A Quote for Today

Interesting. I happen right now to be reading a book by Protestant thinker, Rudolf Bultmann. The book is entitled “Primitive Christianity in its Contemporary Setting”. The section I’ve arrived at is “The Greek Heritage” and the chapter of that section which I finished last night was “The Crisis of the City State”. Consider the article to which Mark has linked with this excerpt the cited chapter of Bultmann’s text:

“The constitution of a the city state was …an empirical manifestation of an eternal principle. The gods watched over it and protected it, punishing the wrongdoer. The State had an aura of sanctity about it, and the relation of the citizen to it was in effect his religion, with its external expression in the official cultus. Unlike the majority of the Semitic deities, the Greek gods were not tied to the land or the soil. Primarily, they were gods of the nation, of the nation constituted as a State. Religion and politics did not develop in watertight compartments, nor was there any conflict between them. There was no problem about the relation of Church and State, no autonomous priestly caste as in the religions of the East. The worship of the gods was a STate cultus, the priests State officials.

“Yet all these considerations fail to touch the real problem before the city state. How long would the belief in the divine origin of its constitution survive? Would the State continue to be looked upon as a sacred institution with priority over all individual interests? Would the gods still command reverence for their divinity, or would they be reduced to the level of personificiations of man’s spiritual and intellectual capacities? True, the doctrine of the divine origin of the STate and its laws was still upheld. But, on the other hand, the concrete shape of the laws was determined by the decisions and action of the citizens. Thus there was a very real danger of the gods losing their authority, of the city state and its laws pasing increasingly into human control and being subordinated to their private and collective interests. Once this kind of criticism hasd been brought to bear on the existing constitution, once the democratic assembly could repeal old laws and pass new ones at will, the State became increasingly the scene of party conflict and a scramble for power on the part of individuals. As a result, political life became secularized, and there was no check on self-seeking, greed or avarice. The old, divine sanctions had disappeared.”

Does any of this look familiar, Vox Novians?

My point above was the much-too-often-repeated one that those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it. The Founding Fathers, the elite amongst whom were mostly Deists and men of the Enlightenment, knew about the Greeks. They knew that for the people of a democracy–especially one peopled largely by religious dissidents and refugees from religious wars or persecution–to be kept in check and made to toe the line, the governmental powers needed to have divine sanction. So they stuck it in there, with enough vagueness so that any group or individual could allow himself to believe that “the Maker” in question was the Maker of his particular flavor of the faith. I.e., they tried to create precisely what the classical Greeks had tried to create in the infancy of the city-state, as described by Bultmann in my previous comment. And it eventually unravelled in much the same way that ours in the process of unravelling now. We are currently witnessing the reaction of the last of the die-hards being played out religio-politically. Same old, same old.

So how does Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and all the pre-socratic philosphers fit in with Bultman’s description of the divine sanction. Didn’t Plato/socrates react against the religious myths of the day? Socrates was killed for this meddling. But at the same time Plato insisted in the Republic that an elite should run the state because of their education and virtue? Who are these elites and what is the foundation for their rule? The foundation almost always falls back on religious language. It’s just that since the enlightment the religious language has taken on a secular tone. If the foundation is not divine sanction then what? Humans are religious and therefore politics will always be infused with religion.