Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning by Edward Carpenter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
At first glance, Carpenter seems to be heavily de-valuing Christianity as he examines how Christian rituals have precedence within pagan rituals. But in reading this book you learn this is not what he is trying to do.
He is actually seeking to find the root of religion. Carpenter grounds religious understanding in the development of human consciousness… so in that sense, pagan or Christian makes no difference — we are attempting to find our place in the world. How we do so through religion, is by grounding validation of our social reality through various external markers. In other words, we use sacrifice and ritual to maintain a consistency with the outside world.
The actual thesis comes fairly late in the book. About half way through, he notes that this humanity seeking place develops in turn from the increased consciousness that comes with the loss of drive…with knowledge. The 2nd stage is self awareness, when knowledge of the world is mobilized as functionality of the world oriented to the self. The last stage is a return to unity of humankind within the ground of Self.
Where Christianity steps in, is within the increased development of self-consciousness… for instance, Carpenter notes that with the rise of self-consciousness came self-will. This will according to self came as a threat to the coherency of the group. Christianity solves this by requiring that newcomers be born into the group, or I should say, born again. This doesn’t stop the selfishness though:
with the rise of Protestantism and Puritanism, this tendency reached such an extreme that, as some one has said, each man was absorbed in polishing up his own little soul in a corner to himself, in entire disregard to the damnation which might come to his neighbor. Religion, and Morality too, under the commercial regeime became as was natural, perfectly selfish. It was always: “Am I saved? Am I doing the right thing? Am I winning the flavor of God and man? Will my claims to salvation be allowed? Did I make a good bargain in allowing Jesus to be crucified for me?” The poison of a diseased self-consciousness entered into the whole human system.
Carpenter isn’t quite done yet with Christianity. He also writes that “Sin is actually (and that is its only real meaning) the separation from others, and the non-acknowledgement of unity.” After all, any sin is really the run-away of human will, for the exclusion of all else, an imbalance within human consciousness.
Carpenter’s final point, the rise of the ground of Self marks for him a return to past truths, half sensed within human consciousness but not fully articulated. This ground of Self is really a return to philosophy, something Carpetner shys away from, but being from the earlier part of the 20th century, this was how existence was conceptualized, along a kind of immanent ground, be it consciousness or Self.
And that is my only compliant. His argument is from a structuralist framework, and it works well when dealing with other religions. Where it becomes sketchy is in that he slides from speaking of consciousness to speaking about Self… as if the two are the same. They aren’t. Nonetheless he ends on a positive note. He quotes one Dr Frazer from “The Golden Bough”
The laws of Nature are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names of the World and the Universe. In the last analysis magic, religion and science are nothing but theories (of thought); and as Science has supplanted its predecessors so it may hereafter itself be superseded by some more perfect hypothesis, perhaps by some perfectly different way of looking at phenomena–of registering the shadows on the screen–of which we in this generation can form no idea.”
Carpenter does hope that we can find out of self-conscious obsessed world, wherein we think only of ourselves, to find unity. What he doesn’t mention is that science too, is a knowledge based oriented along the self, for humankind and so on…. at least in the 20th century it was viewed as such. More understanding of how we are interconnected with nature has been revealing a different picture, one in which we cannot take a self interested view only, for to only be interested in things for us, is to lose the rest of the world… and no one can live without that.
