4.6 Type VI: Dualism. In Iran a new religion arose perhaps in the 7th century bce, or as early as the 12th century bce. Zoroastrianism, which became the religion of the Persian Empire, the Empire conquered by the Greek, Alexander the Great, in the 4th century bce, and continued to be the official religion of the successor to the Persian Empire, which coexisted with Rome and then the Byzantine Empire, until it was conquered by the Muslims in the 7th century ce. This religion was very different from Paganism, and, together with Judaism, introduced the notion of a supernatural God who transcends the natural universe, and indeed, created it, with its natural laws.
The religion was founded by Zoroaster. He was a worshiper of the Ahuras, a set of younger gods opposed to the Daevas, older deities who were their parents, and perhaps represented the deities of the indigenous population of Iran at the time of the Aryan invasion. In any case, the Daevas became the chief gods of India, and the Ahuras (Indians call them the Asuras) became a kind of powerful and mischievous demon. The gods of the Aryan herdsmen won out in Zoroastrianism, and the chief god of the religion is Ahura–Mazda, the sole creator of the world, and the only god worthy of worship. The Daevas were viewed by Zoroaster as evil beings that sought to destroy the good creation of Ahura–Mazda, the Wise Lord. There was also a worship of seven “bountiful powers,” apparently intended to represent more or less independent aspects of Ahura–mazda. Spenta Mainyu, the “bountiful spirit,” chose the truth in the beginning, while “angra–mainyu,” the corresponding Daeva and an evil spirit, chose the lie. Thus arose the battle that is ongoing in this world, which will end with Ahura–Mazda’s final victory after 12,000 years. The practice of the religion involved sacrifices to the pure fire (compare the Hindu Agni, fire god) and the use of pure water to cleanse oneself of filth and evil. Under no circumstances was one to harm a cow, and the ritual involved no killing. The Daevas demand sacrifices of animal life, and this is a sign that they are evil.
In the Achamenid period the Persians conquered Israel, and the Hebrews were exiled in Persia in accord with a standing policy of relocating subject populations that seemed likely to prove troublesome to control. The monotheistic character of the Persian religion appealed to the Hebrews, and they absorbed much from it, including strict dietary and domestic rules (keeping kosher) to preserve the ritual purity of every person in the population, and the notion of an evil principle opposed to God, the Devil, the world as an arena where the conflict between good and evil is played out, and the apocalyptic end of the struggle leading to a new heaven and earth and the resurrection and judgment of the dead.
Zoroastrianism changed somewhat over time, due in part to philosophical analysis and criticism. According to the Zoroastrian account in later times, the supreme God Zurvan (infinite time) sacrificed for a thousand years to obtain offspring, but doubted if it would work right at the end, and so his doubt gave life to Ahriman, the evil principle. At the same time, Ormazd arose due to the good work of the sacrifices. After three thousand years, Ahriman, jealous of Ormazd’s beauty and brightness, crossed the void to attack him, but the fight was equal, and Ahriman finally agreed to withdraw, exhausted. Ormazd foresaw a renewed attack, however, which came after another three thousand years, and created the world as a trap to bring about Ahriman’s final defeat. Meanwhile, Ahriman lay exhausted at first, and then created six demons to aid him in his attack on Ormazd’s creation. He managed to break through the sphere of the heavens, but was trapped within it after another three thousand years. At this point Zoroaster was born, and revealed the nature of this struggle to human beings, who must choose sides. Human beings who aid Ormazd will receive rewards in a new creation at the end of things, while those who oppose him will have to go through a purification, their evil dross before they, too, can enter this paradise. Ahriman will be utterly destroyed, or, by some more gentle accounts, will be put to sleep for all eternity. Ahriman’s failure is due chiefly to the demons he himself creates, for the chief of them, a kind of implacable desire for control and destruction of all that opposes it, will eventually run out of food in the world created by Ormazd, and turn on her creator in her hunger.
Read this psychologically—Ahriman is, like Satan in the Hebrew–Christian tradition, a liar and the father of lies, because he will not admit that Ormazd is superior to him, and so turns away from goodness to the assertion of power as the center of his endeavor after excellence. He decides to destroy what he cannot have or be, all the while denying his own jealous hatred of the excellent. His chief weapon, then, is a kind of possessive desire that drives him to control a thing, or destroy it, while admitting the right of nothing aside from himself to any autonomy or excellence of its own. Ormazd defeats Ahriman not through violence, but by turning his violence in on himself, when at last he fails to control or destroy what Ormazd has created, and is destroyed by his own self–loathing at his failure. Ormazd sets a trap for Ahriman, who destroys himself. He then gives those human beings seduced by Ahriman an opportunity to be purified of their error and the Lie, and, restored to wholeness and health, to enter a new creation unspoiled by Ahriman.
