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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books A Short History of Ethics: a History of Moral Philosophy From the Homeric Age To the Twentieth Century CHAPTER 9: CHRISTIANITY “GOD CANNOT talk about anything but Himself.” Léon Bloy’s remark about the Bible is an important half-truth. The Bible is a story about God in which human beings appear as incidental characters.

That which is omitted by Bloy’s epigram is the rich foreground of tribal saga, Middle Eastern kingship, prophesying and ritual, eating, drinking, sex, and death, which constitute the incidents. But that these constitute only the foreground becomes obvious if we remove God from the story: for what is then left is a jumble of characters and events in which all connection is lost.

It is easy to underestimate this unity of the Bible; one way to bring out its importance is to reconsider some sociological theses about religion. Myths, as anthropologists tell us, exhibit social pattern and structure. Myth and ritual together provide a means whereby men can exhibit to themselves the forms of their collective life. If we ask the key question of a society, What is holy to whom, we shall lay bare the different norms that inform social life.

This is the thought that inspired Durkheim and his pupils in their work on religion, and especially on relatively primitive religion. It is a thought equally applicable to modern American religion, if we consider the way in which American religion acquired its hegemony by its key role in the work of imposing the norms of American homogeneity upon immigrant variety, and how, in filling this role, it transformed its own content.

But it is equally clearly a source of great misunderstanding, if we suppose that this kind of analysis could afford us an exhaustive understanding of religion in the case of those religions which outlast a single people or society. In such religions we find built up a set of beliefs and ways of behaving which become relatively independent of particular, specific forms of social life.

For this very reason we shall expect to find built into such religions enormous flexibility and adaptability with regard to behavior. We shall expect to discover a great capacity for coming to terms with quite different sets of moral standards in different times and places.