All posts tagged Judea

Freud on religion

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motivation of human behaviour and thought, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian, bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

‘God is at bottom nothing but a projection of the father.’

The influence of Darwin

In his later writings, in the 1870s, Charles Darwin hinted at the implications of his theory of evolution by natural selection for human psychology. In the 1890s Sigmund Freud, like many other scientists and psychologists of his generation, picked up on these hints by developing a theory of human nature which aimed to be entirely materialistic, secular and biological.

But in Freud’s writings this project became closely linked to his lifelong, systematic and remorseless attack on religion, specifically Roman Catholic Christianity – leading to a lifelong obsession with rewriting Christianity’s history, concepts and present-day appeal in purely secular, materialist, psychological terms.

Freud takes Darwin’s insights into the natural world (i.e. that all life evolved from less organised to more organised forms via countless trillions of variations, with no divine intervention or plan) and applies them to the life of the mind. He aimed to show that the mind, as much a part of the natural world as our legs or eyes, also evolved by a process of natural selection, by trial and error, from below, rather than being divinely created from above.

Freud’s theory of the mind

Building on this foundation Freud went on to claim, and try to prove, that the mind is a complex overlay of different strategies, instincts and forces which are frequently in conflict with each other. It is the conflicts between different instincts in the mind which account for much of our unhappiness, our sense of being at odds with ourselves or with the world.

Freud divides the mind into different compartments or functions which engage in the struggle for survival among themselves: predominantly this is a battle between the unconscious, instinctive part of the mind, the ‘id’, and the rational, strategic, forward-looking ‘ego’.

Freud developed a technique, the so-called talking cure, whereby patients were helped to express these unconscious conflicts in order to become fully conscious of them and so cope with them better. The technique and the theory together came to be called psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis has been used differently in the hands of different practitioners, but with Freud it went hand-in-hand with Darwin’s idea that religion, ethics and so on are to be dealt with naturalistically, as products of the developing human species, rather than as supernatural gifts from God.

The roots of Freud’s anti-religion

Freud’s lifelong animus against religious belief was:

  1. partly a product of the antisemitism he encountered from childhood onwards in the Austrian capital, Vienna
  2. partly due to the fierce anti-clericalism of the German, rationalist, materialist tradition which he imbibed at school and while studying science at university

Both these sources were further confirmed by the hypocritical and hysterical attacks made on him by churchmen of all denominations as he published the results of his new discoveries of the mind throughout the early 1900s. As with Darwin, the stupidity and ignorance of the Christian attacks on him confirmed Freud in his low opinion of Christian authorities and ‘thinkers’.

Freud’s critique of religion

Freud critiques religion in a number of ways, approaching the issue from various angles, which this blog post will describe in the following order:

  1. by providing an alternative, purely secular psychological account of religious experience
  2. by demonstrating that religious feeling is at bottom wish-fulfilment, to which we are all susceptible
  3. by drawing an analogy between religious rituals and neurotic obsessions
  4. by analysing specific religious phenomena in secular terms
  5. by rewriting religious history (of Judaism in particular) in purely psychological terms
  6. by showing how harmful religious belief is in modern life, both to the individual and to society as a whole

1. The psychoanalysis of religious experience

Religion, Freud claims, is the fulfilment of mankind’s oldest, deepest wishes, namely:

  • to have a coherent explanation of why we’re here
  • to have our path through the world watched over by a benevolent Providence
  • to have clear-cut guidelines as to how to behave and the promise of reward if we behave well
  • to live forever
  • to be loved unconditionally

Religion answers all of these wishes by creating an all-powerful God:

  • who made the world
  • who watches over and protects all of us so that not even the falling of a sparrow goes unnoticed
  • who created us free to choose, and planted a knowledge of morality in us and a little watchdog in our brains – our ‘conscience’
  • who will reward us for obeying its promptings with eternal life

But for Freud individual religious belief is an illusion because none of the above is true. Very obviously all the qualities attributed to ‘God’ are based on the child’s view of their all-powerful father, or are designed to address the anxieties and uncertainties we all face as adults.

As for society as a whole, society-wide religious belief is a type of mass delusion and, at its most extreme, actually takes the form of mass delusions, from the group weddings of the Moonies to the religious hysteria of entire nations e.g. the Iranians in the aftermath of their revolution, or periodic outbreaks of ‘end-of-the-world’ hysterias.

You don’t have to delve far back into European history to uncover evidence of mass, society-wide outbreaks of madness, many of them centred around hysterical religious fervour, not least the 130 years of social turmoil and civil war which came to be called the Wars of Religion (roughly 1520 to 1648).

In addition to the, as it were, ‘rational’ or sympathetic wishes listed above (the wish to be looked after, protected, comforted etc), religion offers a range of other satisfactions:

  • by teaching you to turn away from relying on the outside world and concentrate on ‘spiritual affairs’, religion helps in the avoidance of the pain inevitably caused by the outside world; for example, the inevitable ageing and death of ourselves and those we love
  • religion helps you sublimate your basic instincts into socially acceptable routes; for example, a powerful sexual drive can become sublimated into a love of all humanity, or into exhausting works of ‘charity’; aggression can be practiced as long as it’s against acceptable objects, like ‘heretics’, ‘the infidel’, Jews etc
  • religion helps you feel part of a gang, of a large organisation which you can devote yourself to, and so helps you to forget your personal difficulties, or submerge them into working for a higher cause
  • religion offers the pleasure of feeling superior to outsiders – ‘I’m saved. You’re damned’ – which has been such a feature in Christian theology

2. Religion as wish-fulfilment

When we turn our attention to the psychical origin of religious ideas we see that they are not the precipitates of experience or the end-results of thinking; they are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes. The infant’s terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood arouses the need for the protection provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life makes it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one.

Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fears of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfilment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilisation; and the prolongation of a earthly life in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfilments shall take place… It is an enormous relief to the individual psyche if the conflicts of its childhood arising from the father complex – conflicts which it has never wholly overcome – are removed from it and brought to a solution which is universally accepted.

When I say these things are illusions I must define the meaning of the word. An illusion is not the same as an error; nor is it necessarily an error. Aristotle’s belief that vermin arose out of dung was an error. On the other hand it was an illusion of Christopher Columbus’s that he had discovered a new sea route to the Indies. The part played by Columbus’s wish in the illusion is obvious. He wanted to discover a new route to the Indies. And so on the slightest evidence he thought he had.

Thus what is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. Illusions need not necessarily be false – that is to say, unrealisable, or in contradiction with reality. For example, a middle class girl may have the illusion that a prince will come and marry her. This is possible and a few such cases have occurred. But that the Messiah will come and institute a golden age is much less likely, that is, it includes a larger proportion of pure wish-fulfilment… And so we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation.

(The Future of an Illusion, section 6, Pelican Freud volume 12: pages 212 to 213)

Thus, at the heart of religious belief – or religious illusion – there is a real truth, the truth of our infantile, helpless dependence on our parents and our experience of the unconditional love they showed us. And religious belief arises from a long-suppressed wish to return to such a state of unconditional belovedness.

Submission to an organised religious creed, with its offers of punishment as well as reward, amounts to a compromise between a) the Pleasure Principle’s bottomless need for love and b) the Reality Principle, the rational ego’s knowledge that endless love is difficult if not impossible to attain in this hazardous world. Between optimism and pessimism.

This explains why religious ‘conversion’ is commonly experienced as a breakthrough into a realm of radical happiness, happiness such as we thought we could never have again because it is the re-experiencing of childhood simplicities.

