Collin Cornell on Monotheism & Divine Aggression

R&R

One thing I’ll sometimes do in this dispatch is read and reflect upon whatever catches my eye. I make no claim to offer expert criticism or insight. Instead, as I take up this book or that, lured by muse or siren (as the case may be), I’ll convert the thoughts thus stirred into words here. For this venture I’ve devised a most scintillating title, wrapped in learned mystique: Read and Reflect, otherwise known as indulging a little R&R or “holding forth.” No more, no less, always diffuse. All of which is an overwrought way to say that I plan to swim in intellectual waters quite out of my depth, all for your amusement and my continuing education.

I take as my first attempt the fascinating pamphlet by the budding biblical scholar, Collin Cornell, Monotheism and Divine Aggression, published by Cambridge University Press in their “Cambridge Elements” series.¹

Monotheism, the way Cornell uses it, does not make any metaphysical or theological claims. He does mean to intervene in the seemingly interminable debates about whether and to what extent ancient Jewish and early Christian authors were themselves metaphysical monotheists. If anything, he assumes the mainstream scholarly view that “monotheism” in this sense is an anachronism. “Is this biblical author a monotheist?” is typically a question with two specific aspects in mind: what does the author (1) believe about the (2) universal relation of his God to all other gods, divine entities, angels, demons, human heroes, etc.? Cornell follows Robert Goldenberg and others in thinking that these “intellectualizing and universalizing features” are the wrong identifiers for these authors’ “monotheizing” rhetoric, which more concerns the existential demands of exclusive devotion to a particular god than some systematic account of “universal religion” (4). He might also agree with the likes of Matthew Novenson that, even when ancient authors practiced interpretatio—the habit of “translating” the names and identities of one people’s god/s into that/those of another—they proved far more liberal with metaphysical identifications among gods than they were with replacement or repression among ritual and devotional practices: that Antiochus IV identified Yhwh with Zeus Olympios wasn’t overly offensive (both the Letter of Aristeas and Josephus did that too); that he attempted to change the Temple rites, overtly was (2 Macc 6.1–6).²

Cornell instead “takes monotheism as a textual phenomenon: a specific way of depicting gods ‘on the page.’” Authors “monotheize” if their texts portray “other forces, fates, and powers in the universe” as ultimately answering to one god (6). The monotheized god in these texts does not answer to anyone or anything superior to him. Nor does this god exhibit the sort of struggle indicated by having to pray or use magical rituals or the like (which a variety of ancient gods are portrayed as doing). Here the literary monos of monotheism is not a claim about the quantity of theoi. The claim rather is qualitative or adverbial: this God singularly or uniquely enjoys absolute sovereignty. This God’s agency appears qualitatively “alone,” peerless.³

Cornell’s main thesis is that in the Bible “monotheizing amplifies [divine] aggression” (24). Cornell is as careful with “divine aggression” as he is with “monotheism.” He refrains from speculating about the divine motive behind the aggression, which often remains “painfully inscrutable” (9). Cornell’s rubric measures the monotheized god’s aggression not by emotional depth or precise intentions, but by its concrete and negative impact on other agents of whatever variety. Thus the thesis reveals its contours: the more a biblical author monotheizes its God, the more intense and all-encompassing becomes that God’s aggressive acts towards others, whether those acts prove actual or virtual (i.e. as potential threats that don’t come to pass).

Three qualifications here. First, Cornell is not claiming that all biblical authors monotheize. He acknowledges diversity among biblical authors regarding this strategy. Indeed, each of Cornell’s three case studies are followed by later Jewish and Christian instances of reversing this trend—about which more anon. Second, the monotheizing = intensified divine aggression claim is a judgment made relative to other relevant, contemporary depictions of the god(s) and their relations to other agents. Hence the case studies are comparative in nature. Third and just to make things crystal clear, Cornell is not claiming that monotheism as such necessitates violence or renders adherents of a monotheized god more hostile to outsiders. He makes a few fleeting remarks about that thesis near the end. But that’s not his argument here. Cornell’s thesis restricts itself to literary and rhetorical parameters of the way the gods and/or God appears on the page (13).

