The Ways of Wisdom

Towards a Global, Postsecular, Convivencia Theology

Mansueto

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498200271
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Ways of Wisdom answers the demand for a new kind of theology appropriate for a postsecular, global civilization, showing how to engage questions of meaning and value across as well as within traditions. Arguing that humanity is the desire to be God, The Ways of Wisdom analyzes the diverse ways in which humanity has pursued this aim, and argues for a synthesis that draws on the great spiritual traditions of the Axial Age as well as on the humanistic secular commitment to innerworldly civilizational progress and social justice. At the same time, it rejects both the technocratic god-building that it argues is the hegemonic ideal of the Saeculum in which we live and the radical immanentism that imagined that we could create a collective political subject that would make us the masters of our own destiny, proposing instead what it calls Sanctuary, a way of life centered on seeking wisdom, doing justice, and ripening Being.

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The Desire to Be God

The Quest

Humanity is the desire to be God (Sartre, Jean Paul. Being and Nothingness, 1943/1993: 556). Being finite, we are aware of the infinite and seek to be without limit. Being contingent, dependent on other beings for our existence, we seek the power of Being as such and seek it absolutely. It is this Being that, as something set apart, because we seek it but do not have it, we call the sacred. It is the condition for and horizon of any possible world we might inhabit, apart from which such worlds are groundless and lack meaning.

The mere fact that we seek Being does not, to be sure, imply that such Being is. But it does mean that the struggle for existence that we share with everything else in the material universe, whether extended, elemental, mineral, vegetable, or animal, takes on a new dimension. We seek Being not just objectively, in the form of our own survival and reproduction, but subjectively as an autonomous generative power. And we suffer from its absence. Our very existence is a longing for Being which is, in the end, insatiable. And everything that we do, no matter how mundane, is infused with this longing. Everything we do is not just an encounter with, but a reaching for, the sacred.

Human beings, furthermore, have a definite strategy for seeking Being, both objectively, as their own survival and reproduction, and subjectively, as an object of knowledge and desire. Some things, such as mathematical objects, exist only in potentia, as categories defined by operations on and relations between hypothetical elements which are, in turn, defined by these operations and relations. Some mathematicals, in turn, exhibit properties, such as dimension and extension, which make more complex forms of organization possible, giving rise to fundamental forces governed by mathematical laws, and to elements and compounds formed in accord with these laws. Some elements and compounds, which we call minerals, seek Being by exploiting the Boltzman Order Principle or some other thermodynamic law to conserve, however temporarily, their form. More complex compounds (plants) seek Being by nutrition, growth, and reproduction, or by sensation and locomotion (animals). But we humans seek Being by cultivating the ecosystems we inhabit in order to make higher, more complex forms of being possible. Our encounter with the sacred is, in other words, from the very beginning, an encounter with ourselves as laboring being.1

Human history is fundamentally the history of our search for Being, and of the distinct ways of being human to which it has given rise. Seeking to be, we proliferate throughout diverse ecosystems, create increasingly complex technologies, centralize and allocate resources for production, build and exercise power, and create imaginative, conceptual, and transconceptual artifacts which articulate and embody our quest and its specific forms.

In the beginning, human beings sought to be by means of hunting, gathering, and cultivation: by participating in the cycles of death and life and nurturing the organized and meaningful cosmos into which they had been born. The universe was transparent to its ground and all acts were understood as sacred: as a participation in Being. At the same time, the boundary between contingent and necessary Being, finite and Infinite, was recognized as impermeable. While human beings might participate in Being more fully than minerals, plants, and animals, there was no question of becoming divine, however much we might want to. Indeed, the divine properly understood, while ever present as ground and aim, was rarely if ever fully thematized as such. The divine was our Mother, a womb from which we only ever partly emerged.

Being aware of Being as such, however dimly, we could never be satisfied with mere participation. At first, to be sure, we had no choice. But eventually metal technologies made it possible to enslave and instrumentalize others and live off their labor (Childe 1851, Lenski 1981), and so to imagine ourselves as ends rather than means, as indeed the end itself which we sought, as Being as such. We became as gods, recipients of great public liturgies centered around the sacrifice of the human: where not literally, then figuratively, as the human labor which makes life possible.

The conquest and sacrifice of the human was also, always, the conquest and sacrifice of the feminine. This is not because women have no drive to conquer or lack the ability. It is, rather, that women found themselves bound by their own generative power to the bearing and rearing of children (Firestone 1970/2003). On the one hand they already participate in Being to a higher degree than men (through childbearing), and perhaps saw less reason to conquer and exploit the generative power of another. And they would have felt more immediately the loss of authentic generativity which conquest implied. It was there in the face of the children they would have had to abandon to go off to war. On the other hand they soon found themselves the object rather than the subjects of the new way of conquest and exploitation. The advent of warfare as a strategy for economic development—and deification—was the world historical defeat of the female sex (Engels 1884/1948).

It could not have been otherwise. Had we not made war there would likely have been no significant organization above the village level, and certainly nothing beyond the pre-urban ritual centers at places like Chaco, Stonehenge, and Gobekli Tepe. And besides, we are the desire to be God. Thus was born the way of the Master, the sacral monarchic way of conquest, exploitation, and sacrifice. This was the first manifestation of what we are calling the Saeculum, the attempt to achieve divinity, or at least transcend finitude and/or contingency, by means of instrumentalizing others.

