Assmann, Jan The Price of Monotheism . Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2010. 140 pages.
This book is Jan Assmann’s response to the critics of his
previous book, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western
Monotheism (Harvard University Press, 1998). Assmann states, “This
book does not aim to provide an exhaustive account of the shift from
polytheism to monotheism, from primary to secondary religions,…
but rather to clarify and further develop the position I advanced in my
book Moses the Egyptian by confronting it with a number of critical
responses and objections.” (p. 4) With this in mind, it is helpful for a
reader to actually encounter Assmann’s arguments in Moses the Egyptian
before reading this book. This said, because the primary task of this
essay is to examine The Price of Monotheism, it is going to be focus of my
attention. Let me summarize briefly first the content of each chapter
and then I will give my assessments of the book.
In Chapter 1 Assmann tries to re-articulate his argument on
the distinction between primary religion (polytheism or cosmotheism)
and secondary religion (monotheism). This is actually Assmann’s
effort to answer his critic’s objection that he is an anti-monotheistic,
or anti-Semitic, scholar that paints monotheism as a religion of
intolerance and violence. For Assmann, both primary and secondary
religions exist side by side, but in opposition to one another, in the
Bible. The primary religion can be found in the Priestly tradition,
whereas the secondary religion is seen in the Deuteronomistic source
and prophetic tradition. The break from the primary religion to the
secondary religion took place through the mythical figure of Moses.
Moses, an Egyptian who follows a strict monotheistic religion,
introduced the Jews to the concept of an exclusive God. Moses
imposes a strict law that separates between true and false religion, a
concept that Assmann calls “Mosaic distinction” throughout the book.
Assmann acknowledges that monotheism is a religion of intolerance.
It operates similar to the law of the excluded middle (tertium non datur)
introduced by the Greek philosopher, Parmenides, in the sixth century
BCE. This law of logic is characterized in its very core by
“differentiation, negation, and exclusion.” (p. 12) Assmann explains
further that the primary religion usually works within the hermeneutics
of translation. The deity is translatable to other forms of deity.
“Religion functioned as a medium of communication, not elimination
and exclusion. The principle of the translatability of divine names
Resensi Buku: The Price of Monotheism 76
helped to overcome the primitive ethnocentrism of the tribal religions,
to establish relations between cultures, and to make these cultures
more transparent to each other.” (p. 19) Conversely, monotheism or
the secondary religion functions within the hermeneutics of difference.
It “assures itself of what is its own by staking its distance from the
Other, proceeding in accordance with the principle ‘Omnis determinatio
est negatio.’” (p. 23) For Assmann, explaining this exclusive and
intolerant nature of monotheistic religion does not have to lead to anti-
Semitism or anti-monotheism. Both monotheism and the Greek
scientific understanding are “the civilizational achievements of the
highest order.” (p. 13) They are good because they contribute to a
people’s ability to “have their own criteria of validity, verifiability, and
falsifiability” by which they make a distinction between truth and lies.
Assmann argues that he is actually not advocating a return to the
primary religion. He states, “I am not advocating anything; my aim is
rather to describe and understand.” (p. 13)
In Chapter 2, Assmann deals with the question of the real
opponent of monotheism by distinguishing between religion and
theology. Theology is the conception about God, whereas religion is
the translation of theology or doctrine in everyday life. On a religious
level, the real opponent of monotheism (the belief in one God) is not
polytheism (the belief in many gods), but rather cosmotheism. As an
Egyptologist, Assmann traces the origin of monotheism not to Moses,
but to Akhenaten, an Egyptian pharaoh who lived in the 14th century
BCE. He is the “founding myth of monotheism.” (p. 35) Akhenaten
is a very important figure because he “completely broke with the
traditional religion and introduced in its place the cult of a single sun
and light god, must be understood as an exclusive and revolutionary
monotheism.” (p. 36) However, Assmann maintains that the
understanding of how the gods relate with the world in our modern
understanding is somehow different from that of Egyptian religious
tradition. In ancient Egypt, “a world of gods does not stand opposed
to the world made up of the cosmos, humankind, and society, but
endows them with meaning as a structuring and ordering principle.”
