Religion
Related: About this forumWhat ancient Egypt tells us about a world without religious conflict
Neil MacGregor’s final triumph at the British Museum is a show that tells the story of the shared lives and deities of Jews, Christians and Muslims in Egypt’s diverse past – proof that we don’t have to be divided in the present
Ahdaf Soueif
Friday 30 October 2015 08.00 EDT
High above the atrium of the British Museum, in the Hotung Gallery that curves around the dome of the old Reading Room, you can – for the next four months – walk through 1,200 years of Egypt’s history: from Alexander’s conquest in 331BC to Salah al-Din’s takeover in AD1171.
Faith After the Pharaohs begins, appropriately, with three large, handsome – and strikingly similar – manuscript volumes: a ninth-century Tanakh, a fourth-century Bible and an eighth-century Qur’an. Across the aisle, a tiny engraved stone shows Abraham (“Ibrahim” in Arabic) gripping his son ready for sacrifice while an angel holds him back. Beyond Abraham, the patriarch of the region’s Jews, Christians and Muslims, a vast landscape unfurls on the wall; its crowds and churches and mosques and fields rich with palm trees announce the locus of the show more clearly than any signpost.
What a fitting space and subject for the final triumph of Neil MacGregor, the museum’s outgoing director: to go back to the very beginning, the place and time where the great storms that swirl around us now all started. For the aim of Faith After the Pharaohs is no less than to show the development of the idea of faith itself, how each of the three great monotheistic faiths emerged from what came before, how they ran into and alongside each other. It aims to show how faith was articulated and expressed, and how it was used – at the level of the state, of institutional religion and of the people.
The Roman state adopts the gods of Egypt: Horus and Anubis strike fancy-dress poses in Roman military costume. A hawk-headed Roman on horseback carrying a lance is both the receding Horus and the yet-to-come St George. Christian iconography appropriates the image most popular in Egyptian devotion: the mother with the baby on her knee. Then young Islam abstracts it all, grasps the old vivid colours and the motifs of plant and animal life and develops them into designs that will influence the look of the world from the great tapestries of Cluny to the facades with which the city states of Italy faced the Mediterranean.
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/oct/30/ancient-egypt-faith-after-the-pharaohs
http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/faith_after_the_pharaohs.aspx
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HappyinLA
(129 posts)I will have to find a way to pop over to see this. Getting the chance to be inches away from things like the Rosetta stone, the statue of Ramesses II, the Elgin marbles. London in general was a dream for an old British History major. I miss that place.
Fred Sanders
(23,946 posts)Fred Sanders
(23,946 posts)rug
(82,333 posts)
DetlefK
(16,423 posts)In religion, that one proof-positive is all you need.
In science, that one proof-negative is all you need.
DetlefK
(16,423 posts)In the Christianity-dominated Middle-Ages, the mindset was "God does it, end of story".
The occult movements changed that:
Lullism (though deeply esoteric and mind-bendingly complex) gave birth to the concept of laws of nature separate from God.
Hermeticism heavily influenced art in the Renaissance and created the notion that man can manipulate nature on an elementary level (through magic) that Christianity reserved for God only.
The mathematical discoveries in the late Renaissance (Newton, Leibniz...) gave birth to the desire for actual quantitative explanations, not just qualitative ones.
The magic laws of nature ultimately turned out to be the wrong approach, but they gave birth to the natural sciences and to psychology. They gave birth to the method of postulating an explanation and testing it. (Giordano Bruno churned out set after set of proposals for magical laws of nature, but none of them was satisfying to him. He was burned at the stake by the Inquisition when it became undeniable that a new sun-worshipping religion was at the core of all of his proposals.)
The predecessor of the scientist was the magus.
For more on this topic: "The Art of Memory" by Frances Yates
rug
(82,333 posts)As Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Magic, not religion, is a more accurate counterpoint to science.
DetlefK
(16,423 posts)Though both are esoteric, magic and religion are not the same.
In magic, the power is accessible through certain rules:
Pull the sword from the stone, drink the potion, wave the wand in this way, speek that incantation...
Religion has no rules that let the believer take part in the power:
You get to feast in Valhalla, the fortress of the norse gods, after your death, but you won't be equal to the gods.
You will live with God and the angels in heaven, but you won't be like them.
You can perform a miracle only if God feels like. You cannot perform a miracle without God.
Magic is closer to science than religion is to science.
Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)Agree with this...
Igel
(35,296 posts)Religion provided an elite that was invested in reading and often, in collusion with government, math for the sake of bookkeeping. They typically also had time to ponder and wonder.
This provided time for observation and deduction. In many ways, it provided ways for formal thinking to occur and to establish principles that deduction could apply to, or the use of induction to produce principles that weren't jarringly at odds with the assertions of religion. This was often meager. You'd need a fairly robust society to provide the level of income and support for such an elite to occupy, otherwise you'd get the random shaman. Individual scholars in isolation are often crazies or become crazies.
It's not proto-science. But under the auspices of formal religion the elite could dabble in what was can be seen as proto-science. Sometimes bits and pieces of it got worked into religion--setting official dates using means that required astronomical observations, for instance. Or supporting the power structure by using information and techniques that easily fit in with science (again, observation and deduction). Most basic education resided in religious communities. Those religious communities that also were hands-on in their work with the population (e.g., monks) instead of pondering esoterica in their temples were also pioneers in the application of technology to new situations or the inductive reasoning that provided knowledge that yielded innovations.
Even Pythagoras and many of the Greek philosophical movements had mystical elements worked into them. Some set up isolated bases to avoid official condemnation.
Feudalism worked the same--any concentration of wealth and leisure is sufficient, it seems, whether in the Chinese or Caliph's or European monarch's courts or in monasteries. Commoners, mostly spending their time working and rearing the next generation, had pretty much plateaued in their level of self-produced physical culture and more and more even in ancient Greece innovations were coming from centers of learning that had large accretions of power, money, and leisure, sometimes in the far East, sometimes in S. Asia, sometimes elsewhere. Even if a particularly brilliant commoner innovated something truly useful, it probably would fail to spread without being picked up and promulgated by others outside his village, spreading from a center of innovation. (Oooh, I think I'm generalizing one of Bartoli's norms to the history of technology.)