Note that Ormazd, in this account, is perfectly good, loving and gentle, and entirely non-aggressive, and his followers are supposed to be the same way. This is a significant departure from Paganism, and very much in the line of the Christian message in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, that one is to turn the other cheek, do good for those who do evil to you, give your cloak also to the one who takes your coat, and so on. Indeed, ultimately the Zoroastrian view is the source of Jesus’s thinking here. The advice may seem unwise, but Zoroastrians, like Jesus, fully expect to be rewarded seven-fold for any sufferings they endure at the hands of the followers of the Lie for the sake of Ormazd, and so were willing to act with an unworldly gentleness and charity. The self-sacrifice of Jesus, the sacrifice of God’s own Son to frustrate the devil and obtain salvation for his followers, is rather the sort of thing one might expect a Zoroastrian to see as appropriate to his God.
This approach to ethics is well-entrenched in the Buddhist and some Hindu traditions (as the ideal of ahimsa, or ‘doing no harm’). It is not typical of Type II and Type III religion, and is explicitly rejected in Confucianism (Type III-a), though it is accepted, with a quite a different rationale, in Taoism (Type IV). There it is argued that one can deal with people most effectively by not arousing opposition, so that the advantages of the pacifist strategy are to be gained here and now, not in the afterlife. Perhaps it is a natural development of the “cooperate with nature for the good of the whole” approach, but this requires the additional assumption that nature does not work through competition, an assumption rejected in the Greek tradition, for instance. It may be that this approach was developed first in Zoroastrianism, and spread East and West to influence the Christian and Indian traditions. Or, perhaps somewhat more likely, it originated in Buddhism. (Much depends on the dates of Zoroaster’s life, which are quite uncertain.) Zoroastrian apocalypticism influenced Christianity very strongly (see, for instance, the Gospel of Mark, esp. Mark 13). But Buddhism sent missionaries abroad, and may well have influenced Zoroastrianism, and there are a number of Buddhist-inspired elements in Christian culture. For instance, there is the practice of religious pilgrimage, and much in the stories of Jesus’s life before he began his teaching mission—the temptation by the devil and the rejection of worldly power as a universal ruler is precisely paralleled in older Buddhist myths about the Buddha, and the use of the halo to mark a saint in Christian imagery parallels the use of halos to mark a Boddhisattva in Buddhism. Again, like Jesus, the Buddha was supposed to have enjoyed a virgin birth, having descended into his mother’s womb from the Heavens. There are even some intriguing verbal parallels in the teachings of Jesus to those of the Buddha, though we probably should not make too much of this. So both figures say that it is what comes out of a man, not what goes into him, that is important, in criticism of a ritualistic obedience to religious dietary restrictions lacking in real charitable deeds. It seems more than possible that these and other elements of the Gospel stories of Jesus’s life are borrowings ultimately from Buddhism, which were added by some editor looking for information to fill in the blank spots in the story. (This was, unfortunately, rather a typical way of writing history in the Ancient world.) Given the dates of the Buddha, the influence cannot possibly have gone the other direction.
Like Christians, though, Zoroastrians had no problem with persecuting other religions within the regions they controlled, since it was so important that one see the truth and not ally himself with Ahriman. Indeed, despite their pacifist ethics, the black and white world view of Zoroastrianism has led to a great deal of violence and intolerance, for it introduces the notion that one can be allied to pure evil, and opposed to the good God who made the world and to whom we owe allegiance. People allied to evil in this way clearly must be opposed by every means possible. Christianity, especially in its earliest phases, was obsessed with this issue, and saw Greek and Roman Paganism as devil-worship. This is why, once Christianity was established as the state religion, the death penalty came to be imposed for the making of Pagan sacrifices. Later survivals of Pagan practices came to be thought of as witchcraft, in which the witch has a familiar (a creature made by Ahriman to mess up Ormazd’s creation, for instance, a goat or a cat) to enable him to communicate with his master, a devil, to whom he makes blood sacrifices, just as blood sacrifices were made of old to the Greek and Roman Gods. Often the dualist world view is combined with nationalism, so that the Persian Empire sees itself as the nation favoring Ormazd, since it has Zoroastrianism as its established religion, and sees all its enemies as allies of Ahriman, since they have other religions. Note that Buddhism and Zoroastrianism, religions of Type V and VII, are protest religions, formed in direct opposition to pre-existing religious systems which the founders thought perverse in one way or another.
