MONOTHEISM AT THE MAGAZINE RACK By Mark Glouberman *** The Montréal Review, August 2026 |
|||
In a lively New Yorker essay titled “Just One: How God Got So Great” Manvir Singh, an anthropologist specializing in the foundations of religion, looks at monotheism from multiple angles. The essay serves excellently as a foil for putting right the deep misunderstanding of the ism that prevails not much less among the consumers of the literature on the topic that graces the shelves of research libraries than in the high-brow but non-academic circles whose members get their intellectual sustenance at the magazine rack. The following sentences, especially the second one, pinpoint the thrust of Singh’s discussion with regard to – my topic – the nature of monotheism.
I agree with Singh about its failure to hold up. But before I address the standard definition, I must remark on the oddity of his asserting that the one-god view is inaccurate to the main positions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) classified as monotheistic and at the same time appealing to the one-god view to explain the positions’ real word successes – their “power.” Can the oddity be overcome by saying that the successes were had by religious positions whose devotees worshipped one god? It cannot. A theology’s accepting a god cannot be separated from worshipful reactions on the part of those whose theology it is, be the worshipful reactions in the mode of glorification and thanksgiving or in the mode of fearful propitiation. (If the acceptance of a god is understood, as I understand it, in some bloodless, theology-free, way, the same “cannot” would apply mutatis mutandis.) I’m sure I don’t have to stress that gods are not like elements of the periodic table, “out there” like some exotic isotope to be discovered, any more than our lives are things that we chance upon in the course of living. Returning now to the standard definition: Singh knows of course that vigorous resistance will greet the denial that the Bible is monotheistic. It’s not just that most of us are conditioned to treat “monotheism” and “Bible” like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. That is little beyond a verbal reflex. The fact is that we have quite a lot of skin in the game, committed as we are to what Singh quotes the sociologist Rodney Stark as asserting: “monotheism may well have been the single most significant innovation in history.” The West, that is to say, owes its cultural distinctiveness, a distinctiveness that we in the West value and celebrate, to the revolution dramatized in theological terms in the biblical narrative. As Singh indicates, “In the First Commandment [even God] does not deny the existence of other deities.” Doesn’t reason therefore oblige us to affirm that the Bible is not monotheistic? That the affirmation is at odds with firmly held beliefs is a reason for mounting stout resistance to it. Ultimately, though, it is an excuse, not a reason, for rejecting the proposition. One could of course manipulate the definition to make “monotheism” hold up in the case of the Bible. “A theology is monotheistic if it includes God.” But wouldn’t such a manipulation, for disqualifying Akhenaten’s one-god theology, deprive the idea of monotheism of analytic utility and neuter monotheism itself of explanatory power? Singh grasps the nettle. “How,” he asks, “can a concept carry so much social, moral, and historical weight when so many attempts to define it prove incoherent?” It’s best, Singh advises, to dig in some other location than the Bible’s theology to unearth the underpinnings of the characteristically Western social and moral ideas. Is there a coherent definition of monotheism reflective of the position in the Bible that breaks the restriction to one deity? In the ambient environment of discussion, Singh cannot be faulted for responding with a negative. “Multi-deity monotheism” seems suspiciously like an alias for polytheism. In fact, however, there is a definition of “monotheism,” a non-standard one, therefore, that fills the bill. The definition applies to the Bible because, by contrast with the standard one, whose primary source is Judaism, it’s drawn from the Bible. Along with most scholars, Singh understands monotheism’s assertion of one-ness in numerical terms. God is unique in the class of deities. But the sense of it that informs the Bible’s attribution of one‑ness to God is not numerical. The sense of it is ontological. “God is one” means that God is unitary. God, in my categorial labelling, is a particular. (I’ll explain the category presently.) Here, then, is the definition. A theological position is monotheistic if it numbers among the gods at least one that is unitary. The Bible thus qualifies as monotheistic. Its qualifying is entirely compatible with there being other gods. “At least one,” not “exactly one.” What about Akhenaten? The characterization of Akhenaten’s theology as monotheistic turns out to be a mischaracterization. The Egyptian pharaoh’s deity, Aten, the only deity acknowledged in his religion, is not, ontologically, a one. Singh’s scholarship lets him down on this point. He endorses a view that he attributes to Jan Assmann, the view that Akhenaten’s religion is “an early flicker” of monotheism. But here’s what James P. Allen, in “The Natural Philosophy of Akhenaten,” quotes Assmann as saying of Akhenaten. “‘We stand here at the origin less of the monotheistic world religions than of natural philosophy. If [Akhenaten’s] religion had succeeded, we should have expected it to produce