Specific Cultures Viewing the Individual Person - Essay Example

The rights-centered view of man’s relation to s and governments is a relatively new phenomenon. If we think that it only emerged in the past three centuries, with the birth and application of Enlightenment values to the real world, we see that individual freedom and liberty is still quite young. Although it has demonstrated its effectiveness in bringing about equality and happiness to scores of people around the world, the legacy of its practice is still developing. Other legacies, however, have come and gone with the centuries, like the Greek polis and the Soviet commune. We can analyze these legacies and identify the most probable reasons why they have gone extinct through the ages. One strain of individual/state relation that has since left us is the truly God-centric view of the state and its justification. The Enlightenment, with its secularization of society, attempted to move the reasoning behind state power away from the dictates of an all-powerful creator, and move it to the realm of man. What is not so clear in our present age is how the individual related to the state in a time when God was indeed the central philosophic focus of all government and social power, when priests and religious men made all decisions under the watchful eye of God. One such society was that of Judah and Israel with the Hebrews upon their Exodus from the sands of Egypt. How was the individual seen then as opposed to now? In the Israelite society, government was seen as the intermediary between man and God, enforcing God’s will. Any governing force not acting on God’s will was portrayed as malicious and evil. Individuals, of course, serve the state as they serve God, for the state is a surrogate for divine power. 1 Maccabees, the deuterocanonical Jewish book, begins after Alexander the Great has conquered Judea and his empire has been split on his death. The entirety of the book encompasses the events after the suppression of Jewish rites in Judea, ordered by the Greek Seleucid Antiochus IV. Antiochus imposes his will on Jerusalem, extracting objects from the Jewish temple, slaughtering worshippers, and enforcing a tax and building a fortress in the city. To make matters worse, Antiochus smothers the observance of Jewish laws, desecrates the temple and forbids the practice of circumcision. Antiochus establishes an idol in place of the Jewish god, forcing members of the community to make sacrifices to it. This all comes in an attempt to reestablish the Hellenistic culture and, in some respects, the Greek polis in place of the new paradigm. Antiochus’ conservatism leads to the story given as 1 Maccabees and an account of Judea’s view of the ideal individual. A holy war is called against Antiochus’ evil impositions. In 15:7, the narrator says, “And let Jerusalem be holy and free, and all the armor that hath been made, and the fortresses which thou hast built, and which thou keepest in thy hands, let them remain to thee”. In this passage, we see the religious and political call to arms, with the clear integration of the two spheres. It is the individual’s responsibility and duty to God to serve the state. Our job is to reestablish our freedoms as a means of better serving God (by having the freedoms to attend rites and such). This stands in contrast to the modern picture of individual freedoms and rights as ends and all other things as subservient to those ends. The individual person serves the state as he serves God: purely as a servant and not as a master. Governments, when they exist in Judea, do so as a mandate from heaven and with divine authority. The entire institution of government is justified on the power of God. Not until the Enlightenment is it thought that individual human beings should be so worthy of having something like a state constructed as a means of serving their ends instead of the ends of some higher being, whether a God or a King. If a King is in power, that King is himself a servant of God, even as a master of all men within his realm. And this fact makes it so that any action the King decides to take is legitimate, insofar as he is the surrogate, or the material embodiment, of God’s will. Anything the state does, according to this view, is right and good and just. This too comes in contrast with the modern liberal political philosophy that the Enlightenment produced; within that paradigm, governments can make follies, do things which are against the will of the people and against the rule of law. Religion, we find, invariably shapes both the structure and perception of governments by all people living under them. Ultimately, the people of Judea are successful in rooting out Antiochus. They align themselves with the Roman Republic, which helps ensure the removal of all elements of Greek conservatism from the new Judea. Before the fight to regain their independence, the question of whether it is allowed to fight even on the Sabbath is raised, and the Jews conclude it is. This interesting question goes further in proving the point that individual freedoms are instrumental for serving God, in contrast to our modern notions of individual freedom. God’s will (that Jews worship on the Sabbath) is treated as secondary as the Jews seek to secure the freedom of individuals to celebrate God at all. This view of freedom is