4.7 Type VII: Theism. Judaism developed a concept of a transcendent God who created the world, with its natural laws. This is the God most often discussed by philosophers. Here is a brief list of his chief properties in the eventual philosophical elaboration of the concept of God within the Western tradition. In this elaboration Neoplatonism (Type IV) played a significant role, though its notions were adapted to a God who is not identical with anything in the world, but is utterly separate from it and unlike it. The new thing here is that God, though a person with will and understanding, is not part of the natural world, but its creator.
(1) God is the uncaused, self-existent, first cause of all other things. This arises from Aristotle’s writings, and, among Aristotelians such as Thomas Aquinas, it forms a counter-weight to the Augustinian God-as-Truth line (point (7) below). The idea is that there must be a cause for whatever exists, but that cause also exists (the cause is temporally simultaneous with what it causes in medieval thought), and needs a cause, and so on, but it can’t go on this way indefinitely. So there must be a first cause that exists necessarily, and so does not need a cause for its existence, and does not need to be produced. That is God, who contains the reason for his existence somehow within His own nature. St. Anselm tried to back this up by proving in a mathematical fashion that God’s existence is a necessary truth, and so requires no causal explanation. This “ontological argument” was justifiably rejected in later thinkers. (These arguments are discussed in detail in Chapter II.)
(2) God creates all things, that is, brings about their existence—created things are “creatures,” and only God is uncreated. Creation is not governed in any way by natural laws, and is incomprehensible to men. Augustinians pointed out that creation falls under no Forms, and, indeed, that God Himself falls under no Form, since he is prior to Forms, and many Christian Platonists regard Forms as the first item God created. We know creation occurs because it must occur if any non-necessary things are to exist, and because scripture tells us it occurs, but it is impossible to understand how God can do this, not because it is so complex or deep, but because there is no way in which God does it. The act of creation is entirely simple—He just does it. God created the world freely, that is, he chose to do it and nothing caused him to do it, nor does the world “emanate” necessarily or evolve from God, as the NeoPlatonists held. Creatures are entirely distinct from God. Christians emphasized this as the central truth differentiating their view of God from the NeoPlatonist view, i.e. (A) and (B) below.
(3) God is perfectly good, just, and so on, but he is also Goodness, Being, Justice, etc. That is, he is identical with these things. So He is good not by having goodness, as creatures have goodness, but by being goodness. This means his goodness is unlimited and perfect. The notion is Neoplatonic, and does not sit entirely comfortably with the idea that the world is created by God rather than emanating from Him. A Neoplatonic Christian (for instance, Eriugena in the 9th, or St. Anselm in the 11th century) might say that my goodness is God’s goodness in me, but that seems to clash with the doctrine of creation. Aquinas in the 13th century said that creatures only participate contingently in goodness, due to their creation, whereas God is identical with His goodness. Thus for God to be good is a different thing than a creature’s being good, since God possesses the properties he possesses in a different way than creatures do, even though the properties are the same. Thus we can know that God is good, and know that it is the sort of goodness we have that is at issue, but we cannot really understand the way in which he is good, since our minds understand only having properties, not being identical with them. So we understand God “analogically,” that is, we understand that He is like creatures in a certain way, but also unlike them radically enough so that we cannot grasp His real nature as we can a creature's.
In the later Middle Ages some thinkers took a more Hebraic view of the thing, holding that God was not so much good Himself as the standard and source of all goodness. As the standard of goodness, it is impossible that God should be judged good or bad by some independent notion of the good. Rather, as William Ockham observes (14th century), whatever God is or commands, is necessarily good. So if God had commanded that people steal or murder, those actions would, ipso facto, be good. Of course, he has commanded that we not do these things, so these actions are bad. Moreover, he has commanded this from eternity, so they always were and always will be bad. Ockham is not suggesting that God is capable of evil, but only that his incapacity for evil is not a matter of his living up to some external standard, but a matter of his being the standard.