a Thales [sc. a material monist] rather than a Moses [sc. a monotheist].” The same goes for most so-called polytheisms. What, now, are particulars? Things (in the most general sense of the word) fall into two broad categories: general and non-general. Properties such as redness and characteristics like generosity are general things. A red apple and a generous person are non-general things, as are a red daub and a generous act. The category of the non-general divides into two sub-categories: particulars and non-particulars. Particulars, then, are one kind of non-general things. What kind? Non-particular non-general things run the gamut: atoms and molecules, motes of dust, plants, animals, mountains, planets, stars. Among creatures the Bible recognizes only one class of non-general things the members of which qualify as particulars: persons. Particulars differ from other non-general things in having a tight unity. The difference isn’t just quantitative. The tight unity is sui generis. One of the markers of its distinctiveness is this. Only particulars among non-general things have real beginnings and real endings. Obviously, all non-general things can come into and can go out of existence. But their beginnings and endings are in the nature of increases and decreases of local order. A tree, for instance, is a characteristically arboreal organization of matter in a specific region of space. The beginning of a tree is an increase in the order of a parcel of matter such that arboreal organization emerges. Typically, the increase in order involves matter’s being incorporated from the surrounding environment into the organized whole at a rate at least equal to the rate at which it is lost to the surrounding environment. Most of the life of the tree, its “adult” life, is a series of exchanges with the surrounding environment during which a rough equilibrium is conserved. The ending of a tree is, typically, the reverse of the beginning. The arboreal order decreases as matter is taken up at a greater rate by what we count as surrounding things. Eventually, insufficient arboreal order remains for “tree” to apply. From the standpoint of the Bible’s system of categories, to say, as we do, that a tree dies, is anthropomorphic. Non-particular non-general things run the gamut from a pile of sand (no unity at all), to a tree (quite a bit of unity). (Difficulty of disassembly is not a gauge of unity. Composed of grains of sand, a rock puts up great resistance to disassembly.) To overcome the strong tendency to think that the gamut has a break in it, with the pile of sand on one side, the tree on the other, it helps to think of all non-particular non-general things as variations on an eddy. What’s an eddy? An eddy is a characteristic way in which water flows when it encounters an obstacle such as a rock. Certainly, we would not attribute to the eddy anything like internal unity. Certainly, should the rock be removed we would not call in the riverine homicide squad or say of the eddy that it died. Indeed, many an eddy has a temporally discontinuous existence. No more when the stream freezes in winter, it is resurrected (it, not another eddy) after the spring thaw. In the interim, was it with the wild geese, in warmer climes? The case of the tree may usefully be thought of along these lines by tweaking the model. For understanding the Bible it’s vital to appreciate that at the heart of the move from the creation story of Genesis 1 to the creation story of Genesis 2 is the contrast between non-particular non-general things and particulars. This contrast is not conjured by me out of a text that doesn’t contain it, nor am I forcing it onto a text that is as a result bent out of shape. The contrast, a systematic one, is fully intended in the text. The changes described in Genesis 1 are all of them of the sort that the tree undergoes. The primordial chaos resolves into heavens and earth. The overall disorder gives way to localized order. The differentiation continues until a physical world emerges that we recognize. All the things that come into being are products of the (reversible) process. In the world of Genesis 1, there are no particulars. The (purely) physical world of the Bible is, then, a whole governed by something like the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (This is the Bible’s concept of nature.) What God does in the Bible’s creative narrative is shepherd the process of differentiation; much of which process would take place even without his ministrations, as we (in effect) read in non-biblical origin stories like the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish and the archaic Greek Theogony. In the world of Genesis 1, there are no particulars. An appropriate ontological theory for this world is a stratified bundle theory: non-particular non-general things all the way down. It’s only in Genesis 2 that particulars come into the world. The first particular is the first person, “Adam” we call him. The next is the second person, “Eve” by name. Their progeny, among whom she and he and you and I number, inherit the one‑ness. Most interpreters/commentators/readers get this completely wrong. They miss the ontological shift and misrepresent Genesis 1 as a bird’s eye view of what Genesis 2 describes from the worm’s perspective. Here, from the shelves of the research libraries, are two illustrations of the mistake, the first an assertion by E. A. Speiser in the much-used Anchor Bible Genesis, the second an analogy by Richard Elliott Friedman in the much-praised Commentary on the Torah.