(p. 40) There are two things related to the relationship between gods
and cosmos that Assmann proposes: First, “a world of gods
constitutes the cosmos, understood as a synergetic process of
converging and conflicting forces.” (p. 40) And second, “a world of
gods constitutes society and the state insofar as the gods exercise
dominion over worldly affairs. All the great deities are gods of their
respective cities; every important settlement stands under the aegis of
a deity.” (p. 41) In this sense, “Polytheism is cosmotheism. The divine
cannot be divorced from the world.” (Ibid.) Thus, Assmann contends
77 Indonesian Journal of Theology
that the real opponent of monotheism is actually cosmotheism.
Behind monotheism, there is an effort to separate the world from
gods. Borrowing from Max Weber, Assmann argues that monotheism
at its very core is a project of “disenchantment of the world.” (p. 102)
In addition, related to the idea of disenchantment of the world,
Assmann argues that the law of justice in the Ancient Mediterranean
world was actually a human institution. It has profane origins.
Monotheism is not the inventor of justice. What monotheism
achieved was “to have transferred them [laws and justice] from the
earth and human experience, as the source of law, to heaven and divine
will.” (p. 52)
The main premise of Chapter 3 is that anti-Semitism in Egypt
is actually rooted not in the Jewish community itself, but in the
psychohistory of the Egyptians. The monotheistic revolution that
Akhenaten brought to Egypt in the Amarna period had caused a deep
traumatic experience in Egyptian society. The story of Osarsiph and
his leper followers preserved by Manetho, an Egyptian historian living
in the Ptolemaic period, is the key to understanding the psychic of the
Egyptians in the face of monotheistic violence. (see pp. 59ff)
Josephus, a Jewish historian, makes a connection between Osarsiph
and the Exodus because Osarsiph then changed his name to Moyses.
Assmann, disagreeing with Josephus, argues that this story is not about
Moses but rather about Akhenaten. Josephus and other nonspecialists
have misread the text. The persecution and pain during the
monotheistic revolution in the Amarna period left a deep wound in the
Egyptian psychic to the extent that the name Akhenaten was removed
from the lists of kings of Egypt.
People no longer knew the name of the leader who had
initiated the reforms; they forgot the extremely regrettable
complicity of their own monarchy and drew on the semantics
of illness to characterize the unnamable heresy as the worst
form of impurity known to Egypt (and incidentally to Israel as
well): leprosy. (p. 62)
So, when encountering the Jewish community, the trauma that had
existed in their psychohistory for many centuries shaped the way the
Egyptians engaged with the Jews. Assmann states, “The Egyptians
were probably the first people in history to undergo this experience, in
the fourteenth century BCE. I cannot imagine it to have been anything
other than traumatic.” (p. 64) Assmann calls this the Egyptian
“Amarna complex.” (p. 66) In addition, the clash of memories not
only takes place in the psychohistorical level, but also in the political
Resensi Buku: The Price of Monotheism 78
and religious level. Monotheism is also closely related to the ban on
graven images. As we have seen before, cosmotheism (or polytheism)
sees the world and the gods as two entities that live together in one
reality. “The ban on graven images… entails the rejection of
cosmotheism.” (p. 69) It is obvious that images are intended to
“establish contact between mortals and gods.” So the rejection of
images is an act of separating the divine from the world. The different
understanding of images has triggered a clash between iconoclast and
iconolatry.
Chapter 4 is the expansion, as well as a somewhat of a revision
of his previous book. It examines Sigmund Freud’s book Moses and
Monotheism. Freud contends that Moses is an Egyptian, and Assmann
agrees with that notion. He is not only an Egyptian, he was also killed
by the Jews. Freud’s assessment of the monotheism in the Bible is
done in the psychoanalytical frame of “repression, latency, and the
return of the repressed.” (p. 85) The Freudian development of
monotheism is a “progress in intellectuality,” a concept which
Assmann acknowledges that he misunderstood in his previous book.
Assmann thought that “Freud was trying to abolish Mosaic distinction
between true and false religion.” (p. 86) After rereading Freud’s book
a few more times, Assmann came to the conclusion that his suspicion
of Freud was wrong and that the idea of progress in intellectuality is
actually a positive move of monotheism. It is a stage that monotheism
becomes a religion of intellectualism. So anti-monotheism is also antiintellectualism.
Freud basically wants to know “how the Jews have come to be
what they are and why they have attracted this undying hatred.” (p. 89)
Freud finds the answer in the psychoanalytical analysis of the trauma
Assmann, Jan The Price of Monotheism . Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2010. 140 pages.
