In the name of God

Islam, as it turns out, may be just one, perhaps the worst, of a bad lot. The worshipers of the One True God, collectively the monotheists and, more specifically, Jews, Christians and Muslims, have a long, though somewhat episodic, record of mayhem and murder in the name of their God. That God is variously called Yahweh, God the Father or Allah, and while it’s Allah and the Muslims who are currently in the headlines’ glare, Jews and Christians have also, at sundry times and various places, acted in much the same aggressive manner, and for mostly the same reason, to protect or sustain the rights of God.

That reason has no present currency in the societies where most Jews and Christians now live. The notion of a holy war, one fought in the name of religion, has been overtaken by that of a just war, force employed for a good and sufficient reason, which does not, in the arguments of its advocates, include the rights of any god whatever or of any people claiming to be God’s chosen. Jews and Christians are now members of civil and secular societies that bid them to restrain themselves, and, though free to follow whatever religious path they might choose, they are not to impose either their beliefs or their practices on others. They had little choice but to obey, the Jews with some enthusiasm since it had been many centuries since they were capable of imposing their will on anyone, and, for almost as long, they had received rather severe theological chastisements at the hands of the Christians. Some Christians, with a long history of hegemony still fresh in their memories, were more reluctant, but in the end both Jews and Christians were persuaded that state-imposed tolerance was not only a prudent course but the morally preferable one as well.

Christians have not always thought so. For most of their history, they have waged fierce warfare against the enemies of Christ and the church, both within and without. Jonathan Kirsch’s “God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism” carries us back to those earlier days, when first Jews and then Christians turned easily and often unreflectively to violence. The wars waged by the Israelites/Jews against the goyim are rapidly and energetically described, their brutality and coercive tactics duly noted, as is the Jews’ willingness to die for their faith in, for example, the Maccabean wars. But the Maccabean heroes were resurrected into eternal life for their pains, a point that Kirsch passes over, though it was a cause and an effect noted with great attention and great consequence by later generations of Christians.

The attractions of idol worship were replaced by something far more alluring in the 4th century BC. Alexander the Great and his successors carried Hellenism and all its intellectual and cultural baggage into the land of the Jews. The Hellenic lifestyle was immensely seductive to Jews, as Kirsch explains, but even more insidious was the Hellenic worldview, which offered a rational, flattering and attractive -- and still viable -- alternative to the Jewish revelation, and later to the Christian and Muslim ones as well.

This titanic, and ongoing, struggle between reason and revelation is not much featured in “God Against the Gods”; the Hellenes are treated more in terms of their myths (which were already turning “mythical” in late antiquity) than of their ideas. What Kirsch is really interested in, and it takes up a well-merited two-thirds of his book, is, to put it somewhat baldly, Emperor Constantine’s heavy-handed conversion in 313 of Christian monotheistic intolerance into the policy of the Roman empire, antiquity’s “first totalitarian state.” It was a policy that led in the end to the death -- though Kirsch makes it sound more like murder -- of paganism, despite the strenuous though short-lived efforts of one of Constantine’s relatives and imperial successors, Julian, to resuscitate it.

His Christian contemporaries glorified Constantine, whom they dubbed “the Great”; modern writers, who are not much taken by either autocrats or dogma, are considerably less kind, and the first Christian emperor is undoubtedly the villain of “God Against the Gods.” Though he might have been a Christian, the bloody-minded emperor did not act like one, Kirsch points out, particularly where his family was concerned.

And behind Constantine there is perhaps an even darker evil. Like Islam’s own zero tolerance of other gods, Christianity’s Roman-armed persecution of paganism was simply a reflection of its Jewish exclusionist roots, or perhaps of the very essence of monotheism with its famously jealous God. But the old gods were already expiring, as even Julian, that incurably romantic classicist, must have understood. More damnably, however, Christianity turned its energies against its own brood by its deadly insistence that its own members get it, always and everywhere and by everyone, right.

Why is Christianity so different from Judaism and Islam in its unique emphasis on in-house orthodoxy, on “thinking with the Church,” as it was later called? It is already clear from Paul, writing a mere 20-odd years after Jesus’ death, that the new community of “Messianists” (Christianoi) was founded on a belief system and not on a behavioral code. No, it was not even a system; rather, the new faith was precisely that, adherence to a series of core beliefs -- that Jesus of Nazareth was the (Jewish) messiah; more, that he was, in some sense, the Son of God and, indeed, veritably “Lord” (Kyrios), the same word the Greek-speaking Jews used to translate the Hebrew “Yahweh”; that he had died for our sins and been raised by the Father on the third day, as Scripture had predicted and as witnesses testified.

This was an enormous mindful to swallow. Paul tried to unpack it as best he could -- the early Christians regarded his explanation as normative -- and his successors tried as best they could to unpack Paul and the Gospels and, increasingly, to square them with what they learned in the ancient world’s various Institutes of Advanced Study. Within two or three generations, the new movement was drifting, then furiously paddling, away from its Jewish moorings. First demographically and then intellectually, Christianity became not a Hellenic phenomenon but a Jewish phenomenon understood Hellenically. That understanding was called theology, reasoned discourse about God, and the Gentile Christians of the 3rd and 4th centuries could no more avoid explaining their faith in that mode than their 20th and 21st century successors can disdain laying out their own in the present political, cultural and scientific style.

The results of the early Gentile Christians’ efforts are on display in the creeds of the church councils. Kirsch, no fan of theology, calls them “gibberish,” and they are in fact an imperfect blend of bent Scripture and near-defeated science. An unbegotten Son? A perfect human and divine nature in one and the same person? Or hypostasis? Each nature sharing the essential characteristics of the other? As theological science it was earnest but nonsensical, and perhaps it traduced Scripture as well by converting its provocative but perfectly acceptable metaphors into another idiom altogether.

Jews had earlier attempted the same exercise, as Muslims were to do later, of converting Scripture into theology while preserving the integrity of each. Though sometimes brilliantly undertaken -- the Jews’ Philo and Maimonides and the Muslims’ Avicenna and Averroes all put their skilled hands to it -- both Jews and Muslims gave it up as a bad and even dangerous idea.

Not so the Christians -- for them theology is still the queen of the sciences -- perhaps because they possessed, as the Jews and Muslims did not, the means to convert what was essentially an explanation into orthodoxy: charismatically certified and hierarchically organized officials, the bishops, who were authorized to pronounce on matters of truth, and a complex sacramental system that enabled those officials to regulate the flow of the merits of Jesus’ redemptive death to the faithful. The threat of excommunication, the denial of access to those means of salvation, was a powerful instrument for enforcing adherence to the dogmatically pronounced beliefs of the church.

So Christianity did, and, in many instances, so it still does, though not with the same zeal and no longer with the cooperation of an all-powerful state. But Christianity, like Judaism (though perhaps not yet Islam), has learned true tolerance from paganism, which practiced only the attitude of tolerance in the form of an indifferent shrug of the shoulders about things that perhaps don’t matter that much. Rather, Judaism and Christianity have been instructed by the secular state on the principle of tolerance, the right of others to believe and worship as they please. Julian, the necromantic emperor who tried to breathe life into the cold corpse of paganism, did not possess it, nor Cicero, nor Plato nor any of the “pagans” whose easygoing indifferentism Kirsch mistakes for something more grave. *