Monotheism

MONOTHEISM. - I. THEOLOGY. - Monotheism (from μόνος θεός) is the doctrine that teaches that God is one only, inasmuch as, given his nature, he admits no other gods like himself.

The unity of God flows as a logical consequence from the idea of God as it is taught by Catholic philosophy and theology. Once God is conceived as a most perfect being, pure spirit, a most simple entity, such as to exclude every composition, in any order whatsoever, substantial or accidental, physical, metaphysical, and logical (Sum. Theol., 1a, q. 3), as pure act, as subsistent being itself, in whom no real distinction between supposit and nature is possible, he cannot but be unique and distinct in a supereminent manner from any being. He must rise above all beings, and the relation of the universe in general, and the particular relation of each individual thing to God, cannot be other than that of creature to creator. And this title of creator must belong to him in the broadest sense of the word, as universal artificer from nothing, « ex nihilo », ἐκ τοῦ μὴ ὄντος.

Two, therefore, are the essential elements of a true monotheism: one only God, creator of all things. Any other conception that does not respect these two elements necessarily deflects from pure monotheism, and slips into ambiguous forms, either toward pantheism or toward disguised systems of polytheism.

Although it lies within the power of reason to give such an idea of God, and to arrive at monotheism, in fact no philosophical system attained a clear conception of the unity of God. Greek philosophy, even in its highest conception and in its greatest representatives, remained far from true monotheism. It lacked a clear concept of the unity of God, because it lacked the exact concept of efficient causality, and therefore it stopped at a dualistic conception (Plato and Aristotle) or, worse, degenerated into pantheism (Xenophanes, Plotinus). Only in the period of the first Christian propagation did pagan intellectuals, especially the Neo-Platonic philosophers, appreciating the superiority of monotheism over polytheism, seek to lead their polytheism to a monotheism « sui generis » with the Hellenic conception of the monarchy of one supreme God and of subordinate gods. But it was barely a middle way between polytheism and monotheism.

From Revelation, however, it is known that man had originally received the true idea of God through supernatural manifestation, and that monotheism was thus prior to polytheism: indeed the latter was nothing but a corruption of the former. (Gen. 1 ff., Wis. 13-16; Rom. 1, 18 ff.). This, moreover, even from the comparative study of religions alone (deliberately ignoring all revelation), is a scientifically justified and justifiable thesis (v. below). But polytheism then submerged monotheism in the world, so that the monotheism of the people of Israel (undisputedly admitted, at least by the prophets onward, and for Catholics existing from the moment of the election of Abraham as forefather of the chosen people) remained an originality in the midst of the Euro-Asiatic world, such as to have no counterpart in the civilized Greco-Roman world until Christ. Such a singular phenomenon, unless one wishes to take refuge a priori in a skepticism denying every possibility of the supernatural, cannot be explained without a true miracle of the moral order (cf. V. Laridon, De monotheismo populi Israèl, in Collat. Brugens., 45 [1947], pp. 62-77, 148-57).

Once the knowledge of God was perfected in the New Testament with the clearer revelation of the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity (v.), monotheism remained at the basis of the Christian faith.

This truth was confirmed by the preaching of Christ and of the Apostles (cf. Mt. 19, 16-17; Mk. 10, 17-18; Lk. 18, 18-19; and again: Mt. 4, 10; Mk. 12, 30; Lk. 4, 8; 10, 27: the common source of these last texts is Deut. 6, 5; cf. also I Cor. 8, 4-6). And subsequently, as A. Harnack rightly observes, the contrast between monotheism and polytheism was truly, down into the 3rd century, the harshest and most prominent point in the relations between Christianity and paganism (Missione e propagazione del cristianesimo nei primi tre secoli, Turin 1906, p. 16). In the Creed the first article reads: we believe in one only God. The formula: εἰς ἕνα θεόν begins to appear as soon as sufficiently developed symbolical formulas begin to be found: in the East at the end of the 2nd century, throughout the whole 3rd century until the beginning of the 4th century, when officially this expression becomes a characteristic element of the Eastern Symbol (Formula of Nicaea, 325; Denz-U, n. 54). In the West, at Rome, where the history of the Symbol is better known, the literary tradition carries it back to the end of the 1st century (Hermas, Mond., I, 1; F. Funk, Patres Apostolici, I, 2nd ed., Tübingen 1901, p. 468), although it came to disappear between the end of the 2nd century and the beginning of the 3rd, for fear of laying itself open to a monarchian interpretation.

