Zera Yacob, Enemy of All Dogmas

This view was proven false when the Canadian scholar Claude Sumner began publishing his research on seventeenth-​century Ethiopian philosopher Zera Yacob during the 1970s. Yacob’s writings advocate for the same principles that would form the backbone of Enlightenment thought: the importance of rationality, a critical attitude towards unexamined knowledge, and a philosophical methodology centered around stripping back one’s biases.

Yacob, after being persecuted for his religious free-​thinking, isolated himself in a cave to evade capture. While isolated, Yacob theorized about religious toleration, the nature of reason, and the equality of all people, ideas that would become the bread and butter of later Enlightenment thinkers such as Rene Descartes, David Hume, and John Locke—though they never read Yacob’s work.

His life and work show us that Enlightenment ideals are neither merely nor exclusively the expression of a particular European nation or thinker, but rather express a universal urge for freedom. Whether in France or Ethiopia, there will always be some who dream of a freer world.

Zera Yacob was born on August 28, 1599, near the ancient capital of Ethiopia, Aksum. By the end of the 16^th century, Ethiopia was a mighty nation that had conquered other kingdoms and become a major power. But Yacob was not born into the ranks of the wealthy or powerful. His family were farmers. Despite his background, he had access to some education and distinguished himself as an extremely quick learner. Yacob’s teacher encouraged him to continue his education to study rhetoric, poetry, and critical thinking for the next four years. Then, something unexpected happened: while still young and playing with his friends, Yacob accidentally fell into a ravine. Miraculously, he emerged unharmed despite the ravine being 50 meters deep. Flabbergasted he was even alive, Yacob decided to thank God by dedicating his life to studying the Holy Scripture.

Though a mighty empire, Ethiopia was also a place of great religious unrest. Ethiopia, alongside Armenia, is one of the oldest Christian nations belonging to the Orthodox tradition. Even today, Ethiopia is home to practicing Coptic Christians. Listening to the religious debates between Muslims, Jews, and Christians, Yacob concluded that most people hold their faith out of a sense of habit, tradition, or, at worst, dogma. Seeing this, Yacob rejected all labels, explaining that he “did not believe in anything except in God who created all and conserves all, as he had taught me” (Sumner 1976, p. 72). Yacob’s skepticism of organized religion anticipates that of American founding father Thomas Paine, who aimed to make religion more rational and individualistic in his famous work The Age of Reason.

Completing his studies, Yacob returned to his home of Askum to teach. Sadly, for Yacob, an environment of religious tension was not the best place for someone who wished to discuss each religion’s merits and issues openly. He explains that he took an ecumenical approach: “The Frang say this and this or The Copts say that and that, and l did not say: This is good, that is bad, but l said: All these things are good if we ourselves are good” (p. 5). But Yacob’s more open-​minded approach confused his contemporaries, who often misunderstood why Yacob was not part of any religion. He loved and worshiped God; there was no need to be part of any particular group in Yacob’s eyes.

Portuguese Jesuits had begun traveling to Ethiopia to convert Ethiopians to Catholicism. By 1626, the reigning king Susenyos was converted from Orthodoxy to Catholicism. Unrest began as the king forced his subjects to convert to the Catholic faith despite their protests. Yacob, a known freethinker and gadfly, threatened the status quo. Shortly after Susenyo’s conversion, Yacob was accused by a priest named Walda Yohannas of misleading people and corrupting their morals. Yacob was forced to flee for his life; grabbing some gold and his trusty Book of Psalms, Yacob fled south towards Shoa, another Ethiopian kingdom.

While on the road, he found an uninhabited patch of land with a cave framed by the gorgeous scenery of the Takkaze River. Yacob decided to make this cave his home until he could return to Askum. He mostly spent his days contemplating and praying, only occasionally seeing people when he visited nearby towns where he was often mistaken for a religious hermit. During these two years of solitude, Yacob conceptualized what he would later record in his short yet potent book titled Hatata, meaning The Enquiry.

Yacob begins Hatata by briefly explaining his life and how he ended up in a cave. Without much to do or many people to talk to, he spent much of his time meditating, and one of the first things he meditated on was the persecution, strife, and misery committed in the name of God by men. The religious persecution Yacob observed was intensified by dogmatic thinking, which made rational argumentation impossible.

The gift of reason was not bequeathed to us by chance. For Yacob our minds and sense of reason are tools to uncover and examine fundamental truths. Yacob explained that God has endowed “us with the gifts of intelligence and reason” (p. 6). If God gave humans reason, it must follow that God is a rational being. Yacob explains that the “creator who endowed us with the gift of intelligence and reason and cannot be himself without them” (p. 6).

