the polytheism that preceded the monotheism associated with Yahweh, according to the biblical archaeologist William Dever.
¹⁶⁰

Early Israelite religion seems to have been polytheistic just as was its Canaanite predecessor. Monotheism was imposed much later by the priestly caste in Jerusalem and during the Babylonian captivity, but the priests then devised an ancient pedigree for their new religion which back-projected its origins into the distant past. “Virtually all mainstream scholars (and even a few conservatives) acknowledge that true monotheism emerged only in the period of the exile in Babylon in the sixth century B.C., as the canon of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, was taking shape,” writes Dever.
¹⁶¹
The Hebrew Bible’s frequent imprecations against the worship of Ba’al, golden calves and other idols were required because that was indeed the prevailing religion among the general population.

Much is now known about the development of the Hebrew Bible, from textual analysis, from archaeology and from the independent records of other contemporary civilizations, such as those of Egypt and Assyria. Textual analysis by the nineteenth-century German scholar Wilhelm de Wette showed that of the first five books of the Bible, known as the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy had been written much later than the others. He identified it with the book of law said in the Bible to have been discovered during a renovation of the temple in the eighteenth year of the reign of King Josiah of Judah, namely in 622 B.C.
¹⁶²

Another German scholar, Julius Wellhausen, laid out evidence for supposing that the Pentateuch seemed not to be the work of a single author—traditionally held to have been Moses—but was based on four different sources, each with a specific perspective, and some using different names for God (Yahweh or
elohim
).

More than a century of study by textual scholars and archaeologists has established that the Bible is indeed a composite document. Some of its sources are drawn from legends of the great Babylonian civilization on Israel’s eastern borders. Some are historical accounts. Some are folklore explanations of how a certain place or people got its name. The complex of materials has been skillfully shaped, probably to forge a political and religious identity for a small nation buffeted between two powerful neighboring states.