فصل 16: بدون پوست در بازی، خبری از عبادت نیست

Chapter 16 No Worship Without Skin in the Game

Symmetry, symmetry everywhere—Belief requires an entry fee

It is when you break a fast that you understand religion. I am writing this as I am ending the grueling Greek-Orthodox period of Lent, which, for the most part, allows no animal products. This diet is particularly hard to keep in the West where people use butter and dairy products. But once you fast, you feel entitled to celebrate Easter; it is like the exhilaration of fresh water when one is thirsty. You’ve paid a price.

Recall our brief discussion of the theological necessity of making Christ man—he had to sacrifice himself. Time to develop the argument here.

The main theological flaw in Pascal’s wager is that belief cannot be a free option. It entails a symmetry between what you pay and what you receive. Things otherwise would be too easy. So the skin-in-the-game rules that hold between humans also hold in our rapport with the gods.

THE GODS DO NOT LIKE CHEAP SIGNALING

I will always remember the church altar in Saint Sergius (or, in the vernacular, Mar Sarkis) in the Aramaic-speaking town of Maaloula, even if I live 125 years. I visited the church a few decades ago, sparking an obsession with that ancient and neglected language. The town still spoke at the time the version of Western Aramaic that was used by Christ. At the time of Christ, the Levant spoke Greek in the coastal towns and Aramaic in the countryside. For those into Talmud, Western Aramaic corresponds to “Yerushalmi” or “Palestinian Aramaic,” as opposed to the Babylonian Aramaic closer to what is now Syriac. It was mesmerizing to see children speak, tease each other, and do what children usually do, but in an ancient language.

When a town holds the remnants of an ancient language, one needs to look for vestiges of an ancient practice. And indeed there was one. The detail that I will always remember is that the altar in Saint Sergius has a drain for blood. It had been recycled from an earlier pre-Christian practice. The appurtenances of the church came from a reconverted pagan temple used by early Christians. Actually, at the risk of upsetting a few people, it was not that reconverted: early Christians were sort of pagans. The standard theory is that before the council of Nicea (fourth century), it was common for Christians to recycle pagan altars. But there turns out to be evidence for what I always suspected: Christians and Jews in practice were not too differentiated from other Semitic cult followers, and shared places of worship with one another. The presence of saints in Christianity comes from that mechanism of recycling. There were no telephones, fax machines, or websites financed by Saudi princes to homogenize religions.

“Altar” in spoken Levantine and Aramaic is still maḋbaḣ from DBH, “ritual slaying by cutting the guttural vein.” It is an old tradition that left its mark on Islam: halal food requires such a method for slaughter. And qorban, the Semitic word QRB for “getting closer (to God),” originally done via sacrifice, is still used as a word for sacrament.

In fact, one of the main figures of Shiite Islam, the Imam Hussein son of Ali, addressed God before his death by offering himself as sacrifice: “let me be the qorban for you”—the supreme offering.* And his followers, to this day, show literal skin in the game during the commemoration of his death, the day of Ashoura, engaging in self-flagellation that leads to open wounds. Self-flagellation is also present in Christianity, as commemoration of the suffering of the Christ—while prevalent in the Middle Ages, it is now gone except in some places in Asia and Latin America.

In the Eastern Mediterranean pagan world (Greco-Semitic), no worship was done without sacrifice. The gods did not accept cheap talk. It was all about revealed preferences. Also, burnt offerings were precisely burnt so no human would consume them. Actually, not quite: the high priest got his share; priesthood was quite a lucrative position since in the pre-Christian, Greek-speaking Eastern Mediterranean, the offices of high priests were often auctioned off.

Physical sacrifice even applied to the Temple of Jerusalem. And even to later Jews, or early Christians, the followers of Pauline Christianity. Hebrews 9:22: Et omnia paene in sanguine mundantur secundum legem et sine sanguinis fusione non fit remissio. “And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission.” But Christianity ended up removing the idea of such sacrifice under the notion that Christ sacrificed himself for others. But if you visit a Catholic or Orthodox church on Sunday service, you will see a simulacrum. It has wine representing blood, which, at the close of the ceremony is flushed in the piscina (the drain). Exactly as in the Maaloula altar.

Christianity used the personality of the Christ for the simulacrum; he sacrificed himself for us.

At the Last Supper, on the night when He was betrayed, our Savior instituted the Eucharistic sacrifice of His Body and Blood. He did this in order to perpetuate the sacrifice of the Cross throughout the centuries until He should come again. —Sacrosanctum Concilium, 47 Sacrifice was ended by making it metaphorical:

I appeal to you therefore brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. —Romans 12:1 As for Judaism, the same progression took place: after the destruction of the Second Temple in the first century A.D., animal sacrifices ended. Before that, the parable of Isaac and Abraham marks the notion of progressive departure from human sacrifice by the Abrahamic sects—as well as an insistence of skin in the game. But actual animal sacrifice continued for a while—though under different terms. God tested Abraham’s faith with an asymmetric gift: sacrifice your son for me—it was not as with other situations of just giving the gods part of your yield in return for future benefits and improved harvests, as with common gift-giving, with tacit reciprocal expectations. It was the mother of all unconditional gifts to God. It was not a transaction, the transaction to end all transactions. About a millennia later, Christians had their last transaction.

The philosopher Moshe Halbertal holds that, post the simulacrum of Isaac, dealings with the Lord became a reciprocal gift-giving affair. But why did animal sacrifice continue for a while?

Canaanite habits die hard. Maimonides explains why God did not proscribe immediately the then-common practice of animal sacrifice: the reason is that “to obey such a commandment would have been contrary to the nature of man, who generally cleaves to that to which he is used”; instead he “transferred to His service that which had served as a worship of created beings and of things imaginary and unreal.” So animal sacrifice continued—largely voluntary—but, and this is the mark of Abrahamic religion, not the worship of animals, or the propitiation of deities through bribery. The latter practice even extended to the bribery of other tribes and others’ gods, as continued to be practiced in Arabia until the sixth century. Then a United Nations of sorts, a communal marketplace for both goods, foreign relations, and various bilateral worship, took place in Mecca.

Love without sacrifice is theft (Procrustes). This applies to any form of love, particularly the love of God.

THE EVIDENCE

To summarize, in a Judeo-Christian place of worship, the focal point, where the priest stands, symbolizes skin in the game. The notion of belief without sacrifice, which is tangible proof, is new in history.

The strength of a creed did not rest on “evidence” of the powers of its gods, but evidence of the skin in the game on the part of its worshippers.