The Twin Idols

     I was talking to a friend the other day about the striking absence, in the Hebrew Scriptures, of any nature-worship, any procreation by or of the gods, and any idolatry of the city as such.  He's a confirmed atheist, a geologist by trade, who is fascinated by the rise of civilization -- cities -- in some places, and not in others.  (Not, for example, in pre-Columbian North America, since the lack of oxen and horses makes plowing the rich but heavy soil impossible on any large scale.)  He mentioned a recent book that argues that a male cabal in the Babylonian exile assiduously excised from the Scriptures any reference to a wife for God, along with the last traces of polytheism and fertility cults.  The exiles were also, understandably, not too fond of cities, having Babylon for their prime example of one.

     Well, that can be dismissed pretty easily, I think; it's equally plausible to suppose that the exiles would insist upon their own panoply of gods to beat the Babylonian, or to fashion for YHWH a procreative history to beggar the paltry ruttings of Tiamat and Ea and Ishtar and all the rest.  Rather, I said, the suspicion of cities and of nature worship is of great antiquity, even if you accept the JEDP hypothesis.

     It's easy to see why.  There are really only two options for worship: you can adore God (or you can attempt to, anyhow), or you can adore what-is-not-God.  If you adore what-is-not-God, you can adore either a creature, or a work of the human imagination.  That work can be either intangible or tangible.  If intangible, your adoration soon degenerates into a philosophy -- often a very attractive philosophy, but nevertheless not genuine worship, not a compelling object of wonder.  If tangible, your adoration degenerates into the worship of power.

     There you have them, the two fundamental poles of idolatry.  You may turn this or that creature, or all of creation, into your divinity -- hence the often brutal fertility cults, the worship of Mother Earth, pantheism.  Or you may turn human works into your divinity -- hence the state gods, or the worship of the king as god, or the elevation of a political program to the status of savior.   Modern ecofeminism partakes of both forms, as did Hitler's Nazism.  I am not equating the two; if I could think of a third example of dual idolatry, I'd use it, too.

     These are easy errors for the vain imagination of man.  That explains why the Lord made no real concession to them.  You could have your harvest feast, but you could never suggest that the Lord had sent his seed down into mother earth.  You could have your capital, Jerusalem, but it was only because the Lord had set his tabernacle there -- and you were ever reminded that the Lord needed no temple, and that his people had come from the desert, strangers in a strange land.  Cain was a farmer, and the first builder of a city.

Comments

[labrialumn]

I think that you can and should equate the two. Both are examples of group identity politics, and both have the same philosophical presuppositions, to wit:

*There is no transcendent, objective, signified.

*Individual moral responsibility is a bourgeois and Judeo-Christian notion, and thus rejected.

*Therefore, the sumum bonum is the group will-to-power.

[labrialumn]

BTW, That's odd. There were cities in North America. They persist in the desert southwest, but they also existed throughout the eastern forests until that civilization collapsed towards the beginning of the Little Ice Age. They built temple mounds (of earth) and performed massive human sacrifices and cannibalism, as did the meso-American civilizations, and were very hierarchical. Some of those cities persisted in the South among the Caddo and a few other peoples.

These could serve as a third example of the unity of those two polarities.

[Gene Godbold]

Hey Tony,
That's a really nice observation. Let me muse upon this awhile...

[Matthew N. Petersen]

They excised the idea of a wife for God from all the Scriptures! Have they even read the Scriptures? Or perhaps they just completely missed Hosea, and Ezekiel, and Jeremiah, and the Song of Songs.

And most likely it was the chauvinist Apostle Paul who made the myth that there is no bride of Christ Christian? Particularly in that most offensive of books, Ephesians.

Or perhaps they point to Revelation to prove that there is no Wedding of the Lamb?

You could have your harvest feast, but you could never suggest that the Lord had sent his seed down into mother earth.

I suppose he completely forgets about March 25, the celebration of when YHVH sent his seed down into Mother Mary?

[Matthew N. Petersen]

They excised the idea of a wife for God from all the Scriptures! Have they even read the Scriptures? Or perhaps they just completely missed Hosea, and Ezekiel, and Jeremiah, and the Song of Songs.

And most likely it was the chauvinist Apostle Paul who made the myth that there is no bride of Christ Christian? Particularly in that most offensive of books, Ephesians.

Or perhaps they point to Revelation to prove that there is no Wedding of the Lamb?

You could have your harvest feast, but you could never suggest that the Lord had sent his seed down into mother earth.

I suppose he completely forgets about March 25, the celebration of when YHVH sent his seed down into Mother Mary?

[Peter Gardner]

Cities can't be all bad, since God has us living in one for all eternity.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Cities can't be all bad, since God has us living in one for all eternity.<<<

Everybody should try to remember what people meant when they referred to a "polis" or a "civis" in the Apostolic age, and how that differs from what we think of as "city".

[Ethan Cordray]

Yes, Labrialumn, that sentence made me wonder, as well, about the mound builders of Cahokia and elsewhere. They certainly didn't seem to have much trouble moving dirt.

Still, it is rather fascinating to me that cities arise in the places they do, and in addition that cultural advances take place when and where they do. I think geology and deography can be of great help in studying such things, though of course they cannot exhaust the subject. Let us hope Dr. Esolen's friend's interests spark in him the same questions that began certain commentators here toward faith.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>They certainly didn't seem to have much trouble moving dirt.<<<

Amazing what you can do with some wicker baskets and unlimited, compliant manpower. Ever see Silbury Hill?

