The Christology of Early Christianity: A Brief Overview

Put simply, Christology is the study of the titles that were attributed to Jesus both during his life and in the post-easter period. It basically begins with a study of the earliest Christian texts (in the NT these include the authentic Pauline Epistles, the Gospel of Mark and the "Q" segments of gMatthew and gLuke) to see what titles were attributed to Jesus by the earliest Christians and what their understanding of such titles might be. This may seem like a simple task, but uncovering the specific understanding that a 1st century Palestinian may have had of a term like "Son of God" is actually a rather difficult process. Where in modern Christian theology such titles for Jesus are largely interchangeable and have largely converged in meaning (it is of little theological importance, for instance, whether I call Jesus my "Lord", my "Messiah" or my "Saviour" - the theological claim I am making is in each case identical) we cannot make the same presumptions for the earliest Christians. The use of different titles for Jesus in the New Testament is telling, and we can probably assume it to be of great significance what the earliest Christians did or did not choose to call Jesus at different places at different times.

Of these various titles, the most widely-attested appellation for Jesus is that of the "Christ" and we can therefore probably presume that it was applied to Jesus almost immediately after his crucifixion, if not before. The word "Christ" is derived from the Greek word christos which means "anointed one" and is a translation of the Hebrew word mashiach (anglicised as "messiah"), which means the same thing. Now exactly how we should interpret this term in the context of early Christianity is a matter for debate, in part because the meaning of the word (or at least how it is used) seems to have changed throughout the history of Judaism. In the Old Testament, the term is used almost exclusively in relation to the divine appointment of kings and high-priests in Israel, who were literally "anointed" with oil as part of a religious ritual. David, for this reason, is seen as the first Messiah (see 1 Sam 16:12-13; 2 Sam 23:1), and it seems to have been used in this early period as a title to affirm the divine sanction of Judahite kings. Later, in the post-exile period when the royal house of David failed to be re-established, the term was applied more generally to other offices, including that of the high-priest (Zech. 4:14), prophets (Isa. 61:1) and even the Persian king Cyrus (Isaiah 45:1). There are then signs in the prophetic OT literature that there was a general expectation among the Israelites for the re-establishment of the Davidic royal line at some point in the undefined future (a new "Messiah"), but these expectations have of course not been realised.

A re-emergence of interest in Messianic theology emerged in the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE, doubtless partly inspired by the first independent (though non-Davidic) Jewish royal-line to emerge in Israel for over 400 years. The Hasmoneans ruled from 140-37 BCE and during this time (that we may crudely term the "inter-testamental" period) Messianic expectations of prophetic literature were revived, fueling a lasting belief that eventually one from the line of David would ascend to power in Israel and institute a golden age of peace and prosperity. This was also a period of enhanced eschatological speculation, which centred not merely on a historical epoch shift initiated by the Messianic claimant, but by the direct intervention of God. Although these themes would come to be woven together in early Christianity, it should be pointed out that Messianic expectations and eschatological expectations were largely kept separate in Judaism. However, we do find that many of the Jewish beliefs of this time appear to anticipate early Christian theology, for instance the idea that the Messiah would be killed as a preface to a general, universal resurrection of the dead (4 Enoch 7:28-34 and 2 Baruch 30:1) which is similar to the eschatology advocated by Paul in his early letters (e.g. 1 Thess 4:13-16) and elsewhere in the NT (e.g. Mt 27:52). Other Jewish literature from this period perceives the Messiah as a powerful figure, coming to rule in judgement over Jew and Gentile alike (Psalms of Solomon 17:23-35), perhaps sitting on a divine throne at the right-hand of God (see 1 Enoch, esp. 48:10 and 52:4) themes that also appear to have had some influence on the trajectory of Christian thought.

Such Messianic expectations took on a more practical importance during the 1st century CE, when there were apparently several claimants to the kingship during the first Jewish revolt (66-74 CE) and the second revolt, where the military leader Bar Kochba was explicitly hailed as the Davidic Messiah (132-135 CE). Luke even appears to suggest that the Messiah question was alive during Jesus' lifetime and was being applied to other individuals (Lk 3:15). Such facts tell us that the "Messiah" question was alive and well both immediately before, during and after the ministry of Jesus, though the earliest Christians appeared to envisage a more eschatological Messiah (see the numerous "Son of Man" passages in the gospels) than a political or military one. So anyway, what can all this tell us about Jesus?

In the first place, we must ask to what extent these Messianic "expectations" in Judaism may have affected how the early Christians viewed the significance of Jesus' ministry, and also - perhaps - how Jesus himself may have viewed it. Most scholars now accept that we can't draw a direct path from these heterogeneous Judaisms to the emergence of Christianity, and would also accept that simply pointing to Jewish Messianic expectations at the time of Jesus (as I have just done) tells us little about what the first Christians thought specifically about Jesus. Did they view him as a royal heir to David's throne, for instance? From the desire of NT authors to place Jesus into the Davidic genealogy (Rom 1:3; Mt 1:1-17; Lk 3:23-38) we can probably say yes. Such a perception may also explain (presuming the gospels' reliability on this point) the reason why Jesus was crucified under the ironic epithet of "King of the Jews" (Mk 15:26 etc.). That is, Jesus may well have been hailed as a Messiah in the traditional mould (as one claiming a particular political office) and this may have been why he was viewed as such a threat by the Romans.

But the traditional understanding of the word "Messiah" apparently does not exhaust the understanding the early Christians had about the term, as whatever royal claims were made of Jesus during his life, they were plainly never realised by any conventional meaning of the term. Nor were the hopes that the enemies of the Israelites would be smashed, either through divine retribution upon the death of the Messiah, or by the armies of the Messiah himself. However, we should note that whatever hopes Jesus may have failed to realise, this apparently was not cause for wide consternation among the early Christians: that is, rarely in the early writings are these failed expectations (or how they should be adjusted in view of this) ever raised. They were able to adapt the meaning of the word "Christ" into something new, something better adapted to the circumstances they now faced.

So within the first 20 years of Christianity Jesus had undoubtedly come to be considered "the Messiah / Christ", though probably not the kind of Messiah we can unambiguously identify in either the OT or the inter-testamental literature. Whether or not Jesus would have personally accepted this title during his own life is a little dubious: he is presented with many opportunities to affirm his status as the Christ in the synoptic gospels, yet only once is he depicted as doing so (Mk 14:62). Even then this account must be considered problematic from a historical perspective because this affirmation was supposedly given in a private audience before the Jewish high-priest (and who would have been present to witness such a conversation?), the "I am" is used as a springboard for Jesus to relay his "Son of Man" eschatology (which may be at odds with Messianic claims?) and the parallel accounts in Luke and Matthew (Mt 26:64; Lk 22:70) have Jesus giving a much more ambiguous and cryptic response. So, even by the testimony of the gospels, if Jesus was ever considered the Messiah during his own life, it was apparently a title that he was not keen to publicly embrace or advertise. In any case, we can probably suggest that the idea that Jesus ever considered himself as heir to the Davidic throne runs counter to our understanding of his teachings which express (at best) a deep ambivalence towards institutional power, and his eschatological beliefs that the powerful would suffer in the coming Kingdom of God and that it was better, therefore, to approach the kingdom like a child or a slave (that is to say, as one completely devoid of power) rather than as a king.

Other Christological titles are even more problematic. Probably the next most common title applied to Jesus in the NT is that of "Son of God", though again this is a phrase that can be interpreted in a number of ways. We know that such a title was used in Judiasm under a variety of circumstances, as I have previously explored on this blog:

Our understanding of the phrase "son of god" is unfortunately clouded by its rather literal use in gMatthew and gLuke, where Jesus' mother is impregnated by the Holy Spirit (Mt. 1:18, Lk. 1:26-35) making Jesus quite literally "God's son". However, this understanding of the phrase "son of god" occurs nowhere else in the New Testament and so we should not assume that the phrase means the same thing for Mark as it does for Matthew and Luke. Indeed, although the phrase "son of god" is often used in the New Testament as a unique title for Jesus (i.e. "the Son of God") it is a phrase with a long history and a wide variety of meanings.

In the original Hebrew of the Old Testament, for instance, the expression "sons of god" can be used to describe angels (or "heavenly beings" as it is rendered in many English translations - see Gen. 6:1-4 and Job 1:6) or holy men blessed by god (i.e. priests and kings, especially of the Davidic line – e.g. II Sam 7:14, Ps. 2:7; 89:26). The Jewish author Philo, writing in the same century as Jesus, used the expression "sons of God" in a very general way to refer to the entire Jewish people. And the expression doesn't only have a history within the Jewish faith: the Roman emperor Augustus (who was almost certainly emperor during Jesus' lifetime), for instance, was also given the title "Son of God" (from divi filius in Latin) during his long reign.

Yet even if we interpret this title as implying that Jesus was "[the only-begotten] Son of God" rather than merely "[a] son of God", the issue doesn't end there, as the exact nature of this "sonship" was a matter of often quite vitriolic debate during the first few hundred years of Christianity. The contemporary Christian understanding of Jesus as the pre-existing, "only-begotten" Son of God, descended from heaven, was of course the view that won out in the fallout from these debates, but there were other competing claims, such as those held by the "adoptionists". Such Christians held to the idea that Jesus only became God's son at the moment of his baptism at the beginning of his ministry, as Paul (Rom 1:4) and the Gospel of Mark (Mk 1:10-11, referencing Ps 2:7) may appear to imply. As for Jesus' own disposition to such a title - or whether he may have accepted it for himself - it may be telling that he had an apparently distinct and unusual of way of addressing God in prayer: namely, his use of the Aramaic word abba. In most modern English translations this is translated as "father", but it was actually a much more intimate form of address than that. A more apt translation might be "daddy" and such a degree of familiarity that apparently left its mark in the memories of subsequent generations (and is retained even today in the Lord's Prayer). So while Jesus may have considered himself (and his disciples?) to be [a] "son of God" in some significant way, the evidence that he considered himself the "only-begotten" Son of God is almost completely absent from the synoptic gospels.

