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Revisiting Zara
Yacob, The
Rationalist Ethiopian Philosopher of the
Seventeenth Century This
Zara Yacob Project, initiated and sponsored by
the Institute of Development and Education for
Africa (IDEA) and African Ascent, presents two
articles authored by Ghelawdewos Araia and Tedros
Kiros, and will have a companion video discussion
that will be disseminated to the public at large
and the academia in particular. Dr. Ghelawdewos
Araia is professor of history and political
science at Africana Studies, Lehman College of the
City University of New York, and he is the founder
and president of the Institute of Development and
Education for Africa (IDEA); Dr. Tedros Kiros is
professor of philosophy and literature at Berklee
School of Music and Harvard University (summer
school), and he is the producer and host of
African Ascent. The Autobiography of Zara
Yacob and Decoding his Rationalist Discourses Ghelawdewos Araia, PhD Before
I delve into the autobiography of Zara Yacob, a
fascinating and highly intelligent Ethiopian
philosopher of the seventeenth century, I first
like to begin with what I remarked about him a
decade and half ago (April 2005) in my article
entitled “Modernism, Post-Modernism, and
Afrocentrism: Meanings for Ethiopia”: It
is important to acknowledge the Weberian mantra of
religion/development nexus in rationalist
analysis, but it is more important for our present
discussion to rediscover our own rationalist
thinkers such as Zara Yacob. Contrary to the basic
tenets and doctrine of the Ethiopian Orthodox
Church, Zara Yacob, sometimes in the late 16th
century and early 17th century,
advanced the idea of ‘God as reason’ and hence
‘faith is rational and not an irrational and
dogmatic assertion’; celibacy and monastic life
were unreasonable and lent is meant to be not
God’s wish. The most fascinating aspect of Zara
Yacob’s philosophy that comes very close to our
20th/ 21st centuries is his
‘citizen rights advocacy’ and his challenge to
the status quo in this respect. He argued,
“citizens who are morally/rationally formed need
not be silenced and intimidated by an
authoritarian or manipulative sovereign…and men
should be accountable for their actions.” Credit
is due to Claude Sumner for authoring The
Treatise of Zara Yacob, the Source of African
Philosophy: The Ethiopian Philosophy of Man.
But because most Ethiopian philosophers were
educated in European curriculum, they knew more
about Rene Descartes than they did about Zara
Yacob. Upon transcending Eurocentrism and
rediscovering Zara Yacob, the Ethiopian
philosopher would have the opportunity to witness
notions such as mediation, discourse of method,
rules of direction of the mind, and hyperbolic
doubt promoted by Descartes (“father of modern
philosophy”), also incorporated in the corpus of
Zara Yacob’s philosophy.” My
remarks on Zara Yacob above gives the reader the
gist of the rational discourses of the Ethiopian
genius of the 17th century that I will
systematically dissect in this article. However,
when I wrote the commentary in my Modernism
and Post-Modernism, I did not have the
brilliant piece on Zara Yacob authored by Teodros
Kiros, that is now included in this Zara Yacob
Revisiting Project with a separate heading. Who
is Zara Yacob? According to the book on Zara Yacob
translated from Geez into Amharic by Zemenfes
Kudus Abraha, Zara Yacob himself says, “…I was
born into the ecclesiastical priesthood in the
district of Aksum in the year 1592 Nehase 25
(Ethiopian calendar) in the third-year reign of
Emperor Zara Yacbo [it should be Yacob, and not
Zara Yacob, who ended his reign in 1594 EC] from
peasant parents. My baptismal name was Zara Yacob
but people call me Workie. When I approached
school age, my father sent me to school and after
I read the Psalms, my teacher tells my father,
‘your child has bright heart and is patient and
studious, and if you send him to a higher school
he could be an intellect and a teacher’; and
after my teacher’s recommendation my father sent
me to a higher school to study Zema (hymn).
However, I had a creaky gutter or hoarse throat
and my voice was not good, and my friends mocked
me and I was delayed by three months; I was sad
and melancholic and instead I decided to study
grammar with another teacher. At this juncture,
God gave me a special talent to learn quickly with
my friends; now, instead of being sad, I was
delighted and stayed in the school for four years.
During
those days, God delivered me from death; as I was
playing with my friends I slid and fell off the
cliff; unless God miraculously rescued me, I
wouldn’t know how I survived; after I
recuperated, I measured the height of the cliff by
employing a long rope and it measured 25 feet and
some inches; Thankful to God, I went back to
school and began learning the interpretation of
holy books and in this schooling I stayed ten
years, and I studied books pertaining to how
foreigners and our country’s teachers
interpreted them; most of the time the
interpretations were not in congruence with my
heart. However, I hid all my thoughts within my
heart and kept quiet and I went back and settled
in my country Aksum, and for four years I taught
books, but the times were very bad; in the 19th
year of the reign of Susneyos, the foreigner Abuna
Alfonso came and after two years, because the king
liked and embraced the religion of the foreigners,
in all Ethiopia people were displaced and became
refugees, and those who did not accept the new
religion were being intimidated. When
Zara Yacob says the interpretations of the books
were not compatible with his own interpretation,
he was employing the observer-participant and/or
‘thick description’ of cultures and ideas ala
Clifford Greetz, an American anthropologist known
for his book Toward
an Interpretive Theory of
Culture.
