What's the oddest philosophy/theology you ever did see?
I could write so much in response to that, but I'll limit myself to the ones that leap immediately to mind.
Valentinianism has to be a highly-placed candidate in anyone's list. This was the most popular form of Gnosticism in the second century AD, and revolved around a system of Aeons - divine entities within the Pleroma (fullness), a sort of pantheon which was itself the totality of God. Here's a quick summary of Valentinus' views that I wrote a while back:
The doctrines of Valentinus are attacked at length by Irenaeus in most of Against Heresies I, by Tertullian in Against the Valentinians, and by Hippolytus in Refutation of all Heresies VI. Moreover, the Nag Hammadi sources have shed much further light on Gnosticism, including that associated with Valentinus. Much of his theology can therefore be reconstructed.
Like Basilides, Valentinus combined a complex system of divine hierarchies with a strongly apophatic theology. The system is headed by the high God, characterised as “Proarche” (before the beginning) and “Bythos” (depth). Below him are thirty lesser divine Aeons, which together make up the “Pleroma” or fullness of divinity.
As with all Gnostics, Valentinus was convinced of the intrinsic evil of matter, and developed an elaborate mythology to explain how the pure spirit of the Pleroma could have produced it. The least of the Aeons was Sophia, who became jealous of those who were closer to the high Father: this passion became a kind of shapeless substance, which was rejected from the Pleroma. Sophia was thus restored, but from her passion, known as Achamoth, came both matter and an entity known as the Demiurge, or Creator. The Demiurge, ignorant of the spiritual realms above, proceeded to create the material world out of the matter he found to hand, and set himself up as its god. This ignorant and proud being is the God of the Old Testament.
Valentinus further taught that there are three kinds of substance in the world. Physical and psychic substance are the work of the Demiurge, and both were made from Achamoth. But there are also shards of spiritual substance scattered throughout it, remnants of the Pleroma where it all came from originally. Most Christians, it seems, have only bodies and souls. But the Valentinians are fortunate enough to possess spirit as well. Salvation consists of learning one’s true nature: of recognising the spirit within oneself, and, ultimately, in separating it from the base substance of the world and returning to the Pleroma. This is made possible through the teaching of Christ, an Aeon who was sent into the realm of the Demiurge with exactly that purpose. Like Basilides, Valentinus is a docetic, claiming that Christ’s physical body was an illusion. His teaching is handed on, secretly, by those in the know; but if you are sufficiently spiritual you can also discern it in allegorical form in the Bible, hidden behind the brash words of the Demiurge. In the end, the world will be separated: physical matter will be destroyed, psychic matter (the souls of the righteous) will join the Demiurge in a sort of semi-heaven, and the spirits of the Gnostics will return to the Pleroma.
The theology of Valentinus is thus an elaborate attempt to explain, in highly mythological language, the existential crisis which he believed to be intrinsic to embodied life. It draws heavily on Platonism and Pythagoreanism, as well as on the influences of Zoroastrianism. It was enormously popular, and spawned several different groups. The two main divisions were the Oriental Valentinians, who believed that Christ was wholly spiritual, with no body; and the Italian Valentinians, who distinguished between the Jewish Christ, a man sent by the Demiurge, and Jesus the Aeon, sent by the Father Bythos, who descended on Christ at his baptism and left again before his crucifixion.
