The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

As long as there’s no find, the noble brotherhood will last.
Woe, when the piles begin to grow!

—B. Traven,
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Caught between two eternities—the vanished past and the unknown future—we never cease to seek our bearings and our sense of direction. We inherit our legacy of the sciences and the arts—works of the great Discoverers and Creators, the Columbuses and Leonardos and Shakespeares—recounted in my two earlier volumes. We glory in their discoveries and creations. But we are
all
Seekers. We all want to know
why.
Man is the asking animal. And while the finding, the belief that we have found the Answer, can separate us and make us forget our humanity, it is the seeking that continues to bring us together, that makes and keeps us human. While this brief volume does not aim to survey the history of philosophy or of religion, it does sample ways of seeking by great philosophers and religious leaders in the West. This is a story not of finding but of seeking. I have chosen those Seekers who still speak most eloquently to me, and whose paths toward meaning in our lives and in our history still invite us on our personal quest.

Our Western culture has seen three grand epochs of seeking. First was the heroic Way of Prophets and Philosophers seeking salvation or truth from the God above or the reason within each of us. Then came an age of communal seeking, pursuing civilization in the liberal spirit, and then most recently an age of social sciences, when, oriented toward the future, man seems ruled by forces of history. We draw on all these ways in our personal search. They still speak to us, not so much for their answers as for their ways of asking the questions. In this long quest, Western culture has turned from seeking the end or purpose to seeking causes—from the Why to the How. Might this empty meaning from our human experience? Then how can we recapture and enrich our sense of purpose?

The plan of this volume as a whole is chronological. But in detail it has a shingle scheme. Each of the three books overlaps chronologically with its predecessor, as the story advances from antiquity to the present. This, too, is a story without end, as we continue to explore our humanity in the eternal Why. And we see how we have come from seeking meaning to finding meaning in the seeking.

AN ANCIENT HERITAGE

We have a common sky. A common firmament encompasses us. What matters it by what kind of learned theory each man looketh for the truth? There is no one way that will take us to so mighty a secret.

—SYMMACHUS, ON REPLACING THE STATUE OF VICTORY IN THE ROMAN FORUM, A.D. 384

Great Seekers never become obsolete. Their answers may be displaced, but the questions they posed remain. We inherit and are enriched by their ways of asking. The Hebrew prophets and the ancient Greek philosophers remain alive to challenge us. Their voices resound across the millennia with a power far out of proportion to their brief lives or the small communities where they lived. Christianity brought together their appeal to the God above and the reason within—into churches, monasteries, and universities that long survived their founders. These would guide, solace, and confine Seekers for the Western centuries.

THE WAY OF PROPHETS: A HIGHER AUTHORITY

When we do science, we are pantheists;
when we do poetry, we are polytheists;
when we moralize we are monotheists.

—GOETHE,
MAXIMS AND REFLECTIONS

From Seer to Prophet: Moses’ Test of Obedience

The future has always been the great treasure-house of meaning. People everywhere, dissatisfied with naked experience, have clothed the present with signs of things to come. They have found clues in the lives of sacrificial animals, in the flight of birds, in the movements of the planets, in their own dreams and sneezes. The saga of the prophets records efforts to cease being the victim of the gods’ whims by deciphering divine intentions in advance, toward becoming an independent self-conscious self, freely choosing beliefs.

The Mesopotamians experimented with ways to force from the present the secrets of the future. Diviners watched smoke curling up from burning incense, they interpreted the figures on clay dice to give a name to the coming year. They answered questions about the future by pouring oil into a bowl of water held on their lap and noting its movement on the surface or toward the rim.

The Hebrew scriptures leave traces of how they too sensed the divine intention, and gave today’s experience the iridescence of tomorrow. Jacob “dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. And behold, the Lord stood above it, and said, ‘I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac; the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed.’ ” And the chief priest used the
Urim
and
Thummim,
sacred stones carried in his breastplate. These gave the divine answer, by whether the “yes” or the “no” stone was first drawn out. David consulted just such an oracle, manipulated by the priest Abiathar, before going into battle against Saul. When the “yes” stone appeared, forecasting his victory over the Philistines, he advanced in battle.

“A man who is now called a ‘prophet’ (nabi),” we read in the Book of Samuel, “was formerly called a ‘seer.’ ” The “seer” was one who saw the future, and his influence came from his power to predict. The priest-predictor who admitted his clients into the intentions of the gods was held in awe when his predictions came true. The prophet had a different kind of power. He was a
nabi
(“proclaimer” or “announcer”) and spoke with the awesome authority of God himself. So, the ancient Hebrew prophets opened the way to belief. “I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, . . .” declared the Lord, “and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him” (Deuteronomy 18:18). They used the words “mouth” and “nabi” interchangeably. Our English “prophet” (from the Greek: a speaker before, or for) carries the same message.

While the seer forecast how events would turn out, the prophet prescribed what men
should
believe, and how they
should
behave. In ancient Israel the two roles at first were not always easily distinguished. But seers, mere forecasters, came to be displaced by prophets, touched by the divinity for whom they spoke.

It was this transformed role that opened the way to the discovery of belief, toward the self-consciousness that awakened people to their freedom to choose, and their responsibilities for choice. The history of ancient Hebrew prophecy is a saga of this unfolding self. The seers, adept at interpreting signs and omens, sometimes drew on their own dreams and visions of ghosts and spirits for sights of the future. The seer could see things on earth that others could not see. But the prophet carried messages from another world. It is not surprising, then, that this “Man of the Spirit” heard his message in ecstasy and so seemed “touched” with madness. His ecstasy was commonly a group phenomenon, sometimes expressed in song.

This view of the prophet as messenger of God is distinctively biblical. With it came distrust of the techniques and tricks of the seer—the ways of the pagan Canaanite.

When you come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you, don’t follow the disgusting practices of the nations that are there. Don’t sacrifice your children in the fires on your altars; and don’t let your people practice divination or look for omens or use spells or charms, and don’t let them consult the spirits of the dead. . . . In the land you are about to occupy, people follow the advice of those who practice divination and look for omens, but the Lord your God does not allow you to do this. Instead, he will send you a prophet like me [Moses] from among your own people, and you are to obey him. (Deuteronomy 18:9-22)

When the founding prophet, Moses, spoke to the Pharaoh he spoke for God: “Thus said Yahweh.” And it was through the prophets that God governed His people. What proved crucial for the future of belief in the West was the Hebraic ideology that came with the Mosaic religion.

The single all-powerful, all-knowing, benevolent God would impose on mankind the obligation of belief—and eventually of choice. This “ethical monotheism” would create its own conundrums.