Zara Yacob was indeed greatly involved in the
interpretation of ideas, outlooks, culture, and
religions that also include foreign religions, as
he himself tells us.
In
the above narration, which is by and large
summarized from chapter one of Zara Yacob’s book
Hatata,
I have used the first person singular so that Zara
Yacob himself tell readers about his own life, and
by doing this 1) his autobiography is
authenticated, and 2) the false claim by some
Ethiopian “scholars” that Zara Yacob is from
Gondar and not from Aksum, a despicable
narrowminded assertion, is negated. But from now
on, that is, beginning chapter two of his book, I
will engage in decoding the discourses of Zara
Yacob’s philosophy for the sole purpose of
reinforcing his highly sophisticated world
outlook. I will also compare and contrast the many
themes and theses of Zara Yacob with many other
thinkers and present-day scholars, especially
those that I found incredibly similar in the
analysis and interpretation of philosophical
underpinnings. Throughout
the book, and in all his critical examinations and
inquires, Zara Yacob superbly underscores his
thematic analyses in conjunction with the
‘heart’, the leitmotif of his Hatata.
This, however, is not surprising because in
the Ethiopian ethos, the heart is not only equated
with wisdom and love but it is also associated
with the brain, the seat of thinking, if not the
thinking machine itself. It is in light of this
portrayal of the heart that we must understand
what is stated above: ‘Your child has bright
heart’; ‘the interpretations are not in
congruence with my heart’; ‘I hid all my
thoughts in my heart’. The word ‘Lebam’
(Amharic and Tigrigna) for ‘wise’ is derived
from ‘Lebe’ (Amharic and Tigrigna for heart).
The heart also took centerstage in the
philosophical thoughts of the ancient Egyptians,
and during mummification process, while all vital
organs like the intestine and the liver were
extracted out from the body and mummified in
separate canopies, the heart remained in the body
and was mummified along with the body. Interestingly,
some five years ago, when I was teaching my Ancient
Egypt course at Lehman College, CUNY, in due
course of my lecture, I told my students that the
heart is a miniature brain; some were curios but
the majority in the class were not impressed. Now,
to my gratification, scientists have proved that
the heart has its own ‘little brain’, and one
of the pioneers in this nascent vista of research,
is J Andrew Armour, who, in 1991, heralded the
idea of a ‘little brain in the heart,’ and
convincingly defines it as “intrinsic cardiac
nervous system”, the ‘heart brain that is
composed of approximately 40,000 neurons, which,
incidentally, are alike the brain neurons. Moreover,
writing in the Science News blog, Laura Sanders
(June 2, 2020), argues that “the heart has its
own ‘brain’. Now, scientists have drawn a
detailed map of this little brain, called
intracardiac nervous system, in rat hearts. The
heart’s big boss is the brain, but nerve cells
in the heart has a say, too. These neurons are
thought to play a crucial role in the heart
health, helping to fine-tune heart rhythms and
perhaps protecting people against certain kinds of
heart diseases.”
In
chapter two, Zara Yacob critically examines his
erstwhile enemy Wolde-Yohannes, Emperor Susneyos,
and the then head of the Church Alfonso. He also
comments on the religion of the foreigners (the
Catholics) and the Orthodox religion of the
Ethiopians without taking sides; he does not say
this religion is right and that religion is not
right, but he believed that we learn from all and
that is a good thing. However, because
Wolde-Yohannes lied to the king by saying “Zara
Yacob is teaching the people to rise in defense of
their religion, kill the king, and deport the
foreigners,” he had no choice but to run for his
life; when fleeing, he had only three ounce of
gold and the Book of Psalms (popularly known in
Ethiopia as Mezmur Dawit or the Songs of David);
he did not tell anyone where he was heading for
but he headed toward the Tekeze River. While
wandering from village to village, he began
begging for food and people mistook him as a
wandering hermit; he was not sure where he will
end up, but temporarily he entered into a cave and
protected himself with a fence so that wild
animals don’t enter the cave and eat him. In his
solitude in the cave, Zara Yacob felt that he was
in heaven; he was in peace and prayed to God via
his Psalms. Chapter
three essentially is about the existence of God
and the separation of religions and chapter four
deals with the examination of religion and prayer,
and it is in these chapters that the real Hatata
of Zara Yacob emerges; as a matter of fact,
throughout the book, the embodiments of Zara
Yacob’s philosophy on all knowledge and truth
such as investigation, examination, inquiry,
study, inspection, and exploration are reflected;
and this methodology, in turn, is manifested in
the questions Zara Yacob directs to himself, and
provide answers to himself. Here below are some
examples: ‘who
gave me the ears?’; ‘how did I come to this
earth?’; How did I come into existence?’;
‘where did I come from?’ if I were in
existence before the world came into existence,
could I have the beginnings and end of my
life?’; ‘have I created myself?’;
‘however, when I was created, I may not have
existed!’; ‘and if I say my father and mother
created me, I would have inquired how my parents
and their parents came into existence until the
creator is found’. From
the above multiple interrogations, I believe Zara
Yacob was trying to find meaning in existence and
with an understanding that everything that exists
in the world has a purpose. He further continues
his modality of investigation and says, “if I
was born from my parents, I would say there must
be one existing lord that lives all over and this
lord has no beginning and end; his time can
neither be counted nor changed. I say there is
uncreated creator; if there was no creator, there
won’t be creatures, and thus we must say there
is a creator that created us, and this creator
created us with knowledge and articulate
speech.” In
regards to the ‘uncreated creator’, it seems
to me Zara Yacob, very much like Friedrich Hegel,
was trying to grapple with the ‘unmoved mover’
(borrowed from Aristotle). The ‘unmoved mover’
according to Aristotle is the one that moves
without being moved or the prime mover , or the
uncaused cause, or mover of all the motion in the
universe; after all these convoluted
characterization of the ‘unmoved mover’,
Aristotle finally calls it the ‘active
intellect’ or God, but the God of Aristotle is
not the Christian God of Zara Yacob; the Christian
God that comes very close to that of Zara
Yacob’s God is the God of Thomas Aquinas, the 13th
century Italian philosopher and Catholic priest. And
with respect to his search for truth, Zara Yacob
entertains the very essence of Descartes (and
Plato before him) rationale, “we can only trust
the truths that the mind arrives on its own”
although the path to exploring the truth for Zara
Yacob is prayer, not dogmatic but rational prayer.
