The Price of Monotheism

Jan Assmann, Robert Savage

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780804772860
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion comparée

Nothing has so radically transformed the world as the distinction between true and false religion. In this nuanced consideration of his own controversial Moses the Egyptian, renowned Egyptologist Jan Assmann answers his critics, extending and building upon ideas from his previous book. Maintaining that it was indeed the Moses of the Hebrew Bible who introduced the true-false distinction in a permanent and revolutionary form, Assmann reiterates that the price of this monotheistic revolution has been the exclusion, as paganism and heresy, of everything deemed incompatible with the truth it proclaims. This exclusion has exploded time and again into violence and persecution, with no end in sight. Here, for the first time, Assmann traces the repeated attempts that have been made to do away with this distinction since the early modern period. He explores at length the notions of primary versus secondary religions, of "counter-religions, " and of book religions versus cultic religions. He also deals with the entry of ethics into religion's very core. Informed by the debate his own work has generated, he presents a compelling lesson in the fluidity of cultural identity and beliefs.

CHAPTER 1

The Mosaic Distinction and the Problem of Intolerance

How Many Religions Stand Behind the Old Testament?

The shift from primary to secondary religion takes place in the Bible itself. Not one religion but two stand behind the books of the Old Testament. One scarcely differs from the primary religions that coexisted with it at the time in its adoration of a supreme god who dominates and far excels the other gods, without, however, excluding them in any way, a god who, as creator of the world and everything in it, cares for his creatures, increases the fertility of the flocks and fields, tames the elements, and directs the destiny of his people. The books and textual layers ascribed to the “priestly” traditional and redactional line are particularly shaped by this religion. The other religion, by contrast, sharply distinguishes itself from the religions of its environment by demanding that its One God be worshipped to the exclusion of all others, by banning the production of images, and by making divine favor depend less on sacrificial offerings and rites than on the righteous conduct of the individual and the observance of god-given, scripturally fixed laws. This religion is on display in the prophetic books, as well as in the texts and textual layers of the “Deuteronomic” line of tradition. As its name suggests, this “Deuteronomic” line has its center in Deuteronomy, the fifth book of Moses. This book breathes an unmistakably didactic and homiletic spirit that also animates other books and a specific redactional stratum. The texts ascribed to the priestly tradition lack a clear center, such as that represented by Deuteronomy, instead being dispersed throughout the first four books of Moses. Despite that, they have an all the more conspicuous center in the temple of Jerusalem. These texts belong to the cult of the temple and are addressed to a professional sacerdotal caste of readers, whereas the Deuteronomical tradition is pitched at a much wider audience. “The Deuteronomium,” writes Gerhard von Rad, “has something about it that speaks directly to the heart; but it also satisfies the head through its continual willingness to explain itself. In short, it is perfectly adapted to its readers or listeners and their capacity for theological understanding. This vibrant will to interpretation is entirely missing from the writings of the priests. Their task was essentially limited to compiling, selecting and theologically classifying the relevant material.”¹ Whereas the priestly writings constitute a manual that serves as a foundation for the temple cult, the Deuteronomium is a prescriptive textbook and guidebook that purports to lay the foundation for the practical and social life of the entire community. Over and above these stylistic and functional differences, however, the two lines of tradition appear to derive from two different types of religious experience. Whereas the religion associated with the priestly writings aims to make its people at home in the world, to integrate all things human into the divine order of nature, the religion that announces itself in the Deuteronomic tradition aims to transcend the world, to release its people from the constraints of this world by binding them to the otherworldly order of the law. One religion requires its people to turn towards the world in rituals of cult and sacrifice, giving their rapt assent to the divine order of creation; the other demands, above all, that they turn away from the world by assiduously studying the writings in which god’s will and truth have been deposited.

These two religions are not just placed side by side in the Hebrew Bible. Rather, they stand opposed to each other in a relationship of tension, since one envisages precisely what the other negates. That this antagonism does not break out into open contradiction is due to the fact that neither religion unfolds in its full purity and rigor in the writings of the Old Testament. The archaic, polytheistic religion that seeks to make its votaries at home in the world is accessible to us only in fragments, having been painted over by the monotheistic redaction. It cannot be reconstructed in anything more than broad outline, with the help of numerous parallels drawn from neighboring religions. The post-archaic, monotheistic religion of world-redemption, for its part, is evident only as a general tendency in the books of the Old Testament, and does not come to full expression, in the severity with which it denounces other religions as idolatrous, until the writings of rabbinical Judaism and patristic Christianity that build upon those books. In the Hebrew Bible, both religions are able to coexist in this state of nonsimultaneous simultaneity, of a “no longer” and a “not yet.” Indeed, this highly charged antagonism within the Bible undoubtedly represents one of the secrets of its worldwide success.

