Epilogue: On Shepherds and Shepherding

“The lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” Psalm 23

 

If you read the About This Project section you will know that I spent a great deal of time working with the late Peter Manchester. In Manchester’s works (Temporality and Trinity, Syntax of Time) he employs a ‘looking backwards’ method which, instead of tracing historical influence (in this case of St. Augustine) uses modern existential and phenomenological insights (of Heidegger) to illuminate and reinterpret the 5^th century work of Augustine.

Manchester levels a harsh critique at Heidegger and his reliance on Aristotle’s concept of “clock time.” He argues that Heidegger’s notion of time as a measurable sequence misses the deeper, non-sequential nature of temporality as an event, which Manchester finds in Augustine’s phenomenology of revelation. For Manchester, Augustine’s understanding of time as a lived experience aligns more closely with Heidegger’s ecstatic temporality than Heidegger himself acknowledged. 

The ‘looking-backwards’ methodology developed by Manchester is not, I believe, merely a textual hermeneutic tool, but rather an epistemological reality. This is to say, I do not believe Manchester went far enough with his idea. Our cognitive schema will be “looking-back” in a sense as we see the Age of Enlightenment close in a reductio ad absurdum, collapsed under the weight of axiomatic internal contradiction, leaving sensus communis, the epistemological epoch, to evolve backwards rather than synthetically evolving forward. The reason this is possible, according to Manchester, is owing to Heidegger’s ecstatic-horizonal notion of temporality, that the human existence projects itself into the future (anticipation), is shaped by the past (thrownness) and engages with the present (being-alongside).

 Applying this to Augustine’s On The Trinity, arguing that the human soul’s faculties — memory (past), understanding (present) and will (future) reflect a similar temporal structure. This allows Manchester to interpret Augustine’s imago dei as a temporal disclosure of divine life where the human being’s existence mirrors the eternal relationality of the trinity.

Instead of treating philosophy as an ancient curiosity, Manchester engages Augustine’s texts directly, using Heidegger’s concepts to probe the nature of human temporality and its relation to divine eternity — a method he will also use reading Anaxagoras through the lens of Iamblicus and a method which I am bringing to this project both as thoroughgoing methodology, but taking it one step further than Manchester did by positing that it is suggestive of epistemic reality in slow changing and pervasive epochs.

This is all by way of telling you not only where we are going, but also why you are reading an Epilogue at the beginning of such a large project. One goal here is to better understand the ancient mode of conscious thought through the lens of the intellectual history that came after it as that will replicate the manner in which thinking itself is evolving into a more ancient form. 

So now that you know why there is an epilogue at the beginning, I imagine you must be asking yourself what the hell any of this has to do with shepherds. And to this, the answer is quite simple: everything. 

To better understand we first have to ask ourselves, “who are shepherds?” The image of the peaceful, bucolic shepherd lazily relaxing under a tree in a pastoral wonderland with his docile flock grazing before him is an absolutely watered down image bearing little resemblance to reality…especially if we consider the ancient near eastern shepherds on whose image the entirety of western civilization rests. 

A shepherd’s job is for the care and maintenance of a flock of sheep. This requires the tripartite job description of organizing multiple sheep into a single flock, herding them, maintaining their well being and protecting them. You might ask what it is they are being protected from. The answer, for bronze aged shepherds in the near east, is from both predators and poachers. 

Leaving aside for a moment the idea that the shepherd needs to physically defend and protect his flock from people who wish to steal them which is a tough job to begin with, protecting sheep from predators is no small feat. Wolves, hyenas, jackals and falcons all pretty on sheep. So let’s dispense with the idea of the peaceful pastoral shepherd. This is a job which has, under its description, fighting off hungry mountain lions with a staff.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but shepherds are badasses. Our modern image of the gentle shepherd does not work as an analogy for our ancestors for whom shepherding would have been the pinnacle of masculinity and toughness.

So why are these badasses such a crucial image in the underpinning substructure of the west? In order to really get into that, it is important to recognize that one of the earliest problems philosophers grappled with is the problem of the one and the many. The problem of the one and the many deals with unities and pluralities and how they interact with one another. Examples of the ancient problem of the one and the many are questions like “How is it that the category ‘humanity’ encompasses all individual humans” or “how does a single substance underlie the multiplicity of objects in the world?”