Of the other Christological titles attributed to Jesus in the NT, their historicity suffers from the fact that they are only sparsely attributed in the NT and then largely absent from other early texts. It is sometimes claimed that Paul may have conceived of a high-Christology - based on possible allusions in his writings to Jesus' pre-existence (Gal 4:4) or divinity (Phillip 2:16-11; Col 1:15-20) - but these claims probably stretch the available evidence too far. Paul was generally explicit and repetitive in his enunciation of other Christological themes, and if he genuinely conceived of such a high-Christology then its presence in only a couple of ambiguous passages is difficult to explain. That is, if Paul believed Jesus to be God incarnate, we might be entitled to ask why he didn't say so more emphatically, given how important such a claim would surely be to his wider theology.

As for the undeniably "high" Christology of the gospel of John, again we must note that the language and titles the author uses are highly idiosyncratic (that is, to be found almost nowhere else in early Christian literature) and were likely confined only to the community from which the author wrote. In part this may be a consequence of normal Christological development (i.e. gJohn, as the last gospel to be written, was always going to have a more advanced view of Jesus' nature than the other gospels) but John's Christology seems unique not just within the NT, but among all early Christian literature. Of course John's Christology would come to play a disproportionately important role in the formation of later Christian theology, but this does nothing to ameliorate the fact that his writings (the gospel and the three epistles) were representative only of the beliefs of the somewhat ostracised sect from which he was writing, and cannot be considered at all normative within early Christianity. Other Christologies - such as the Trinitarian formula - find literally no support in the NT at all.

So the evidence is complex, and difficult to summarise properly in one post, but if you want to ask me what my opinion is of how Jesus viewed himself and his ministry then I think we have to see that Jesus clearly viewed himself as having some (uniquely?) special relationship with God and that he saw himself as an important cog in some wider eschatological process, but beyond that it's difficult to say with certainty. He was a preacher, likely a disciple of John the Baptist, who continued to preach his mentor's message of repentance in the face of the coming eschaton, but who pursued no institutional aims or titles beyond his leadership over a small, but committed group of disciples. As per the conclusion reached by Raymond Brown, if he believed himself to be the Messiah then he likely had a rather different interpretation of that term as compared to the interpretations that came before him (in Judaism) or after him (in orthodox Christianity). If he believed himself to be anything else (e.g. the divine logos or God incarnate) he doesn't seem to have shared such beliefs with the world.

How Did Early Christians Conceive of the Afterlife?

Finding meaningful answers as to what the early Christians believed about heaven and hell is not easy. To put the problem in perspective, consider how difficult it is to even form an answer to the questions about what a modern Christian believes about heaven and hell. The question depends on many factors, both doctrinal and personal. The doctrinal differences can include factors such as the denomination of the believer (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox etc.), whether they attend "liberal" or "conservative" leaning churches and so on. The personal factors are almost too difficult to mention, but include everything from upbringing, to what literature has been read, to the scope of one's imagination, to mere personal preference. It would be no great exaggeration to suggest that there are as many different conceptions of heaven and hell in Christianity as there are Christians, and the creation of a meaningful definition of these terms which would satisfy all believers would be literally impossible.

Given that, imagine how much more difficult it is to probe the beliefs of early Christians. The ancient mind was as variable and as subject to individual circumstance as our own, and exactly the same kind of factionalism existed between early Christian groups as exists presently between modern Christian denominations. The titular question is rendered even more difficult to answer because systematic theology is largely absent from the earliest Christian writings (Romans and Hebrews perhaps come the closest to being so), which means that our understanding of the earliest beliefs must be deduced entirely from the passing references to heaven and hell that exist in the surviving texts, which obviously leaves a lot of room for ambiguity and guesswork. So, in addition to the kind of definitional problems that preclude us from answering the question about what modern Christians believe about heaven, we can't know for sure what the first Christians believed about heaven and hell because they never actually bothered to tell us. (Although this realisation in itself may be significant: the peripheral treatment of heaven and hell in the NT may tell us that it was not an issue of great interest to the earliest Christians, at least not in comparison to questions of the Law, eschatology, Christology and so on.)

Having said that, we can probably say with some certainty what the earliest Christians didn't believe about heaven and hell and that might be the best place to start. The modern idea that Christians go to heaven by virtue of their faith in Christ is a Protestant idea that postdates Christian origins by some 1500 years. It comes from Martin Luther's concept of sola fide ("by faith alone"), which was a reaction to the then prevailing Catholic view that entry to heaven was governed by performance of the Sacraments, which themselves required the mediation of priests. In modern times this concept of sola fide has been taken to a particular extreme by certain Protestant fundamentalists who appear to believe that entry into heaven depends solely on whether or not one assents to the metaphysical claim of Jesus' divinity. I think the best that we can possibly say about such a theology is that it's a lazy one, but in any case it certainly isn't Biblical. In fact most of the ideas affecting modern Christian views on heaven and hell are post-Biblical, inspired largely by later systematic theology and the vivid medieval imagery of Dante and others. The Biblical references are - as I have already mentioned - sparse, inconsistent and often confusing.

The first Christians were obviously influenced first and foremost by Judaism. The Israelites of the OT period didn't really have a concept of an afterlife, although they did, of course, believe in a "heaven". This heaven, though, was literally God's home - a great Kingdom existing above the firmament in the sky - which he shared with the angels (and the other Gods?) in something resembling a great city or palace. This was a place completely closed to human entry, with the exception of the two prophets Elijah and Enoch, who apparently ascended there without ever dying. There was also belief in a shadowy netherworld referred to as "Sheol" that one may have found oneself in after death, but it was apparently not seen (uniformly) as a place of either reward or punishment, and nor is there any indication that existence there would be a permanent or eternal one. In this respect, it shared a great deal in common with other near-Eastern views of the afterlife from the same period. So how did we get from such beliefs about the finality of death to the apparently common belief in the NT that one could - under certain conditions - enter God's Kingdom and be granted eternal life?

To answer this question, we need to look at the theological developments in Judaism during the so-called "inter-testamental" period, roughly 200 BCE - 70 CE. For reasons that aren't entirely clear (though it may be related to the perceived "injustice" of the righteous dying during the Maccabean revolution before their vision of a new Kingdom was realised), the Jewish belief in the resurrection of the dead became common (though by no means universal) during the inter-testamental period, and it is usually found interwoven with the eschatologies that also became common during this time. With the restoration of the New Jerusalem, the dead would be raised to share in its glory, not in some higher spiritual plane (it seems) but right here on Earth. More to the point, the dead would be physically raised - that is, they would be resurrected to walk the Earth in physical bodies much like their old ones. Did such beliefs concerning the afterlife carry-over into early Christianity, or did expectations change in the post-easter period?

Responding to the Corinthians, who were apparently concerned that the dead would not get to see the coming Kingdom of God, Paul assures them:

1 Corinthians 15:12-20:

Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.

Note firstly that this passage (and others in Paul's letters) refer to this resurrection of the dead as a future event, as something that will happen at a singular and definitive moment in history (namely when "the trumpet will sound" 1 Cor 15:52), and also that such happenings were not yet current at the time of writing (though the resurrection of Jesus was the sign that such an event was imminent). The idea of a resurrected soul at the moment of death (which is what the current Christian understanding of the afterlife amounts to) has not yet entered the zeitgeist of Christianity, and won't for quite some time yet. In any case, quite how we should understand an expression like "resurrection of the dead" in Paul's writings is open to debate, but he wrote extensively enough on the subject for us to hazard some timid assumptions. The first and most important is to explore what the nature of this "resurrection" really was, and if it differed in any substantial way from the Jewish beliefs that preceded it.

Paul says to the Corinthians that the dead will be raised into "spiritual bodies" (1 Cor 15:42-44), but a contrast with Paul's other writings tells us that such a belief was not necessarily normative in Paul's writings, let alone among other early Christians. It is true that Paul believed the resurrected body would not be identical to the earthly body (i.e. it will be "transformed" at this moment - Phil. 3:21), but he also makes it quite clear that the resurrection will involve the "mortal body" (Rom 8:11). This is consistent with his wider belief that the resurrection of Jesus marked a fundamental turning point in history, and that everything to come would be fundamentally "renewed" through God's grace (e.g. 2 Cor 4:16-17). So although we repeatedly find tension in Paul's writings between "the spirit" (pneuma) and "the flesh" (sarx), we shouldn't assume that Paul held a kind of Platonic dualism, where the immortal "spirit" and the perishable "body" were held as strictly demarcated entities. Paul was moved to write the above passage in response to the skepticism of the Corinthians ("how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?") who shared more typically Greek conceptions of immortality - if Paul believed that Greek philosophy was right to scorn the prospect of bodily resurrection in favour of the immortality of "the spirit" then he would have indicated so here. That this passage exists is proof enough that Paul (and so, presumably, other early Christians) generally believed in a bodily resurrection and were motivated to defend it against the charges of its more stubbornly Hellenic adherents.

This idea of a "physical" resurrection is more clearly demonstrated among the writing that would later become the New Testament corpus. The empty-tomb tradition and the subsequent appearence of Jesus in his physical, still wounded body (cf. Jn 20:25-28) seems to indicate as much, as well as other similar scattered passages that clearly refer to the physical resurrection of the dead in the NT (e.g. Mt 27:52-53). The upshot of all this is that while in late-2nd Temple Judaism and early Christianity we have unequivocal signs of a belief in an afterlife, it's still not one recognisable to modern Christian theology. Souls aren't floating gently up to heaven in this scenario, rather the dead are expected to literally be revived to once more walk the Earth.

Connected to the belief in the resurrection of the dead was the belief in some future involvement of God here on Earth that would radically and eternally transform it to make such a development possible. Such beliefs can only be termed "eschatological" and it was such eschatological beliefs that informed new understandings of heaven among the early Christians. As I have said in earlier posts, Jesus (and his later followers) seem to have believed in a future state where the Kingdom of God would be literally implemented on Earth and it was in this future reality (still part of the world, though a drastically transformed one) that eternal life might be possible, though - again - the mechanics and terminology of this event seem a little confused. Can we so easily equate "Kingdom of God" with "Heaven" with "Kingdom of Heaven"? Will heaven come down to us (the Synoptics?) or will we be raised to heaven (Paul and Hebrews)? Such questions defy easy answers, and it makes it difficult to talk about what the precise beliefs of the first Christians were with respect to heaven and life after death with much confidence.

