Monotheism
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Monotheism
Bruno Cariou
Monotheism is a very unusual form of religion and it is one which creates difficulties even for the most skillful of its theologians. If it is a theism, its god must be a superhuman person, aware and accessible to his followers. So the religions which pose an impersonal force, like the classic Fatum , or the impersonal (neutral) Brahma of the Hindu, as supreme power in the universe are not one, neither are all the forms of pantheism which consider that the entire universe is a living, but unconscious, entity that cannot be called a god. And if monotheism is mono, God must indeed be supreme and therefore all-powerful, although he is not necessarily the only supernatural being in the universe. Men can hardly imagine a hermit god, so that monotheism, to be viable, presupposes a God who is truly an absolute master, but who has his retinue of collaborators, companions and servants who obey him and carry out his orders. But he must be supreme: all other gods must be considered as his agents and no other god can be represented as his rival and enemy. This is, of course, what makes it impossible to consider Christianity as a monotheistic religion, at least for most of its history and as described in the Holy Book,which flanks the Christian God of a rival god (Satan) and posits that the two gods compete for supremacy, even if one of them must ultimately triumph. In fact, in recent years, the clergy of most Christian sects have banded together to kill the devil, in order to make their religion monotheism, so that a prominent Catholic theologian, Father Jacques Turmel, has joined forces to kill the devil complained, in the work he published in English translation under the pseudonym of Louis Coulanges: "Satan ... is now like the Son of man, whom the Gospel tells us he had not laid his head down on no shoulder. But as long as Christianity posited the existence of a god and an anti-god,it was a ditheism - and again on the only assumption that its tripartite god formed only one and that the anti-god was the ruler of all the other gods, like Jupiter, Apollo, Venus and Dionysus, a a point on which some of the early Church Fathers disagreed.
The invention of monotheism is generally attributed to Akhenaton (Akh-en-Aton), a misshapen and half-mad king, who ruled (and nearly ruined) Egypt from 1354 to 1369 BC and who cannot not to have been worthy of his charming wife, Nefertiti whom he hated so much that he had his name erased from the monuments which represented them both. His portraits, which depict him with a prominent belly and wide hips that contrast pitifully with a frail body and limbs, show that he was afflicted with a disease or deformity. He was a bastard. His grandmother was a blonde, possibly Nordic Aryan princess, whose skull and hair attest to race. The features of the father suggest that he could have a Semitic ancestor, the race of his mother, with a round face, is uncertain:it was perhaps an octoronne, even a quarteronne; and her thick lips are the visible mark of black blood, while the odd shape of her jaw is a testament to clashes between incompatible genes. A mind so genetically divided against itself had to match the deformity of its body. There is no doubt that he venerated Aten, the solar disk, as supreme god and it must be recognized that heliolatry is a very rational monotheism, since the sun is obviously the source of all life on earth. The question of whether the king admitted the existence of other gods, subordinate, divides Egyptologists, but does not call into question, as we have indicated above, his claim to be the first
monotheist. It is not so certain that this religious innovation is due to his father, Amenhotep III,with whom he possibly reigned jointly for a few years.
Akhenaton's religion, for which he upset Egypt and renounced his empire, must not have been well known to the Aryans who then lived in Crete and the region of Mycenae, but there is no indication that they were impressed by its monotheism. Some have conjectured that a tradition relating to Akhenaton may have reached the Jews, who, however, would not develop monotheistic tendencies until a millennium later, inspired by very different models.
The first Aryan considered a monotheist was Xenophanes (570 - 470). He certainly rejected the anthropomorphic gods of polytheism and affirmed the existence of a single god, admittedly spherical, because it is a perfect, eternal and immutable form, but which was also an infinite sphere and identical to the universe. Was the universe conscious and men, of whom Xenophanes thought were the products of a sort of chemical reaction between earth and water, could they pray to the gigantic being of which they formed a tiny part? There is no evidence that Xenophanes thought so and I don't see how anyone can imagine that a man could get the attention of the universe. Even assuming that Xenophanes conceived of the universe as a living being (which, of course, is not immutable),is it imaginable that a cell in our body is begging us? In my opinion, what has been called "the only true monotheism that ever existed in the world" was, properly speaking, atheism. If there is no god that men can ask to intervene in human affairs, it is simply a misnomer to call an inexorable impersonal force "god". Xenophanes was certainly one of the great men of whom our race can legitimately be proud, but I do not see how he can be called a monotheist, although it is possible that he later helped to make the Greeks accept monotheism. .If there is no god that men can ask to intervene in human affairs, it is simply a misnomer to call an inexorable impersonal force "god". Xenophanes was certainly one of the great men of whom our race can legitimately be proud, but I do not see how he can be called a monotheist, even if it is possible that he later helped to make the Greeks accept monotheism. .If there is no god that men can ask to intervene in human affairs, it is simply a misnomer to call an inexorable impersonal force "god". Xenophanes was certainly one of the great men of whom our race can legitimately be proud, but I do not see how he can be called a monotheist, even if it is possible that he later helped to make the Greeks accept monotheism. .
