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About the Author

Jan Assmann is professor of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg.

Includes the names: Jan Assman, Ägyptologe Jan Assmann

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Works by Jan Assmann

The Price of Monotheism (2003) 70 copies
Violencia y monoteísmo (2017) 6 copies
Kultur und Gedächtnis (1988) 3 copies
Ägyptische Geheimnisse (2004) 2 copies
Kultur und Konflikt (1990) 1 copy
Gerechtigkeit (1998) 1 copy
"Isis" 1 copy
"Amun" 1 copy
"Re" 1 copy

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Very, very good--I recommend this to anyone who's teaching Exodus, or is interested in the story. Usually I'm irritated by the kind of asides that Assmann uses (did we need quite so many pages on Schoenberg's work?), but here, for whatever reason, they're charming; perhaps it's because everything is so authoritative and generous that I actually care what he thinks about things that he is slightly less expert in.
 
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stillatim | Oct 23, 2020 |
On the one hand, this author writes very well, and I learned quite a bit in the parts of the book that dealt with music and liturgical history.

On the other hand, I have real problems with the idea that the participation by the congregation can be replaced with professional musicians singing something, multiplied when that something can only be understood if you know the responses by heart or are following the text while you listen.

I even bought a copy of Missa Solemnis to listen to, and can't follow it. Maybe I am faulty, but I just don't buy the idea that this leads to great religious emotions. Perhaps for the musicians, but hardly for most listeners.… (more)
½
 
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MarthaJeanne | Sep 29, 2020 |
Quite a profound article envisioning (in the steps of Freud's Moses and Monotheism) the "Mosaic distinction" as the distinction between true and false religion--fundamental to monotheism--and thus the emergence of the Jewish religion as, in the ancient context, a "counterreligion," an Egyptian heresy (preceded by the lost monotheism established by the "Mad Pharaoh" Akhenaten) based not on idolatry, connection and universal oneness but on iconoclasm, separation, gradations of purity, oppositions, violent rejectionism, etc. And then, within the Jewish and Christian traditions, the attempts to reach back to Egypt as a mystic or revelatory source of knowledge to go with the exegetic or hermeneutic Scriptures. I know a bit about that, but the Mosaic origin story he sketches is new and interesting. Paper appeared in Representations.… (more)
½
 
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MeditationesMartini | Oct 21, 2013 |
The Price of Monotheism, Jan Assmann

Monotheism ... and Its Consequences

Many (if not most) people, upon reading Jan Assmann's earlier book, "Moses the Egyptian: the Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism," took him to be advocating a return to pagan religiosity. Our author specifically denies that several times in this text. But what drew readers to his 'Moses' book is apparently not what drove our author to write it. This book before us was written to set the record straight. Our author is interested in memory, specifically cultural memory. And not only memories that everyone acknowledges, but also ones that are repressed, like the memory of the specific forms of religiosity that came before the rise of monotheism and continually reappear at the edges of our western society, culture and history. In this review I would like to concentrate on what he thought to be some of the consequences of this turn to monotheism from the earlier 'paganism' which preceded it.

First, being a 'mnemologist,' he is naturally interested in the transition from cult and ritual to text. Now, of course, he is not maintaining that our monotheists (our author calls them 'secondary' religions) do not have rituals; his point is that for them, ritual "is reduced to a supporting and supplementary role." Whereas for pagans (he refers to them as 'primary' or 'archaic' religions), "the text is embedded in ritual and subordinated to it". This turn from primary religion to these later 'book religions' was a pivotal moment in world history according to our author. "Writing and transcendence belong together on the side of secondary religions, just as ritual and immanence belong together on the side of primary religions." Regarding these archaic religions we are told that "interlinked with the principle of ritual continuity is the idea that the world needs to be held on its course. Ritual cultures or cult religions typically operate on the assumption that the universe would suffer, or even come to an end, if the rites ceased to be observed in the prescribed fashion."

