Polytheistic Prologue
Xenophanes’ famous claim that “if cattle, horses, and lions had hands, they would draw and sculpt gods who looked like themselves,” can equally well be understood as a revelation that the appearances we lend to gods to make them like ourselves are a tacit recognition that what we call [a] god cannot be attributed a form at all, that it is not that we are ignorant of God’s appearance, but that [a] God, as an/the embodiment of the sacred, has no physical appearance—or existence. God’s essential presence to us is through language, above all, imperatives, and his commands are dominantly negative, thou shalt not… Xenophanes’ aphorisms make clear that he understood that the fact that we may imagine God as a man with a beard is wholly independent of His fundamental reality, which is very simply, as Hillel might have said, to make us remember the Golden Rule.
Thus the Greeks had seen through the false meaningfulness of the gods’ imaginary incarnation, but by giving the gods a “superhuman” form had made them rivals of ourselves, as demonstrated in Iliad 24:525-6, where Achilles laments to Priam:
Such is the way the gods spun life for unfortunate mortals, that we live in unhappiness, but the gods themselves have no sorrows.
In a word, the Gods are our (happy) doubles, a notion not without relevance, but whose anthropological significance is much more sharply expressed by the “absurdity” of the Crucifixion: the sacred cannot be our victorious rival; on the contrary, it would take on human form only in order to share our mortality.
After all, in the originary hypothesis, the sacred embodies the transcendent will of the human community to preserve it from mimetic rivalry, and the idea of transferring this rivalry to that between gods and men, however useful it may be in allowing Achilles to transcend the enmity of the Trojan War in returning Hector’s body to Priam, scarcely provides a solid foundation for the human social order. It is a short distance from Achilles’ lament to Gloucester’s in King Lear:
As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods:
They kill us for their sport. (IV, 1)
where the gods are not merely blamed for being immortal when we are not, but for sadistically reminding us of our mortality.
Xenophanes’ revelation allows us to understand the self-consciousness of Greek polytheism as grasping its mimetic nature, yet not seeing this as problematic—although, as we know, the sacred exists precisely to defer mimetic rivalry. No doubt deflecting this rivalry onto that between humans and gods is conducive, as in the Iliad example, to human solidarity; it is of course significant that Achilles’ sympathy for Priam has as its object his son’s mortality. But to define the gods as our rivals is to deny their role as agents of the sacred, in which their status as models must be devoid of resentment. This is in effect an autocritique of polytheism that heralds its decline, and its replacement in the Axial Age by monotheism focused on the unique divinity’s role as lawgiver, that is, regulator of interhuman moral relations.
Abrahamic Religion
The paradox that is at the root of the attempts to think the sacred that we call “religion” is that deferral has no subject. It is a suspension of the subject as the doer of actions, and our invention of god(s) as the subject enforcing this suspension cannot be effected without paradox, whether we fall into it or deliberately foreground it—as Christianity itself, in its rejection of the quasi-Tertullianian credo quia absurdum, refuses to admit openly. We worship the divinity by affirming its necessity, which we know we cannot demonstrate as other than a need. And with the first inklings of the universe’s infinities, Pascal understood this as an earthly wager, whose potentially infinite payoff is as close as we can come to understanding its value.
If I were now at the beginning of my career, I would have had time to study this question in depth, and no doubt to write a book such as the 1981 The Origin of Language, which had the effect of discouraging anyone who might have found my never-refuted hypothetical syntactic progression from ostensive through imperative to declarative sufficiently credible to warrant further investigation. But at present, the best service I can provide my ideas is to offer them via these Chronicles, in the context of what is now known as generative anthropology—about which I should remind the reader that I was forced to accept the Chomskian generative in the place of what I had intended to call “genetic,” translating the French génétique that, unfortunately unlike the English equivalent, is not necessarily connected to the biological gene.
