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| Can We Be Awe-Inspired without Thinking Hierarchically?
Can We Be Awe-Inspired without Thinking Hierarchically?
The Problem of Early Modern European Pantheists and Panentheists
In a world that is not always friendly, animal survival often enough seems to rely on the ability to discern patterns and sequences and to grasp categorical and symbolic relationships if not the fine points of causal necessity and sufficiency. Edward Wilson reminds us "The waggle dance of the honeybee... is a miniaturized rehearsal of the flight from the nest to the food."(1) In Africa, vervet monkeys have different vocalizations that must be learned by their young to indicate danger from above and danger from below. Thus, the vocalization for a leopard is different from that indicating an eagle, and while the former causes an adult vervet to go high into the treetop canopy where branches are too thin to support a leopard's weight, the latter has an adult vervet dash for the bushes.(2) In human cognition, according to Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, there is an ability "to directly grasp the regularity immanent in complex natural events, that is to filter it from the background 'noise' information that is simultaneously transmitted by our sensory organs and perceptual apparatus."(3) This alone is not so far removed from other animals. However, just as other animals have developed particular mental skills within their evolutionary contexts, humans, like so many other primates, have evolved in a social context that influences and perhaps even clouds our thought. In general terms, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby argue that the demonstrated ability of human primates to construct relationships among objects evolved in the context of a social animal's need to determine relationships within the group, as did "coalitional action in chimpanzees" and "'friendship' and dominance in baboons."(4) Pascal Boyer, in Religion Explained, writes, "Our inference systems may be there because they provide solutions to problems that were recurrent in normal human environments for hundreds of thousands of years." When we foraged "for food in small nomadic groups, where close cooperation is a matter of survival and information is richly transmitted through example and communication," humans learned to perceive complex action as a function of the benevolent or threatening intentional agency of others.(5) If this perspective is accepted on the basis of the strength of its factual and inferential evidence, it should come as no surprise that, to cite Edward Wilson, "Culture, including the more resplendent manifestations of ritual and religion, can be interpreted as a hierarchical system of environmental tracking devices."(6)
David Sloan Wilson, however, sees religion as often functioning as a leveller of special benefits and individual selection. As suggested by the the book Darwin's Cathedral, culture and its specific religious manifestations may very well serve as tracking devices indicating who can be trusted to provide altruistic aid and thereby promote group selection, as in the case of the Christians of the Roman Empire, who seemingly had a better support system in times of contagious plague and a resulting higher survival rate than pagans.(7) Still, in the midst of binding communities, religion creates hierarchies in thought, eventually replicated analogously in social hierarchies needed to organize societies larger and more complicated than the small foraging bands in which Homo sapiens originally evolved. Christianity acquired a pope in the west and a patriarch in the east as a result of this process.
Religion, from the Latin "religare" (to bind fast) is thereby embedded within a system of hierarchically constructed survival mechanisms-mechanisms that especially promote the survival of the individual's community through the priestly and kingly communication of rules that dare not be broken at the risk of offending supreme otherworldly power:
"To sanctify a procedure or a statement is to certify it as beyond question and imply punishment for anyone who dares to contradict it.... The individual is prepared by the sacred rituals for supreme effort and self-sacrifice. Overwhelmed by shibboleths, special costumes, and the sacred dancing and music so accurately keyed to his emotive centers he has a 'religious experience.' He is ready to reassert allegiance to his tribe and family, perform charities, consecrate his life, leave for the hunt, join the battle, die for God and country. "Deus vult" was the rallying cry of the First Crusade. God wills it, but the summed Darwinian fitness of the tribe was the ultimate if unrecognized beneficiary"(Wilson, E.O. 8).
Through religion human individuals who recognize themselves as individuals with individual purpose are indoctrinated to submit to the group and its leaders. They are bound fast by chains of social and cultural relationships, by accepted patterns of behavior. Though human history has exhibited some ambivalence to hierarchy and the capacity of coalitions to lessen hierarchical impact, even egalitarian sympathizers like Christopher Boehm warn us that the most egalitarian foragers must be vigilant to lessen hierarchical impact in their communities, and a propensity for hierarchical construction is a human trait.(9) According to Marc Hauser, "When animals compete for resources, the number of individuals they track is small: a few competitors of higher or lower rank, two or three allies in a coalition, and a small number of potential mates."(10) Often enough living in extremely large communities, humans may use the conceptual abstractions of culture and religion to keep track, even as the authority of alphas is reinforced by religious code. Where hierarchy is pronounced, religion has served as an ally of hierarchy, even as intimated by Edward Wilson.
However, religious cognition may also be related to the discernment of other, broader patterns of relationship than the social cohesion stressed by D. S. Wilson and the hierarchical cultural tracking devices emphasized by E. O. Wilson. In Sociobiology, Edward Wilson argues, with some evidence, that before religious power belonged to priests and kings, it belonged to shamans actively trying to manipulate nature and the deities. Thus, he proposes that a relationship with a broader natural world may have taken precedence over social relationships in the development of religious sentiment. In Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species, Wilson indeed argues for an "innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes," to distinguish life from the inanimate, and, from infancy, to "concentrate happily on ourselves and other organisms." For him, "biophilia" involves a wide-ranging diversity of bonds and experiences, including "awe of the serpent," "the idealization of the savanna," and "the hunter's mystique."(11) It is a submergence of self in relationships with the natural world, and although he does not define biophilia as a religious expression, it is written about as a discourse replete with poetic symbolism if not ritual. Thus, the biologist Edward Wilson himself raises an interesting question: does human religious cognition manifest itself as a general sense of awe, a relationship between individual and overarching environment? Does it grow as a reflection on the animal ability to process information about the world around us? In the words of Marc Hauser, "All species carry specialized mental tools for processing information about objects, number, and space," but the human species does show a proclivity for ascribing intentionality to others.(12) Does this propensity for the assignment of intentionality so cloud human mental processes that religion must be the search for intent and superhuman, intentional actors called gods, goddesses, ancestors, ghosts, saints, and bodhisattvas? Philosopher Daniel Dennett, in fact, has drawn a direct relationship between our ability to take an intentional stance, to ascribe a theory of mind to others, and animism, "the idea that each moving thing has a mind or soul."(13) Is human religion nothing more than an anthropomorphic attempt to project our intentions and methods of social organization unto the entire universe? Are we capable of nothing else?