Conquest gave birth to the first urban civilizations—Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Huang He, and (with some differences) the Indus Valley, a world of warlords and walled cities and pyramids of sacrifice. We thought ourselves great ba’alim, lords and masters. But we were not. Lord Death was our master then and we were his slaves. Conquest itself creates nothing, and the conquered are never particularly creative. And being finite and contingent, all that is old eventually disintegrates, decays, and dies. It should thus come as no surprise that throughout the Afro-Eurasian “Old World” where it was born, this way suddenly collapsed sometime around the end of the Bronze Age, between 1200 and 1000 BCE, giving humanity a chance for a new beginning.

That new beginning took the form of what Karl Jaspers (Jaspers 1953) has called the Axial Age—the period which gave birth to Judaism, Hellenism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. Over a period of about six hundred years (800-200 BCE), in each of the principal centers of Afro-Eurasian civilization, specialized agriculture and crafts production and petty commodity production transformed humanity’s way of being. Comparative advantage based on ecological niche and human value-added rooted in techne now competed with conquest as strategies for growth and development. The emergence of first regional and then global trade networks brought competing ways into contact with each other, rendering meaning problematic for the first time. Humanity found itself in a world of formal relations (the market) which created the basis in experience for formal abstraction, the rise of abstract mathematics, and ultimately of philosophy. Image and story give way, at least partly, to concept and argument. Those formerly bound to serve the aristocracy of warlords and priests began to struggle for the right to enjoy the fruits of their labor, to govern themselves, to participate fully in both deliberation around questions of meaning and value and to claim for themselves the theosis (deification) which was previously reserved for the aristocracy.

This is the point of origin of the three great ways of which what are ordinarily called the “world religions” are ultimately variations: the way of liberation and justice (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), the way of the search for Being (including Hellenism, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Jaina tradition, and their peripheries), and the way of harmony (Taoism, Confucianism, and perhaps some other Chinese traditions). The first of these we can call the way of the Slave proper, of those who, defeated by the warlord, are reduced to pure labor power, and discover therein the power of Being as such (Hegel 1807/1993), something which gives them the vantage point of Being prior to any dialectical ascent. The second two, the way of the search for being and the way of harmony, we call clerical ways because reflect more nearly the perspective of intelligentsias which, in the wake of the late Bronze Age collapse and the failure of the sacral monarchic project, and even more so with the development of petty commodity production, sought to develop new strategies for theosis which did not fall into the trap of the Master, or for living in harmony with a universe in and from which theosis was impossible.

What these great axial ways did not call into question, at least not radically or consistently enough to make a difference, was the patriarchal expropriation of female generative power. Even when born of a peasant revolt, like ancient Israel (Gottwald 1979), one led in part by women (Judges 5), and even when devoted to the Magna Mater, Prajnaparamita, Tara, the Mahavidya, or Guan Yin (Stone 1976) the emerging axial ways remained overwhelmingly attempts by men to liberate men. This left more of the old sacral monarchic dynamic intact than anyone understood or imagined.

And with the underlying dynamic of patriarchal expropriation intact, it should thus come as no surprise that new empires arose—the Hellenistic and Roman, the Mauryan and the Qin being the most important—which exploited not so much direct production, but rather the global trade in luxury goods (silk, spices, porcelain, wine, oil, slaves, and precious metals). known as the great Silk Road. This strategy proved far more effective than the earlier sacral monarchic project and resulted in empires large and powerful enough to imagine themselves as global in character. Though none were really more than regional hegemons, they were fare more powerful than their Bronze Age predecessors. Where the ba’alim had proven vulnerable to relatively small scale revolts by poorly armed marginalized peasant communities of the sort which brought Israel into being (Gottwald 1979) or to the combination of ecodemographic collapse and the withdrawal of villages back into subsistence agriculture which is the most likely explanation for the sudden “disappearance” of so many early proturban and urban civilizations around the planet, the great Iron Age empires, while they might periodically lose some territory to an uprising like that of Maccabees, were ultimately beyond the reach of most revolutionary popular forces, except where these forces were themselves (like emerging Islam or the Chinese peasant revolts which created new dynasties) emerging Imperia. This is why it seemed to many Silk Road Era critics of Empire that they were struggling not with human beings but rather directly with angelic/demonic/asuric “powers and principalities” of which the earthly Imperia were simply agents (Eph 6:12). This was the second manifestation of the Saeculum.

Sometimes these empires attempted to repress the axial traditions, as in the case of the Qin (Collins 1998) or early Roman responses to Judaism and Christianity. Ultimately, however, the new empires co-opted them and used them as forms of legitimation. This in turn meant that the fundamentally exploitative character of these empires was softened and transformed, sometimes very significantly, by the influence of the axial project (the Tang and the Song, the Mauryans, and the Abbasids and Fatimids are probably the best examples in this regard) (Mansueto 2010a). The result was the protracted war of position between competing ways of being human that we often identify as the Middle Ages, though it is, more properly characterized as the great Silk Road Era (200 BCE–1800 CE).

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Table of contents

• Title Page
• Chapter 1: The Desire to Be God
• Chapter 2: Theology Is Intercultural Engagement
• Chapter 3: Being and Dependent Origination
• Chapter 4: The Way of Justice and Liberation
• Chapter 5: The Way of Harmony
• Chapter 6: God’s Work of Redemption
• Chapter 7: The Engine of Divinity
• Chapter 8: The Solution to the Riddle of History
• Chapter 9: The Way of Ways
• Bibliography