The Biggest Monkey Of Them All

It has been well-established that man is a social animal. As a monkey dependent on the troop for his continued survival and flourishing, man must compete not just with his environment to get his needs met but also with the troop itself. Resources are in short supply, and what is acquired by the troop is not necessarily shared equally within the troop. Life in the troop, therefore, is a constant struggle for power and authority. It is a game of social positioning, of status and influence, of alliances and politics. In the most straightforward sense possible, man wants to be the biggest monkey so that he can get his hands on the biggest share of the resources. Man wants to be in charge – this is a fundamental dynamic in all human social organization.

But there is more to the nature of man than just that of a gregarious animal. Man looks beyond himself, beyond his time and place, beyond his position within the troop. Something about the world calls to him, something which he perceives to be higher and more sublime than his everyday life. He tries to step outside of himself, to leave himself and his conditioned experiences behind and reach the unmoving and unbounded heart of all things. Man is not just a social animal – he is a transcending animal.

Both of these sides of man are present in one of his most distinctive creations, namely that of religion. They are so intertwined that it is often very difficult for people both within and outside of a faith to untangle them. But the purpose of this essay is to do just that. As my readers are no doubt aware, I’ve made a habit of calling out those whom I think are abusing religion for the sake of petty social status games. My reasons for doing so are quite simple – first, because I despise the power games of human social life, and second, because my own interest in religion arises from a desire to know the Supreme. I am, in other words, both repulsed and attracted by religion, and I do not believe this to be an uncommon sentiment. My hope is that these musings of mine will help those who also wish to know the Supreme to navigate religion and see through the antics of the socially competitive.

What is the core of religion? I would argue that, while different faiths will approach it in radically different terms, all religion at some point deals with the question of what the Supreme Reality is. In philosophy this is given the dry term of the Absolute, but in religion the most common term for this is God. And while different faiths have radically different theological approaches to God, they all seem to agree that God is both the first cause and the ultimate end of all that exists. Everything comes from God and seeks to return in some way to God. God is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, the cause, the way and the goal of all things. Religion itself is the way in which people of different times and places have attempted to engage with this Absolute Reality, in whatever way they conceive of it.

It is this idea of God or the Absolute which calls to man from within the heart of the world. This is what the transcending animal is ever in search of, the search for which being what defines the transcending animal as such. And all religions, at their highest level of development, at their most sublime peaks, hold the realization of this Absolute to be the most precious fruit of their endeavors. It is here and only here that the transcending animal fulfills its nature.

But what of the social animal in man?

Because of his gregarious nature, man cannot but conceive of things through metaphors taken from social life. When standing before a thing which precedes all, causes all, moves all and governs all, man feels a sense of overpowering awe. It is the same awe he feels when he looks on the mightiest sights of the world, from the towering mountain peaks and the dome of the sky, to violent storms and earthquakes, to the blazing sun and even the great beasts of the wild. He thinks these great thoughts and sees these great sights, and he tries to fit that greatness into the most human image of majesty and awe that he can fathom. Here is born the idea of God as the Divine King. Whether he be styled the Father of All, or the King of the Heavens, or the Lord of Lords, in this image of God man has brought down the ineffable and given it human form.

And what a fitting form! For when he thinks of God this way, man naturally engages in those social behaviors which are in his nature to perform before the great and the mighty. He prostrates himself, he asks for mercy and forgiveness, hopes to receive the bounties of his Lord, he offers gifts and vassalage, and he calls all this faith, the same way he shows faithfulness to his earthly lords. He derives his laws and his social order from the Divine King, he goes to war in his name, he founds cities and dynasties with the King’s blessings. In this way, man has taken the Supreme and neatly fit it into his troop as the Biggest Monkey Of Them All.

But God is not really a king or a lord, in the human sense. He is something far greater, far more sublime, more subtle, something superhuman, something inhuman. While man is not wrong to humanize the divine in order to divinize the human, he runs the risk of letting his social instincts overtake his transcending instincts. The transcendent is abstract and distant, but being in charge and calling the shots is concrete and familiar. Many are those who cannot fully understand the transcendent meaning behind the idea of the Divine King, and who look on the imagery as being more literal than it is. And many more are those for whom the promises of authority are far greater than the promises of spiritual fulfillment. God is then degraded in the minds of men until he becomes just a Really Big Monkey, and spiritual seekers are replaced by sycophants who hope that their proximity to the Biggest will mean that they get to be big enough to get what they want.

Is there a sight more damning to the whole project of religion than the sight of two believers locking horns over whose God has authority over whom, over whose teaching is the one truth, over who just so happens to have the Biggest Monkey? Waving sacred books and precious quotes, they overtake each other by the loudness of their voices. What you see then is not the intellectual might of two men seeking to unearth the Supreme Truth of God, but two primates eeking and ooking over territory. Such antics can be forgiven in the realm of politics, which is nothing but primates fighting over scraps. But those who nurse pretenses of caring about something greater than that reveal themselves as frauds. Can anyone be blamed for rejecting the idea of God after such a display?

Worse yet, such people are liable to becoming the lawyers of God, nitpicking the lives of the faithful down to the smallest detail.  Religion to them becomes an endless set of rules that are to be followed simply because rules imply an enforcer, their supposed piety barely masking a desire to pass judgment and feel powerful. They gladly join the ranks of scolds and busybodies, debating endlessly amongst themselves about the proper way to twist scripture so as to best find something in six lines to hang an honest man. In their hands, God is just a bureaucratic technicality. Ask them about him and they’ll regurgitate some half-remembered theology. Ask them instead about some minor heresy in the 1400:s and they will spit hellfire for half an hour about how “the rules” weren’t properly “followed”.

After such men have pulled God from the heavens to be their Biggest Monkey, what remains of that call towards the heart of truth that constituted the first religious instinct in man? What remains after we beat our peers over the head with God as if he were a baton wrapped in the rags of pettiness and spite? Only banality remains, and that gnashing of teeth which is the anthem of politics. The awe we first felt at the sight of the mountains is gone, and with it the wonder of the silvery moon on a winter night. So caught up are we in our little social world that we no longer consider truth or beauty, seeing them as just another baton to wield. When we only care for our position within the troop, it is easy to forget the sublimity which we originally sought. That part of us that seeks the highest peaks of the spirit cannot be separated from God, and when we degrade him we also degrade what is highest within ourselves. By our own pettiness shall we be made small.

We see, therefore, the problem that arises from these dual natures in man, and that makes religion into such tangle of man’s best and worst sides. There is a genuine yearning for the Supreme Reality that is felt to exist beyond the limits of life. But there is also a desire to clobber ones fellow man into submission and assert oneself as the biggest and most important monkey of the troop. God is the focal point of both these desires – he is the Supreme Reality that the transcending animal seeks, but he is also the unquestionable authority that can grant that extra bit of bigness and importance to the aspiring troop leader.

So how does one reconcile the social and the transcending animals within man? Humanize the divine and build a relationship with it, but understand that you aren’t building a bigger monkey. Don’t call God your Lord with the hopes of becoming a petty duke, but understand that you are to be the servant. The only neck around which the leash of God will be tied is yours, and no human hand shall hold it. But do not mistake being the servant of God for being the doormat of just any charlatan or striver to come and demand obeisance. Understand clearly what it is you are seeking, and let your desire to know the highest truth be your guiding light in all such matters. Care only for the peaks, such that you forget the antics of those in the valleys. Only then can you put God back in heaven where he belongs, and not pull him down to be just the Biggest Monkey Of Them All.