A further confusing factor is the influence of Hellenistic philosophy and how it may have influenced early beliefs over and against those of Judaism. Paul, the earliest surviving Christian writer, seems to have been influenced by Hellanistic philosophy on these matters to at least some extent (e.g. his reference to a "third heaven" - 2 Cor 12:2 - appears to be derived from Platonic schemata of the heavenly realm) but it's not clear what significance we can draw from such observations. As mentioned earlier, Paul plainly doesn't subscribe to the wider Greek philosophy concerning the eternal nature of "the soul". One important Hellanistic influence on early Christianity, however, seems to be the notion of hades - the Greek underworld - most commonly translated as "Hell". This, obviously, was a fiery place of torment where the souls of the unrighteous were fated to go, though I'm not sure if it's clear how or why such a concept was incorporated so early into the Christian tradition (it is regularly mentioned in the Synoptic Gospels though not - perhaps tellingly - in either Paul's letters or in gJohn). Can such a belief be traced back to Jesus?

Probably not directly. Familiarity with Hades and a willingness to incorporate it into one's world-view would have required a familiarity with Greek philosophy that probably would not have been accessible to a marginal Jewish peasant like Jesus. Likely it was something invoked by the Synoptic Gospel authors to better illustrate to their gentile readers a concept that Jesus likely did talk about in his time - that of Gehenna (e.g. Mk 9:43-48 etc.). Now exactly how this term was understood in Jesus' day is still being debated, but it bears emphasising that it was a real location, situated in a valley outside the boundaries of Jerusalem, that was associated with Pagan sacrifice and the burning of dead criminals (i.e. those who had died in sin). If we presume that Jesus had similar understanding of this place, then we can (with some caution) speculate that Jesus believed that this was the destination for those who were not fit to inherit the Kindgom of God. In other words when the Kindgom of God was to be implemented on Earth (in the form of a "New Jerusalem"? cf. Rev 21:2) those who had lived up to God's expectations would be admitted, but those who didn't would be consigned to Gehenna to burn. However, even if such an interpretation portrays accurately the beliefs of Jesus, we should note that Gehanna should be treated as a different place to that of Hades, and that it is misleading for modern English Bible translations to translate both terms as "hell". Our current understanding of hell would almost certainly seem foreign to Jesus and other Jews of his day.

So, to recap, modern Christian understandings of heaven, hell and the afterlife in general are predominantly later developments, though they do have their seeds in the theology of the first century. The ambiguity of terms, mixed expectations of the authors and paucity of references in the NT, however, left plenty of flexibiltiy for later theologians to both re-interpret and embellish these early accounts with some degree of freedom, which they clearly have taken advantage of. If you want some clear insights into the nature of heaven, hell and the afterlife, though, then the Bible probably won't help you much.

The Historicity and Significance of the "Cleansing of the Temple" Episode

One of the most curious episodes from Jesus' life as depicted in the gospels is that of the "Cleansing of the Temple". This is one of the few narratives and biographical details to occur in all four gospels (Mk. 11:15-19, 27-33; Mt. 21:12-17, 23-27; Lk. 19:45-48, 20:1-8; Jn. 2:13-16) and also one of the few to depict Jesus in a violent and aggressive light, making it all the more worthy of our attention.

Though specifics of the incident differ between the gospels, the core of the story remains relatively consistent: Jesus and his followers travel to Jerusalem for Passover, enter the Temple (the centre of Jewish religious and commercial life at the time), accuse those present of being "thieves" and disrupt commercial activity by overturning the tables of merchants. For many, the story paints relatively simple moral message concerning the need to avoid the corrupting influence of money and to show due deference to that which is holy. For others - particularly in European churches since the middle-ages - the story could be set forth as an example of Jesus' denunciation of Jewish avarice and the gratuity of the old Jewish sacrificial system, rendered obsolete by Jesus' ultimate sacrifice. Both of these interpretations are a little anachronistic though, and both fail to cut to the likely historical context of the incident. Before we turn to that question, though, we must pose a more immediate one: did this episode actually occur?

On the balance of probability I'd say this event was likely historical, even though I wouldn't be moved to place it among the most "certain" facts we have concerning Jesus (his birth and early mission in Gallilee, his crucifixion in Jerusalem etc.). Good cases have been made both for and against its historicity.

On the positive side:

• The event is attested by multiple sources, including all four canonical gospels. There is also a strong tradition both within the NT (gospels and Acts) and in external literature (Gospel of Thomas etc.) linking Jesus to provocative sayings and deeds concerning the Temple. Such a well-attested theme must have had begun somewhere, and a memorable event like this would be as good a starting point as any.
  
• The event explains why Jesus may have been targeted by both Jewish and Roman officials during his ministry, and why he eventually came to be executed (the fifth of J.P. Meier's "Criteria for the Historicity of Jesus". Trashing the Temple - the most sacred and important site in Judaism at the time - would certainly have raised the ire of Jewish officialdom and probably would have been viewed as valid grounds for the pacifying intervention of the Roman authorities.
  
• The event could be seen as embarrassing or provocative to the proto-Orthodox Christians, who were - remember - attempting to "convert" (for want of a better word) Jews in the Palestinian area. The Gospels were penned shortly after the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE (a singularly traumatic event in the history of Judaism), and the claim that Jesus was earlier involved in its ransacking would not have served as a terribly effective apologia. Similarly, the claim would not have done much to win the confidence of those who already viewed Christ's execution (and thus his criminality) as a "stumbling-block" or "foolishness" (1 Cor 1:23). The gospels go to great length at times to downplay Jesus' ultimate culpability in the crimes for which he was killed, and this episode (where Jesus clearly engages in "criminal" activity) does much to undermine this message. In short, there is no clear motivation for the authors of the gospels to have "invented" this story if there wasn't some clear memory of an actual historical event.

On the negative:

• Although it is cited in all four gospels, the details of the incident in the latter three gospels all appear to be drawn almost entirely from the account in gMark. None of the later gospels include any credible detail not mentioned by Mark, which indicates that there were no "parallel" or external traditions for these authors to draw on. In other words, what at first glance appears to be a reliable, multiply attested tradition may in fact just a single tradition derived almost entirely from gMark.
  
• The episode may be recapitulating OT prophecy, and may therefore have been created as a means of portraying Jesus as somehow fulfilling said prophecy. In the text of gMark (and consequently gMatthew and gLuke) Jesus cites Jeremiah 7:11 in denouncing the Temple as having become a "den of theives" (Mk 11:17). Jeremiah is significant in that it also depicts YHWH as driving his believers from the Temple (Jer 7:15) which means the narrative follows the same trajectory as that in gMark (Temple condemned as "den of theives", all are "cast out"). Jeremiah also contains allusions to "rotten figs" (Jer 24:3,8; 29:17 etc.) which must surely remind us of the peculiar fig-tree incident that Mark prefigures the Temple cleaning event with (Mk 11:12-14). In other words, could it be that Mark has just invented these events (the cursing of the fig-tree and the Temple cleansing) to link Jesus with OT prophecy?
  
  (The alternative explanation would be the Mark simply used OT prophecy to whitewash, or contextualise, an otherwise unsavoury event in the ministry of Jesus. It was clear that the gospel authors used OT prophecy to explain events in Jesus life, even resorting (it seems) to inventing prophecy where no suitable prophecy could be found (cf. Mt 2:23). John, for instance, makes no reference to Jeremiah (neither the fig-tree nor the "den of theives" line), so is it possible that an independent tradition of the incident - one seemingly divorced from OT prophecy - circulated, that would lend greater credence to its historicity? Or has John just expurgated Mark's account to remove its "Jewishness", in keeping with his theological interests elsewhere in his gospel? Such competing ideas are difficult to assess reliably.)

So clearly the historicity of the Temple Cleansing incident is contested, which makes it difficult to make definitive historical claims about it with any confidence. If, however, we proceed with the assumption that it did happen (as I take to be the most probable assumption) we can then ask the pressing question as to why it happened. What was Jesus' motivation here? What message was he trying to send and to whom? The chronology presented in the Gospel of Mark - if it is accurate - may give us a clue.

Where the incident has been depicted in contemporary Christian film and literature, it is usually presented as a hot-headed act of passion: an otherwise placid and irenic man is driven to violence by the tragic sight of his holy Temple overrun with avaricious merchants. The evidence from gMark, however, points to something different. We are told that Jesus actually entered the Temple the day before and "looked around at everything" (Mk 11:11) before returning the next day to "overturn the tables" (v.15) and "teach" (v.17). The fact that the act succeeded is also an indication that it must have taken some degree of planning or forethought. The Temple complex was a seat of Roman power as much as it was Jewish, and during the often febrile atmosphere of the Passover holiday it must have been crawling with Roman guards ready to intervene at the first sign of trouble. The ability to cause such a memorable raucous there would surely have required group co-ordination: an individual acting impulsively would surely not have had the time or the power necessary to "drive out" merchants (v. 15) or the carry out an embargo on goods being carried through the Temple (v. 16) (to say nothing of his "teaching" there!).

Presuming this account contains kernels of genuinely remembered history, we cannot possibly classify the incident as an act of mere hot-headedness; a "crime of passion". We must - rather - view it as a deliberate and pre-meditated act: in short, as a political statement. The gospel authors (and subsequent generations of Christians, for that matter) were motivated to de-politicise the actions of Jesus in order to make his ministry more palatable to Gentiles within the Roman Empire, and - indeed - to avoid unwanted attention from the Empire itself, which may explain why Mark is hesitant to avoid any implication that Jesus had a wider political intention here. However, if this was a deliberate political statement, what could it mean? What was he protesting against?

