Ahteism and Religion
Do we really need to reinvent the wheel?
6/23/20263 min read
The evolution of human thought about itself and the world is inseparable from the religious dimension. From shamanic animism to Greek polytheism, human beings have represented reality through their gods. These deities and spirits served as essential vessels, allowing popular wisdom — as well as certain thinkers of our past — to encode and transmit the life lessons and reflections they had acquired.
Transmission: From Direct Writing to Symbolic Legend
Sometimes, the thinker conveys ideas directly or indirectly, in the form of poems, dialogues, or stories written down by disciples. Certain philosophers, such as Lao Tzu or Aristotle, transmitted their thought directly through their own writings. Other major figures — Jesus, Socrates, or Buddha — left no writings during their lifetimes; it was their disciples, and their successors, who recorded their teachings.
In other cases, wisdom takes shape through legendary tales. Often, these stories lend themselves to multiple levels of reading: the symbols they contain reflect mechanisms applicable on a broader scale. Take the legend of Prometheus: a symbolic reading reveals profound human lessons about creation and the nature of being. These teachings remain strikingly relevant and carry near-universal significance. This interpretive exercise works with most legendary texts and initiatory novels, whether the Romance of the Round Table or the Book of Genesis.
Moses at Sinai: Epiphany or Strategy?
Certain great leaders knew how to wield the gods of their culture to bolster and gain acceptance for their ideas. Consider the emblematic example of Moses and Mount Sinai. Here is a leader seeking to rally a group, to give it unity and identity. In a different context, a Chinese emperor might have chosen writing to unify his empire. For Moses, this option was not viable: he was dealing with a tribal group that had to survive on already occupied territory — not with cultural ensembles forced to coexist.
Moses goes up the mountain, encounters God, and comes back down with the Tablets of the Law. If we imagine a rational and materialist reading coupled with a symbolic lens, we might envision that during the wanderings of the Exodus, Moses took time to isolate himself and reflect on how to unify and stabilize his people. He did so by providing them with a law. But what law should he bring? Under this angle, could the episode of the divine encounter be the description of an epiphany? A moment of awareness characterizing the attempt to think about the group as a whole — moving beyond the narrow individual perspective to integrate the very workings of reality.
Divine Injunction: A Tool for Virtue
Following the same logic, other thinkers and leaders used this system of divine injunction to introduce innovations into their societies. This often begins with the divine origin or validation of royalty. Consider the cardinal virtues formulated by Thomas Aquinas: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. According to the Church, they are inspired by God or conform to His will. Yet they are also articulated by Aristotle and Confucius, and appear in similar forms across most systems of thought.
We see here a perfect illustration of our thesis: these virtues are sometimes presented as such by the philosopher, sometimes attached to God for believers. The virtues of fortitude and temperance can be taught and transmitted, for instance, through the story of Samson (who demonstrates both the exercise and the excess of these qualities). We thus discern various modes for introducing an analysis into a society and lending it authority. Humanity was reflecting long before the advent of philosophy; it simply found diverse means to make its conclusions tangible.
Beyond Origin: The Pragmatic Rationale
These virtues were not chosen at random. The fact that they are presented as a divine imperative — a condition for entering paradise, according to the Church — can lead us to forget that they have a real and pragmatic reason for being. The philosophies of Aristotle and Confucius are not centered on a God or an afterlife. They are pragmatic philosophies, born respectively from the rational analysis of reality and from the observation of human experience. Yet they reach the same conclusions about the crucial importance of these attitudes.
We might even ask whether the advance of science changes anything in this picture. Far from refuting them, scientific inquiry tends rather to illuminate and reinforce them. On a related subject, the research conducted by Harvard on meditation bears this out: the observed benefits confirm ancestral wisdoms. These virtues appear, indeed, in this form or a similar one across nearly all human societies, through time and space, regardless of how they were introduced and integrated.
Conclusion: The Vehicle Matters Less Than the Destination
We therefore observe that the same element can be justified differently depending on the frame of reference and the workings of the social group in which it is expressed. Sometimes justified by philosophy, sometimes attributed to one or several gods, it often amounts to a fundamental truth. Ultimately, the question of divine or non-divine origin matters little in this situation. What counts is the permanence of the answer offered to the human condition.