Religio Duplex

How the Enlightenment Reinvented Egyptian Religion

Jan Assmann

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780745668437
  9780745668420
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745681498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In this important new book, the distinguished Egyptologist Jan Assmann provides a masterful overview of a crucial theme in the religious history of the West - that of 'religio duplex', or dual religion. He begins by returning to the theology of the Ancient Egyptians, who set out to present their culture as divided between the popular and the elite. By examining their beliefs, he argues, we can distinguish the two faces of ancient religions more generally: the outer face (that of the official religion) and the inner face (encompassing the mysterious nature of religious experience).

Assmann explains that the Early Modern period witnessed the birth of the idea of dual religion with, on the one hand, the religion of reason and, on the other, that of revelation. This concept gained new significance in the Enlightenment when the dual structure of religion was transposed onto the individual. This meant that man now owed his allegiance not only to his native religion, but also to a universal 'religion of mankind'.

In fact, argues Assmann, religion can now only hold a place in our globalized world in this way, as a religion that understands itself as one among many and has learned to see itself through the eyes of the other. This bold and wide-ranging book will be essential reading for historians, theologians and anyone interested in the nature of religion and its role in the shaping of the modern world.

1

Egyptian Foundations

The Dual Meaning of Signs

Religio Duplex and the Endgame of Egyptian Culture

Although the idea of ‘dual religion’ ultimately derives from ancient sources, it represents a construction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which, so far as ancient Egyptian culture is concerned, rests mainly on misconceptions. Before we turn to address this idea in its own right, three points need to be considered. First, there were certain characteristics of Egyptian culture which sanctioned their interpretation as religio duplex. Second, the Greeks – who can ultimately be held responsible for this interpretation – could still experience Egyptian culture in full flower and receive answers to their questions about it. And, third, there is much evidence to suggest that the Egyptians who were interrogated by the Greeks in this way themselves set out to disseminate an image of their culture as a religio duplex, a religion split between popular and elite culture. It may therefore have been the Egyptians of this late period who put into circulation many apparent misunderstandings. The idea of Egyptian religion as religio duplex would then be a Greco-Roman confabulation, rather than the product of a one-sided Greek projection of native ideas and institutions onto the Egyptian world.¹ We should therefore begin by looking more closely at the interlocutors.

On the Greek side, we find a slew of research into Egyptian culture that almost merits the title of an Egyptology.² The second book of the Histories of Herodotus, who travelled to Egypt around 450 BCE, offers a comprehensive description of the country, with excurses into its history, religion, customs and mores, geography and chronology. The four-volume history of Egypt by Hecataeus of Abdera, who lived in Alexandria towards the end of the fourth century BCE, must have been even more wide-ranging. Diodorus of Sicily, a contemporary of Cicero, imported large sections of this book into his Historical Library (Bibliotheca historica).³ Strabo devoted the seventeenth book of his Geography to Egypt.⁴ These works deal very extensively with Egypt, shedding light on its state, system of government, religion, culture, history, customs, geography, mythology and much else besides. Despite the occasional expression of bemusement and disapproval, they are all marked by a tone of fascination and admiration. This positive appraisal is perhaps most noticeable in Hecataeus (as cited by Diodorus). It was this representation of ancient Egyptian culture that was to exert by far the greatest influence on the Enlightenment view of Egypt.