(4) God is pure act and pure being. That is, there is nothing the least bit unreal about God, nothing that God is not, or that he is only potentially. This makes God very unlike the Aristotelian notion of the substantial forms of natural things, which are marked by sets of potentialities (entelechies) which they only realize in part in their actual careers in the world. More Neoplatonic thinkers tend to see all reality as coexisting in God, making him a mysterious totality of all that could possibly be real. Later thinkers, such as Ockham, held that this amounted to nothing more than God's being the cause of all things, and so containing them all “virtually,” in the way that a power contains what it produces. The picturesque qualities of the NeoPlatonic view are lost here, becoming mere metaphor, and God's being pure act comes to nothing more than his being omnipotent.
(5) God cannot will evil, even though He is free and omnipotent. The reason is that the “ability” to will evil is no real ability at all, but only a lack of ability, a failure of being. (So argued St. Anselm in the 11th century.) God can do whatever is real. God is free not only from outside interference, but also from any possibility of some lack or failure entering into his actions, from error or incomplete accomplishment of his aims. Ockham, as usual, reinterpreted this, suggesting that whatever God wills is ipso facto good (point (4) above), and his inability to do evil is not due to his living up to any kind of standard. God ‘s omnipotence means he can do anything that can be conceived, as long the conception of its doing does not somehow involve a contradiction. It follows that God is omniscient, i.e. that he knows everything that is true.
(6) God is perfectly blessed. His life is the perfect life that all creatures desire to know for themselves. That is one reason why knowledge of and friendship with God is so important for us, it enables us to participate in the perfect life.
(7) God is identical with Truth. The idea is rooted in Platonism and Neoplatonism. A proof of God’s existence was spun out of this by Augustine in his On Free Choice of the Will (388–391 CE): There is always something that is true (at least this, that there will in the future be something true, is true), and things that are eternally and necessarily true (like the theorems of geometry), and for these to be true they must refer to some eternal and unchanging reality. But this can only be the Forms, in the mind of God. God is Truth, for he is that by which all propositions are true, and so the Form of Truth (which is the truth in which the true sentence participates). Thus all things are truly what they are by participation, in the end, in God Himself, who contains all perfections in Himself.
The picture of God as Truth has one leg in Plato, but the other is in the transcendent God of the Old Testament Hebrews. Augustine argued that nobler things always act on less noble things, and are not acted upon by them. Thus we are active, not passive, in sensation, interpreting the images our souls view in the sense organs in light of the Forms which we recollect, and judging by the unchallengeable standard of our soul’s good the goodness of material things. But we ourselves are judged by the standards that God embodies, in particular by the standard of the Truth, to which our opinions are obliged to conform. So God=Truth is something nobler than we are, just as we are nobler than the physical world.
Aristotelians took God to be Truth only metaphorically, because of His containing the “exemplary Forms” of things, to which he looked when he created the world. These exemplary Forms are standards by which the things created in accord with them are to be measured, so that the closer the horse comes to matching its exemplary form the better a horse it is, and the more real it is in the sense that it has actualized more of its potential being. But they are also God’s freely formed conceptions of things, his blueprints, produced (created) as he creates the world. They are not simply God himself, but rather more like God’s decisions what to create, and perhaps God’s first creations (after all, there will be no psychological mechanism governed by natural laws behind God’s decisions). Moreover, things do not depend on their exemplary forms to exist, or to be what they are (except insofar as they depend on God’s looking to the exemplary Forms in his creation), but only on their own “substantial forms,” which are distinct from the exemplary Forms, and found in this world, even if they are made in imitation of the Exemplary Forms.
(8) God bears no "real relation" to any creature, rather the reality or characteristics that underlie every relation between God and His creatures are entirely located in the creature. This is because God is not capable of suffering any action or change from any source, and so is never made different by “entering into a relation” with another thing. This has some connection to God’s eternity, since God is related to creatures in time as an eternal being standing outside time, and so there is, from God’s point of view, no passage of time within which change can take place. The changing world is viewed by God, and created by God (all at once in a single eternal action), from a viewpoint standing outside of, not involved in, time and change.
(9) God is a perfect unity. That is, he has no parts, and his different powers and other qualities are all of them identical to God, rather than merely belonging to him but being really distinct from him. This traces back to the one God of the Old Testament, but also to Neo–Platonic thought, which insists that the coherence and unity of the universe shows that the ultimate reality behind it is entirely free of any multiplicity at all. This feature of God is much emphasized in Islamic theology.
