A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 3, by Mircea Eliade: A Review
The Myth of the Innocents, Faith vs. Reason, Judaism vs. Plato, and the Reformation — Tackling Jordan Peterson’s Reading List
My aim is not to outline every religious idea Eliade presents. Each volume is way too dense to do that and that’s why the book exists. We can just read it. I’ll highlight some thoughts I had particular to a couple of the religious ideas and some ideas I had that were inspired by this intellectual trip.
The Myth of the Innocents
In modern times we have witnessed a strange desire by some to follow the lead of children. Greta Thunberg is the most stark example of this. Why is it that a child who knows little if anything about the complex sciences and world development literature necessary to understand climate change and its impact leading the charge? And why are so many people paying attention to her? Well, in a civilization heavily influenced by the Christian religion, it makes sense.
Because of the shift to towards the weak, the poor and the innocent, Christianity has in it a mythology around children leading the way.
“It is simultaneously the myth of the Innocents, the exaltation of the child by Jesus, and the popular reaction against the Barons’ Crusade, the same reaction which expressed itself in the legends that crystallized the ‘Taurus’ of the first Crusades.”
In 1212 a child named Nicholas gathered a multitude of children and women and affirmed that he was commanded by an angel to liberate the Lord’s Cross in Jerusalem. They walked from the region of Cologne, down the Rhine, crossed the Alps and reached northern Italy. The Pope did not support them and pointed out that they were without authoritative support so they returned by foot. Many were said to have starved and died in the villages along their trail back home. It was written that their bodies often littered the streets and nobody took the time to bury them.
Usually children are dismissed when expressing their opinions of complex and important ideas based on their lack of education and/or authority on the matter. And that is what the Pope did to Nicholas. Now that is not to say that children by default are wrong or that we shouldn’t listen to them. But there is a hierarchy of knowledge and experience with which we should consult and respect as we listen and then guide them towards truth.
Nicholas wasn’t the only child to have done this during the Christian Crusades. Here’s a link to a nice article about both mini-crusades.
The children's’ crusades display the authoritative stance of the Catholic Church in how they were both seen as troublesome. The Church did not like the idea of the people gathering on their own without guidance as it can lead to a loss of power. Why have the church when the people on their own can follow the word of God and change history?
Although the later Reformation was lead not by children, the spirit of individual responsibility challenged the established hierarchy in a similar fashion.
Faith & Reason
I’ve heard several times the description of Americanism to be a melting together of faith and reason. It can be hard for modern people to see this as even possible because there is a myth that faith is the opposite of reason, or that faith is in conflict with science. It is not. In fact Eliade outlines the rationale behind the development of science as “magia naturalis which represents a new attempt to work out a rapprochement between Nature and religion. In fact, the study of Nature constituted a quest for a better understanding of God.”
I don’t know that any framework of thought is possible without first an act of faith. There seems to be some presumption of something unknowable at the bottom of every idea. It could be faith in the idea that truth is redemptive, or that the laws governing the universe are consistent across all corners of the universe. It could be faith in the idea that humanity should be free from suffering or that it deserves to be.
At the bottom of any of our pursuits, there lies an idea that is an assumption. What it is that motivates us to action, at its source, is not rationally based reasoned arguments. A scientific paper that discusses the efficacy of cancer treatments never starts out by explaining why we should fight cancer in humans. It presumes that fighting cancer in humans is good, which presumes that reducing suffering for humans is good, which presumes that humans have something good to do and contribute to the world. Why otherwise would we be excited to save a life?
How do we know that human life is worth saving? How can we prove that? Not everyone believes that as evidenced by depopulation movements since the seventies and de-growth environmentalism today. People have less children sometimes because they believe it is immoral to create too many humans. “There are already too many people in the world. Why should I create more?” is a common trope.
What faith and reason do is contribute to each other. They exist in a dialogue.
We have used reason to understand our faith by subjecting it to reasoned arguments by seeking to grasp and articulate what it is we have faith in. We Identify what is both at the top — that towards which we should aim — and what is at the bottom — that which is fundamental.
I found it interesting to follow some of these threads of development, most deeply by St. Thomas Aquinas, which put faith to the test of reason. Important to understand is that this process started well more than a thousand years ago. We’ve had more than one thousand years of dialogues amongst some of the most intelligent and accomplished people in the world dealing with the intersection of faith and reason.
There is even a specific term in religious studies for this process: Scholasticism
“In a general sense, ‘scholasticism’ designates the diverse theological systems aiming at the accord between revelation and reason, faith and intellectual comprehension.”