The mistake is especially glaring in Friedman’s lines. The man and the woman are not in the first chapter of Genesis! The particulars in the world – she’s and he’s and you’s and I’s – do not emerge by the processes that governs the events in Genesis 1: diffusing and condensing, percolating and subsiding, parting and merging. Eddie is no eddy. Eddie can die; the eddy can’t, though that does not of course mean that it is immortal. The particulars are the products of God’s special intervention in nature. The representation of God breathing his breath of life into a parcel of organic matter is the Bible’s preferred way, the genetic way, of assigning to the product an irreducibly different, and indeed a non-natural, character. This identifies what God’s one‑ness means in the Bible, and leaves no doubt that views about the biblical god’s origins in the pantheons of the Canaanite religions of the time are irrelevant to monotheism’s character. (“Before he was God,” writes Singh, “Yahweh was a subordinate figure in a polytheistic drama headed by El, the white-bearded king of the gods.”) Yahweh’s character is fully developed in the Bible itself, specifically in the systematic contrasts between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. It’s worth stating the following upshot again. To attribute one‑ness to God is not to say that God is the only god. I’ll conclude with four points, important to all who think about these matters, that the criticism of Singh brings out. Christianity and Monotheism: Singh says that the standard definition of monotheism does not apply to Christianity. His (main) reason for saying this differs from the reason that he adduces for saying it in the case of Judaism. Obviously, Trinitarianism, the doctrine that God has a three-in-one character has nothing to do with the claim that God is unique among gods. What Trinitarianism calls into question is the proposition that God is unitary. Christianity’s in-house philosophers have been kept busy for centuries trying to square the circle; to secure God’s ontological one‑ness compatibly with God’s ineluctable three‑ness. So far as the character of human persons is concerned, Christianity may be putting itself at odds with itself in taking over the Bible’s account of the non-Trinitarian deity creating the first one of them. Perhaps, as the Church Father Marcion urged, Christianity should have abandoned the Old Testament and its god. Perhaps, like Islam, Christianity should also have retold the story in its own terms. On the other hand, as Tertullian indicates, Christianity is quite comfortable with absurdity. Western Culture and Monotheism: However much its theological mode of presentation gets in the way of our seeing this, the Bible, in advancing monotheism, gives us the notion of the individual person. This, in my view the reason why there is a Bible, is the anthropological meaning of the representation of God’s breathing his breath of life into a parcel of matter, thereby imparting to it a unitary character that it does not itself possess. Why God’s breath? Nature in and of itself (the domain of “the other gods”) lacks one‑ness. One‑ness, a characteristic of him and of her and of you and of me, cannot be accounted for in natural terms alone. So, pace Singh, we do not have to look elsewhere than the monotheistic Bible – providing, of course, that we understand its monotheism – for the foundational element of our distinctively Western, sc. individualistic, social and political arrangements. It’s no wonder, then, that the Bible places such emphasis on practice. For a person to live their life on the understanding of themself as slotting into only the category that the other gods represent is for the person to live their life on principles of conduct unsuited to what they are. “I am the Lord your god … ; you shall have no other gods before me”: God’s declaration at the start of the Commandments is central to the Bible. Singh misses two essential things in the declaration, and misunderstands the injunction. “Your” and “you,” like “I” and “me,” are singular. The injunction applies only to persons. “Before me” means “as the (sole) principle of your (singular) unitary being.” Missing these things, Singh is in no position to appreciate what the Bible’s recognition of “other gods” means. They, too, are principles of being, but not principles of being of persons. They are not, therefore, rivals to God. In Introduction to Genesis, Speiser states: “Monotheism … is predicated on the concept of a [g]od who has no rivals.” This Speiser misunderstands to mean that God is the sole deity. A formulation about God like “There is no other” is compatible with monotheism as I have explained it if “no other” is understood as “no other like God, a one.” Of course, I could only guess what those who use the phrase have in mind. How Not to Generalize: We can see in Singh’s discussion a disease that afflicts many scholarly discussions. (Discussions around the magazine rack are, for the most part, disease-free.) In speaking of monotheistic positions, Singh leaves behind God’s special character. All he sees is God’s belonging to the class of deities; God’s being a god. That’s why he classifies Akhenaten’s theology as monotheistic. But monotheism has essentially to do with that special character. The monotheistic deity, God, is not like Aten, or like Zeus, or like Marduk, or like Amun-Ra.
A specific view of the
Bible’s dominating higher being and a specific view of persons are strict
counterparts. The religious speak of the Bible’s god as the creator of the
person; the secular speak of the view of God of the biblically devout as an
upwards projection from the view of persons as particulars. And the other gods
that biblical theology acknowledges? A specific view of them and a specific
view of non-particular non-general things are strict biblical counterparts too.
They – the other gods – are the (projected) principles of
being of eddies, not of Eddies.
|
Art Note: Barnett Newman, Onement I (1948). A single vertical band of orange, laid down freehand, splits a field of dark red and brown that would otherwise be indivisible. Newman called it the moment a canvas stopped being a background and became one thing. Not two colors side by side — a field made singular by the cut that runs through it. Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2026 The Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
