Freud - Complete Works (785 page)

  
¹
Eduard Meyer, 1906, 222 ff.

Moses And Monotheism

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   The union of the tribes into a
nation through the adoption of a common religion, whenever it may
have taken place, might easily have turned out quite an unimportant
happening in world history. The new religion would have been
carried away by the current of events, Yahweh would have had to
take his place in the procession of departed gods in
Flaubert’s vision, and all twelve of his tribes would have
been ‘lost’ and not only the ten of them which the
Anglo-Saxons have been in search of for so long. The god Yahweh, to
whom the Midianite Moses then presented a new people, was probably
in no respect a prominent being. A coarse, narrow-minded, local
god, violent and bloodthirsty, he had promised his followers to
give them ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’ and
urged them to exterminate its present inhabitants ‘with the
edge of the sword’. It is astonishing how much remains, in
spite of all the revisions of the Biblical narratives, that allows
us to recognize his original nature. It is not even certain that
his religion was a genuine monotheism, that it denied the divinity
of the deities of other peoples. It was enough probably that his
people regarded their own god as more powerful than any foreign
god. If, nevertheless, in the sequel everything took a different
course from what such beginnings would have led one to expect, the
cause can be found in only one fact. The Egyptian Moses had given
to one portion of the people a more highly spiritualized notion of
god, the idea of a single deity embracing the whole world, who was
not less all-loving than all-powerful, who was averse to all
ceremonial and magic and set before men as their highest aim a life
in truth and justice. For, however incomplete may be the accounts
we have of the ethical side of the Aten religion, it can be no
unimportant fact that Akhenaten regularly referred to himself in
his inscriptions as ‘living in Ma’at’ (truth,
justice).¹ In the long run it made no difference that the
people rejected the teaching of Moses (probably after a short time)
and killed him himself. The
tradition
of it remained and its
influence achieved (only gradually, it is true, in the course of
centuries) what was denied to Moses himself. The god Yahweh had
arrived at undeserved honour when, from the time of Kadesh onwards,
he was credited with the deed of liberation which had been
performed by Moses; but he had to pay heavily for this usurpation.
The shadow of the god whose place he had taken became stronger than
himself; by the end of the process of evolution, the nature of the
forgotten god of Moses had come to light behind his own. No one can
doubt that it was only the idea of this other god that enabled the
people of Israel to survive all the blows of fate and that kept
them alive to our own days.

  
¹
His hymns lay stress not only on the
god’s universality and oneness, but also on his loving care
for all creatures; and they encourage joy in nature and enjoyment
of its beauty. (Breasted, 1934.)

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   It is no longer possible to
estimate the share taken by the Levites in the final victory of the
Mosaic god over Yahweh. They had taken the side of Moses in the
past, when the compromise was reached at Kadesh, in a still live
memory of the master whose retinue and compatriots they had been.
During the centuries since then they had become merged with the
people or with the priesthood, and it had become the main function
of the priests to develop and supervise the ritual, and besides
this to preserve the holy writ and revise it in accordance with
their aims. But was not all sacrifice and all ceremonial at bottom
only magic and sorcery, such as had been unconditionally rejected
by the old Mosaic teaching? Thereupon there arose from among the
midst of the people an unending succession of men who were not
linked to Moses in their origin but were enthralled by the great
and mighty tradition which had grown up little by little in
obscurity: and it was these men, the Prophets, who tirelessly
preached the old Mosaic doctrine that the deity disdained sacrifice
and ceremonial and asked only for faith and a life in truth and
justice (Ma’at). The efforts of the Prophets had a lasting
success; the doctrines with which they re-established the old faith
became the permanent content of the Jewish religion. It is honour
enough to the Jewish people that they could preserve such a
tradition and produce men who gave it a voice - even though the
initiative to it came from outside, from a great foreigner.

   I should not feel secure in
giving this account, if I could not appeal to the judgement of
other enquirers with a specialist knowledge who see the
significance of Moses for the Jewish religion in the same light as
I do, even though they do not recognize his Egyptian origin. Thus,
for instance, Sellin (1922, 52) writes: ‘Consequently we must
picture the true religion of Moses - his belief in the one moral
God whom he preaches - as thenceforward necessarily the property of
a small circle of the people. We must necessarily not expect to
meet with it in the official cult, in the religion of the priests
or in the beliefs of the people. We can necessarily only reckon to
find an occasional spark emerging, now here and now there, from the
spiritual torch which he once kindled, to find that his ideas have
not entirely perished but have been silently at work here and there
upon beliefs and customs, till sooner or later, through the effect
of special experiences or of persons specially moved by his spirit,
it has broken out more strongly once more and gained influence on
wider masses of the population. It is from this point of view that
the history of the ancient religion of Israel is necessarily to be
regarded. Anyone who sought to construct the Mosaic religion on the
lines of the religion we meet with, according to the chronicles, in
the life of the people during their first five hundred years in
Canaan, would be committing the gravest methodological
error.’ Volz (1907, 64) speaks even more clearly: it is his
belief that ‘the exalted work of Moses was understood and
carried through to begin with only feebly and scantily, till, in
the course of centuries, it penetrated more and more, and at length
in the great Prophets it met with like spirits who continued the
lonely man’s work.’