Knowing that and reading some of the fundamental arguments was a good reminder that none of the “clever” quips against either faith or reason are clever much less new.
I hear the roots of this reason vs faith argument in the desire for many to supplant the Biblical influences of our civilization, especially the founding documents of the United States, with the rationality and reason so popularized and developed by Greek thought.
But what Eliade points out here in the development of Judaism is its power to sustain in the face of challenges from Greek thought.
Judaism vs. Greek Thought
Eliade describes the dance between Judaism and Greek thought as a dialogue in which both sides are “reciprocally enriched.”
“In effect, the Jewish religious genius is characterized at once by its fidelity to the biblical tradition and by its capacity to submit to numerous exterior ‘influences’ without allowing itself to be dominated by them.”
What I see as the most important of these influences and discussions between Greek thought and Judaism is the personal relationship with God that Judaism insists on. This is the root of equality in the Western world. If all individual human beings are in a personal relationship with God, then who are we to interrupt that? You don’t see that in Greek thought as fundamentally as you do with Judaism.
Greek thought, from Aristotle to Plato and his dialogues of Socrates, often supports inequality, presuming some humans are better and thus more capable and should take the responsibility to construct and lead human societies. That is the specific prescription Plato provides in The Republic. In fact he (Socrates) goes as far as to propose censorship of poetry and art, the type of items that would make most if not all religious documents illegal. He in fact wants to heavily censor their own Homeric poems. There would be no individual right nor responsibility to decide for one’s self what to read and think. This is the direct opposite of fundamental beliefs necessary for modern Western civilization.
Without that sense of equality provided in Judaism and then Christianity, we would have no foundation from which to construct our Constitution. The Declaration of Independence (DOI) and Constitution make no sense without an assumption of equality that is completely absent in Aristotle and Plato’s framework of thought.
Where reason provides the how, faith provides the why
The DOI is a statement of why — individual equality — while the Constitution provides the structure for how individual equality is protected.
The Reformation
This concept of individualism was heavily spread through the Reformation of Martin Luther. This is why Protestantism is so heavily linked with the founding and structure of what would become the United States. His breakdown of hierarchies in relation to how we come to have and nourish faith in God was the foundation for how we today understand individual equality.
“In the manifesto To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (August 1520), he rejected the supremacy of the people over the councils, the distinction between clergy and laity, and the clergy’s monopoly in the study of Scripture; to this end he recalled that all Christians, thanks to their baptism, are priests.”
Timing for Martin Luther’s Reformation was critical in that the invention of a new version of the printing press allowed books, especially the Bible, to be printed and spread en masse throughout Western civilization. Literacy became a responsibility of each person in order to propagate and nourish their personal relationship with the divine. Eventually, most everyone had the mental capacity and resources to study and wrestle with faith on their own.
The importance of this idea is evidenced in other sources, namely the work Joseph Henrich has done in explaining the development of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) societies. The spread of literacy parallels the spread of Protestantism (and Catholicism to a lesser extent) which affects the manner in which we think and the actual structures of our brain. People in literate societies have structural brain differences like a thickening of the corpus callosum.
And if you know anything about the next book I’m reviewing, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, you know how important the corpus callosum and inhibition are to his proposed development of consciousness itself.
Conclusion
Reading and completing this third volume was a bit easier in that it was much shorter than the first two. But like the first two, there were times where I had to really push myself to complete the chapters. The discussions on religions that I was not at all familiar with were harder to get through likely because I had no sense of how they related to the world in which I live today.
At best, there were hints of a similar view of how the world came to be in that a near human universal is the symbolism of creating order out of chaos, and the microcosm-macrocosm concept.
Almost all origin stories for our world involve a view that there was chaos which we or the gods ordered as a means to control our world. The symbolism usually involves water which is fluid and chaotic and ends up with land or mud as the start of a new world which is ordered.
The microcosm-macrocosm themes all involve seeing the universe as the macrocosm structure that is directly reflected in the microcosm of the human form as well as nature itself. This was what first inspired humans to study nature in order to understand themselves and the universe. All knowledge would fit into that framework so understanding nature brings us closer to an understanding of God.
So even though reading books like this isn’t as entertaining as scrolling Instagram reels or binging Netflix, I have to remember that entertainment is not necessarily the goal of reading. It can be, but there is also a duty involved.
And in order to understand our world today, it’s important to understand the substance upon which it is founded. Without an understanding of religion and its development, which is a human universal, you cannot understand humanity nor yourself.