Religions come and go, but not the needs of our weakness. To these needs, our endless prayers bear witness. Yehuda Amichai, the great poet of modern Israel, insisted that although cultures with their languages and beliefs may perish, prayers do not. Along with prayers, ritual too survives. Often a practice continues with new meanings long after old meanings have been forgotten. Ritual is more robust than belief and has more staying power, but wherever there is ritual, there should be the reverence to take that ritual seriously. Otherwise—and too often it is otherwise—the ritual becomes dry and useless, withers away or becomes a mask for irreverent behavior.
In these fast-changing times, many people feel the ground of religion shifting underneath them. They should be comforted to learn that religious ground has shifted before. Faith changes over history, but reverence remains. We should, therefore, be able to trace reverence back to cultures that have religions very different from modern ones. That’s what I plan to do in this chapter, with special attention to religions that seem most repugnant to modern Christian taste. One very hard case is religion that is agnostic, or that places no emphasis on belief, such as classic Confucianism or Jainism. A different sort of hard case is religion that calls for violence in the form of blood sacrifice. If I can show that reverence has a chance of growing on either sort of ground, then we may reasonably expect that it could grow almost anywhere.
If you stand on the ground of your own religion and look at another that is not your own, you may ask how any true reverence could be part of such bizarre practices or such a misguided faith. G. K. Chesterton is eloquent on behalf of Christianity: “Sometimes it would seem that the Greeks believed above all things in reverence, only they had nobody to revere.” He believed, apparently, that there can be no reverence that is not about the God of Christians, because He is the only God. Chesterton’s view seems to be widely shared—among Christians. Thinkers like Chesterton have a double problem with pagan Greek reverence, or rather, with the gods that pagan reverence is about: It’s bad enough (they think) that these alleged gods do not exist, but it’s even worse that if such gods existed they would not be reliably good.
But if reverence is a cardinal virtue, then it should be able to team up with a wide range of religious practices and beliefs—and with atheism and neglect of religion as well. That means that we must be able to detach reverence from most features that are distinctive of particular religions. But it’s not the case that anything goes with reverence. Reverence will wither away in any movement—religious or otherwise—that arrogates the authority of God to human beings, and it may have little chance to flourish in a movement that has no time for ceremony or ritual of any sort. There is such a thing as religion without reverence; it is frightening and restrictive, as we will see in the next chapter. Here I will bring out some surprising features of religion that are compatible with reverence.
The practices of ancient Greek religion are especially repulsive to modern minds, which see idolatry and bloody sacrifice as at best a set of quaint rituals suitable only for anthropological study. And as for belief, Greek mythology deviates so sharply from morality that even the ancients were shocked. What virtue, you might ask, could be linked to a polytheism that revels in stories of sex, violence, and conflict among the gods? What virtue, besides a narrow and self-interested prudence, could be deployed in transactions with the gods by way of sacrifice or magic? The virtues of a religion centered on sacrifice would appear to be those of a successful merchant or business, virtues you can enjoy without paying the cost of morality: Do what you like and then buy off the gods with burnt offerings. What could such a practice have to do with virtue?
In fact, the performance of sacrifice (like that of any gift or offering) may or may not express reverence. Sacrifice will not protect you if you lack reverence, because the mere performance of ritual will not be enough to win over a god you have insulted. In ancient Greece, ceremonies mattered to the life of the city, of course, but people with good sense knew they could not achieve reverence by the mere performance of ceremony. They did not believe that the gods could simply be bought or crudely manipulated by human beings. The gods of their myths make their own decisions, in their own way.
Sacrifice to the gods is an exchange of honor. Honor is as important to gods as it is to kings, and for similar reasons, as Tiresias argues in the Bacchae (317–22). In giving and accepting honor, humans and their gods recognize the special relationship they have with one another and the enormous difference in rank that is bridged by it. Beyond sacrifice, however, the gods demand reverence and justice and soundness of mind from human beings. And what they require they may also grant to those who honor them.