In the first Christian writers, in the attempt to reconcile faith in one only God with the Trinitarian dogma, an attempt barely adumbrated in elementary essays of interpretation in the first apologists, one can find vestiges of subordinationism (Justin) or of modalism (Athenagoras), but it is all too evident that these fleeting hints, if they can be taken in a bad sense, are unintentional.

From the end of the 2nd century and at the beginning of the 3rd, with the Christian polemicists the conflict came alive between the unitarian and the trinitarian school, the one exaggerating the monarchy at the expense of the Trinity, the other, relying too much on the distinction of the persons, drawing upon itself the reproach of ditheism. But after long and profound examination the two extreme theses were discarded and agreement was established, so far as the human mind could glimpse it, between the two notions, apparently contradictory, the unity of God and the Trinity of Persons.

Thus the formula of the first Roman Symbol will still be the formula of the Nicene Symbol and of the Constantinopolitan Symbol (πιστεύομεν εἰς ἕνα θεόν: Denz-U, 54, 86), the formula of the Athanasian Symbol («The Catholic faith is this, that we venerate one only God in the Trinity and the Trinity in unity, without confounding the Persons or separating the substance... one is the divinity» [Denz-U, 29]), the faith of the Church in God «one in essence, three in persons» (Decretum pro Jacobitis: ibid., 703).

Pietro Palazzini

II. ETHNOLOGY

1. History

Until the 18th century everyone, including the rationalists, held that the primordial religion of humanity was an ethical and pure monotheism. It was further believed that this monotheism was of supernatural origin through a primitive revelation, and that later, with the passage of time, men, by corrupting monotheism, had become polytheists, with the sole exception, by special providence of God, of the Israelites. In the Middle Ages even the Muslims were considered polytheists (v. POLITEISMO).

As Fr. Pinard de la Boullaye has pointed out, the first to oppose this thesis, turning it upside down, was D. Hume in the Natural History of Religion (1757), affirming that the first and most ancient religion of humanity was and necessarily had to be polytheism and idolatry, the religion of all the savage peoples of the world. The theory was followed by J. J. Rousseau in Émile (1762), by A. Comte in his Course of Positive Philosophy (1830-42), adding and placing before polytheism fetishism, another religious form, today shown not to exist, of which De Brosses had spoken in his work On the Cult of Fetish Gods (1757). The same theory was also followed by Tylor, in Primitive Culture (1871), who posited animism as the first foundation of the religious evolution of humanity. Thus, according to this theory, which was defined as the "classical" one of evolutionism, monotheism would have been reached through two stages: animism and polytheism. To this theory, which conceives monotheism as the last stage of the religious evolution of humanity, are linked all the evolutionists, who believe it impossible that man could have had at the beginning such lofty ideas as the monotheistic ones, and also those scholars who, while admitting belief in Supreme Beings among the ethnologically most ancient peoples, do not judge it to be monotheism, or else speak of an original religious polymorphism.

The exploration of individual primitive peoples also brought about a reaction against the religious evolutionist theories (v. Dio, III). The first to react was the Scotsman A. Lang (The making of religion, London 1898), observing that primitives neither deny nor affirm in God the spiritual character, have not yet concerned themselves with this "metaphysical" question; they see in God simply a Being and precisely a Being who truly exists, and for them that is enough. It is excluded that in this conception the idea of a spirit, procreated by the phenomena of death, has any part, since almost always there predominates in it the declared conviction that that Being exists from eternity, that it exists at least before death and that it can never die; and he also demonstrates that this monotheism could not have derived from manism, nor from religious animism, because precisely among primitive peoples, such as the south-eastern Australians, the southern Andamanese, the Semang, the Negritos of the Philippines, there does not exist the veneration of ancestors, or at least it does not exist in the form of a religion associated with practices of worship, nor does there exist any form of veneration of the spirits of nature. Against Tylor's animist theory, which denied any relationship between morality and religion, Lang observed that if manism and animism were not the sources of the monotheism existing among the most primitive peoples, there no longer remains any theoretical basis for denying the ethical character of their religion. In fact it is known that those primitive peoples have moral laws; indeed, according to their beliefs, these laws come from the will of the supreme Being who with his omniscience watches over their observance, with his justice rewards their fulfillment and punishes their transgression in this life, and often also in the next. A more intimate connection between religion and morality is not found even in the highest types of religion, if one excepts the concept of these religions according to which God himself is good and holy by nature. Even the content of the social laws of those peoples is substantially in conformity with ours. Lang rightly points out that in those laws acts of altruism and self-denial are always required.