Our author argues that the truly unique stance of paganism is not its polytheism, rather it is its insistence that the world is divine. Pagans most usually thought that there was indeed a single One above and behind all the various divine beings.
"The counterposition to monotheism does not claim 'God is Many,' but rather 'God is One and All.' It would therefore be misleading to label it polytheism. What is important is not that the divine be manifold, but that the fulness and richness of its innerworldly manifestations not be hemmed in by any dogmatic boundary lines. In essence, the issue here is the godliness of the world."
This is why our author prefers to define these primary religions as 'cosmotheism' (the belief that our mundane world partakes in the divine) rather than the expected 'polytheism'. Of course, over against this cosmotheism is the One God of the Monotheists who is above, and Other to, everything, - and He most decidedly is not a part of nature!

With the rise of the several monotheisms the Sacred (perhaps) irrevocably changes. For our cosmotheists and their rituals, the focus is on "the sacred as it is made manifest in the world." For our monotheists, "the sacred is no longer to be found in our world." The sacred is now found only in holy scripture. The sacred has left the world, it is now found in either transcendence or scripture. "This amounts to a complete volte-face. Rather than being used to stabilize ritual, writing takes its place." The World (land-sea-sky-sun-stars) is no longer sacred: "The step into the religion of transcendence was a step out of the world - one could almost speak in this context of an 'exodus' - into scripture." Our author regards this as a pivotal moment in our history. After this, the natural world itself really can only be, at bottom, an Idol!

We have left the magical world behind. Of course, this doesn't happen immediately, it is a long ongoing process that is not yet complete. But down this road, something like our secular modernity may be almost inevitable once 'book religions' rise. "Prophetic monotheism lacks natural evidence; it walks, as Saint Paul says, not in vision but in faith." But this particular faith is in a God Who is entirely separate from His Creation. What the sociologist Max Weber named 'disenchantment of the world' and the psychoanalyst Freud called 'progress in intellectuality' continually grows along this road. Consider yourself at least a sympathizer of cosmotheism if this doesn't entirely strike you as progress.

The question now is 'how have these sympathies survived?' That is another consequence of monotheism. "None of the new or secondary religions succeeded in completely wiping out the vestiges of the primary religion or religions on which they were built; rather, they frequently adopted such traces and adapted them to their own purposes." This is a process of 'syncretistic amalgamation'. The archaic sacred was not immediately wiped away as if by a sponge. The 'New,' in order to arise, must incorporate aspects of the 'Old'. Our author quotes Theo Sundermeier approvingly on this point: "Here we find an organic syncretism at work that is both inevitable and unobjectionable. The more this synthesis succeeds, the greater are the chances that the new religion will be able to establish itself as a viable popular religion." So you see, secondary religions must incorporate pre-existing 'sacred' material in order to be successful. Without such pre-existing material, one suspects that the religion would be largely ignored and then forgotten.

But our author adds that the origin of these syncretistic elements "has to be forgotten and made invisible." Assmann argues "that secondary or counterreligions develop a new form of unconsciousness by enriching themselves with elements of primary religious experience and religious practice, while at the same time having to reinterpret their semantics and refunction their forms to fit them to the new context." And it is from this 'crypt' of cultural unconsciousness that supposedly new religious movements often draw their ideas. Of course, as our author notes, this has some similarity to the Freudian notion of the 'return of the repressed'.

Freud was right about this much, there is always an unacknowledged depth. Out of these depths grow ever new syntheses of the contemporary and the archaic. These deep traces "forms a depth dimension, a 'crypt' of religious tradition, which, like language, bears within it much more knowledge and many more memories than those who live in that tradition can ever fully bring to consciousness." Not only does the individual mind have an unconscious, but culture does too! One suspects that just as psychoanalysis teaches us that all individuals are a bit neurotic so too all cultures, or at least all cultures formed around secondary religions, must also be a little 'crazy'. It is the existence of this crypt of memory that allows our author to say of our secondary religions that they, "are duplicitous; they bear encrypted within themselves the paganism they ostensibly reject."

A third consequence of monotheism, according to our author, is 'the invention of the inner self'. This occurs because monotheism at its inception "sharply delimits itself from its own other, a process for which 'Egypt' and 'Canaan' stand as the central symbols; and it gives itself the form of a 'covenant', modeled on a political alliance, according to which Israel not only agrees to become the people of god, but god likewise vows to become the god of a people." Our author understands this to mark a "conversion from primary to secondary religion, from a lower to a higher state of consciousness, allegiance, and commitment."