As a rational being, God’s existence does not need to be affirmed by omens, soothsaying, or rituals. For Yacob God’s existence is affirmed through rational thought. But if all we need to do is contemplate, why is there so much conflict over religion? Yacob answered that many people do not want to think for themselves. Thinking independently is daunting, so in Yacob’s words, people “hastily accept what they have heard from their fathers and shy from critical examination” (p. 8).

But by isolating himself from all cultural pressure of other people’s opinions, Yacob could apply reason without any hindrance of cultural concerns. Fourteen years’ worth of learning under the best scholars did little compared to unbiased contemplation of life’s great issues.

Defenders of these faiths might respond to Yacob by pointing towards their sacred scriptures, which were revelations from God. For Yacob, any doctrine of revealed religion is absurd. Why would God only make himself known to a small group of humans in one part of the world? Revelation is not rational because it privileges a few above the rest. Yacob believed in humans’ fundamental equality, writing, “All men are equal in the presence of God, and all are intelligent, since they are his creatures; he did not assign one people for life, another for death, one for mercy, another for judgement. Our reason teaches us that this sort of discrimination cannot exist in the sight of God” (p. 12).

Yacob’s commitment to equality entailed that slavery was an immoral and irrational practice that subverted God, “who made us equal, like brothers” (p. 11). In his discussion of the legality of slavery, Yacob establishes a dichotomy between God’s and man’s laws. The laws of God are eternal, unchanging, and perfect. The law of man is contingent, ever-​changing, and imperfect. The laws of men are based upon the will of fellow men, while God’s law is based upon the natural and proper order. Yacob argued that laws created by humans will always be inferior to God’s natural, immutable law based upon reason. The guidance of what Yacob calls God’s law is accessible to all peoples, races, creeds, or genders because “the law of nature is obvious, because our reason clearly propounds it” (p. 14). Sadly, the laws of men are often inconsistent, self-​serving, and based on irrational premises that cannot be made universal.

Yacob criticized organized religion, affirmed the supremacy of reason, argued in favor of natural law as the basis for morality, and roundly condemned slavery. Despite Yacob’s humble beginnings, he impressively developed a system of ideas surprisingly similar to the foundational intellectual commitments of classical liberalism.

After two years of solitude, news reached Yacob that King Susaynos, who had persecuted Yacob, had died and was succeeded by his son, who quickly expelled the Jesuits and reestablished Coptic Christianity as the faith of his kingdom. With Susanyos dead, Yacob left his cave and traveled north to a town called Emfraz. While here, Yacob met a wealthy man named Habtu who, upon finding out Yacob could write, asked him to copy the Psalms of David. Being the only person nearby who could transcribe texts, Yacob happily took on the task.

While living alongside Habtu and his family, Yacob decided he needed a wife, believing that a married life was a virtuous life. He found a maidservant working for Habtu named Hirut, who he described as not the most outwardly beautiful woman, but, on the inside, good-​natured, intelligent, and patient. His host Habtu saw no issue with this, offering to give Hirut to Yacob as his maidservant. Yacob replied that she would not be his maidservant but his wife and that in marriage, equality reigns supreme.

In the 17th century, women were generally not asked for their consent in marriage. But unlike his contemporaries, Yacob was committed to the doctrine of equality and believed her consent was equally important as his own. Hirut happily accepted, and the pair married, with Zera loving her unrelentingly, saying that he did not believe there was “another marriage which is so full of love and blessed as ours” (p. 21).

Eventually, Habtu asked Yacob if he would teach his two sons to read and write. One of these sons was named Walda Heywat, who admired Yacob’s sage wisdom. Walda constantly asked him to write down his thoughts. Thankfully for us, Yacob loved Heywat, happily writing down for the young boy his thoughts and experiences of his time in the cave. Yacob inspired Walda, and he became a philosopher himself, applying Yacob’s thought to the practical issues of everyday life. Until his death, Yacob was a second father to the philosophical Walda. Yacob lived out the rest of his days peacefully with his wife and family, dying in 1692 at the impressive age of 93.

Individual rights and freedom are not ideas confined to the western mind. Zera Yacob is a firm reminder that freedom is not the brain-​child of an amalgamation of European thinkers, but a universal human urge to live freely from any form of oppression. Liberals and libertarians are correct to praise the achievements of the Enlightenment, but this narrow praise of European achievement can narrow our minds. For the fullest argument for individual rights and freedom to be made, we must engage the thinkers, traditions, and ideas outside the West. The fight for freedom always has and always will be a global affair.