The spread of Stoicism in the Greco-Roman world is one of the most remarkable phenomena in history. Many have observed that it is paradoxical that a Semite, a Phoenician merchant in the export trade, who, on a business trip to Athens, attended lectures there by a cynical philosopher and who spoke Greek poorly , went so far as to claim to be a full-fledged philosopher and, although he was foreign in features and language, made many followers among the Greeks (1). Even more paradoxical is that what inspired the subversive doctrine and the hotbeds of revolutionary agitation in which Robert von Pöhlmann recognized ancient communism became the philosophy of the more conservative Romans. The first paradox can be explained by the fact that,when Zeno went to Athens in the second half of the 4th century BC, Greece was going through an endless economic crisis and was culturally demoralized; a large number of citizens were subjected to the same morbid fascination with exoticism that drives our contemporaries to put “melancholy” Russians and Hindu swamis on a pedestal. As for the second paradox, Zeno's successors changed his doctrine so much that Panetius, a Greek from Rhodes,
succeeded in making this philosophy attractive to the Roman mind (2).a large number of citizens were subjected to the same morbid fascination with exoticism that drives our contemporaries to put “melancholy” Russians and Hindu swamis on a pedestal. As for the second paradox, Zeno's successors changed his doctrine so much that Panetius, a Greek from Rhodes, succeeded in making this philosophy attractive to the Roman mind (2).a large number of citizens were subjected to the same morbid fascination with exoticism that drives our contemporaries to put “melancholy” Russians and Hindu swamis on a pedestal. As for the second paradox, Zeno's successors changed his doctrine so much that Panetius, a Greek from Rhodes, succeeded in making this philosophy attractive to the Roman mind (2).
Stoicism was for several centuries the dominant philosophy of cultivated minds in the Greco-Roman world, for four main reasons.
1. He claimed to be based exclusively on observing the realities of the physical world, "following nature" and rejecting all superstitions on the supernatural. This argument was reinforced by studies of natural phenomena, such as the causes of tides, undertaken by some of the leading Stoics.
2. It affirmed to be strictly founded on reason, inaccessible to religious mysticism and this argument was supported by a very elaborate system of logic and dialectics which made it possible to infallibly deduce any proposition from the observed phenomena and to provide absolute certainties and to satisfy minds that could not be satisfied with a high degree of probability, which is all that epistemological limits allow us to achieve.
3. It maintained social stability by guaranteeing the essentials of the generally accepted code of morality and by stigmatizing exceptions to this code as irrational and unnatural.
4. More importantly for the Roman spirit, Stoicism (revised by Panetius) was the only philosophy which encouraged and even enjoined men to take an active part in political life and to devote themselves to the service of the State and of the nation. Patriotism and morality, which make great statesmen and great generals, were decried by other philosophical systems, especially the Cyrenaic, the Cynical, and the Epicurean, and practically ignored by the New Academy, which anticipated the methodology of modern science and represented the intellectual summit of Greco-Roman civilization, but required a rationalism and a cold objectivity of which only the best minds are capable.
Anyone who has read De natura deorumof Cicero remember that they were taken by surprise when Cicero, in the very last paragraph, spoke in favor of the Stoic point of view, although Cicero himself was a member of the New Academy and, moreover, he could not fail to see which of the arguments he had taken up was the most reasonable. In the last sentence, the statesman imposes silence on the philosopher by invoking the reason of state.
