In chapter 4 I tried to place the rise of monotheism in Israel in the broader cultural and intellectual context of transformations that have traditionally been subsumed under the notion of an “Axial Age.” More-over, I tried to place these “Axial” transformations in the context of primarily traumatic historical changes and experiences. In the present chapter I will explore another context that seems to me of equal rele-vance for those “Axial” transformations—especially with respect to the rise of monotheism, namely, the development of writing and literacy.1It never occurred to Jaspers that his theory was based on ancient texts, and that without the use of writing for the codification and ensuing canon-ization of “transcendental visions,” the “Axial Age” could never have occurred. Writing is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for transformations of “Axial” magnitude and importance. Nor did it occur to students of monotheism that there is not a single monotheistic reli-gion that is not based on a canon of holy writ.2The history of media provides an equally important context for the emergence of monothe-ism as political history. Traditional “pagan” religions also have “sacred texts” whose sacredness rests in their power to create divine presence, the “third dimension” of the divine world, as explained in chapter 1.
However, these are never collected into a canon that is simultaneously closed (i.e., excluding the addition of any new texts and the removal of any existing texts) and foundational in providing the basis for the entire life of the community and its individual members.3
Though I cannot claim any specific competence concerning biblical history and literature, I am interested in the history and phenomenol-ogy of canonization in the context of my theoretical work on “cultural memory.”4In this context the textual history of the Hebrew Bible repre-sents both a unique and extremely influential instance of the formation and transformation of a canonical tradition. Here one finds—perhaps for the first time in recorded history—a form of codifying cultural memory that changed our world in a most fundamental way, more than all the changes brought about by war or revolution. As was stated earlier, all of the so-called world religions are founded on an architec-ture of canonized scriparchitec-ture. There seems to exist a necessary connec-tion between “revelaconnec-tion” and “canon,” between “secondary religions”
(i.e., religions based on the distinction between true and false that reject every older and foreign tradition as falsehood or ignorance),5and that specific form of written and highly normative codification of cultural memory called canonization. There is no secondary religion that is not based on a canonized body of scripture serving as a codification of memory. Belonging to such a religion means having learned and more or less internalized this memory recorded as text. It is, moreover, obvi-ous that this preponderance of memory and codification is a necessary correlative of revelation. Revealed knowledge always is (or presents it-self as) extraterrestrial, or extramundane. It comes from another world, like “air from other planets blowing,” to quote Stefan George. It is not knowledge based on thisworldly experience and accumulated in the course of centuries. Furthermore, it is knowledge that people are not encouraged to expand through their own experience. God is invisible:
this is the first and foremost teaching of revealed monotheism. You are not going to see God; you depend on listening to his word in order to get close to him. The concept of revelation is the opposite of what can be called natural evidence. There is no other access to revealed truth other than through Scripture. “Nobody has ever seen God,” one reads in the Gospel of John (1:18; cf. First Epistle of John, 4:12, where this phrase is quoted), and Saint Paul teaches us “that we walk in faith and not in clear sight (or evidence)” (2 Cor. 5:7). Faith (Gk. pistis; Heb. emunah) is just an-other word for “memory,” for it is all about not forgetting what was said to the ancestors and about trusting the authenticity of their experience and testimony. The absence of exterior evidence is compensated for by an interior or spiritual representation, that is, memory and its codifica-tion in Scripture. This shift from external evidence to memory and
internal trust or certainty has much to do with what Freud called prog-ress in spirituality or intellectuality (“Fortschritt in der Geistigkeit”).6
The appeal to memory is so decisive that right from the start a reli-gion based on revealed truth has had to have recourse to techniques of recording—that is, to writing—in order to fight the ever-present danger of forgetting. Moreover, it had had to invest writing with the highest au-thority and to develop a new form of tradition, namely, canonization. It requires not only writing but a very innovative and special form of writ-ten tradition—canonized Scripture—to represent the revealed truth that has no natural basis in human experience. Monotheism, therefore, is primarily a matter of memory.7This applies not only to the three West-ern monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—but also to Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Buddhism, Jainism, Daoism, Confu-cianism, Mormonism, as well as other religions, some of which may not be classified as monotheism but all of which share the polemical charac-ter of biblical monotheism in opposing and rejecting an older religion.
Even “Western culture”—that corpus of literary, aesthetic and sci-entific works—is based on processes of canonization.8The same applies to every national and regional organization of cultural memory. The principle of canonization thus appears to be ubiquitous, natural, and self-evident. This perspective, however, is entirely subjective since we are looking at these developments and their origins from within. The situation appears in a totally different light if viewed from the perspec-tive of ancient Egypt, that is, from a point of view that predates even the early origins of canonization and is external to this development.
Seen through the eyes of ancient Egypt, the phenomenon loses its self-evident nature and appears as a virtually inexplicable process resulting from an unpredictable and improbable concatenation of events. Recog-nizing this change of perspective is one advantage of a remote disci-pline such as Egyptology and may justify this venture into a field beyond one’s professional competence.
The notion of tradition oscillates between two meanings. If one looks at it from the point of view of memory and remembering in the manner of, say, Maurice Halbwachs, tradition appears as the opposite of living, incorporated, and communicated knowledge (“la mémoire vécue”).9 In contradistinction to the fluidity and malleability of what Halbwachs has called “la mémoire collective” and I prefer to call “com-municative memory,”10 tradition appears as externalized, objectified, and institutionalized knowledge, something solid, fixed, and normative.
However, if one looks at tradition from the point of view of Scripture, it
is tradition that appears fluid and malleable when compared to the so-lidity and fixedness of normative Scripture. Seen in this light, tradition appears as knowledge that is largely implicit and transmitted not only verbally but also through nonverbal imitation, whereas the transmission of canonized knowledge operates through verbal teaching and interpre-tation. The reflections and observations that follow are based on this second perspective, the opposition of “tradition” and “Scripture.”
First of all, one has to realize that there is no natural evolutionary path that leads from tradition to text. The natural path of tradition leads toward habituation, toward becoming implicit and even unconscious.11 In order to become explicit, a tradition has to confront a crisis or even a break. Impulses to make tradition explicit, to record or codify it in textual form, must come from without. Here one encounters the same connection between “breakdown” and “breakthrough,” or trauma and (“axial”) transformation, discussed in chapter 4. The present chapter will identify five such external impulses that helped shape the Hebrew Bible.
There might be more, but it is not the number that matters but rather the plurality. My thesis is that these impulses are purely contingent; they do not follow each other based on any logical necessity. After any of these externally caused changes, the development might have taken quite a different turn. Just as the transformation of tradition into text is not the natural evolution of tradition, canonization is not the natural conse-quence of such text creation. On the contrary, the natural path of tex-tual transmission is deterioration, not an increase but rather a decrease in normative meaning. In search of normative meaning, philologists always look for the archetype, the original text, the earliest attestation.
Canonization turns this natural and logical course of textual history on its head. Normative meaning is to be sought not in the earliest but in the final stage of textual history. The logic of archaeology must be replaced by the logic of emergence in order to do justice to the semantics of can-onization. Process, tendency, and finality matter, not origin, archetype, and source criticism.12Again, there is no natural path leading from text to canonization. Impulses must come from without, not from within.
The five steps of canonization are therefore external to the inner dy-namics both of tradition and of literary transmission. They come from outside, from the contingencies of history. The plurality and external nature of the impulses toward textual recording and canonization are mirrored in the pluralistic structure and content of the Hebrew canon.
This is its most conspicuous distinctive feature, unlike a more monolithic canon such as the Qur’an.