The little I have learned about Buddhism has been—as it clearly was for Sartre a century ago—a liberating experience for a Westerner whose culture has taught him to judge all experiences with respect to the instrumentalities of the ego: what can I do with this? Thus in my talk in Nagoya in 2016, where I compared Zeno’s paradoxes with those of the Buddhist Nagarjuna, I noted that for Zeno, the paradoxes of motion are really paradoxes of notation; Achilles never meets the tortoise because the infinite series never ends, except that of course it does if one understands how to sum an infinite series—which was not at all Nagarjuna’s point.
But the case of Sartre is more telling: we need only compare his terminology with that of Hegel, whose analysis of the subject he was following. For Hegel the difference between the animal consciousness that grasps its content “in itself” (an sich, en-soi) and the human whose content is “for itself” (für sich, pour-soi) has no extra-mental counterpart, the reflexive element implicit in the für remains, as it were, in the brain of the subject. Whereas Sartre’s notion of the pour-soi, influenced as it was by his conversations in 1923 with Japanese philosopher Kuki Shuzo (see Chronicle 806), unambiguously conceives this contrast as opposing constraint to freedom, which Sartre metaphorizes as an “empty space” (néant) between the subject and his object—the internalization of the real spatial distance that permits deferral and that establishes the scenic space of human cultural communication.
Returning to Western civilization, it is along similar lines that I would seek to explain the difference between Judaism and Christianity. Hebrew monotheism is unlike the kind of abstract one-ness that one finds in Plato and Aristotle, where the Homeric Gods are no longer taken seriously as representing the sacred, only to be replaced with an abstraction to which, significantly, no prayers can be said and on which no collective ceremonies are centered. It is the cultural specificity of the Hebrew God, whose name cannot be pronounced (ostensively) but only read (intensively), that has made the Hebrews and their descendants the object of history’s most long-lasting, and as we have recently witnessed, still-virulent resentment. To accuse the Jews of being “the chosen people” illustrates the blindest form of mimetic rivalry, for if the non-Jews wish to reject the Jewish God, the Jews will have no objections. But the fact is that the other great religious movements of the West, Christianity and Islam, are both dependent on the original Hebrew intuition of the sacred—the former, openly and avowedly, and the latter ambivalently at best with a great proneness to denial, as the pronouncements of Mahmoud Abbas concerning Jerusalem and the Hebrew Temples so perfectly illustrate.
Leaving Islam aside, it seems to me that now that Roman Catholics, along with many Protestants, are willing to see the Jews as “the elder brothers” of Christianity, Jews can likewise regard their younger brothers and sisters with not just affectionate tolerance but admiration—that of the elders for the creativity of the “younger generation” in their daring introduction two millennia ago of the incarnate sacred—the divine—into the world of what was then today. Whence my fondness for credo quia absurdum, however Tertullian really worded it.
Not that we need say that the Christian understanding of the sacred is superior to the Hebrew, but in Hegelian terms, it is clearly a posterior development, a historical/dialectical transcendence of a kind. Whether it represents an advance or a deformation cannot be determined through conceptual analysis; whether it is ultimately more faithful to humanity’s needs can only be determined “at the end of history.” The millennial survival of the “tribal” community of Jews along with the “global” one of Christians indeed suggests that both models are necessary. On the one hand, Christianity might not have emerged had Judaism been willing or able to transcend the boundaries of “tribal” peoplehood; on the other, the enduring phenomenon of antisemitism demonstrates that rather than the Jews denying the legitimacy of Christianity, the hostility has always been fundamentally in the other direction, such that it has always been the Jews who are felt to pose a danger, even a mortal one, to Christianity, rather than the reverse.
Indeed, now that the Jews have a real army at their disposal, the present identification of the victimary Left with the Palestinians is both an extension and a validation of this judgment. In sum, the worldly triumph of Christianity has always been haunted by the fear that Jesus’ mediation is less powerful than God’s original covenant with the Jews, given that the Jewish people has survived for two millennia in the face of Christian dominance.
