Spiritual development, Greek philosophy, and the birth of monotheism
by Jonas Atlas
Psychotherapist and author Mark Vernon published several books on philosophy, spirituality, Christianity, and the evolution of consciousness. In our podcast conversation we sat down to discuss the relationship between these various topics.
Ancient Greek philosophy is generally described as a strain of thought that was predominantly concerned with logic and rational thinking. According to the common story being told about that period of history, this strain of thought was subdued by the dogmatic and anti-rational faith of Christianity. During the Renaissance, however, humanists and freethinkers rediscovered the old philosophical ideas, and once again placed rationality at the forefront, laying the groundwork for our modern, scientific world view. From a historic perspective, however, this whole narrative needs to be questioned. It loses sight of important elements. To start with, the philosophers themselves were not merely interested in rationalist thinking. They were predominantly driven by a search for spiritual development, were they not?
That’s indeed an important corrective. Even in academic circles, the spiritual outlook of the ancient Greek philosophers is ignored. There’s this well-known phrase of Aristotle, for example: “In wonder all philosophy begins, and in wonder it ends.” Nowadays that’s taken to be an expression of a purely intellectual amazement, as if it’s about a kind of philosophical pleasure trip. For Aristotle, however, this thought had much greater significance. It was about asking why thinking about life and contemplating the natural world even produces a sense of wonder to start with. Aristotle knew — and this was very standard in the ancient world — that this wonder was the result of experiencing how your cognitive capacity, your aesthetic sensibilities, your mind, and your whole person was resonating with the world. Owen Barfield, one of the great friends of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, said that Aristotle woke up to the experience that his mind fitted the cosmic mind like a hand fits into a glove. So, that moment of wonder is also an invitation to develop this resonance, to “fit” yourself more and more to Reality.
As such, Greek philosophy was primarily a way of life. It was about your personal transformation and about cultivating virtues, not because that made you a “goody two shoes,” but because it expanded your contact with Reality. In fact, it’s only since the 19th century that this approach to knowledge completely changed. Because of contemporary science, the idea is that you need to extract yourself from what you’re studying as much as possible to gain “objectivity.” That would have been regarded as a hopeless effort in earlier centuries. Such an approach may give you certain insights that enable you to manipulate the world and produce tremendous technology — which is not to be sniffed at, since it offers many advantages — but, at the same time, it comes with this great price of feeling “uncoupled” from the world. In this respect, Barfield noticed that the more power we’ve gained over the material world, the greater our experience of its meaninglessness has grown. The desire for “objectivity” disconnects us from that world. Whereas the ancients and people in the Middle Ages would always say that the true nature of all things, can be known intimately within yourself, which implies a need to work on yourself. So, the old philosophies were primarily about personal and social transformation.
Besides being predicated on a search for personal transformation, they also strongly focused on a search for the divine. The idea of an all-encompassing God certainly wasn’t a foreign concept when Greek philosophy encountered Christianity. A Stoic term like “the logos,” for example, described the divine essence of life. That’s exactly why it was taken up in the Gospel of John.
Even more so, in both the Hellenistic Greek tradition and the Hebrew Jewish tradition changes in the view of the divine were related to a change in people’s sense of interiority. From the middle of the first Millennium BC the emphasis on personal transformation goes hand in hand with the birth of monotheism. The older parts of the Hebrew Bible, for example, do not present a form of monotheism. Yahweh is still one God among many, while people’s identity was derived from their family, their city state, their surroundings. Gradually, however, the sense of being an individual started to form. The individual became a center of its own. And when that sense of being able to say: “I am” integrates enough, the divine “I am”, the divine oneness, starts to become perceivable. This is how Barfield summarized the process, and I find it very helpful to think about the evolution of consciousness during that historic period. I just don’t think that monotheism was perceivable to people before. It was much more natural to think in a polytheistic way because your identity was “spread around.” So, it made more sense to think of deities as spread around as well: deities of place, deities of time, deities of the family ancestors, and so on. But eventually a kind of “gathering in” happens. The tradition starts presenting God as a Reality that can be found within the individual.
Something similar can be seen among Greek philosophers. I tend to see Plato as a kind of “emergent” monotheist, for example. In his writings, Plato explains that if you follow the path of love and intellect, and if you follow its spiral that draws you towards that which is good, beautiful, and true, you’ll eventually be led towards unity. For example, in The Symposium, Socrates has this great conversation with Diotima, who’s a priestess of love and who tells him: “I don’t know whether you’ll understand this because it’s a higher mystery, but if you follow the path of love, it leads to a revelation not just beautiful things, but of that which is beauty itself.” So, there is a sense of things coming together in a perception of The One.
