By looking at Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ I want to show how it simultaneously plays a role as a hymn, a national song and a political anthem or manifesto. My object is to illustrate the close relation between religion, nationalism and politics, in particular their common participation in myth. I also want to indicate how all three modes of social being oscillate between mental fight and physical struggle. I take my text from the British playwright Jez Butterworth: ‘There is no Logos without Mythos.’
Jez Butterworth is the author of a very successful play about Britain called Jerusalem, and for those who do not know, ‘Jerusalem’ is the British national song about the Second Coming which is sung by people of all political persuasions. It was written in 1808 at a time of continental war, revolutionary upheaval and political repression, by William Blake, a poet influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg and Jacob Boehme. It was set to music in 1917 at a time of mounting casualties, by a humanist composer, Hubert Parry, a great admirer of Germany torn apart by the war. Socialists sing ‘Jerusalem’ because Blake was a radical and his poem presents a prophetic and revolutionary vision of Albion, Albion being an archaic name for Britain. A New Jerusalem shall be built here, one day. Conservatives sing it because they think they already live in a Promised Land of liberty and justice, though maybe it needs sensible improvements from time to time.
Socialists and conservatives are in two minds about whether this shared vision is achieved by peace or a sword. We think peace and war are opposites, but in the visionary perspective of Apocalypse Now, or Apocalypse very soon, they go together. The Book of Revelation portrays war in heaven itself before the heavenly city of Jerusalem comes down on earth as it is in heaven. In Germany during the Radical Reformation there was violent mayhem in Münster before the Anabaptist movement was distilled into the peaceful Mennonites. In England during the Civil War beginning in 1642, the Fifth Monarchy Men tried to bring in the kingdom of Jesus by violence. The peaceful testimony of the Quakers only emerged in 1660 with the death of the revolutionary Republic. In both Germany and England radicals were simultaneously demanding perfection and sweeping away the demands of the moral law in declarations of antinomian liberty. Peace and war, perfection and moral anarchy go together in apocalyptic times. Religious ideas are ambiguous. They contain multitudes.
If prophets spoke like lawyers or scientists they would be of no account. Like most prophets, Blake is ambiguous. In his poetry Blake attacks legalism and the law embodied in commandments in favour of ‘life, more life’, but in his condemnation of the Pharisees, meaning perhaps the Church, he plainly believes that there is a higher law of perfect righteousness. In ‘Jerusalem’ his language is simultaneously cherishing and threatening, pacific and warlike. He writes: ‘Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!/Bring me my chariot of fire!/I will not cease from mental fight,/Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand/Till we have built Jerusalem/In England’s green and pleasant land.’
Blake wrote during the Pandemonium of the Industrial Revolution. Socialists think he anticipated endless struggle, political revolution and apocalypse now. They overhear his reference to the unsleeping sword. Of course, if revolution can be achieved by what Blake called ‘mental fight’, so much the better. Indeed, Socialists see war as part of the corrupt world they are fighting against, so they may even describe themselves as pacifists. They are fighting for peace and struggling against war. They would prefer what Blake called ‘mental fight’, but maybe they need to come out on General Strike if pushed to the limit by the forces of evil.
When Conservatives sing ‘Jerusalem’ they overhear the reference to England’s pleasant land, and they imagine a patchwork of green fields and cloudy hills with many a shared enclosure around an ancient church. These paradisal images were constantly reproduced in the Second World War alongside very different images of a dead sea of destruction and a barren landscape of crosses. As far back as the eighteenth century, and beyond, England has been pictured and sung about in benign images of a Promised Land of peace and plenty, like Israel in the reign of good King Solomon. This ‘Fairest Isle’ is defended like ‘another Eden’ against the corrupt continent by the Channel, specially created 10,000 years ago by a kindly providence. The defence of this precious earth requires ceaseless vigilance and an unsleeping sword.
This is a perfect text to illustrate how religious ideas work because the ideas appear to be religious in origin, but they are really not confined to religion and they are not really ideas at all. They are condensed images, pictograms to be read at different times by different people in very different lights. They emit an aura of the sacred and they can be backed up by Sacred Scripture. Blake’s imagery is saturated in Scripture. But condensed images are easily translated into any number of political scripts. We may think there is a boundary between religion and politics, and Christianity itself sets an ambiguous boundary between God and Caesar, but the repertoire of religious images ignores our imagined boundaries. After all, it was created two and a half millennia ago by Israelites under threat, and they had no boundary between religion and politics.