Next up we have the Donatists, who always struck me as very peculiar. The Donatist church was a splinter group that broke away from the Catholic Church in the fourth century in part because they had very high standards of the priesthood, and they thought that the Catholic priests weren't good enough because they associated with people who had betrayed the faith during persecutions but then repented. The Donatist church was actually more popular throughout North Africa during the fourth century than the mainstream church was (Augustine's sermons were sometimes drowned out by the sound of singing from the Donatist church down the road). Now that's not so wacky, but the Donatists quickly developed a serious martyr complex because they were persecuted by the newly Christianised Roman state (Constantine's first forays into meddling with ecclesiastical matters were concerned with the Donatist schism, not Arianism as you might think). And of course the Catholics weren't getting martyred any more, so the Donatists took martyrdom to be a sure sign of the true faith. The upshot of this was that the more extreme ones actively tried to get martyred. This wasn't entirely new. A century and a half earlier, Origen had been only 17 when his own father was martyred and he decided he wanted to join him; his mother prevented him from turning himself in to the authorities by hiding his clothes while he was asleep, and Origen suffered from enough teenage coyness to be unwilling to go to the authorities in the nude. However, the Donatists went even further by declaring that if you weren't getting martyred then suicide was an acceptable alternative. Some used to throw themselves off cliffs. The strangest were the Circumcelliones, thugs who marauded around the countryside making a nuisance of themselves and attacking Catholics. They would capture unwary passers by, and then ask their surprised victims to kill them. There is a story of one such person who promised to kill the Circumcelliones as they asked, and tied them up first, saying this would make the task easier. Once they were secure he beat them up but left them alive before stealing all their stuff and going on his merry way.
The Cathars also exalted suicide; many of them would starve themselves to death. The Cathars also thought that children are intrinsically demonic and have to have the diabolical side of them purged through suffering. Actually, they may have had a point there.
The Messalians were good for a laugh. These were a group of mystics based around Syria in the fourth and fifth centuries. Like most Syrian Christians, they rejected the rather Platonic approach to anthropology which had been adopted by Greek-speaking Christians, together with its rigid distinction between the soul and the body. They argued instead for a more integrated, holistic understanding of the human person. Now this was all very sensible and to be applauded, but it seems the Messalians took it a bit further and claimed that sin is something physical that exists in your physical body. Similarly, when God gives you the Holy Spirit, this is something physical inside you too. You can actually feel the difference (and if you can't, you are not really saved). Apparently some of them took this to extremes and claimed that you can literally expel the devil from yourself by going to the toilet. Now you have to admit that that's a fun religion.
Those are just the ones that come to mind immediately. Of course you should be aware that most groups later labelled heretical, especially those from antiquity and the Middle Ages, are known only or primarily through the writings of their opponents. So our understanding of them is probably very distorted.
Why is sexuality such a hugely restricted taboo laden area in large parts of christianity? In particular, I'm interested in where (and why) the whole sexual taboo began - the Abrahamic religions are full of it.
It depends on what you mean by "sexual taboo". Now I don't know about the other Abrahamic religions, but in Christianity it's varied very greatly from place to place and over time. As far as I can tell, Christians in antiquity had much the same attitude towards sex that Jews and high-minded pagans did; they didn't much approve of it as a rule, but they didn't have a great deal to say on the matter. The only ancient Christian writer I know of before Jerome who had much to say on it was Clement of Alexandria, who laid down various rules in his "The Teacher", a compendium of rules for how to behave in society which are fantastically interesting (there's a chapter on shoes, for example, and another on etiquette when in the bath). Clement says that you should have sex only with your spouse, and only in the evenings, never before dinner. He has harsh words for those who go at it in the morning like cockerals. Like most of Clement's social rules, it seems that these reflect the way that high-minded, educated people in early third-century Alexandria thought everyone should behave; there's nothing particularly Christian about them.
Now with Jerome, and then Augustine, things changed somewhat. Jerome was rather obsessed with sex and tried to discourage it wherever possible. His famous 22nd letter, written to a young female admirer, proved highly controversial at the time since he seemed to be saying that you practically had to be a virgin to be saved. Many Christians in Rome, where Jerome was living, decided he was an unhealthy influence, and this is one reason why he ended up living in a cave in the Holy Land instead. One man, Jovinian, was particularly scathing in his attacks. Jovinian argued that in fact it makes no difference whether you are a virgin or not; he said that married people are living the Christian life just as well as single people.
Now the interesting thing is that the church condemned Jovinian, not Jerome. Jerome's more extreme outbursts were considered unacceptable, but so too was the notion that it makes no difference whether you are married or not. A middle way was found between the two: you can certainly be a good Christian if you are married, but it is better not to be - just as Jesus said that Mary had chosen the "better part" than Martha, but he still loved them both.
