2 of 6

Schwartz is careful not to put all the blame on monotheism; other factors contribute to violence, too. But monotheism nonetheless offers a religiously sanctioned symbolic universe in which the violence of "us" against "them" is decisively legitimized.

Schwartz employs most of her arguments to chisel away at monotheism. Occasionally, though, she climbs the mountain of debris left by her chisel and, like an alternative Moses, surveys the new promised land. In that land the One and the Same has opened itself "into endless difference," and its imitation is "not a replication of the Same, the identical, but a proliferation of nonidentical repetitions." There the first commandment, "to have no other God," has given way to a new commandment, "to let every person walk in the name of his god" and let multiple gods legitimize liquefied identities. There "the old 'monotheist' Book" is closed and new books are "fruitful and multiply." "The Same" is no more in the new promised land, and therefore the rivalry for "the Same" has disappeared. Scarcity is abolished in the land that flows with the milk and honey of plenitude, and therefore violence has given way to peace sustained by the practice of generosity.

It would be easy to respond to Schwartz's book with a barrage of small gripes. What kind of book is this, one could ask, that peddles distortions as uncontested verities? Where does the Bible "insist that you slay your Other to forge your identity" (the first italics mine), for instance? Or what is one to make of the claim that Christ himself had "yearnings to be God"? How much data must one ignore to conclude that the war in Bosnia is best explained in terms of "the monotheistic commitments of nationalism"?

Schwartz can also be faulted for one-sided and superficial readings of the biblical texts. Take the key biblical passage in her book, the story of Cain and Abel. Why assume that God's acceptance of Abel's sacrifice and rejection of Cain's is arbitrary? Simply because the text does not state the reason explicitly? Why not see Cain as an arrogant first-born and Abel his despised sibling, a reading suggested by the meaning of the names of the two brothers in the original? Far from being arbitrary, God's action would then invert the order of social inequalities established by the powerful. Or, why highlight only God's rejection of Cain's sacrifice but overlook God's continued commitment to Cain, even to the point of placing a protective mark on the condemned criminal so he would not be killed? Far from excluding Cain, God's intention would then be to embrace him.

Distortions such as those just mentioned suggest an impatient mind armed with a deft pen. What makes the book intriguing is the "system" behind the impatience. Many of these distortions are not arbitrary errors but are governed by Schwartz's main thesis about monotheism, identity, and scarcity, and by the alternative she proposes. Many of them line up nicely around the fundamental contrasts that make up the backbone of the book: Not one, but many gods! Not the struggle for the proper identity, but an endless composing and recomposing of "temporary and multiple identifications"! Not scarcity, but plenitude! So one has to ask whether her three-pronged main thesis is more defensible than her individual arguments.

next page... |  2 of 6

share this page

April 27 1998, Vol. 42, No. 5