Evidence of Cornell’s thesis comes in two kinds: the “aggregative” and the “evacuative.” The aggregative kind is when attributes and actions distributed among many gods in other texts are collapsed into attributes and actions of the single, highest God. This occurs in the Genesis Flood Story when compared to various Mesopotamian flood stories, particularly the Old Babylonian Epic of Atrahasis. The evacuative kind is when non-divine agents that normally enjoy protective privileges because of their devotion to their god become themselves potential targets of divine aggression. This occurs both in Psalm 89 as juxtaposed to ancient Near Eastern royal inscriptions, and in the Golden Calf Story (Exod 32).

A brief summary of the three case studies:

1. The Flood Story. We have three Mesopotamian flood stories. They share a common plot: a divine council jointly decides on flooding the world, a special god (e.g. Enki) provides providentially for the human hero, and there’s some sign of divine regret or astonishment at the scale and severity of the havoc wreaked. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, no explicit reason is given for the divine action. But in the Epic of Atrahasis there is: “Enlil heard their noise / And addressed the great gods / ‘The noise of mankind has become too intense for me, / With their uproar I am deprived of sleep’” (given at 17). Whether this indicates an increase in human presumption or just overpopulation, Enlil convinces the gods to help him flood the earth because he wants better sleep. (As a father of four young ones, I sympathize.) Atrahasis’s sincere devotion to Enki causes the latter secretly to resist the destruction of all humanity, so that the catastrophe is in no small part the product of the gods’ own feuding. After the deluge comes Nintu’s profound regret and inner conflict: she had created humanity herself, let herself be taken up in Enlil’s crusade, and then regret ever having taken part: “Contrary to my own nature, against my very self,” she sighs (18).

   The Genesis Flood Story, though it bears several features in common with these other stories, aggregates to Yhwh many features and actions that these other stories distributed among many gods. Like Enlil, Yhwh “acts to safeguard divine privilege” (21). Ghastly interbreeding between the “sons of Elohim” and the “daughters of mankind” (Gen 6.2–4) generate the Nephilim, whose divine-human power seems to menace Yhwh (as the collective effort of humanity will in Gen 11). But unlike Enlil, it was Yhwh himself who had willed and created humanity. Again, like Enlil, Yhwh directly aggresses the entire human race with the great flood. But unlike Enlil and more like Nintu, Yhwh regrets, only here he regrets having made humanity at all (Gen 6.6)—“the Bible’s saddest verse” (23). Genesis thus collapses divine resentment and divine regret, which in the Epic of Atrahasis are ascribed to two different gods, into the same God, Yhwh. This renders Yhwh himself and his aggression decidedly complex. Monotheizing here simplifies the divine side of things—there is no dispute among gods, nor do many gods perform distinct roles in aggression—but thereby compounds the complexity of God himself and his relation to creatures: “Because it monotheizes, [Genesis] relocates conflict either between humans and God or within God’s own self” (24).

2. Royal texts. This and the next case study show that monotheizing evacuates otherwise secure, non-divine agents of their protected status. In fact, the more exclusive Yhwh’s prerogative, the more potentially menacing it is to be devoted exclusively to him. Those under his care stand simultaneously under his conditional threat. Covenant with Yhwh intensifies the retribution consequent upon breaking that covenant. Again, this isn’t always the case. Cornell sees in Psalm 2 (“Why do the nations rage?”), for instance, what he sees in other ancient Near Eastern royal inscriptions: a promise to protect the divinely-favored king against all enemies, come what may. The same theme sounds in “one representative inscription, Tel Ahmar 6 (the Ahmar/Qubbah stele)” (28). Here the king, Hamiyatas, is “the firstborn child” of the gods, who secure his legacy and punish those who oppose him. In the Hadad Inscription, king Pannamuwa’s dominion is the gods’s own gift, and all thereafter are obliged to remember “the soul of Pannamuwa,” to petition for its eventual communion with Hadad. Whoever fails to do this will suffer Hadad’s wrath—even the kings own sons. The function of the patron god in all these inscriptions is to ensure “the absoluteness of the king’s exemption” from divine wrath and to bring divine aggression on those who defy him (32).