In order to answer this question, I will explore the expression of pantheism and panentheism in the early modern European world.(14) Did thinkers who identified all reality with god (pantheism), or saw nature as part of the infinite reality that is god (panentheism), use monism as a means to leveling hierarchical and intentional thinking in a demographically large culture with a pronounced sense of hierarchy, and if they did, how successful were they? In turn, how do pantheism and panentheism fit within an evolutionary framework? With a limited data base presented in an historian's narrative discourse, I cannot pretend to make universal claims. I have indeed developed the habit of proposing hypotheses based upon limited evidence in the hope that at some point other historians might investigate further. At present though, I will suggest that a binary tension between religion as social and hierarchical projection and religion as a sense of awe building from cognitive relationships with the natural environment has manifested itself in cases other than my early modern European example.
During the Eastern Zhou Period (770-256 B.C.E.) in the land that would become China, kings and warlords struggled for the control of resources measured in land and laboring peasants. Authority was often enough measured by the expression of force. In response to this cultural context, two great Chinese intellectual traditions arose: Confucianism and Daoism. While the former focused on an attempt to define proper ritual and custom, the latter embraced a way-the Way-embedded in the natural world. The teachings attributed to Confucius do state that "The Master never spoke of the supernatural, violence, disorder, or gods and spirits," but they then often enough portray Confucius as honoring the rites and rituals associated with revered dead ancestors and divine forces: "In making Ritual offerings, he looked tranquil," and "He made an offering of even the simplest rice and vegetable, broth and melon-and he did so with the greatest solemnity."(15) Likewise, the sayings attributed to Confucius taught that subjects should subordinate themselves to rulers and youth to elders. His thought tried to bind a violent China through hierarchical relationships and rites, through "li," and through reciprocity within those relationships, or "shu."(16) Confucius may have personally taken no interest in supernatural speculation, but like Machiavelli after him, he saw religious ritual as a means of binding people, of creating a community through a particular form of communication between humans and the human-like intentions projected into the universe. In contrast, Daoism argued for the development of character through pursuit of the Way (Dao). Both kind and unkind, the Way embedded in Nature taught the Daoist sage to adopt behavioral practices according to changing circumstances and to be suspicious of status attributed through culturally constructed hierarchies and the use of human communication.
The Daoist Sage "loves the (lowly) earth," and "dwells in (the lowly) places that all disdain." He learns from Nature, and "Nature says few words:/ Hence it is that a squall lasts not a whole morning./ A rainstorm continues not a whole day./ Where do they come from?/ From Nature./ Even Nature does not last long (in its utterances),/ How much less should human beings?"(17) Eschewing relational thinking through language and observance of social hierarchy, though still ascribing intent to nature writ large, the very first statements of Daoism, though not necessarily later ones, vere towards a sort of highly adaptive pantheistic anarchism in rejection of the binding functions of culture and religion-those binding functions being seen as the source of competition, violence, and the problems of the Later Zhou. While Confucianism sought out a more tightly defined sense of hierarchy and social binding, using the rituals of religion as a means, early Daoism rejected these things in an attempt to become one with Nature and changing environments, though later Daoism would evolve into a set of rituals presided over by priests. Thus, as the Han dynasty disintegrated in China during the second century C.E., religious leaders in Szechwan Province taught the Five-Peck-Rice sect of Daoism, in which charity, the building of roads, and other constructive acts of social religion were seen as a means of religious redemption before the deities and heaven. Early Daoist thinkers tried to abandon hierarchical social thought through an impersonal pantheistic sensibility. Later Daosim tried to do so through altruistic acts, but scholars like Henri Maspero and C. K. Lang agree that priests eventually came to lead and direct a more hierarchically inclined Daoism.(18)
In a different culture, that of Medieval European Christendom, St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) blended a respect for hierarchically defined religion with the leveling notions of a nature mystic and near panentheist.(19) In his synthesis, he avoided the stigma of heresy by submitting to the authority of the Medieval Church, its priests, and Pope Innocent III, seeking out Innocent's expressed approval for his Order of Little Brothers. In fact, he tried to keep his followers from ever becoming priests or university professors, to be different from St. Dominic's contemporaneously founded Order of Preachers. He failed, and in 1220, he retired from active leadership where his order of friars was concerned. A submissive personality, Francis had great difficulty drawing up regulations for his order that were not entirely vague.(20) He could live human religion as a hierarchical social construct, but he could not play the role of an alpha, even though his life and words inspired others. A leader who avoided the trappings of leadership, he saw nature as the holy and blessed signification of god's presence. His "Canticle of Brother Sun" does not identify god with nature in any pantheistic or panentheistic way, but it reveres an intentional nature as beloved by god: "Be praised, my Lord, for our Sister, Mother Earth./ Who nourishes and governs us,/ And produces various fruits with many-colored flowers and herbs."(21) In honoring and anthropomorphizing "our sister, mother earth," Francis passively denounced the Cathari heresy of his day that attacked the established clerical hierarchy and saw nature as the evil creation of Satan. Francis was accepted by Innocent for his submission to the established Church in an era of heretics like the Cathari and Waldensians.(22)& |
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