Freud’s theory says that the sense of ‘victory over death’ described by converts is a purely internal, psychological victory of the love-wanting, wishful part of our mind over the mature, realistic, pessimistic part. It is thus a ‘real’ experience, just that it has no reference to events outside our minds.

Christians’ mistake is the elementary one of thinking that this breakthrough inside their own heads is reflective of an objective reality; is fed by, or part of, a great cosmic struggle between good and evil. It is the same mistake made by drug-users, drunks and psychotics of projecting their inner experience onto the universe.

Thus, on Freud’s theory, the success and endurance of religion is its ability to fit the individual’s powerful libidinal wishes into an acceptable, nay, an eminently respectable social structure, the form and hierarchies of the church. In the church the most personal and private, semi-conscious, infantile fantasy-wishes are united with eminently grown-up, sophisticated, objective realities. Are approved.

Where else outside the Church could ordinary, boring, middle-aged men dress up in purple skirts, be adored and worshipped by pretty young boys, move solemnly through an atmosphere rich in incense and gold, and play-act that they have infinite power of judgement, of the forgiveness of sins?

Where else could their rather mediocre opinions and ideas about life be listened to, soaked up and debated with fervour by a large, devout congregation? The power of that experience must be intoxicating. And, since all enjoyment is suspect in Christianity, the very thrill of power and control itself might make the subject think he is being tempted by to the Devil’s sin of Pride. Which explains, in Freud’s view, why so many Christians go around and around in a self-confirming cycle of hyper-self-awareness, doubt, spiritual agonies, religious breakthrough etc etc, all the time convincing themselves that they are not boring, insignificant cyphers who will grow old, grow ill and die – but are at the centre of a great cosmic battle between good and evil.

How boring non-believers’ mundane lives seem in comparison. How lost and unfocused they seem.

3. Religious rituals as forms of neurotic obsession

Freud was the first to draw attention to the similarity in psychological structure between the religious believer’s performance of religious rituals and the array of bizarre obsessions displayed by some mental patients:

It is easy to see where the resemblance lies between neurotic ceremonials and the sacred acts of religious ritual; in the qualms of conscience brought on by their neglect, in their complete isolation from all other actions, and in the conscientiousness with which they are carried out in every detail.

(Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices, 1907)

On the face of it, though, obsessive compulsions – like not walking in cracks in the pavement in case the Devil snatches at your feet, or closing all the doors in a house in a certain fixed order – are meaningless, whereas religious ritual is charged with the highest meaning.

No. This has been psychoanalysis’s greatest achievement: revealing that even the silliest behaviour, the kind of deviant behaviour that in previous ages resulted in witches being burned and lunatics locked up in Bedlam or dismissed as ‘hysterics’, is in fact supercharged with meaning for the subject.

This meaning may be either historical (the compulsive repeating of a real trauma) or symbolical (i.e. a disguised defence mechanism against a perceived threat, where the threat – for example, of a long-dead father’s punishment – no longer exists in the outside world, but is still a terrifying reality in the patient’s mind).

A good deal of Freud’s work consisted in listing compulsive behaviours which seem weird in isolation and showing their origin and root in real unhappiness experienced in a patient’s life. And Freud’s distinctive contribution was to show that often this unhappiness was caused by the repression of an instinctual need.

At the bottom of every obsessional neurosis is the repression of an instinctual impulse which was present in the subject’s constitution and which was allowed to find expression for a while during his childhood but later succumbed to repression. In the course of the repression of this instinct a special conscientiousness is created which is directed against the instinct’s aims; but this psychical reaction-formation feels insecure and constantly threatened by the instinct which is lurking in the unconscious.

Analysis of obsessive actions shows us that the sufferer from compulsions and prohibitions behaves as if he were dominated by a sense of guilt. This sense of guilt has its source in certain early mental events but is constantly being revived by renewed temptation…. This sense of guilt of obsessional neurotics finds its counterpart in the protestations of pious people that they are miserable sinners and the pious observations (such as prayers, etc) with which pious people preface every daily act.

As the mental protection slips, crumbles, the subject – threatened with a return of the repressed and forbidden instinctual wish, and warned of the return by symptoms of anxiety or hysteria – erects ever more frantic mental barriers against its inadmissible return into consciousness, actions which will ward off the unacceptable truth by, as it were, magic.

The same psychic mechanism thus underlies superstitious belief (not walking under ladders), obsessive behaviour (washing of hands, not walking on cracks in the pavement), the games of children with arbitrary but crucial rules (hopscotch), the propitiatory behaviour of primitive peoples towards their gods (for fear that omission of one aspect invalidates the entire ritual and thus will call down the anger of the gods), and the propitiatory behaviour of Christians towards their God (saying three Hail Marys, crossing yourself as you pass in front of the altar in a Church etc).

The formation of a religion, too, seems to be based on the suppression, the renunciation, of certain instinctual impulses. These impulses, however, are not, as in the neuroses, exclusively components of the sexual instinct; they are self-seeking, socially harmful instincts, though, even so, they are usually not without a sexual component.

A sense of guilt following upon continual temptation and an expectant anxiety in the form of fear of divine punishment have, after all, been familiar to us in the field of religion longer than in that of neurosis.

For some reason the suppression of instinct proves to be an inadequate and interminable process in religious life also. Indeed, complete backslidings into sin are more common among pious people than among neurotics and these give rise to a new form of religious activity, namely acts of penance, which have their counterpart in obsessional neurosis.

4. Aspects of organised religion explained in psychoanalytical terms

Communion

A reversion to the primitive oral phase of childhood when we try to control the environment, to assimilate the outside world, by eating it: watch any two-year-old.

Conscience

‘Conscience’ is the superego, the absorption into your psyche of the instructions and demands of your parents from your earliest years, a function of the mind then expanded by later teachers and other authority figures. It hurts to disobey them but we do, and guilt is the result. Guilt is no proof of Man’s uniquely moral nature, as some Christians argue. It is the purely mechanical result of transgressing our early training. Think of dogs who disobey their masters, and then look sheepish.

Conversion

Being ‘born again’ is the result of returning, after a detour, to the sense of being loved by, and of loving, the God-like figures of our parents as they appeared to us in our childhood. Most ‘born-again’ Christians are in fact returning to the religion of their childhood which they had rejected at some stage. Two examples I know of are W.H. Auden and C.S. Lewis who were both brought up in Anglican households, underwent student and early manhood years of light-hearted atheism, and then returned to the religion of their boyhoods with an overwhelming sense of relief and illumination, which went on to underpin all their writings from the moment of their (re)conversions until they died.

God

God is a projection onto the universe of the demanding, caring, loving, all-powerful father as we experienced him in our earliest infancy, in the first couple of years of life.

The devil

The devil is an equal and opposite projection of the father in his bad, punishing aspect. In the Old Testament the two are mixed together in the figure of Yahweh, the demanding, violent jealous god. The achievement of Christianity was to extract and focus on the figure of the God of Love implicit in the Old Testament. Unfortunately, this psychological or theological development also had the effect of bringing into greater clarity the image of the anti-God, the figure of pure malice and evil, the Devil. This explains why there is little mention of the devil in the Old Testament but why he comes to play such a central role in the New Testament.

Immortality

Immortality is everyone’s deepest wish, for death does not exist in the unconscious mind. It is a creation of the conscious mind which we can never quite fully believe. Everyone else might die, but not me.

Morality

Morality is a system of approved behaviour worked out by society, instilled in a child by its parents, and reinforced by later authority figures. Some Christians use the alleged existence of a moral sense in human beings as proof that there is a moral God. But:

  1. the so-called moral sense boils down to a person’s accumulated training in how to behave and not behave
  2. it is, to put it mildly, extremely variable, in content and effectiveness, across individuals, societies, and cultures
  3. it is entirely absent in some people, so God demonstrably did not implant the moral sense in some people – why not?