In fact, Zara Yacob says, “when I pray to my
creator he heard my voice and I am greatly elated;
I pray with hope and I loved my creator from the
bottom of my heart.” However,
Zara Yacob’s rational discourse is clearly
manifested in his reasoning that goes like this:
‘Because my creator knows about my ideas before
I was born, I said Oh! my creator, give me
knowledge,’ and as we shall see later,
‘knowledge’ and ‘prayer’ are recurrent
concepts and are central in all his investigative
discourses. ‘Knowledge-as-motion’ is also a
recurrent theme in Hegel’s writings, including
in his original approach to epistemology already
formulated in his ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’;
knowledge for Zara Yacob, however, is a wisdom
given to man by God. Nevertheless,
Zara Yacob is a born-inquisitive mind and he
won’t be satisfied with some interrogations, and
it looks he was indeed a consummate rational
thinker with no limitation to his inquiry. “Once
upon a time” says Zara Yacob, in chapter 4 of
his book, “I said to myself, do all these
written holy books have the truth? And because I
did not have prior knowledge, I wanted to ask the
learned men, but on second thought I guessed that
they might tell me what is in their hearts.” By
that Zara Yacob meant, the so-called knowledgeable
and learned men, when consulted, could not
maintain objectivity and integrity and may provide
biased ideas only. Furthermore,
Zara Yacob says, “I asked the foreigner on his
religion but he gave me interpretation based on
his religion, and I asked the great Ethiopian
teacher he too gave me interpretation according to
his religion; and I inquired, ‘where shall I get
whoever judges for the truth?’ Zara
Yacob’s unparalleled and tremendous passion for
his search to find the truth, as always and very
much like a monologue, gives an answer to his own
query: “If I am knowledgeable, what do I know?
It is not without reason that God created me as a
wise human being.” Now, at this stage, the wise
man, the homo sapiens so to speak, was born in the
mind of Zara Yacob, but his inquisitive mind will
not be quenched given the vast array of complex
and yet universal realities that need to be
explored and examined. In chapter five of his
book, thus, he confronts the so-called
commandments of Moses and Mohammed, and
substantiates his arguments by employing the
doctrines of the so-called prophets and premise,
and via logical deduction he arrives at his own
inferences. In
the Book of Moses, there is bad wisdom that is in
contradiction with the laws of nature and with
God’s wisdom. According to the laws of nature
and God’s wisdom, so that human existence
perpetuates and does not become extinct, and in
order to beget children, a man and a woman are
ordered to engage in sexual intercourse, and this
kind of relationship was ordained by God to man,
and because God’s work should not be desecrated,
sexual intercourse cannot be desecrated or
portrayed as profane. In this regard Moses
promotes falsehood. The
marriage system is God’s system; monastic life,
however, prevents the perpetuation of the human
species and encourages rather the extinction of
human life, thereby undermining God’s wisdom. If
the Christian doctrine argues that celibacy or
monastic life is better than marriage, it
advocates falsehood, and it is not with God. Similarly,
we know in our hearts that Mohammed’s teachings
cannot be from God. Men and women are born equal
in number; it is one man to one woman, not one man
to eight or ten women. If one marries ten women,
nine men will remain without women, and this
violates God’s orders and the law of nature, as
well as the benefits of marriage; the law of
nature, in fact, orders a man to a woman marriage
relationship. By
‘law of nature’ Zara Yacob means the regularly
occurring patterns that we encounter or the
inevitable phenomenon observable in human society,
and in the latter context he solidifies his
argument of the opposite sex marriage relationship
and of on-to-one and not one-to-multiple
relationships. And he further argues that
Mohammed’s teachings, and that of Moses and the
Christians view this God’s wisdom as damnable
and/or detestable, however, is wrong. This Mosaic
outlook makes a woman’s life hard, prevents the
upbringing of children, and destroys love;
therefore, the Mosaic law cannot be from God that
created a woman. Again,
whatever is stated in the Gospel, that s/he who
abandon his father, mother, and children cannot be
right to God; actually, on the contrary, the act
of abandoning is tantamount to terminating all
human life; but God is not going to be contented
by destroying his own creature. Our heart tells us
that abandoning our fathers and mothers during
their old age is a major curse; and those who
abandon their children are by far worse than wild
animals who don’t abandon their offspring. ‘Muslims
argue that a human being can be sold and bought
like animals,’ and this argument of ‘human
chattel’ was detestable and offensive to Zara
Yacob, and he tells us that out heart tells us
that the Islamic law cannot come from the God that
created us. But Mohammed made the weak person the
property of the powerful, and he equated the wise
creature with the unwise animal; can this
violation come from God? God
apparently does not order frivolous things; he
won’t say eat this, don’t eat that; eat today
and don’t eat tomorrow; what Christians thought
when observing lent, [God] does not say eat meat
today but don’t eat meat tomorrow; he did not
say to Muslims eat during night fall and don’t
