Rousseau's Dog

by Edmonds and Eidinow

Rousseau quoted:

Thanks to [Therese], I lived happily, as far as the course of events permitted. At first I tried to improve her mind, but my efforts were useless. Her mind is what nature has made it; culture and training are without influence upon it. I am not ashamed to confess that she had never learnt how to read properly, although she can write fairly well. . . . She has never been able to give the twelve months of the year in correct order, and does not know a single figure, in spite of all the trouble I
have taken to teach her. "

That he remained with this intellectually disadvantaged creature brought censure and bewilderment from friends and acquaintances. In public, he did not treat his gouvemante well. Occasionally he was eager to show her off, like a rich man defiantly displaying his conspicuously tattered clothes. More often than not, however, he treated her like a belowstairs servant. Indeed, many visitors to the Rousseau household assumed that that is what in fact she was. When Rousseau had guests, she was routinely dispatched to the kitchen or scullery. However, that was his choice. As we have seen over the Townshends’ refusal to dine With her, it was quite impermissible for anybody else to humiliate her in the same way. 

So far, wherever Le Vasseur had followed him, French had been the local language. Now her constancy and his dependency would bring the Parisian scullery maid to Chiswick, and exposure to a totally foreign land, language, and culture.

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For his access to George III Hume was dependent on General Conway, who at the time had more pressing preoccupations. The Rockingham administration, and Conway in particular, was embroiled in the Stamp Act crisis. The Seven Years’ War had drained the exchequer. In February 1765 under the previous Grenville ministry, stamp duties levied on paper used for all official documents (embracing everything from newspapers to marriage certificates to wills) had been applied tothe American colonies, incensing the colonists, who were not represented in the British parliament and who were never consulted. Faced with a wave of protest from across the Atlantic and at home from commercial Interests. the new Rockingham government was seeking a way to repeal the detested act while maintaining the right of Parliament to tax the Americans. In the British Isles, the idea that the free-riding colonists should contribute to the cost of campaigns that had lifted the French threat to North America was predictably popular. 

In the Memoirs of George III, Walpole records: “The situation of the ministers became every day more irksome and precarious.” Conway was under attack by Grenville for his handling of the emergency. Meanwhile, the king was fomenting opposition to his own ministers, worried that his right to tax his colonists was in jeopardy. 

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THE Scot's "dead-born" Treatise of Human Nature, a seminal work in the history of philosophy, though these days its content tends to be absorbed by students through his later, less dense Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles Of Morals. 

The overall impact of Hume’s fusillade on common sense was, and still is, most unsettling. Applying the utmost intellectual rigor, he blows away the ground under our day-to-day assumptions: we are like the cartoon dog that runs in midair until he sees there is no ground under his pans. If that was where Hume’s head led him, with his heart he was almost apologetic. He did not mean to disorient. Even his demolition of religion, ruthless and unsparing in its analysis, caused him some agonized dissonance: to spare the feelings of friends and acquaintances, le bon David often downplayed the full extent of his skepticism. 

Hume was (what we now call) an empiricist- that is, he believed that all our knowledge must originate in our experience, which we gain through our senses. Empiricism has a healthy image-in the Anglo-American world at least- of a plain-talking, feet-on-the-ground, no-nonsense philosophy: if it were a person, it would be the solid member of a jury, commonsensical, conscientious, and moderate. But that was not Hume's empiricist. 

Hume took empiricism to its logical conclusion: his empiricist was a destructive revolutionary. If knowledge cannot be detached from the internal state of the knower, if the world is what it seems to be to me, he argued, I cannot be sure that that is how the world objectively is. My senses are merely my senses; there is no guarantee that they are accurate, that they reflect the world beyond. The Scotsman showed that ifwe rely on experience, then we can have no complete confidence in the existence of the external world; we can have no complete confidence in our personal identity (that I am the same person today as l was yesterday); we can have no confidence in the law: of nature that We take for granted, such as gravity or cause and effect. 

Take the latter. Hume illustrated his problem with billiard balls. When we see one billiard ball strike another, what reason do we have for believing that the impact of the first ball will bring movement in the second? Yes, we are convinced it will have this effect- but why? For, as Hume points out, when we see a relationship appearing to be one of cause and effect, all we experience in reality is one event followed by another-we cannot see, smell, or touch the causation; we do not see, smell, or touch any necessary connection. Each ball’s movement is a distinct matter of fact; we observe the second movement following the movement of the first. And it is entirely conceivable that the second will not follow from the first. The second ball might stay rooted on its spot, or turn into a dove; the two balls might explode on impact; the first might just roll backward. The problem of causation is related to that of induction- the inference of a future event on the grounds of past experience. We cannot logically infer that the sun will rise tomorrow just because it has risen on every previous day. 

How then to explain our hitherto unquestioned assumptions about causality and induction? Well, says Hume, when events are constantly connected in time and space, we naturally make the mental leap from one to the other. Thus, we have experienced the temperature from a fire so often that when we place our hand near some flames, custom and habit lead us to anticipate heat. In place of a logical basis for our beliefs, Hume substitutes a psychological one. 

His reflections on “personal identity" were equally counterintuitive. You might have the idea that there is some enduring entity-the self-that constitutes the essential “you," that makes the “you” digesting these words now the same “you" who absorbed the previous paragraph moments ago.

The Rousseau who fell before a blue periwinkle believed he was the same Rousseau who picked a periwinkle three decades earlier when out walking. But, argues Hume, this notion of identity is illusory. Try to reflect on your "self.” Try to locate this immutable thing that is supposed to make you, you. All you can detect is a disparate bundle of perceptions. In Hume’s words: “I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure, colour or sound etc..I never catch my self, distinct from some such perception.” The various snapshots passing through one’s mind are not linked by any invisible film. 

In the face of Hume’s skeptical juggernaut, we risk a psychological flattening. If all our deepest assumptions about the way the world works are shown to be illusory, to be derived neither from reason nor from the senses, how can we function, how can we force ourselves out of bed in the morning? Indeed, in the Treatise Hume confesses that his theoretical musings even have a debilitating impact on their creator, making him morose and lethargic. But he always finds a way to carry on. Fortunately, the human animal, even the Humean animal, can dwell on such reflections for only a short spell. Our instincts overpower out reason: we cannot help but assume the existence of causality and cannot help but rely and act on past experience. As Hume himself put it: "I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours amusement I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous that l cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further.” (And, Indeed, his deliberations on economics and history take for granted personal identity. consistency in human conduct, and cause and effect in the material world.) 

Philosophically, he subjected the idea of a rational foundation for morality to a parallel diagnosis. Hume knocks us down and then lifts us up. First the overthrow: reason, said Hume cannot tell us how to act. It is perfectly inert. That the world is a certain way furnishes no logical reason to act in a certain way. It is not inconsistent or incoherent. or false both to recognize that there are starving children in the world and to deny that we have an obligation to feed them. Logic is an inappropriate tool for dissecting morality, like taking a carving knife to water. To quote another of his famous statements, “’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." 

If reason does not prop up our moral values, what does sustain them? Hume derived his moral principles from an examination of human nature. According to Hume, our behavior is dictated by sentiment. We are naturally a mixture of various passions, such as selfishness and altruism (his word for the latter was “sympathy”). We are born neither utterly selfish nor wholly selfless. Sympathy awards us with a glow of warmth when we perform‘a virtuous act and instills a nagging sense of unease, if we are responsible for a vicious one. 

Although Hume, on occasion, hints at the beneficial spin-offs arising out of our innate sympathy, he maintains that it is futile to ask why we have this instinct. For Hume, it is simply a truth, and that is that. “it is needless to push our researches so far as to ask, why we have humanity or a fellow-feeling with others. It is sufficient, that this is experienced to be a principle of human nature.” All this was neatly incapsulated in Hume’s aphorism that “Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions." 

