For my birthday, my son, Noah, gave me Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, the book that studies the entire millions of years development of our species. I’ve been slowing working my way through this amazing 416-page work. Of course, in order for him to cover that much in one book, he had to over-generalize many times, which was frustrating to read but still thought provoking.
My attention was focused, of course, on the chapter about the history of religion,
and so I was very frustrated by his over-generalizing. A complaint I have with his analysis deals with the way he focuses on the development of religions but ignores their origins. That’s unfortunate because most of religious development did not stay faithful to the profound spiritual insights of their founders, those insights that Einstein called “spiritual genius.” Some of the later people, we could call them ‘religionists,’ did a major disservice to the original spiritual geniuses by distorting their words and lives in order to construct a religion.
Harari did have a point, though, about how human is the development of religion. That brought him to the modern development of humanism, and how it showed the 7,000 years of human theories about life, were just that: human theories about life. Now, that might seem obvious, but of course, there have always been some people who built a religion on the claim that their theories about life were somehow more than merely human theories. And in the process of such development over all those years, those people claimed that their ‘more than merely human theories’ were more inspired and thus “more true” than other people’s such theories.
Of course all that Homo Sapiens can do is run thoughts thru their brain’s filters. Even if a person were to experience ‘beyond human’ revelation, whatever would come out would have to be expressed in human language. And such inevitable process would necessarily make any theory a human-produced theory. And so, looking back over 7,000 years, all religion becomes in that way a form of humanism.
AlthoughYuval Harari tried to separate out modern humanism by claiming that the definition required “the worship of Homo Sapiens.” But I think there is a type of humanism that merely takes into account that all theories are expressed in human language. So we can still appreciate spiritual geniuses while acknowledging they had to speak in human language.
That’s what I’ve had to do when researching language about 'agape' and the spiritual genius of Jesus and Paul. Well, my stumbling around trying to figure out why Paul chose to express his revelation with such a strange word, had led me to speculate that he wasn’t trying to come up with a descriptive word but instead wasn’t trying to describe at all but was ‘pointing’ (as Martin Buber would have said).
In Paul’s time, they didn’t have a way to say ‘spiritual power,’ so in trying to point to a spiritual power in the heart, he said, “God’s agape.” In trying to talk that way, he would have made no sense, and to me that was exactly it. So of course, when religionists translated it with a meaningful word, like ‘love,’ that just messed up the whole point. That particular ‘beyond human’ cannot be made sensible with language, so Paul just gave it an ancient sound that would have made no sense. No one would have known what “God’s agape” meant, and that would have been the point. It was a spiritual experience without knowing what a spiritual experience was, and anyone who didn’t have the spiritual experience wouldn’t have known what he was talking about, and no amount of language would have made any difference.
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