eat during daytime; our heart tells us that God
trained us to eat what is beneficial to our
health. On the other hand, such schedules of one
day for eating and the other day for fasting
compromises our health…God gave us permission to
eat…and we must extend gratitude to God for
letting us eat, and we should not attempt to
correct or contravene his blessings. “If
they tell me that lent is designed to kill the
love of meat,” says Zara Yacob, “I will
advance contraire idea by saying that love of meat
actually is God’s wisdom to enable a man
attracting a woman and a woman attracting a
man”; and we must follow God’s design instead
of eliminating it; our creator did not introduce
this love unto humans and animals without purpose;
in fact, he planted this love of meat unto the
body of man (in the generic sense of the word) so
that it serves as a base for the worldly life and
creatures. When
the Jews, Christians, and Muslims invented the law
of lent, they did not pay attention to God’s
work, and they lied by saying that ‘God gave us
lent and prohibited us from eating’. But, our
creator God gave us food that we eat and not keep
distance from it. The
rational thinking of Zara Yacob on meat eating
human behavior is quite astonishing, and for the
sake of clarity I like to digress briefly from the
central thesis of Zara Yacob’s discourse and
examine the psychological dimension of flesh
eating. Modern day psychologists reaffirm that
love of meat eating is a complex phenomenon
illustrating the juxtaposition of morality,
emotions, cognition, and personality
characteristics. In fact, they ensure us that meat
eating suggests correlations with masculinity in a
given hierarchical society. And if we understand
meat eating in the context of psychology, Zara
Yacob was indeed ahead of his time; he did not
only relate meat eating with masculinity but also
with its benefits in romantic life as well. In
chapter six, Zara Yacob begins by saying, ‘and
there is one major inquiry (investigation): all
people are equal and all creatures are
knowledgeable and/or wise; our heart (instinct)
tells us that he [God] is not 1) for life; 2) for
death; 3) for mercy; 4) for condemnation; such
partiality could not be part of a sacred God. During
this epoch, the people of our country changes the
love of the Gospel into conflict and subsequently
into earthly poison; they shattered their religion
from below; while conspiring they preach and they
are wrongly perceived as Christians. In
chapter seven Zara Yacob critically examines the
laws of God and the laws of man, and as always
(and I call this Zara Yacob Inquisitive
Methodology – ZAIM-), he begins posing a
question: “Why would God tolerate the liar
people when they push his own people to engage in
abandoning others?” and as always, via ZAIM he
answers his own inquiry himself (which I call a
soliloquy monologue of investigative discourse):
“But, God gave each and every person wisdom in
order to know what is false and what is true and
also to choose between what is false and what is
true. Therefore, via the wisdom that God gave us,
lets discover the truth with our hearts.” It
seems to me however that Zara Yacob was not only
in search of truth but also in search of
‘true’ people, ‘real’ people in the midst
of a world full of liars. This Zara Yacob
discourse could reflect of his times full of
negative energy to which he himself became a
victim and was even compelled to leave his native
Aksum and wander in the wilderness until he
settled in Enfraz, Gondar. “All
people are liars,” says Zara Yacob, “and we
cannot get the truth from them, ad if we choose
falsehood instead of the truth, it is we who will
be destroyed by our own mistake, but the crafty
order of God that is made for all creatures would
not vanish.” On
the top of the above true-false nexus, Zara Yacob
truly believes that the liars want to destroy the
law of nature; they can only expose their weak
falsehood and God will laugh unto them, because
God knows how to judge and he will make the
sinners entrap themselves by their own deeds.
Thus, the monk that denigrates the marriage system
will be ensnared by a very bad illness and will be
entrapped in unnatural sexual conduct. Beyond
the liars’ ultimate destiny, Zara Yacob examines
what he calls ‘human want’ and in regards to
the latter, he reasons by reaffirming his own
outlook that ‘our want on this earth will not be
satisfied’; those who don’t have they want to
get what they need, and those who have want to add
more. All people in this world, as long as they
live, they want to have more and they won’t be
quenched. Interestingly,
what Harvard psychologist and educator Abraham
Maslow introduces ‘hierarchy of needs’ in the
1940s and 1950s as the basic needs or
psychological needs of food, water, warmth, rest,
or security needs etc. were thoroughly examined by
Zara Yacob in the seventeenth century. Maslow
argues that in order motivation to arise at the
next stage, each must be satisfied with the
individuals themselves. In the same vein, Zara
Yacob argued that human want will increase once
the first needs are accomplished and there is no
end to those human needs; hence ‘hierarchy of
needs.’ Both Zara Yacob and Abraham Maslow
clearly delineated physical needs and
psychological needs; their difference is that Zara
Yacob was more concerned with what he calls
spiritual needs in the context of the human soul
as opposed to the physical needs that satisfies
the human body, and there is no doubt that his
synthesis on ‘human want’ is psychosomatic.
