“Whenever you can, act as a liberator. Freedom, dignity, wealth–these three together constitute the greatest happiness of humanity. If you bequeath all three to your people, their love for you will never die.”
-Cyrus the Great
When Pope Francis objects to individualism and libertarianism it is not a new argument. The fundamental underlying issues have been discussed since before The Epic of Gilgamesh was written some 4500 years ago. We live in a very polarized society full of conflict. Our society and our world are divided. What we call left and right is just one example of the dualism that permeates the human condition.
The pagan religions of the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Canaanites were polytheistic, and their gods were not perfectly good: rather they had some very human qualities and failings. The Dharmic religions of India were also polytheistic, and even Buddha was eventually just “one of the gods”.
The ancient Zoroastrian religion was perhaps the first monotheistic religion. It was started by Zarathustra (aka Zoroaster) in what is now Iran perhaps a thousand years before Christ, and there are still followers of the Zoroastrian religion today in Iran and India. They believe in one god, who they call Ahura Mazda. Ahura Mazda controls the forces of good in the universe and is opposed by Angira Mainyu, who represents evil.
Zoroaster believed in the freedom of the individual to choose right and wrong and he also believed in personal responsibility for one’s actions. He believed in dualism, which is the idea of the struggle of opposing forces in the world. He also believed in Heaven and Hell, and a judgment for each soul that would weigh the good and evil in each life.
Ahura Mazda is represented by light, or fire, while Angira Mainyu is represented by darkness. While they are monotheists, they do believe that Ahura Mazda is responsible only for that which is good, and not evil. When Zoroastrians engage in “Good thoughts, Good Words, and Good deeds” they are helping Ahura Mazda (truth) and opposing Angira Mainyu (lies).
Josiah was King of Judah from 641 to 609 BC. Josiah was descended from David. His third son was Zedekiah, who was conquered by Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon just before his destruction of Solomon’s temple and the exile of the Jews from their homeland in about 596 BC.
Cyrus the Great lived from 600-530 BC, and he was the founder of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. Under Cyrus and his son Darius the Achaemenid Empire would grow to be larger than the later Roman Empire. The importance of Cyrus the Great to history cannot be overstated. Cyrus ruled for 30 years and in addition to the largest empire the world had yet known he was one of the most influential rulers in history.
Cyrus conquered Babylon in 540 BC and set the Jewish people free to return to their homeland. He even issued the Edict of Restoration and ended up rebuilding their temple. The Jewish people praised Cyrus in Ezra and Chronicles and elsewhere for his fair rulership. Cyrus is known for his achievements in human rights and his respect for the customs and religions of those he conquered.
"Success always calls for greater generosity--though most people, lost in the darkness of their own egos, treat it as an occasion for greater greed. Collecting boot [is] not an end itself, but only a means for building [an] empire. Riches would be of little use to us now--except as a means of winning new friends."
-Cyrus the Great
When we watch the movie 300 about the conflict between the Persians and the Greeks at the Battle of Thermopylae we are presented a story of virtuous Greeks and villainous Persians. We are invariably on the side of the Greeks, who we believe share our values. But Xerxes was the son of Darius who was the son of Cyrus, and there are reasons to like the Archaemenid Empire.
Zoroastrianism was the official religion of the Empire, and the religion forbid slavery. As a result when Cyrus did projects he actually paid the workers. When he conquered a new land he did not take the people as slaves, but simply let them continue their lives and cultures. By contrast, the Greeks embraced slavery. While it is true that the Athenians had a democracy and Cyrus was a Monarch, the Greeks put Socrates to death for not believing in their gods, while Cyrus let people worship as they saw fit.
When the Jews returned from exile they did so with a lot of new ideas that they had learned while living in the lands of the Zoroastrians. Later Jewish writings became more dualistic, with more emphasis on the battle between good and evil.