Of all this, primary religions knew nothing. They "do not separate themselves from something else, and they therefore have no need to distinguish themselves from 'culture' or to 'sectorally segregate' themselves within culture. Secondary or counterreligions foster a higher degree of consciousness because the distinction between true and false on which they rest must continually be drawn anew within the soul of the believer." (Our author often refers to the distinction between true and false religion as the 'Mosaic Distinction'.) It seems that the old pagan religions were religions almost exclusively of exteriority; one performed the appropriate rituals correctly at the prescribed time and one was done with it. But I doubt that one could ever be 'done' with the God who is interested in the recesses of our very souls!

Exteriority is easy; interiority is hard. Thanks to these secondary religions many distinctions, primarily between True and False Religion (but also between True Religion and 'science, art, politics', and also the natural world), we are told that the "the transition from primary to secondary religious experience is therefore also a consciousness raising experience." Now, if this experience sounds unhappy to you, you may well be a cosmotheist! Our author again approvingly quotes Theo Sundermeier (from an untranslated work) regarding this transition: "Now one can and must decide for the new. It is not enough to go through the motions, inner acceptance is required as well. Belief and discipleship are the order of the day, truth must be separated from lies. ... Now there is 'true' and 'false' religion."

There are people who read these last words and say, perhaps only to themselves, 'welcome to hell'. Our author concludes his discussion of this particular consequence of monotheism by saying, "the distinction between truth and lies does not just carve up external space, it cuts through the human heart as well, which for the first time becomes the stage upon which the religious dynamic is played out." Again, the archaic gods were gods of exteriority and performance; the One God Who Rules Alone is concerned exclusively with our interiority (i.e., our faith). And it is the resulting expansion of human interiority (both terrible and exhilarating) that has irrevocably changed our world.

The last consequence of monotheism that was especially important to our author is its status as what our author calls a 'counterreligion' and its relation to sin. Our secondary religions (i.e., our monotheisms) are counterreligions because they must oppose something that is 'untrue'. The first thing they oppose, of course, are the primary religions. Now, the type of 'sin' our author has in mind has nothing to do with the Biblical 'Fall of Man' (i.e., expulsion from Eden) and the story of Noah and the Flood. As our author points out, there "are numerous parallels to the fall and the flood; this concept of sin is thus nothing new and by no means first came into the world with Monotheism." The 'new form of sinfulness' that our author is interested in is found "in the dance around the Golden Calf."

Ultimately, the difference is that with our monotheisms, one must want to sin. Now, one could certainly, in the primary religions, dishonor the gods. Of course, we are told, the gods "can be neglected, insufficiently venerated, sinned against in a hundred different ways, for example by breaking one of the taboos associated with them, but one can choose neither to initiate nor to terminate a relationship with them." After all, the pagan gods are but names for the various forces in the world. It is obvious that "no one would ever contemplate denying the existence of divine forces. They are there for all to see, in the form of sun and moon, air and water, earth and fire, death and life, war and peace." All these things are either natural or social (i.e., collective); none of them require an inner decision on the part of the individual. My inner decision is no more responsible for war and peace (for the pagans, these too are personified as divine forces) than it is for keeping the sun and moon in their appointed paths.

But my inner decision, and mine alone, decides my relationship to the One True God. A terrible and exhilarating responsibility indeed! We are now forever alone with The One Who Is Forever Other. "In turning to face the world, the One and Only God finds no other partner than the people who believe in him and the human heart that yearns for him, since the world itself is bereft of all godliness." Each of us, alone with the Alone, "bears the weight of god's address to the world [...] Never before had man borne such a heavy responsibility...". I found this point in particular to be the most profound consequence of monotheism; I mean the unprecedented expansion of human interiority. I believe this expansion occurs in order for each of us to better meet the unfathomable depths on the One God Who is Forever Other. The depths within each of us (unconsciously) strive to mirror the Other Who cannot ever be imitated.

