There Is Nothing So Obviously Untrue Or Even Absurd As An Accusation Against Religion That Even Academics Need Fear Saying It

I'm sick as a frickin' dog.  As the saying goes.  I'm going to post a bit more of Marilynne Robinson's essay,  The Fate of Ideas: Moses, and try to write something of my own later.

It's tempting to go over the several fairly recent books that she takes apart because they were well chosen to illustrate the typical, current mid-brow, would-be erudition on the topic.  The first one is the ridiculous claims of Jack Miles in his "God: A Biography (1995), which is so much like what you'll typically read in online atheist garbage, but it's not the most serious of them. I'll take the two that I think are the most typical of would-be serious

Moses the Egyptian:  The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (1997) is the work of Jas Assmann, a major German Egyptologist.  It dusts off Freud's old theory that Mose was in fact Egyptian.  Therefore Moses would have been influenced, Assmnn argues, by the monotheistic cult of Aton, which worshiped the solar disk. (More precisely, it seems the pharaoh worshiped Aton and everyone else worshiped the pharaoh.)  Aton tended to go down at night, and there are lovely hymns of relief at his rising in the morning – facts which suggest that this was a lesser order of monotheism, and that Moses's achievement is undiminished.  This is another example of the tendentious use of scholarship.  Assmann argues that the monotheism of Akhenaton, the pharaoh who founded the cult, was intolerant and hated, and its effects lingered to infect the monotheism of Moses, which was therefore also profoundly intolerant and hated.  Obviously there is nothing inevitable here. 

Assmann's argument is the sort of razzle-dazzle that depends on coinages like “mnemohistory,” which is the exalted and useful discipline of intepreting history that collective memory has displaced and suppressed so thoroughly only the writer has an inkling even of the fact of suppression.  In this cognitive implosion a fusion occurs between Moses and the Aton cultus which conventional history simply cannot achieve.  Assmann is writing this book in response to Freud's abysmal question about the origins of anti-Semitism.  “Strikingly enough,  his [Freud's] question was not how the Gentiles, or the Christians or the Germans came to hate the Jews, but “how the Jew had become what he is and why he attracted this undying hatred.”  He paraphrases Freud's answer thus: “Not the Jew but monotheism had attracted this undying hatred.  by making Moses an Egyptian, [Freud] deemed himself able to shift the sources of negativity and intolerance out of Judaism and back to Egypt, and to show that the defining fundamentals of Jewish monotheism and mentality came from outside it.”  So we are to concede, apparently, that these are “the defining fundamentals of Jewish monotheism and mentality.”   Comment is unnecessary, though I will draw attention here to the notion of victimization I remarked on earlier.  We Gentiles have the Torah to blame for our own worst moments, it would appear. 

Like others of these writers, Assann argues that ancient polytheism was essentially tolerant, “cosmotheism,” and readily accepted other gods, translating them into the terms of the culture that received them.  Granting that Melqart, a god of Carthage, did indeed lounge around in a lion skin looking just like Hercules, we have the fact that Rome loathed Carthage and was despised in turn and reduced that great city to bare earth.  Athens and Sparta had just the same pantheon, and they fought to the death.  And Rome conquered Greece, whose gods it had thoroughly Latinized.  That is to say, whatever the merits of polytheism, at best it only obliged people to find other than religious grounds for hostility, which they were clearly very able to do.  How the wars of the Hebrews against the Canaanites are more culpable than the wars of the Romans against the Etruscans I fail to see, or why anyone should imagine that these wars were less formative of European civilization than those distant, inconclusive wars among the Semites.  Or,  for that matter, why they do not prove that the character of the civilization was already formed when Rome set about the conquest of Italy.  Miles attributes the structure of Western consciousness to monotheism on the grounds that “the Bible was the popular encyclopedia of the Middle Ages.”  But in fact through most of the Common Era in Europe the Bible and especially the Old Testament, existed almost exclusively in Latin, a language incomprehensible to the great majority of people, who were in any case illiterate.  So its influence is easily overstated.  Yet ferocious intolerance has characterized most of Western history in the Common Era. 

Polytheism is as fashionable now as it has been since fascism was in it prime.  As a corollary to the current tendency to blame monotheism for intolerance and aggression and genocide, there is an assumption that polytheism must have been tolerant, pacific and humane.  This notion is old, too.  In The Natural History of Religion, Hume says, “by limiting the powers and functions of its deities, [idolatry] naturally admits the gods of other sects and nations to a share of divinity, and renders all the various deities, as well as rites, ceremonies, or traditions, compatible with each other . . . [By comparison] when one sole object of devotion is acknowledged, the worship of other deities is regarded as absurd and impious.”  

It is striking to see how the cultural discourse is circling on itself.  Perhaps the real familiarity of their arguments explains why these writers I have looked at offer so little in the way of evidence.  For example, Assmann, the most scholarly of them, says the Old Testament is deeply informed by aversion to Egypt, then offers no support from the text.  And, coincidentally, perhaps, little evidence is to be found in the text.  One Mosaic law of unambiguous relevance, which goes unmentioned by him is Deuteronomy 23:7, “You shall not abhor an Edomite, for he is your brother, you shall not abhor an Egyptian, because you were a sojourner in his land.”    This law provides that both Edomites and Egyptians may enter the assembly of the Lord on favorable terms – after three generations that is, which seems long, but which is liberal by comparison with the ancient Athenians, for instance, who never naturalized the descendants of foreigners.  Nor, as I understand, do the modern Germans.  This one verse is sufficient to demonstrate that there was not hatred but in fact a certain bond between Hebrews and Egyptians. 