Guilt

Guilt is an internal psychological response to the act of disobedience to the rules and regulations which have been so strongly inculcated by your parents and other authority figures. It is a purely psychological reaction, a form of fear that punishment will be inflicted if we do something wrong. Inflicted by whom? By our parents, even if they’re dead, because their image and prolonged training live on in our minds, whether they are alive or dead, present or absent. It is the legacy of our earliest, deepest training, which is almost impossible to shake off.

Spiritual feelings

Spiritual feelings are reawakenings of the earliest narcissistic phase of childhood when the child hadn’t yet differentiated between its feelings and the reality of the outside world. These feelings, just like the earliest infantile feeling of fear or abandonment, can be revived in later life. This is the explanation of all forms of religious feelings of the sublime or ‘oneness with the universe’.

Original sin

Original sin combines two emotions:

1. The deeply held feeling all of us have of having been in some way expelled from a paradise of love and physical bliss. Freud says this was the experience of babyhood at the mother’s breast, the immensely powerful, pre-linguistic, pre-conscious experience of inhabiting a wonderland of union and fulfilment.

2. Along with obscure feelings of punishment at the hands of our parents.

Each of these can be experienced individually. What’s interesting is that some individuals, and even entire cultures, fail to combine the two into ‘original sin’ as Christians wish them to.

The two main sources of ‘original sin’ can be explained as the inevitable result of the natural processes of human growth and development, with no supernatural overtones whatever.

Prayer

Prayer is a relic of ‘magic’, a reversion to the child’s primitive belief in ‘the omnipotence of its thoughts’, the childish conviction that the universe revolves around us and can be altered by our wishes and commands. It can’t.

We are taught to pray to ‘our Father’ to make things right, look after us and our loved ones. What could be more transparent?

Superstition

Superstition amounts to relics of animism and primitive (i.e. childish-neurotic) beliefs which have been discarded by religion under the modernising influence of the rational Enlightenment (for example, burning witches, epileptics are possessed by devils, evil omens and unlucky days).

But these primitive psychological formations, anxieties and fears, still threaten to grip the ignorant, the simple, or the extremely repressed. or any of us when we’re in a stressful situation.

5. A psychoanalytical history of Judaism and Christianity

Central to Freud’s theory is the Oedipus Complex. Each of us is born into the world with the problem of how to grow beyond the boundaries of our parents’ care into autonomous individuals. To put it another way, how to overthrow the sometimes terrifying authority of our Father and build on the love and nurturing of our Mother.

In our unconscious minds, swarming with uncontrollable feelings, we act out countless inchoate scenarios of revenge and possession. How effectively we repress these earliest fantasies determines our later character.

Freud (who was, of course, himself Jewish, although a non-believing, atheist Jew) thought that Judaism is the religion of the Oedipus Complex par excellence.

He believed the Jews stood out in the ancient world due to their more advanced ethical code but that this was intimately connected with their greater fear and reverence of a demanding Father-God.

Freud thought that the Jews’ especial devoutness stemmed from an actual historical event when they actually played out an Oedipal scenario. He thought that the Israelites actually rose up and killed their obstinate leader, Moses, who tried to impose his version of monotheism onto the Jews’ primitive worship of the thunder god Yahweh – and were forever afterward guilty about this murder.

Slowly, over the following centuries, the primitive belief in Yahweh was spiritualised by the higher ethical and intellectual content of Moses’ monotheism. A belief grew among the spiritual elite that the Israelites were the chosen people because Moses, the prophet of the One God, had quite literally chosen them.

The Old Testament records a succession of prophets rising up to recall this stubborn, backsliding people (the Israelites) back to the high spiritual requirements of Moses’ idol-less, afterlife-less faith.

Sometime around the fifth century BC priests compiled the various stories handed down by tradition into a coherent and chronological account of:

  • the creation of the world
  • the era of the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob etc)
  • the era of the Kings (Solomon, David)
  • the era of the Prophets (Ezekial, Isaiah, Jeremiah)

Central to the entire religion are the ‘covenants’ or promises made between the Chosen People and God. Because the Israelites are constantly falling away from God’s detailed and demanding law, they are in continual need of forgiveness.

This process – adoption of pure monotheism and the sorting out of their holy writings – was substantially complete, and the Jewish religion formalised, by about the fifth century BC.

The Jews’ survival was due, paradoxically, to the fact that they were repeatedly conquered and hauled off into bondage, first to Egypt, then Babylon and finally, after the failed wars with Rome, in 70 and 135 AD, expelled from Palestine altogether.

These experiences left the Jews no land or capital or buildings, nothing but a written tradition requiring the highest ethical standards, which both produced a tremendous ethnic cohesion, confidence and success, but also triggered suspicion and resentment of them wherever they went.

Saul of Tarsus was a deeply religious Jew, a Pharisee, steeped in the Orthodox tradition. When he heard about the crucifixion of an obscure wandering preacher in Judea he set about persecuting his blasphemous followers.

But then Paul had a literally blinding insight which changed his life and the course of history. For a thousand years Judaism has been a guilty Father-religion, the purest form of the social memory of the struggle all human beings undergo to wriggle free of their parents’ domination.

Judaism was saturated in the sense of letting the Father down. According to Jewish scripture and tradition, again and again and again the Chosen People fell away from the laws and purity demanded by their God and Father, which resulted in a permanent sense of guilt and unworthiness.

It was Saint Paul who realised that the death of this man who called himself the Son of God had the potential to bring a millennium of crushing guilt to an end. From now on Christians could openly acknowledge the importance of Original Sin, an idea only vaguely formed in official Judaism, because they have been relieved of it. The execution of the Son relieves us of the guilty memory of being the Father-hating children we all were in childhood. In the ultimate sacrifice of the crucified Son, all true believers are freed from their primal guilt and so experience the wonderful psychological liberation of being ‘born again’, of starting a new, guilt-free, sin-free life.

In the decades after Jesus’ execution it quickly became clear that Christianity and Judaism were incompatible. The Jews doubled down on their religion of guilt while the Mediterranean world of the Roman Empire swiftly fell for the new religion of liberation, especially as it proved capable – unlike the racially and geographically restricted religion of the Jews – of claiming to be universal, of welcoming everyone, rich or poor, man or women, free or slave, of any ethnicity.

Christianity also had the advantage of being flexible. In its early inchoate form it had the ability to assimilate a lot of the fringe beliefs which were floating around the Mediterranean during the Roman Empire. For example, Christianity easily assimilated:

  • doctrines based on the oriental Mother goddess
  • the idea of a family of Gods (Father, Son and Holy Spirit, plus the Holy Mother)
  • the idea of a terrifyingly powerful Evil Spirit who came to be called Satan, derived, ultimately from Zoroastrianism
  • a sky full of angels
  • a complicated system of punishment and reward in a place called ‘hell’, only vaguely hinted at in Jewish scripture but worked out by Christians in terrifying detail

In this sense (in Freud’s view), although a step forward psychologically (insofar as it presents a solution to the perennial Oedipus problem), Christianity actually operates at a much lower intellectual level than the rigid monotheism of the Jews. It leads to much more florid and bizarre behaviour (as history, indeed, records: monks, stylites, self-castrators, martyrs, miracles).

The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. It is still more humiliating to discover how large a number of people living today, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions.

Christianity triumphed because of its ability to combine Jewish high ethical standards with pagan superstition, thus providing a comprehensive home for most people’s deepest fantasies and wishes – of salvation, of punishment, of eternal life.