These were revolutionary claims whose implications were revolutionary in another sense: Hume dragged man down toward his fellow animals. Human judgments about the world were really akin to instincts, and Hume pointed out how such instincts are to be found in “brute beasts" as well as “the most ignorant and stupid peasants.” “The experimental reasoning itself, which we possess in common with beasts, and on which the whole conduct of life depends, is nothing but a species of instinct or mechanical power".Dogs can be trained through a system of rewards and punishments,in which they act on the basis of past experience. It is clear that the are not engaging in any process of complex reasoning here, Hume argues. What happens is that animals behave instinctively and mechanically, just as humans do.

WHILE HUME the historian is now studied principally for his philosophy, Rousseau the novelist is these days studied mainly for his political theory-for what he says about the relationship between government and citizens; for his radicalism, his egalitarianism, his understanding of liberty; for his (to some) notorious concept of the general will; and for his distinctive vision of the state of nature, linked to his posthumous reputation as a pre-Romantic. 

Rousseau wrote a great deal about the state of nature: a primitive if unspecified period in which humans interacted with one another before the creation of political institutions (a notion deployed by political theorists for a multiplicity of purposes). Sometimes he seemed to use the phrase as though it were a depiction of a historical reality, at other times as though it were just a useful theoretical tool. But he gave the concept a unique twist. For unlike Thomas Hobbes’s pessimistic vision of chaos and uncertainty, his was not a picture of violent anarchy. Quite the opposite, in fact: it was of a tranquil idyll in which man was free and self-sufficient and had an entirely fitting regard for his own well-being-amour de soibut combined this with an instinctive sympathy for others. 

What had happened to corrupt this primitive state? The rot set in with the invention of property. Property had bred inequality, conflict, and war. Property had spawned an obsessive and invidious compulsion to compare oneself to others, leading to greed and jealousy, “a black inclination to harm one another.” Property had transmuted the clean, simple, and natural quality of amour de soi into an ugly self-satisfaction , inflated self-conceit, amour propre. Whereas with amour de soi we 

possessed an honest and direct self knowledge and self love. now om image of ourselves came back through the gaze of others: it was like staring into an ugly distorting mirror. “Nature has made everything in the best way possible; but we want to do better still, and we spoil everything,” said Rousseau. Voltaire found the idea of a primitive wmld less alluring. After reading "The Origin of inequality Among Men, he playfully but bitingly told its author that he was “seircd With a dam to walk on all touts.” 

In any case, by the time that Rousseau went into exile. he had rehry quxshed the prelapsarian vision of man in a state of nature and had come to believe that this creature was stunted and unfulfilled: maybe free, maybe happy, maybe self-sufficient, but not fully developed. In the state of nature, men were not conscious of morality; only by becoming conscious could they become virtuous. it was by participating in political society that man could live out his potential and be elevated to a level above the rest of the animal kingdom, above the life of creatures controlled by base instinct. 

His image of the ideal political society in no sensetesembled the despotic governance of eighteenth-century France or the enlightened despotism of his supporter, Frederick the Great of Prussia. His task was b show how we could reclaim our freedom-and how freedom and the law could be compatible. 

He sought to reconcile them through his concept of the general will. The general will is the will of the community, but it is not calculated by any mathematical summation of individual preferences It is, rather, what is good for the community generally: the general \Hll emerges through the coalescing of individuals into an organic “hole. The niceties of how the general will is to work in practice remain Opaque in Rousseau's theory, but since we are a part of the collective. the execution of the general will is good for each of us. 

That argument, later critics claimed, carries ominous overtones. In a phrase that has sent a chill down many spines, Rousseau talks of us being "forced to be free”-the origin of the common charge that h“ ideas were a precursor of totalitarianism. If a person were compelled to obey the general Will. he would be forced into observing both the common good and what was objectively best for him. Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx would pick up on these themes. Kant, heavily influenced by Rousseau. came to believe that autonomy rested in complying wn}, the rules of reason; Marx employed the notion of false conscious a state in which we are unaware of our real interests). 

Rousseau's theoretical writings were intertwined with his need to. independence and yearning for innocent solitude. A leitmotif in I). Work was the importance of men not being reliant on others. Depcn. deuce was the root of evil; not being dependent meant being free. i was modern man’s downfall that to survive and thrive, he had come b rely on the contributions of others. Although Rousseau lived in a pre. industrialized world, the theme of man’s alienation from property and from the fruits of his labor would be echoed a century later in Marx, Rousseau even fulminates against money in the Confessions-“good Ex nothing in itself"-and claims he always regarded it with “more horn: than pleasure.” 

Rousseau’s bold prescription for how children should be nurtured and educated to lead their lives fully can be found in Emile. Initially, the infant is to be unconstricted. In this period of “negative education." there is a recommendation that the child be deprived of all books, bar one: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which provides a master class in survival and self-sufliciency. By bringing up the boy Emile outside the community, his tutor will enable the child to learn to know his own will, and not to be prey to popular opinion and the values of “the conventional world." (Among many passages acutely discomforting to n twenty-tirst-century Western outlook, Rousseau proclaimed that girls were not like boys, since “dependence is a state natural to women”) 

Unlike Hume’s, Rousseau’s work and life were inextricably intermingled. For Rousseau, the state of happiness, as explained in the Confessions, was “the absence of all that make me conscious of my dependent position.” And, in a letter to de Malesherbes in 1762, he describes the perfect day with friends as one in which “no image of servitude and dependence troubled the good will” within the group. 

Rousseau’s unease about receiving presents and assistance from others was a recurring theme in his life. He routinely rejected offerings of both money and goods-sometimes gracefully, more often tersely. In 1751, he threatened to break off one relationship unless the friend withdrew his present of coffee beans: “take back your coffee or never see me again." And when Mme d’Epinay offered to supplement his income, Rousseau replied that her proposal struck a chill to his heart: she was degrading him, in his words, “making a valet of a friend.” However, life was not theory: though the imaginary Emile is taught self-sufficiency, Rousseau's adherence to this idea] was somewhat less rigid. Thus, while irascibly spurning offers of free accommodation, he was willing to pay a nominal or below-market rent. By doing so, he could convince himself that his integrity remained intact.

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As for human nature, Rousseau maintained it had altered over time, that man was born good but had fallen, while Hume regarded it as more or less constant. Indeed, that was precisely why the Scot believed it was possible to learn lessons from history- for example from Europe’s depressing catalog of wars and revolutions. This belief is expressed most explicitly in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. “It is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations." Yet his conduct again parted company from his theory. As we know, he disregarded the cautions about Rousseau given by his friends, ignoring their evidence of his past behavior. His own work highlights how imprudent a policy this was. 

"Were a man, whom I know to be honest and opulent and with whom I live in intimate friendship, to come into my house, where I am surrounded with my servants, I rest assured that he is not to stab me before he leaves it in order to rob me of my silver standish; and I no more suspect this event than the falling of the house itself, which is new, and solidly built and founded.--But he may have been seized with a sudden and unknown frenzy-So may a sudden earthquake arise, and shake Ind tumble my house about my ears." 

However, it is their reflections about how and where man should live, and about the arts and luxury, that most sharply expose the fundamental contradictions of their brief union. Rousseau glorified nature. His state of nature was one of bliss. But beyond the theory, his autobiographical writings are full of exaltations of nature itself. Of panoramic views, a walk in the country, open air, he writes in the Confessions: “all this sets my soul free, gives me greater boldness of thought, throws me, so to speak, into the immensity of things.” The isolated rural life suited his ascetic self-image. Luxury made men soft. Frugality and the good life were inseparable. Hence his distress at what he believed was Diderot’s deliberate stab in proclaiming that only the evil man lives alone. Rousseau associated the black vapors of the city with blackness in men’s hearts. 

While Rousseau’s stance on the theater and the organized arts was highly ambiguous, Hume unequivocally promoted the benefits of civilization. He was convivial, a city lover (though preferably Edinburgh aver London). His identification with the city was part of a wider urban cosmopolitanism. “A perfect solitude," he regarded (in the Treatise) as "perhaps, the greatest punishment we can suffer." The Scot was an advocate of refined tastes, "the study of beauties" such as poetry, music, and art as well as science. These kept us off the streets, mentally challenged us, and even made us more social and gregarious. Science and the arts elevated the human spirit: Thus enriched, he wrote in one essay, “Of Refinement in the Arts," people would never be “contented to remain in solitude, or live with their fellow-citizens in that distant manner, which is peculiar to ignorant and barbarous nations.” That last phrase, had he been acquainted with it, would surely have angered Rousseau as much as had Diderot's. 

