Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
which has brought transitory benefits at the price of a long and degrading
tyranny.”
59
In this regard, Condorcet's understanding of religion's historical
role anticipates Marx's materialistic dictum that the “criticism of religion”
should be the “premise of all criticism.” Once reason was closely identified
with nature, the root of all evil became any form of reason that failed to
reference the natural world, and this made supernatural religion, more than
any other such rational perversion, as Marx would later say, the “inverted
consciousness of the world.”
60
This is why priestcraft always supersedes
political ambition as the root cause of tyranny for Condorcet. To be sure,
political motives always lurk within religious actors, but only a perversion
of reason could in theory have sufficient power to overcome natural reason.
Thus it was when the priests became the “depositaries” of science that they
were able to monopolize its power and thereby prevent the rest of humanity
from enjoying its benefits. Political privileges followed. It was only by first
perverting reason that priests emerged as a “class of individuals who affected
insolent prerogatives, who separated themselves from the common mass of
mankind so that they might dominate them more effectively.”
61
The priestly castes had put such controls in place long before Socrates'
time, but the emerging Greek Enlightenment threatened to expose them,
thus prompting his martyrdom and the onset of a prolonged dark age.
It was with a heavy heart that the priests observed how mankind in its
efforts to perfect its own powers of reasoning and to trace everything
back to origins, discovered the full absurdity of their dogmas, the full
extravagance of their ceremonies, the full imposture of their oracles and
miracles. They were afraid that these philosophers would unmask them
before the pupils who attended their schools; that such knowledge would
then be transmitted to anyone who, in pursuit of authority or prestige for
himself, felt the necessity to cultivate his mind; that as a result priestly
dominion would soon hold sway only over the most vulgar of the people,
and that in the end even they would be undeceived. Hypocrisy in terror
hastened to accuse the philosophers of impiety towards the gods so that
they would be unable to teach the people that these gods were the work
of the priests.
62
Close study of Greek religion makes it seem improbable that ancient Ath-
ens' priests would have had the power or inclination to persecute Socrates.
63
But the thematic continuity that Condorcet sustains by inventing a cen-
tralized and powerful Hellenistic priesthood in the image of the medieval
Catholic one to come is vital to his ability to theorize progress. Condorcet's