What
I found interesting about the notion of ‘soul’
of Zara Yacob is that he does not simply portray
it as a metaphysical entity but he gives it the
semblance of a power with the potential of
everlastingness, and sometimes he depicts it like
a concrete material force that has a thinking
power because he says, ‘she [our soul] thinks
about God, and in her mind can see God’; ‘she
can think that she can live forever’ and ‘it
is not without reason that God gave her [our soul]
the power of thinking’; ‘but he gave her so
that she thinks and find out’. According to Zara
Yacob, it is not only the brain, a concrete gray
matter, that thinks, but also metaphysical
entities like the soul also think. Ultimately, he
substantiates his idea of ‘a thinking soul’ in
the context of the law of nature, and he reasons,
‘if we investigate the laws of nature, our heart
tells us that it is in order and its essence can
be proven.’ In
chapter eight, Zara Yacob comes up with what he
calls ‘natural knowledge’ and I like to label
it ‘instinctive intelligence’. Zara Yacob
teaches us that we love people like we love
ourselves, and says, ‘what you don’t want
people to do to you, don’t do unto them’;
‘our heart tells us that we are not supposed to
commit murder, theft, and lie’, because our
creator gave us wisdom and skill; concomitantly,
he gave us permission to make our livelihood
better through knowledge and work, and without
these we cannot attain what we want. Moreover, he
gave us permission to marry and raise children. We
must understand that God did not create us to be
perfect…but with his craftiness he gave us
wisdom for our preparedness in this world…he
also created us as wise humans so that we
appreciate his greatness and pray unto him. In
this chapter, apart from the cliché of ‘love
others like yourself’, he repeatedly injects the
idea of ‘a knowledgeable soul’ that recognizes
the greatness of God, and the necessity of
constant prayer is guided by our instinctive
intelligence. With this rationale, thus, Zara
Yacob promotes his discourse on ‘challenges and
prayers’ in chapter nine of his book. In
chapter nine, Zara Yacob begins by saying, “I
prayed with all my heart and God listened to my
prayers and gave me salvation/redemption; and I
sang from Psalms 116 which states ‘God listened
to my demands and I loved it. I repeated it, and I
thought this song was written for me. That kind of
Zara Yacob’s feeling in which he associates a
song of David to his own person reminds me of a
film entitled Amadeus that I watched in 1984; this
film obviously is about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,
and Mozart apparently writes a requiem at the
request of Antonio Salieri (Murry Abrahams), but
when Mozart finished writing the requiem, he
exclaimed, “I felt that I wrote this requiem to
myself!”; the difference between Zara Yacob and
Mozart’s emotional expressions, however, is that
of the former is pleasant and positive while that
of the latter is melancholic and negative, but the
common wavelength in anticipating encounters unto
oneself is the same. In
chapter ten, Zara Yacob discusses prayer in the
context of mundane and sacred works, and although
he emphasizes the significance of prayer, he
argues that prayer alone is not enough unless it
is supplemented by work (physical labor). He
reasons, ‘I thought, to the extent possible I
should work till exhaustion to fulfill what is
necessary for my life…I prayed to God and said,
‘God bless all my ideas, my life, and my
work…give me happiness and money in accordance
with what you know and you permit’, and ‘turn
the hearts of my work colleagues to something
positive…because your blessings and your will,
if fulfilled, make my old-age a fulfilled old-age.
As we shall see at the very end of this article,
the prayer in regards to old-age was granted to
Zara Yacob. “While
I pray,” says Zara Yacob, “I also admired
God’s creatures, animals, and wild beasts in
their order”. In order to protect themselves and
reproduce, these animals attract each other; and
the logs and grasses in the wild created with
great craft sprout, get green, and grow flowers,
and yield fruit without making any mistake, and
due to this [behavior] they seem to have life
(life in the sense of feelings and/or emotions).
On top of this, says Zara Yacob, “Your name
(that is God’s name) is praised because of the
mountains, hills, rivers, and springs.” Zara
Yacob continues on his nature discourse by
admiring the work of God: This work of your hand
that made the sun out of which emanates light for
the world; the moon and the stars that you made
them move on the roads you made for them without
making any error, and this [really] is
fascinating. Because the stars are far away, they
look small and minute, but who is the one who
knows their number, their distance, and their
size? The
clouds provide rain in order to create lash green;
all great, all wondrous, all crafty; that is the
way they were created; I spent two years admiring
and extending gratitude to my creator. Zara
Yacob continues…Again, I thought God’s work is
extremely fine and his ideas are deep and
unintelligible, and in a typical ZAIM tradition,
Zara Yacob inquires, “but why wood the minor and
innocent person lie that he is a messenger of God
and [shows off] pontificates he has wisdom? Oh
lord! I, in your eyes, am poor and innocent and so
that I appreciate your greatness and know what I
am supposed to know about you as well as praise
you, give me wisdom.