The most obvious solution - that he was simply angered by the presence of merchants making a profit in a holy place - doesn't really square with the facts. The merchants played an important role in the day-to-day running of the Temple, by supplying pious pilgrims with the offerings they wished to give there (the money lenders would exchange foreign currency for the Hebrew shekels, the form of payment that all adult males were required to make there). They were not in the Temple proper, and there is little indication that their role was ever otherwise the subject of moral scrutiny. As J.D. Crossan points out, Jesus' line about "den of robbers" doesn't square particularly well with the idea that Jesus was angered by their role in the Temple either, as he doesn't seem to be accusing them of thieving at that moment: a "den of thieves" is where thieves would retreat and hide, after all, not where they would do the actual thieving!

Given that - and this is now my speculation more than anything else - Jesus was making a statement to the Jewish priestly class who were in charge of the operation of the Temple (especially the Sadducees), who were closely allied with the Romans and who abused this position of power to collaborate in the dispossession of the already impoverished classes of Judea and its surrounding areas. From the beginning, Jesus centred his ministry on concern for the poor and regularly denounced the accumulation of wealth ("Blessed are you who are poor... But woe to you who are rich" - Lk 6:20,24) and the exploitation of the poor in the context of Temple offerings (which were often exorbitant) would have been an issue in keeping with his wider concerns. The ruling classes "hid" in their "den" (the Temple) and - from behind this veil of piety - were able to collude in the further disenfranchisement of an already marginal class. This also explains the focus in the narrative on the "dove sellers (e.g. Mk. 11:15) - doves were offered as sacrificial animals to the poor who were unable to afford more substantive animals to offer up.

It's difficult in providing such an explanation to avoid the impression that I'm retrojecting modern left-wing politics into an ancient problem, but it is simply impossible to read the message of Jesus in the gospels - moderated as it often is - and come away with anything other than the conclusion that his primary concern lay with the lot of the poor. Given that, in lieu of more obvious explanations, it makes sense to try to fit otherwise troubling, inexplicable incidents like this into his wider philosophy: the Temple incident was a political protest on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised.

Justice and Eschatology

There is no religious tradition that I am familiar with - certainly among the so-called "literate" religious traditions - that have not been forced to confront, in one sense or another, the problem of justice. There is, to begin with, the intimate relationship that always pertained between gods and the provision of "laws" in the ancient world. Whatever power was vested in the king was invariably justified on the basis of his unique connection to the gods, and whatever laws he enacted were said to have been delivered, with his mediation, by the gods. The link between God and the authority of Law (or, more generally, morality itself) has persisted in the Abrahamic traditions down to this very day.

More than simply acting as a legitimising conduit for legal authority, however, religions have also been forced to confront the problem of justice as it presents itself beyond the mere provision of laws. It has long been recognised, for example, that many evil people have prospered where good have suffered, thus originating the long-standing quandaries that exist at the heart of theodicy. The problem has been tackled in many different ways throughout history, though it must be said that modern resolutions to the problem of theodicy - which I will address shortly - took a long time to emerge. The earlier solutions were rather more "crude", if that is a fair judgement to impose, and reflect a vastly different view of humanity's relationship with the divine.

In the ancient world, gods were heavily anthropomorphic and believed to have motivations and failings almost indistinguishable from those of human beings. Initially in all religious traditions, Ernst Cassirer argues, the "gods" represented nothing more than the instantiation of ephemeral - yet deeply affecting - moments of "spontaneous feeling", that can be encountered in "every impression that man receives, every wish that stirs in him, every hope that lures him [and] every danger that threatens him"¹. In this there was no sensation - nor no physical object which may give rise to such a sensation - that could not have been treated as some manifestation of the divine. In such a way, as we find in the ancient Greek culture and many others, every feeling and every physical facet present within the human world could find itself deified. The next stage (Cassirer here is using Hermann Usener's tripartite scheme) involves the reification of these "momentary gods" into discrete, permanent entities, that are capable of persisting even in the absence of the phenomena which gave rise to them. It is in this stage that the gods were vested with (generally) human personalities, their essential characters furnished by rich sets of mythological histories and motivations. It is at this stage (that all literate religions traditions that I am familiar with have graduated to) that the gods could be worshipped and entreated as one might a king. 
 
If the gods at this level of religious development were heavily anthropomorphic, it should come as no surprise that their basic motivations and behaviours were - by modern standards at least - relatively base and capricious. The favour of the gods could generally be one with the provision of ritual sacrifices, which were not merely symbolic but rather genuine gifts to be consumed by the deity in question (even the OT God consumed the burnt sacrifices in the form of their "pleasing odour" - see Numbers 28 etc.). The gods, in their turn, could react to this human supplication by visiting various favours or abominations upon the worshippers depending on how well the rituals were performed. Note, though, that for all the caprice that could be shown by the ancient gods in their disposition towards human beings, it was invariably assumed that the visitation of divine intervention - for good or for bad - was somehow conditional on the behaviour of human beings. Proper conduct before the gods would deliver blessings, improper conduct would deliver curses. This rather prosaic formula was never questioned, certainly not in terms of the reasonableness or otherwise of the divine requests. If calamity struck, it must have - in some sense - been the fault of those in the community who had failed in their duty towards the relevant gods. 

This is brought into particularly sharp focus in the treatment of theodicy in the the early Old Testament texts. The theodicy of the Book of Kings for example - and other such Deuteronomic texts - was predicated entirely on the basis of Israel's faithfulness to Yahweh. Where they had approached him with due deference, and not provoked his jealousy through the worship of other gods, they prospered. Where they had abandoned this single, overriding duty, Yahweh in his wrath saw fit to use his power - via the intermediary of foreign powers - to visit wanton destruction on all the land. Even where the course of history failed to fit this rather simple pattern, the author(s) of Kings simply explained it in terms of deferred punishment for earlier crimes (e.g. 2 Kings 24:26). For the Judahites in the 7th century, then, the logic of divine justice was rather simple: obedience and unwavering deference to the will of Yahweh was the path to prosperity, all other paths led to ruin.

This simple logic was, however, severely undermined by the Babylonian invasion of the early 6th century, less than three decades after Josiah first launched his religious reforms. If the Judahites had done everything within their power to abolish the shrines and places of worship devoted to other gods, then why had Yahweh seen fit to launch the armies of Babylon against them? What more could they have done? The questioning of divine justice appears prominently in the Biblical texts here for the first time, especially in the books of Ezekiel and Lamentations. There was the very real sense of anguish in these texts that Yahweh had acted in a distinctly unjust way, in plain contradistinction to the pliant and dutiful acceptance of divine whim in the earlier texts. For some authors (for example, the second Deuteronomist) the theology needn't be amended: as mentioned above, the horrors visited upon the Judahites were merely a sign of deferred punishment for the sins of earlier generations. For other authors, however, this explanation would not suffice and they were drawn increasingly to explanations outside of the Hebrew tradition to explain the otherwise gratuitous nature of the injustices they had suffered.

It is the period after the Babylonian exile that gave us much of the so-called "Wisdom" literature in the Bible. Although much of this literature plainly sees itself as forming a continuum with earlier Yahwistic traditions (e.g. those of the Torah), it is also clear that the wider Wisdom tradition from which it emerged had a rather more international origin, and that Wisdom philosophies could be readily found in most near-Eastern cultures at the time. Rejecting - at least in part - the preceding cosmology of conflicting, parochial, anthropomorphic gods who were entirely constrained to very specific regions and / or duties, Wisdom philosophies took a rather more secular attitude towards the world. They searched for universal truths and rationales, largely detached from any specific theological premises. The rational order of the of the world - including the order of justice - could now be explored in ways obviating the need for officially sanctioned religious practice.

It was this search for such truths - in the context of divine justice - that gave us, for example, the Book of Job, a fairly sophisticated and honest look at the problem of evil. In contrast to earlier texts - and the theologies that were previously typical to the near-East - Yahweh is no longer an anthropic figure who can be assuaged by mere ritual or sacrifice, but rather a transcendent and eternal figure, for whom the struggles of human existence are comparatively trivial. That is not to say that Yahweh existed entirely beyond or outside of the everyday struggles of humanity, but rather that the human relationship to the divine needed to be completely rethought. Yahweh, suddenly, existed on a plane of time and space which absented him from the possibility of direct and immediate entreaty (in the form of sacrifice etc.) and who must now be approached with rather a longer view in mind. Whatever misfortunes may befall you from day to day, the Book of Job seems to say, keep it in perspective: in terms of the eternally transcendent nature of the deity with whom you wish to maintain a relationship, your daily troubles do not count for much. It is at this point that we start to get a clear indication of a belief in the afterlife in Hebrew literature and the conterminous belief that one's relationship was Yahweh could extend beyond the limits of the here and now. That is, whatever injustices that might be meted out over human time scales could surely be rectified over divine time scales. Psalm 49:15 and Job 19:25-26 are good indications of this kind of belief first emerging.

With time, these rather vague and half-formed intuitions of the afterlife became reified into something far more specific. In the context of Judaism, we can evince the emergence of two related kinds of belief in the Hellenistic period between around 332 and 63 BC: namely, the belief in an imminent eschatology and the belief in bodily resurrection. Both were intimately related to conceptions of justice. The former was, from the outset, linked with prophecy and revelation, generally penned in the name of ancient prophets. The Book of Daniel and the Book of Enoch are good examples of this kind of genre. The eschatology in question was generally that of the imposition of a coming divine intervention that would effectively end (or cause a sharp break with) history. Sometimes this was imagined in purely heavenly terms, sometimes it was imagined as the definitive imposition of divine will on Earth. In either case, the eschaton would mark the cessation of the tyranny of the powerful on Earth: for the oppressed, the belief in a coming eschaton was essentially conceived as a future antidote to their powerlessness in the present. The evil of the powers that be would be finally and forever banished from the Earth, and those who remained would be granted the justice denied to them for so long.