This book is Jan Assmann’s response to the critics of his
previous book, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western
Monotheism (Harvard University Press, 1998). Assmann states, “This
book does not aim to provide an exhaustive account of the shift from
polytheism to monotheism, from primary to secondary religions,…
but rather to clarify and further develop the position I advanced in my
book Moses the Egyptian by confronting it with a number of critical
responses and objections.” (p. 4) With this in mind, it is helpful for a
reader to actually encounter Assmann’s arguments in Moses the Egyptian
before reading this book. This said, because the primary task of this
essay is to examine The Price of Monotheism, it is going to be focus of my
attention. Let me summarize briefly first the content of each chapter
and then I will give my assessments of the book.
In Chapter 1 Assmann tries to re-articulate his argument on
the distinction between primary religion (polytheism or cosmotheism)
and secondary religion (monotheism). This is actually Assmann’s
effort to answer his critic’s objection that he is an anti-monotheistic,
or anti-Semitic, scholar that paints monotheism as a religion of
intolerance and violence. For Assmann, both primary and secondary
religions exist side by side, but in opposition to one another, in the
Bible. The primary religion can be found in the Priestly tradition,
whereas the secondary religion is seen in the Deuteronomistic source
and prophetic tradition. The break from the primary religion to the
secondary religion took place through the mythical figure of Moses.
Moses, an Egyptian who follows a strict monotheistic religion,
introduced the Jews to the concept of an exclusive God. Moses
imposes a strict law that separates between true and false religion, a
concept that Assmann calls “Mosaic distinction” throughout the book.
Assmann acknowledges that monotheism is a religion of intolerance.
It operates similar to the law of the excluded middle (tertium non datur)
introduced by the Greek philosopher, Parmenides, in the sixth century
BCE. This law of logic is characterized in its very core by
“differentiation, negation, and exclusion.” (p. 12) Assmann explains
further that the primary religion usually works within the hermeneutics
of translation. The deity is translatable to other forms of deity.
“Religion functioned as a medium of communication, not elimination
and exclusion. The principle of the translatability of divine names
Resensi Buku: The Price of Monotheism 76
helped to overcome the primitive ethnocentrism of the tribal religions,
to establish relations between cultures, and to make these cultures
more transparent to each other.” (p. 19) Conversely, monotheism or
the secondary religion functions within the hermeneutics of difference.
It “assures itself of what is its own by staking its distance from the
Other, proceeding in accordance with the principle ‘Omnis determinatio
est negatio.’” (p. 23) For Assmann, explaining this exclusive and
intolerant nature of monotheistic religion does not have to lead to anti-
Semitism or anti-monotheism. Both monotheism and the Greek
scientific understanding are “the civilizational achievements of the
highest order.” (p. 13) They are good because they contribute to a
people’s ability to “have their own criteria of validity, verifiability, and
falsifiability” by which they make a distinction between truth and lies.
Assmann argues that he is actually not advocating a return to the
primary religion. He states, “I am not advocating anything; my aim is
rather to describe and understand.” (p. 13)
In Chapter 2, Assmann deals with the question of the real
opponent of monotheism by distinguishing between religion and
theology. Theology is the conception about God, whereas religion is
the translation of theology or doctrine in everyday life. On a religious
level, the real opponent of monotheism (the belief in one God) is not
polytheism (the belief in many gods), but rather cosmotheism. As an
Egyptologist, Assmann traces the origin of monotheism not to Moses,
but to Akhenaten, an Egyptian pharaoh who lived in the 14th century
BCE. He is the “founding myth of monotheism.” (p. 35) Akhenaten
is a very important figure because he “completely broke with the
traditional religion and introduced in its place the cult of a single sun
and light god, must be understood as an exclusive and revolutionary
monotheism.” (p. 36) However, Assmann maintains that the
understanding of how the gods relate with the world in our modern
understanding is somehow different from that of Egyptian religious
tradition. In ancient Egypt, “a world of gods does not stand opposed
to the world made up of the cosmos, humankind, and society, but
endows them with meaning as a structuring and ordering principle.”
