Translating Ancient Religions

May 28, 2008

The last time I read Herodotus I was struck by the ease with which Herodotus could navigate Egypt. Theoretically this was a completely different culture from what he knew in Greece, and he does not tire of pointing out how the Egyptians do things the opposite of the way the Greeks do things, but with respect to the Egyptian religious system he has an easy time. The gods were quite different, but he translates those foreign gods into his own Greek names. This trick of translating names from one religious system into another is an important method for minimizing religious friction.

As I began to read Jan Assmann's Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism I was impressed by the way Assmann had already described and theorized this ancient phenomenon:

The polytheistic religions overcame the primitive ethnocentrism of tribal religions by distinguishing several deities by name, shape, and function. The names are, of course, different in different cultures, because the languages are different... The sun god of one religion is easily equated to the sun god of another religion, and so forth. Because of their functional equivalence, deities of different religions can be equated. [3]

A bit later he will note the "common semantic universe" that was shared among civilizations in the ancient Near East. This is what enabled Herodotus to so easily read Egyptian religion.

The opposition to this system of mutually understandable polytheisms came in the form of monotheism.. which should be thought of as much more than a simple mental switch from many gods to one god. Assmann labels monotheism a "counter religion" since it is not content to be mutually translatable but must actively oppose the dominant religious system: "The decisive feature of the monotheistic movements is their revolutionary, 'idolophobic,' or iconoclastic character" (39).

The first historical example of this kind of iconoclastic monotheism is the solar religion of Akhenaten in the 14th century BC. Its successors are to be found in the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Assmann sees our own civilization as largely denying and pushing away the polytheism that is exemplified by Egypt.. and embracing the spirit of monotheism. He is keenly interested in tracing the return of this repressed polytheistic system (poststructural philosophy?).

I find Assmann's way of understanding these two opposed forces fruitful but strained. For example there are classical examples of theologians within both Judaism (Philo) and Christianity (Clement of Alexandria) who by means of allegory merged their religious traditions with the classical traditions. Whatever "monotheism" that developed in the tradition of Platonic philosophy (a major influence on Christianity) was able to translate the polytheistic terms of traditional religion into its own way of seeing things (see Plutarch's "On Isis and Osiris" for a tour de force example of this process).

So I am a doubter as to the reality of a radical cognitive distinction between polytheism and monotheism. What I see is that at various historical points it has been useful for a tradition to explicitly counter another tradition. I have no problem seeing biblical Judaism in this light, as it really does seem to be a conscious negation of all things Egyptian (no images, no magic, no afterlife..). But even though Judaism may truly be a "counter religion" in its historical origin, it had within itself the resources to become a translatable religious tradition. Each religion can find within itself principles of translatability when it so desires.