In the Hellenic world in the 6^th century BC the Milesian Monists like Thales, Anaxagoras and Anaximander were grappling with these issues as they believed the substructure of the universe was a unity — in the case of the material monists, one of the primary elements: earth, wind, fire or water. Be careful when you consider these 6th century thinkers archaic or primative in their thought. While it may not be one of the primary elements which form the substructure of the physical world, we now know it is atoms — so lets give these guys a little credit for getting it almost right six hundred years before Christ. While it may be hard to see from our vantage point, this was an absolutely revolutionary way of thinking for a polytheistic people. That the multiplicity which is the lived world has, as a single and unified arche (Gr. ἀρχή) was one of the greatest discoveries of mankind. 

Meanwhile, in the Hebraic world, nearly a thousand years earlier, the Books of Moses were being compiled and they were dealing with the same problem in a different way. The ancient Hebrews had the idea that there was a single God which was the source of all things imposing, through the singular act of creation, a unity amongst the diversity of the world — its people, creatures, things, nations, etc. — with the word spoken into the chaotic abyss. 

It is in this Hebraic tradition (and its Egyptian and Mesopotamian roots as well as deeper connection to preliterate peoples dating back to the end of the last ice age ), far more psychological in origins than the Ancient Greek philosophers and their natural monism, that we get the reoccurring image of the shepherd. As a metaphor, the shepherd is, amongst other things we will cover, that force which coalesces a multiplicity into a unity — the solution to the problem of the one and the many.  

One thing that is important beyond measure at this point is to remember that the ancient Greek philosophers, like the ancient Hebrews, are trying to make sense of their world and themselves. They are coming to many of the same questions and answering them in ways specific to their cultures and specific to the oral traditions they evolved out of. 

Do not make the mistake of thinking that these stories about shepherds are just nice pastoral images. These are

very serious people, geniuses, who are grappling with the most fundamental questions which reality poses and are doing it on the heels of tens of thousands of years of oral tradition and distillation of knowledge. The Greek Natural Monists and the Ancient Hebrew authors of the Old Testament are expressing the collected wisdom of a hundred centuries of wisdom which form the cornerstone of western civilization.

Over time in the Greek and then later in the European world the question of the one and the many would be tackled by Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zeno, Empedocles and Anaxagoras. The solutions ranged from various elemental solutions, to the metaphysical concept of flux and even to the denial of the multiplicity with arguments that even motion is logically contradictory and only exists in human perception.

The issue is finally formalized in Athens by Plato who argued that the form of the Good united all things and later Aristotle who argued that universals only exist within and as an abstraction from particulars. 

From the standpoint of a cosmogony, the shepherd is that force which unites disparate singularities into a unity.We see this most clearly in Genesis where, “in the beginning” God hovers over an earth which is “void and without form” with “darkness…upon the face of the deep” (Gen 1:1) until God speaks into the void and unifies and structures it into habitable order.

There are three things that are of particular importance to note here. The first is “in the beginning” (heb: B’rêshîth) which is translated in the Septuagint as en arche (Gr. ἐν ἀρχῇ), arche being a concept that the first essay in Philological Concerns deals with more fully and is what the Greek Natural Monists were trying to understand as the unifying principle which is underneath the world’s multiplicity.

The second item of note is the chaos which exists before having the unifying principle applied, “void and without form” which is the untranslatable ancient Hebrew tôhû va-bhôhû which can best be understood as totally unintelligible chaotic multiplicity and this describes the “face of the deep.”

That face of the deep, in Hebrew t’hôm whcih is linguistically connected to the Babylonian Tiamtu, or Tiamath — the dragon goddess of the Great Deep whose destruction at the hands of the Babylonian supreme god Marduk preceded his creative deeds of cleaving the dragon’s body and using it to create the heavens and the earth.

The move of our ancient Hellenic and Hebraic ancestors to find underlying unity in multiplicity is the cosmogony of the shepherd. However, that is not where it ends. More than just the cosmogony of the universe, these ancient thinkers are also trying to understand how the human psychological unity is possible while undergoing the evolutionary process of psychological unification.