Hecataeus of Abdera numbered among the many Greek scholars and philosophers invited to Alexandria by Ptolemy I (367/366–283/282 BCE), with the aim of acquiring intellectual prestige in the Hellenistic world for his newly founded capital. His history of Egypt was meant to provide the Macedonian ruler who commissioned it with an historical past on which he could base his project of a Hellenistic-Egyptian pharaonic dynasty. At the same time, the work was intended to hold up a mirror to Ptolemy, reflecting back the model of an enlightened monarchy. Strikingly, Hecataeus (or Diodorus) fails to mention the divine status which the Egyptians traditionally associated with the office of pharaoh. He depicts the king as a man duty-bound to uphold strict laws and to adhere to a daily routine prescribed right down to the minutiae; a sovereign who excels his subjects through his extraordinary virtues, his extensive education, and the rigorous example of his conduct, at best, but not through any divine attributes.⁵ This image of the ideal ruler must be set in the context of contemporary Greek political theory, which distinguished between freedom and despotism and placed the law on the side of freedom and democracy, whereas despots were deplored for ruling without regard for existing laws. Against the background of this alternative, Hecataeus – like Plato, Isocrates and other conservative political theorists before him – recommends Egypt as a third way that unites monarchy and the law.⁶ In the heyday of absolutism, this image of Egypt could therefore be advanced as a counter-model to the absolutist state. So it was that, 2,000 years later, Hecataeus's Egypt could once again serve as a mirror for princes. At the behest of Louis XIV, Jean-Bénigne Bossuet wrote his Discours sur l'histoire universelle (1681) as a guide- and textbook for the dauphin, hence under conditions comparable to the Alexandrine Museum. Egypt was described there as the school of wise lawmaking and politics, a land which envisaged the happiness of the people as its supreme goal and strictly committed the king to upholding the law.

With Egypt's annexation by Rome as a crown colony, the country forfeited its political interest for the Greeks. Now religion – and the culture of writing, believed to stand in the closest possible connection to that religion – moved to the forefront of attention. Among the most important works of Greek Egyptology to have survived from this period are Plutarch's treatise, De Iside et Osiride (On Isis and Osiris),⁷ and the text known since the Renaissance by the title De mysteriis Aegyptiorum (On the Egyptian Mysteries),⁸ written by the Neoplatonist Iamblichus and stylized as the reply of an Egyptian priest, Abammon, to Porphyry's Letter to Anebo.⁹

To be sure, the Greek ‘Egyptologists’ had no first-hand knowledge of Egyptian religious affairs. They were ignorant of the language and unable to read the writing. For this reason, modern Egyptology has tended to dismiss this literature as an authentic source on Egyptian religion. What is thereby overlooked, however, is the fact that those who contributed to this Egyptological discourse included Greek-writing Egyptians who were well-versed in Egyptian writing, language and religion: above all, the priests Manetho of Sebennytos¹⁰ (first half of the third century BCE) and Chaeremon of Alexandria (first century CE).¹¹ While their works are now mostly no longer extant, Plutarch, Iamblichus and others could still consult them, and authentic information may well have found its way into their writings by this route. The image of Egypt that the Greek ‘Egyptologists’ handed down to us may thus contain more genuinely Egyptian ideas and motifs than we realize.

To this Greco-Egyptian ‘Egyptological’ canon was added, in late antiquity, a fairly extensive religious Greco-Egyptian primary literature, above all the ‘magical papyri’¹² and the treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum.¹³ This literature mostly purports to be translated from the Egyptian, but it is so strongly steeped in Neoplatonic terminology and motifs that the Egyptian content has tended to be dismissed as a masquerade.¹⁴ However, Iamblichus expressly points out that the ‘Hermetic’ writings, in being translated into Greek, were equally brought ‘into the language [i.e., conceptual vocabulary] of the philosophers’.¹⁵ This means that the situation could be exactly the opposite of that assumed by later scholars: the Greek content, not the Egyptian, could be the ‘packaging’. At any rate, the Egyptian elements in this discourse, too, are being assessed quite differently today.¹⁶

