Zera Yacob

Their big question

Can you work out what is right without being told?

In Ethiopia in the 1630s, the emperor had converted to Catholicism, and the country fought over it. Zera Yacob refused to go along with the side that was winning, so he took some gold, a book of psalms, and left. He found a cave near a river and lived in it for two years.

He did not spend the time being miserable. He spent it thinking — and, unusually for his time, he did not start from what he had been taught. He started from what he could work out. He decided that reason, which he called the light of intelligence, was something every person has: a way of seeing the difference between true and false, and between good and evil, that does not require a priest to operate. He wrote that an action is right if it increases harmony in the world and wrong if it breaks it.

Then he asked whether all the holy books could be true, since they disagreed, and concluded that they could not all be. Most of his neighbours would have found that dangerous. He wrote it down anyway — thirty years later, when a student of his asked him to.

Two things about him are worth holding together. One: he lived at the same time as Descartes, asked almost the same question — what can I know for certain? — and answered it in a cave in Ethiopia. Two: whether the book is really his is still disputed. That second thing is not a footnote. It is the whole problem of history: how do you know who wrote anything?

“I have learnt more while living alone in a cave than when I was living with scholars.”

He wrote that down about himself, years after the cave. The cave was not the point. The thinking was.

Three things worth knowing

• He fled a war over religion in Ethiopia and spent two years alone in a cave near the Tekezé river.
• In about 1667 he wrote down his inquiry — and argued that a husband and wife are equal in marriage, which almost nobody was arguing then.
• Scholars still argue about whether the book really is his. Historians who doubt it think a European monk wrote it later. How to tell the difference is itself a philosophical question.

Try it — think like Zera

Take one thing you have always been told — something ordinary, like when bedtime should be. Ask why. Then ask why to that answer. Keep going until you reach something you either believe or cannot defend. Either ending is a real result.

We have no portrait of Zera that is both authentic and free to use, so this page uses a drawn mark rather than an invented face. About the pictures.