"The gods of polytheistic religions realized the forms in which they addressed the world in mutual obligations and constellations. In monotheism, the One God invests himself for the first time exclusively in humans and their capacity for love and fidelity. The correlate of this shift is an entirely new sense of inadequacy on the part of humans." Ah yes, sin. This is why the dalliance with the Golden Calf is of such importance to our author. We had given our word to be faithful to the One God, and we broke it. "The commandment to renounce false gods evidently meets with the greatest resistance in the human soul." So no, monotheism did not 'invent' sin; it invented a new kind of sin. And this is not to be considered a denunciation of monotheism by our author:
"I am not claiming that 'sin and guilt are the result of the division of the world through the Mosaic distinction,' merely that a new consciousness and conception of guilt came into the world with the distinction and the turn it brought about in the history of consciousness. This assertion does not imply any value judgment."

Perhaps a few concluding words on the 'Mosaic Distinction' between True and False Religion are in order. "Monotheistic religion [...] defines itself in the Exodus story by differentiating itself from Egypt. Egypt had to be left behind so the promised land of monotheism could be reached." Again, our author insists that this move is not to be deplored. Unfortunately, this never happens in an evolutionary manner. "Humankind would never have progressed to monotheism in the natural course of events, in the sense of a gradual evolution. Monotheism demands emigration, delimitation, conversion, revolution, a radical turning towards the new resulting from an equally radical break, abnegation, denial of the old." Paganism is the 'natural' form of religion; there is no 'progress' from it, only revolutionary rejection. The Exodus from Egypt was the first Revolution. One doubts we will ever see the last one.

Perhaps there may even be a revolution overturning our present religions! How? Well, the archaic remains of pagan religion still haunt our cultural unconscious. In fact, our author will make note of the "eruptive forcefulness with which this repressed dark side has continually returned to haunt the West: in the idea of a prisca theologia and in Renaissance hermeticism, in the ideas of natural religion, Spinozism, and pantheism in the Enlightenment and early Romanticism, and in the various neo-cosmotheisms, from the Munich cosmicists through to 'Hitler's God,' the Wicca cult, and other New Age religious fads."

As you can see, throughout post-medieval times, new religious movements have continually appeared. And all of them, according to our author, with a healthy dose of the archaic cosmotheism within them. Is there a religious revolution that overturns our secondary religions in the making? No one knows for sure. However, if it does come I believe we can be certain of one thing. It will be no mere return to ancient religiosity. The 'new', according to our author, always emerges out of a mixture of the contemporary and the archaic. I suspect that if a new religion were to arise it would be a mixture of the archaic belief in the 'divinity of the world' alongside the spiritual depth gained thanks to our several secondary religions. If this were ever to come to pass the apologists of this new religion would likely say that, 'the infinite exterior of our divine World and the eternal recesses of the in-dwelling Spirit had at last come to rest in each other arms'. ...Or so I imagine.

But is a new religion even possible? "The Hebrews in thrall to pagan idolatry are converted to monotheism by Moses, Paul converts Jews and gentiles to Christianity, Mohammed converts Jews, Christians, and infidels to Islam; and in all these situations of conversion the Mosaic distinction between true and false is reintroduced and tightened. The Mosaic distinction must constantly be drawn anew." It seems that the Mosaic distinction between true and false belief is itself a permanent revolution! Ultimately, all theology is local. Each and every religious formation reacts, negatively, to the beliefs that came before them; of course, along with this there is, as one would expect, also a reaction to what is unique in its local circumstances too. Thus what our author calls 'cosmotheism' (the entire world is divine) precedes monotheism (the Divinity is entirely separate from the world) which in turn will (eventually) be overthrown by something else. So yes, perhaps it is not impossible that a new religion, especially in a time of protracted trouble, would again be able to rise. But the 'Price of Monotheism', that is, the consequence of humanity first drawing the Mosaic distinction between true and false religion, is always repression of what came before it. And so, each new religious formation can never truly bring a lasting peace.

This is because the 'denied' (i.e., the overturned religion), whatever it might be, becomes at least a part of the newly minted archaic, and there it slumbers fitfully in the deep recesses of culture. ...Until the next crisis calls it forth.
… (more)
 
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pomonomo2003 | Sep 25, 2011 |

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