The Ancient Greeks had an idea that man was the mere plaything of the gods. What does that mean? Take, for example, Ares. What would it mean to be a plaything for Ares? The idea in the preliterate oral tradition handed down to the earliest Greek epic poets was something like the spirit of Ares is the singleminded expression of wrath. As such, Ares exists aside from any one person who manifests his spirit. Ares, as the spirit of wrath, existed prior to any individual, is eternal and can never be destroyed. This is what makes him a god. 

When we are under the sway of Ares, when we are lead by single minded aggression, the things we say and do are not things we would say or do at any other time. This is what makes us Ares’ plaything. We can think of the unified psyche for the Greeks as being the multiplicity of the gods vying for control of us and the self as being whatever it is that unifies these forces in the psyche, stabilizes and focuses them.

While Freud is validly credited for understanding the human psyche as a losely knit grouping of a multitude of sub-personalities, it is a very ancient idea which existed long before the epistemic epoch which allowed for scientific articulation of it and found its only expression in that of stories of the gods. After all, what is it that makes you think that you have thoughts? How is it possible that you think something up? From where? Where do dreams come from? How is it possible to ask yourself a question and get an answer? The conceptualization of the Freudian idea of the psyche being a loosely knit grouping of a multitude of sub-personalities is well described as the autonomous spirit of gods inhabitant you.

This is just another form of acting out embodied knowledge before its articulation, just on a social scale. And of course, why not. In a preliterate time these ideas, hard gained over eons needed to be passed generation to generation, distilled and refined — a process that has taken millions of years. The way to do that in a world before writing is through story and the story had to be memorable. The reason the way to do it is with story is that narrative is the natural mode of thought for human beings. You study for an algebra test, but you don’t study a friend’s funny story which you just remember. We are wired for narrative.

Some of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales can be traced back ten to fifteen thousand years through the oral tradition. The early stories in Genesis and in the Homeric poems both likely date even earlier than that.

When we talk about the move from polytheism to monotheism, this is what we are talking about. Both in terms of cosmogony, society and psychology, the ancient fragmented ideas (and modes of thinking as such) are being pulled together like so many sheep into a single flock.

It is far too often that we look at the emergence of monotheism simply as a new story people started to tell, but it is far from this. Xenophanes famously said that if horses had hands to draw then horses would draw gods in the shape of horses. What Xenophanes was getting at back in the 5^th century BC was correct in ways that he himself might not have fully understood.

As human consciousness evolved and became less fractionated the polytheism of the most ancient stories seemed less and less valuable. To be clear, the story of monotheism is not just some story competing with older polytheistic stories, but represents the evolutionary unification of the human mind and consciousness and with it, God. Stories of all sorts are a culture’s way of expressing their thoughts and reflecting their emotional, intellectual, cultural and political realities. A change in the story from polytheism to monotheism isn’t just a new clever tale but reflects a fundamental shift in the alignment and organization of the human mind and with it its society, culture and gods.

One very interesting place to see this evolution is in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. In the Iliad there are no references to any characters internal thinking whereas the Odyssey, written some centuries later, is constantly looking into the psychology of its characters. The books are reflecting different stages in the unification process.

Monotheism didn’t just happen. The monotheism in the Hebraic religion dating back to the 15^th century BC and the move to Natural Monism in the Hellenic philosophical tradition around 600 BC philosophically but much older dramatically, represent the beginnings of where two separate cultures began to unify their fractured psyche and it was reflected in their cosmogony as well as their cultural artifacts like their dramas.

It is of the utmost importance to mention, and sadly it is necessary, that it is an absolute mistake to write these people off as primitive or superstitious. This type of criticism is rooted in the ignorance which is the patrimony of the Enlightenment. While the methodology for putting across ideas is very different than our modern idea of scientific proofs, we mistakenly write off these ancient ideas at our own peril. What we gain with regard to understanding the matter of the universe with the tools of the scientific revolution we lose with regard to meaning and, as we will see, meaning, not matter, is how we interact with the world. It is the difference between a focus on matter and a focus on what matters — an idea we will take a look at with regard to the evolution of language as well.

The fact is, the human being is the single most complicated thing in the universe that we know of. There has not been, in the last 500 years, a single shred of advancement in our knowledge of what consciousness is. The reason, I believe, is because the post scientific revolution western world has been trying to tackle the problem with the tools and methodologies specifically made to understand a reductionist rational universe — one which everything can be explained by the understanding of matter and the laws which govern its motion and interaction.

