Violence and Monotheism (a review)

Mar Rosas Tosàs
04.03.18

The following is a review of the Spanish edition of “Violence et Monotéisme”, published by Fragmenta, Barcelona, 2014 

René Girard, in his celebrated work Violence and the Sacred (1972) maintained that religion constituted the best remedy against humanity’s violence. Jan Assmann sets out to upset this thesis: in the foundational texts of biblical monotheism, he says, we find a semantics of violence.
 

Assmann’s thesis is that the Pagan religions had no conception of any distinction between true religion and false religion, and that it was biblical monotheism that introduced this distinction. This is what he calls “the Mosaic distinction”: the religion of the other is false and, consequently, the others are aliens and enemies because they are enemies of God (p.24).
 

As Lluís Duch says in his introduction (and as Assmann’s regular readers will quickly note) this study is closely related to his previous research on the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaton, who led a monotheistic revolution which was, per Assmann, the first to articulate religion on the basis of the Mosaic distinction.
 

Amongst the ancient Pagan religions, Assmann continues, there existed a mutual translatability which guaranteed communication between cultures. Not only did they not question the gods of other communities, but foreigners’ beliefs in the gods was a guarantee that they were people worthy of trust, and that relationships with such people could be established. Yes, there was violence, but that was a question of power, not one of truth, as it would be in biblical monotheism (pp.42-43). With this new emphatic concept of truth, monotheism introduced, then, a new kind of pseudospeciation, to use a term of Erik H. Erikson borrowed by Assmann. In biological terms, humans are identical, and it is only due to culture that strangeness and violence towards the same species is generated. The configuring of a new ontology, in practice, translated into a new kind of violence.
 

Assmann goes on to examine the type of violence which the Mosaic distinction creates. It’s important to point out that his interest is not in what really happened, but rather what he and his wife Aleida Assmann call “cultural memory”, which frequently weighs more in the life of the group than the events that really occurred. So Assmann concentrates on how biblical monotheism presents itself in its early texts: why does it present itself as a leap and a revolutionary break if, in reality, it was really a progressive evolution (various biblical texts take for granted the existence of other gods, which is why in those texts God demands an exclusive fidelity)? And why is a language of violence employed in order to show the victory of monotheism over other religions?

Assmann distinguishes between pure violence –that divine violence of which Walter Benjamin wrote –and cultural violence, which he divides into five categories. The forms that most interest him in the pursuit of his study are juridical violence and religious violence. The first is a counterviolence which aims to create a juridical sphere which opposes pure violence, that is to say, it opposes that violence that is exercised as a function of merely private interests. Religious violence, on the other hand, is exercised in the name of God’s will (p. 34).
 

By extension, Assmann next develops the thesis that violence is an original contribution of monotheism (p. 32) and goes on to examine it. As we said, it is a question of the violence which bases itself on the distinction between the true and the false, which translates into a classification of people as friends or enemies. Now, the peculiarity on which Assmann lingers is that this religious violence is simultaneously a juridical violence (p. 84). For Assmann, biblical monotheism’s original gesture was its idea that violence exercised by despotic political leaders in the pursuit of personal desires rather than the enforcement of the law was in fact pure violence And in opposing this with a juridical violence legitimated by religion, biblical monotheism presents itself as a liberation movement from pure violence. In this way, biblical monotheism seeks to oppose the pessimistic anthropology that bases itself on the premise that, without a strong state, society is condemned to chaos, in the same line of reasoning that centuries later would be developed by Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. In summary, Assmann argues that the biblical God makes the claims to justice his own. For the first time in history, religion is the object of an ethical and juridical transformation.
 

Biblical monotheism also presents itself as a “bastion of justice” to the extent that it opposes the supposed “blindness” and violence of Paganism. In its opposition to Paganism, the prohibition of images plays a crucial role, something which biblical monotheism also frames in an incredibly original way. Assmann examines how – in one passage in Deuteronomy and another in Exodus –two apparently separate things are linked: the prohibition of worshiping other gods on the one hand, and on the other, the prohibition on representing God. This serves to clarify who is faithful to God and it constitutes the distinctive mark of the new religion. Assmann astutely points out, however, that biblical monotheism doesn’t so much oppose the Paganism beyond its borders as it does the Paganism within them. It’s not a matter of Egypt or Babylon, but rather of Canaan.
 

The final thesis that he defends in this work is that “the move towards this new form of religion as a life principle could never have been realised without the resource of the written word (p 10). In the ancient oriental empires, the king was the incarnation of the law, such that the legal text was of merely informative value. This ceases to be the case with the new religion, in which the text comes to have the value of a performative utterance. According to Mendelssohn, in Judaism one can only write the laws and rules of life, that is, the historic truths, but not the salvific and eternal truths. Assmann disagrees with Mendelssohn: the move towards a transcendental religion requires the writing down of laws because their codification is a necessary first step for establishing the distinction between the true and the false, between the true God and that of the idols (pp. 119-120). In distinction to what Mendelssohn claimed, the written word is related to eternal truth, even if only indirectly.

Assmann has been criticised for an unjustifiable inclination towards Paganism. Duch, in a more moderate tone, speaks of his “sympathy” for it (p.1). But the truth is that Assmann does not call for a return to polytheism (p.35) but rather proposes an attempt to realise the original impulse of biblical monotheism, which was never fulfilled: to dispossess the political leaders of their omnipotence and to free men from any totalising system (p.123).
 

In our view, before doing this, we need to deeply analyse monotheism’s notion of truth, which Assmann labels “emphatic”, and which he opposes to the ancient Pagan religions’ concept of truth, which he qualifies as “weak”. The Mosaic distinction seems like a good starting point to settle the strengths and merits of both groups of religions, but it requires a deeper study.


Translated by David Montoute.

Original text:

https://www.unav.edu/publicaciones/revistas/index.php/anuario-filosofico/article/viewFile/2764/2630