(10) God is infinite. That is, God is in no way limited in any positive quality, or “perfection,” that he has, so that he is good without limit, powerful without limit, knowledgeable without limit, and so on. From this it follows that God is without a cause, and that there is no second God, who would, if He existed, necessarily limit the power of the first.
(11) God is eternal. That is, God’s life is not something that experiences the passage of time. Rather God experiences all times at one and the same time. God is unchanging, even if, from the temporal point of view of a human being, God may seem to be doing one thing at one time, and another later. This in part follows from God’s unity, which would be broken up if he had temporal parts. God exists at all times, but all at once, not successively, so that God’s “now” is stationary and all encompassing, and not a moving now, that is now one time and then another. Similarly, God is everywhere, and entirely in each place, though this location is treated by some thinkers as a matter of his power being evidenced everywhere. After all, God is a spirit, and a spirit’s location is due to the presence of its power, not, absurdly, due to the location of the matter making up the spirit! This view of God’s eternity is not universal. Some hold only that God always is and always was, and is ‘sempiternal’, everlasting, but temporal as his creatures are.
How did this complex notion of God arise? About 900 bce, the Hebrews had a fairly normal Type II religion, with one peculiarity, that being an insistence that there was only one God, and the other Gods of other people were not real at all. It is unclear how this view arose, but one thing that is clear is that the Hebrews thought of themselves as the conquerors of the land they inhabited, and thought it important that they be absolutely loyal to their own God, avoiding worship of the Gods of the peoples they had conquered. This requirement of faithfulness to one’s God was characteristic of the region, being found, for instance, among the Moabites as well as the Israelites.
The situation was intensified among the Israelites by the rise of guilds of Prophets, who claimed to transmit the words of their God to the Israelites, apparently words received in a trance, brought on by ritualistic dancing (rather like the Sufis among the Muslims). These Prophets were often critical of the King and his government because it was necessary to allow freedom of religion to the different peoples ruled by the Israelites to prevent revolts, and the King’s marriage with foreign wives who brought their own Gods with them was a commonplace and indispensable diplomatic practice. The United Kingdom under David and Solomon broke into two, often warring, Kingdoms quite early, and Israel and Judah were in a very unfortunate position geographically, being pressed on one side by Egypt, and the other by the Assyrians and other northerners, and it maintained its independence only by playing off these two powerful empires against one another. But eventually the Egyptians withdrew from the area, and then it was necessary to adopt the Gods of the Assyrians. The Prophets and their following, a significant group of fundamentalists, insisted that pure and perfect worship of their own God would bring their God to defeat the Assyrians miraculously, and King Josiah discovered an ancient book, Leviticus (the core of our present version of the book), in the Temple, which prescribed this pure and faithful worship, and claiming that the Israelites had been miraculously led out of Egypt by their God. But, of course, the Assyrians were not defeated, and in the end, even the Prophets began to waver in their trust that independence could be maintained. A final revolt led the Assyrians, in frustration, to round up and ship off to Babylon the most educated and wealthy members of the community.
This elite was no longer capable of making any trouble, but they held on to their identity by practicing faith to their God, which, after Ezekiel, included a faith that their God would someday restore them to their lands, and even make them the tool by which he would convert all peoples to his worship. They became convinced that their God, who had created the universe, was the only real god, and that everyone else was worshiping idols, stone and timber and other created things. All their troubles were blamed on their lack of faith in previous days, and it became a commonplace belief that the Messiah would come at the head of God’s armies and restore the Hebrew state, as soon as every single Hebrew acted faithfully toward God, keeping the commandments they had agreed of old to keep, worshiping him alone.