Even E. Sydney Hartland, one of the most authoritative opponents of Lang, recognized that the facts brought forward by Lang up to that time had been little considered in ethnology; Tylor himself, against whose theory they were directed, attributed them to Christian and Muslim influences. Nevertheless Lang's theory did not immediately receive the recognition it deserved; to admit among primitives any form whatsoever of monotheism meant for evolutionist ethnologists renouncing all their doctrines of evolution by stages, which they could not do. But recognition came little by little, and the most authoritative confirmation of it is the monumental work of Fr. W. Schmidt, Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (Münster in W.; not yet complete: the first six volumes [1912-35] concern the so-called gatherer peoples, and the other three [1940-49] the pastoral peoples [v. Dio, III, 1]).

Pettazzoni in his study Monotheismus und Polytheismus (in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, IV, Tübingen 1930; Italian ed. 1945) noted how "once the prejudice (of Tylor) of a possible infiltration of monotheistic ideas (Christianity, Islam) among savages has been overcome, the supreme beings of primitives, however differently conceived by individual scholars, could be considered (N. Söderblom) as antecedents of the individual supreme gods of polytheistic and monotheistic religions, and employed for the formation of a new general theory on the formation and development of monotheism," and this is his particular theory, called by Fr. Pinard de la Boulaye "uranism."

But the high antiquity of primitive monotheism has been demonstrated in the cited work Der Ursprung der Gottesidee, where the author, after having analyzed in detail the religion of the ethnologically most ancient peoples, makes "a final synthesis of the most ancient common religion of humanity." And there he first of all notes the absence of pseudo-or anti-religious manifestations, such as naturism, animism, manism and magic, which are instead much developed in the ethnologically more recent civilizations. The reason for the absence of these different kinds of manifestations lies in the relative clarity and vitality of the monotheism of these peoples. He emphasizes the unity, the figure, the name and the dwelling place of the supreme Being; his characteristics: immensity, omniscience, omnipotence and infinite mercy; his functions: the creative force and the relations with ethics; finally their religious attitude toward the supreme Being, which is manifested especially through prayer and the offering of first-fruits. Now, since such a monotheism cannot come from the influence of peoples of more recent civilization, nor can it be explained by independent parallel development, it must necessarily be considered as a common spiritual heritage, possessed before separating from the common homeland. Regarding the relation between this common religion and the original one, the author concludes: that in the common religion of the most ancient humanity, belief, obedience and religious worship were certainly directed toward the one, great and powerful figure of the supreme Being. Therefore, at the origin there existed a pure and ethical monotheism, as the ancient thesis mentioned at the beginning held.

2. The origin of monotheism

Some scholars (such as Fr. Schmidt, Fr. Koppers and others), while considering a natural origin possible, find it insufficient and admit a supernatural origin; the evolutionists, on the other hand, and the agnostics reject every supernatural origin and seek a natural one. Evidently every explanation of monotheism must clarify all its essential and characteristic aspects: belief, worship, ethics.

The natural causal thought of the most ancient men, notes Father Schmidt, led to the concept of creation, and final thought to that of the moral ordering of this world and the next, so that the most ancient men, by their own thought, were able to attain and give rise by themselves to their religion. But this purely natural search and inquiry could not last long without leading to numerous differences of conception. Therefore, the causal and final thought of the most ancient men cannot explain the unity and compactness of that most ancient religion with all its internal vitality and emotionality, with the clarity and stability of its beliefs and forms of worship. A confirmation is found in the history of philosophy, which shows a great variety of philosophical systems. Indeed, thought is originally individual and is affected by the differences of the individual.