The notion of an all-powerful all-seeing God who nonetheless allowed His Creation to be wrecked by evil, pain and suffering is a logical nonsense but who cares? It is a bold and imaginative attempt to explain and justify, in mythological terms, the fundamental psychological need of human beings to reconcile the childish experience of our all-powerful, all-seeing parents with the traumas of adult life – and then to project this fantastical narrative onto the (in reality, blank and uncaring) universe.

We need to be helped. We want to be protected. We want to be loved. If something’s gone wrong it must be our fault. ‘I’m sorry, Daddy, say you forgive me.’

So we try to reconcile this deep need for there to be an all-powerful, all-seeing father guiding the universe, with the evidence before our noses that the world is harsh and arbitrary, amoral and terrifyingly indifferent to our little lives.

The doctrine of Original Sin is a mythological way of reconciling these opposite desires. The fact that it makes no sense to those outside the cult is a matter of indifference to those inside the cult; for them it is vital because the deeper ‘Original Sin’ has plunged us into the depths of misery and guilt, then the more intense the feeling of liberation, of being ‘born again’ through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus, becomes. The longer the foreplay, the more intense the feeling of release.

So, in Freud’s view, the psychological mechanism at the heart of Christianity is extremely effective in channelling and resolving very real psychological feelings which we all experience, but it comes at a price: the price being that you accept a good deal of weird, often deeply irrational, beliefs, superstitions and legends.

But even this problem has long ago been worked through and resolved by Christianity’s many, very brilliant, apologists: ‘God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform,’ as the 18th century poet William Cowper wrote i.e. don’t think about any of this too hard or the illogicality and irrationality will undermine your faith. Just accept it.

Jesus himself said: ‘You must become as a little child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’ (St Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 18, verse 3). Exactly. Just as Freud said, almost all of our problems, our anxieties, our achievements, our characters, stem from our earliest childhood experiences. One difference between Freud and Christianity is that the latter calls us to relinquish adult intelligence, and adopt a sentimentalised, simplified version of childhood, all submission and innocence. Whereas Freud knew what anyone who can remember their childhood knows, that those years are far from being paradise but often full of dread and anxiety, awash with uncontrollable emotions, and sometimes the scene of terrible experiences which we spend the rest of our lives trying to come to grips with.

6. Religion’s harmful effects

Christianity imposes impossible ethical requirements on people, which result in failure and a crippling sense of guilt (for example, the impossible requirement to ‘love your enemy as yourself’). Imposing these impossible commandments on young children warps their personalities and leads to neurotic illness in later life.

Christianity’s forbidding of open-ended debate, and limiting the spirit of scientific enquiry, damages the prospects of creating a better society.

Christianity suppresses perfectly natural sexuality in a way calculated to produce the maximum number of neurotics and perverts. By restricting sexual activity to heterosexual, adult, married, genital-focused copulation, exclusively for the purposes of procreation, Christian teaching drives people into illness or the arms of prostitutes, makes them choose between madness or immorality; or, more simply, makes them disobedient to their teachers and moral leaders and so habituates them to a life of lies and hypocrisy.

Relying on religion to underpin morality is dangerous because, since religious belief is visibly crumbling away (Freud wrote in the 1920s), so will the foundations of our social morality. Quite obviously, morality needs to be put on a firm, secure, secular basis in order to survive the coming social changes.

Conclusion

In his more optimistic moments Freud thought that organised religion would wither away in a new world shaped by reason and technology – but this turned out to be misplaced optimism.

Indeed, the whole tenor of his work undermines and disproves his own hope. The whole point of his work was to establish the existence of the vast, unconscious, irrational aspects of the mind – primitive, inexpressible urges whose attempts to enter the conscious mind can only be controlled at the expense of a variety of compulsions and obsessions, personal rituals and beliefs.

Precisely the penetrating nature of his critique of religion as an appeasement of so many of our deeply irrational instincts should have alerted Freud to the fact that religious belief will continue as long as human nature continues to be what it is, because – although irrational in form and content – religion does, often very effectively, alleviate many of the anxieties and fears which all human beings will always be prey to.

Therefore, it was childish of Freud to imagine that organised religion and religious belief would die out. They will quite clearly be around as long as there are anxious irrational humans i.e. forever. And in times of stress and uncertainty they will revive and flourish and there is nothing the hyper-rational psychoanalyst can do about it.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. All the works cited here were translated into English as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, published throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s. My quotes are taken from the versions included in the relevant volumes of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1980s.

Freud and religion reading list

  • Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
  • Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907)
  • Totem and Taboo (1913)
  • On Transience (1915)
  • A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis (1923)
  • The Future of An Illusion (1927)
  • Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930)
  • Group Psychology (1930)
  • Question of a Weltanschauung (1933)
  • Moses and Monotheism (1939)
  • Freud, A Life For Our Times by Peter Gay (1988)

More Freud reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on July 3, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Biology, Christianity, Psychoanalysis
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on July 3, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/07/03/freud-on-religion/

The Life of Titus by Suetonius

A sub-edited version of the 1914 Loeb Classical Library translation of Suetonius’s Life of Titus by J.C. Rolfe, with a few comments and clarifications.

Summary of Titus’s life (from Wikipedia)

Titus Caesar Vespasianus (39 to 81 AD) was Roman emperor from 79 to 81. A member of the Flavian dynasty, Titus succeeded his father Vespasian upon his death.

Before becoming emperor, Titus gained renown as a military commander, serving under his father in Judea during the First Jewish–Roman War. The campaign came to a brief halt with the death of emperor Nero in 68, launching Vespasian’s bid for the imperial power during the Year of the Four Emperors. When Vespasian was declared Emperor on 1 July 69, Titus was left in charge of ending the Jewish rebellion. In 70, he besieged and captured Jerusalem, and destroyed the city and the Second Temple. For this achievement Titus was awarded a triumph – the Arch of Titus commemorates his victory to this day.

During his father’s rule, Titus gained notoriety in Rome in his role as prefect of the Praetorian Guard, and for carrying on a controversial relationship with the Jewish queen, Berenice. Despite concerns over his character, Titus ruled to great acclaim following the death of Vespasian in 79, and was considered a good emperor by Suetonius and other contemporary historians.

As emperor, Titus is best known for completing the Colosseum and for his generosity in relieving the suffering caused by two disasters, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 and a fire in Rome in 80. After barely two years in office, Titus died of a fever on 13 September 81. He was deified by the Roman Senate and succeeded by his younger brother Domitian.

The Life of Titus by Suetonius

(1) Titus, of the same surname as his father, was the delight and darling of the human race, such surpassing ability had he, by nature, art or good fortune, to win the affections of all men and, what was harder, to do so while he was emperor. For as a private citizen, and even during his father’s rule, he did not escape hatred, much less public criticism.

Titus was born on the third day before the Kalends of January (30 December, 41 AD) in a mean house near the Septizonium and in a very small dark room besides. It still remains and is on exhibition.

(2) Titus was brought up at court in company with [Claudius’s son] Britannicus and taught the same subjects by the same masters. At that time, so they say, a physiognomist was brought in by Narcissus, the freedman of Claudius, to examine Britannicus and declared most positively that he would never become emperor but that Titus, who was standing nearby at the time, would surely rule.

The boys were so intimate that it is believed that when Britannicus drained the fatal draught that poisoned him, Titus, who was reclining at his side, also tasted of the potion and for a long time suffered from an obstinate disorder. Titus did not forget all this, but later set up a golden statue of his friend in the Palace and dedicated another equestrian statue of ivory, which is to this day carried in the procession in the Circus, and he attended it on its first appearance.