Stoicism, which was adopted by most educated and influential men until the time of Marcus Aurelius and the twilight of human reason, was a philosophy, not a religion: it had no mysteries, no revelations, no gospels, no temples, no priests, no rituals, no ceremonies, no worship. Nevertheless, this eminently "respectable" doctrine, which deeply influenced the masses, was monotheism.
The Stoics asserted that the universe (which, we remember, was to them the earth and its dependencies, the sun, the moon and the stars that revolved around it) was one living organism, of which God was the brain, animus mundi. This cosmic spirit ordered and controlled everything that happened, so that fate, the link of cause and effect ( heimarmene ), was one with divine Providence ( pronoia ). This animus mundi, whom they generally called Zeus and which some of them placed in the sun, was conscious and had thoughts and designs incomprehensible to men, which could not conform to them. Their Zeus, who, of course, was not anthropomorphic, was the supreme god, perhaps the only god. However, few were prepared to refuse compromises with mainstream religions and as a result they admitted the probable existence of the popular gods as subordinates of Zeus, an order of living beings superior to men and more or less anthropomorphic, who were part of the divine plan. As a result, they interpreted popular beliefs and myths as allegories, playing on words and manipulating ideas with a sophisticated ingenuity that made them peerless theologians.After making this concession to state cults and popular superstitions, the Stoics insist that a wise man perceives that the various gods who seem real to the people are in fact all aspects of theanimus mundi and that there is really only one God.
CLEANTHES, Zeno's disciple and successor in Athens, is best known for the eloquent prayer, commonly known as a hymn, addressed to one God, which begins thus: "Lead me, Zeus and you Destiny." After talking about the majesty of the universal spirit, he assures Zeus that he will gladly go wherever the god leads him, but adds that if he did not want to lead him, it would make no difference, because he would be obliged to follow him. Obviously, this is simply Seneca's oft-quoted phrase, Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt , with which, moreover, Spengler appropriately concludes his Untergang des Abendlandes.. There is nothing in this that is very coherent, since we recognize in fata the inexorable link of cause and effect in the real world. On the other hand, we are somewhat surprised to find that this prayer is addressed to a god - who no doubt can hear it - and that we are then assured that Divine Providence has fixed the order of events in such a way. invariable that what must happen will happen anyway. A sane man will immediately ask why to pray, if the prayer does not matter.
The Stoics have an answer. The good and the bad, the pain and the pleasure, are only in the head and what makes the difference is your attitude towards the events: it would be aberrant as well as futile to oppose the divine plan. he orders you. All that matters to you is maintaining your moral integrity, and as long as you do, events have no power over you. They even insist that the sage, aware of his moral integrity, would be perfectly happy, even if he were immersed in boiling oil. As far as I know, this proposition has never been subjected to empirical examination,although intelligent men often must have thought it would have been an interesting experience to put Chrysippus or another prominent Stoic in the pot to see if the boiling oil would have changed his opinion.
The Stoics asserted that, as everything is "conformable to nature", that is to say to Providence, there is no such thing as evil or injustice. To support this paradox, they had to devise various arguments, usually wrapped in a long sequence of seemingly logical propositions, seasoned with infinitely complex definitions, some of which were mere verbal tricks that went unnoticed in their harangues. The most plausible proposition was that what seems unfair or wrong to us is only part of a whole that we cannot understand. To simplify it by an analogy, the lungs or the liver may be repulsive in themselves, even a
beautiful woman has them. The Stoics thus constructed a theodicy which satisfied them. Naturally,these intellectuals strove to excogitate arguments which undermined common sense.
What we have said suffices to show how the Stoics made monotheism an eminently "respectable" belief. It became the hallmark of great brains.
Professor Gilbert Murray made a most accurate observation in his famous Five Stages of Greek Religion. After reporting the anecdote that an impressionable Greek who had attended Aristotelian classes and then Stoics classes declared that there was the same difference between the two as between men and gods, Murray notes: “the Greeks gave way to the Semites, philosophy to religion. It is true that we know that Zeno and a few other Stoics were Semites and we believe that a few others were perhaps hybrids from the crossing of Greeks and individuals from one of the countless peoples of Asia Minor as the Alexander's conquests had Hellenized,but the point is that their doctrine attracted Aryans (there is no reason to believe that Panetios was not of our race) and was accepted without suspicion by the great majority of the Greeks and Romans of the educated classes. It thus acquired prestige.