This was a new way of reading the problem of cosmic evil. It insists that we are entirely responsible for the evil in the world, for God is omnipotent, and can make the world utterly free of evil if he chooses. The problem is that we freely violated God’s commandments, and then he is required by justice to punish us, and does so. To punish the Hebrews, God often used foreign nations who would defeat them and hold them under subjection. But he also sent plagues, famines, and all the rest. The Jews (we can call them that now, instead of ‘Hebrews’) were robbed of the opportunity to sacrifice to their God like other people did, since they had no temple, but they tried to show their faithfulness by adopting, every one of them, the same standards of purity that had been considered in the past appropriate to the priests who made the sacrifices. Hence the dietary laws and all the rest became established. With the conquest of the Babylonians (who had overcome the Assyrians) by the Persians, the Hebrews were returned to their lands, which were ruled as a Persian province. The Persians were Zoroastrians, and probably sympathy of one set of monotheists for another was involved, but it was also a standard policy of the Persians to gain the cooperation of their new subjects. But this partial independence was only temporary, the Greeks, and then the Romans moving in, and the Temple being destroyed in 70 ce after yet another violent revolt in expectation of God’s help. Moreover, many of the Jews who had scattered abroad (the Dispersion) remained abroad, and lost the Hebrew language, but remained Jews, emphasizing the need for faith in and faithfulness to their God. Many now thought that individuals, not only the nation, could expect some sort of salvation, a resurrection from the dead in the last days when the new heaven and new earth were established, if they remained faithful (though some held on to the older view that the individual went down to a kind of eternal half-conscious life in the underworld upon death). The religion became a religion of the Book, then, in which the reading of the Sacred Scripture containing the Promises and Commands of God took the central place, for sacrifice was no longer possible. Synagogues replaced the temple, and scholarship centering on the Scriptures became the occupation of religious specialists, Rabbis.
The contact with Greek philosophy was crucial to the development of the notion of God we have laid out. The basis of the notion is the Old Testament God, all powerful and King of the Universe, which he made. Philosophers, trying to work out what is involved here, asserted omnipotence of him, and denied that God was subject even to natural law. The miracles reported of God in the Old Testament (even to stopping the Sun in its tracks) were interpreted to fit this picture of omnipotence. The God of the Neoplatonists, perfectly simple and eternal, was identified with the Jewish God, who was at least one and everlasting, and a critical (and ambiguous) Old Testament passage in which God identifies himself to Moses by saying “I am who am,” (maybe, “I am the same guy I always was, who talked to Abraham,” or “I am who I am and it is not for you to know or question”) was interpreted as a claim to be pure and perfect being, again, like the Neoplatonic God. One can see this development full blown in the works of Philo Judaeus, a Jewish-Platonic philosopher and scriptural commentator (who was enormously influential in the Christian tradition) in the first century ce. But however much Neoplatonism might be taken on board, Jews always insisted (like Madhva in the Vedanta tradition) that God was in no way identical to the world he created, or to us, his worshipers. Unlike God, we can do evil, can be unfaithful, due to our imperfection, and we suffer as a result, and so clearly we are not God, even if we might perceive him in such a way that we almost become him in deep meditation and prayer.
4.8 Type VIII: Christianity. Jesus, the founder of Christianity, was a Jew, who apparently identified himself as the “suffering servant” portrayed in a late Jewish Scripture, Isaiah. This suffering servant represented Israel, and made a number of prayers to God in this writing in which he bemoans his suffering, but understands it as a suffering not because of his own sins, but for the sake of others. The apparent intention was that the Jewish people are continuing to suffer, not because of unfaithfulness, since they have passed that test, but because God intends to use them to spread his worship abroad (hence the Dispersion), and he will reward them richly in the end for their suffering on his behalf if they continue to maintain the faith. This, of course, would be a response to Jewish disappointment that, despite rather heroic efforts of faithfulness, God still has not rescued them. It explains why God has not rescued them. Jesus apparently identified himself personally with this figure, and these passages in Isaiah are later taken by Christians to be prophecies of Jesus’s death and resurrection.
Jesus managed to get himself crucified as a potential rebel leader by the Romans, and probably expected to return in glory, leading God’s armies, shortly after his death. This did not happen, and those faithful to Jesus had to rethink the meaning of what had happened, just as Jesus had had to think through the meaning of the God’s failure to rescue his people. They decided that Jesus’s sacrifice was not to free them from this world, but to gain them forgiveness for their sins, which could not be forgiven without a divine being offering to pay for them, since their sins were of such magnitude that no mere human being had what was needed to make a proper penance. So the theme of Faith in Judaism was reworked, and now a personal faith in Jesus (= God) came to be considered the key to salvation. This meant believing a number of pretty improbable things, and so faith came to mean not only a trust in God and keeping up our end of the bargain he made with us, but also a trust that what the Scriptures and prophets have said is in fact true. It is incredible that God should have done this for us, but we believe it by faith, and if we don’t, we cannot be saved.
