The Philosopher Monk

The name Zera-yaekob (1599 -1692) sometimes gets confused with that of the Ethiopian king who reigned at the turn of the 16^th century. Due to this confusion you may sometimes hear people referring to Atse Zera-yaekob as the philosopher king. But the Ethiopian philosopher known by this name had never been close to the throne in any way. He was rather a monk who spent much of his life fleeing away from people around the throne.

The Birth of a Philosopher Monk

Born in 1599 at Axum three years later after Atse Zera-yaekob came to the throne, the child Zera-yaekob, commonly known then as Workie, obtained the basic traditional education, Dawit, at home. And then he moved to another place to attend traditional church music education which ended in failure. After three months of unsuccessful attempt in this field of study, Workie spent the next four years attending Grammer and Kine (traditional poetry of the highest standard) in which he proved himself to be a person of exceptional intelligence.

Then he continued to learn Bible interpretations for a decade, which did not actually make him a dedicated scholar in the field. This was because of his critical tendency which made him rather uneasy to the different interpretations of the Bible he had been studying all those years. This dissatisfaction later on led him to critically examine the different, often conflicting perspectives of various religions on some important issues in his life. He even went to the extent of questioning the very existence of an omniscient creator for which he had found the answer in his own way without resorting to any scriptural justification.

After he completed his decade long Bible studies, he went back to his birth place and began teaching the Bible. When he taught the scripture, he would only outline the various religious perspectives and interpretations of the issues in focus without any attempt to impose any one of them or his own perspective on the audience. He always believed that it is the duty of every individual to examine the various perspectives and arrive at some kind of conclusion of one’s own.

Atse Susnios, who had been in power by then for 19 years succeeding Atse Zera-yaekob, had been converted to Catholicism by Bishop Alphonzo who had come from Portugal.  His unusual teaching method coupled with the King’s new found religious fervor made things very difficult for Zerayaekob to continue his service, so he had to flee for his life towards Tekezie and then to Shoa. Zera-yaekob particularly blamed his arch enemy known as Yohannes who using his close connection to the throne had turned the king against him by accusing him of spreading misinformation and inciting violence against the king. Zera-yaekob had to live in seclusion mostly on the northern part of Shoa until Atse Susnios died a couple of years later. These two years of seclusion were the defining moment of his life in which most of his philosophical reflections had been crystallized to give birth to the philosopher monk as we know him today.    

Philosophical Reflections

During these formative years of his life, Zera-yaekob spent his days in a cave hiding from people for fear that he might fall in the hands of his enemies. He spent all his time praying and reflecting on the most important questions of his life. Why God allow people to do all sorts of evil deeds in His name?  Is there in the first place an all knowing God in the heavens? Is there God who would answer his prayers?

His critical mind seemed to offer him satisfactory answers to many of his questions following a logical pattern of reasoning which marked him as a genuine philosopher of unlikely place and time. He seemed to have expected his questions or prayers to have been answered by some external power, but he did not wait for the answers to be sent for him through a supernatural agent. Starting from the most basic understanding he had about his own nature, he continued to build on this understanding following logical pattern of reasoning. He knew that he was an intelligent being who had such amazing faculties for seeing and hearing. And he was convinced that he had received all these qualities from some other being who must have all these qualities. Hence, he had no doubt that his questions or prayers would be received and then responded to accordingly. It looked that the answers were already put in his mind or they were perhaps sent to him in the form of logical deduction. Whatever the case might be, the answers started to pour down on him as he kept on asking more and more questions.

Pretty much satisfied with his realization of the presence of an all knowing being who has caused everything in the universe, he continued to ask which of the various religions the true God could have been genuinely represented with. All the different religions claim that it is only theirs which represents the true God, in effect relegating all the others to mere pretension. How could they all be true then while they are all making contradictory claims?

He knew that no other living soul could provide him the answers for all these questions. He did not also want to take the scriptures he had been studying for more than a decade as reliable sources of true knowledge and understanding. He already found many contradictory assertions written in these texts. Thus, if one really wants the truth, one does not have to rely on anything outside him. He/she has to look deep within oneself since “we all,” as he believed, “have already been created wise by the wisest of all.”

Here, Zera-yaekob seems to set an important precedence at least in the Ethiopian context in recognizing oneself as a source of supreme knowledge and understanding. Most importantly he rejected an uncritical acceptance of traditional knowledge including that which is believed to have been contained in the scriptures. After all it is one’s own understanding and critically examination of whatever is passed on to us through tradition or scripture that would help us identify the truth from all other impurities.     