A conterminous belief was that of bodily resurrection, which seems to have been occasioned largely by the Maccabean revolt in 166 BC, and presented in the Books of Maccabees. Those who participated in the revolt noted acutely the injustice of the fact that the slain - though offering everything to the cause - had not lived to see their revolution to its final fruition. Passages such as 2 Mc. 7:11 and 14:46 give clear indication of the belief that the bodies of those who had perished might be resurrected in the future by Yahweh. Note that such passages constitute the belief in a literal bodily resurrection: to the extent that one's bones persisted, it was not beyond the power of Yahweh to cover them once more with flesh. More importantly, though, this belief - as with the belief in a coming eschaton - was predicated by a belief in the injustice of the present world that would be rectified by Yahweh in the world to come. The Jews ceased believing in the possibility of Yahweh administering justice by intervening in history, and rather started to believe in the possibility of Yahweh administering justice by ending history.

While it's difficult to completely recapitulate the philosophy of Jesus with any confidence, it seems relatively clear that such eschatological beliefs - like John the Baptist before him - were central to his world view. The earliest Christian texts - the authentic letters of Paul, gMark and the putative Q Gospel - all have clearly identifiable eschatological emphases and it's difficult to make sense of the fervour of the early Christian community without the presence of the belief in a coming eschaton. For Jesus, it seems, the iniquities of his age (and there were a great many of those, to be sure) constituted the mere presaging of the coming "Kingdom of God". The current age was one dominated by evil, yet the future age would be one dominated by good. Hence, those who resisted the temptations of the current age (i.e. those who declined the trappings of wealth and power) would be those to profit most in the coming age. As Jesus himself was said to have put it, "who are first will be last, and the last will be first" (Mk. 10:31). In other words, the problems of injustice in the Kingdom of Man would soon be rectified in the coming Kingdom of God.

Resurrection held a similarly important place in the beliefs of the earliest Christians. For them the resurrection of Jesus was not a sign of his divinity and his uniquely divine constitution, but rather the "first fruits" (as Paul put it) of a more general resurrection to come: that is, even those who had died in the age of injustice would still be present to enjoy the "fruits" of the age of justice to come. The horrors of the present age - including the ongoing travails of Roman imperialism - would come to an end at the moment of the parousia, and the dead and living alike would be resurrected to heaven (1 Thess 4:17). As a consequence, calls towards forceful rebellion against the forces of Rome seem to have been completely absent from early Christianity, in contradistinction to other Jewish movement of the 1st century which often took on a more militant edge. Jesus, for example, is depicted as advocating the dutiful payment of tax to the Roman empire (Mk 12:13-17) despite the fact that the onerous Roman system of taxation frequently rendered Palestinian agriculturalists of the first century destitute. Paul, for his part, advocates "subject[ion] to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established" (Rom 13:1), ignoring the disenfranchisement that God's chosen people were experiencing under the imperial yoke. Whatever prospects existed at the time for the provision of justice were now entirely out of the hands of ordinary people, and had become entirely vested in the eschatological return of Jesus. 

As the parousia continued to be interminably delayed against all expectations, however, and the prophecies of the first generations of Christians predicting a return of the Lord before "some who are standing here... taste death" (Mt. 23:36) failed to be realised, a different theological tact was required. Already by the time we reach the Gospel of John, we witness an almost total de-emphasis of eschatological expectations among the early Christian communities and a corresponding rise in the belief of "eternal life". Borrowing heavily from Hellenistic conceptions of the immortality of the soul and the persistence of one's spirit after death, Christians came to abandon the more Jewish conception of bodily resurrection at some definite period in the future, and came rather to embrace the idea of a spiritual resurrection at the moment of death. Justice remained the sole domain of God, but now the judgement of the good and the wicked had been entirely removed from the earthly realm. Whatever prospects existed for justice would no longer be realised here at some historical moment Earth, but rather in the timeless realm of heaven. Such beliefs were to remain normative in Christianity, and would also emerge in Islam, where eschatological expections (such that they are) are now entirely confined to speculations concerning the nature of heaven and hell: the concept justice in these faiths must now be considered to exist completely outside the earthly realm.

Note, then, the progressive abstraction of justice in the history of the Abrahamic faiths. The theology which originated as a means of explaining earthly injustice has been entirely translated to idle speculations concerning the nature of alternative worlds. God's justice is no longer to be expected in this world, but rather at the moment of some timeless, dimensionless eschaton that we may only enter upon death. While this view in some ways delays the problems of theodicy (in the sense that apparent injustices will eventually be righted on a long enough time scale) it invokes a sense of justice that is far too attenuated to be of any value to us in this life, in this universe. Where injustice exists, the idea that such injustices will be addressed by God on some different metaphysical plain at some point in the indefinite, atemporal future can surely offer us little consolation. In any case, such eschatological beliefs overlook the very real fact that we can already construct the future direction of the universe and what will happen to us when we die, and that such constructions leave very little room for Gods or heavens.

Upon death, of course, our body will decay. The elements in our body will be broken down and reused in other living organisms. We can expect such a process, such a recycling of the elements of life, to continue for at least a billion years after we leave this planet. By this time, the growing, slowly dying sun will be 10% hotter than at present, potentially triggering a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth and transforming it into a hellish sister planet of Venus. Whether or not life is capable of existing on Earth by then, within 5-7 billion years the sun will have ballooned into a red giant, engulfing Venus and Mercury and extending its diameter all the way to the orbit of the Earth. By the time it explodes, the sun will have already transformed the Earth into a barren, unimaginably hot world, drowning in molten metal. During this time, our galaxy will have collided with the nearby Andromeda galaxy, potentially banishing what is left of our solar system to the obscure fringes of our galaxy's mighty arms.

Within one trillion years, the galaxies in our local super cluster will likely converge, forming in the process a super-galaxy. Within two trillion years, as the universe expands ever faster, all galaxies outside our local cluster will move away from us at ever faster speeds until the point they start to recede at such speeds that they become red-shifted beyond any possibility of detection. Ours will then be an island universe: any future observers will have no way of knowing that other galaxies exist beyond their own. For the next 100 trillion years, star formation will proceed as normal, until the point at which all the available stellar fuel is used up. The bigger, brighter, more spectacular stars will be the first to become absent from the universe, their cooling cores - the white dwarfs - the only remaining evidence of their existence. Eventually even the small, stable red dwarfs will dwindle out of existence, and nothing material will be left in our galaxy beyond the cold, black ashes of once brilliantly burning stars. Eventually even the ashes will decay, with atomic nuclei breaking apart and eventually even the protons themselves decaying into a weakly interacting soup of photons and leptons. About 10¹⁰⁰ years from now, no matter will exist in the universe at all, whatever energy is left will be entirely bound up in photons, neutrinos and leptons, all rushing past each other at the speed of light, completely oblivious to each other. Here the universe will reach heat death, with all signs that there was ever a universe of such beauty and complexity as the one we see around us today will be completely lost forever. We are bound to return to the formless void from which we sprang.

It may sound grim, but this is the only future - the only eschaton - on which we can reliably pin our. For all the religious speculation on the topic, we now know through scientific investigation the fate to which we are all careering. In this bleak scenario, even concerns of justice reach their ultimate apotheosis. For here, in this cold, undifferentiated, inexorable soup - a fate which nothing and no-one can hope to escape - there exists no possibility of greatness or mediocrity, no possibility of good or evil. All shall forever be a single, undifferentiated unity and therein lies our prospects for eschatological justice: here, in the final equation, all shall be equal.

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1) Language and Myth, p. 18.

Is the Universe "Rational"?

It is a curious, surely not insignificant observation that the universe appears (or appears to appear) to us in a comprehensible way. Children, for example, prior to any specific instruction, are capable of discerning emotions on faces, finding patterns in numbers and predicting with admirable precision the path that a ball makes through the air. As an adult living in the 21st century, we can be similarly amazed by the extent to which our universe seems to make itself understandable enough to us for its behaviour to be expressed in the language of mathematics. It is difficult not to be taken in by the elegant efficiency of Newtonian laws, for example, which compress the behaviour of physical phenomena into a few simple formulae, each containing just a handful of variables. With such examples in mind, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the universe is ordered according to a rational plan, designed to obey laws amenable to human understanding. 

It is this conclusion, certainly, that many theologians would like us to reach. With all other avenues of "natural theology" blocked off by the march of scientific progress, the role of God in nature has since been resigned to the above observation: that the universe is, and could only ever be, the way it is due to the premeditated design of some rational creator. Superficially, the argument doesn't appear to be without merit: even some non-theistic scientists have marvelled at the fact that the universe is comprehensible to us to the extent that it is. There is no inherent reason for the universe to have made itself comprehensible to us, so we are right to find something remarkable in the fact that we can explain certain facets of the universe with such extreme precision and, what is more, that these explanations appear to be true for all places at all times. Is this necessarily a sign that the universe is inherently rational, though?

One trouble with using the word "laws" to explain the behaviour of the universe is that we've inadvertently introduced an anthropic concept to explain otherwise inert, purposeless objects and events. A "law", of course, is something that is designed with forethought to control or modify the behaviour of people in a society. When we use "law" to describe physical phenomena, then, we inadvertently smuggle in a package of unintended theological implications. If there are "laws", afterall, and physical phenomena obey these "laws", then that immediately implies the existence of a law-maker who intended to control or modify the physical phenomena to facilitate the development of some teleological end. This a consequence of the poverty of the current terminology, and in lieu of replacing such terms with more teleologically neutral language, we must instead endeavour to explore why the "laws" of the universe are not the kind of "laws" that necessitate a law-maker.