(3) Even in boyhood Titus’s bodily and mental gifts were conspicuous and they became more and more so as he advanced in years. He had a handsome person in which there was no less dignity than grace, and was uncommonly strong, although he was not tall of stature and had a rather protruding belly. His memory was extraordinary and he had an aptitude for almost all the arts, both of war and of peace.

Skilful in arms and horseman­ship, Titus made speeches and wrote verses in Latin and Greek with ease and readiness, and even extempore. He was not unacquainted with music but sang and played the harp agreeably and skilfully.

I have heard from many sources that he used also to write shorthand with great speed and would amuse himself by playful contests with his secretaries. Also that he could imitate any handwriting that he had ever seen and often declared that he might have been the prince of forgers.

(4) Titus served as military tribune both in Germany and in Britain, winning a high reputation for energy and no less integrity, as is evident from the great number of his statues and busts in both those provinces and from the inscriptions they bear.

After his military service Titus pleaded in the Forum, rather for glory than as a profession. He married Arrecina Tertulla, whose father, though only a Roman knight, had once been prefect of the praetorian cohorts. On her death he replaced her with Marcia Furnilla, a lady of a very distinguished family, but divorced her after he had acknowledged a daughter which she bore him.

Then, after holding the office of quaestor, as commander of a legion he subjugated the two strong cities of Tarichaeae and Gamala in Judaea, having his horse killed under him in one battle and mounting another, whose rider had fallen fighting by his side.

(5) Titus was sent to congratulate Galba on becoming ruler of the state [in January 69) and attracted attention wherever he went, through the belief that he had been sent for to be adopted by the new emperor. But observing that everything was once more in a state of turmoil, he turned back. He visited the oracle of the Paphian Venus to consult it about his voyage and was encouraged to hope for imperial power.

[His father, Vespasian, put him in charge of the siege of Jerusalem.] In the final attack on the city he slew twelve of the defenders with as many arrows. He took the city on his daughter’s birthday, so delighting the soldiers and winning their devotion that they hailed him as ‘Imperator​’ and detained him when he wanted to leave the province, urging him with prayers and even with threats either to stay or to take them all with him.

This aroused the suspicion that he had tried to revolt from his father and make himself king of the East and he strengthened this suspicion on his way to Alexandria by wearing a diadem at the consecration of the bull Apis in Memphis, an act in accord with the usual ceremonial of that ancient religion, but unfavourably interpreted by some.

Because of this he hastened to Italy and, putting in at Regium and then at Puteoli in a transport ship, he went with all speed from there to Rome, where as if to show that the reports about him were groundless, he surprised his father with the greeting, ‘I am here, father; I am here.’

(6) From that moment onwards Titus never ceased to act as the emperor’s partner and even as his protector. He took part in his father’s triumph and was censor with him. He was also his colleague in the tribunicial power and in seven consul­ships. He took upon himself the discharge of almost all duties, personally dictated letters and wrote edicts in his father’s name and even read his speeches in the senate in lieu of a quaestor.​

Titus also assumed the command of the praetorian guard, which before that time had never been held except by a Roman knight. In this office he conducted himself in a somewhat arrogant and tyrannical fashion for whenever he regarded anyone with suspicion, he would secretly send some of the Guard to the various theatres and camps to demand their punishment as if by consent of all who were present and then he would put them out of the way without delay.

Among these was Aulus Caecina, an ex-consul whom he invited to dinner and then ordered to be stabbed almost before he left the dining-room. But in this case he was led by a pressing danger, having got possession of an autograph copy of a harangue which Caecina had prepared to deliver to the soldiers. Although by such conduct he provided for his safety in the future, he incurred such odium at the time that hardly anyone ever came to the throne with so evil a reputation or so much against the desires of all.

(7) Besides cruelty, Titus was also suspected of riotous living, since he protracted his revels until the middle of the night with the most prodigal of his friends. Likewise of unchastity because of his troops of catamites and eunuchs and his notorious passion for Queen Berenice, to whom it was even said that he promised marriage.

He was suspected of greed as well for it was well known that in cases which came before his father he put a price on his influence and accepted bribes. In short, people not only thought but openly declared that he would be a second Nero. But this reputation turned out to his advantage and gave place to the highest praise when, on coming to power, no fault was discovered in him but, on the contrary, the highest virtues.

Titus’s banquets were pleasant rather than extravagant. He chose as his friends men whom succeeding emperors also retained as indispensable alike to themselves and to the State, and of whose services they made special use. Berenice he sent from Rome at once, against her will and against his own. Some of his most beloved paramours, although they were such skilful dancers that they later became stage favourites, he not only ceased to cherish any longer but even to attend their public performances.

Titus took away nothing from any citizen. He respected others’ property, if anyone ever did. In fact, he would not accept even proper and customary presents. And yet he was second to none of his predecessors in munificence. At the dedication of his amphitheatre​ and of the baths which were hastily built near it he gave a most magnificent and costly gladiatorial show. He presented a sham sea-fight too in the old naumachia,​ and in the same place a combat of gladiators,​ exhibiting 5,000 wild beasts of every kind in a single day.

(8) Titus was most kindly by nature, and whereas in accordance with a custom established by Tiberius, all the Caesars who followed him refused to regard favours granted by previous emperors as valid, unless they had themselves conferred the same ones on the same individuals, Titus was the first to ratify them all in a single edict, without allowing himself to be asked.

Moreover, in the case of other requests made of him, it was his fixed rule not to let anyone go away without hope. Even when his household officials warned him that he was promising more than he could perform, he said that it was not right for anyone to go away sorrow­ful from an interview with his emperor. On another occasion, remembering at dinner that he had done nothing for anybody all day, he gave utterance to that memorable and praiseworthy remark: ‘Friends, I have lost a day.’

The whole body of the people in particular Titus treated with such indulgence on all occasions that once, at a gladiatorial show, he declared that he would give it ‘not after his own inclinations but those of the spectators’ and, what is more, he kept his word. For he refused nothing which anyone asked, and even urged them to ask for what they wished.

Titus openly displayed his partiality for Thracian gladiators and bantered the people about it by words and gestures (i.e. by humorously pretending to wrangle with those who favoured other gladiators than the Thracians). However, he always preserved his dignity, as well as observing justice. Not to omit any act of condescension, he sometimes bathed in the baths which he had built, in company with the common people.

There were some dreadful disasters during Titus’s reign, such as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Campania, a fire at Rome which continued three days and as many nights, and a plague the like of which had hardly ever been known before. In these many great calamities he showed not merely the concern of an emperor but even a father’s surpassing love, now offering consolation in edicts, and now lending aid so far as his means allowed.

Titus chose commissioners by lot from among the ex-consuls for the relief of Campania and the property of those who lost their lives by Vesuvius and had no heirs left alive he applied to the rebuilding of the buried cities.

During the fire in Rome he made no remark except, ‘I am ruined,’ and he set aside all the ornaments of his villas for the public buildings and temples and put several men of the equestrian order in charge of the work, that everything might be done with the greater dispatch.

For curing the plague and diminishing the force of the epidemic there was no aid, human or divine, which he did not employ, searching for every kind of sacrifice (i.e. to propitiate the gods who were supposed to inflict such evils upon mankind by way of punishment)​ and all kinds of medicines.

Among the evils of the times were the informers and their instigators who had enjoyed a long-standing licence. After these had been soundly beaten in the Forum with scourges and cudgels and finally led in procession across the arena of the amphitheatre, he had some of them put up and sold and others deported to the wildest of the islands.

(9) Having declared that he would accept the office of pontifex maximus​ for the purpose of keeping his hands unstained, he was true to his promise for after that he neither caused nor connived at the death of any man, although he sometimes had no lack of reasons for taking vengeance, but he swore that he would rather be killed than kill.