With such convictions and clarity of the mind, Zera-yaekob was set to examine the various claims and assertions made by people from the major religious perspectives of his time. He already realized that the Holy Bible does not necessarily contain the truth and only the truth as it is widely accepted by most Christians. He particularly rejected the Book of Moses on the premise that it advocates celibacy over sexual relationship formalized by marriage which he believed to be more congruent to human nature than the former.

He also rejects the permission given by Prophet Mohamed to a man to marry more than one wife. His argument rests on a hypothetical assumption that the number of men in the world is roughly equal to that of women so that every man could only get married to one other woman alone. According to Zera-yaekob, if one man is allowed to marry more than one woman, there will consequently be some men who can never get married to any woman at all. And for him this is against the nature of human beings. Even though we may find some of the premises of his argument questionable today, we acknowledge the fact that based on his own understanding of the law of nature he dared to challenge spiritual truth supposedly sent from God through his human agents. 

Zera-yaekob believes that all human beings are created equal, and that there are no special people chosen by God to have any special privilege or status than the rest. Every one has a natural ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Even the supposedly well versed people in such area could not be of much help except that they would provide us with some kind of opinion of their own. Different scholars well versed in their respective religion tend to always consider their own perspective the most accurate of all, relegating the others to utter nonsense or as having harbored evil intentions. For Zera-yaekob, it is obvious that all these people from various religious orientations could never be all truthful as truth can not contradict itself. Hence, it is the duty of every human being to seek the truth within oneself rather than expecting it from someone else or from any kind of written documents. 

Zera-yaekob also believes that human beings have been given the freedom to choose whatever they want to do in their life. But he also recognizes that this freedom is not without any consequence. As every action has its own consequences, be it good or bad, one will finally receive the fruit of his action as a reward or punishment even after death. Here we find Zera-yaekob simply accepting the notion of life after death and the myth of receiving reward or punishment with a sort of blind faith rather than with critical examination typical of his philosophical orientation.

Apart from this point we can see Zera-yakob critically examining many other issues generally accepted and even mentioned in Holy Scriptures of both Christianity and Islam. He strongly asserts that many of the things we have learned from these two great religions are not in line with what we instinctively understand to be the law of nature. It is unpalatable for him that menstruation which is an essential part of the natural process in the continuation of human life on earth is regarded as a sin in the Book of Moses.

Despite his high regard for married life which the Bible also upholds, it is unacceptable for him to leave one’s own wife just because of adultery as the Scripture says. For him sexual feeling is something natural that should only be expressed naturally through sexual intercourse rather than being suppressed as it is implied in the Holy Bible. He is also against the very idea of fasting since he believes that it contradicts the natural requirement for human beings to sustain their life on earth. Even though he does not totally discredit what is contained in the scriptures, he boldly asserts that they provide some aspects of the truth mixed up with falsehood. Hence, it is the duty of every individual to dust off the scriptures from their impurities in order to arrive at the golden truth of existence.  

Pragmatism

Zera-yaekob was not only a philosopher living in the world of ideas. He was a practical man who made an effort to lead his life according to the realities of his time. His pragmatism can be best explained by the fact that he led his life among a predominantly Christian society pretending to be one among them. He of course had a strong spiritual tendency and indeed accepted the presence of an omniscient being who caused the entire universe. But he never considered himself a follower of any particular religion. He merely followed his own natural instinct to understand the workings of nature and tried to grasp greater spiritual truths different from what was widely accepted at the time.

Even then he did not dare to openly disseminate his ideas which would not be favorably accepted by the people of his time. Thus, upon the insistence of one of his admirers, he chose to leave them behind in writing for the future generations who he hoped would perhaps understand and accept them very well. He did not, however, claim to have arrived at the whole truth, as he suggested in his writing that any one from the future could improve on his ideas to match them with the realities of the time to come. And that was what his successor, Wolde-hiwot, had accomplished following his foot-steps. 

Though Zara-yaekob had never considered himself a follower of any particular religion, he had a strong spiritual tendency which would rather mark him as a spiritual thinker. In a sense, he was a deeply religious person who prayed all the time referring to the verses in Psalm, but, of course, changing some parts of it when he found them not agreeable to his conscience.

He knew very well that prayers alone would not be enough for a living, so he did some works to sustain his life. After Atsie Susnios died in 1632 and then succeeded by Atsie Fasiledes, Zara-yaekob went out to the town of Enfraz, not far from Gondar and Lake Tana and started to make a living by scribing books and then by teaching the sons of the benefactor with whom he had been staying henceforth. He also married a woman called Hirut who was a relative of that same person, and had a son born to him on October 11, 1631. Three years later the king’s favorite bishop by the name Alfonzo left the country, but Zara-yaekob refused to return to his place of origin abandoning his new found way of life at Begemdir despite an attractive offer made to him for a prominent post at Aksum.