Chapter
ten of Zara Yacob’s book clearly demonstrates
that this fascinating man was also a great admirer
of nature, and although given the rich history of
the Aksumite Ethiopian civilization in general and
the development of advanced astronomy of ancient
Ethiopians in particular could have contributed to
Zara Yacob’s imagination of the heavenly bodies,
his thesis on the revolution of the planets on
their orbits (he calls them roads) and nature and
characteristics
of the stars brings him very close to
modern astrophysicists. Chapter
eleven is about Zara Yacob’s internal migration
and sojourn in Enfraz, Gondar after he left his
native Aksum for good and this coincides with the
reign of King Fasiladas in 1632 (1625 EC). At
Enfraz, Zara Yacob earned a living by writing
Psalms to one rich man by the name Habtu; he did
the same for his son Wolde-Michael and the latter
gave him two goats and an ox. At this juncture,
Zara Yacob converses with his own inner voice and
says, “I would like to live with everybody in
love and peace; and instead of enjoying respect in
accursed houses, I rather isolate myself from
people, consume the fruits of my labor and choose
to hide and live with the wisdom that God granted
me.” At
Enfraz, Zara Yacob was the one and only one
writer, and he wrote books and letters for those
who demanded them and they compensated him with
cloth, goats, grain, salt, and other essential
goods; he ultimately became a teacher of Psalms at
the behest of the wealthy man Habtu, who assigned
Zara Yacob to teach his children, and subsequently
Zara Yacob developed an intimate relationship with
Habtu and his extended family members. Chapter
twelve is about what Zara Yacob calls
‘legitimate and voluntary marriage’, and he
candidly and bluntly asserts that ‘life for a
man without a woman leads to disaster’; ‘in
the long haul, a man needs a woman and it is not
right that he leads a bachelor life’. And in
order to substantiate his reasoning of the
legitimate and voluntary marriage, Zara Yacob
reiterates his recurrent theme and advises his
fellow humans: ‘In order not to be ensnared by
their own trap, humans should not lead an
unnatural life.” When
Zara Yacob was ready to settle down, he tells us
he told his master Habtu, “my appearance is due
to the bad times, but I am not a monk” and then
he goes on telling the tale of his encounter with
a young lady: There was a girl who was the
relative of my lord, but although she was
well-mannered, wise and patient, her countenance
was not attractive. However, I proposed to my lord
Habtu to give me this girl as a wife, and my lord
said, “okay, from now on she is going to be your
slave and not my slave” Zara Yacob was not happy
about the slave attribute to his would be wife,
but although he is intelligently analytical and
could have made an incisive remark, in rather
quick and inventive verbal manner, he simply said,
“she is going to be my wife and not my slave; a
man and
a woman in one flesh and one property are equal
and we are not supposed to view them as master and
slave.” And my lord Habtu responded, “You are
a man of God, and do what you like to do.” And
we called the girl, and I said to her “can you
be my wife and would you love me?”; “If my
lord permits” she said, and my lord Habtu said
to her, “I give you permission”; with the
permission of the lord, Zara Yacob and Hirut were
married and happily ever after; the legitimate and
voluntary marriage was accomplished! What
came to me personally as a big surprise is the
fact that Zara Yacob arranges his own marriage and
asks Hirut directly whether she would marry him or
not; this kind of unique behavior of Zara Yacob
was dismissed as vulgar in the 17th
century and unthinkable even in the 20th/21st
century Ethiopian society; what Zara Yacob did is
a new relationship pattern even for present-day
Ethiopian communities, especially in the rural
areas; Zara Yacob, without doubt, was ahead of his
time! In
chapter thirteen, Zara Yacob critically examines
the crisis that befell Ethiopia following the
religious conversion of King Susneyos to
Catholicism and the deterioration of the political
system and the culture of the people even during
Fasiladas when a lot blood was shed despite the
fine advice the king enjoyed from his close
associates. Following the political and cultural
crisis, famine engulfed the country and many
people died. According to Zara Yacob, a prophecy
of a man hating his own brother and thus lives in
darkness has happened. But of his own family, Zara
Yacob says that they exhausted their gold reserves
and sold their clothes and cattle and purchased
food for themselves and others and they were not
hungry like others; “in the two-years long
famine,” says Zara Yacob, “we were neither
hungry nor sick; in fact, the maxim of ‘you
shall not be ashamed during bad times; you shall
be satiated during hunger’ reflected our
situation.” Chapter
fourteen is about the passing of Habtu and the
brief bio-sketch of his son, and chapter fifteen
is about the end of Zara Yacob himself; and the
rationalist Ethiopian philosopher narrates his
contributions and how his legacy should be
continued. “When I scribbled this book,” says
Zara Yacob, “I kept it secret; after I die, if a
knowledgeable and inquisitive person is found, I
beg him to add ideas on my ideas. I began
investigating what had not been examined or
inspected before, and so that the people of our
country know the truth and love their brothers, as
well as refrain from quarreling on senseless ideas
surrounding religion; the person who understands
this and has more knowledge should continue what I
started, and teach and write about it. The
person who would follow the footsteps of Zara
Yacob and continue his mission of religiosity,
ethics, and rational thinking was his student
Wolde-Hiwot, who actually became the narrator of
the life of Zara Yacob and the promoter of his
ideas; Wolde-Hiwot tells us that his mentor Zara
Yacob died at the age of ninety-three, without any
ailment or illness. Teodros Kiros, PhD To
the ancient Egyptians and following them to Zara
Yacob, a seventeenth century Ethiopian
Rationalist, the heart is a symbol of Wisdom
broadly understood, and a symbol of Reason and
Rationality, analytically understood. That
is: The
Heart is a symbol of Reason Humans
can reason They
reason with the Heart The
ancient Egyptians mummified the human heart and
sucked out the brain. The heart captured their
imagination and stimulated their reasoning power
and their wisdom. It is said that hearts were
lifted and soaked in wines and herbs, preserved
for worship by saints. Aztec priests captured the
hearts of their enemies and “offered them to
their Gods”. The Egyptians were cardiocentrists.