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   And here, it seems, I have
reached the conclusion of my study, which was directed to the
single aim of introducing the figure of an Egyptian Moses into the
nexus of Jewish history. Our findings may be thus expressed in the
most concise formula. Jewish history is familiar to us for its
dualities:
two
groups of people who came together to form
the nation,
two
kingdoms into which this nation fell apart,
two
gods’ names in the documentary sources of the
Bible. To these we add two fresh ones: the foundation of
two
religions - the first repressed by the second but nevertheless
later emerging victoriously behind it, and
two
religious
founders, who are both called by the same name of Moses and whose
personalities we have to distinguish from each other. All of these
dualities are the necessary consequences of the first one: the fact
that one portion of the people had an experience which must be
regarded as traumatic and which the other portion escaped. Beyond
this there would be a very great deal to discuss, to explain and to
assert. Only thus would an interest in our purely historical study
find its true justification. What the real nature of a tradition
resides in, and what its special power rests on, how impossible it
is to dispute the personal influence upon world-history of
individual great men, what sacrilege one commits against the
splendid diversity of human life if one recognizes only those
motives which arise from material needs, from what sources some
ideas (and particularly religious ones) derive their power to
subject both men and peoples to their yoke - to study all this in
the special case of Jewish history would be an alluring task. To
continue my work on such lines as these would be to find a link
with the statements I put forward twenty-five years ago in
Totem
and Taboo
. But I no longer feel that I have the strength to do
so.

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III

MOSES, HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEIST RELIGION

PART
I

PREFATORY NOTE I

(before March, 1938)

With the audacity of one who has little or
nothing to lose, I propose for a second time to break a
well-grounded intention and to add to my two essays on Moses in
Imago
the final portion which I have held back. I ended the
last essay with an assertion that I knew my strength would not be
enough for this. By that I meant, of course, the weakening of
creative powers which goes along with old age;¹ but I was
thinking of another obstacle as well.

   We are living in a specially
remarkable period. We find to our astonishment that progress has
allied itself with barbarism. In Soviet Russia they have set about
improving the living conditions of some hundred millions of people
who were held firmly in subjection. They have been rash enough to
withdraw the ‘opium’ of religion from them and have
been wise enough to give them a reasonable amount of sexual
liberty; but at the same time they have submitted them to the most
cruel coercion and robbed them of any possibility of freedom of
thought. With similar violence, the Italian people are being
trained up to orderliness and a sense of duty. We feel it as a
relief from an oppressive apprehension when we see in the case of
the German people that a relapse into almost prehistoric barbarism
can occur as well without being attached to any progressive ideas.
In any case, things have so turned out that to-day the conservative
democracies have become the guardians of cultural advance and that,
strange to say, it is precisely the institution of the Catholic
Church which puts up a powerful defence against the spread of this
danger to civilization - the Church which has hitherto been the
relentless foe to freedom of thought and to advances towards the
discovery of the truth!

  
¹
I do not share the opinion of my
contemporary Bernard Shaw, that human beings would only achieve
anything good if they could live to be three hundred years old. A
prolongation of life would achieve nothing unless many other
fundamental changes were to be made in the conditions of
life.

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   We are living here in a Catholic
country under the protection of that Church, uncertain how long
that protection will hold out. But so long as it lasts, we
naturally hesitate to do anything that would be bound to arouse the
Church’s hostility. This is not cowardice, but prudence. The
new enemy, to whom we want to avoid being of service, is more
dangerous than the old one with whom we have already learnt to come
to terms. The psycho-analytic researches which we carry on are in
any case viewed with suspicious attention by Catholicism. I will
not maintain that this is unjustly so. If our work leads us to a
conclusion which reduces religion to a neurosis of humanity and
explains its enormous power in the same way as a neurotic
compulsion in our individual patients, we may be sure of drawing
the resentment of our ruling powers down upon us. Not that I should
have anything to say that would be new or that I did not say
clearly a quarter of a century ago: but it has been forgotten in
the meantime and it could not be without effect if I repeated it
to-day and illustrated it from an example which offers a standard
for all religious foundations. It would probably lead to our being
prohibited from practising psycho-analysis. Such violent methods of
suppression are, indeed, by no means alien to the Church; the fact
is rather that it feels it as an invasion of its privileges if
someone else makes use of those methods. But psycho-analysis, which
in the course of my long life has gone everywhere, still possesses
no home that could be more valuable for it than the city in which
it was born and grew up.

   I do not only think but I
know
that I shall let myself be deterred by this second
obstacle, by the external danger, from publishing the last portion
of my study on Moses. I have made yet another attempt to get the
difficulty out of the way, by telling myself that my fears are
based on an over-estimation of my own personal importance: that it
will probably be a matter of complete indifference to the
authorities what I choose to write about Moses and the origin of
monotheist religions. But I feel uncertain in my judgement of this.
It seems to me much more possible that malice and sensationalism
will counter-balance any lack of recognition of me in the
contemporary world’s judgement. So I shall not give this work
to the public. But that need not prevent my writing it. Especially
as I have written it down already once, two years ago, so that I
have only to revise it and attach it to the two essays that have
preceded it. It may then be preserved in concealment till some day
the time arrives when it may venture without danger into the light,
or till someone who has reached the same conclusions and opinions
can be told: ‘there was someone in darker times who thought
the same as you!’

Moses And Monotheism