Sacred Scripture is an explosive and dangerous mine where we dig up what we want. Sacred earth is not a New Testament notion, but there is enough material in the Hebrew Bible to give a religious sanction to the sanctity of place – whether that is a land or a temple or a city, or a holy temple in a holy city at the sacred heart of a holy land. Royalty is not a New Testament notion either, but the coronation psalms and the idealisation of Solomon have shored up sacred monarchy from the time of the Holy Roman Empire until yesterday. The coronation anthem written by a German Lutheran composer for a German Lutheran king, George II, when he was crowned in Westminster Abbey in 1727, begins ‘Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon king’.
But even if we did not appeal to Sacred Scripture to shore up power we have the revered writings of the ancient classics to perform the same service. The ceiling of the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall, London, painted by Rubens in 1630, depicts the apotheosis of James I. Since Constantine the classical vocabulary of apotheosis has cooperated with the biblical vocabulary to shore up the sacred panoply of power. The vocabulary of power finds whatever dialect it needs to shore it up. We can take it for granted that power seeks to be taken for granted. All over Europe sacred kings traced their origins to Israel and to the ancient classical world. Christian shrines are sacred places, but ‘sacer’ comes from the pagan lexicon. So it is as difficult to draw a clear boundary around a purely Christian language as it is to confine religious language to religion.
I do not want to be misunderstood. I do not mean there is no properly Christian language. The New Testament contains a social logic of closely related signs. The break with territory, with genealogy and with the associated imperatives of collective violence and sexual reproduction translates into the Virgin birth, into bands of disciples and their female support networks, and into international brotherhoods and sisterhoods dedicated to celibacy (or purity), peace and the relief of the poor. The royal, priestly and covenantal traditions of Judaism mutate into the fusion of the suffering servant who is also the promised king, into our great high priest who takes our humanity into the holy of holies, and into the Good Shepherd of his People who is the sacrificial Lamb of God. In the New Testament, assuming post-AD 70 back projections, the local temple in Jerusalem is quite explicitly translated into the body of Christ as that is realised across every frontier wherever two or three are gathered together. The holy city is translated into a heavenly city for all nations, tribes and tongues, ‘the mother of us all’.
Those translations represent a complete transformational grammar, but under the pressure of power they can be translated back into real sacred cities and holy lands. Paul’s ‘sword of the Spirit’ becomes just a sword. The Norsemen in Norway were converted by force and they did not cease to be warlike just because they had been forced to be Christians. By the time the Normans had reached southern Italy and Sicily their geopolitical imagination saw the holy city of Jerusalem as yet another capital of Norman power. They saw themselves as successors to King Solomon and their ambitions are inscribed all over the great church of Monreale in Sicily.
So while we can locate a distinctively Christian language in the New Testament, in practice we are dealing with incredibly powerful religious and political creoles. If you prefer terms from linguistics we are dealing with floating signifiers. Just as a shared repertoire migrates freely across the boundaries between religion and politics, so it migrates across the boundaries between religion and nationalism. In Germany there was a time when Arminius was a national hero against the Roman Empire, just as Martin Luther was a national hero and Ein feste Burg against the Roman Church a millennium and a half later.
Winchester was the capital of the West Saxons in the ninth century, and in 1899 a statue was raised to King Alfred the Saxon warrior, with a distinctly Wagnerian look about it. However, the statue of Alfred in Winchester is a statement of British nationalism, when in actual fact the Britons were conquered by the Saxons and mostly driven into Wales, where they now have their own nationalism. This statue also commemorates a Christian king who defended Britain against the pagan Danes. It is a multipurpose artefact to help us tell what we call ‘our island story’. Yet even as I write I keep swinging backwards and forwards between referring to Britain and referring to England, because the language I am using is itself a creole. Indeed, it is a multiple creole because it is part Celto-British, part Danish and part English, but more importantly part English and part Norman French.
So we come to the crucial question: ‘Who do you think you are?’ We are all mixed up with mingled genealogies, and yet we have a shared story to tell: sometimes our story of Christianity, sometimes our national story, sometimes both together. The narrative is a kind of Heilsgeschichte which makes sense of who we are. It does not matter whether we are conservatives, liberals or socialists; whether we are Americans or Germans or Russians; whether we are Catholics, Protestants or secularists; whether we are followers of the light of Christ or of the Enlightenment, if there ever was such a thing. We all have our Heilsgeschichte. It is the story we tell to others in order to tell ourselves where we came from, who we are now and where we are going.