Also, Socrates and Plato had a strong devotion to the God Apollo. Since they were Athenians, it might have been a lot more natural for them to be devoted to Athena, but Apollo was the God of light, and by following the light, they proposed, you can find your way to the unity of all things. Also, the name of the god comes from the Greek word “Apollos,” which means “not many.” So, they were intuiting something in the traditions associated with Apollo that was actually leading to monotheism as well.
If the birth of the individual and the sense of an interior spiritual life is coupled with birth of monotheism and the sense of divine unity, how then should we deal with certain elements in the Hebrew Bible that seem to contradict this pattern? For example, in the well-known story of the burning bush, God says to Moses: “ehyeh ašer ehyeh.” These words are often translated as “I am that I am” or, a bit more freely, as “I am the one who was, who is and who always will be.” It clearly indicates an all-pervading divinity.
The Moses of the Hebrew Bible is, I think, a reworking, of older traditions. We know, for example, that most books about Moses are exilic and post exilic works. Initially the Hebrew people, who lived in the land of Judah, worshiped Yahweh as the God of Mount Zion. As such, they associated God with a specific place. However, after the Jews were conquered by the Babylonians and taken into exile, they started questioning what had happened to Yahweh. Is Yahweh still with us now that we are not living around Mount Zion? Where can we find Him if we cannot worship Him in the Temple? In fact, I think that’s part of the reason why the name “Yahweh” became so central to the emergence of their monotheism, exactly because it does not refer to a place but implies “I am and always will be.”
To give another example of the same dynamic: at about the same time, Jews started calling themselves Jews. They started identifying themselves as an ethnicity, rather than as a group of people living in Judah. It made them bury the dead in single tombs or small family tombs instead of burying them in the great ancestral land. This as well shows a movement from “a place out there” to “a space inside.” And to come back to Moses: he’s considered to be the one figure people could look at and see the divine radiance. So, the concept of “divine presence” was no longer connected to a place or a temple but became drawn into a person. Moreover, the Jewish tradition is very explicit about the fact that the burial place of Moses is not known to this day. All these details, I think, are ways of telling a story that foster the interiority within you when telling the story of Moses. I believe that’s why Moses eventually becomes more important than Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
How then, do you place Christ in this narrative of spiritual interiorization?
I think Jesus is a sort of culmination of such a process. He’s not the end, because it continues, obviously, but he’s an embodiment of the spiritual evolutions of his time, of the realization that God is one and that this oneness can be known within us as well. The teachings of Jesus continually stress interiority: don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, go to your room to pray to your father in secret, and so on. You can see the same thing in his acts. For example, before He starts his public life, he goes into the wilderness, to confront his inner demons and during his public life, He often withdraws from the crowd to pray.
If such a spiritual interiorization was a pivotal element in the consciousness of humanity, how then do you look at some seemingly diverging trends in modern times? You already referred to them when you mentioned our “decoupling” from the world because of the emphasis that was placed on rationality and objectivity. On the one hand, this Cartesian split between the self as something “inside the mind” and the rest of the world as something “outside ourselves” is a logical outcome of strengthened individuality and interiorization, but on the other hand, it’s a deviation from the spiritual search for our mystical bond with divine unity.
I think it’s an old pattern, but one with a particular modern inflection. We feel alienated because we no longer know how we participate in the cosmos. The individual has become thrown onto itself and needs to find meaning, because it’s no longer obvious that meaning flows and floods all around us, as was the case in the medieval and the ancient world. Aristotle, for example, never asked: “what’s the meaning of life?” For him, the only question was how to engage with the meaning in everything that surrounds us. But we have to ask ourselves this question because of our alienation. We are forced to develop and focus our awareness on what is present and around us. We need to engage with it all the more freely and consciously.
Of course, modern individuality can sometimes slip into individualism, seen as a kind of fight against all the other individuals around you; but it also leads to valuing the individual in such a manner that we are convinced that everybody should have an education, that everybody should have a say in society, and so on. Values like equality and justice can often cause frictions, but they do come from the effort to understand how the individual matters in relation to The All. So, today, we find ourselves in a situation where we know that the individual matters, but we’re not quite sure in what way. As a result, concepts like freedom become very confused. We know that the individual needs freedom from coercion and destruction and that kind of freedom is often strongly celebrated, but, as Isaiah Berlin once put it, we are very aware of what we want to be free from, but we’re not quite sure what our freedom is for.
This is a short, edited fragment from a much longer podcast conversation about Mark’s latest book on Dante’s Divine Comedy, about the concept of the spiritual journey and about the comparisons and differences between his views and New Age views on the spiritual development of humanity. You can listen to the whole conversation here or search for Re-visioning Religion in your favorite podcast app.