The importance of ceremony to virtue (as we saw in chapter six) is that it is a language of behavior for recognizing a hierarchy and keeping it benign. Without reverence, ceremony cannot do this. With reverence, ceremony shows that one knows and accepts where one belongs, both as a human being in the large order of things, and as a member of structured human society.
Animal rights advocates may wonder how reverence could be deployed in a religion that sanctions the killing of cattle in sacrifice. But evidently the ancients felt that butchery is an arrogant display of power over animals unless it is hedged in by ceremony and tempered by reverence. The priest who brings a proud bull to his knees is reminded at that very moment that he too lives at the mercy of more powerful beings. Workers in today’s meat plants have no such ceremonies, no such reminders.
Modern taste is especially disturbed by ancient religions that call on their gods for vengeance against their enemies. How could such calls be reverent? One wonders how the Chorus of the Bacchae could be reverent, when they scream for vengeance and take joy in the dismemberment of the young king by his mother.
Keep in mind, however, that the vengeance for which the Chorus calls is to be wreaked by the god—not by human beings. Throughout the play, the Chorus observes the essential distinction between what is up to human beings and what is up to the god. “Vengeance is mine,” says the Christian God; “vengeance is thine,” say the Chorus to Dionysus. This is simply another instance of the main principle of reverence, that human beings should never play at being gods.
If such calls for vengeance still seem irreverent to you, consider the most reverent texts of the scriptures shared by Jews and Christians—the Psalms of David. Here are a handful of familiar passages: “Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potters vessel” (2.9). “… Thou hast smitten all mine enemies upon the cheekbone; thou hast broken the teeth of the ungodly” (3.7). “Upon the wicked he shall rain snares, fire, and brimstone, and an horrible tempest …” (11.6). “Thou shalt make them as a fiery oven in the time of thy anger: the Lord shall swallow them up in his wrath, and the fire shall devour them. Their fruit shalt thou destroy from the earth, and their seed from among the children of men. For they intended evil against thee …” (21.9–11). “O Lord God, to whom vengeance belongeth; O God, to whom vengeance belongeth, show thyself” (94.1). “And he shall bring upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off in their own wickedness …” (94.23).
All that is necessary is that you should not mix a wise moral system with absurd fables, because you weaken through your impostures, which you can do without, the morality that you are forced to teach.
—Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, s.v. Fraud (trans. H. I. Woolf)
Humanists such as Protagoras, Thucydides, and Socrates guarded reverence by taking care not to make unfounded claims about the gods or the heavens or the underworld. Agnosticism is, in fact, a time-honored way of recognizing the limits of human understanding. An agnostic does not presume to know. We are human, and the wisdom allowed to us, Socrates says, is the wisdom of knowing our own limitations. If this is right, then the Greeks should never find that an omission of belief by itself is a failure of reverence.
Godless reverence may strike the reader as impossible. But we have already seen that there are several forms of it. In Greece as in China, the reverence of humanism grows in intellectuals on the wreckage of polytheism. After polytheism has worn thin, or after the fear of violence by personal gods has begun to look silly, many people still believe that they must sustain reverence as a foundation for society. This is the curious and fragile stage that I tried to explain in the chapters on ancient Greece and China.
The arch-humanist of ancient Greece is Protagoras, who is best known for his statement that “a human being is the measure of all things.” We do not know exactly what this means, but we do know that Protagoras concerns himself only with human beings and with those elements in the world that have effects on human life. This concern leaves him firmly agnostic about the gods:
Concerning the gods, I am not in a position to know either that they exist or that they do not, nor can I know what they look like, for many things prevent our knowing—the subject is obscure and human life is short. (Protagoras, Fragment 4).
Despite his agnosticism, Protagoras is the first Greek thinker to speak clearly about the reverence that brings us together. As we saw in chapter four, Protagoras thinks reverence—or something very much like it—is a matter of life or death. No group of human beings can stand by one another without reverence and justice, and if they cannot stand by one another they will perish. The reverence of humanism is a kind of social glue that enables us to survive by helping us to work together. Protagoras is right, I will argue, mainly because reverence marks the difference between stable government through leadership and insecure rule by fear.