The story is not just any old narrative wandering into our distracted heads from nowhere, but part of the basic grammar of developed language out of which emerges religion. Language is made up of tenses, past, present and future, and it concerns what may be and what cannot be. It creates and reflects hope and frustration. So does religion. Religious language does what all language does. Just as we all tell stories about who we think we are, so we all use a language of hope and frustration. Moreover, we cannot say whether our images depend on and derive from the exercise of power, or whether the exercise of power depends on images. Religious language affects the world, reflects it, inflects it and deflects it. But there is no It.
Let me repeat my text: ‘There is no Logos without Mythos.’ We are inveterate storytelling animals, even though the story we tell is as much a redaction of varied elements as was the Bible when it was edited, maybe in exilic and post-exilic times. The library of books we call the Bible provides a wide repertoire for us to select from, and mixed messages for us to choose from, as circumstances dictate. Other times and other people will be drawn to different parts of the repertoire and they will each translate the message in their own tongue for their own purposes.
Today’s Pentecostals read the descent of the Spirit as falling on untutored men and women and empowering them to prophesy and dream dreams as in the days of Joel. It is their global meta-language available across every barrier of dialect, class and nation. The Jesuits in Salamanca read the descent of the Spirit rather differently. In their University Church of the Holy Spirit they pictured the dove falling on the first chosen representatives of the universal Church and the Blessed Virgin, ordaining them to preach in Latin America, or China.
Now, this repertoire is kept available by the external storage provided by alphabetic writing and for the last 500 years since Gutenberg by printing. That brings me to my second text: ‘Nothing is ever lost’, which I take from Robert Bellah.1 He discusses the evolution of religion all the way from certain biological givens to the associated emergence of developed language and religion, and then to what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age two to three millennia ago. Bellah believes that there were various stages of development in human history, recapitulated in child development, which create enhanced capacities. He also believes that the achievement of narrative is not superseded by theoretical scientific knowledge such as was presaged in ancient Greece and achieved in the seventeenth century. So my first text, ‘There is no Logos without Mythos’, can be given a social scientific translation in my second text, ‘Nothing is ever lost’.
The Axial Age took different forms: prophetic denunciation in Israel; ascetic renunciation in India; the wisdom of the philosophers in Greece and of the sages in China. Today we are still living with the tensions created then by the achievement of a critical distance from immemorial givens. Critical distance opened up new perspectives that enabled us to redraw the map of human possibility. Conditions of crisis and breakdown made people question the way things were ordered here on earth. They fostered religious transformation scenes that allowed us to see how far we had fallen short, through sin or weakness, or through imprisonment in the shadowy realm of Plato’s cave, or immersion in Maya (or illusion) or defection from the Way of Heaven and Nature.
The dynamic unleashed by the visionary perspectives of the Axial Age expressed and fostered a critical doubt about the beneficence and power of the god-kings of Egypt or Persia in their role as good shepherds of their people. It raised the possibility of one true God over all and in all, and of a universal humanity under a universal law, and it asks who then might be the true king. The world religions as we know them are dramatic configurations and transfigurations dating from the Axial Age. They are the narratives generated by those transfigurations. They are the icons and rituals that carry them forward.
Here we come to the crux: a basic profit and loss account sometimes obscured by talking about functions and dysfunctions as though you could balance them up and come to a judgement. I want to say that everything has a large price tag and you have to pay it whether you like it or not. There is a social logic of strict entailment you cannot evade. In religion as in science you cannot have the perfume without the mustard gas. For example, the moment you embrace universality and the idea of truth you are entangled in a struggle with the partisans of particularity and of alternative versions of universal truth. The moment you embrace the need for good faith and sincerity all the way from Jeremiah to Luther you are engaged in a struggle against mere forms, bad faith and hypocrisy.