(p. 40) There are two things related to the relationship between gods
and cosmos that Assmann proposes: First, “a world of gods
constitutes the cosmos, understood as a synergetic process of
converging and conflicting forces.” (p. 40) And second, “a world of
gods constitutes society and the state insofar as the gods exercise
dominion over worldly affairs. All the great deities are gods of their
respective cities; every important settlement stands under the aegis of
a deity.” (p. 41) In this sense, “Polytheism is cosmotheism. The divine
cannot be divorced from the world.” (Ibid.) Thus, Assmann contends
77 Indonesian Journal of Theology
that the real opponent of monotheism is actually cosmotheism.
Behind monotheism, there is an effort to separate the world from
gods. Borrowing from Max Weber, Assmann argues that monotheism
at its very core is a project of “disenchantment of the world.” (p. 102)
In addition, related to the idea of disenchantment of the world,
Assmann argues that the law of justice in the Ancient Mediterranean
world was actually a human institution. It has profane origins.
Monotheism is not the inventor of justice. What monotheism
achieved was “to have transferred them [laws and justice] from the
earth and human experience, as the source of law, to heaven and divine
will.” (p. 52)
The main premise of Chapter 3 is that anti-Semitism in Egypt
is actually rooted not in the Jewish community itself, but in the
psychohistory of the Egyptians. The monotheistic revolution that
Akhenaten brought to Egypt in the Amarna period had caused a deep
traumatic experience in Egyptian society. The story of Osarsiph and
his leper followers preserved by Manetho, an Egyptian historian living
in the Ptolemaic period, is the key to understanding the psychic of the
Egyptians in the face of monotheistic violence. (see pp. 59ff)
Josephus, a Jewish historian, makes a connection between Osarsiph
and the Exodus because Osarsiph then changed his name to Moyses.
Assmann, disagreeing with Josephus, argues that this story is not about
Moses but rather about Akhenaten. Josephus and other nonspecialists
have misread the text. The persecution and pain during the
monotheistic revolution in the Amarna period left a deep wound in the
Egyptian psychic to the extent that the name Akhenaten was removed
from the lists of kings of Egypt.
People no longer knew the name of the leader who had
initiated the reforms; they forgot the extremely regrettable
complicity of their own monarchy and drew on the semantics
of illness to characterize the unnamable heresy as the worst
form of impurity known to Egypt (and incidentally to Israel as
well): leprosy. (p. 62)
So, when encountering the Jewish community, the trauma that had
existed in their psychohistory for many centuries shaped the way the
Egyptians engaged with the Jews. Assmann states, “The Egyptians
were probably the first people in history to undergo this experience, in
the fourteenth century BCE. I cannot imagine it to have been anything
other than traumatic.” (p. 64) Assmann calls this the Egyptian
“Amarna complex.” (p. 66) In addition, the clash of memories not
only takes place in the psychohistorical level, but also in the political
Resensi Buku: The Price of Monotheism 78
and religious level. Monotheism is also closely related to the ban on
graven images. As we have seen before, cosmotheism (or polytheism)
sees the world and the gods as two entities that live together in one
reality. “The ban on graven images… entails the rejection of
cosmotheism.” (p. 69) It is obvious that images are intended to
“establish contact between mortals and gods.” So the rejection of
images is an act of separating the divine from the world. The different
understanding of images has triggered a clash between iconoclast and
iconolatry.
Chapter 4 is the expansion, as well as a somewhat of a revision
of his previous book. It examines Sigmund Freud’s book Moses and
Monotheism. Freud contends that Moses is an Egyptian, and Assmann
agrees with that notion. He is not only an Egyptian, he was also killed
by the Jews. Freud’s assessment of the monotheism in the Bible is
done in the psychoanalytical frame of “repression, latency, and the
return of the repressed.” (p. 85) The Freudian development of
monotheism is a “progress in intellectuality,” a concept which
Assmann acknowledges that he misunderstood in his previous book.
Assmann thought that “Freud was trying to abolish Mosaic distinction
between true and false religion.” (p. 86) After rereading Freud’s book
a few more times, Assmann came to the conclusion that his suspicion
of Freud was wrong and that the idea of progress in intellectuality is
actually a positive move of monotheism. It is a stage that monotheism
becomes a religion of intellectualism. So anti-monotheism is also antiintellectualism.
Freud basically wants to know “how the Jews have come to be
what they are and why they have attracted this undying hatred.” (p. 89)
Freud finds the answer in the psychoanalytical analysis of the trauma
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