Like other religions, Christianity established itself by becoming the official religion of a state, in this case the Roman Empire of the fourth century under the Emperor Constantine. Buddhism established itself by becoming the official religion of northern India under the Emperor Asoka, Zoroastrianism was the religion of the Persian state, Judaism was originally the religion of the Hebrew state, and so on. Since Christians, like Jews, believed that the supposed gods of other peoples were all fakes, in fact, demons masquerading as God, they persecuted all other religions as devil-worship. The Jews, they thought, worshiped the real God, but they were nonetheless damned because they did not accept Jesus, and so fell short in Faith. They did not impose a death penalty on Jews as they did on Pagans, but they did make life pretty hard for them, and pressed them continually to convert. The Dualist element is strong in Christianity, but since Christians think the devil was created, they do not think he can stand for a second against the power of God. The devil has power over us only because we have allied with him, and God, rather than condemn the whole lot of us to Hell right away, is willing to wait, inflicting punishments, until we come round and convert, renouncing our allegiance to the devil. The Devil has power over good people, inflicting evils on them, because even the best people have sinned, and deserve punishment. At the end of time, when everyone has been saved who can be, the apocalypse will occur, as in Zoroastrianism or later Judaism.
Christian beliefs are quite complex, indeed, they are rivaled in complexity only by the beliefs of Mahayana Buddhists. As a result, innumerable variants on Christian belief have emerged over time, most of which have been rejected by the majority and labeled heresy. Once a belief is identified as heretical, Christians in most times have considered a death sentence appropriate for it, since anyone who is converted to such a belief by a heretic will be damned to Hell, and the faithful must be protected from these wolves who would ravage the fold. This extreme intolerance of other religions is a special quality of Western Monotheisms.
4.8.1 Type VIII-a: Compassionate Suffering as Part of Blessedness. God is conceived within Christianity and Judaism as perfectly blessed, but this gives rise, within medieval Neoplatonic Judaism, for instance, to the question whether God could be aware of the evil in his creation, or take steps to ameliorate it or compensate for it. It would seem that if God were aware of the evil actions and the sufferings of individuals within creation, and took measures to assist those individuals, then His blessedness would be disturbed, and He might even be frustrated in his actions if he tried to save sinners but were prevented from doing so by their intransigence and lack of faith. On the other hand, if God indeed loves his creatures, or justly punishes them, and so fulfills the ethical ideal, and is indeed omnipotent and omniscient, it would seem that He must know His creatures’ suffering and evil, and must not be indifferent to it. One can respond to this problem by insisting that God is not disturbed in his perfect blessedness by his knowledge, or by his actions on behalf of creatures, or even by his failures when creatures won’t cooperate, and this answer might be associated with an image of the perfect saint as somehow removed from emotional involvement in this world, loving his fellows in a sort of perfect intellectual manner, but free of any emotional disturbance arising from his association with them and his attempts to aid them. In Buddhism, as well, this image of the perfectly enlightened Buddha took a place, even though it was granted that one of a Buddha’s characteristics virtues is compassion.
Within all three religions, a certain tension arose between those who insisted on the ideal’s imperturbable blessedness, and those who instead suggested that true blessedness included within it a compassion that responded emotionally to the sufferings of others, and led one to forgive and help others. Since suffering and evil-doing are real, it was insisted by some, the ideal would know about it, and would view this knowledge, like all its other knowledge of reality, as part of its blessedness. It is only self-centered and limited creatures, unenlightened individuals, that find ignoring the existence of evil, or emotional and practical dissociation from those who suffer and sin, part of blessedness. In fact, such turning way from suffering is itself a form of sin and despair. The suffering of Christ, a Boddhisattva who puts off enlightenment to aid others, or the God of the Hebrews who remains faithful in spite of all to his people, is a part of that perfect being’s blessedness. So some suffering, that which is free of ego involvement or a sense of one’s own guilt, is in fact a good thing, which completes the blessed life, perhaps by affirming one’s fellowship with others. No one, not even God or Buddha, can live a good life apart from the other beings, imperfect as they are, found in the world.
To others, such views seemed to deny the possibility of true blessedness, which must in the end require that we separate ourselves from the sufferings of those who would not do what is necessary to abandon self and sin and the suffering that arose from it. One can explore this issue with a traditional Christian by asking whether they think the joy of those in Heaven is spoiled by an awareness of the sufferings of those in Hell. Most will find the question uncomfortable, and most will reply in the end that those in Heaven can ignore the sufferings of those in Hell because they are deserved. It seems that those who take the other road, insisting that the Boddhisattva who puts off his own enlightenment to aid others thereby actually becomes a perfect Buddha, or that Christ’s suffering for our sins is genuine and comports with his Godhood rather than clashing with it, have rather a different diagnosis of the problem of evil, and rather a different view of salvation from evil, as well as a rather different view of ideal religious practice, than the others. Their saints are not free negative emotions, and once we allow a sort of suffering as part of blessedness, we might even allow a kind of righteous anger compatible with this compassionate suffering, and so conceive of fierce as well as gentle Buddhas, or perhaps a reconciliation of the God who punishes with the God who suffers on the Cross for our salvation.