Having a Sacred Scripture entails gains and losses. The stable text eventually achieved by the Jews not only gave them hope in the promise of return but, through the social inventions of the synagogue and the Rabbinate, it enabled them to survive and live anywhere. But it also meant, on at least one interpretation, that they were stuck with 613 inconvenient commandments as a condition of the covenant between God and his people. Of course, you can also turn this cost into a profit. The Hebrew Scriptures are a kind of forensic rhetoric marvellously adapted for arguing the toss, even with God. But they also offer you an incentive to become even more argumentative to get round their inconvenient demands. That skill could be put to use all over again when the Jews were pushed out of the ghetto by Enlightenment and disagreed how much enlightenment they really wanted and whether it would give them a better chance of survival or lead to their disappearance because they have lost the social definition provided by the Law.
Perhaps the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten started it all, even though his top-down reforms ran into the sand. He closed temples, smashed icons and abolished priesthoods. Because he failed, the story as we tell it begins with Moses, though biblical scholars seem to think he is mostly a back projection anyway, like the Enlightenment. The Covenant between God and the people revealed to Moses on Sinai did not run into the sand, but it did lead to the same radical consequences as in Egypt. When Moses came down from Sinai and found the people worshipping the golden calf he had the same three options as revolutionaries ever since. There was the Leninist answer: savage punishment to save the revolution from dilution. There was the social democratic answer: you should lead by persuasion and example. There was the conservative answer: conserve the tradition and keep the commandments that you may live long in your promised land. Moses adopted all three.
The dynamic unleashed by truth, universality and sincerity, all those good and costly things, ensures that rituals will be challenged by anti-rituals. The mediation of icons and of priesthoods will be challenged by iconoclasm and a demand for lay access. The partial expropriation of hope and truth by power will be challenged by heresies and movements of purification, often among the excluded but also among counter-elites. That means that the controversies of religious history, for example, access to the chalice, are not about trivialities, but issues of central human concern. Access to the chalice, like the priesthood of all believers, is by implication about universal human access.
There is a particular cost exacted by permanent revolution. The evolution of revolutions and reformations is punctuated by permanent revolutions and permanent reformations: semper reformanda. These reformations and revolutions hide an enduring will-to-power behind a claim to nurturance, and behind the ritual recitation of an impeccable genealogy as the Party of Humanity. The Enlightenment did just this, keeping itself in power by hiding what was in practice its racism, its demand for assimilation, its exemplary violence, its imperialism and autocracy. Christianity did much the same 1,500 years earlier.
Let me illustrate the socio-logic of great possibilities and inevitable costs by sketching a modern version of Genesis. In the beginning certain generalised potentials were built into the psyche by biological evolution. These are: attention and intention; empathy and cooperation; fight and flight in the service of self preservation; competition, ranking, hierarchy and dominance, including dominance through nurturance; and violence both against individual rivals and collective enemies. Social solidarity with others engenders social solidarity against others ‘from foragers to schoolchildren to nation states’. Unity and conflict go together. These generalised potentials roughly correspond to what sociologists consider the prerequisites of society as such. So if you do not care for the biological account you can always stay with the cultural account. Cain will always be prone to murder Abel. The charter of liberation chanted by one group to celebrate its exodus from slavery makes it so much easier to legitimate its oppression of some other group in land it believes the Lord its God, or manifest destiny, or history and geography, has given it.
Those who follow the Enlightenment narrative blame religion for whatever goes wrong. Root out religion, if necessary by violence, and all shall be well. But when you think of the course of the French Revolution and the great secular persecutions of the twentieth century it is very obvious the problem is more profound, more generic to our species. Unfortunately, by some triumph of unreason enlightened rational individuals cannot see it. It contradicts the story they tell. It disrupts their Heilsgeschichte. Our modern genesis story suggests that wars and rumours of wars are only to be expected. Unity implies conflict. There is always conflict over scarce resources, and scarcity comes in innumerable kinds. No need then to explain war as such, as distinct from particular wars. Moral hyperventilation about religion is waste of breath.
What really cries out for explanation is not war but the vision of non-violence in Buddhism, in Isaiah and the Sermon the Mount, and in the Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s idea of Perpetual Peace. That vision is a projection of the Axial Age which provides the platform in consciousness on which we stand. That is the basis on which we recognise the disparity between Buddhism and the repression initiated by the Buddhist government and the monks in Sri Lanka. That is why we are shocked by the difference between loving your enemies and the Puritan cry in the middle of English Revolution ‘Jesus and no quarter’. We rest with unquestioning faith on the religious advances we violently disavow.
1Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution.