In the first chapter of the Dynamics of Monotheism in Late Antiquity, Guy Stroumsa characterizes Origen’s Dialogue with Heraclides (I.20–II.20) as what “may be the best proof text in all of patristic literature that Christological doctrines, even before Trinitarianism, have polytheistic propensities” (p.29). (“Origen said: … ‘Isn’t it true …we have no trouble in saying both that there are two Gods [duo theous] and that there is one God?’… ‘Do we profess two Gods [homologoumena duo theous]?’ Heraclides said: ‘Yes.The power [dunamis] is one.’” (p.29)). Explicating the meaning and significance of such passages in the context of late antique Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is the primary interest of Dynamics of Monotheism in Late Antiquity. In this slender monograph, Guy Stroumsa hopes to “shed new light on various anthropological, social, and political implications of monotheism,” which will help to articulate “elements of a future generative grammar of religion” (p.ix). It complements three of his previous books on religion in Late Antiquity: The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity (2011, trans. Susan Emanuel) and The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity (2015), as well as The Idea of Semitic Monotheism: The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth (2021). As in the first two works, Stroumsa explains religious transformation in Late Antiquity as a product of several interacting elements: an emerging care of the self, book production and scripturalization, politicization, and the centrality of a community based on shared narratives. And while late antique religion is primarily a story of polytheism and Christianity, Stroumsa does not neglect to note Jewish influences and to frame the period as a kind of praeparatio coranica ‘preparation for the Koran’. The very slimness of the volume enhances the impressiveness of Stroumsa’s accomplishment—it is engagingly written, filled with convincing, provocative, and brilliant insights, and demonstrates a mastery of primary and secondary sources. Rarely does one encounter a work at once so full of erudition and so delightful to read. In part, the medium is the message. Rather than eschew terms like “monotheism”, “religion”, and “dualism”, Stroumsa deftly applies them thereby demonstrating their continuing utility. In addition, however, he makes substantial claims about late antique monotheism, such as how monotheism evokes dualism and polytheism and how polytheism contains monotheism.
Both the title and the succinct articulation of the book’s purpose and approach might give a skeptical reader pause because “monotheism”, “Late Antiquity”, and “religion”, along with “anthropological”, “social”, and “political” apparently embrace an etic rather than emic approach to the subject. The author disarms any concerns in the “Introduction: A Religious Revolution.” There he defends the heuristic value of these terms by attending to emic categories and social rather than “doctrinal dimensions”. Although “monotheism” may be unattested, “polytheism” is (Philo, Mut. 205), and thus related to the generation of communities based on adherence to one, two, or three divine beings or multiple ones as they stake out their identities through internal heresiology or external polemics. Stroumsa still attends to an ancient understanding of these terms. He qualifies monotheism as having polytheistic inflections (binatarian and trinitarian) and polytheism as having monotheistic aspects (henotheism). Not surprisingly then, he questions the facile view of the political dimension that views polytheism as universalist and monotheism as ethnocentric. In response to a similarly contentious term, “Abrahamic religions”, Stroumsa notes that authors as early as Justin Martyr attest to a division of Abrahamic communities that best can be described as religious and that accounts for the emergence of Islam. The formative myths of Judaism and Christianity are religious ones that embody an underlying structural grammar of polytheism, dualism, and monotheism and govern the theologoumena of Islam. Analyzing Judaism, Christianity, and polytheism as religions can be productive.
Chapter 1, “Origen, Plotinus, and Unio Mystica,”, applies the underlying grammar of Abrahamic religions by demonstrating that polytheism is imbricated in Christianity and monotheism in polytheism. In chapter 2 “Henotheizing Pagans and Abraham’s Religion”, Stroumsa links the figure of Abraham to hypsistos and the Qur’anic view of Abraham as a ḥanīf Muslim, a non-Jewish and non-Christian before the distortion of pure monotheism. In chapter 3, “Varieties of Dualism,” Stroumsa demonstrates that monotheism, polytheism, and dualism represent two sides of the same coin or modifications of each other. Here the discussion ranges broadly on Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Mazdeism, dualistic language within a fierce monotheism in the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo and rabbinic tradition. In chapter 4, “A Just God or a Good God,” Stroumsa applies Henry Corbin’s “paradox of monotheism” to the concept of divine attributes of mercy and justice. According to Corbin, historically, no pure, unmediated monotheism has existed (p.76). Mercy and justice can transform from attributes to hypostasized hierarchal and oppositional powers. The main purpose of chapter 5, “Election and Ethnicity”, is to complicate conventional views that disassociate ethnicity from Christianity and correlate monotheism with chosenness.