They considered the brain worthless, whereas they
worshipped the heart. The human heart also
fascinated the Greek philosophers. Plato and
Aristotle. Plato, however, was much more concerned
with the wisdom of the Soul than he was with the
heart; in The Republic he
divides the soul into three parts, the Rational,
the Spirited
and the Desiring,
and primacy of governance is given to Rationality,
a foundational attribute to the Soul. Plato was
cerebrocentrist. Aristotle, his brilliant student,
parts company from his teacher. As the son of
biologist, and influenced by his father, and
accustomed to shrewd observation, he dissected and
studied animal hearts, his Historia
Animalum and De
Patribus Animalum, are wealth of empirical
evidence and detailed documentation of the
structure and function of the heart. He disagreed
with Plato that the heart is cushion, by arguing
that, in fact, the heart is the seat of the soul,
therefore, the seat of wisdom and rationality. The
human heart, this industrious and muscular pump,
the size of a fist, which beats 100,000 times, and
pumps 2000 gallons of blood, through 60,000 miles
of blood vessels, and which in a life time will
beat more than 2.5 billion times, is also the site
of a penetrating intelligence and the seat of
wisdom and generator of not merely irrational
feelings but passionate thought impulses. It is
the heart which carves out the right moral path
and the originator of thought impulses in the form
of emotion. It is the ultimate house of what we
moderns have come to call moral intelligence. The
heart as part of the body is indeed a diligent
blood pumper, and as the seat of the soul, it
originates thought impulses. Thus, the heart has
both a scientific function and a transcendental
function; the heart is both a physical
material/material and non-physical transcendental
organ. The body and mind dichotomy, which raged in
the seventeenth century, was made prominent by
Descartes, who was claiming that the body and the
mind could not possibly interact, and that the
body is merely sensations, and the mind a thinking
organ. However, in contrast, Zara Yacob
orchestrated a Copernican revolution by arguing
that the Leb (heart), (in Geez, a classical Ethiopian language) is in fact
both the seat of emotion and the seat of thoughts.
That the dichotomy of between the body and mind is
overcome inside the heart, the seat of the soul.
Zara Yacob’s resolution of the dichotomy is his
view that the heart is part of the body, as a
blood pumper, and part of the non-bodily, the
penetrating intelligence which originates and
dissects thoughts, and directs them to the brain,
where thought impulses are processed and
linguistically articulated, thereby facilitating
communication and producing discourses. For Zara
Yacob, a spiritual religious thinker, the
transcendental function, is given by God to
persons, so that they can think wisely and act
rationally. From this angle, one can develop a
modality of rationality.
One
is wise, therefor potentially rational, when one
uses the God given penetrating intelligence and
put oneself on a moral path, guided by
self-generated limiting conditions of discourse
and action. I presuppose this particular view of
Zara Yacobian rationality, and I am calling it the
Rationality of the Human Heart (RH)
which I distinguish from the popularly modern
Scientific Rationality (SR).
I will briefly contrast these modalities of
Rationality. I do not wish to draw the line too
deeply. I allow the possibility of SR, when it is not purely instrumental and calculative, to draw from
RH, also. After all, scientists have hearts also and not all
rationalists consult their hearts, either. When
science is instrumental (calculating), then the
distinctions, which I have drawn, are plausible.