City life, said Hume, was good for us. We humans were unusual beings. conspicuous among animals for our combination of physical vulnerability and exacting physical needs. Being puny creatures, he thought, and yet having to be clothed, kept warm, sheltered, and fed, we have had to adapt and cooperate to survive. Only through organization and social activity have humans come to flourish. For humans, cooperation is natural. Hume concurred with his old friend Adam Smith’s, maxim about one of the distinguishing characteristics of the human race: “Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.” Of course, in Marischal’s words, Rousseau’s attitude to simple acts of generosity made him “more savage than any savage of North America.” 

AT FIRST GLANCE, our two antagonists did at least share one basic position. Both assailed established religion in their homelands and both were hurt in consequence. Both railed against superstition, both shared a dislike of Catholicism. 

Hume's assault on religion was the more intellectually rigorous and sustained, but barely rattled the foundations of the established churches in Scotland and England. In France and Switzerland, Rousseau’s challenge was seen by the authorities as highly threatening. Hume’s career suffered but Rousseau's life was endangered. The stones that smashed through Rousseau’s windows in Métiers were missiles that, in effect. had the blessing of the priesthood. 

Yet even their critiques of religion were very different: different in argument, different in motivation. Rousseau’s religious views had pleased nobody- neither Christians nor the atheists and deists. (Deism held that knowledge of God was possible only through reason. Those who believe God set the universe off but then left it alone are also often called deists.) To the philosophes, split between a minority who were deists and the majority who were outright atheists, Rousseau’s conviction of God's existence, his professed love of God, his belief in God's goodness. his certainty that there was an afterlife and that the soul was immortal- all this was risible. Deeply suspect, too, was his attitude toward the beauty of nature. He saw God in mountains and valleys, in brooks and waterfalls, in thunder and sunshine, in flowers and trees. “Atheists.” he once said, “do not like the country.” 

There were also instrumental grounds that justified religion: it was useful, he believed, in promoting patriotic and civic values. But this was not the case for the institutions of religion. By teaching men that salvation lay in the next life rather than this one, these institutions actually undermined the state. 

This was not the only point on which he criticized the Christian church (particularly the Catholic Church) as misguided. And when we lead the “Savoyard Vicar” section in Emile, it is obvious why its passages were regarded as so egregiously blasphemous. Thus, Rousseau thought the direct route to God was through introspection, through the examination of the heart, the pursuit of what he called the “inner light,” through reason. It was not through the clergy and their over~ blown rituals, nor through Scripture. Priests should be excluded from a child’s upbringing. They had no special claim to religious truth-if anything, they were obstacles to its discovery. 

As for Hume, he did not intend to cause umbrage-“I would not offend the Godly"--and he amended his History to make its relatively bland remarks on religion blander still, though his view was that the church had played a corrupting role in British life. Nonetheless, the comments he did make landed him in trouble, as we have seen, stalling his career. He wrote to Blair to complain. “Is a 'man to be called a drunkard, because he has been seen fuddled once in his lifetime?" 

In fact, he was not seen fuddled once only. Try as he might, he could not conceal his contempt for religion and its superstitions. The religious fanatic was a peculiarly dangerous animal, thought Hume; and clerics were hypocrites. He admitted that "the church is my particular aversion." 

His deconstruction of religion followed a familiar strategy, the first stage of which was to examine whether there was any logical reason to believe in God. Take the claim that God reveals Himself through "revelation”: truths about the divine apparently shown in empirical/historical sources, such as miracles. In section X of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume's painstakingly constructed case can be summed up in one sentence: We always have more reason to disbelieve a miracle than to believe in it. If a person claims to have witnessed an act which defied a law of nature-such as that Queen Elizabeth was seen walking and talking five days after her death-then we should ask ourselves whether there are other explanations. We should speculate about the person’s motivation, inquire whether there were other witnesses and whether these witnesses were truly independent, and so on. In reality, there was never testimony that has met these stringent criteria. (He thought it no coincidence that sightings of miracles tended to occur “among ignorant and barbarous nations”) His chapter “On Miracles” ends with a Iacerating summary. “So that upon the whole, we may conclude, that the Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity." 

Hume's critique of natural religion, in which conclusions reached about God’s existence are allegedly based on reasoning, is systematically laid out in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Composed as conversations between various characters, and published only posthumously, it is often said to be the most important book on the philosophy of religion ever published. Hume scholars tend to concur that Philo, the skeptic, is closest to the voice of the Scotsman. 

Having shown- to his satisfaction at least- that received arguments for believing in God were wretchedly inadequate, Hume questioned why it was that so many people persisted in their beliefs. Once more he located the explanation in the psychological rather than the rational. In particular, he believed that religion was the crutch for our apprehensions and anxieties. We have a fear of the unknown, Hume surmised, a fear of those external events that derail our lives, a fear of the erratic and unpredictable. The devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755 had provoked much theological head-scratching. How reassuring to believe that some Greater Being was making sense of these events, imposing some (hidden) order on apparently random fortune or misfortune. 

HOST AND GUEST could hardly have had outlooks less in sympathy. The instant relationship between them inevitably had shallow foundations: respect for each other’s achievements, Hume’s compassion for the dispossessed, Rousseau’s need for a haven, some mutual friends, the courtesies of the age. There was little else to create any affinity between these two cerebral beings. 

In terms of a philosophical dialogue, they could not agree about religion, human nature, the good life, politics, or economics. However, what truly parted them, and held them apart, was the profound disjunction in their intellectual characters. 

Hume was all reason, doubt, and skepticism. Rousseau was a creature of feeling, alienation, imagination, and certainty. In Emile, the Savoyard vicar states that his "love of truth" is “his whole philosophy” Whose method “exempts me from the vain subtlety of arguments.” He would “accept as evident all knowledge to which in the sincerity of my heart I cannot refuse my consent." Observing the heart was not easy: it had to be perceived through opaque rather than clear glass. “We see neither the soul of the other, because it hides itself, not our own, because we have no mirror in the mind.” But introspection was crucial, The most powerful validation for his beliefs came from his heart. 

Once the man of sensibility was settled, he and the man of rational skepticism had no reason to keep in touch. In this context, Hume was the last person who might fulfill Rousseau’s dream of friendship, and the decision not to correspond becomes comprehensible. Of course, Hume had never planned to look after Rousseau from day to day, and we can sense the relief when he later told Blair that Davenport had assumed charge of him.

More Adorno and Horky

On art:

Marcuse in his 1937 essay had argued that bourgeois culture in the 19th c. had sought higher experience in withdrawing from the world into a more refined spiritual world. But segregating cultural life from its materialist base, he thought, served to reconcile its consumers to the inequalities in the latter. Adorno and Horkheimer shared Marcuses contempt for what he called 'affirmative culture'. What they championed was neither high nor low culture but art that exposed the contraictios of capitalist society rather than smoothing them over -in short, modernist art. That is why, for instance. Adorno attacked Stravinsky's neoclassical period in his 1949 book Philosophy of Modern Music as ‘universal necrophilia'. He argued that in such works as Oedipus Rex and the Symphony of Psalms. Stravinsky’s incessant quotation of earlier music 'is the very essence of everything approved and certified in the two hundred years of bourgeois music . . . The authoritarian character of today is, without exception, conformist; likewise the authoritarian claim of Stravinsky’s music is extended totally and completely to conformism. In that book, Adorno once more championed Schoenberg over Stravinsky (both of whom were at this time his neighbours in Log Angeles) for moving on from his twelve-tone system, which had become a cage from which Schoenberg exploded, like Beethoven, into a late style. 