   So too the first half of Psalm 89. It tells of Yhwh’s fidelity to his people, his establishment of the Davidic dynasty, David’s divine sonship and the privileges thus incurred. But the psalm’s center turns as dark as an incoming storm. “But you – you have cast off and rejected / you have grown furious with your anointed / you have voided the covenant of your servant / you profaned his diadem to the ground…. / you lifted up the right hand of his foes…” (Ps 89.39–46). Cornell comments: “The thought that was unthinkable for other royal texts comes raggedly to speech” (37)—the thought, that is, that God might obliterate the one most protected by covenant with God. The medieval Jewish scholar, Ibn Ezra, considered this psalm blasphemous, and mentioned another like him “who refused to read Psalm 89” (38). Cornell observes that here and elsewhere the degree of divine aggression is directly proportionate to the degree to which the covenant frames the episode or discourse. The temperature and totality of divine aggression is considerably less in Judges, for example, which also says considerably less about Israel’s covenants with God. For Cornell, all this suggests that monotheizing evacuates divine protection for those who usually enjoy it absolutely—here the king—and thus intensifies divine aggression on the whole.

3. The Golden Calf. Here the agent under threat is the entire people of God. Again, the main issue is not what the two-dimensional notion of “monotheism” might suggest. It’s not that the people confessed another god besides Yhwh, when, in fact, no such other god exists. For one thing, Aaron seems to identify the golden calf with Yhwh (Exod 32.4). For another, the direct accusation isn’t about the technical liceity of what the people do, but of “what this people is like: hard-necked, obstinate, impervious to instruction” (44). Yhwh is ready to destroy the people and start over with Moses himself. Moses “soothes the face of Yhwh his God” (Exod 32.14). And yet later Moses himself threatens to destroy the people (Exod 33.3). Precisely the covenantal relationship is what justifies these global threats. Cornell strengthens the point by comparing the language throughout this narrative to that of Neo-Assyrian vassal treaties, which display a similar proportionality between the emperor’s protection and his conditional aggression if the treaty is broken. Because Yhwh acts as sole “emperor,” is Israel’s only God, it’s Yhwh’s prerogative to exact the most extreme retribution should the people’s infidelity provoke it (51–2).

   Monotheizing amplifies divine aggression.

***

After each case study Cornell indicates ways that later Jewish and Christian authors relaxed or reversed this tendency. In 1 Enoch’s “Book of the Watchers,” say, God distributes his aggression among four archangels. And the hideousness of the Watchers’ and Nephilim’s wickedness renders God far less internally complex (they all deserve what’s coming to them). For a Christian instance, Cornell notices how in the NT the church, as “Body of Christos,” often appears exempt from divine aggression, at least in its absolute manifestation (cf. Eph 5.29). Christ, the Anointed One, is never under the shadow of divine menace; nor, then, are his people, his Body. Later Jews and Christians also “repopulated the heavenlies such that powers and principalities, angels and archangels, blurred the boundary between God and humanity that the Hebrew Scriptures, by and large, maintain” (56–7). Far from slavish repetition of the monotheizing performance evident in much (not all) of the Bible, its inheritors appear fairly free to repeat or resist this performance. Indeed, they mostly “let [the Hebrew Scripture’s] theological model lie fallow” (59).

Here I hesitate. My hesitation isn’t really historical, admittedly. It seems obvious to me that 1 Enoch does just what Cornell says it does. And of course the very contentiousness of debates over “high or low Christology” in the New Testament and its immediate aftermath suggests, at the very least, some contrary or ambiguous trends around monotheizing vs. de-monotheizing. But theologically speaking, I don’t see why a resurgence of de-monotheizing necessitates the movement away from monotheizing. This isn’t really a critique of Cornell. His parameters were textual and literary. Such a method can’t help but detect the shift between monotheizing to de-monotheizing as a linear movement. But what if the movement is from one essential moment of the whole to another? If, say, Christ comes to be recognized as equal to the Father and so in some sense share the monotheized divinity with the Father, then Christ’s simultaneous identification with us, his human/created Body, will entail a parallel double-movement of monotheizing and de-monotheizing: because Christ is both God and head of his Body, both the image of the invisible God and the visible creature in whom deity dwells entire, the first- and only-begotten of the Father and the first of God’s creation—therefore we are all to become gods in Christ. Nor is this a merely hypothetical: I think it describes precisely the way Gregory of Nyssa’s In Illud interprets 1 Corinthians 15.