The first observation to make is that all physical laws have necessarily been designed by human beings. The universe did not appear to us with any kind of comprehensible blueprint, so whatever regularities we observe in the universe have had to be mined from nature through years of dedicated observation and number-crunching. That is, if the "laws" of nature are presently clear, comprehensible and rational to us, they certainly weren't to the ancients, who were no less intelligent or perceptive than we are. So let us be clear on this: it is we who superimpose our "laws" onto the phenomena we observe in the universe, not the universe which imposes its inherently rational nature onto our consciousness. An example used by Stephen Hawking is to imagine the kind of laws a goldfish might create to explain his world from the confines of its bowl. It could (were it sufficiently clever) certainly invent some rules that were true from its vantage point (which would include the refraction of light as it hit the fishbowl, hence why the universe would appear to be inherently curved to the fish) but that these rules plainly wouldn't be universal for the simple reason that they probably would not be applicable to those who live beyond the confines of a fishbowl. Hawking uses this example to posit the idea that "there is no theory-independent concept of reality".¹ This is not to say that all attempts at an objective explanation of universal phenomena are futile, or that we should all collapse into solipsistic despair as prisoners of our own mind with no possibility of ever accessing "true" reality, but simply that all the physical "laws" we create are necessarily mere "approximations" of reality that constitute our attempts at imposing rationality upon nature, rather than the discernment of rationality in nature itself. This is why scientific theories can be supplanted despite never really being shown to be wrong (or definitively right): the latter theory simply constitutes a better approximation of reality than the one which preceded it.

Allow me to illustrate with an example, shamelessly cribbed from Isaac Asimov's Essay, The Relativity of Wrong. For most people in the ancient world, it was accepted wisdom that the world was flat. For the first several thousand years of human existence, people had no way of knowing that they actually lived upon the surface of a three dimensional sphere. We may smirk now at their naivete, but in truth they weren't far wrong. At the human scale, the curvature of the earth is extremely slight, almost exactly zero. When building a house or undertaking a car journey we can safely disregard the curvature of the Earth entirely: that is to say, to treat it as though it were flat and two-dimensional. We know now that the Earth is not flat, of course, but for most human endeavours, if we proceed under the assumption that it is, then we will not be penalised for it. In a purely pragmatic sense, the flat Earth theory is correct enough to correctly guide us upon the undertaking of most everyday activities.

Next it was realised that the Earth was actually three-dimensional in shape, and that if one started walking in one direction that one would eventually return to the point at which one started, rather than falling of the edge of the Earth. It was therefore presumed that the Earth was spherical in shape, a misapprehension shared by most people down to this very day. For although it is true that the Earth closely resembles a sphere, due to the influence of centrifugal forces it is actually wider around the equator than it is from pole to pole. Thus, although the spherical Earth theory is more correct than the flat Earth which preceded it (more correct in the sense that it is able to make accurate predictions for a wider variety of phenomena) it still fails to accurately depict the state of nature so as to conform to our best, most precise observations. Though the story doesn't even end here: according to Asimov at least, there is actually slightly more mass in the Earth's southern hemisphere than in its northern hemisphere, thus making it ever so slightly pear-shaped. So note the progress here: each theory along the way has been correct on its own terms, in the sense that it can be used accurately as the basis for some action or prediction, though there is also a definite progression towards being more "correct. It is clear, for example, that spherical Earth theory is more correct than the flat Earth theory, the distended sphere theory is more correct than the sphere theory and so on. As our body of evidence grows and changes, earlier theories come to be displaced by theories that better fit the evidence.

Another example - perhaps more pertinent to the topic at hand - is the progression in our understanding of the movement of the planets. It is the elegant, almost metronomic order of planetary orbits that epitomise the theologians insistence that this rationally comprehensible universe could only be the product of some divine watchmaker. Indeed, the regularity of the planetary movements through the sky have long been used by religious authorities as evidence of divinity in the universe. For the ancients - including the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Mayans and so on - the planets themselves were gods, their daily wandering across the sky associated with the personalities of the divine. Venus, for example, was commonly linked to gods of love and fertility in the ancient world. Again, it may be tempting to snigger at such naivete, but when we consider that the appearance cycle of Venus (the period during which it is visible in the night sky) occurs in periods of around 260 days - almost exactly the same period a human pregnancy takes - we can begin to see that the connection makes sense. In fact, doubtless the ancient Mayan theologians would have tried to tell us that the universe must be rationally ordered to some divine plan, because the simultaneity of the human reproduction cycle and the cycle of the fertility God in the sky is simply too perfect to be the result of mere chance or coincidence. Furthermore, the astrological tables drawn up by these ancient cultures could still be used today to predict the future positions of planets in the sky. Within the social context that they lived, the astrological "theories" the ancients proffered concerning the movement of the planets in the sky were perfectly rational and perfectly consistent with the data that they had so assiduously collated.

Next came the Greeks, who believed - for theological reasons as much as for scientific ones - that the universe must be ordered to according to perfect geometric principles, expressible in simple mathematical formulae. Ptolemy, rejecting the crass arbitrariness of astrological tables, took it upon himself to find some universal order in the movement of the planets during the sky, some pattern expressible in the perfect language of geometry. His solution was a geocentric model comprised of nested spheres and epicycles, based, he claimed, on over 800 years of observations. The model he proposed was in some sense an improvement on what came before it, and like the astrological tables of the ancients, we could still use Ptolemy's model today to predict the movement of planets relatively accurately for a period of at least some months or years (the accuracy of the more distant, slower moving planets would hold for longer than those of the inner planets, particularly Mercury, whose orbit wasn't well understood until the 20th century).

The next major development came with Nicolaus Copernicus who was the first to develop a heliocentric model of the solar system, and while again we can view it is an improvement over what came before it due to its correct placement of the sun at the centre of the solar system, it still contained a fatal inaccuracy that limited the long-term scope of its predictive powers. Like the Greeks before him, Copernicus believed that the universe must be order according to some perfect schema, namely one based on perfect circles. As the planets actually revolve along elliptic orbits, it wasn't until Isaac Newton elucidated his laws for the movement of the planets in his masterful Principia Mathematica that we had a relatively accurate depiction of our solar system that could be used to predict and explain the movement of the planets over a long period of time. In fact, Newton's theories proved to be so accurate that they are still used today to navigate spacecraft over a distance of millions of kilometres to within an astronomical hair's width of their intended target. In time, however, it was recognised that even Newton's theories fail under particularly extreme circumstances - e.g. in situations involving very high speeds or masses. Newtonian physics therefore came to be replaced by Einsteinian Relativity at the beginning of the 20th century, and even that may not mark the end of our story: the fundamental incompatibility of quantum mechanics and relativity (despite each proving to be powerfully accurate in their own fields of application) hints strongly at the need for the development of some newer theory, of which string theory is just one of the potential candidates.

So again note the development here: at each stage in the understanding of the shape of our planet or the behaviour of bodies in our solar system, human beings have been able to devise seemingly "rational" theories to explain the available observations, and all of the aforementioned were capable of making accurate predictions concerning future events. We must, however, be careful not to presume that our ability to express the patterns of physical behaviour in "rational" terms says anything about the inherent rationality of the universe. The ancient Babylonians could say, with some justification, that the universe must be inherently rational because the fertility god represented by the planet Venus was born and killed with such regularity (one which parallels the human reproductive cycle) that it could only be the work of a divine presence in the world. However, we moderns would be similarly justified in baulking at the suggestion that the explanation proffered by the Mayans could give us any genuine insight into the rational order (or lack thereof) of our universe, as we now know that any correlation between the heavenly cycles of Venus and the human reproductive cycle are entirely coincidental and share no causal relationship. Perhaps, then, our descendants will look back on our curious proclivity to try to explain such complex phenomena in the form of simple, rarefied mathematical language in the same disdainful way that we look back on the proclivity of the ancients to explain such complex phenomena in the form of dying and rising gods. That we are capable of making the universe rationally comprehensible to ourselves is indeed a remarkable achievement, without which our modern world would have proved unrealisable, but we must make sure that our wonder is directed at just that fact - that is, that we can make the universe rationally comprehensible, not that the universe is rational in and of itself.

On this latter point, again we might do well to return to Newton. The simple, elegant laws he devised were - after an initial period of resistance - eventually employed by theologians as evidence for the fact that the universe must be run like clockwork; so ordered and intricate in its construction that it would be literally impossible for it to have come into being without pre-ordained instruction from some all-powerful watchmaker. The argument continues to be used with great regularity among modern theologians, though the sense of awe has been expanded beyond the periodic movement of the planets to deeper cosmological facts (such as the value of the cosmological constant and other physical values) that, frankly, they are not qualified to ruminate upon quite so casually. In any case, the wonderment they express is entirely backwards: these "values" and their relationship to one another were not rationally programmed into the universe, just waiting for some perceptive scientist to reverse engineer them, but rather had to be created and elucidated by these same preceptive minds. Newton didn't simply discern some obvious mathematical relationship governing the movement of bodies in the solar system, he actually had to invent some new method by which he could create some laws. When the existing body of mathematical logic failed to help him in his quest to "uncover" the rational basis of the movement of heavenly bodies, he was actually forced to create an entirely new form of mathematics (calculus) in order to make this movement rationally expressible. In other words, there is nothing about the universe (at least in this case) that makes it inherently amenable to human logic. Where the universe doesn't make itself amenable to human reason in an immediately obvious way, we just happen to have been clever enough on occasion (or, rather, certain pre-eminent members of our species have been clever enough) to devise a new form of logic in which the observed relationships and regularities can be expressed.

And this is something that we are coming to appreciate ever more deeply: the universe does seem to be, in a very fundamental sense, operating on principles that are at best counter-intuitive to human beings, or - perhaps more accurately - deeply and inexorably irrational in nature. In one way, we should expect that world around us - that is, the everyday world, divorced from the loftier concerns of theology - be, in some sense, rationally comprehensible. Our "folk-physics" - our innate ability to predict the flight of a ball in the air, for example - and our ability to express these predictions logically, do seem to be in such a state of consonance with nature which must surely must transcend mere coincidence. Our ability to track a ball through the air, predict its path and then to catch it in our outstretched hands is a feat beyond even the most advanced robots we have been able to develop, and it would be tempting to discern a divine teleology at work in this regard: Earthly physics are so rational - and our minds so rationally attuned to them - that it could again only be the result of divine forethought. While it would be correct to note that there is nothing "coincidental" about the consonance of  human rationality and the rationally discernible laws of Earthly physics, the explanation has nothing to do with the divine. We are the product of 4 billion years of evolution that has ruthlessly culled those whose understanding of their immediate environment was subpar: only those with a functional understanding of the physical world (e.g. that falling from a tall cliff would kill you) stood any chance of surviving to produce offspring. Our folk-physics have been slowly refined by this evolutionary process to help us navigate the world in which we live, each minor improvement in our innate understanding of the world being preserved down future generations. So yes there does seem to be a compatibility between our "logic" and the "logic" of physical events on Earth, but we needn't look for divine explanations: given our existence as physical beings and the relentless drive of evolutionary pressures, it simply could not have been any other way.

