I'm interested in, for my own purposes, the politics of innocence. To which end I've been reading
Adam, Eve and the Serpent by Elaine Pagels, the third or fourth of her works I've enjoyed. She emphasizes the politics of the choice, centuries after its writing, by such characters as Ireneus, of the version of the Bible that we now take as gospel. The account of the resurrection, for example, which privileges apostolic succession (rather than the alternative text, which asserts that Mary Magdalene was the first to see the risen Christ: that would mean whores as pope, and We Can't Have That), and the inclusion of the books written long after the apostle Paul to contradict and ameliorate his message on marriage. His message was that celibacy is the mark of the true Christian, which might equally be men and women; the contradictors, aka the Deutero Paulines (great name for a girl group), assert that marriage is good and that women are bad. Paul is much maligned as a misogynist; but he is actually an egalitarian who doesn't like sex. 'Tis better to marry, he conceded, than to burn.
While making a persuasive case for the choice of alternate texts at a later date for political reasons, Pagels also denies that it is done for political reasons, a tenure-worthy feint for which I kiss the hem of her mini.*
So I have come to read the Bible as a political document, among other things. Over at
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sacred_texts the Bible portion last week included the sacrifice of Isaac, which may be the central episode of the old Testament, a horrendous story.
I have two responses.
First, without looking at the footnotes of who wrote it and when, I suspect it was formulated as a narrative to shock and awe the Molech-worshipping pagans -- proselytizing being one of the Jews' major efforts. Letting thy seed pass through the fire to Molech -- explicitly, burning babies as human sacrifice to the pagan gods, was one of the practices the Jews are forbidden (in Leviticus, along with all kinds of other stuff).
I posit that the Abraham and Isaac story was formulated to teach the Molechians that god doesn't really want human sacrifice, though it is your duty to have faith in his telling you he does. Real faith will rewarded by the sparing of your child.
The really powerful aspect of this message is that Jehovah is a god as powerful as Molech, because he demands the sacrifice not just of animals, but of Abraham's only convenantal son. Which means his is bigger than yours.
William James remarks upon the character of a god who demands not only human sacrifice, but the sacrifice of the very best young man there is, as a mark of the god's power.
James, in a slightly different context, points up how such cruel appetites are a status marker for the king of kings:
But such common-sense prejudices and instincts are themselves the fruit of an empirical evolution. Nothing is more striking than the secular alteration that goes on in the moral and religious tone of men, as their insight into nature and their social arrangements progressively develop. After an interval of a few generations the mental climate proves unfavorable to notions of the deity which at an earlier date were perfectly satisfactory: the older gods have fallen below the common secular level, and can no longer be believed in. Today a deity who should require bleeding sacrifices to placate him would be too sanguinary to be taken seriously. Even if powerful historical credentials were put forward in his favor, we would not look at them. Once, on the contrary, his cruel appetites were of themselves credentials. They positively recommended him to men's imaginations in ages when such coarse signs of power were respected and no others could be understood. Such deities then were worshiped because such fruits were relished.
http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=JamVari.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=allSecond, Homer and the Greeks contributed to this idea, that tragedy is when a hero, young and good, dies. To have Isaac or Jesus be sacrificed to God is a mark of the power of the monotheists' God in the pagan emotional transaction. To those for whom the greatest sacrifice is a black rooster, the human sacrifice of one's son is a conformation of the Isaac and Jesus stories into a proselytizing polemic.
It makes God bigger than Molech, and I think that is the conscious political purpose of the Isaac story. It also makes Isaac and Jesus each a hero and a manly man. Very important.
I'd like to know if the Isaac story was written at the same time as the
Iliad, and I'd be much interested in how Aristotle's
Poetics -- explicitly his still-operative, in Hollywood, strictures for tragedy and the tragic hero -- influenced the Jesus story, and depending on the dates, the influence of Isaac on Homer and vice versa.**
The entire notion of manhood, as well as all the hero ideology of war and literature, is based on the three stories -- Hector/Achilles, Isaac, and Jesus. The good die young, and to propitiate the gods.
[If you can stand it, read Jay Winter's
Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, and compare it to the Bush heroics of Iraq.]
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*
Writes Pagels:
One of my colleagues, misunderstanding the viewpoint presented here and in my previous book, The Gnostic Gospels, has objected that religious ideas cannot be reduced to practical (or, in his words, political) agendas. On this I wholeheartedly agree with him. I am not saying that religious ideas are nothing but a cover for political motives, as if, for example, Christians in the fourth century first chose to join forces with the Roman state and then adopted the doctrine of original sin to justify their new political direction [oh, but grrl! you so do!]. Instead [you're killin' me!], I intend to show that religious insights and moral choices, in actual experience, coincide with practical ones [Chica! let me drink your bathwater!] Scholars and Theologians may separate them theoretically [hee hee], but at the cost of distorting our understanding: in our actual experience -- as in that of Christians in the first four centuries -- moral choices are often political choices. An act of religious affirmation is always, in some sense, a practical and consequential act.
Op.cit., p. xxvii
**Sez here, Homer came first. I thought as much.
Bruce Louden takes this on in his book on the Iliad, in which "The second part of the book compares fourteen subgenres of myth in the Iliad to contemporaneous Near Eastern traditions such as those of the Old Testament and of Ugaritic mythology."
For Louden on Herakles, Isaac and human sacrifice, click here.
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