When two men of patrician family were found guilty of aspiring to the throne, he satisfied himself with warning them to abandon their attempt, saying that imperial power was the gift of fate and promising that if there was anything else they desired, he himself would bestow it. Then he sent his couriers with all speed to the mother of one of them, for she was some distance off, to relieve her anxiety by reporting that her son was safe. And he not only invited the men themselves to dinner among his friends but on the following day, at a gladiatorial show, he purposely placed them near him and when the swords of the contestants were offered him handed them over for their inspection. It is even said that, inquiring into the horoscope of each of them, he declared that danger threatened them both, but at some future time and from another – as turned out to be the case.

Although his brother, Domitian, never ceased plotting against him, but almost openly stirred up the armies to revolt and meditated flight to them, he had not the heart to put him to death or banish him from the court or even to hold him in less honour than before. On the contrary, as he had done from the very first day of his rule, he continued to declare that Domitian was his partner and successor, and sometimes he privately begged him with tears and prayers to be willing at least to return his affection.

(10) Titus was cut off by death, to the loss of mankind rather than to his own. After finishing the public games, at the close of which he wept bitterly in the presence of the people, he went down to the Sabine territory, somewhat cast down because a sacrificial animal had escaped as he was sacrificing, and because it had thundered from a clear sky [i.e. bad omens]. Then at the very first stopping place he was seized with a fever and, as he was being carried onwards in a litter, it is said that he pushed back the curtains, looked up to heaven, and lamented bitterly that his life was being taken from him contrary to his deserts. For he said that there was no act of his life of which he had cause to repent, save one only.

What this was he did not himself disclose at the time nor could anyone easily divine.​ Some think that he meant the intimacy which he had with his brother’s wife; but Domitia swore most solemnly that this did not exist (and she would not have denied it if it had been in the least true, but on the contrary would have boasted of it, as she was most ready to do of all her scandalous actions).

11. Titus died in the same farmhouse​ as his father, on the Ides of September [13 September], two years two months and twenty days after succeeding Vespasian [81 AD], in the forty-second year of his age.

When his death was made known the whole populace mourned as they would for a loss in their own families, the senate hastened to the House before it was summoned by proclamation and, with the doors still shut, and then with them open, rendered such thanks to him and heaped such praise on him after death as they had never done even when he was alive and present.

Related links

Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars

Roman reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on January 16, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, Biography, Translation
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on January 16, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/01/16/the-life-of-titus-by-suetonius/

The Year One by M.I. Finley (1968)

History tends to be the history of the winners, with the losers assigned the passive, largely unvoiced, faceless role of the people on whom the winners operated.
(‘Aspects of Antiquity’, page 189)

Notes on ‘The Year One’, a short essay included in Finley’s 1968 collection, ‘Aspects of Antiquity’.

Ancient calendars

People living through a momentous year (1066, 1789, 1939, 2000) usually know about it. The most obvious thing to say about the year 1 is nobody living through it knew about it at the time. The entire chronological framework of Western civilisation, whereby we divide years into before Christ (BC) or after Christ (in the year of the Lord, anno Domini, AD) hadn’t been invented.

Instead, all the different cultures of the ancient world kept their own calendars relating to their own cultural landmarks. The Greeks thought in terms of four year blocks or ‘Olympiads’ which began with the first Olympic Games in 776 BC, so year one was the first year of the 195th Olympiad.

The Romans had, for centuries, dated events by referring to the two consuls who were in office for that year, thus ‘in the consulship of Caius Caesar, son of Augustus, and Lucius Aemilius Paullus, son of Paullus.’

Only the learned wanted to look back deeper than a few decades and, for those purposes, Roman historians had worked out the year of the legendary foundation of Rome, and dated everything AUC standing for ‘ab urbe condita’ or ‘since the founding of the city (Rome)’. Many centuries later Christian historians aligned this legendary date to 753 years before the birth of Christ. So the year one was 754 AUC. This system was devised by the Christian historian Dionysius Exiguus, a Greek-speaking monk.

The evidence of the gospels

Of the four gospels only two give details of the birth of Jesus, Matthew and Luke

Matthew’s Gospel

Matthew’s gospel includes the story of ‘the massacre of the innocents’ (chapter 2, verses 16 to 18). Herod the Great, king of Judea, is said to have heard a prophecy that his kingdom will be overthrown by a child about to be born in Bethlehem, so he ordered the execution of all male children aged two and under in the vicinity of Bethlehem. The Catholic Church regards them as the first Christian martyrs, and their feast – Holy Innocents’ Day (or the Feast of the Holy Innocents) – is celebrated on 28 December. In this story, Joseph and Mary were warned by angels about the impending massacre and so made their way secretly to Egypt, ‘The Flight to Egypt’, a journey depicted in countless paintings.

Unfortunately for the veracity of this version, Herod the Great died in 4 BC. If Matthew is literally correct, Jesus must have been born in 4 BC at the latest.

Luke’s Gospel

Luke’s story is different. He says the Romans sent out a decree that everyone had to return to their home town in order to take part in a national census of the population of Judea so they could be taxed more efficiently.

Unfortunately, the only census decreed by the Romans that we know of occurred in either 6 or 7 AD.

In 6 AD the Romans deposed Herod’s son, Archelaus, themselves took over Judea, and installed a Roman governor with instructions to conduct a census. (The northern province of Galilee remained under the rule of the Herod family; Finley says this slight inconsistency between direct and indirect rule was common in provinces on the edge of the empire.)

The Roman Empire

Was an empire in the full sense. The ‘Roman people’ i.e. citizens of Rome and central and northern Italy, ruled all the other inhabitants of the empire as subjects. The empire outside Italy was divided into provinciae. In 1 AD the Roman empire covered about 1,250,000 square miles with a population of about 60 million (population figures are deeply contested). Censuses were taken in the provinces to maximise tax revenue, but at different times in different provinces, using different methods and definitions, so…

The tax collector, along with the soldier, was the most obvious and ubiquitous link between the provinces and Rome. (p.187)

The limits of Empire

In 9 AD a Romanised German warrior chief named Arminius lured three legions into an ambush in the Teutoburg Forest and annihilated them, seizing the precious standards. Traumatised by this terrible news, the emperor Augustus ordered the remaining two legions and all Roman citizens to withdraw back across the Rhine, a decision reinforced by his successor Tiberius, which crystallised into a fiat. The Romans never attempted to conquer and colonise Germany and the north European border settled for the next four centuries along the Rhine-Danube line.

The borders finalised as England in the north-west, the Atlantic in the west, the Atlas mountains, the Sahara and the cataracts of the Nile in Africa, Judea in what is now the Middle East, and Asia i.e. half of Anatolia up to the border with Armenia.

Imperial exploitation

The Romans had no shortage of writers and propagandists (Horace, Virgil and so on) praising Augustus’ rule and, by extension, Rome’s right to rule the entire world (Virgil). The Christian European empires 1700 years later (Spain, France, Britain, Holland) made lengthy attempts to justify their imperial conquests in terms of bringing civilisation etc to barbarian lands. The Romans used the same rhetoric but were much more honest about the sheer greed and looting involved in conquest. As Finley says in his essay about slavery, Julius Caesar set out for Gaul a penniless aristocrat from a down-at-heel family and he returned 8 years later a multi-millionaire and the most powerful man in Rome. That’s what 8 years of burning and looting did for him.

Once a province had been conquered and pacified there an infrastructure was imposed designed to extract wealth, consisting of extensive taxes(in goods and services and money) for the state, but great personal income skimmed off by high officials and members of the tax farming corporations.