When we leave our immediate human world and begin to explore the nature of the universe on the smallest and largest scales, however, we find that our intuitive preconceptions about the nature of physical events very quickly cease to conform to reality. We expect the universe to adhere to certain "rules" concerning cause and effect (as Hume noted some three centuries ago) and for objects to adhere universally to rationally discernible principles. We now know, however, that the universe often fails to conform to our expectations in this regard. The most blatant examples can be drawn from the science of quantum physics, where the universe at the most fundamental level has shown itself to be irrational, indeterministic and completely irreconcilable with the expectations of our folk-physics. The completely random (and seemingly uncaused) appearance and disappearance of sub-atomic particles is not possible to square with the idea of a rationally apprehensible universe, as even a suitably well-informed observer (i.e. a god) would have no way of predicting exactly where or when a particle and it's anti-particle might come into existence. As a consequence, even the most mundane predictions concerning the behaviour of objects in the universe turn out to be mere probabilistic statements rather than inviolable natural laws. For example, we can take it for granted that I will not be able to walk through my wall were I to try, yet it turns out that this is merely a statement of probability: it actually isn't impossible for me to walk through my wall (i.e. it's not an inviolable "law" of the universe) it's just overwhelmingly unlikely.²

Such randomness and indeterminacy on the quantum scales may still credibly be dismissed as irrelevant by the believer in the rational universe, however. They may, for example, argue that even if the universe is predicated upon random and indeterminate factors, that on bigger scales determinate laws can still be discerned. That is to say, even if the location of an electron is entirely indeterminate, the location of large groups of electrons (for example, those in my body) appear to behave collectively in ways that are roughly deterministic. In other words, I could try to walk through my wall every day until the end of the universe and could reasonably expect to get the same result every time, which if not strictly an "inviolable law" of the universe surely constitutes the next best thing. Such an argument is problematic, though, because it fails to address the reality that the universe was formed at least in part by completely random factors that even a hypothetical being blessed with omniscience could not have predicted. While it may be true that it is not necessary to take quantum factors into account when presently addressing the orbital path of a planet, say, the argument breaks down when we examine the early history of the universe: at the very beginning, a fraction of a second after the big bang, the universe was still small enough for quantum effects to have a massive influence on the path that the evolution of the universe would take. We now know from our mapping of the early universe that these very early quantum jitters came to have a lasting influence on the shape of the universe, including (most likely) the distribution of matter that may have permitted the formation of galaxies. This prohibits the possibility of the current universe being created with genuine teleological foresight: there is no way that any being - omniscient or otherwise - could have predicted that the universe would emerge with the exact structure it presently has. If we rewound the clock to zero and started the universe again, we would end up with a universe very different from our present one, and this is due entirely to the influence of quantum randomness in the earliest fraction of a second of the universe's being. God may have rationally chosen to create a universe with quantum jitters, but he couldn't have rationally chosen to create a universe with human beings.

Even on bigger scales we find that probability plays a much higher role in the behaviour of matter than could have ever been envisaged by the classical, deterministic physics that the theologians seem to remain beholden to. The distribution of gas in a room, for example, can only really be probabilistically determined. We can take it is as something akin to a "law" that gas in an enclosed space (the air in a room, for example) will tend to distribute itself fairly evenly given enough time. That is, we should expect the air pressure and the distribution of molecules within such a space to be distributed relatively evenly from one cubic centimetre to the next. In actuality, though, there is no physical reason why the molecules of air couldn't find themselves confined only to one side of the room, for example, leaving the other half a complete vacuum. Such a bizarre eventuality wouldn't violate any physical principles, it would just be exceedingly unlikely (in the sense that there are far more ways for the air in a room to be evenly distributed than for the air in a room to be confined entirely to one half). So, even when we're talking about the behaviour of physical processes on scales far greater than that of the quantum level, we find that these process are often not governed by rationally discernible "laws" so much as they are governed by probabilities. Even on distinctly human scales, it seems that God enjoys playing dice.

But we can take such indeterminacy to even greater scales. When it comes to the belief of rationally discernible laws governing physical objects in the universe, there is surely no more elegant example than the aforementioned metronomic movement of planets around the sun. If nothing else in the universe could be said to obey rationally apprehensible laws, expressible in the elegant, efficient language of mathematics, then surely it could still at least be said about the "music of the spheres". In practice, however, when physicists attempt to quantify the gravitational relationship (and therefore the movement and periodicity of planetary orbits) between anything more than three bodies, the mathematics because ungainly and completely unworkable. This is known as the n-Body problem, which remains unsolved. So even here, with something as simple as the orbit of a spacecraft around the Earth, we lack the ability to rationally express or predict with any sort of exactitude the path the spacecraft will take. We could of course get a good approximation by taking into account only the effect of the gravity of the Earth on the spacecraft (and if such approximations weren't pretty close to reality then satellite technology would be entirely impossible) but such a method would only be an approximation of reality, because we have failed to take into account the gravitational influence of the sun and the moon into the equation. And the gist of the n-Body problem is that calculating the orbital path of a spacecraft around the Earth is fundamentally impossible with such precision, because we don't have the mathematical tools to calculate fully the gravitational relationship between all 4 bodies simultaneously.
 
And so we return to the point I wished to make at the beginning of this post: even where the universe appears to be obeying rational laws, we find that these "laws" are little more than approximations of reality (albeit very good ones) that cannot be treated as reflections of some deeper logic governing the behaviour of physical events in our universe. We will continue to find patterns and regularity in the universe - to do so is part of our nature as a species - and we will continue to create physical "laws" that approximate reality with ever greater precision, but we shouldn't suffer under the conceit that we are therefore "discovering" the laws the were programmed into the universe into the universe from its very beginning. On almost any scale we probe, the universe frequently shows us that it is under no obligation to conform to the expectations of human rationality. Perhaps we should just accept that - certainly at the most fundamental levels - the universe is an impenetrably irrational place.

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 1) The Grand Design, Chapter 3.

 2) This is a consequence of a phenomenon known as Quantum Tunnelling. Essentially, the precise location of an electron around an atomic nucleus can never be determined with exact precision - this is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle at work. As such the location of an electron can only be specified fuzzily - as a kind of "cloud" - governed by laws of probability. In principle, there is nothing preventing all of the electrons in your body to "jump", simultaneously, to a location on the other side of the wall, it would just take an unfathomable amount of time for such an event to occur.

"The Reason of Unreason" - José Ortega y Gasset and the Revolt of the Masses

In 1930, as Spain teetered on the cusp of fascism, José Ortega y Gasset penned one of his most famous works, The Revolt of the Masses. In approaching this work, we must be mindful of the historical context in which it was born. Spain, at this stage, was mired in an internal struggle for power that would culminate in civil war and the eventual triumph of fascist General Franco, who - with Nazi support - assumed power in 1939. When Ortega wrote this book, the horrors of Franco's regime still lay in the future, but the seeds of this regime - like all such fascisms, predicated on fear, ignorance and a rank form of nationalism - were already being sowed. The nation was crippled by divisions, with the population split into a wide plurality of irreconcilable factions. There were, on one side, the monarchists and Catholics. On the other, the socialists and communists. Many more were caught somewhere in the middle. I do not know for sure, but I imagine that the work in question was to a large extent a reaction to - and warning against - precisely these divisive, popularly led movements.

Reading the book now, we may be taken aback by the disdain Ortega heaps upon "masses", itself a term that even the most shamelessly haughty of us today would baulk at using. For Ortega, the "mass-man" emerges for the first time in the 20th century as a fulcrum of political power, and - as a consequence of his ignorance and his critical lack of preparedness to govern - threatens the very basis of civilization. This "mass-man" fails to understand the lessons of history - forever facing forwards, as he inevitably must, because he believes himself to be the apex of history - and he rejects the possibility of there existing an authority any higher than himself. The culmination of the mass-man's ascent to power lies in the emergence of what Ortega terms "hyperdemocracy", "in which the mass acts directly, outside the law, imposing its aspirations and its desires by means of material pressure". Mass-man, however, lacks the competence to run a state - such a job is presumably best left with the "artisans", as Ortega puts it - and this was the source of Ortega's angst: how could civilization persist in such unworthy hands?

In the largely egalitarian democracies in which we live today ("one man, one vote") such thoughts must strike us as repugnantly conceited, if not outright dangerous. Such open disdain for quotidian folk (I struggle to find a better euphemism for "masses") runs against our modern democratic principles, and one might find it quite easy to draw a direct line from such disdainful views to the eugenic mania of various mid 20th century ideologies. If we start isolating swathes of the population as being somehow below our contempt, then what logical reason do we retain to defend them from persecution or extermination? However, I must defend this work against such charges, since in referring to the "masses" Ortega makes it clear that he has in mind no specific race, class or creed: the overwhelming majority of us comprise this gormless, faceless "mass", so I take Ortega's work predominantly as a warning against "falling in with the herd" (to invoke an unsuitably trite idiom) rather than as the disparaging identification of an inherently defective class of people. To the extent that Ortega has a specific group in mind, it appears to the burgeoning bourgeoisie class, a group - then as now - that scarcely requires our dolorous coddling. 