This championing of modernist art has looked to Adorno and Horkheimer’s later critics like elitism. As J. M. Bernstein points out in his introduction to Adorno’s The Culture Industry, it looked as though they were defending an esoteric modernist art against a culture available to all. Thirty years later, the new cultural theorists of postmodernism disdained what they took to be the elitism of modemists such as Adorno and Horkheimer. But what they had defended was not elitist art per se, but art that refused to be affirmative -as Adomo would put it in his posthumously published book Aesthetic Theory- the idea of art as the only remaining medium expressing the truth of suffering ‘in an age of indescribable horror’. What some called esoteric modernist art was for them the only art that could express that sutfering, could dare to be negative. It was defined in opposition to what is. to the powers that be: it was, as Adorno put it, a promesse du bonheur. a vision of something other than the affirmative culture. 

What the Frankfurt School did not have the temperament to do was consider popular culture as a site of resistance against affirmative culture. In Frankfurt’s twin city of Birmingham, though, another group of left wing intellectuals, including Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall, would do just that. The Birmingham Centre of Cultural Studies, established in 1964, while following the Frankfurt School in recognising that culture was a key instrument of political and social control, appreciated how the culture industry could be aberrantly, even rebelliously, decoded by its mass consumers and that popular sub cultures might subvert the culture industry in a form of immanent critique. Adorno could not hear in jazz the truth of suffering, nor ( one suspects) would he have enjoyed punk rock or hip hop but in those forms of music and other kinds of popular culture, Birmingham’s cultural studies scholars found a critical negation of the existing social order. Indeed, the modernist canon became an esoteric retreat for a cultural elite and thus akin to bourgeois high art the opposite of what Adorno had hoped for it. 

IN CALIFORNIA, Adorno and Horkheimer had more than Hollywood and the culture industry in their sights. Dialectic of Enlightenment turned the Hegelian and Marxist notion of history as the unfolding of human freedom on its head. For Adorno and Horkheimer, Enlightenment values themselves had become a prison rather than a means of escaping prison. They were not automatically progressive but were undermined by our enslavement within the totality of capitalist social relations. This was what was incendiary about their book: while eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot and Kant took the process of enlightenment to involve liberating mankind from nature and thereby led to human freedom and flourishing (Kant defined enlightenment as ‘the human being’s emergence from self-incurred immaturity’), Horkheimer and Adorno took it to be a process that imprisons mankind as reason is used instrumentally to create ever more pervasive networks of administrative discipline and control. For them, the founding father of the scientific mindset was Francis Bacon, the seventeenth-century English thinker, who argued that technological innovations had made man ‘master of nature’. It was Bacon, they argued, who eulogised what Max Weber would later call the ‘disenchantment of the world: Bacon cited the printing press, artillery and the compass as the key innovations that changed the world the first changed learning, the second changed war, the third made possible oceanic travel and so man’s domination of the globe. 

Mankind sundered itself from nature in order to dominate it - to make it and other men calculable, substitutable and, above all, exploitable. Putatively value-free science and capitalism walk hand in hand calculating the world the better to exploit both it and humans. In the process nature is denatured and we are dehumanised. ‘Nature becomes: Adomo and Horkheimer wrote, ‘what can be registered mathematically; even what cannot be assimilated, the insoluble and irrational, is fenced in by mathematical theorems. In the Pre-emptive identification of the thoroughly mathematised world with truth, enlightenment believes itself safe from the return of the mythical. It equates thought with mathematics’. The philosophical villains of this piece are Parmenides and Bertrand Russell, since both the pre-Socratlc philosopher and the father of contemporary logical analysis were fixated on reducing everything to abstract quantities and ultimately to the One -a fixation that seems rational but that could equally well be called utterly irrational. Just as bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence and capitalism unthinkable without the exchange principle that strips human labour and the fruits of that labour of anything but its equivalence to other commodities, so Parmenides and Russell render everything that cannot be reduced to numbers as illusion, to be written off as mere literature. ‘The destruction of gods and qualities alike is insisted upon'. 

It’s a shame that Russell came under fire here, not least because the Englishman, who had taught at the University of California from 1939 to 1940 and who was barred from teaching at the College of the City of New York in 1941 because of his radical views on women and the family, presumably didn’t think the values for which he had fought such as pacifism, women’s suffrage, or, later, nuclear disarmament could be written off as mere literature.“ At a moment when some in New York were calling for Russell to be tarred and feathered and thrown out of our country merely because he had dared years before to suggest that adultery may not always be a bad thing, he might have warranted a more sympathetic approach from two philosophers who spent much of their book bemoaning the 

dearth of human solidarity. Certainly Russell’s commitment to formal logic and the power of logical analysis was inimical to the German dlalecticians, but to take him and his philosophy as upholders of scientlfic orthodoxy and therefore social oppression seems unfair.

The anthropocentric hubris and urge to dominate, though, that Adorno and Horkheimer took to be characteristic of the Enlightenment involved self-alienation. Consider, by way of analogy, they suggested, what happened to Odysseus and his men when they tried to avoid the lure of the Sirens and not fall prey to their lethal song.“ They took this incident in Canto 12 of Homer’s Odyssey to be filled with symbolic meaning, and one can understand why it was so resonant for them- like Odysseus’ sailors they were wanderers encountering strange lands miles and years from home. The sailors stop their ears with wax so they can continue the work of rowing their ship, just as modern labourers discipline themselves, repressing their sensuality and desire for gratification in order to keep working. As for their master, he can hear the songs of the Sirens but has been tied to the mast. so he cannot respond to temptation. Adorno and Horkheimer argued that this attempt to break the feared power of nature (symbolised here by the Sirens) led thought ‘all the more deeply into enslavement. Hence the course of European civilisation'. Both the sailors and Odysseus have liberated themselves from the constraints of nature through self discipline, and in so doing have used human reason instrumentally to break the coercive power of nature and thus dominate it. But the human subject was thereby reduced ‘to the nodal point of conventional responses and modes of operation expected of him'. The process of individuation took place therefore ‘at the expense of individuality'. They took this mythical incident dramatised by Homer in the eighth century BC as an allegory of how the bourgeois subject of the Enlightenment domesticated, not just nature, but itself. Odysseus is the first bourgeois hero on whose treacherous journey involves risks that justify profits, one who uses reason, trickery, self-renunciation and self-discipline to survive. What Odysseus started, the technological innovations eulogised by Francs Bacon continued in the seventeenth century -namely, the domination of nature and the self-alienation of the human subject. 

In another excursus in Dialectic of Enlightenment called ‘Juliette: or Enlightenment and Morals’, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that a completely secularised scientific knowledge refuses to recognise any moral limits." This is the terrifying thought that haunted writers like Nietzsche and de Sade. For Nietzsche, if God was dead anything was permitted; for de Sade, the cruel subjugation of women, the denial of their subjectivity, their reduction to sex objects, was the perverse corollary of the Enlightenment's mastery of nature. Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Kant’s attempt to ground morality in practical rationality, the application of reason, served to extend the calculating, instrumental, formal rationality that involves the domination of nature and mankind. De Sade, then, is the barbarous dark side to Kant’s civilised project of enlightenment. 

The historian of the Frankfurt School Martin Jay contended that this instrumental rationality led to the horrors of the twentieth century. ‘In fact’, he argued, ‘the Enlightenment’s sadism towards the “weaker sex” anticipated the later destruction of the Jews- both women and Jews were identified with nature as objects of domination.’ But while the Frankfurt School, understandably, spent a lot of time writing and thinking about the oppression of Jews, they spent hardly any on the oppression of women. In part that’s because there were no eminent women in the Frankfurt School- odd for a putatively radical group of thinkers in the twentieth century. Contrast critical theory at this point with the new and related psychoanalytical theory, where women such as Melanie Klein and Anna Freud made substantial and distinctive contributions. That’s not to say that the Frankfurt School was ignorant about the oppression of women. In Minima Moralia, for instance, Adorno wrote a single paragraph unpicking the notion of the ‘feminine character’, arguing that it is the product of masculine society. Women, like nature, are dominated and mutilated as part of the Enlightenment project. In our civilisation, he argued, nature and the feminine character have this much in common: they seem natural, but bear the scars of domination. ‘If the psychoanalytical theory is correct that women experience their physical constitution as a consequence of castration: wrote Adorno mordantly (and the implication is he didn’t accept this theory), ‘their neurosis give them an inkling of the truth. The woman who feels herself a wound knows more about herself than the one who imagines herself a flower because that suits her husband. Women are oppressed and no more so than in being resuced to and compelled to perform the role of the feminine character.