>>>Still, it is rather fascinating to me that cities arise in the places they do<<<

Cities arise (or used to arise) at utterly logical places, based on one or more of the following criteria:

1. Access to navigable rivers (often at the fall line) or at natural harbors
2. At or near fords or mountain passes
3. Near sources of valuable raw materials
4. Close to defensible terrain.

Hence, Rome: on a set of defensible hills, at the crossings of the Tiber, upstream from Portus at the mouth of the Tiber, close to the salt marshes, and along the salt road that led into the Appenine Mountains.

Or Byzantium, at the Golden Horn at the entrance to the Black Sea

Or Troy, overlooking the Bosphorus, on a protected hill, with access to the sea and on roads leading to the Anatolian hinterlands.

Or London, at the fall line of the Thames, at a convenient crossing spot

Or New York, at the mouth of the Hudson

Boston, inside Massachussets Bay, at the mouth of the Charles

Or Tokyo, with its own magnificent harbor

Or Paris, on an island in the midst of the Seine, at another ford

In fact, not until the late 19th century do we start to see cities emerge at utterly arbitrary places, and then due entirely to the fact that these were selected as convergence points for the railways, which, thanks to steam power and dynamite, could go where they wanted by the shortest route through brute force, without necessarily taking the easiest route. No need to go over a pass, when you can go under a mountain. No need to look for a ford, when you can span any river. If the shortest distance between point A in the north and point B in the south is a straight line, and if the shortest distance between point C in the east and point D in the west is also a straight line, then the intersection of lines AB and CD at point X becomes the logical place for a city.

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

"I was talking to a friend the other day about the striking absence, in the Hebrew Scriptures, of any nature-worship, any procreation by or of the gods, and any idolatry of the city as such. He's a confirmed atheist, a geologist by trade, who is fascinated by the rise of civilization -- cities -- in some places, and not in others."

Actually, I was interested in an interesting side street on this thread: How does a Catholic share the gospel of Jesus Christ with a confirmed atheist friend?

Did you or have you shared Jesus and/or the Catholic faith prior with your confirmed atheist friend Tony? If so, how did it go? What did you do? Did you back off for fear of fraying the friendship?

This part of your post is interesting to me.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>How does a Catholic share the gospel of Jesus Christ with a confirmed atheist friend?<<<

We live it.

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

>>>How does a Catholic share the gospel of Jesus Christ with a confirmed atheist friend?<<<

"We live it."

Are the Roman Catholic churches growing and thriving as a result of this lifestyle evangelism?

[Tony Esolen]

TUAD:

How do you evangelize such an atheist? With kindness -- and with slowly placed hints, here and there, that the Christianity which he rejected when he was a young scientist (a Christianity for which he seems to feel some residual affection or nostalgia) was not necessarily the real deal -- or if it was, maybe he had not been given the intellectual tools for understanding it aright and seeing its consonance with natural science. Basically, I am trying a flanking maneuver, with Brother Thomas as my cannon.

I'd like to clarify a point: by civilization both he and I mean that complex net of trade, government, craftsmanship, learning, permanent buildings and division of labor that characterizes the Nile cities, or the Greek poleis, or the walled cities in Mesopotamia. In civilization, you find cities full of people who are not directly involved in the procuring of food -- even when they are supported by plenty of farmers in the regions around them, as the center of the Athenian polis, Athens proper, was supported by the countryside of Attica. You need a surplus of preservable grain -- and then you can have men whose sole work is to carve tables, dress stone, cut and polish jewels, conduct religious rituals, etc. The Indians of the American southwest came close to that, but not quite.

[Gene Godbold]

Ah, yes, the old "Franciscan method" trick. :-)

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Are the Roman Catholic churches growing and thriving as a result of this lifestyle evangelism?<<<

Sure looks like it. The Orthodox around here seem to be doing pretty well, too.

Asked how he wanted his followers to gain converts, St. Francis of Assissi said, "Preach the Gospel constantly. Use words, if you must."

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

St. Francis of Assissi said, "Preach the Gospel constantly. Use words, if you must."

Funny, you should mention that one. It's been around a long time. Plus I just heard it again from the pulpit this past Sunday.

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

"Basically, I am trying a flanking maneuver, with Brother Thomas as my cannon."

Thanks for the response Tony. I was thinking along the lines of Professor Peter Kreeft. I have about 8-10 of his books. And I think he is a superb, amazingly great apologist for the Christian faith.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>You need a surplus of preservable grain -- and then you can have men whose sole work is to carve tables, dress stone, cut and polish jewels, conduct religious rituals, etc. <<<

Actually, you need a lot of silver from the Attic mines, to pay for the building of lots of triremes and the hiring of lots of citizen-rowers, who can then be used to subjugate and enslave lots of artisans from surrounding city-states, allowing one to live a life of ease, wherein one can philosophize until the cows come home, surrounded by lots of beautiful things made by unfree men.

That's the dark side of Greek culture.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Thanks for the response Tony. I was thinking along the lines of Professor Peter Kreeft. I have about 8-10 of his books. And I think he is a superb, amazingly great apologist for the Christian faith.<<<

For all that his book "Ecumenical Jihad" was hopelessly naive in positing a congruence of interests among believing Christians, Jews and Moslems against rampant secularism.

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

Just read the reader reviews on Amazon.com for Kreeft's book Ecumenical Jihad. Wow, it spanned the whole spectrum. I never heard of the book until now.

Can't believe my favorite contemporary Catholic apologist laid an egg on this one.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Can't believe my favorite contemporary Catholic apologist laid an egg on this one.<<<

It's a fantasy that some people just can't let go. It seems to have had a serious influence on the otherwise sensible Dinesh D'Souza.