It is not clear that any identifiable historical religion adopts this view of things, but one does find more or less self-conscious groups within historical religions that do. Perhaps Mahayana Buddhism comes closest to exemplifying the idea in its official teachings, but one might also note such thoughts in Eastern Orthodox Christianity as well as individual Christian theologians. In the West, we can identify such views in the Romantic thought of the 19th century, and its rejection of a purely rational, emotionally dispassionate ideal of the 18th century Enlightenment.
These views are sometimes associated with Universalism, the view that all creatures are saved by God, which has surfaced in Christianity from time to time, indeed, as early as Origen’s thought in the second century. Indeed, itt would seem that two options are available, one easier to comprehend than the other. The easier view would hold that all beings are eventually brought to a level of perfection that eliminates all serious suffering of the sort that makes a life not worth living, but due to God’s power and wisdom. The original Fall, however, will likely be taken as inevitable, so that God knowingly accepted compassionate suffering when he undertook to create the world. This would be Universalism. The more difficult view would hold that there are creatures who are not saved, so that a world free of the radical evil that makes life not worth living is never attained, and the radical compassionate suffering coupled with this situation would always be present in God. It is not hard to see why most people who accept that God suffers compassionately with the sinner also lean toward Universalism, and the rejection of Universalism within the Orthodoxy of the Church has always hindered such an interpretation of the sufferings of Christ.
4.8.2 Type VIII-b: Islam. The Islamic religion is another descendant of the Jewish religion. In Islam faith in God is rather de-emphasized, for it is held that the truths of the religion are evident to reason, so that the Christian faith in the apparently impossible is not needed, and the Jewish faith that, despite appearances, God will eventually come through with salvation for the nation is also irrelevant. Islam holds that Allah is merciful, and denies that a blessed life involves compassion for sinners. God, although merciful, does not share in the suffering of sinners. God is always willing to receive back the repentant without requiring any satisfaction other than a sincere attempt to live well thereafter. The religion is therefore without the semi-magical element of the Sacraments such as Baptism and the Eucharist, in which one’s sins are atoned for or set aside. So there is no need for the complicated Christian story of the sacrifice of his Son to accomplish salvation. Only a sincere repentance and a turn to moral virtue and the worship of Allah will gain Allah’s free forgiveness, and nothing else is needed. The religious duties in Islam include the giving of alms to the poor, a pilgrimage to Mecca once in one’s life, fasting during the month of Ramadan, and daily prayers. The reward for a holy life is an eternal Heaven in the afterlife.
Some Christian thinkers, finding it inconceivable that God should suffer in his blessedness, advance a similar view, and take it that Jesus’s entry into our sufferings, though real, is done only for the sake of communication with us, so that we sinners can psychologically speaking bring ourselves to accept God’s forgiveness without either underestimating the seriousness of sin or falling into utter despair and self-contempt. God needs to prove to us, as it were, that we are, mirabile dictu, indeed loved by Him despite our sin, and the sufferings of his Son prove our love. These sufferings are not, then, part of his blessedness. A similar view is likewise found among some interpreters of Buddhist thought, who would take it that an enlightened Buddha does not actually suffer, and emphasize that the compassion of the Buddha is a love and concern without attachment, and conclude it is therefore without suffering.
Islam is an intolerant religion, like its relatives, Christianity and Judaism, and though it permits Jews and Christians their worship, since they worship Allah, the God of Abraham and Isaac, even if they don’t do it right, it persecutes other religions, and pretty much exterminated Buddhism in India.
Islam began as a religion providing laws and even political structure to groups of tribesmen who stood in need of both, and even now it is the general view of Muslims that the Q’uran, their sacred scripture, which the Prophet Muhammad dictated under the Inspiration of Allah, should form the legal basis of the community. Religious courts and judges following the Q’uran have always been recognized in Muslim countries, and it is the general view that good Muslims should be able to settle any disputes among themselves in such courts, without the intervention of secular authority.