Liberal Religion, Part 2

16 October 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

NOTE: This is the second of a several-part piece on the history and essence of liberal religion as a worldwide human creation dating back nearly three millennia.

Prayer

We give thanks on this beautiful day for the beauty that is all around us and within us.

For the beauty of the earth, we give thanks, and we accept its stewardship.

For the love of family and friends – love we did not earn – we give thanks, and we vow to be worthy of it.

For the love that lives in our own hearts we give thanks. We hope and pray that we can nourish that love until we are filled to overflowing, and the world around us is fed with the overflow.

We are stewards of love and life that come through us more than they come from us. And only by sharing these gifts can they – or we – grow to full size.

We give thanks for the many gifts of life. Now it is also our turn. Let us share the gifts of life – with ourselves, with others, and with the often hungry and lonely world around us. Let us share our gifts.

Amen.

SERMON: Liberal Religion, Part Two

Three weeks ago, I began talking about liberal religion, and have decided to make it a short series of sermons, on the worldwide phenomenon of liberal religion that dates back to at least 2500 years ago.

This is a much broader sense of liberal religion than you’re probably used to, so let me take a couple paragraphs to explain.

Between about 2200 and 2800 years ago, in what one scholar named the Axial Age, religious thought all over the world turned on its axis. Before that, religions had been religions of fear, centered on offering bribes to the gods for our safety, trying to see the whole world as somehow revolving around our wishes, if only we could find the right sacrifice, the right ritual formula, the right appeasement. It was a million fearful people in search of a persuasive magician.

Ancient religions both East and West had human sacrifice, meant to be the most precious gift they could offer, to bribe the gods and gain favor. It was the picture of powerless and frightened humans trying to bribe a sort of cosmic Alpha Male or tribal chief for safety and favors. And echoes of all this can still be seen in the world’s major religions today.

But in this Axial Age, for reasons we don’t know, cultures that had no contact, no relation to one another, all began to see religion as looking for ways to live more wisely and well here and now, in spite of whatever slings and arrows Fortune might bring. This was the birth of seeing religion as a quest for wisdom rather than ways to bribe or fool the gods. It was the birth of the spirit of liberal religion, which has always been about the search for wisdom to help us live more wisely and well.

And while some religions, like Hinduism, kept their supernatural stories about some sort of afterlife, the focus in the emerging liberal styles of religion was on the here and now, on our souls, our own capacity for understanding and meaningful action.

There are many ways to sketch this history, both in long and short versions. I want to do it this time in just three or four sermons, so I’ll take what might feel like a simple approach.

Last time, I talked about how the messages of the emerging liberal religions can be found with and without supernatural stories, with or without gods. Hinduism taught reincarnation as a central belief. But in one of the Upanishads, you read “there is no consciousness after death.” (Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad) You’re recycled. Your parts become the parts of other things. Nothing is destroyed, but your consciousness and memories and identity die with you. That’s a bold message in the history of religion. It’s a message that prophets proclaim and priests suppress.

Buddhism also teaches about reincarnation, which they inherited from their Hindu origins. Yet the more advanced Buddhist teachings don’t mention the supernatural stories, as much as they mention living in the here and now, and outgrowing our need for illusions. This is the spirit of liberal religion in Buddhism.

And Taoism and Confucianism are all about how to live, with almost no supernatural stories to sugarcoat their teachings.

The best teachings of religion can be done with or without supernatural stories. The Hindus had both the teachings and the stories, as Buddhism also did. And you know that Judaism, Christianity and Islam also come with both the teachings and the stories.

But it’s important to know that the stories are optional. And nobody taught us this better than the ancient Greeks. I want to talk about the Greeks today, because they introduced some very new ideas into Western religious thinking. Their concern, going all the way back to Homer, was with how we should live. They thought breeding mattered, but they focused more on how we can create noble humans out of the raw material we’re born with.

If you think about this with me, you’ll see how deeply logical they were about this. And you’ll learn a new word, which you might think at, first is completely foreign to anything in our world, but you’ll then see that it is absolutely fundamental.

The Greeks had both teachings and stories. But their gods were intended from the start as symbols of, projections of, the natural forces around and within us. Gods like Zeus and Poseidon were responsible for thunderstorms or storms at sea, as Demeter controlled the growing of the crops and Hestia gave us the subtle ability to add human feeling to worship and home. It was the presence of Hestia’s spirit that made a religious service feel like a worship service, and that made a house feel like a home.

Other gods and goddesses were personifications of some of the psychological styles that have always been part of human nature. The war-making, angry spirit familiar to many men came from Ares, the god of war. Our cleverness, as well as our ability to understanding subtle and sacred meanings in things came from Hermes. Women whose lives revolved around the care of their children were the daughters of Demeter, as those with a fierce and focused ambition claimed Artemis. Several years ago, I read a book on the gods of Greece by Arianna Huffington. She grew up in Greek culture, and said her life has been a series of trade-offs between the demands of Demeter – since she is a single mother of two daughters – and Artemis, since she is also extremely bright and very focused and driven.