The Question of Identity

The true identity of Zera-yaekob has been a bone of contentions among various scholars from both the Ethiopian and Italian sides. The Italian historian Carlo Conti Rossini was one of the first scholars who cast doubt on the Ethiopian identity of the philosopher. The basis of his argument seems to rest on the belief that such radically different ideas could not possibly originate from the 16^th century Ethiopia. Hence, he tried to locate the time of the writing of Zara-yaekob in the 19^th century, which was well suited to match with the presence of an Italian monk by the name Giusto D'Urbino in Ethiopia. The earliest copy of the manuscript was reportedly found out by this man who later sent it to Anton Dabadi accompanied by a letter dated Yekatit 28, 1853 (March 7, 1861). The letter described that Father Justo had found part of the same manuscript years before and later got the complete version from a soldier returning back from a battle at Dembia. Even though Justo did not claim to have written the manuscript himself, Conti Rossini chose to take him as the original writer of the manuscript taking into account the historical circumstances surrounding the material.

Father Justo who came to Ethiopia in 1846 was said to have duplicated a book containing the ideas of Freemasonry and distributed them among his friends. The title of the book was Workie. Remember that this title is the same as the childhood name of Zera-yaekob. Conti Rossini referring to some people close to Father Justo reported that he himself wrote the book in the name of someone else. To back up his argument, Rossini also cited the similarity of the Christian name of Father Justo which was Jacobo that is very close to the Ethiopian version, Yaekob. The date of the handwriting which was of course believed to have been copied by Father Justo himself appears to have conveniently corresponded to the 19^th century which overlaps with the time the Italian monk had been to Ethiopia. The Italian monk’s love and good command of the Geez language could also adequately explain the fact that the manuscript was originally written in that language. Moreover, Rossini drew certain resemblances between some of the ideas contained in the manuscript and similar discourses found in another book published in Paris in 1847.

 

Some strong counter arguments have also been made by an Ethiopian scholar known as Alemayehus Moges. This man attempted to reassert the Ethiopian identity of the philosopher by criticizing the arguments Rossini has made. Alemayehu cited the fact that the book of Zera-yaekob made specific references particularly to Psalm highlighting the Ethiopian tradition that this book was orally recited by the people of the time. He also rejected the possibility that the Italian monk presented as the author of the manuscripts had a good command of the Geez language on the ground that Father Justo stayed in Ethiopia only for eight years among which he spent only three years to study Geez and some books written in the language. He mentioned the two letters written by Father Justo to back up his argument.

The first letter was the one written on Yekatit 17, 1850 (February 24, 1858) in which Father Justo explained that he started studying the language of the land and some religious books at that time. And in the second letter dated Yekatit 28, 1953 (March 7, 1861) he made a reference to the manuscripts he said he had received from the hands of a soldier. Hence, the three years between these two dates were the time in which the Italian monk could have mastered the language to have written the manuscript as proclaimed by Conti Rossini. But according to Alemayehu that was not enough time to master the language and study all the complexities of religious and cultural understanding of the people. The fact that the book of Zera-yaekob and that of Wolde-hiwot were found together in one bind does not necessarily show as Rossini chose to believe that they both were written by the same author. In this case, Alemayehu mentioned a number of other such instances where compiling books written by different authors has been a long established tradition in Ethiopia.

Alemayehu also confronted Rossini’s position that such radical ideas of the time could not possibly have emanated from the 16^th century Ethiopia, saying that such kind of generalization appears to expose the naivety of Rossini since oral traditions of the time show different occasions where some people apparently criticized God and that there were even certain instances when some individuals even claimed to be the true Christ themselves.

Some of the ideas about Islam contained in the manuscript that Rossini mentioned as instances of plagiarism from the book published in Paris could have easily been learnt by the Ethiopian philosopher as there was a visible presence of Muslims in Ethiopia from earlier days. Considering all these points, Alemayehu seems to have concluded that Rossini’s attempt to strip the manuscript of its Ethiopian origin was only a continuation of Western scholars with colonial mindset to cast Africa as the darkest continent devoid of its own history, tradition and wisdom.

       

Despite the claims and the counter-claims made in favor or against the identity of Zara-yaekob, the man deserves a serious attention in any kind of discussion of the evolution of an African Philosophy. After all, the ideas of a philosopher are worth a lot more than the question of his ethnic origin.