Thucydides is the Greek humanist about whom we know the most. His reverence is based on beliefs about human beings. About the gods he is agnostic or atheistic, yet he sets the highest value on reverence, and indeed seems to think that it sums up all virtue, because he treats its loss as the consummate ethical failure of a city:
[Of the plague] No one was held back, either by fear of the gods or by the laws of men. (Thucydides, 2.53.4)
[Of civil war] Each party was limited only by its own appetite at the time, and stood ready to satisfy its ambition of the moment either by voting for an unjust verdict or seizing control by force. So neither side thought much of reverence. (Thucydides, 3.82.8)
In order to appreciate Thucydides’ loyalty to the classical conception of reverence, one must read with care his entire history of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides expresses himself rarely through authorial observations, and often through the arrangement of incident, the balancing of speeches, and the tone of suppressed outrage that is unmistakable in such scenes as the final execution of oligarchs on Corcyra (4.47–48). The tragic patterns that the historian arranges, from beginnings in arrogance and overreaching to endings in rage and destruction, are driven not by the anger of the gods but by the anger of men. These are patterns of human history, rooted in the human condition. There is nothing divine about them, but they suffice to bring down the mighty in their pride.
Reverence, in Thucydides, is one of the crucial virtues that, along with justice, has little hold on the minds of men when they are at war with each other or battling a natural disaster. Only in a stable social order can these virtues flourish, and their flourishing serves the order in return, by giving it stability through the satisfied loyalty of all parties to the state. The account of Thucydides I have just given is somewhat speculative—because he does not come out and say it—but is nevertheless the most plausible solution to a number of theoretical difficulties.
What is the particular value of reverence, as opposed to justice? The two virtues govern many of the same situations in Thucydides, but reverence at least gives rise to emotions such as awe, which may in good circumstances have motivating power, while it is hard to see how justice functions at all, except as an abstract idea. I note also that his characters think of justice as mainly regulating the affairs of people or cities who are roughly equal in power, while reverence comes most into play when the strong have the weak at their mercy.
In China, humanism survived the death of Confucius for centuries, at least among intellectuals, but it had little staying power among the ancient Greeks. Traditional religion continued to flourish in Greece despite the power of intellectual criticism, and people continued to fear the gods no matter how hard the philosophers tried to spread peace of mind through their teachings.
Greece had an alternative to humanism, however. Plato was no humanist, but he rejected most of traditional religious mythology and established a pattern of reverence leading beyond the gods. He attacked Protagoras on a number of points and declared that the measure in his system is not a human being but a god (Laws 716c). But Plato’s attitude towards traditional polytheism is ambivalent. On the one hand, he retains the practices of traditional Greek religion in his ideal state, but only as a device for maintaining order among ordinary people. For philosophers, on the other hand, he will offer a mystery religion in which gods and humans journey together to see the sacred objects. Education, he will say, is like initiation, but the sacred entity that an aspiring philosopher will meet as he is initiated is not anything like the personal gods of traditional myth. Instead, Plato will invest pure justice and every other kind of pure goodness with the attributes of divinity.
Pure justice and goodness are (in Plato’s system) examples of transcendent forms, eternal beings that Plato separates from the level on which human beings live. Every moral perfection is truly real, according to Plato—more real than anything we human beings can know through perception. And the things that are most truly real are the transcendent forms. As such the forms are above the gods themselves (in Plato’s myth), outside the rim of the heavenly dwelling of the gods. Even the gods must feed their souls on the sight of the forms in order to maintain their immortality. The gods are supposed to be good in every way, but they do not define their own goodness. They have no more control than human beings do over what is just or beautiful or good.