In its relation to two quite different forms of religion—one polytheistic, the other monotheistic; one turned towards the world, the other turned away from it; one a cult religion, the other a religion of the book—the Hebrew Bible resembles a picture puzzle: first one picture, then another moves into the foreground, depending on how we look at it. Neither of these two readings can claim exclusive validity. Those who read the Bible against the background of religious history and present it, on the basis of numerous parallels, as a Middle Eastern religion like any other, as does Bernhard Lang in his recent book Jahwe der biblische Gott: Ein Porträt (Yahweh the Biblical God: A Portrait),² prove no less guilty of one-sidedness than those who read it in the light of its reception history, as I did myself in Moses the Egyptian: as the proclamation of the One God who, on the basis of the Mosaic distinction, posits his religion as the truth and consigns all other religions to the darkness of falsehood. Neither of the two images does full justice to the Hebrew Bible, but both are contained within it.

This dualism inherent in the Hebrew Bible, this Janus face, has not just caught the attention of theologians. A particularly striking example is Sigmund Freud’s book on Moses, which I discuss in more detail in chapter 4. Freud distinguishes between two Moses figures, an “Egyptian” and a “Midianite Moses.” One stands for a sublime monotheism, for what is referred to here as “counterreligion,” the modern stratum of the Hebrew Bible. The other is considered by Freud to have been a follower of the volcanic god Yahweh and the representative of a typical tribal religion; he therefore stands for the archaic stratum of the Bible.

Far from resulting from the shift to monotheism, the Bible thus still reflects in large measure a pre-monotheistic religious form. Yet monotheism can already be discerned in the Bible as a general tendency. The texts compiled therein straddle this divide, bearing witness as much to the polytheistic point of departure as to the monotheistic end-state, and in particular to the conflicts that arose in the transition from one to the other. For the monotheistic religion by no means followed upon the archaic religion as the logical next stage in its development; the relationship between monotheistic and archaic religions is one of revolution, not evolution. My argument, then, is that the monotheistic shift, which lies between the two images combined in the biblical writings as in a picture puzzle and organizes their differences, takes the form of a rupture, a break with the past that rests on the distinction between truth and falsehood and generates, over the subsequent course of its reception, the distinction between Jews and Gentiles, Christians and pagans, Christians and Jews, Muslims and infidels, true believers and heretics, manifesting itself in countless acts of violence and bloodshed. A number of highly significant and central passages of the Old Testament already tell of such violence and bloodshed. This aspect is examined in more detail below.

Having lived for hundreds and thousands of years on the terrain of secondary religious experience and in the spiritual space created by the Mosaic distinction, we Jews, Christians, and Muslims (to speak only of the monotheistic world) assume this distinction to be the natural, normal, and universal form of religion. We tend to identify it unthinkingly with religion as such, and then project it onto all the alien and earlier cultures that knew nothing of the distinction between true and false religion. Measured against this concept of religion, the primary religions cannot fail to be found wanting: orthodoxy is unknown to them, they barely differentiate themselves from other cultural fields, and in many cases it remains unclear where exactly the boundary lines between divine and natural phenomena, charismatic teachers and normative principles are to be drawn. In these and many other respects, they are not yet “proper” religions. Against the background of this implicit and deeply rooted conviction (naturally, it is not a question of an explicitly formulated theory of religion), a concept such as “counterreligion” is bound to cause offense. What? The highest, purest, and most advanced form in which religion can appear to us, monotheism, is to be called not “religion” but “counterreligion” ? How absurd!

What Is Truth?

I want to make clear how this term is to be understood with reference to the parallel case of science. Just as monotheistic religion rests on the Mosaic distinction, so science rests on the “Parmenidean” distinction.³ One distinguishes between true and false religion, the other between true and false cognition. This distinction, articulated in the principles of identity, noncontradiction, and the excluded middle (tertium non datur), is commonly associated with the name of Parmenides, who lived in the sixth century BCE. Werner Jäger rightly speaks of a “constraint on thinking” or cognitive straitjacket that is introduced here: “As he [Parmenides] repeats again and again, with increasing force, Being is, and Notbeing is not. That which is cannot not be; that which is not cannot be—thus Parmenides expresses the constraint on thinking that was established by his realization that a logical contradiction cannot be resolved.”⁴ In drawing a line between “wild thought”—the traditional, mythic modes of world production—and logical thought, which submits to the principle of noncontradiction, this constraint on thinking places cognition, validation, and knowledge on an entirely new footing. The new concept of knowledge introduced by the Greeks is no less revolutionary in nature than the new concept of religion introduced by the Jews and represented by the name of Moses. Both concepts are characterized by an unprecedented drive to differentiation, negation, and exclusion. Ever since there has been science, and with it a knowledge, based on the distinction between true and false cognition, that distinguishes itself from error and opens itself to criticism through its manner of reasoning, there have also been such distinctions as those between muthos and logos, wisdom and knowledge, which correspond precisely to the distinction between pagan idolatry and religion. Scientific knowledge is “counterknowledge” because it knows what is incompatible with its propositions. Only “counterknowledge” develops a regulatory code that establishes what is to count as knowledge and what not, that is, a second-order knowledge.