Jesus, Salvation and the Afterlife

via Robert Wright

For many Christians, the word “Jesus” is virtually synonymous with the word “savior.” God sent his son so that, as the New Testament puts it, “all flesh shall see the salvation of God."' 

In a sense, actually, God’s salvation had long been visible. The Israelites were saved from the Egyptians by Yahweh. ("God. their Savior, who had done great things in Egypt," as the Hebrew Bible has it.) They were later saved from various other torments sometimes by a human being sent for that purpose. (“The LORD gave Israel a savior, so that they escaped from the hand of the Arameans.”) And even as Yahweh subjected them to the wrath of the Babylonians-his subtle reminder that salvation is not unconditional-he was preparing Cyrus of Persia to carry divine salvation to the Israelites yet again. Thus the prophet Jeremiah could call Yahweh the “hope of Israel, its savior in time of trouble.” 

But none of this is what Christian§ mean by “salvation.” When they call Christ the savior, they’re not talking about the salvation of the society or even the physical salvation of the individual, but lather the salvation of the individual’s soul upon death. The heart of the Christian message is that God sent his son to lay out the path to eternal life. 

Jesus is, in this view. a heavenly being who controls access to heaven. He “is seated on the right hand of the Father“ and will “judge the living and the dead," as it is put in the Nicene Creed, a foundational document of ancient Christianity and to this day a common denominator of Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and most Protestant churches. 

This Christian notion of salvation was a watershed in the evolution of the Abrahamic god or. at least. in the non-Jewish lineage of that evolution. In both its Christian and Muslim forms, it would prove influential in ways both fortunate and unfortunate. Believing that heaven awaits you shortly after death makes death a less harrowing prospect. And this, in turn, can make dying in a holy war a more attractive prospect, a fact that has shaped history and even today shapes headlines. 

After Jesus's death, there was good news and bad news for anyone who would set out to carry the Christian message of salvation across the Roman Empire. Both kinds of news are embodied in little figurines that archaeologists have found in the northern regions of the empire. There, scattered across burial sites, are bronze renditions of a god named Osiris. Exploiting trade routes, this god had traveled all the way to Gaul -what is now France-from his native Egypt. 

Osiris. who had been a major god in Egypt for millennia. bore a striking resemblance to the Jesus described in the Nicene Creed. He inhabited the afterworld, and there he judged the recently deceased, granting eternal life to those who believed in him and lived by his code. Hence the good news for Christian evangelists: Osiris‘s penetration of the Roman Empire suggested a widespread thirst for a divine figure of this sort, a sizable niche that a figure like Jesus might fill. And hence the bad news: at least some of the demand for this kind of divinity had already been met. As Christians carried the gospel across the Roman Empire, they would face competition from a god that already embodied some of the emotional appeal we associate with Christianity. 

The earliest of these evangelists faced a second kind of bad news as they preached the gospel in the Roman Empire. Not only was there already some crowding in the market for a blissful afterlife via spiritual salvation; Jesus himself, it turns out, didn’t initially fit Into this market niche very well. This will strike some people, including Christians. as strange. Doesn‘t the Nicene Creed describe a Jesus tailor-made for that niche? Yes, but the Nicene Creed was written centuries after Jesus died.

The common picture of Jesus it reflects- Jesus as heavenly arbiter of immortality- would have seemed strange to followers of Jesus during his lifetime. So would its corollary: that the righteous ascend to heaven in the afterlife. Eternal life of a certain kind may have well been part of Jesus' original message. But it may have not been, and in any event the details of the story- the part about heaven for example- changed consequentially in the decades after the Crucifixion. The way the now official story took shape is a case study in how God evolves to fill the psychological needs of his followers and also the survival needs of himself.

The idea of followers of Jesus getting to join him In heaven upon dying probably didn’t take shape until about a half century after he died. To be sure, his followers believed from early on that the faithful would be admitted to the “kingdom of heaven.” as the New Testament calls it. But “kingdom of heaven" is just Matthew‘s term for what Mark had called the “kingdom of God"-and as we‘ve seen. the kingdom of God was going to be on earth. In Matthew, Jesus says, “Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire. so will it be at the end of the age.” Angels will come down and scour the land for “all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of tire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” 

Note the dynamic: angels come to earth from heaven and weed out the bad people, after which the good people remain on the new, improved earth. There’s nothing about the souls of dead people ascending to heaven. 

In fact. there’s nothing about dead people at all. Jesus, convinced that the kingdom of God was “at hand," didn’t spend much time describing the afterlife; he spoke as if the day of reckoning was going to arrive any moment, before his listeners had a chance to die, and told people how to prepare. Judgment Day was about the living, not the dead. 

But just out of curiosity: What was going to become of dead people? Would they be resurrected and enter God‘s kingdom? And what was existence like for them in the meanwhile? In the years after the Crucifixion, such questions would grow salient as Jesus's followers saw friends and family, people with whom they’d expected to enter the kingdom. die. In a letter Paul wrote to Christians in the Macedonian city of Thessalonica probably the earliest document in the New Testament-he confronts the unease: “We do not want you to be uninformed. brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you my not grieve as others do who have no hope.” Those who stand in God‘s good graces, Paul assured his fellow believers, can look forward to an afterlife even if they die before Judgment Day. 

This probably reflects Jesus's own view. The idea that the dead would be resurrected at the culmination of history is found in the Jewish apocalypticism that Jesus inherited (including the book of Daniel). and Jesus affirms the idea in the earliest gospel. Besides. Paul's credentials as a witness to Jesus’s teachings are good, as such credentials go. Paul was alive when Jesus died and was attuned to the doctrines of Jesus‘s followers -first as one of their persecutors and then as one of their brethren. ln that sense, this passage from First Thessalonians, written some two decades before the book of Mark, is the earliest written evidence we have of Jesus’s view of the afterlife. 

In any event. Paul's view of the afterlife is the earliest documented Christian view, and it is notable for two things. First. though Jesus, being the son of God. went to heaven shortly after dying, ordinary Christians don’t follow that path. They have to wait for Jesus to return before things get blissful; “the dead in Christ will rise" only when “the Lord himself. with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and With the sound of God‘s trumpet, will descend from heaven.”. Second. even then. heaven isn’t where the dead are going; rather, they will live out eternity on earth-the much improved earth of the kingdom of God. 

But what about “the Rapture”-the idea of many Christians today that Christ will come down and escort both living and dead Christians up to heaven? This idea rests on a dubious interpretation of Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, in which he describes how, upon Christ’s arrival. first the resurrected dead and then the still living will rise into the sky: “the Lord. . . will descend from heaven. and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left. will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever." A fact rarely noted by evangelical Christians-including readers of the Left Behind series of apocalyptic novels-is that this passage leaves open the question of what happens after earthlings and Jesus ‘meet" in midair. Will they all go to heaven together (the “Rapture” interpretation) or come back to earth together? If anything, the fact that the earthlings “meet the Lord” rather than the other way around suggests the latter-that it’s the humans who am playing host, welcoming Christ to tetra firma. 

This suggestion is continued elsewhere in Paul's writing. We learn from a letter to the Corinthians that the returning Messiah, after raising the dead, will have some mundane business left on his agenda: wiping out the world’s many unsavory politicians. Paul. again reassuring Christians about the fate of the dead, writes: “All Will be made alive in Christ. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits [that is, after Crucifixion he became the first to return from the dead]. then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father. after he has destroyed every rule! and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet" 

The final enemy to die, says Paul. will be death itself. (Where, O death. is your sting?” he asks in a phrase destined for immortality.)" But even then, once Christians are thus rendered immortal, 
they apparently spend eternity on earth. After Jesus “hands over" the kingdom to God. there’s no mention of it being relocated. 