Nonetheless, we exist in a political environment that - quite rightly, for the most part - discourages the gradation of human being into superior or inferior classes. That way, as the crimes of the 20th century still show us, leads to the greatest realisations of misery. The political zeitgeist of the current age is increasingly one of toleration, mutual respect and individual sovereignty - once again, we can count our blessings that it should be so. However, for all the unquestionable benefits of such politics, it also runs the risk of mistaking equality for crass undifferentiation: that, in a system where all should be granted equal political rights, that all political or social claims - and those who espouse them - deserve to be treated with completely undifferentiated and uncritical respect. Even in America - a supposed meritocracy of almost Darwinian degrees - the idea that every political opinion is as valid as the next one, has led to a kind of intellectual morass where the possibility of an honest, intellectual inquiry into the fitness of a given idea - particularly in the domain of mass media - has completely vanished.

Ortega puts it like this:

"The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. As they say in the United States: "to be different is to be indecent." The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated."

Now many Americans may baulk at the suggestion that "to be different is to be indecent" in the avowedly individualistic context of American politics, but I believe it rings true. The peculiarities of the US electoral system renders the possibility of a sizeable third-party presence completely moot, with the entire political dialogue in the country consequently entirely confined to that which is most electorally convenient to the two major parties. Issues that do not carry a clear electoral advantage to either of these parties are simply ignored or glossed over. I'm certainly not one to suggest that the two parties lack clear ideological differences as others might, but however unique they may be in constitution, the presence of only two major political voices clearly dilutes the potential for open and honest political dialogue.

In the first place, each party knows that it need only discredit the other party in order to win power - it needn't trouble itself selecting the best policies from a wide plurality of options, for example, which would be necessary if their primary objective were to govern effectively on behalf of the American people. Rather, it need only seek to scandalise the positions of the opposing party: if the other party finds itself discredited, the populace is left, after all, with only one alternative. The result is a ongoing process of acrimonious gainsaying, in which neither side is truly prepared to commit itself to any policies that might benefit the other electorally, completely irrespective of their merits. This process leads not to a confluence of positions between the two parties as many have suggested, but rather an increasing dichotomisation. For the first time, the most conservative Democratic congressman is more liberal than the most liberal Republican congressman, and this makes the possibility of compromise on any number of important issues increasingly low. There are several flow-on effects to this.

The first is that electoral politics is increasingly portrayed as a two-horse race, and that all media narratives must inevitably cohere to such a portrayal. This leads to an endless and evermore tedious cycle of promiscuous politicisation, where literally every event - no matter how insignificant - is pitched as yet another battle waged in the ongoing war between the blue and red teams. This leads us to further polarisation, where the supporters of each side believe quite sincerely that all the nation's woes can be attributed to the glaring sins of the opposite side. For their part, the media - fearful of losing 50% of their market - are increasingly apprehensive about reporting unambiguous facts that may be detrimental to one side, and therefore muddy every issue by unthinkingly - yet somehow meticulously - presenting the deliberately obfuscatory "spin" of both sides on every issue. The public are therefore starved of quality information, and - with the lack of any third party to keep the two major parties honest - the Republicans and Democrats find themselves receding further and further from reality into the safe, hermetically sealed discourse of partisan politics.

The increasing polarisation of American politics presents a second problem. With each party virtually guaranteed around 40% of the vote¹, that leaves both with the need to target their message with increasing specificity to the remaining 20%. Now despite what they might like to think about themselves, these unaffiliated 20% are generally not independent-minded people, heroically guarding their vote until a full, rational analysis of the respective party platforms has been completed, but rather low-information dolts who are capable of being swung to one side or the other for the most trivial of reasons. Since these are the people who decide elections one way or another, the level of political discourse is severely downgraded and the micro-targeting strategies of each of the major parties lead us to policies which yield nothing beyond the most asinine, populist pap. Now populism in itself is not necessarily something that should concern us (sometimes the best ideas also happen to be the most popular), but when the entire political process tends inexorably towards rank populism (because neither party can win power without this middling 20%) then we start to have the kind of problems that Ortega has warned us about.

Until now I have spoken as though both of the major parties deserve their share of blame for the current malaise in US political discourse, but I think such a portrayal would be disingenuous and just another example of the insidious need to render US politics as a two-horse race. Rather, when it comes to leading political discourse down into the sewers of rank, unthinking populism, the Republicans must clearly accept the lion's share of the blame. It has long been recognised that conservatives in the US have hitched their wagon to the forces of anti-intellectualism, forgoing open and honest policy debates in favour of the much more poisonous methods of the deliberately eristic and paranoid. Once you have completely abandoned the pretence of "facts" and "reason", your only justification now lies in the realm of the instinctive and the popular. To protect these justifications from the harsh light of reality, it becomes necessary to sacralise instinctive, populist politics by placing them beyond any possibility of rational reproach. This is achieved via the advancement of the notion that to reproach the political opinions of the "common man" on rational or empirical grounds is to engage in "elitism": the views of each man must be considered inherently valid and to dispute this claim is to violate the very basis of democracy. I think such a view - in and of itself - is rather cynical, but not necessarily pernicious. The trouble arises when "the masses" adopt it as a pseudo-religious mantra.

What we have now in the American populace is the idea that to simply have a political opinion carries with it its own justification, and that it needn't be justified any further to anyone. To believe in something, in a principled way, is inherently meritorious and that no-one has the right to disabuse one of that notion. This process culminates with Ortega's notion that "the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will": namely, everyone has the obligation to respect the intrusion of my "commonplace" opinion, no matter how ignorant or inapt it may be. All views are inherently valid, every man a qualified authority on that which he happens to be passionate.

Yet, to the extent he believes himself to lie beyond any possibility of reproach (what politician, after all, has ever won votes by telling him otherwise?), the "mass-man" can accept the authority of no-one beyond himself. The rejection of scientific and political authorities - under the banner of "freedom" - is a particular feature of modern Republicanism, though it happens to be one presaged by Ortega in the "mass-man" some 80 years ago:

"...the modern mass finds complete freedom as its natural, established condition, without any special cause for it. Nothing from outside incites it to recognise limits to itself and, consequently, to refer at all times to other authorities higher than itself... He is satisfied with himself exactly as he is. Ingenuously, without any need of being vain, as the most natural thing in the world, he will tend to consider and affirm as good everything he finds within himself: opinions, appetites, preferences, tastes. Why not, if, as we have seen, nothing and nobody force him to realise that he is... subject to many limitations..."

This arrogance, obdurate certainty and complete disdain for authority beyond himself leads the "mass-man" to a sickening degree of self-congratulatory selfishness. To the extent that he has found himself born into a comfortable position, he sees no need to protect and maintain the kind of structures - including strong government - that allowed him to be born into such privilege in the first place. The plight of future generations - or present generations born into quite different circumstances - should be left entirely to chance. The government - or any other organisation which challenges the quite gratuitous autonomy of the "mass-man" - must be challenged and rejected at every step. Consequently, the "mass-man" is "incapable of creating or conserving that very organisation [namely, the civilised state] which gives his life the fullness and contentedness on which he bases this assertion of his personality". Ortega continues:

"...the new masses find themselves in the presence of a prospect full of possibilities, and furthermore, quite secure, with everything ready to their hands, independent of any previous efforts on their part, just as we find the sun in the heavens without our hoisting it up on our shoulders. No human being thanks another for the air he breathes, for no one has produced the air for him; it belongs to the sum-total of what "is there," of which we say "it is natural," because it never fails. And these spoiled masses are unintelligent enough to believe that the material and social organisation, placed at their disposition like the air, is of the same origin., since apparently it never fails them, and is almost as perfect as the natural scheme of things."

It is for this reason - the complete lack of respect for or appreciation of social structures that took centuries to erect - that Ortega feels the "mass-man" threatens civilisation. The Republicans would be his modern-day equivalent. The demure capitulation of at least one of the major US political parties to this new "mass-man" and his abhorrent politics has left the entire political system impoverished, with all discourse now conducted in thrall of the lowest common denominator. The possibility of sensible, rational debate has been completely exhausted by a climate in which the populace have been pandered to and indulged to such a degree that they no longer have the capacity to recognise the limits of their wisdom. A child who is not used to being told "no" will not grow-up into a mature, thoughtful and considerate adult and that is the dilemma facing us today. The genie of simply untethered freedom (i.e. that which has been granted without any corresponding responsibilities) and entitlement has been taken from the bottle, and we may find it difficult to replace him. How can a child who has grown up to respect no authority beyond itself ever be told otherwise?

 So, what to do? What lessons can we draw from Ortega? I think that the most sage advice we can take from  Revolt of the Masses is the idea that there are such things as legitimate authority, and that we shouldn't be so hasty in sacrificing the need for such authority on the altar of democratic liberalism and tolerance. The events of the mid-20th century rightly made us wary of the dangers of unchecked political authority, but that doesn't mean we should race as far as possible in the other direction. There are people who understand the world far better than we, and we should have no qualms about ceding them at least some power to do what is right for us. If they are unsuccessful to this end, we retain the hard-won right to vote them out.

 Ultimately, mass populist movements, who respect no perspective beyond their own, need to be challenged, no matter how electorally inconvenient this might be. We need to abandon the idea that all opinions are equally valid and that all deserve to be listened to. We already do this when we marginalise those at the fringes of political discourse (the 9/11 Truthers, the Birthers etc.), we just need to be a little more discriminating. As far as the Republican Party is concerned, we can take some solace from the fact that the unthinking and unfeeling crassness of its electoral strategy is teetering, and has been rejected at the last two presidential elections. The reports of its impending death are surely exaggerated, though it is clear that they must start listening to the voices of a much more diverse electorate if they are to enjoy any future success. Perhaps they might start by reading this book, and recognising the inherent dangers of their current strategy of populist pandering and reactionary anti-statism.

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1) This partly has to do with brand recognition, and partly has to do with tribal politics. The "brand recognition" of the parties means, for instance, that the GOP is forever seen as the party of small government, despite all evidence to the contrary. So people will vote for the GOP as the small government party despite the massive debts run up by recent GOP administrations, their appalling records on civil liberties and so on. Petty tribalism is also a factor now. There are many people who will never vote for one of the parties - regardless of what policies they espouse - simply because they have been conditioned to hate that party in the current electoral climate. It is here that US politics, as much as anywhere else, begins to resemble a sport.