Wisdom in Exile. Lama Jampa Thaye

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      At the heart of the mediaeval vision was a notion of a cosmic order into which humankind was folded. It was a hierarchy comprising humans, saints, angelic orders and God, and, of course, the denizens of purgatory and hell. Reflecting the vastness of this vision, the Catholic culture of the time was spacious enough to accommodate everything from the scholarship of the monastic orders to the devotional cults of the peasantry, from Dante’s Divine Comedy to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

      In 1517, the German Protestant Reformer, Martin Luther (1483–1546) – followed, a few years later, by Jean Calvin (1509–1564) in Geneva – shattered the world of Catholic Christianity. Luther and Calvin’s new theology eliminated devotion to the saints, jettisoned purgatory, abolished the monastic orders and dispensed with the role of the priesthood as the intermediary between man and God. Through removing these structures that securely located the individual life within a spiritual and social context which was greater than the mere individual, the two Reformers broke the chain that had connected the sacred and the temporal. It seems also that, in insisting on the absolute privacy of the individual conscience alone before God, they unintentionally gave rise to a new alienated individualism, for, from now on, humanity would be cut off from the mediating assistance of the priest and saints.²

      To this interior transformation of what it was to be religious, Calvin added the sanctification of work, through his notion that one’s profession was a divine calling or ‘vocation’, and this, together with his depiction of wealth as a sign of divine favour bestowed only upon those who had been chosen by God, brought into being a culture that was remarkably favourable to the growth of a capitalist economy. In due course, these cultural and economic shifts would sweep away the mediaeval ordering of society, together with its religious forms.³

      In this way, the old spiritual world was fractured, and our sense of having a place within an ordered cosmos was lost. From that time onward, Christianity, even in its new guise – and despite the ambitions of the Protestant Reformers – has only continued to cede territory and authority to other blueprints for meaning and happiness, most notably those stemming from the worlds of politics and science. However, strangely enough, in these two systems, one may still discern the ghost of Christianity, as we shall see.

      In recent times, political ideology has thus come to enjoy some of the unquestioning faith that was previously accorded to religion. The roots of such a development actually lie in the Reformation itself, when Luther’s attack on the hierarchical authority of Catholic Christianity in matters of religion soon spilled over into a demand by Anabaptists and other revolutionary Millenarians that society and authority should be levelled: a re-ordering that they associated with the return of Christ and his thousand-year kingdom over which he would rule together with the just. Although the German Peasants’ Revolt of 1525 and the various uprisings of the subsequent decade in Europe were crushed, they were harbingers of what was to come.⁴

      In the event, it would take nearly three centuries for a revolutionary movement finally to succeed in its aim of a total reconstitution of society, when the French Revolutionaries seized power at the end of the eighteenth century. However, by this time, the essentially apocalyptic Christian view of history that had been revolution’s initial impulse had been obscured. Revolution was to be, from then on, in the hands of the officially secular and anti-religious. Nevertheless, all revolutionary movements up to the present day are, in important respects, still indebted to Millenarian Christian views. All these movements anticipate an apocalypse that will consume the unrighteous and be followed by the age of perfection to be enjoyed by the just – as, indeed, the post-Reformation movements had envisioned.

      Despite the aspirations of its devotees, who are still highly influential in our culture, utopia has not put in an appearance. Its failure to do so should alert us to the intrinsic and inescapable flaw in this pattern of thought: its externalisation of the search for perfection. Contrary to what political ideologies assert, a totally positive re-ordering of society cannot take place in the absence of an interior transformation. Unless the actual roots of the suffering that we inflict upon ourselves and others are dissolved in the individual heart, political action is, at best, doomed to disappoint, and is more often likely to be disastrous. In short, as Buddha taught, it is only by cultivating a freedom from the tyranny of selfishness through sustained attention to ethics, meditation and wisdom that any engagement with the world can be well-founded. This is a point to which we will return in Chapter 4.

      By contrast, political ideologies, even those which seem benevolent in their intentions, rely for their energy upon the notion of external enemies – often, one suspects, to spare their followers the challenge of the confrontation with the enemy within. We see this time after time, when at last the revolution, having warred first with its visible enemies, finally consumes its own children, as in the French Revolutionary Terror of the 1790s. Again, we will have cause to say more about this later.

      If, in recent centuries, political ideologies have offered many a supposed route to happiness, science provides another. The rise of science itself is usually associated with the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ‘Age of Reason’ and the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ respectively. In those centuries, a new type of thinker achieved prominence: the ‘intellectual’ or ‘free thinker’, who came to replace the Church-sanctioned scholar, priest or minister as the new figure of prestige and authority.⁵ Yet this development too, as with the rise of a political culture, also has roots in the Reformation. There, Luther’s insistence on the primacy of the individual conscience, informed only by the Bible and not by tradition, was a first step towards the creation of a free-thinking intellectual, even though Luther had intended only a new orthodoxy.

      Even the free thinkers of the seventeenth century did not start off as explicitly anti-religious. The greatest of them, René Descartes (1596–1650), hoped, as a loyal Catholic, to endow theism with a sure defence when he argued that the existence and nature of God could be determined solely by the free exercise of reason.⁶ In so doing, he contradicted St Thomas Aquinas,⁷ perhaps the greatest of Christian thinkers, who, despite his Aristotelianism, had ruled that some matters were still the domain only of revelation and inaccessible to reason.

      Unfortunately for Descartes, just as Luther before him, his work would have entirely unintended consequences. Luther had failed to anticipate that, in making the Bible available to all, he would merely ensure that now there would be hundreds of different interpretations of Scripture, culminating in one that would reject it entirely. So too, Descartes did not foresee the consequences of his innovation. He had failed to anticipate that, by the end of the eighteenth century, the free exercise of reason would reach its inevitable apotheosis in the work of truly post-Christian thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Hume, who would respectively use it to satirise religious authority, plan for an entirely secular society and demolish any case for God’s manifestation in nature.

      Thus, by the nineteenth century, Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, was a defeated and discredited force among the opinion makers of the West. The notion was by now firmly entrenched that, through the application of reason to the natural world in scientific analysis, nature could be forced to yield up its secrets. Any sense of a sacred presence in nature – one demonstrated in mediaeval Catholicism by its shrines and other holy places – had been banished, first by the iconoclasm of the Protestant Reformation and now by the new science. Thus grew the belief that the physical world, society and, finally, the mind itself, could all be understood and re-ordered on rational lines, and, with this, suffering would be banished. In short, the idea of the scientist as a kind of substitute God – who has assumed powers previously ascribed by Christianity to the Creator – was now in place, as slyly dissected in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein early in the nineteenth century.⁸

      There were, of course, dissenters from this mood of optimism, but even they, whether Romantics, or, some time later, Nietzsche, felt that modern humankind lived in СКАЧАТЬ