Monotheism and Polytheism

God Against the Gods
by Jonathan Kirsch

The Everlasting Fire
The Dark Side of Monotheism,
the Bright Side of Polytheism
Religious intolerance was inevitably born
with the belief in one God.

— Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism

Something deep in human nature prompts us to imagine the existence of a power greater than ourselves, whether we call it "Yahweh" or "Christ" or "Allah," "Mother Nature" or "the Higher Power" or "the Universe." Religious belief and practice begins with the origin of the human species - the Neanderthals invented rituals for the burial of the dead - and modern medical science proposes that the idea of "god" is literally hard-wired into the anatomy of the brain. Human beings, in fact, can be distinguished from lower orders of animal life not because we use language or make tools or fight wars, but because we are the only creatures who conceive of a higher power and who are inspired to offer worship and sacrifice to that power.

"Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens ['Rational man'] is also Homo religiosus ['Religious man']," writes Karen Armstrong in A History of God. "Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognizably human; they created religions at the same time as they created works of art."

Nothing in human nature, however, suggests the inevitability of the notion that there is only one god. On the contrary, men and women in every age and throughout the world have offered worship to literally thousands of gods, goddesses and godlings, male and female alike, and they still do. Only very late in the development of Homo religiosus did monotheism - "one-god-ism" - first emerge, and whenever some visionary king or prophet sought to impose the worship of one deity to the exclusion of all others, he would discover that ordinary people so cherished their many beguiling gods and goddesses that the very idea of monotheism was appalling. That is why the very first recorded experiment in monotheism was an abject failure, and polytheism has survived every effort to destroy it.

But, fatefully, monotheism turned out to inspire a ferocity and even a fanaticism that are mostly absent from polytheism. At the heart of polytheism is an open-minded and easygoing approach to religious belief and practice, a willingness to entertain the idea that there are many gods and many ways to worship them. At the heart of monotheism, by contrast, is the sure conviction that only a single god exists, a tendency to regard one's own rituals and practices as the only proper way to worship the one true god. The conflict between these two fundamental values is what I call the war of God against the gods - it is a war that has been fought with heart-shaking cruelty over the last thirty centuries, and it is a war that is still being fought today.

The Roots of Religious Terrorism

On September 11, 2001, we were reminded once again of the real meaning of the 3000-year-old conflict between monotheism and polytheism. The men who hijacked and crashed four civilian airliners were inspired to sacrifice their own lives, and to take the lives of several thousand "infidels," because they had embraced the simple but terrifying logic that lies at the heart of monotheism: if there is only one god, if there is only one right way to worship that god, then there is only one fitting punishment for failing to do so - death. At that moment, we were shown, yet again, the power and the consequences of true belief in monotheism.

Nowadays, the bloodiest acts of violence in the name of God seem to come from the Islamic world, and the hijackers who piloted airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are only the most horrific examples. Other recent incidents include the dynamiting of ancient Buddhist statuary in Afghanistan by the Taliban, who condemned the 1600-year-old artifacts as "false idols" and "gods of the infidels," the sentencing of Nigerian women to stoning for the sin of adultery and Iranian journalists to death for the sin of blasphemy, and suicide bombings by Palestinian adolescents who seek martyrdom in a jihad ("holy war") against nonbelievers by blowing themselves up in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

But the roots of religious terrorism are not found originally or exclusively in Islamic tradition. Quite the contrary, it begins in the pages of the Bible, and the very first examples of holy war and martyrdom are found in Jewish and Christian history. The opening skirmishes in the war of God against the gods took place in distant biblical antiquity, when Yahweh is shown to decree a holy war against anyone who refuses to acknowledge him as the one and only god worthy of worship. Holy war passes from biblical myth into recorded history during the wars of national liberation fought by the Maccabees against the pagan king of Syria and later by the Zealots against the pagan emperor of Rome, which provide us with the first accounts of men and women who are willing to martyr themselves in the name of God. The banner is taken up by the early Christians in the first century of the Common Era, when they bring the "good news" of Jesus Christ to imperial Rome, where the decisive battle in the war between monotheism and polytheism is fought.

The crucial encounter takes place in Rome during the fourth century, when the Roman emperor Constantine worked a revolution in the name of monotheism and then his nephew, the emperor Julian, sought to work a counterrevolution in the name of polytheism. The years in which these two men reigned, one in living memory of the other, would literally change the history of the world. "For better or worse," remarks Gore Vidal in a novel based on the life of Julian, "we are today very much the result of what they were then." And yet the final victory of God against the gods was not inevitable, and we can see with our own eyes how the Western world teetered between two possible fates during the lifetimes of these two willful, ruthless and charismatic men. Above all, we will glimpse something that is rarely considered in our churches, synagogues and mosques - the dark side of monotheism, and the bright side of polytheism.

© 2005 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Jonathan Kirsch is a book columnist for the Los Angeles Times and author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed King David, Moses, The Harlot by the Side of the Road, and The Woman Who Laughed at God. He lectures and consults widely on biblical, literary, and legal topics and is a past president of PEN Center USA West.