In his 1989 paper Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links, physicist John Wheeler outlines what he calls a ‘participatory universe’ in which he suggests that consciousness is not merely an observer of the universe but plays a constitutive role in its creation and evolution. Wheeler goes as far as suggesting that ‘no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.’ This idea will reemerge several times including an upcoming essay on why God has Adam name animals in the garden.

In Modern Times, because we have not been able to get a grasp on consciousness, the scientific as well as the lay conception has become that it is intrinsically unknowable (Max Planck, Roger Penrose, Eugene Wigner, etc.). I believe it to be the case that consciousness is only unknowable when we try to know it with scientific rational reductivism…a mode of thinking which is so ubiquitously pervasive that I feel it is properly characterized as an epistemological epoch and, for all the good is has brought, has caused a blind spot in areas that took hundreds of millions of years to develop. What is important to note is that it isn’t that one is right and one is wrong, but that one is native and one is artificial which leads to different strengths and weaknesses. By the end of this project I hope to present to you a way in which the two cognitive frameworks can coexist and be co-constitutive of epistemic reality strengthening one another by addressing each other’s weaknesses.

The reason scientific rational reductivism does not work in understanding the conscious mind is because it is a methodology alien to that mind — human minds being so construed as to see value, affordant utility and meaning and not simply matter. We could also say that the natural epistemic framework of narrative is not very good with regard to the exact measurements which are required in engineering and applied physics.

The native and natural mode of thinking, that of narration, seems to be our only chance to understand what it is we mean when we talk about our mind or about God. Rational atheists, like Christian fundamentalists, look at ancient texts while being stuck in a modern zeitgeist and as such see those texts as a series of testable facts. For the rational atheist the statements are false and for the Christian fundamentalist they are true, but both of them are looking at the text in the same incorrect manner.

These Ancient stories are the product of tens of thousands of years of oral tradition being passed down, distilled and refined on the patterned substructure of billions of years of hard fought evolution. Dismissing them because they do not conform to the methodological rules of their later and, for the sake of this task at least, inferior modes of research, testing and experimentation is a grave error.

What we are seeing here are two very different societies moving from polytheism to monotheism, the Hebraic side doing so theologically and psychologically while the Hellenic side does so rationally and philosophically. It is not just a new story. This move towards unity is happening on multiple levels in multiple ways in multiple locations simultaneously. It is happening in the psyche of mankind, in his natural philosophy, in his theology, in his dramas and in the civilizations he is building. It is for this reason that the image of the shepherd is so perfect. 

John Wheeler spent years trying to explain, using the tools of quantum mechanics, what consciousness is. Ultimately he is only able to say that it is more than a mere observer in the universe but plays a constitutive role. Wheeler’s notion of the participatory universe will be the topic of another essay. The image of the shepherd in ancient texts is simply a far more eloquent and complete way of explaining this — and more, it is a way that makes native sense to our human cognitive framework in a way that quantum mechanics simply never will…not even to physicists.

The work of explaining consciousness is not something which can be done with equations — even the scientists are admitting that now — but if we let ourselves take seriously this ancient wisdom, the explanation of consciousness is possible as part of a story. Taking seriously is key here. The vast majority of scientific rational atheists are just people who will not or can’t take these questions with any seriousness.The bubbling subterranean abyss that the mind grows out of is only explicable on its own terms — the natural cognitive tool of narrative as opposed to the artificial rational tools of science.To get there we need to leave behind the laughable yet often comfortable ideas that these ancient texts are just primitive fables.

This is the job of the shepherd. The shepherd organizes chaos into a habitable unity — probably the most ancient pattern of behavior in mankind and one which will warrant its own essay. The shepherd organizes fractionated thought into a psychological unity the way he organizes sheep into a flock — though I caution against thinking that just because it is a metaphor it is just or merely a metaphor. The Shepherd organizes the singleminded will of the polytheistic deities and subordinates them under a unified God or, in the language of the ancient Greeks, arche. The Shepherd brings together disparate tribes into a unified civilization (as happened in the ancient near east as many tribes came together starting in 10,000BC). The Shepherd makes order out of chaos and defends that order. The shepherd is also the one that stops, takes stock of a complex matter and organizes one’s thinking into a unified flock.

So, who is the shepherd? We all are.