The Greek-language literature that flowed from Egyptian quills was unmistakably guided by propagandistic intentions: it was motivated by the desire to present Greeks and others with as impressive an image of Egyptian culture as possible. The authors would have been members of the educated, Greek-speaking former upper class. At the time, these were primarily priests. Under the conditions of foreign rule, beginning with the conquest of Egypt by the Persians in 525 BCE and continuing – and, in many respects, worsening – under the Macedonians and Romans, the native Egyptian elite had been forced to come to terms with the loss of its political power, which had now passed into the hands of the occupying forces. Whereas the Persians had still ruled the land in collaboration with the Egyptians, the Greeks immigrated in vast numbers to Egypt and established themselves as a new ruling class.¹⁷ The Egyptian elite reacted to its loss of political influence and social standing with a process of inner emigration, retreating into the sanctified space of the temple. This led, on the one hand, to a clericalization of Egyptian culture, whose standard-bearers were now to be found above all in the priesthood, and to a structural transformation of religion, on the other hand. The religious traditions now expanded into an immensely complicated system consisting of ritual, learning and grammatology, a kind of arcane glass-bead game which – through the virtuosity with which they played it, the intellectual and spiritual prestige it conferred upon them, even and especially in the eyes of the Greeks, and the magical-spiritual claims to power they asserted through it – could to a certain extent compensate the sacerdotal elite for the political interests they had been forced to relinquish. This transformation most clearly left its mark on the culture of writing, which will be examined more closely in the next chapter. The stock of hieroglyphs increased tenfold; learning to write accordingly meant embarking on a decades-long process of initiation into a highly complex world of knowledge; and mastery of writing came to be regarded as a high art. Shut off in the sanctuary of the temple, the clericalized Egyptian culture for many centuries proved remarkably adept at resisting the pressure to Hellenize, even as it paid for its inner emigration by losing contact with the wider community.

This inner emigration of the elite, its self-imposed isolation from the outside world, finds its clearest expression in temple architecture. In earlier times, temples had formed nodal points in a network of avenues along which the deities, periodically leaving the precincts which sheltered them from their impure surroundings, were drawn through the city. These religious processions transformed the populace into a huge festive crowd, sometimes swollen by pilgrims from abroad.¹⁸ Since the people were forbidden from setting foot in the temples, these festivals provided the only opportunity for more general religious participation; that is why there were so many of them in ancient Egypt. If the traditional religion exhibited any characteristics of a religio duplex, then they are to be found in the split between an exclusive everyday cult and communal festive rites. In the Ptolemaic period, however, the temples were transformed into fortress-like precincts, enclosed by high walls, within which the divine processions now took place. Having retreated into the temples, Egyptian culture took on many of the features of an ‘enclave culture’ (Mary Douglas¹⁹), which we also see emerging around the same time in sectarian movements in Judaism. These include xenophobia, stricter purity laws, dietary taboos and other forms of self-exclusion from the general culture.²⁰

We can easily imagine the Egyptian priests presenting their religion to their Greek visitors as a religio duplex. The first questions posed to them by the Greeks would naturally have concerned the more bizarre or even repulsive aspects of Egyptian religion: the holy animals, the theriomorphic gods, and certain cruel or obscene rituals and feast-day customs, such as those described by Herodotus. All that, they would have been told, is put on only for the benefit of the uninitiated; behind it, there stands a deep wisdom which the people know nothing about. The taint of a certain elitist, undemocratic arrogance, which clings to the idea of religio duplex from first to last, may be explained by the situation of a politically disqualified and socially degraded elite struggling for status, prestige and recognition. Thomas Mann depicted this problematic aspect of religio duplex with unsurpassable pithiness in a scene from the final novel in his Joseph tetralogy. ‘I may not think’, he has Akhenaten say, ‘what I cannot teach.’ Tiy, his scheming mother, counters with the principle of religio duplex: ‘The office of teacher need not darken knowledge. Never have priests taught the multitude all they themselves know. They have told them what was wholesome, and wisely left in the realm of the mysteries what was not beneficial. Thus knowledge and wisdom are together in the world, truth and forbearance.’ Akhenaten rejects this as arrogant: ‘No, there is no arrogance in the world greater than that of dividing the children of our Father into the initiated and the uninitiated and teaching double words: all-knowingly for the masses, knowingly in the inner circle.’²¹ That is the arrogance contained in the idea of religio duplex, and it may very well have shaped the mentality of the later Egyptian priesthood.

Sacramental Interpretation: The Dual Meaning of Signs

Transfigurations

In Egyptian religious history, the central importance accorded to s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1: Egyptian Foundations: The Dual Meaning of Signs
• 2: From the Dual Meaning of Signs to Dual Religion
• 3: Religio Duplex and Political Theology
• 4: Religio Duplex and Freemasonry
• 5: In the Era of Globalization: Religio Duplex as Dual Membership
• Prospectus: Religio Duplex Today?
• Retrospectus: Are There ‘Dual Religions’?
• Bibliography
• Index