6. Symphony
Of Emergence
|
Religion and Empire
|
||
|
|
||
| 6.6 Religion and Empire | ||||
|
In light of our model the generation of Christianity and later Islam (and Judaism as we know it now) from the Judaic core phase suddenly falls into place in our explanation. The mechanics of these religions is impossible to understand without an eonic model. And one consequence is that, according to our rules at least, we cannot explain the mideonic religions to come, i.e. our system does not control the coming mideonic futures, although these are sequentially related to some core potential in the transition, and the Old and New Testaments of the Christians virtually say just that as they create an eonic myth of the mysterious system they find themselves in. It is easy to fall into a ditch here, and it is good to be wary. It is helpful also to look at the Buddhist example for comparison to see the strange core process at work. But we can see how the general pattern is in some fashion latent in the transitional period. That said, it is very easy to produce a plausible scenario of the way our model ‘generates’ the seeds for what comes, as long as we are wary of speculation. The case of Christianity, for example, is both exceeding obscure and completely transparent, at least with respect to our model. The Judaic stream brims and overflows, as we see a spiritual movement suffer the strains of transcultural integration and break away into a new religion. These religions are now challenged in the next phase of our system, and the New Age effect is starting over. Nothing in our account requires any future for religion, since this category tends to the ad hoc of its age period. But modern secular thought can barely do justice to the immense task performed by the era of these mighty oikoumene integrators whose impulse moved toward the protection of disparate peoples and diverse evolutionary groups. Secular would replace this integrator theme with Darwinian thinking, then wonders fundamentalism is resurgent. We are so distracted by the metaphysical issues of theology that we fail to see the gestation of a new man from the action of these mysteriously emerging formations rising to challenge, then defeated by, the world of empire. The critique of someone like Nietzsche of the onset of these champions of spiritual equality is unfair, and historically blind, and we must dread a future constructed of scientism, Darwinist reductionism, and neo-barbarism if an improper or ill-considered exit into secularism entirely displaces the impulse toward the community of man these vehicles created. Modern man must surpass these religions without regression. Our modern transition has already laid the foundation for a resolution of these questions. But we must note the way that these mideonic periods tend to fall into chaotification. Darwinism will almost certainly reignite an ‘Athens-Jerusalem’ style collision if it grows to overtake the global consciousness. This won’t have anything to do with a renewal of the ancient religions. A similar effect is very clear in the far left of the nineteenth century, a materialist movement. We will remain within the deliberate restriction of our model and issue its stern reminder, that these religions are mideonic constructs. That means that men created them, and how they did that is simply not clear from the evidence, and requires some grounding in the more adept spiritualities of India. Especially with the birth of Christianity is that the case. It is a puzzle with too many missing pieces, one of them the charming tidbit of the ‘three Magi’. The triple action of John the Baptist, Jesus and Paul is hard to reconstruct, and too coordinated to be chance, but too ad hoc to be divine action. We can easily suspect, but not prove, something missing is crucial. The story of Paul’s conversion is a giveaway, but a giveaway to what? A true tour de force of concerted action whose choreographers we do not see, and whose tactics we may never know. The most obvious indication is the truly ominous decline of the entire system, in the West. The fall of the Roman Empire is the token piece here, yet we might assume that our system predicts this, or the argument requires it. Not true. This massive decline is not visible to anything like this degree in the world of China. Our subject is eonic rise, plateau, rise, not necessarily decline and fall. The problem is that system runs out of octane, and becomes humdrum, sluggish, then starts downhill slowly, unable to advance, among other reasons because of the factor of slavery. Our system might have had two millennia of democratic experiments. Instead modern man ends up doing tenth grade work in the eleventh grade. We see the drastic cutoff point, as the transition coughs, sputters, and dies across the board. The eonic falloff phenomenon in the Hellenistic Age is the answer to Dodds’ ‘failure of nerve’. The difference is unmistakable very quickly, and proceeds from the era that started with the Iliad and passed toward that of Vergil’s Aeneid. The contrast of Athens and Rome shows the clear difference of ‘phase and sequential dependency indicated at the root of this analysis. We see the one blend into the other as the new era proceeds, and proceeds from the sturdy Roman Republic to the time of the Empire. Empire, by Negri and Hardt A great deal of debate is currently in progress over the theme of the ‘American Empire’. Sometimes the comparison is to the Roman Empire. These cyclical comparisons are apt, yet misleading. The correct comparison would be to the much earlier Athenian Empire, the stage of a democratic system unfaithful to the freedom of its exterior. The Roman case is later, and different. These analogs are open to wrong thinking. Our system of eonic cycles shows cyclical progression, but not cyclical recurrence. The content is independent from the cycles. There is no one-to-one match. Nevertheless the breakdown of an emergent democracy or republic associated with the eonic sequence might indeed show some form of resemblance. We should note that the term ‘empire’ often confuses the breakdown of a republic with the imperialism of a democracy. By that standard the comparison with the Roman example fails, for the equivalent period would be about –400, at which point the Roman Republic began to construct its external empire. It is a better analogy to see the similarity to the period of the Athenian empire, which coincided with the period of democracy.[i] Mideonic Forces? The nature of our tale changes as we pass from eras of transition to the related sequential dependency of the mideonic world that arises from eonic generation. Our model has a problem, we can’t explain the ‘middle periods’. We designed it that way, on the basis of the evidence, the plus, beside the minus, of a discrete-continuous model. Everything in the mideonic interval defaults to ‘free action’, an apt and illuminating, though limited, approach, justified, however, by the facts. That is its value, and limit. By definition of our terms there are no such ‘mideonic’ forces, and the system proceeds on its own. And yet there seem to be such. Something in the transitions generates the potential to create the mideonic realization. In one way the answer is right in front of us. Our form of analysis creates a seeming paradox, the reverse of that of the transition. If we attribute ‘driving force’ to phase, and yet associate this with emergent freedom, we are confronted with the chance that after the phase we will wish to see ‘unforced freedom’ and yet more probably will find a loss of freedom. Such paradoxes are really a sign that we cannot apply conventional dynamical statements to the system we find. But the data reflects this feature of the model most definitely and we know we are on the right track to something because of such accurate reflections of the model. The terms of explanation are ‘eonic determination’ and ‘free action’. Sequential dependency is not determinism. Instead, information flows outward and there’s a good chance the local future may conform to that information. The new influences of the transition diffuse outward, sort of hoping to influence the future, but more or less just keeping its fingers crossed. So what’s to stop someone in the mideonic times and places to simply ignore the general ‘evolutionary’ direction. We see the elemental significance of religion as a core area generates a ‘script of action’, in the form of a corpus of materials, which, remarkably, even include claims on divinity saying, ‘Do this’, ‘This is how free action’ should behave. The tablets of the law, crystallizing as myth just at our divide, in the expanded abstraction of the state called a ‘religion’, flow outward into the field of free action. |
||||