The idea that the hatred of the Other is the signal preoccupation of the Old Testament is carried to great lengths by Regina Schwartz in The Curse of Cain  The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (1997).  The following passage gives a fair sense of the book:

“Western culture is laced throughout with a variety of institutions, marriage laws, laws concerning the right of so-called minors, sodomy laws, and a less overt but equally insidious bourgeois morality that specifies which sexual practices and partners are permissible as strictly as Leviticus.  These institutions that reduce women to property – wives owned by their husbands, daughters owned by their fathers – are stubborn institutions that are the heirs of monotheistic thinking about scarcity that have kept misogyny alive and well long after the biblical period, institutions that regard a sullied property – a land shared by a foreigner, an adulterous woman – and other variations of multiple allegiances (multiple gods, if you will), as anathema.  The tentacles of the injunction “you shall have no other gods before me”  reach throughout our social formations, structuring identity as a delimited possession with a remarkable grip”

If there are Eastern polytheistic cultures which cannot be described in the same terms, or in much harsher terms, Schwartz does not name them.  So we must take her word for it that monotheism has created misogyny and xenophobia and all the rest of Western culture.  For her, monotheism functions as original sin has done traditionally.  It is the ultimate source of every evil.  And it is entirely located in the Old Testament – the New Testament is mentioned once, in a note.  This is an extraordinary burden of opprobrium to place on a literature that was of distinctly secondary significance during the formative stages of Western Civilization, beside civil law and canon law and common law and natural law, beside the New Testament and the teaching of the Church, beside the customs and prejudices that survived Christianization.  I think it is unlikely that the Norse or the Franks turned misogynist under the influence of Moses.  For some reason the grim prehistory of Christian Europe seems to deserve not a glance  Considering the view Christendom has taken of Mosaic law, there is no great reason to imagine that its princelings were deep students of Leviticus. 

Schwartz draws attention to the striking perdurability of attitudes and approaches to biblical scholarship that arose in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  This scholarship was the work of Germans for the most part and it was profoundly influenced by emerging nationalism and anti-Semitism – and often brilliant, like so much that was done in Europe in those years.  Schwartz draws attention to some highly questionable assumptions that survive and flourish in biblical criticism on the strength of that old prestige.   Source criticism, which has given us J, E, P, D, and other such artifacts of learned speculation, was pioneered by Julius Wellhausen in the middle of the nineteenth century.  This analytical method is so perfectly suited to conforming the text to the critic's assumptions about it that it establishes nothing.  Yet it has profoundly conditioned the reading of the Bible, which is now assumed by many to have been patched and botched and redacted until its intelligibility is at best merely apparent.  It is refreshing to see attention drawn to the extremely tenuous nature of so much of the seeming learnedness that cumbers writing about the Bible.  Bishop Spong tells us in what order and for what reason the books of the New Testament were composed.  Not surprisingly, his hypothesis – which is all in the world it is or can be – make his interpretation of these texts seem downright inevitable.  To offer hypothesis as fact is not fair to the nonspecialist readership for which his book is clearly intended.  In doing so he is typical rather than exceptional among popular writers. 

On the other hand, Schwartz's own approach is full of the mannerisms of contemporary scholarship, eager to indict, indifferent to the strengths and pleasures of the text.  It is perhaps this approach which makes her insensitive in her own book to the worst tendency in the nineteenth-century criticism she is so right to consider suspect.  That is, its tendency to primitivize and demean the Old Testament, encouraging the belief that it is full of ideas Western culture could be well rid of, that it revealed the “negativity and intolerance,” in Assmann's words, of the Jewish mind.  A favorite disparagement has always been that the Hebrew scriptures have little religious meaning and reflect no spiritual aspiration.  Every book I have looked at proceeds from these assumptions without comment, as if no reasonable person could take another view.  It  is perhaps worth noting that the contemporary literary-critical sensibility is rooted in a milieu not so unlike the one that produced nineteenth-century biblical criticism and which was surely influenced by it – in, for example, Nietzsche and Heidegger. 

The glaring lapses in the scholarship and the assertions made about the texts of the Old Testament as well as the absurdly unrealistic attribution of such malign power to them in a Western Civilization which, as Robinson pointed out earlier, doesn't seem to have taken any of the radical economic egalitarianism that permeates the entire text at all seriously - discounting the clearly more powerful influence of the pagan cultures which never were entirely expunged in Western Europe or wherever Western Europeans colonized - all of that is typical of anti-Jewish-Christian and to some extent anti-Islamic polemics in the materialist-scientistic, atheist would be elite culture of academia and its seepage into popular, especially mid-brow culture.  If you want an example of that, look at how the Ayn Randian thinking of such people as Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, and so many others who claim to be primarily motivated by Christianity and the scriptures are the real motivation behind their actions.  If The Law, The Prophets and the Gospels are of so little influence over those who claim that they rule their lives, as they violate all of them, continually, claiming that Moses is all to blame for everything is as absurd a deflection of responsibility as is ubiquitous, today.   I think it is bad enough that it should be considered an expression of real but permissible and blatant animus to Jews and the Jewish tradition. 

I'll remind you that the entire essay appears in the book "When I Was A Child I Read Book".   I've tried to keep up with the publication of Marilynne Robinson's essays but I'm not only one book of those behind,  I noticed the other day, another collection is soon to be published.   I'll have to catch up but I'm too busy re-reading the earlier ones.   She is one of the most important of today's intellectuals, that is beyond any doubt the case.