The Rising Power of Mammon
The most powerful of the idols in the desacralized world was Mammon. In the New Testament, he was the personification of riches; by the Middle-Ages, he had become the demon of commercial greed The famous Puritan poet, John Milton, depicted him as a fallen angel :
... even in heaven his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heaven's pavement, trodden Gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific: by him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransacked the Centre, and with imperious hands
Rifled the bowels of their mother Earth
For treasures better hid. Soon had his crew
opened into the Hill a spacious wound
And dug out ribs of Gold
Far older than the Christian conception of Mammon is the Sumero-Babylonian goddess Mammetun, the Mother of Destinies. Her name stems from the same linguistic root as our words mama, mammary, mammal and mother. And Mammon could be a masculine form of the name of the archaic goddess whose generous breasts were the source of plenty. The appropriation of her gifts by men was diabolical, and mammon was a male demon.
In India, wealth is still thought to flow from a goddess, Lakshmi, who is often depicted pouring out streams of gold coins from her inexhaustible vases of plenty. In ancient Rome, money was minted in the temple of Juno Moneta, the Great Mother in her aspect of adviser and admonisher. She is the source of our words money and monetary.
Money has many metaphorical aspects. Gold coins were like little images of the sun. But modern money is more alive, filled with a breath like spirit, subject to inflation and deflation. Money is also currency, and its flows is what animates the economy; like blood it circulates. Monetary assets are « liquid ». Like a milk-giving breast or udder,the economy works on the basis of supply and demand; it supplies the demands of consumers. And like a woman its behaviour is cyclic. Money is a human creation, and so is the economy that generates it, but it has taken on a life on its own. Economic forces rather than natural forces have come to dominate our lives, and the ruling power of our world is Mammon.
The Final Desecration
The rationalistic spirit in which the Protestant reformers attacked the practices of traditional religion was not brought to bear on their own beliefs. These depended on faith and on the authority of scripture. But once the forces of skepticism and iconoclasm were released, there was no stopping them. Secular humanism takes the Reformation to its ultimate extreme, turning the Protestant critique onto Protestant faith. In this second revolution, devotion to the words of the Bible in itself becomes a form of idolatry. What reason is there to accept its authority ? As for God, why should he not be like other gods, a phantom of the human mind ? Those whose religion is founded on a protest against other people's unreasoning faith have been ill equipped to defend and unreasoning faith on their own.
This ultimate reformation, the protest against Protestantism, leaves man as the source of all goddesses and gods, the Master of desacralized nature, the only conscious rational being in an inanimate world. For the secular humanist, nothing is sacred except human life. Indeed humanism can easily become a religion itself, glorifying man and his wondrous work. But the spirit of negation will never be far away; why should man be sacred ? He is just another species, thrown up by the blind forces of evolution and no doubt doomed to extinction like the dinosaurs. In the end, nothing at all is sacred and the result is disastrous.
Animism
In most cultures, traditional assumptions about the life of the natural world are simply taken from granted. But in ancient Greece, for the first time in Europe, these tacit assumptions were discussed and made explicit. Greek philosophers developed a conception of nature as a living organism that was inherited by their medieval ancestors. The great philosophers believed the world of nature was alive because of its ceaseless motion. Moreover, because these motions were regular and orderly, they said that the world of nature was not only alive but intelligent (from the Latin word intelligere: to understand), a vast animal with a soul and a mind on its own. Every plant or animal participated in the life process of the world's spirit, intellectually in the activity of the world's mind and materially in the physical organization of the world's body. All creatures had spirits. The spirit was not in the body; rather the body was in the soul, which permeated all parts of the body. Through its formative powers, it caused the embryo to grow and develop, so that the organism assumed the form of its species. For example, an acorn sprouted into a seedling and grew into an oak tree because it was drawn or attracted toward the mature form of the tree by its spirit, the spirit of the oak.
In animals, a further kind of spirit underlay sensory perception and behaviour and gave rise to the instincts: the animal or sensitive soul. The English world animal comes, obviously enough, from anima, Latin for « soul ». The human intellect was not separate form the animal and vegetative souls; rather the rational mind was linked to animal and bodily aspects of the same soul, which were generally unconscious. In other words, the human soul included both a person's conscious mind, or spiritual essence, and the life of the body, senses, intelligent activities and animal instinct. This understanding of the spirit clearly connected human life with the life of animal nature, as well as defining the differences between plants, animals, stones, elements, etc. At the same time, man was a microcosm of the entire cosmic organism, the macrocosm. Human societies likewise reflected the order of the universe and the movements and conjunctions of the planets were connected with lives and destinies. The Copernican revolution in astronomy, far from overthrowing the ancient idea of the cosmic organism, was in fact inspired by it. When Copernicus proposed that the sun, rather than the Earth, was at the center of the cosmos, he did so both because the geometrical order of the planetary spheres seemed more harmonious and because of his mystical reverence for the sun: « The Sun alone appears, by virtue of his dignity and power suited for this motive duty and worthy to become the ohm of god himself » The Copernican revolution began by replacing one model of the cosmic organism with another, but it soon led to the realization that the cosmos was not a closed system with a center. Rather it was an universe with no center at all; the stars were themselves suns and space stretched outward in all directions to infinity. The cosmic organism had had broken open. Then, trough the mechanistic revolution, the old model of the living cosmos was replaced by the idea of the universe as a machine. According to this new theory of the world, nature no longer had a life of her own: she was soulless, devoid of all spontaneity, freedom and creativity.
This new worldview was first articulated in 1619 in Germany. There, the 23 years old Rene Descarte had a visionary experience; he was « filled with enthusiasm and discovered the foundations of a marvellous science. »
The universe of Descarte was a vast mathematical system of matter in motion. Matter filled all space; it was the universal matrix. Everything in the material universe worked entirely mechanically according to mathematical necessities. His intellectual ambition was boundless; he applied this new mechanical way of thinking to everything: plants, animals and man. He laid the foundations for the mechanistic worldview in both physics and biology. In the philosophy of Descartes, all nature was inanimate, the soul was also withdrawn form the human body which became a mechanical automaton, leaving only the rational soul, the conscious mind in a small region of the brain, the pineal gland. Since the time of Descartes the favored region has moved a couple of inches to the cerebral cortex, but essentially the idea remains the same. The mind somehow interacts with the machinery of the brain, although how the two are related is still an impenetrable mystery.
Descarte's vision is still, more than three and a half centuries later, the dream of many biologists. The material parts of the seed that are now supposed to determine the form of the organism's life are now the gene. Descarte's doctrine that plants and animals were mere machines furthered his explicit aim of making men « lords and possessors of nature. ». Animals were automate like clocks, capable of complex behaviour but laking spirits. Descartes himself dissected the heads of animals, trying to find a physical explanation of imagination and memory, and through vivisection he studied the pumping mechanisms of their hearts and souls, denying that animals could feel pain:
« The cry of a beaten dog no more proves that it suffered than the sound of an organ proves that the instrument feels pain when struck. »
Since animals were supposedly inanimate, men could be free from « any suspicion of crime, however often they may kill animals ». Hence there need be no further doubts about man's right to exploit the brute creation and all those designed as animals, savages, below-mans, etc.
AKAtjecoutay
photos by Atjecoutay