Chapter 6, “Discourse and Violence,” is representative of the perfect balance of erudition, eloquence, scholarship, and facility with primary sources. Stroumsa begins with the observation that the historical dimensions of salvation history make “(mythical) history…a marker of identity” (p.117) even more than language and culture. This rising status of religious communities based on a collective identity along with the end of public sacrifice and a new balance between narrative and ritual created by the centrality of scripture cannot be unrelated to rising physical violence between religious communities. In Judaism and Christianity, “sacrifice…underwent, as it were, a transformation into an ekphrasis of sacrifice” (p.119). He applies Mira Balberg’s view that discursive treatment of sacrifice by rabbis was not a metaphorical replacement but part of larger development of rabbis learning “how to do things with words” (p.122).[1] Given Girard’s principle that sacrifice channels and defuses violence, so too does discourse about sacrifice. Since words can be physically and emotionally evocative like sacrifice, they have the power to create distinctive identities that produce intolerance. Stroumsa critiques the trope of pagan tolerance versus monotheistic zeal on the grounds that universalists can be intolerant of those who reject their universalist view while exclusiveness can generate tolerance by compartmentalizing the outsiders as groups of little concern. Even the Dead Sea community tolerated some Jews and non-Jews outside their community who ignored them far more than they accepted group members who violated their code. The technological innovation of the codex accelerated the production of scriptural communities with distinctive identities and explains the proliferation of heated debates over correct interpretation of the Bible. In the final section of this chapter, “Mapping Religious Violence”, Stroumsa takes issue with those who would question the validity of this framing on the grounds that religion was a constructed term. Stroumsa applies religion not as an ontological concept but as a deeply embedded vehicle for powerful discourse. This discourse produced violence that might also stem from other tensions. Drawing on Johannes Hahn and Thomas Sizgorich, he suggests that in so far as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were social as well as religious movements, religious differences could and did fuel violence engendered by societal problems. Violence resulted not because communities were separated but because imagined boundaries were blurred and had to be reinforced. For example, claims Stroumsa, the narratives of Catholics and Donatists are what led to violence. More than “religion”, “tolerance” is a term that makes little sense in Late Antiquity. There is a “link between a discourse of violence to the violence of discourse” and between “hermeneutical communities” and these are “verbal expressions of sacrifice and intolerance” (p.134). This link cuts both ways as if, in accordance with Girard, actual sacrifice channeled potential violence, but then discursive, potential sacrifice channeled actual violence.
In chapter 7, “One God, One Self”, Stroumsa agrees with Marcel Mauss’s insight that the birth of the single, unified self can be attributed to monotheism, but notes that just as monotheism begets dualism, so does the monotheism of the self beget a dualistic self. This dualism could be manifested as a reflexive self, a soul separating from the body, a demon and angel in each person, or the double-self, such as the Helen who did not go to Troy. In the book’s conclusion, rather than summarize the argument of the book, Stroumsa explores the “Political Repercussions of Monotheism”. Here Stroumsa reflects on religious time and the relationship between religion and political power as Late Antiquity becomes the so-called Middle Ages. Christian eschatology was short-lived, and the nexus of Christians as True Israel and the Roman empire produced constant tension between the human polity and divine polity. For Jews, messianism is not so much linear time as a modus vivendi with the bleak reality of cyclical time. Cyclical time, by definition, means that troubles are inevitable. Islam emerges as a combination of political and religious dimensions Thus, the transition from polytheism to monotheism is better viewed not so much as a victory of Christianity over paganism but rather a merging of religion and power.
There is very little to criticize in this work. Perhaps Stroumsa protests too much against Boyarin’s questioning of the application of “religion” to periods before Late Antiquity. After all, there is not a major difference between avoiding the term “religion” and utilizing the term in a nuanced, fully explained manner that clearly articulates its advantages and limitations. Indeed, since applying religion to all kinds of phenomena has become conventional in religious studies, we can employ the term and its associated methods to monotheism or Christianity or Judaism regardless of whether they precisely fit a category we call religion. I suppose some might wish for a thicker work with a deeper dive into the primary sources and more extensive indices. I prefer, however, this digestible volume. It demonstrates the productivity of an approach that cautions against reducing monotheism to a clearly defined, theological concept without avoiding the concept altogether. Guy Stroumsa has authored a work that will richly inform future study of Abrahamic religions in Late Antiquity.
Notes
[1] Mira Balberg, Blood for Thought: The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017).