Rome had no mission to civilise comparable to France’s great pretension to a mission civilisatrice. Some of her propagandists later developed this idea but the reality was that, so long as they paid their taxes, Rome left her subject peoples largely to themselves, only interfering if there was disorder, rebellion etc. Over a century of conquering and administering other peoples had shown that minimal interference paid off and…was cheap to run.

This was particularly true in the East, which had well-established cultures/civilisations long before the Romans arrived. Latin was the language of the new rulers but Greek remained the language of intellectuals and the ruling classes which sat directly below the Roman governor. Educated Romans learned Greeks but Greeks rarely bothered to learn Latin, a far simpler, cruder language.

Josephus

Finley makes a pit stop to spend a page profiling Joseph ben Matthias, member of a Jewish priestly family known to history as Josephus and for the epic history of the Jewish War, an account of the 4-year rebellion of Jews against Roman rule 66 to 70 AD which led up to the Romans storming Jerusalem and destroying the Great Temple built by Herod.

Josephus was a Pharisee, a member of the elite priestly caste who identified with law and order and the Romans, so the enemies in his book are the Zealots, who he calls rebels and bandits, religious visionaries who stirred up the people to revolt by playing on their grievances, their extreme poverty and promises of a new world.

Augustus

The essay then turns to consider Augustus’s achievement, namely bringing to an end 60 odd years of chaos as the Roman Republic proved incapable of managing its empire, or, more precisely, the scale of the wealth and power pouring into Rome exacerbate the toxic rivalries among great men which had previously been contained by its republican institutions, but now boiled over into repeated civil wars by over-mighty rulers. Until Octavian put a stop to it (helped by the fact that all the eminent men of his generation had been killed in the civil wars, committed suicide or been murdered in his ‘proscriptions’, leaving him the last significant military-political figure standing).

Augustus’s titles

In 27 BC Octavian was awarded the title ‘Augustus’ by the senate. But his other titles are significant. He wanted to be known as ‘princeps’ i.e. principle figure, partly because it avoided the dreaded term rex or king. And also kept the title Imperator, originally given to victorious generals, but now awarded him a) as recognition of victorious campaigns but b) as continual reminder of where his power lay – the complete loyalty of the army.

Around the time of Christ’s birth, in 2 AD Augustus was awarded a further title, ‘Father of the Nation’, which is not as cuddly as it sounds, given the draconian authority the father of a family had over all its other members, male or female.

Augustus tries to ensure heirs

In his magisterial biography of Augustus Adrian Goldsworthy goes out of his way to emphasise that through most of his rule Augustus appears to have not wanted to create a dynasty and been succeeded by one heir. On the contrary he tried to create a cohort of experienced young men who, Goldsworthy thinks, were meant to form a small cabinet, to rule collegiately.

The two problems with this was that they all tended to come from within his own close family, so royal, monarchical, imperial logic was hard to deny – but worse, that almost all his proteges died, leaving, the grumpy, surly, graceless Tiberius as the last most obvious figure standing.

But before all this had become clear Augustus spent time and energy grooming a succession of young male relatives for rule and in doing so rode roughshod over many of the conventions of the Republic he claimed to be defending. Thus in 4 BC the Senate was prevailed upon to decree that Augustus’s two grandsons (who he had adopted to make legally his sons) Gaius and Lucius, should be designated consuls at the tender age of 15 and then awarded the actual posts, for a year, when they turned 20. Each was titled ‘Princeps of the Youth’. In the Year One Gaius was indeed ‘elected’ consul (as everyone the Princeps recommended to the voters tended to be). But then the curse struck…Lucius died in 2 AD, Gaius in 4 AD.

Augustus’s propaganda machine

Augustus had statues of himself carved and erected in cities all over the empire. Instead of realistic depictions they show an idealised, tall virile commander of men. He ensured his face was on all coinage, so even the illiterate knew who he was. He encouraged his inclusion in the ceremonies of all the religions and cults practiced across the empire. Via his unofficial minister of the arts, Maecenas, he ‘encouraged’ praise by the leading poets of the day, poets like Virgil, Horace and Ovid whose words of sycophantic praise have survived down to our time, 2,000 years later.

Augustus’s campaign for moral regeneration

Alongside a major programme of rebuilding and renovating not only Rome but all the major cities in the Empire, Augustus tried to bring about a moral revival as well. He had roughly two concerns: one was that the ancient noble families of Rome had been severely depleted by the civil wars and so he passed successive legislation promoting marriage and punishing adult men who failed to marry or have children. He gave legal and financial incentives to families with three or more children – legislation collectively known as the Leges Iuliae.

Augustus wasn’t concerned about sexual morality as such but was concerned about its impact on the stability and fecundity of the ruling class which he wanted to grow and stabilise in order to secure Rome’s future. It’s in this context that he passed legislation severely punishing adultery. He wanted more sons of the aristocracy, and that they should marry and do their military and civic duty, instead of not marrying and frittering away their family fortunes on increasing displays of opulence.

Exiling the Julias

It was in this context that in 2 BC he exiled his only biological child, his daughter Julia the Elder (39 BC to 14 AD), who he married to an unwilling Tiberius, allegedly for flagrant adultery and sexual depravity. Several men who had allegedly been her partners were also exiled. In 8 AD he similarly exiled Julia the Elder’s daughter and so Augustus’s grand-daughter, Julia the Younger, again for adultery.

On each of these occasions the ostensible reason was breaching the emperor’s own code of morality, but he also spoke about Julia the Elder being involved in some kind of plot against his life. The details remain obscure but most modern historians think there was more to both affairs than meets the eye, and that in both cases the exiled women were in some way figureheads of attempts to overthrow Augustus’s rule. Hence historians speak of a ‘Julian’ party at his court.

Although the details continue to elude us, Finley draws the central point which is that as soon as you have courts you have courtly intrigue, you have palace plotting – in the later empire this kind of conspiracy became endemic but it is instructive to note that it appears to have arisen as soon as there was a court, in the close family of the very first emperor.

Ovid is exiled

This is the view of Peter Green who devotes most of the long 80-page introduction to his translation of Ovid’s Art of Love to a forensic analysis of events and accusations surrounding the 8 AD exiling of Julia the Younger, because the poet was caught up in the same event and, with little or no warning, exiled by Augustus to the furthest border of the Roman empire, to the miserable provincial town of Tomis on the Black Sea. Ovid wrote a large number of letters to former friends and officials begging to be allowed to return, and a series of poems elaborating on the wretchedness of his fate – but to no avail. Even when Augustus died, his successor, Tiberius, renewed his exile and Ovid died miserably, far from his beloved Rome.

Frustratingly, despite writing a huge amount about his exile, Ovid never anywhere specifies the nature of his error. He insists it was minor, that he never plotted against the emperor, or planned to use poison or a knife or anything like that. Green weighs all the evidence and thinks Ovid must have seen something or been present at meetings where such plots were discussed and failed to report them to the authorities. Because he wasn’t an active plotter, Ovid’s life was spared; but because he didn’t report whatever he saw, his lack of loyalty to the emperor – and to the entire peaceful regime which Augustus had spent a lifetime creating – was called into doubt. Hence exile.

The Augustan peace

It’s easy to criticise Augustus’s early career, his cut-throat manoeuvres, his participation in the proscriptions i.e. mass murder of anyone who stood in the way of the Second Triumvirate, his hugely unpopular land redistribution away from traditional farmer and to veterans of the military campaigns leading up to the decisive Battle of Philippi. But by these expedients he secured the end of the civil wars which had lasted as long as anyone could remember, brought military, civil and social peace, order and stability. He secured the longest period of continuous peace the Mediterranean world had ever known. In this atmosphere of peace and stability business flourished and people got rich.