Plato is the first to celebrate reverence for moral perfection in place of reverence for the gods. He enlists religion in the support of moral goodness, and indeed he sets moral goodness on the throne which the gods have left. In Plato’s system, human beings and gods alike are in awe of moral perfection. Human seekers come to appreciate transcendent justice and beauty with the same sort of awe that they would feel on being initiated into a special relationship with a god. On this Platonic theory, the gods are good not because they are gods; they are gods, rather, because they are devoted single-mindedly to virtue. The gods, then, are examples to emulate, and human beings should practice reverence by trying to live as gods do. How gods live, in turn, is known not by the study of mythology, but by inquiry into the nature of the good. In practice, then, the reverence of perfection is contrary to tragic reverence. The one urges people to emulate the gods; the other forbids them to do so.
Confucians are silent about the gods, and so they must understand Li as reverence toward a Heaven about which there is nothing to be said—probably because nothing about it is distinctly known. Li preserves a harmonious relationship between humanity and Heaven by maintaining in human beings a sense of their place in a larger (but unknown) scheme. Li, then, is independent of any particular beliefs about the gods and focuses primarily on the expression of reverence in daily life. This is easy to ridicule. Confucius’ younger rival Mo Tzu (fifth century BCE) complained that teaching Li without belief about the gods was like “making fishnets when there are no fish.”
Confucius said of himself that at the age of fifty he knew the will of Heaven (2.4), so we cannot call him agnostic in the strict sense. Some Analects, moreover, imply that Confucius thought of Heaven as something like an active and personal god, but on the whole Confucius maintains silence on the subject of Heaven. His silence is itself an expression of reverence, a sign of the awe in which he stands at the thought of Heaven. Generally, reverence requires that one never pretend to powers one does not have. In particular, it is wrong to claim knowledge of the divine:
The Master said: “I am going to teach you what knowledge is. To take what you know for what you know, and what you do not know for what you do not know, that is knowledge indeed.” (Analects 2.17)
The Master said: “I make no claims to wisdom or to human perfection—how would I dare? Still, my aim remains unflagging and I never tire of teaching people.” Gongxi Chi said: “This is precisely what we disciples fail to emulate.” (Analects 7.34)
Confucius, who sets great store by reverence, keeps silent about that which he does not know. He does not speak about the ancient polytheism of China, does not affirm or deny old tales, and says nothing about the effect of ritual on the divine:
Zilu asked how to serve the spirits and gods. The Master said, “You are not able to serve men, how could you serve the spirits?” Xilu said: “May I ask about death?” The Master said: “You do not yet know life, how could you know death?” (Analects 11.12)
Perhaps Confucius thinks his students are not ready to hear what he has to say. But in view of his modesty about matters with which he is not acquainted, it is more likely that Confucius would not presume to speak on behalf of the divine. After all, Heaven itself is able to rule without a word to those below:
The Master said: “I wish to speak no more.” Zigong said: “Master, if you do not speak, how would little ones like us hand down your teachings?” The Master said: “Does Heaven speak? Yet the four seasons follow their course and the hundred creatures continue to be born. Does Heaven speak?” (Analects 17.19)
For this reason, we should not expect articulated theology or even metaphysics from Confucian philosophy. And yet the system supports both ritual and reverence because it brings them down to the human level. Children have parents, students have teachers, administrators serve higher-ups. But however high you rise on your own ladder of advancement, there is always something higher—Heaven, or the Way—that draws you upward even though you cannot say what it is:
Yen Yuan [a student] said: “The Master is good at leading one on step by step. He broadens me with literature and restrains me with Li, so that even if I wanted to stop I could not do so. But, although I have done all I can, [the goal] seems to rise sheer above me. I long to go after it, but I cannot find the way. (Analects 9.11)
“The goal seems to rise sheer above me. I long to go after it, but I cannot find the way.” Awe is inarticulate. A sense of awe comes over us without our being able to say exactly what it is about. Reverence at such a moment forbids any attempt to put words around it. That is why awe is the most reverent of feelings. You feel, when you are in awe, that you are human, that your mind is dwarfed by what it confronts, that you cannot capture it in a set of beliefs, and that you had best keep your mouth closed and your mind open while awaiting further disclosure.
A human being is the measure of all things, of those things that are that they are, and of those things that are not that they are not.
—Protagoras
It is the god who is a measure of all things for us—much more so than some human being or other, as has been claimed.
—Plato