The “Rapture” scenario actually tests on a double confusion. There is confusion about how Paul envisioned Jesus’s return unfolding, and Paul is himself confused about how Jesus envisioned the return. In fact, he is confused to think that Jesus envisioned his return to earth at all. 

In the gospels, Jesus doesn‘t say he’ll return. He does refer to the future coming of a “Son of Man" a term already applied in the Hebrew Bible, to a figure who will descend from the skies at the climax of history; and the authors of the New Testament seem to have taken this as a reference to Jesus himself.” And plausibly so, since Jesus at one point predicts that the Son of Man will be killed and then arise three days later. Yet Jesus never explicitly equates himself with the Son of Man. And in some cases he seems to be referring to someone other than himself. (“Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.")‘ 

How to account for this odd pattern of usage? One scenario does a pretty good job. Jesus, like any good Jewish apocalyptic preacher of the time, affirmed apocalyptic scenarios in the Hebrew Bible, notably the one about the coming of the “Son of Man." Then. after he died, his followers, stunned by the Crucifixion and trying to make sense of it, speculated that Jesus‘s references to the Son of Man had been veiled references to himself. It would have been an appealing theory: since Jesus predicted the future descent from heaven of the Son of Man. that must mean Jesus wasn’t really dead after all! 

Once the disciples agreed that Jesus had meant this term self-referentially. they would have been empowered not only to give new interpretations to his actual utterances about the Son of Man; they could also Invent or hazily If earnestly half imagine-whole new “Son of Man” utterances. If a disciple claimed that Jesus had once told him that the Son of Man was destined to be killed and resurrected, how could anyone convincingly doubt it? Of course. if the disciple claimed Jesus had said, “I will be crucified,” doubt would have abounded. His peers would have asked, “Why didn‘t you tell us this back while he was still alive?" But if the disciple could insist he hadn‘t understood the true meaning of the remark at the time-because Jesus used the code phrase “Son of Man” instead of the word “I"-then his report would be invincible. 

All of this would explain one of the most dramatic scenes in the New Testament, a scene that is otherwise puzzling. Several days after Jesus is killed, Jesus’s mother and Mary Magdalene have found Jesus’s tomb empty and are “perplexed.” Two mysterious men appear, and the men said to them. “Why do you look for the living among the dead? Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb. they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest." 

Then they remembered his words? If Jews’s followers had known during his lifetime that “Son of Man" referred to him, and If he had indeed told them that the Son of Man would be crucified and resurrected after three days, it‘s unlikely that this prediction would have eluded their consciousness during the Crucifixion itself! 

How could a gospel author write so incoherent a scene? Maybe it wasn’t incoherent at the time it was written. If the idea that Jesus was the Son of Man arose only after the Crucifixion-and indeed was at that time famous for having arisen only after the Crucifixion- then the scene would have made perfect sense: the two Marys were having a major epiphany. Yes, they had heard that he might be the Messiah. the man who would save Israel. but they'd never dreamed he could be something even greater: the Son of Man - the figure Jesus himself had so often glorified. 

The image of Jesus as the “Son of Man." seated serenely in heaven ready to welcome the souls of good Christians, may have been crucial in the eventual triumph of Christianity. This image gave it an edge over the religions that didn’t offer hopes of a pleasant afterlife and kept it competitive with the many religions that did. It also inspired Christians to die on behalf of their faith. In the book of Acts. when Stephen is about to be martyred, he faces death with equanimity: “He gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God." The postmortem identification of Jesus with the Son of Man was a key evolutionary adaptation. 

Actually, a second adaptation was necessary before Stephen could have that vision, Half of his reassuring imagery -the Son of Man residing in heaven -took root shortly after the Crucifixion, but. as we’ve just seen, the part about faithful Christians eventually joining him in heaven didn’t. Nor did the idea, which Stephen apparently shared, that the reunion with Jesus would come shortly after death. Indeed, Paul’s silence on the question of the state of dead people prior to the coming resurrection suggests that his answer was the traditional answer in the Hebrew Bible: they spend their time in sheol, a murky underworld.

It is more than a decade after Paul’s ministry before Christian literature clearly refers to immediate reward for the good in the afterlife. In Luke, written around 80 or 90 CE. we’re told that the God-fearing criminal hanging on the cross next to Christ will find himself in “paradise” alongside Christ that very day." We're also told a story about the afterlives of a rich man and a poor man. The rich man, who died without repenting his sins, goes to a part of the underworld where, he observes, “I am in agony in these flames.” The poor man has better luck. He finds himself in the company of Abraham-perhaps. as some have argued, in heaven. but at the very least in a more hospitable part of the underworld: someplace where “he is comforted.” 

Some scholars argue that this idea of immediate reward for the Christian dead goes back to Jesus himself- who, after all, is the one who in Luke makes these two references to the afterlife.“ Yet neither reference is found in the earliest gospel. Mark, or in the earlier-than-Luke Q source. The mid-twentieth century scholar S. G. F. Brandon was almost certainly right to see this idea as developing after Paul and well after Jesus. It is, he noted, a pivotal idea, a departure from “the essentially eschatological figure who was about to intervene catastrophically in the cosmic process, and gather to their eternal reward his Elect." Toward the end of the first millennium CE, “Christ now began to be imagined as dwelling in heaven as the mediator between God and men."

What caused the shift? For one thing, as the decades rolled by and the kingdom of God failed to materialize, there was growing concern among Jesus’s followers over the state of the not yet-resurrected dead. Paul’s reassurance that believers’ recently departed family and friends would join “the rest of us” in the kingdom had worked for a while. But by the time of Luke, more than a decade after Paul’s death, that expectation was no longer operative. Now the attentive Christian was concerned not just about whether dead friends and relatives would eventually be resurrected but about what death would feel like until resurrection, since it increasingly looked as if the Christian in question would join his or her friends and relatives in that state before Christ returned. (It‘s probably no coincidence that Luke, the first New Testament author to hint at the modern Christian heaven, is also the first New Testament author to downsize hopes of a coming kingdom of God. The kingdom, Luke says, “is not coming with things that can be observed...the kingdom of God is within you.") 

This was another crucial pivot. Now the payoff from salvation wouldn’t be expected within a person’s lifetime, but it could come light after death-the next best thing. Had Christian doctrine not made this turn, it would have lost credibility as the kingdom of God failed to show up on earth -as generations. and generations of Christians were seen to have died without getting their reward. But now, with the kingdom of God relocated from earth to heaven, generations of Christians had presumably gotten their reward, and you could, too, if you accepted Christ as your savior. 

Foreign Competition 

Why is It Luke, not the roughly contemporary Matthew, who makes this pivot? Maybe because Luke is the most “Gentile” of the synoptic gospels. Whereas Matthew often seems to be trying to convert devout Jews to the Jesus movement, stressing its compatibility with traditional Judaism, Luke is focused on winning “pagan” converts. And if he is going to compete with pagan religions, he’d better make sure that Christianity can match their most popular features. Which brings us back to Osiris, gateway to a blissful afterlife. 

It brings us back to lots of other gods, too, because Osiris was hardly the only god in ancient Rome who held this sort of appeal. Though the official gods of the Roman state offered no blissful afterlife. the empire had been besieged by foreign cults that. by filling this void, had won followings." These religions of salvation came under a variety of brands. There were gods not just from Egypt but from Persia and Greece. Persian cults talked of souls migrating through the planetary spheres to paradise, and Greek cults offered bliss in Hades. the underworld that had once offered only a humdrum existence for the average soul but now featured lush subdivisions.” 

Am I saying that Luke stole his afterlife scenario from a competing religion? Not with great confidence, no. But if you wanted to indict him on this charge. you would not be wholly lacking in evidence. 

Certainly that story in Luke about the rich man and the poor man in Hades has Osirian overtones. At the time Luke was writing, a written copy of an Egyptian story about the afterlife was circulating in the Roman Empire. It was about a rich man and a poor man who died and went to the underworld. Both were judged at the court of Osiris. The rich man’s bad deeds outweighed his good and so he was consigned to one of the less desirable stations. In contrast, the poor man, whose good deeds outweighed his bad, got to spend eternity in the company of the “venerable souls near the seat of Osiris“  THe moral? “He who is good upon earth they are good to him in Amenti (the underworld), while he that is evil they are evil to him" 

Luke’s story about the rich man and the poor man seems to have no precedent in earlier Jewish or Christian tradition.” So there is indeed a chance that Luke heard or read the Egyptian story and adapted it for Christian use. But we’ll probably never know, and anyway, that isn’t the point. The point is that whether or not Luke borrowed this particular story from Egypt’s heritage, this theme --immediate reward in the afterlife- must have come from somewhere, and the likely source is one of the religions with which Christianity competed in the Roman Empire. 

Of these religions, Egyptian religion is the leading candidate. 

And it came in more than one variety. In addition to Osiris himself, there was a mutant Osiris named Serapis. Centuries earlier, after the conquests of Alexander, Greek imperialists who wanted to bond with their Egyptian subjects had fused Osiris and the Greek god Apis. They called the hybrid Oserapis, later shortened to Serapis. Now, in the Roman Empire, Serapis was worshipped alongside Isis- who, in Egyptian religion, was both the sister and wife of Osiris. By the time Paul wrote his canonical letters to Christians in Rome, Corinth, and Thessalonica, those cities already had cults devoted to Isis, Serapis, or both. If Christianity was to compete successfully, it would have to meet the psychological needs these cults met.

Born Agaln 

These needs aren't confined to the question of the afterlife. Though the basic meaning of spiritual salvation in Christianity is the saving of the soul from damnation, the term has broader resonance. For many Christians, salvation has been not just a heavenly expectation, but an earthly experience: a dramatic sense of release. What the release is “from" may vary-maybe just from fear of damnation upon physical death. but maybe from something else; maybe from some enslaving influence, such as alcohol, maybe from free-floating anxiety or guilt. And the release can be dramatic. Many evangelical Christians are firmly affixed to faith at the moment they feel “born again," perhaps while walking to the front of a congregation to accept Christ as their savior or during the subsequent ritual of baptism. 

It’s probably no coincidence that religious with which Christianity competed during its formative years also featured moments of transformative release. In the second century CE the Greek writer Lucius Apuleius described an initiation ritual in the Isis cult as a “voluntary death and a salvation obtained through prayer,” a way of being “reborn to a course of new salvation.” 

Apuleius’s account, though fictional. seems to draw on his own experience as a devotee of both Isis and Osiris, and it provides plenty of detail about the born-again experience. Here the initiate recounts his attempt to utter a prayer after a multiday ritual designed to culminate in a sense of contact with Isis.

(prayer skipped)

Note how many things the Isis initiate is being released from: the threat of hell, all kinds of “storms and dangers” of life. and, indeed, the very root of misfortune; back then astrology was for some a grim determinism, and a religion could prosper by pmmising to liberate people from the fate that their stars foretold. Hence the initiate’s gratitude to Isis who “keepest back the course of the stars.” 

There has probably never been a religion that was saving people from only one thing. And certainly in the ancient world most religions, like the Isis cult, addressed various threats to physical and mental well-being. 

Original SIn 

Among the things religions can save people from is a burdensome sense of their moral imperfection the sense of sin. Apparently sin was integral to the salvation message of early Christianity. Paul put the theme front and center. “All, both Jews and Greeks. are under the power of sin, as it is written: “There is no one who is righteous, not even one.’ 

Certainly not Paul. “I am of the flesh. sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. . . . But in fact it is no longer l that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want 15 what I do.” 

Scholars differ over whether this is Paul’s self-appraisal or whether he is speaking generically about the human condition. 'Either way, this passage must have been consistent with his personal experience. 

Indeed. seeing how Jesus could solve his problems with sin may have been Paul’s defining intellectual epiphany the thing that turned him into a zealous organizer of the early church. Suddenly. in Paul's mind, it all made sense. One man, Adam, had brought sin, and hence death. into the human race through his weakness, and now one man, Jesus, had through his strength, and through his death, offered release from sin and death And it was all a sign of love. God, to whom humans had long made sacrifices, so loved humanity that now he sacrificed his son. Thus did a story with an unhappy ending-the story of a supposed Messiah who’d wound up crucified- become a compelling message of salvation and eternal life. 

But if you’re going to start a religion that becomes the most powerful recruiting machine in the history of the world, an appealing message is only half the battle. The message has to not just attract people. but get them to behave in ways that sustain the religious organization and spread it. For example: it would help if sin is defined so that the avoidance of it sustains the cohesion and growth of the church. 

This is something Paul did masterfully. Look at the list of sins he enjoins the Galatians to avoid: “Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife. jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these.” Only two of these -idolatry and sorcery-are about theology. The rest are about workaday social cohesion. The last two- drunkenness and carousing- make people unreliable and unproductive members of the community. The first three -sexual excess- could rend the congregation with jealousy and threaten the marriages of congregants. The middle seven-enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy- are explicitly divisive; they are lapses from the brotherly love that was central to Paul’s strategy. 

And how strongly did Paul urge the Galatians to avoid these sins? After listing them he says. “I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God"

That’s a powerful formula: if you don‘t live the kind of righteous life that helps keep the church robust, then you won‘t get to live forever in God’s coming kingdom on earth. After the amendment seen in Luke -you won’t get to live forever in God’s existing kingdom in heaven-this formula would become if anything more powerful. You might call this a “morally contingent afterlife,” because it makes a blissful afterlife contingent on your moral fiber-a fiber that, in turn, gives sinew to the church itself. Christianity would harness this incentive to carry the God of Israel well beyond Israel, into the religious marketplace of the Roman Empire, where he would thrive. The morally contingent afterlife was a major threshold in the history of religion Yet Christianity was nowhere near being the first to cross that threshold. Once again, we come back to Osiris. That Egyptian story about the bad rich man whose soul is condemned in the court of Osiris has a very long lineage. The code of Osiris-the formula for a happy afterlife-was spelled out more than a millennium earlier in chapter 125 of the “Egyptian Book of the Dead.” This “book" is actually an amalgam of writings used to help secure a happy afterlife, and the writings span millennia. But with chapter 125, which shows up in the second millennium BCE, we see a clear example of a morally contingent afterlife. This chapter tells the deceased exactly what to say when arguing for his soul’s salvation before a court of gods overseen by Osiris. For example: 

I have brought about no evil. I did not rise in the morning and expect more than was due to me. I have not brought my name forward to be praised. I have not oppressed servants. I have not scorned any god. I have not defrauded the poor of their property. I have not done what the gods abominate. l have not caused harm to be done to a servant by his master.I have not caused pain. I have caused no man to hunger.
I have made no one weep. 

I have not killed. I have not given the order to kill. 

[ have not lnflicted pain on anyone. 

I have not stolen the drink left for the gods in the temples. I have not stolen the cakes left for the gods in the temples. I have not stolen the cakes left for the dead in the temples I have not diminished the bushel when I‘ve sold it. 
I have not added to or stolen land. 

I have not encroached on the land of others. 

I have not added weights to the scales to cheat buyers. I have not misread the scales to cheat buyers. 

I have not stolen milk from the mouths of children. .. 

I am pure. 

Here, long before the birth of Christ (and for that matter long before the birth of Abrahamic monotheism), is Judgment Day in a fairIy Christian sense of the term.There is a reward for moral behavior -eternal happiness-and maybe a second, more immediate reward: release from the sense of immorality itself-the sense of sin, the sense of impurity. One funeral spell found inscribed on a coffin was intended to liberate the soul of an Egyptian who had been trapped in “incrimination, impurity and wrongdoing” while on earth." 