R. H. Lowie too arrives at the same conclusions as Father Schmidt, explaining monotheism by a "type of philosophical coordination," whereby all the powers of the universe are placed under a single head; but he asks himself: how is it that the thought of one man can be accepted and become the belief of all, which is precisely the religious belief in the supreme beings of primitive peoples? Likewise C. Clemen, although giving a natural explanation for the origin of these supreme beings. An Urheber (author, maker), who, he said, at first satisfied only the causal exigency, actually found a place both alongside the forces that were first discovered in things and alongside the spirits that were admitted later, because at first he will not have been venerated at all. The supreme beings of primitive peoples, having had at the beginning no religious importance, according to him, were something standing on their own, which had nothing directly to do with the other beliefs.

J. W. Hauer too holds that the origin of religion cannot be explained by the thought of causality and finality alone, and proposes its explanation from the whole complex of religious forces, from which religious polymorphism comes. He thinks that there was no time in which magic dominated and then a subsequent time in which another religious form dominated, but that in every phase of development all the religious forces act together. Yet in every important phase there is one force at the center, so that there is a phase—that, for example, of belief in a father God—while the other forces with their corresponding phases group themselves more or less clearly at the root around the center. When the history of religious development is lacking, one should have recourse, according to him, to this law of polymorphism, which manifests itself more or less rhythmically. He proposed this sequence of evolutionary stages: faith in mana joined with magic, hence primitive pampichism; faith in spirits with the consequent polydemonism; telluric monotheism (mother-earth); development of telluric polytheism; celestial monotheism (father-heaven); celestial and astral divinities; spiritual and moral monotheism. R. R. Marett in his brief study on Pre-animistic Religion does not admit a rational origin of religion, but only an emotional one. According to him, an almost universal feeling of respect, of fear, of admiration, "the vague but terrifying attributes of power" would have been the starting points of religion. It would then have been directed primarily toward "something mysterious or supernatural," which was felt but not known. Very soon, however, according to the author, "there arises in the region of human thought a powerful impulse to objectify, indeed to personify that certain something mysterious or supernatural which is felt." Besides this, there are other theories of a magical-intellectual or voluntaristic and sociological tendency, which seek to explain the origin of religion. Further explanations of the origin of monotheism depend on the different concept one has of monotheism. Pettazzoni, for example, admits, as has been mentioned, that monotheism derives from the supreme beings of primitive peoples through polytheism: Supreme Beings — Polytheism — Monotheism. He therefore defines monotheism as the belief in and worship of a single divinity with the explicit denial of all others, so that monotheism stands not at the beginning but at the end of religious history. At the beginning, according to him, stands a variety of elementary religious forms (perhaps corresponding to a variety of fundamental types of religious experience), one of which is the belief in a supreme being. But such a belief does not suffice, he adds, adducing various reasons, to establish primordial monotheism scientifically.

Since, therefore, a natural origin is insufficient to explain primitive monotheism, Father Schmidt was constrained to seek a supernatural origin. The most ancient common religion of humanity cannot be understood, he observes, in its totality, fullness and characteristics, unless one admits the existence and work of God, who created this religion, personally teaching the men of that time the beliefs, the moral laws and the acts of worship. And after having pointed out that an explanation of the phenomenon is not admissible through an impersonal being, nor by means of a personal being created by the thought and fantasy of man, but only by admitting a real personal being, who influenced man from outside, he concludes: "Who this powerful personality is, there can be no doubt on the matter, and moreover the most ancient peoples themselves tell us: it is the supreme Being really existing, the real creator of heaven and earth and especially of men, who came among his beloved creatures, men, and manifested to them himself, his own being and his own work, immediately after the creation, while he dwelt in friendly company with men, and revealed himself to their thought, will and feeling."

The feasts of creation, mentioned by Schmidt, exist among the north-central Californians and the eastern and western Algonquians of North America. They are ritual feasts that have taken on the character of commemorations, and are celebrated almost every year in an act of gratitude, repeating in sacramental form for four, nine or twelve days the scenes of the creation of the world and of man, in order to implore even now the help and grace of God upon the family, the tribe and the whole world, thus renewing in a certain way the work of the creation of the world.

If one admits the unity of origin of the human race, as most anthropologists, linguists and ethnologists hold today, and if one further admits that God directly created not only the soul but also the body of the first men, one must recognize that the first men, as Father Schmidt himself pointed out, had culturally and religiously a need for extraordinary aids, aids even more necessary after original sin.