Now all this was about sex in general. There was no notion that sex within marriage was absolutely fine but sex outside marriage was not. Clement is the only ancient Christian writer I know of who distinguishes between the two. Jerome and, after him, Augustine disapproved of sex in general, no matter what the circumstances. Indeed, it seems that many Christians during this period and earlier lived chastely even if they were married: we hear of married couples converting to Christianity and then continuing to live together with separate beds, or, later, separating to live in monasteries or nunneries.
In the Middle Ages, as far as I can tell, most people who wrote about sex were concerned about monks, not the laity. For example, there is only one medieval book on homosexuality - the famous "Book of Gomorrah" by Peter Damien. But in that book, Peter is concerned to try to stamp out homosexuality in monasteries, which, if his descriptions are to believed, were all like Old Compton Street. There's little indication that homosexuality is A Bad Thing in itself, simply that it's not what monks ought to be getting up to. The same thing seems to be the case with treatments of other sexual matters during this general period. In fact, for many parts of society, there were fairly liberal attitudes to this sort of thing. For example, peasants would rarely get married; they'd just move in together and call each other husband and wife.
Now we all know about the very "earthy" attitude to sex that seems to have prevailed in Europe from the Renaissance right up to the eighteenth century; no-one could read Chaucer or Shakespeare and think that they were writing about sexually uptight societies. On the contrary, there's more general shagging in their works than in most modern ones. Just read the Miller's Tale, for example. Of course these aren't documentaries; but then think, too, of characters like Chaucer's Monk, terribly worldly and lustful. Fast forward a bit and think of Boswell's journal, which seems to consist mostly of cheerfully detailed accounts of his various liaisons with a broad cross-section of London's prostitutes. As far as I can tell, most people saw no inconsistency at all between such promiscuity and a perfectly sincere Christian faith. Of course Boswell was perhaps a bit extreme. A really debauched character would be denounced as an "atheist", as the Earl of Rochester was, and even a more restrained one might come in for some criticism. Descartes had a daughter out of wedlock (she died, to his great grief); when he was engaged in intellectual controversy with academics in the Netherlands, one of his opponents claimed that the reason the philosopher kept moving from country to country was to avoid all the paternity suits.
But it was during this period that Puritanism developed, and that's really the source of later Christian weirdness about sex. The Puritans - or at least many of them - had highly ascetic attitudes to such things; I don't know precisely why this was. Of course there had been many ascetic groups in Christianity throughout its entire history. And Puritanism was quite a minor movement in the grand scheme of things. However, it proved important for two reasons: first, it was a major influence on the development of evangelicalism in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth century; and, second, it was enormously influential on the development of American society as a whole (not just in religious matters) in the seventeenth and eighteenth. The rather strange attitude to sex found in much of the modern US really goes right back to its Puritan roots (and remember that that country actually celebrates those roots every November). Meanwhile, in Britain, evangelicalism developed from being a minority movement in the eighteenth century to being one of the major elements of Christianity by the end of the nineteenth. And that is where "Victorian" values, particularly about sex, came from.
Today, of course, the churches in the English-speaking world are having to struggle with this heritage: the Puritan-based strand remains extremely strong, while there are also those Christians who either were never influenced by it or who have since rejected it. This is one of the reasons why there are such bitter divisions over homosexuality. The Protestant churches in the non-English-speaking world, meanwhile, don't have all this baggage - or at any rate they have a lot less of it - and you don't usually find such hang-ups about sex among them. Which means that if you want to sleep with a random Protestant, you should go to Germany.
That's Protestants, though. Of course it's Catholics who are supposed to have all the guilt. I know less about that. I think that a hardening (if I can say that in this context) of the Catholic Church's teaching on sexual matters came about in the nineteenth century, in response to what was perceived as backsliding and general immorality throughout Europe; this was the same period that gave the world the Syllabus of Errors and Vatican I. However, the church had always officially frowned upon loose sexual behaviour and the like; it just hadn't been much of an obsession.