Why all the interest in moral purity? When did it become a big human concern? Certainly the annals of anthropology aren’t loaded with reports of hunter-gatherers lamenting their moral impurity. In their societies the list of regrets about earthly existence features things more along the lines of hunger. Is there something about the advent of agriculture, and the attendant growth in social complexity
that made people feel deficient even when they had enough food? A couple of possible culprits spring to mind. 

One is religion itself. As we’ve seen, once social complexity moves beyond the hunter-gatherer level, theft and other forms of antisocial behavior grow more feasible, and religion starts to dis~ courage them. The result could be burdensome. Those Polynesian gods who afflicted thieves with shark attacks are the kind of thing that could weigh on the mind of someone who has once or twice strayed from virtue and is in the mood for a swim. 

More generally, if gods punish with earthly afflictions a variety of moral transgressions, some of which a person is bound to occasionally commit, then everyday misfortunes become haunting reminders of moral imperfection.

Paul himself, the man who put salvation from sin at the center of Christianity, attributed the burden of sin at least partly to religion. A well-educated Pharisee, Paul felt the demands of the Jewish law. “If it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said. ‘You shall not covet.’ 

The burdensome strictures placed on behavior by religions in ancient times came in at least two varieties. First, there were the kind we‘ve been talking about, the kind that are moral in the mainstream sense of the term: rules that keep people from harming their neighbors via theft, assault. dishonesty, and various other weakeners of the social fabric. Second and sometimes intertwined with the first were rules discouraging behaviors that were bad for the sinners themselves. 

The second kind of sin. like the first. was partly a product of social organization’s evolution beyond the hunter-gatherer level. Once people get much past subsistence, there are whole new opportunities for self destructive behavior. As civilization advanced, alcohol was mass-produced. and money could be squandered in new games invented for that purpose. That Indian hymn to the sky god Varuna depicts a sinner who has isolated the cause of his sin: “Wine, anger, dice, or carelessness led me astray." 

And. leaving aside alcohol, gambling, and other famously addictive products of progress, there were human emotions that, however valuable they’d been back in the environment natural selection designed us for, were increasingly problematic. Note the mention of “anger" in that Indian hymn an emotion that, as we saw in chapter 9, is less useful in a state-level society than in a hunter-gatherer village. 

Even an impulse as innocent as hunger could, for the more affluent and sedentary ancient citizens, lead to trouble. And this, too, is something the average hunter-gatherer didn't have to worry about. It’s yet another case of a functional impulse becoming potentially dysfunctional once removed from the environment it was designed for. Natural selection designed us to get “addicted“ to food, but that was in the days when scarcity kept addiction from getting out of hand. 

Maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that Buddhism, with at! its early austerity. was founded by a man who, as a member of the ruling class. could presumably indulge his appetites fully. In any event. the very possibility of overindulging appetites, a possibility that grew as civilization advanced, suggests that some behaviors came to be considered sins not just because they were bad for society, but because they were bad for individuals. Religion has long been partly about self-help. 

By some accounts, the thirst for salvation in the ancient world was grounded partly in a sense that earthly existence itself was impure. By the first millennium BCE, according to the sociologist Robert Bellah. there was “an extremely negative evaluation of man and society and the exaltation of another realm of reality as alone true and infinitely valuable?“ 

It’s certainly true that the long movement from the simplicity of hunter-gatherer society to the complexity of urban civilization had given people new reasons to view social experience dimly. It’s easy to see this in the modern world: just go to a cocktail party. Rapid-fire interactions with a number of people you know less than intimately can lead to a discomfiting postgame analysis and lasting anxieties. Did I offend her? Was he being purposely rude? Was she lying to me? Will he now ridicule me behind my back? These questions are hard to resolve when you may not see the person in question again for weeks, months, or ever. 

There weren’t many cocktail parties in the ancient wand, but things were moving in that direction. drifting away from the small social universe of the hunter-gatherer and toward a world with more social contacts and hence more uncertain ones. Still even as civilisation defused old sources of insecurity, hunger and safety, it seems to have created new ones.

Maybe these insecurities, together with the new sense of sin, help explain why. as civilization wore on. people more and more seem to have wanted gods with parental qualities-protective, consoling, and. if demanding, at least able to forgive. In the second millennium BCE. a Mesopotamian prayer refers to a moon god as “merciful and forgiving father." Granted. the same prayer calls him a “strong bull with terrible horns" whose “divinity is full of fear."“ According to the scholar Thorluld laoobsen, Mesopotamian conceptions of god are in this millennium moving toward that of the “stern but loving father." With the gods‘ terrible awe increasingly “in tension with underlying love. 

Egypt. too. saw the evolution of a loving, parental god. Osiris himself, notes the scholar J. Gwyn Griffiths, had been a god of “fear and terror" before assuming friendlier form. And in the second millennium BCE the great Egyptian god Amun is showing a compassionate side. Christians worship a loving father God, and many of them think this god is distinctively Christian: whereas the God of the Old Testament features an austere, even vengeful, father, the God of the New Teslament -the God revealed by Christianity- is a kind and forgiving father. This view is too simple, and not onlv because a god who is kind and merciful shows up repeatedly in the Hebrew Bible, but because such gods had shown up long before the Hebrew Bible was written. 

And, as we’ve just seen, so too with a lot of other main ingredients of Christianity-the born-again experience, Judgment Day. a morally contingent afterlife: nothing really new here. 

It shouldn’t surprise us that early Christianity was a mildly novel recombination of spiritual elements already in the zeitgeist. Any religion that grew as fast as Christianity did must have been meeting common human needs, and it’s unlikely that common human needs would have gone unmet by all earlier religions. 

Another thing a successful religion has to do is meet its own needs-remain a vibrant and cohesive social movement. As Paul understood when he labeled disruptive behavior sin, his church, first and foremost, had to stay intact. 

The word Romans used for “intact” was salvus. Something that was salvus was whole, in good working order. The expression salvus sis meant “May you be in good health.” Salvus is the word from which “salvation” comes. God, in moving from Israel into the wider world-the Roman Empire-continued to pursue the goal he had pursued in ancient Israel: provide salvation-keep the social system safe from forces of destruction and disintegration. 

There were differences between the way this job description played out in ancient Israel and in Rome. With early Christianity. the social system in question was a nongovernmental organization; it was just a church-not as with Israel, a church-based state. Still in both cases. for the religion to remain enduringly viable, it had to keep the system intact: it had to provide salvation at the social level. Paul's formula for preserving the church's cohesion- deeming divisive behavior damning sin-could be described as I way of linking individual salvation to social salvation. 

If you define individual salvation broadly enough as the saving of the individual or the soul from all kinds of afflictions -then this linkage has fueled successful religions in many times and places. The Polynesian religion that punished theft with shark attack made individual salvation contingent on behaviors conducive to social salvation. So did the Mesopotamian religion whose gods sent suffering to people who imperiled the health of others by urinating in drinking water. So did Moses when he laid out the Ten Commandments, then told the Israelites that God wanted to instill in them the fear of his wrath “so that you do not sin?" (Eventually the contours of the fear would be spelled out: if you sin, and then fail to atone for your sins via repentance and good works during the High Holy Days. your chances of dying during the next year go up.) 

Certainly the Osirian religion of Egypt linked individual and social salvation-and, by defining individual salvation to include a blissful afterlife, strengthened the linkage. This improved formula, once adopted by followers of Jesus, would help Christianity dominate the Roman Empire. It would later, as we’re about to see, help drive the expansion of Islam. There’s no denying its effectiveness in making some of the world‘s dominant religions dominant religions. 

But its modern-day effectiveness is a more complex question. When Christianity Ireigned in Rome, and, later, when Islam was at the height of its geopolitical influence, the scope of these religions roughly coincided with the scope of whole civilizations. The bounds of the Roman Empire were the bounds of an economically and politically integrated expanse, as were the bounds of the Islamic 
Empire. Yes, both empires did business with people beyond their borders, but the world’s polities hadn’t become nearly the dense collective web they would eventually become; there was no global civilization.