If we fast forward from Cyrus some 800 years we find the birth of a prophet named Mani in 216 CE. He was born in Babylon as a member of a Jewish-Christian group of Gnostics. When he was 12 he had his first vision from a “heavenly twin”, and he went and studied Hinduism in India. He later started what would be known as Manichaeism, which is a somewhat strange religion where Mani was the final prophet after Jesus and Buddha and Krishna and Zoroaster and others. He thought these were just previous prophets of the One True God, as he was.
Mani died in 274 CE but his followers continued his religion of Manichaeism, with remnants remaining as late as the 14th century in China. We probably would not care at all about Mani were it not for one particular follower of Manichaeism about 100 years after his death.
Augustine of Hippo was born in 354 CE in North Africa to Monica and Patricius. Monica was a Christian but Patricius was a pagan. As a youth, Augustine lived a pretty hedonistic lifestyle. He had a 15-year affair with a woman who bore him a child but who he never married. When Augustine went off as a young man to study he joined the Manichaeans for about 9 years. From this he developed a lot of dualistic ideas about good and evil and heaven and hell. The Manichaeans adopted the gnostic idea of the material world being evil and dirty, and this influenced Augustine.
After his years as a Manichaean he also spent time studying Neoplatonism, which was founded by Plotinus in the second century and was based on the ideas of Plato. Plotinus taught that there is a single supreme being which he termed “One”, which was the sum of all things. It came from Plato’s concept of the Demiurge. The Gnostics and Manichaeans had expanded on Plato’s concepts and the Demiurge and ideal realm became perfect forms of good while the material world became an imperfect and evil one.
Augustine opened a couple of schools and taught rhetoric but in 384 CE a prestigious position opened up as rhetoric professor in Milan, and Augustine got the job at 30 years old. In Milan, Augustine met Ambrose, who was Bishop of Milan. His mother followed him to Milan and arranged a proper Christian marriage for him, but they had to wait two years for her to turn 12. He was deeply hurt by having to give up his concubine in order to get married. Since he had two years to wait, he took another concubine in Milan.
In 386 Augustine converted to Christianity after a voice told him to “take up and read” the Bible. He broke off his engagement and stopped seeing his concubines. In 391 he was ordained a priest and began preaching and he argued against his former Manichaean philosophy. In 395 he became Bishop of Hippo, a position he held until his death in 430 CE.
Like Cyrus, the importance of Augustine to history cannot be overstated. His writings and philosophy would shape the Christian Church and Western culture for the next 16 centuries, and would form the foundation of most Christian thinking, including that of Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther.
Augustine was born 60 years after the First Council of Nicaea. The basic ideas of Christian theology had been established, but there was a great deal that was unsettled. The writings of Augustine would end up settling a great deal of church doctrine.
By the time Augustine was born the memory of Diocletian (244-312 CE) and his persecutions had just started to fade. The Roman Emperor had targeted Christians and Manichaeans and others who did not worship his pagan gods, and many had been killed. Diocletian instituted price controls to battle inflation, which were not successful. He also split the Empire into a tetrarchy, which was also ultimately unsuccessful.
It is incredible to realize that less than 30 years after Diocletian the Emperor Constantine would not only make Christianity legal, but he would embrace the religion, attend councils, and lead to the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. By the time Augustine took up Christianity the Emperor Theodosius was ruling as the last Roman Emperor to rule over both East and West.
Augustine will present a number of ideas, which we will need to discuss in order to understand why we feel the way we do about issues in our modern world. Do you believe in free will and individual liberty and responsibility? Do you see material things and money as being dirty or evil? Do you see the world as an epic conflict between good and evil? Do you believe in heaven and hell and a Judgment Day?
A thousand years before Augustine there was a Persian society whose King, Cyrus the Great, believed in free will and individual liberty and personal responsibility and human rights and religious tolerance. These are some of the fundamental pieces of libertarian individualist thought that Pope Francis has taken exception to in our modern society. Next time we will take a look at why he may feel that way as we examine the Augustinian ideas a little further.
Parts 1-6 can be found here. http://rakestrawjeff.blogspot.com/?m=1
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