The current renewal of Islamic antisemitism can be traced to Mufti Al-Husseini’s wartime assimilation of Hitler’s exterminationist policy. The Mufti’s virulent antisemitism replaced traditional Islam’s relatively tolerant dhimmi system at the birth of Israel, in response to which the Jews were expelled from the countries of the Muslim Middle East. For Islam to have followed the modernizing of Atatürk would have been effectively to abandon its own sacred for a secularized version of Western Judeo-Christianity, thereby reducing Islam itself to a new form of dhimmitude, whereas by reviving Hitler’s policy, the Muslim Brotherhood and other partisans of jihad have renewed the Muslim dream of ultimately reigning over the entire world.
In contrast, the West’s current indulgence of Islamic Jew-hatred is a prolongation of victimary thinking, the product of the Left’s epistemology of resentment, in the light of which Islamists are happy to identify with the Palestinian victims of “genocide” in the context of their desire for conquest. In thus fostering the “red-green alliance,” the post-liberal West shows itself a more useful ally to Islamism than Hitler, who ultimately failed to eliminate the Jews. The strength of Islamic resentment is such that it is happy to accept (in the persons of the Palestinians) the victimary role in which their European supporters place it, provided they hamper and eventually destroy the Jewish state.
Epilogue: The Failure of the Sacred?
A significant nuance has been added to this equation by the post-cold war transformation of the West’s military doctrine in the wake of the emergence of nuclear weapons. In the January 2025 issue of Mosaic, Ran Baratz’s “What’s Wrong with the Postmodern Military?” (https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/israel-zionism/2025/01/whats-wrong-with-the-postmodern-military/ [available only to subscribers]) explains with admirable clarity not only why Israel, after defeating several Arab armies in 6 days in 1967, has not been able to defeat Hamas in a year and a half—but as well the US’s failures to achieve real victory in any of the wars it has waged since WWII. As the aim of war has been deviated from victory to deterrence, raids have replaced the occupation of territory, allowing in the present case Hamas to return to areas from which it had been cleared and by recruiting fresh troops renew the conflict. It is indeed amazing that the obvious conclusions Baratz draws in this article have still not been accepted by Western armies despite the series of embarrassing failures of their military expeditions even when their adversaries did not possess nuclear weaponry.
What Baratz does not do is draw a connection between this postmodern substitution of dissuasion for victory and, not simply the obsession with avoiding nuclear war, but what can only be called the fear of victory. Some of the quotes he cites from, for example, Benny Gantz, reflect a clear need to distance himself from the “war is hell” attitude that had always dominated the battlefield. Thus Gantz describes what follows a raid: “And when you come back you bring the guys to sing with singers at night.” It is hard to accept that these courageous and patriotic Israeli soldiers are led by men whose minds have been so softened by postmodern liberalism.
No doubt the ultimate source of this softening is the fear that, whether or not relevant to each specific case, the existence of “ultimate weapons” risks provoking the extinction of our species—a fear that we should hope will not be given its ultimate test by allowing Iran to acquire a nuclear bomb.
Which leads me to a final reflection: the Hegelian, if not the Marxist, dialectic of history, functions on the tacit premise that it will continue indefinitely, at least in terms of the human life-span. The solar system will eventually disintegrate, but in a time-frame virtually infinite in relation to human history, so that we can take for granted that our descendants will have had enough time to devise a solution. But the idea that a decision made minimally by a single human being might set off a conflict that could lead to our species’ extinction is a problem that exceeds the capacity of the sacred as we know it. We have by now forgotten the drills in which my generation practiced crouching under our school desks in response to sirens presumably announcing the onset of nuclear war.
In this context, the fact that even the Israeli army, so brave and competent, has lost its confidence in the power of genuine military victory to break the will of the enemy and permit the wounds of war to heal, is a most ominous sign, one that I fervently hope does not signal the beginning of the end of our species and of the sense of the sacred that has maintained it.
For Baratz may not put it in these terms, but the terrible blindness of the Israeli military to the determination of their enemy that was revealed on October 7, 2023 cannot help but put in doubt the capability of the Western sacred—that of the three Abrahamic religions and the Western and Middle-Eastern societies they created—to control and protect humanity’s destiny.