However, in addition to all that, I would say that sexuality just
does tend to be a taboo subject in human society in general, or at least one where basically irrational prejudices or odd prohibitions crop up. Of course we can point to all kinds of exceptions (such as the aforementioned Old Compton Street) but that's a general trend in society in general. Naturally religion often gets involved, but I suspect that this is often because people invoke religion in defence of more basic prejudices, not because those prejudices spring from religion. Of course, once they get linked together, they reinforce each other and it becomes highly complex. But you don't have to be religious to have weird views on sex. A friend of mine got into trouble with her parents when they saw a picture of her hugging her boyfriend; they believed that it was wrong to hug outside marriage (and her aunt said that she didn't even dare hold hands with her husband before their wedding day - what a barrel of fireworks that relationship must have been). And they're Chinese atheists. No doubt if they'd happened to be Christians they would have insisted that these views were those taught by Christianity. So I would be very wary of blaming Christianity for this sort of thing; I think that it's just one of those things that you get in society anyway, and it inevitably gets hooked up to whatever religion is going. Patriotism is a similar case in point. Most societies have an element of patriotism, and it invariably gets linked to whatever the main religion is. Look at Shinto in Japan and the cult of the emperor before WWII, for example. Again, look at how Christianity was basically hijacked during WWI by every combative power. And look at how both the Union and the Confederacy told their soldiers that they were fighting for the true Christian religion - something that caused many soldiers big problems when they got captured and were amazed to see their enemies reading Bibles. But can we blame Christianity for fostering patriotism? Of course not, no more than any other religion that gets twisted for such purposes. At the end of the day, these things come from
people.
I'm kind of enamoured of that group of Pacific Islanders who worship Prince Philip (the Duke of Edinburgh, husband to the Queen, etc.) as a divine being. I'm sure it makes perfect sense to themselves.
What! You're saying he's not? You heretic!
Really, though, is it so peculiar? It's been a common thing throughout history for people to believe their national leader to be divine. You still get it today; in Japan, for example, it's still rather controversial to say in public that the emperor is
not divine, even though perhaps most people don't really believe that he literally is. It's not really any odder for people to think that a minor royal from another country is divine. The fact that it is so obviously daffy just shows how equally daft the more common version of this belief is.
Which reminds me, I've always thought that Rastafarianism is a pretty dippy religion, so add that to the list I gave in response to Perfection's question. Clearly an enormously enjoyable religion, of course, but bewilderingly strange in doctrine!
This dog and cart thing, one of the Stoics wrote that? Because if the Stoics conflated determinism and fatalism into one package, it's no wonder that the Platonists got upset about it. But the "lesson" that one should "not try to change things" only follows from the fatalistic part of the package, and if you take that back with your very next sentence, then you immediately undermine the "lesson". (I'm not criticizing you, here, I'm criticizing the Stoics, on the assumption that what you wrote above is a reasonable approximation to their views.)
Well, that's a royal mess! Obviously, if I want to understand this bit of intellectual history, I'm going to have to read some Stoic writings. Thanks for the intro.
I don't remember who said the dog and cart thing, which is why I was a bit vague about it! One problem with the Stoics is that most of the works of the Greek Stoics are lost, so they have to be reconstructed on the basis of later Latin authors reporting their ideas. The most important is Cicero, and he is probably the man to read if you want it first-hand, or as good as you can get, since he's so readable and seems pretty reliable. I'm afraid I don't really know much about Stoicism so I'm not the person to ask about this - no doubt there are good resources somewhere online. However, I do think that some Stoics, at least, confused fatalism with determinism - or, perhaps, some people who were merely influenced by Stoicism but who didn't really understand it. Certainly true Stoic teaching, such as that of Chrysippus or indeed Cicero, did not make such a conflation.
However, the Platonists thought that even determinism, never mind fatalism, undermined morality, since they thought that contra-causal freedom is essential to morality and determinism is (by definition) a denial of the existence of contra-causal freedom. Now I would agree that in fact it is very hard to show convincingly why you need contra-causal freedom for morality, although it does seem to be a basic belief of very many people that you do.