So these gods and goddesses weren’t really about supernatural creatures, but about the dimensions of our world and of ourselves that always set the stage for our lives, and that seem to drive us through them. The Greek gods and goddesses – originally they had six male and six female deities – were aspects of the human experience writ large, rather than distant and unrelated powers we must appease. When Muslims say that Allah is closer to them than their own jugular vein, they are showing the kind of awareness from within which the Greek gods were created and clothed.

The Greeks did make sacrifices to them, especially Apollo and Athena. But it was more like trying to bring those facets of life into sharper focus, to feel their presence more fully – though they still hoped for favors.

But the other development of the Greeks is what concerns me more today. And this is where the famous Greek logic is especially logical. They believed that we create noble people out of the raw material we’re born with, and that we do it by shaping them in the form of the highest and noblest ideals we know. There are no gods in this picture, only humans, ideals, values and education.

Now if this is true, then the most sacred treasure of any society is precisely that collection of their highest and noblest ideals. Every citizen would be responsible for holding, serving, and passing them on. And that’s how the Greeks saw it.

Here’s your new word for the day. They had a collective noun that referred to all their highest ideals, the most sacred treasure of their civilization. That word was paideia. It was found in the roots of their words for both child (paidos) and education, just as we still find our Anglicized versions of it in our words pediatrics and pedagogy.

Every citizen, in every action, was responsible for upholding these highest ideals. A favorite story makes the point.

It involves Aristophanes, the great comic playwright. He’s the only comic playwright whose works survive, so for us he’s the best by default. But the Greeks thought he was great, too. And while the humor in his plays sounds like 14-year-old bathroom humor, his plays made points that were serious. Some historians think one of his plays (“The Clouds”) was the reason that Socrates was brought to trial and condemned to death for corrupting the youth by questioning the values of the paideia.

The story is about a scene witnessed between Aristophanes and a younger comic playwright, whose play had just won a gold medal in competition. (When the Greeks put on their Olympic games, and the Pythian games and others, they gave medals for athletics, and also for playwriting. They thought the whole person needed to be formed: mind, body and spirit.)

You might think old Aristophanes was congratulating the young writer, but he was reaming him. What he said, in essence, was “You simply went for laughs. You never presented or transmitted the paideia anywhere! You failed in the only sacred mission you had, and compared with that failure, all the gold medals in the world are worthless!”

It’s almost impossible to imagine such a scene today, isn’t it? We’re used to seeing writers rewarded for going only for the laughs. Then again, this young man in ancient Greece had also just won a gold medal.

But the soul of the Golden Age of Greece – the real gold – was a seriousness about preserving, presenting and transmitting the highest ideals they could articulate, knowing that without them, they were unlikely ever to mold the noblest sort of human beings, including themselves. That was a high point in human history, and you could argue that it produced the greatest outpouring of literary and artistic genius of any culture in history. This was secularism raised to its highest level. The word “secular” means to be concerned for this world. So it can overlap with the aims of liberal religion, but only when it’s raised to such a high level.

That old story with its commandment to serve only the highest ideals has been an inspiration to me in my own work ever since I read it over twenty years ago. But even with this story, you have probably still never heard of paideia. At least not in Greek. But you know it in Latin.

For a few centuries later, the Roman philosopher Cicero became acquainted with the ideals of the Greek culture, and with the word paideia. He realized that they had neither a word nor a concept in Latin like this. He also believed that this was one of the most important ideas in any civilization: the notion that we create noble people by molding them in the image of noble values. It’s how we become most fully human.

So Cicero continued to serve the aims of liberal religion through non-supernatural secular means, by coining a word to translate this into Latin. The word he coined was humanitas, which means roughly the essence of what it means to be most fully human. That word, and that concept, became the soul of the “humanities” and the liberal arts in Western educational curricula from his day to our own. These are the courses designed to make us more fully human: an aim we inherited from the Golden Age of Greece. It’s also the root of our word “humanism” which, at its best, still preserves the ancient Greek ideal of preserving and passing on the most sacred of ideals, without using any stories of gods at all.

Indeed, the Greeks were the first Mediterranean people to pass down their highest ideals without wrapping them in religious or priestly authority. Here was the essence of liberal religion, expressed in ordinary language, and expressed in some of the finest dramatic plays, poetry, philosophy, and athletic games our species has ever produced.

You might think that Greek philosophy doesn’t really have anything to do with religion, especially Christianity. You’d be wrong. It had almost everything to do with it. “Philosophy” means, “love of wisdom,” and the Greeks loved wisdom, or “Sophia.” But the Sophia they loved was not a collection of facts or abstractions. The kind of wisdom they loved was the wisdom to live by. After Socrates, it didn’t so much matter what you said, or how smart or wise it was. What mattered was who you were, and whether you had a right to speak such words, whether you had striven to embody them in your own life.