If the theatre was the characteristic secular building of the ancient Greeks, the amphitheatre was its Roman counterpart, and the long peace saw them built in cities all around the Central Sea.

Augustus worship

The result, especially in the East, was that people began to worship Augustus:

as Saviour, Benefactor and God Manifest (Epiphanes) just as they had deified a succession of Ptolemies, Seleucids and other rulers of the preceding centuries. (p.194)

In Rome he couldn’t be worshipped as a god while alive, only his spirit was said to be holy. But the east had no such hesitations and built temples to Augustus the god. This had nothing to do with love or respect but simple pragmatism. Most people were utterly powerless to influence events, least of all the slaves. It made simple sense to venerate and appease the mighty; that was the way of the world. Finley draws the major conclusion with huge implications for the growth of Christianity, that:

Religion became increasingly centred on salvation in the next world, whereas it had once been chiefly concerned with life in this one. (p.194)

Client kings and dependent rulers had a vested interest in encouraging the cult of Augustus as it underpinned their own authority, for most of the East was a patchwork of cults and religions which, for the most part, co-existed peacefully enough.

The Jewish Revolt

The Jews stood apart in their fierce insistence on monotheism. Jews had migrated and had communities all around the Mediterranean and in Rome (where Ovid recommends the synagogue as a good place to pick up women in The Art of Love). The Old Testament writings had been translated into Greek as far back as the third century BC as Jews in the diaspora lost touch with Hebrew.

Herod the Great, King of Judaea, had more in common with his Roman rulers than his Jewish subjects. When he introduced an amphitheatre and gladiator fights in the Roman style there were mutterings of discontent, but when he tried to impose official worship of Augustus the god there was an outcry and an assassination attempt.

The Jews’ dogged insistence on the uniqueness of their god puzzled the Romans (and their neighbours). Neither Augustus nor Tiberius took any steps against the Jews, but Roman officials in the provinces were less tolerant and insistence on conformity to Augustus worship or other religious practices led to repeated clashes. Many Jews were nervous of their masters’ lack of understanding and religious extremists – the Zealots so criticised by Josephus – played on these fears and encouraged proactive rebellion.

All these forces led to the outbreak of the First Jewish–Roman War (66 to 73 AD), sometimes called the Great Jewish Revolt or The Jewish War. It began in the twelfth year of the reign of Nero, with anti-taxation protests leading to attacks on Roman citizens by the Jews. The Roman governor, Gessius Florus, responded by plundering the Second Temple, claiming the money was for the Emperor, and the next day launching a raid on the city, arresting numerous senior Jewish figures. This prompted a wider, large-scale rebellion and the Roman military garrison of Judaea was quickly overrun by the rebels.

It took the Romans with all their might four full years to quell the rebellion, marked by the sack of Jerusalem, the destruction of Herod’s Temple and the displacement of its people around the Mediterranean, followed by three years of further mopping-up operations. Most other Roman provinces suffered from extortionate taxation, harsh military rule, severe punishment for anyone who breached the peace. What made the Jews different was the involvement of fierce religious belief which shaded into millenarian visions of a Final Battle and Second Coming of the Promised One. Egypt, Greece, Britain, Spain and other equally exploited provinces had nothing like this.

The rise of Christianity

Obviously nobody alive in the Year One had a clue that it would one day, centuries later, be singled out as the start of a new dispensation on human history. If you’re not a Christian, chances are you still use the Christian system of numbering years, if only for business purposes. If you are a Christian this year marked the start of a completely new epoch of world and human history, one in which Divine Grace entered the human realm and all people were offered the chance of salvation through faith in the risen Christ.

Finley dwells on the fairly well-known textual records of early Christianity, within his realm of Roman studies, for example the famous letters of Pliny the Elder to the emperor Trajan asking for advice on how to deal with the men and women being denounced to him as ‘Christians’.

Returning to borders, Finley points out that this same emperor Trajan conquered ‘Dacia’, roughly modern Transylvania, and embarked on a foolhardy campaign against the Parthians (graveyard of the ambitions of Crassus and Anthony to name but two) but Hadrian, who succeeded him, gave up the Parthian gains and settled the borders of the empire for good. Thus, give or take a few small provinces and the elimination of a few client-kingdoms, such as Judaea, the frontiers established by Augustus in the Year One were not far from being the final, definitive borders of the Empire.

Trade

One of the consistent surprises when reading about pre-modern history is the extent and complexity of pre-modern trade routes. It was one of the big messages of the British Museum’s great Vikings exhibition, showing just how far-flung Viking exploration and trade was. Whether considering the trading networks of ancient China or the early explorations of the Portuguese or the vast extent of the Mongol conquests, the message is always the same: pre-modern trading networks were always more wide-reaching than you would have thought.

Same here: Finley points out that the Romans bought silk from as far afield as China (via middlemen in Chinese Turkestan), and more directly with China and Ceylon. Indo-Roman trading stations existed as far away as Pondicherry. ‘There was a drain of Roman coins to India and further East’. Yet references to India were thin and misleading. In the works of the elegiac poets India is usually just linked as a name alongside Parthia to represent the furtherst ends of the earth.

Similarly, there was trans-Sahara trade, especially for ivory, but almost total ignorance of the African continent below the desert. (p.198)

In a way the northern border was more intriguing. After the catastrophe of the Teutoburg Forest (described in vivid detail by Goldsworthy in his biography of Augustus) Augustus withdrew all legions, merchants and settlers in Germany back south of the Rhine and the Rhine-Danube became de facto the northern border of the empire for the next four centuries.

Despite interacting with them extensively, despite making treaties with chieftains, trading with them, understanding something about their societies, in a sense the Romans never got to grips with the Germans. Finley explains part of this was because the Germans were illiterate so had no texts for the Romans to study; no history, art, no architecture.

Also, the Germans were made up of loose and constantly changing tribal confederations. The Parthians had an emperor, the Armenians a great king and so on: you knew who you were dealing with and what they had to offer and how to bargain. None of this worked with the Germans.

(He makes the interesting point that, in their relative ignorance, the Germans relied on ‘primitive agricultural techniques’ which rapidly exhausted what agricultural land they created by forest clearance, and this was a factor in their constant migrations. That and the periodic arrival of entire peoples from further east, which pushed the nearby Germans over the Rhine, often for safety.)

Lastly, he makes a quick point that despite trade with far-flung places outside the empire, most of the cultural and especially religious innovation came from within the empire.

The great matrix of religion innovation was within the empire, in its eastern regions: Egypt, Syria and Palestine, Asia Minor. And, of course, in the end the triumphant contribution from that area in this period was Christianity. (p.198)

East and West

He concludes with the Big Idea that the whole notion of Western Europe in a sense owes its existence to the Augustan settlement which secured Italy, Spain, France and Britain for Roman rule for centuries to come, bequeathing them a common culture, no matter how far it decayed during the Dark Ages.

The East, with far deeper cultural roots of its own, was not ‘Romanised’ to anything like the same extent, retaining a cultural independence which was expressed, first through the survival of the Byzantine Empire for another 1,000 years, and then through its conquest by another Eastern religion, Islam, tearing the Middle East and North Africa out of the Roman Christian family of nations, setting up a profound geographical and cultural divide which lasts to this day.

Credit

‘The Year One’ was included in a collection of essays by M.I. Finley titled Aspects of Antiquity, published by Penguin books in 1968. References are to the 1977 Penguin paperback edition.

Roman reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on October 28, 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, Christianity, History
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on October 28, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/10/28/the-year-one-m-i-finley/