J. W. Hauer does not accept Schmidt's thesis that God revealed to man the process of creation, but he acknowledges that the roots of religion are still deeper than the activity of religious consciousness and religious experience, which are analyzed psychologically and which perhaps, through a strong act of empathy, it is possible to reproduce (nachschaffen), that is, they are inherent in the same "Ultimate Reality" that moves everything and that has not left itself unmanifested to the heart of man, not excepting that of the men of primitive peoples, indeed of the most ancient humanity, because, according to him, it is impossible that the fact of being sustained by the Ultimate Reality (God), which is certainly the content of every creed, should not reveal itself to man as he awakens to consciousness. An important observation, this. In fact, once the existence of God is admitted, as human reason can demonstrate it, one cannot exclude divine influence in the world, so that any historical science that denied this possibility a priori would renounce the name of historical science. Therefore the following conclusion of the aforementioned observation of Hauer does not seem right: "By tracing religion back to the ultimate sources of all life and creation, we undoubtedly leave the field of science and enter that of religious experience and persuasion." It is well known that mystical facts are the object of study in order to distinguish them from those that are not of divine origin.

Not rarely, in evolutionist circles, scholars who believe in Revelation are reproached for wanting to derive the present-day monotheism of primitive peoples directly, at all costs, from primordial monotheism. But rightly, as Koppers has written, no one has ever even dreamed of doing this, and one should not even suppose such a lack of method. The true position, rather, is the following: the Revelation of the Christian religion teaches that the most ancient men, the first men, had knowledge of God. But in order to demonstrate apologetically, within the sphere of religion itself, the truth of Revelation, it is by no means necessary that monotheism be discovered among primitive peoples. Ethnological method teaches that even a primitive people, with the passing of the years, can lose its faith in God and other elements of its religion. In fact, in the light of the latest research, it may today be considered probable that certain groups of peoples of the Pacific — for example, of Melanesia and New Guinea — truly had such obscurations. But on the other hand, it is by now established that the relevant scientific data, and primarily the a sufficiently clear and precise theism found among the ethnologically most ancient peoples, argue in favor of primordial monotheism, more than the well-known evolutionist theories of religion, which consider — and from their point of view are forced to consider — the idea of one supreme God as the final product of evolution. Therefore the "forced path," which is so readily reproached to scholars who believe in Revelation, is not at all peculiar to the latter, but rather to the others.

The above-mentioned thesis of Fr. Schmidt on the supernatural origin of primitive monotheism evidently links up with that ancient traditional one set out at the beginning. However, he, as he reaffirmed in a recent critical note (In der Wissenschaft nur Wissenschaft [in Anthropos, 1931]) against K. Birket-Smith, does not present his thesis as "entirely exhaustive and definitive," but as scientifically justified and justifiable.

Once the existence of a primordial revelation has been historically proved, a historical demonstration of the existence of God follows from it. E. F. Lipowski (op. cit. in bibl.) presents it thus: the deduction that the primordial religion is a revelation of God is of great importance also for the historical demonstration of God. This, in fact, can consequently be numbered in the series of causal demonstrations. A logical formulation of this demonstration may be, for example, the following: the primordial religion is a fully valid religion. Such a religion existed, as the religious conceptions of residual ancient peoples (that is, ethnologically more primitive) confirm. The man of primordial times was not capable of creating this religion in its unity and completeness, as has been demonstrated in the course of the exposition. Therefore someone else must have created it. This creator of the religion was God himself, who revealed himself to men. The fact of the primordial religion logically demands the existence of God, because without the existence and the direct action of God it cannot indeed be explained in its fullness, in its totality and in its characteristics.

The historical demonstration, which sought to prove the existence of God from the universality of belief in God, no longer has full validity, because it had to presuppose the existence of God. It is therefore no longer fully justified, because in the proof the existence of God already had to be presupposed. Hence it is no longer accepted in its hitherto usual form. If, however, the new historico-religious facts are connected with it, then one has a new kind of historical proof of God, "the historico-religious proof of God," which must be numbered among the causal demonstrations of God. It does not presuppose the existence of God, but demands it only logically from the concrete facts of religious ethnology.

Luigi Vannicelli