That is why the concept of an ancient Egyptian or Babylonian “science” is to a certain extent anachronistic: in the ancient Egyptian and Babylonian worlds, “knowledge” meant something quite different from what it did for the Greeks after Parmenides. Such concepts nonetheless do their job tolerably well. We all know that the Greeks revolutionized the world by introducing a new, critical concept of truth, and we accordingly take references to a pre-Hellenic “science” with a pinch of salt. As far as religion is concerned, however, this consciousness is nowhere near so well established. Few would suspect that books about Egyptian or Babylonian “religion” use the word in a more or less metaphorical sense. Our concept of religion encompasses both monotheistic and pre-monotheistic religions in an utterly uncritical way. Yet by introducing the Mosaic distinction, the Jews revolutionized the world at least as decisively as the Greeks. They introduced a form of religion that stands out from all traditional so-called religions just as clearly as Greek science stands out from all traditional so-called sciences.

In many discussions in which I have taken part, this thesis has been branded “anti-Semitic.” The charge would perhaps be justified had I interpreted this transformation of the world as a turn for the worse rather than for the better, and had I wanted to castigate the Jews for putting an end to a Golden Age of primary religion by introducing the Mosaic distinction. But this strikes me as absurd—no less absurd, in fact, than had I wanted to reproach the Greeks for disenchanting the world and delivering it over to rational calculation through their invention of scientific thought. It is in my view self-evident that in both cases, in scientific thought no less than in monotheism, we are dealing with civilizational achievements of the highest order, and it has never occurred to me to demand that they be abandoned. I am advocating a return neither to myth nor to primary religion. Indeed, I am not advocating anything; my aim is rather to describe and understand. When I characterize scientific thought as counter-thought and trace it back to the Parmenidean distinction between truth and lies (or the existent and the nonexistent), it is to draw attention to the potential for negation that inheres in such knowledge, not to criticize and deplore. To put it bluntly, scientific knowledge is “intolerant.” The truths of science may well, for the most part, be relative and have a limited life span, but that does not mean that they are compatible with everything else under the sun, for they have their own criteria of validity, verifiability, and falsifiability, which they are obliged to meet. This has become so self-evident to us that it has become practically inseparable from our concept of knowledge. It is what we mean when we speak of “knowledge,” and, with Claude Lévi-Strauss, we label a different kind of knowledge “wild thought” and “bricolage.”⁵

The concept of “counterreligion” is intended to draw out the potential for negation that inheres within secondary religions. These religions are also essentially “intolerant,” although again, this should not be taken as a reproach. Two hundred and fifty years ago, David Hume not only argued that polytheism is far older than monotheism, he also advanced the related hypothesis that polytheism is tolerant, whereas monotheism is intolerant.⁶ This is an age-old argument, which I had no intention of revisiting in my Moses book. Secondary religions must be intolerant, that is, they must have a clear conception of what they feel to be incompatible with their truths if these truths are to exert the life-shaping authority, normativity, and binding force that they claim for themselves. In each case, counterreligions have transformed, from the ground up, the historical realities amidst which they appeared. Their critical and transformative force is sustained by their negative energy, their power of negation and exclusion. How they deal with their structural intolerance is another matter. That is not my concern here, although I want to note in passing my belief that religions ought to work through the problem rather than attempting to deny that it even exists. Significant progress has undoubtedly been made on this front in recent years.

Science’s intolerance or potential for negation is expressed in two directions: in its capacity to distinguish between nonscientific and scientific knowledge, on the one hand, and between false and correct scientific knowledge, on the other. Myths are forms of nonscientific knowledge, but they are not for that reason erroneous. Scientific errors are instances of disproved scientific knowledge, but they are not for that reason mythic. We find something similar when we look at counterreligions. Primary religions are “pagan,” but they are not for that reason heretical; heresies are heterodox opinions and practices, but they are not for that reason primary religions, nor are they pagan.

The analogy between religion and science, as well as between the Mosaic and Parmenidean—or Socratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian—distinctions, could be spun out much further. But more is at stake here than a mere analogy. The new concept of knowledge has as its corollary that it defines itself against an equally new counterconcept, that of “faith.” Faith in this new sense means holding something to be true that, even though I canno...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Translator’s Note
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 - The Mosaic Distinction and the Problem of Intolerance
• CHAPTER 2 - Monotheism—A Counterreligion to What?
• CHAPTER 3 - The Clash of Memories: Between Idolatry and Iconoclasm
• CHAPTER 4 - Sigmund Freud and Progress in Intellectuality
• CHAPTER 5 - The Psychohistorical Consequences of Monotheism
• Conclusion
• Notes