When science is not instrumental, then the
dichotomy which I have drawn is unnecessary. RH
and SR could
work in tandem when ideal speaking and acting
subjects choose wisely and efficiently. In
the moral/rational sphere, the speaking and acting
subjects consults the heart prayerfully and humbly
before intervening in the flow of life to realize
possibilities and life chances. They think deeply
before they act to correct an injustice or
articulate a vision of the good life boldly but
humbly. The penetrating human intelligence located
in the human heart, as we learn from Zara Yacob
propels us when it is functioning
transcendentally, to change the consciousness of
the world and address human miseries-miseries
which SR for the most part ignores as permanent
features of the natural world. It is at this level
that SR and RH give us irreconcilable
articulations of the human condition. Generally,
I contend that SR is not motivated by the goal of
becoming wise. The goal is efficiency and
practical results and maximizing profit and
benefit at work places. RH is centrally guided by
the vision of wisdom, or at the least, valuing
wisdom, and seeking to become wise and make wise
decisions. If one is religiously inclined and is a
believer, the quest for wisdom is accompanied by a
committed passion to reach God prayerfully, so
that one’s speech and action is purely motivated
by Zara Yacobian Hasasa
(looking
for, searching for
God) and Hatata (praying and
mediating). For Zara Yacob, the possibility of
becoming wise, at a certain point of one’s
impermanent life, requires a steady company of
God. In short, one must have faith in this
Transcendental power, located in the heart, in
order to realize wisdom and rationality
simultaneously. SR on the other hand, is not
guided unless one wishes to do so, to engage in Hatata. All that the person has to do is use rationality to produce
efficient accounts. A
plan of life is felt in the heart as a thought
impulse, and the relevant principles of what to do
originate there, as the subject intensely feels
the thought impulses. In this sense the heart
produces intelligent life plans and seeks to
realize them. As it does so, it wears a meditative
and prayerful mood to empower the urge of its
agency. These plans of life and principles of
moral action are knowledge producing moments for
speaking and acting subjects. They are productive
of Noesis.
Following Zara Yacob, I would like to modestly
contend that the heart is wise/rational as are the
speaking and acting subjects who consult Noesis,
which is located in the human heart, originating
thought impulses and seeking to express in
language, so that it could share its possibilities
with others with whom it shares the world. When
SR restricts itself to the relationship between
means and ends to produce efficient and
cost-effective outcomes, RH seeks to change the
consciousness of the world to minimize, and if
possible, eliminate unnecessary human suffering,
such as poverty, diseases, and exploitation at
work places. RH is committed to the idea of making
means and ends themselves rational. When
we consult the heart, and say, it is from the
heart, what we mean is: the feelings which ground
the thought impulses are authentic; that the
subject intuitively feels that she must act; that
the thought impulses are sincere; that the thought
impulses are deeply felt; that the speaking and
acting subject has carefully distinguished
authentic thoughts from inauthentic ones
intuitively; that her intuition is informed by
guidance originating from the companionship of the
Transcendent thought Hasasa
and Hatata;
that the speaking subject means what she says and
acts in accordance with what she feels, following
an intuition penetrated by wisdom, and finally the
thought impulses provoke moral action, they compel
the speaking subject to act in the world, to
change human consciousness. SR and RH could
further be contrasted through the following ways.
The most salient features of SR
are: a) Humans are desiring beings, that is
the natural constitution, therefore, b) humans are
economic animals and their psychological and
materials needs can be satisfied by the
relationship between means and ends, c) the
desires of these beings must somehow be satisfied,
even at the expense of destroying the environment,
as drilling oil, deforestation, coal mining and
others attest, and yet we continue ignoring the
consequences as long as money and wealth are
procured, and the masses are somehow minimally
satisfied, and revolts and revolutions are
systematically averted. In
direct contrast, SR,
a) the human is a potentially peaceful and justice
loving, but this potential has to be patiently
evoked out of the recesses of the unconscious
where it is covered by desire; b) humans are in
fact caring and sensitive beings, evident in the
language of the heart, if they are inclined to
consult the heart before they act, a capacity,
that critical education could unravel , patiently
and lovingly; c) humans are down to mystery, which
includes the possibility of discovering a
Transcendental power, such as God to put them on
the right moral paths, and change the
consciousness of the world; d) humans when
correctly challenged and critically enlightened,
can and are willing to explore extraordinary
possibilities motivated by the power of the
intuition to discover the Good on their own. The
Good is inside them, and consulting the heart with
a reflective, meditative mood could get them
there. Following Zara Yacob, I modestly contend
that possibility of the best in each and everyone
of us begins with engaging in Hasasa
and Hatata as self-imposed moral projects propelled by the quest for
moral excellence as a lifelong quest for
cultivating new habits covered by the weight of SR,
which has become our second nature. RH has the power to redeem us from ourselves, from the
slumber of our sleep, our callousness and
indifference. These are turbulent times.
Indifference is the signifier of our age. Game
playing is the name of our alienated human
relations. Marketing everything is our new nature.
We play people, as opposed to caring for them and
helping them, when we can. We even like to say,
sadly, “do not be emotional”. By saying so, we
think that to be emotional is to be foolish,
thoughtless, when the opposite is the case, that
emotions themselves are thought impulses, and that
it is only when we feel that we think, that we
encounter the company of God, if we are religious
in that particular sense, or we become one with
Brahma, the Imperishable in Hinduism.
To
be rational and wise is in fact the power which
makes it possible for us to thank all those who
serve us, our house cleaners, our maids, our baby
sisters, all those can be changed when we listen
and are guided by the heart, the seat of thinking.
When we listen to the heart – the site of
thought – we will not suffer from the pangs of
thoughtlessness and indifference and internal
cruelty. RH
awakens us from indifference and helplessness,
as the first step of organizing the world to
participate in peaceful marches, informed
participation in social movements, where hearts
meet hearts, and wisdom interacts with wisdom. DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions of the authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect ethioobserver position. ethioobserver does not exercise any editorial control over the information therein. ethioobserver cannot accept any responsibility or liability for any actions taken (or not taken) as a result of reading the material displayed.
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