Furthermore, Stoicism was not just an ideology foreign to the gullible Aryans upon whom it had been imposed. It contained elements consistent with our racial psyche. Professor Günther observed that the Aryans "have always tended to regard fate as greater than the power of the gods" and mentioned the belief in an impersonal, inexorable moros , Fatum , Wyrd , which we have discussed above. The animus mundiof the Stoics approached it, with its unchanging Providence. The Aryans accept the reality of the visible and tangible world of nature and instinctively reject the putrid Semitic hatred of this world. “Never,” says Günther, “did the Indo-Europeans [the Aryans] imagine that they would become more religious, when they replaced their here below with a hereafter and this here below was reduced to nothing. to be a place of pain, persecution and Salvation ”. Here again, the Stoic belief that this world is the only one that exists and that whatever happens is "in accordance with nature" fit into the mentality of our race. Far from the Aryan belief in an unalterable link of cause and effect leading to passive and servile fatalism, kismet, of Islam, fate is on the contrary a reality that the Aryan courageously accepts: "The fact of being linked to fate proved to be from the start the source of his spiritual existence" Thus the healthy Aryan " does not even wish to be redeemed from the strain of a life which, for him, is linked to fate ”and Günther quotes Schopenhauer:“ What we need is not a happy life, but a heroic life. "The Aryan ideal," continues Günther, "is the hero who" nobly understands that the fate awaiting him is his fate, confronts it with righteousness and is therefore true to himself. Similarly, Stoicism asserts that there is nothing more valuable than moral integrity. This fatalism may seem passive,but stoicism was in practice the belief of Cato of Utica and many other Roman aristocrats who proudly lived and died heroically, obeying fate with its unwavering resolve.
Stoicism was founded and to a considerable extent promoted by Semites, although it included, by chance or by design, many elements in accordance with the Aryan spirit and mentality, it was a hybrid philosophy, bastard, because it also contained many Semitic elements foreign to our race. As Gilbert Murray pointed out, there was a latent fanaticism in his religiosity and he claimed to offer some sort of salvation to an unhappy humanity; despite its ostentatious appeal to nature and reason, it was a sort of evangelism, "whose profession dazzled reason".
He claimed to deduce from biology an asceticism which was in fact fundamentally inhuman and therefore irrational; for example, he limited sexual intercourse to reproduction. Although she was the hero belief, it is clear that there was something sick and distorted about this philosophy.
What is more, Stoicism was an intellectual catastrophe. He carried the noxious cosmopolitanism which speaks of "one world" and imagines that Divine Providence has integrated all human beings into the Divine Plan, so that there are no racial differences, but only differences in the education and understanding of the truth of the Stoics. This is why it often happens that we do not know the race of an individual who had learned to speak and write Greek (or Latin) well and had received, or had taken, a Greek name. Our sources of information were so amazed by the insipid verbiage of the Brotherhood of Man that they forgot to discriminate.
Professor Murray is correct that Stoicism is essentially a religion, but it was covered with so many layers of speciously logical and precise discourse and it took so much intellectual effort to understand its complexities that it was regarded as a philosophy. . And I think we can accept him as such on the basis of one criterion: he had no rituals or ceremonies and he had no priests. This is an important point to which we will come back later.
Revilo P. Oliver, “The Origins of Christianity”, Historical Review Press , chap. III, 2001, translated from the American by BK
(1) There is nothing particularly paradoxical about this, since, as has been shown at https://elementsdeducationraciale.wordpress.com/2013/10/01/la-liberte-un-concept-desclaves-2/ , on the one hand philosophy, in ancient Greece, was essentially an import product, the propagation of which in Attica was all the more rapid as the Greek of the time was already strongly mixed and, on the other hand , most of the philosophers were either Metics or Semites. F. Sayre, in The Greek Cynics , recalls that the first audience of the Stoics in Athens was composed entirely of Semites. [Editor's note.]
(2) I need not say that I am making generalizations, which I consider valid, about a doctrine which already had a long and complicated history and was represented by a great number of writers and scholars. teachers, whose various changes in doctrine gave rise, of course, to endless controversy. The most systematic and complete study of Stoicism is in German: Max Pohlem, Die Stoa (Göttingen, 2 vol., 1948). Professor Edwyn Bevan's unassuming little book, Stoics and Sceptics (London, 1913) is enjoyable and profitable to read.