maintained through ancient history as the monotheism of the Jews took on new forms and spread throughout Europe. The integration of religion with the state continued for centuries as Kings ruled under the influence of the Papacy and, by proxy, God’s will. Accordingly, how societies view the individual in comparison to the state changed little: the individual should serve the King as he does God, with unquestioning devotion. This paradigm, similar to its contrast with the Enlightenment, came in contrast to the Hellenistic picture that was defeated in 1 Maccabees, where men have freedom to set and pursue their own ends, and not those of the gods. Of course, in Hebrew Judea, the powers of the government would be limited by the powers bestowed onto the state by God and by that which was expressed by the Jewish God with regards to the state. Simply speaking, the ruler of a nation, as God’s representative in the material world, cannot authorize or impose a will other than God’s. A ruler cannot, in the name of God, make something a law which clearly contradicted the scriptures. Just as in today’s liberal democracy, where the powers of government are checked ultimately by the people who elect their representatives, so would the power and laws of a government in Judea be checked by the established knowledge of God’s plan. Accordingly, the performance of a government would be measured in the context of the divine will and whether the King was enforcing God’s will adequately or not. If not, he would be evaluated as performing his function poorly. As this monotheistic view of religion and integrated view of the state spread throughout the ancient world and eventually into medieval Europe, this paradigm did not shift. In the Middle Ages, just as in ancient Judea, the religious authority exerted control over the government and made it conform to the dictates of the loving creator. Any holy war, as the one accounted for by 1 Maccabees, is conducted in the name of the object of a religion. It is only one example of a political movement for the sake of a religious objective, one amongst many there are in the annals of Hebrew history. From the Book of Exodus, we see again the reasonings behind the Hebrew philosophy of the individual in the context of the theocratic state. Moses, a Jew among Egyptian slaveholders, is commanded by God to lead the Jews to the Promised Land and freedom, where they can worship Him as free persons. In Exodus, of course, there are the good guys and the bad guys—the latter being the Egyptians who do not worship Him and therefore commit evil deeds. This brings with it a corollary: that if the Egyptian state does not act to serve the ends of God, then its actions are not guided by any good. Consequently, the suffering they inflict on the Jews and the curse they suffer as a result come because of their misguided worshipping of idols. What this means is that one’s membership in a community that, as a whole, does not worship the right deity is automatically misguided and evil. Although each and every Jew is not automatically “good” because he or she worships the Jewish God, each and every Egyptian is automatically evil for not doing so. This reveals an additional caveat on the Hebrew view of the individual: that his or her personal identity and moral standing is inextricably tied with that of his or her community. In looking at the legacy of the ancient Hebrews of Judea and their political structure, we find many clues as to how their society as a whole viewed the individual in relation to the state. We find a large contrast between their view and our view, namely that of the post-Enlightenment values of rights, individual freedoms, and liberty. As a result, individual freedom for the ancient Hebrews is merely instrumental and just a means by which one serves God. Without freedoms (and under the oppressive regime of Antiochus) the Jews could not worship their God, as told in 1 Maccabees. In addition, what we learn from the Book of Exodus is that the will of God motivates all political action, including the seeking of the same kind of freedom talked about in Judea’s struggle for independence from Hellenistic conservatism. The individual’s personal identity, as a result, is constructed primarily by the state, and that individuals are best judged ethically by the moral standing or context of their community. Governments, of course, derive their authority from that of God amongst members of the community and the will of God (along with the priests) shapes and limits the power of the state in its proclamations. Bibliography Bright, J. (2000). A History of Israel (4th Edition ed.). Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Brown, J. P. (2003). Ancient Israel and Ancient Greece: Religion, Politics, and Culture. Minneapolis, MN: Ausburg Fortress Publishers. Gottwald, N. K. (2001). The Politics of Ancient Israel. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Johnston, S. I. (2004). Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Old Testament - Holy Bible. (2004). Douay-Rheims Bible. Retrieved 2009, from DRBO.ORG: http://www.drbo.org/book/02.htm Old Testament - Holy Bible. (2002). The First Book of the Maccabees. Retrieved 2009, from The Deuterocanon: http://st-takla.org/pub_Deuterocanon/Deuterocanon-Apocrypha_El-Asfar_El-Kanoneya_El-Tanya__8-First-of-Maccabees.html Read More