Beginning at least with Plato, philosophy was no longer about acquiring mere knowledge, but about questioning ourselves, because we have the feeling that we are not what we ought to be. (Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? p. 29) This started with Socrates, whose effect on some people was so much like a religious experience; it’s hard to know how it’s different at all.

For example, Plato records the words of Alcibiades, one of the prominent men whose life was changed by Socrates. “I was in such a state that it did not seem possible to live while behaving as I was behaving. He forces me to admit to myself that I do not take care for myself.” (Ibid. p. 31)

If this doesn’t sound profoundly religious, it should, because it is. No gods, no supernaturalism, no afterlife, no stories. Wisdom, stripped down to its most naked and arresting, with the power to bring people like Alcibiades forth in a kind of ancient altar call.

This is really what Greek philosophy was about: how to live. They weren’t trying to inform students as much as they were trying to form them, into the noblest sort of people, aware of themselves, their world, and inspired – even driven – to live according to only the highest of personal and moral values. Philosophy was a way of living, not a way of thinking.

They all agreed on this, even though the philosophers disagreed on other things.

The Stoics, who mixed ethics, astronomy, astrology and fate together, believed that everything was a result of the fates, everything that happened was part of a plan. If this sounds very Christian, it’s because the Christians took this attitude, and the structure for most Christian ethics, from the Stoics. So for the Stoics, it wasn’t important whether we were happy, but whether we lived right, served the Good, and always intended to do good.

The Epicureans didn’t think there was a plan. They thought life was essentially a crapshoot, that we were the playthings of Chance. And in this world, they said we need to be able to enjoy whatever our lot is. If it’s steaks, enjoy the steaks. But if it’s only bread and cheese, you should be able to enjoy that just as thoroughly. And what mattered most, they said, was friends: being part of a warm and loving community of friends. This is a teaching I don’t think Christianity ever picked up, unfortunately.

For Plato, it was living in harmony with the abstract Ideals: the notions of pure Beauty, pure Goodness, pure Justice, pure Truth, and striving to emulate them, to serve and become one with them. It was quite mystical, and Platonism is the style of thinking from which Christian mysticism was later derived.

And then there is that other Greek word which, like paideia, provided both the foundation and the transition from secular Greek philosophy to Christian theology: the word logos. It’s a hard word to translate. It referred to the logic of, structure of, essence and understanding of something, as well as the words we use to express all this. We find it in our words “psychology” (the structure and understanding of the psyche, or soul), anthropology (the understanding of humans), and the word “logic.”

For Heraclitus, it was all about the logos, the essence of what is most real and enduring, sort of the hidden Center of all reality. In the second and third centuries, when early Christian thinkers were trying to define just what this new religion was, they were exposed to, and accepted, the Greek notion that philosophy is a way of life, the way we should live here. And they accepted the notion that there was a logos, an invisible sort of structure and understanding, kind of the secret of life, that could be communicated to us, and which became the center of any worthwhile philosophy of living.

Not many Christians know this, but Christianity was first defended to Greek thinkers as a philosophy, a way of life. That’s also how Saint Augustine understood it. He agreed with Plato’s notion that philosophy meant living in the best way, being the best sort of person. Nietzsche once described Christianity as “Platonism for the masses,” and he could have had Saint Augustine in mind, for Augustine could have agreed with him.

Where the Christians thought they had the edge on Greek philosophy was in that idea of logos. For the Christians said they had the ultimate, the final, logos, in the person of Jesus Christ. The opening words of the Gospel of John are almost always translated as “In the beginning was the Word.” But the Greek word there is logos. Let me read it to you with the correct translation, and you can see in just a few sentences the modulation from Greek philosophy to Christianity as the ultimate philosophy:

“In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” (John, 1:1-4).

Now there. In just a few sentences, we moved from secular philosophy without gods or myths, right into Christianity with its God and its very different myths. Snuck in through that one hard-to-translate Greek word logos. And in the history of Western religious thought, it also happened almost that smoothly.

What’s this like? It’s like a holy spirit moving through time, granting life to those it touches, but wearing a hundred different costumes, each suited to the imagination of the ages in which it appears. It appeared first in the Upanishads, wrapped in their innumerable gods, their wonderful webs of myth and story, and cradled in the concept of reincarnation, which promised that we would have all the time we need to get it right.

Then in Buddhism it shed its gods and most of its supernaturalism. In Greek philosophy, it shed them completely, and brought at least the idea of a perfect human down to earth in plain talk.

And the Christians, writing further variations on this timeless theme, said they went one better. They said they had brought God himself, the Logos, down to earth, in human form, in the person of Jesus Christ, to teach us how to live.

Next time I’ll talk about the liberal religious spirit in Christianity. But you don’t get off easy, you know. We’re in dangerous territory here. We’re talking about how we should live, who we should be, and it isn’t just a sterile list of objective facts. It is the living spirit of liberal religion and of life, and it looks at you. It looks at you, and asks “What about you? Are you living as you should? Are you taking proper care for yourself? These aren’t just mind games, you know. There are lives at stake, and one of them is yours. So you: What about you?”