Interchapter Query - 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
From The Observatory
Interchapter Query
Quoted text:
3. [Creation of Order Religious Chapter]
Introduction: The Worldly Relevance of Early Religion
The Etymology and Semantics of ‘Religion’
But above all, religion went hand in hand with order. It was necessary for civil order. As the great classical historian Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff observed a century ago: “Not good or bad, but injurious or useful are the differences” emphasized by early Greek religion.
Archaic justice was primarily distributive justice. It was as such that this set out to protect the poor, above all from the depredations of usury by society’s creditors.
Religion and authority
Religion and the specialization of labor and division of society into classes
1. Religion always has sought to sanctify the status quo. But initially, the idea was to restore an idealized status quo ante.
2. But the epoch of “divine kingship” gave way in the first millennium BC to military emperors and an epoch of rulers who were administrators for the increasingly powerful oligarchies that ended in control of society throughout the Roman Empire.
The downfall came when religion sanctified emperors and creditors. [Root]
3. Authority became increasingly inequitable. Rome’s property-based law.
Conclusion: The economic historian can trace the dissolution of religion into individualistic personal salvation rather than a preservation of social order.
It was this modern stage of religion that has become otherworldly and decayed into mere superstition.
So we are brought back to the anti-science crowd, which turns out also to be the anti-religious crowd as the term historically has been understood.
So, modern economic and religious thought reacts against two abuses stemming from within religion itself. In Germany, Luther reacted against the decay of religion into an autonomous, self-serving bureaucracy. In Scotland, Adam Smith’s Protestant views protected the individual against government intrusion into the economy by ambitious rulers. The State as well as the Church had become self-serving classes for themselves, seeking power rather than social order.
One might hope that the State would provide a check against Church bureaucracies, while the Church provided a reciprocal check on abuses of government. Instead, they joined hands against the rest of the population. Already by the high medieval period Church and State supported each other’s bad behavior. Both sectors became all the more “worldly” in the sense of supporting secular wealth, even as finance was taking over governments, physical capital, and with them repressing labor and its living standards in a mutual expression of worldly opportunism.
It was in this setting that individualism emerged.
The royal andurārum acts cast light not only on early Judaism, but also the Christianity that emerged out of it, while being a protest against the Sadducees and Pharisees—the vested interests that had taken over Jewish religion and made it worldly in quite a different sense than was originally meant.
By contrast, a surviving Dead Sea scroll shows how immediate was the concern with debt at the time Christianity emerged. It was a world in which rural usury was reducing over a quarter of the population to bondage. In this world the preaching of the early social prophets such as Isaiah and Amos struck a vital chord.
[Creation of Order:] Heaven was the sky, hence up. It was the source of order on earth. And so, symmetrically, hell became “down there,” below, the underworld.
The religious advocacy of the “straight” and its condemnation of the “crooked” reflected its primary role as creating order and preventing disorder from disrupting society’s continuity.
“In the beginning” religion was coterminous with the law. And the law also was straight—German “Recht.” As the historian of religion Martin Nilson has noted: “Profane law (as well as religious law) had been placed from time immemorial under divine protection. Zeus watches over law and justice, and even after men had begun consciously to shape and after the positive laws, Zeus sees that justice takes her proper course. For all primitive peoples law has divine sanction and authority.” This of course was long before there were lawyers.
The law was an early form of social planning, by laying down rules grounded in moral ethics.
Public rather than private credit would avoid much modern polarization, along with administered prices for monopoly goods and services.We’re not sure if this section for Chapter 10 mentions, item 3, was meant to be about Chapter 8 or a different chapter altogether. It might indeed have originally been placed in the right chapter—Chapter 10 is about religion—before it was deleted from Chapter 10, as it had no context or transition (it was just added after the Chapter 10 body). This might have nothing to do with Chapter 8; let us know if you think it should be worked into Chapter 10 or Chapter 8.
Suggest an edit or addition for this query. Join the research!