That monotheizing and de-monotheizing are, from a theological vantage, both essential moments of the whole mystery of Christ, introduces a hermeneutical logic by which we might interpret these apparently contradictory tendencies today. When we read scripture as the inspired, written Word, we see that “there is but one God” and “you are gods” not only both contain truths but even entail each other. Doesn’t Melchizedek or Enoch look a lot like they possess features unique to God? Yes. Isn’t Moses called a god to Israel? Yes. Are these mere metaphors or literary strategies? Probably. Are they also, as inspired, indicative of theosis in Christ? I say yes. More: from this vantage, God reveals himself most “unique” (monos) exactly in the depths to which he identifies himself with those who are naturally, infinitely inferior. Because whatever you do to the least of these, you do to him, he is thus revealed as the one God. Nothing is more peculiarly Godlike than God making gods out of mere and corrupt creatures. He makes himself poor that we might become rich—that’s how rich God is!

This approach to scripture also allows us to receive such contrary tendencies in their literal extremity: the God who destroys the people saves the same people (Maximus); the God who repents of having made humankind takes on a less-than-human condition to make humankind at long last; the God whose holiness brooks no sin becomes sin and a curse for us—annihilates the sin along with the sinner, thus effecting the divine and eternal birth of the person within that same sinner. Have I been crucified with Christ? Do I yet live the life of Christ who live in me? When I die in Christ, am I simultaneously born into eternal life? If the Anointed suffers divine wrath, is his reign yet forever? If the people of God are struck down in their infidelity, do their bones yet live? I think so.

Cornell shows us that when the Bible monotheizes, its God grows more aggressive. No one is safe. But theologically he shows us more. When God monotheizes himself, he de-monotheizes himself too. Just where no one is safe, everyone is saved.

1. There’s nothing wrong with a pamphlet, by the way: it enjoys a venerable literary lineage. I call Cornell’s study thus because it comes in at just under 60 compact pages.

2. Matthew V. Novenson, “The Universal Polytheism and the Case of the Jews,” in Matthew V. Novenson (ed.), Monotheism and Christology in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. NTS 180 (Leiden: Brill, 2020) 32–60. Cornell doesn’t cite this essay, but something tells me he’d be sympathetic to its broad claims.

3. Cornell does well to avoid the fraught debates over whether and to what degree “monotheism” and “polytheism” apply to the biblical authors. Not only does it sharpen his own focus. It also spares him of having to address what are surely many conceptual confusions in the ongoing discussion among biblical scholars. On the one hand, some scholars today seem to pride themselves in refuting the older, boring, and unreflective view that the biblical authors are “monotheist” in the sense of denying the existence of other gods besides Yhwh (or El, or Elyon, or Elohim, etc.). Perhaps some stripe of nineteenth-century Protestant, or, alas, a contemporary Catholic biblical scholar, imposes that definition of “monotheism.” But they are vanishingly few. True, there exist more sophisticated attempts at metaphysical monotheism that, while not denying a real plurality of gods, nevertheless posit an absolute ontological difference—an infinite qualitative difference, if you will—between these gods and the God, the One, the Father of all (in the manner of Plato’s Timaeus 27C, which has indeed been a mainstream Christian view from time immemorial). Even here, few biblical scholars parse out the details of how a “monotheist” in this sense might also (and because of this) be “polytheist,” since the One is One as the many gods/henads, and the reverse (thus Edward Butler’s thesis about Neoplatonic henadology). And yet, on the other hand and beyond all this, Schelling’s observation (in the Urfassung of his Lectures on the Philosophy of Revelation, 19) helpfully complicates things: the monos in monotheism cannot be a claim merely to deny the existence of other gods beyond God, since such a denial implicitly concedes the possibility of other gods in its very denial of their actuality. Yet the positive claim monotheism conceals—which seems to differentiate it from mere theism (or atheism)—seems precisely to exclude such a possibility in principle. Monotheism’s claim is either merely negative or positive. If negative, it defines the one God by the negation of a real possibility of many gods. If positive, its claim must be about the very mode of the one God’s oneness as God and of God’s divinity as one. So Schelling: “The content of the concept designated by monotheism is not God in general, but rather the determined God. Only what is one as God, not what is one in general, can verbally indicate this connection.” More directly: monotheism is a positive claim about the modal uniqueness of how God is One and how that oneness determinately exists in God’s actual life. So until we get clear on the way monotheism necessitates this dialectical relation between what initially seemed like two separate claims (divine existence and divine unity), either claim—that the biblical authors are “monotheist” or that they are “polytheist”—will very likely miss the point entirely.