Freud - Complete Works (794 page)

   Let us, therefore, take it for
granted that a great man influences his fellow-men in two ways: by
his personality and by the idea which he puts forward. That idea
may stress some ancient wishful image of the masses, or it may
point out a new wishful aim to them, or it may cast its spell over
them in some other way. Occasionally - and this is undoubtedly the
more primary case - the personality works by itself and the idea
plays a quite trivial part. Not for a moment are we in the dark as
to why a great man ever becomes important. We know that in the mass
of mankind there is a powerful need for an authority who can be
admired, before whom one bows down, by whom one is ruled and
perhaps even ill-treated. We have learnt from the psychology of
individual men what the origin is of this need of the masses. It is
a longing for the father felt by everyone from his childhood
onwards, for the same father whom the hero of legend boasts he has
overcome. And now it may begin to dawn on us that all the
characteristics with which we equipped the great man are paternal
characteristics, and that the essence of great men for which we
vainly searched lies in this conformity. The decisiveness of
thought, the strength of will, the energy of action are part of the
picture of a father - but above all the autonomy and independence
of the great man, his divine unconcern which may grow into
ruthlessness. One must admire him, one may trust him, but one
cannot avoid being afraid of him too. We should have been led to
realize this from the word itself: who but the father can have been
the ‘great man’ in childhood?

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   There is no doubt that it was a
mighty prototype of a father which, in the person of Moses, stooped
to the poor Jewish bondsmen to assure them that they were his dear
children. And no less overwhelming must have been the effect upon
them of the idea of an only, eternal, almighty God, to whom they
were not too mean for him to make a covenant with them and who
promised to care for them if they remained loyal to his worship. It
was probably not easy for them to distinguish the image of the man
Moses from that of his God; and their feeling was right in this,
for Moses may have introduced traits of his own personality into
the character of his God - such as his wrathful temper and his
relentlessness. And if, this being so, they killed their great man
one day, they were only repeating a misdeed which in ancient times
had been committed, as prescribed by law, against the Divine King
and which, as we know, went back to a still more ancient
prototype.¹

   If on the one hand we thus see
the figure of the great man grown to divine proportions, yet on the
other hand we must recall that the father too was once a child. The
great religious idea for which the man Moses stood was, on our
view, not his own property: he had taken it over from King
Akhenaten. And he, whose greatness as the founder of a religion is
unequivocally established, may perhaps have been following hints
which had reached him - from near or distant parts of Asia -
through the medium of his mother or by other paths.

  
¹
Cf. Frazer, loc. cit.

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   We cannot follow the chain of
events further, but if we have rightly recognized these first
steps, the monotheist idea returned like a boomerang to the land of
its origin. Thus it seems unfruitful to try to fix the credit due
to an individual in connection with a new idea. It is clear that
many have shared in its development and made contributions to it.
And, again, it would obviously be unjust to break off the chain of
causes at Moses and to neglect what was effected by those who
succeeded him and carried on his ideas, the Jewish Prophets. The
seed of monotheism failed to ripen in Egypt. The same thing might
have happened in Israel after the people had thrown off the
burdensome and exacting religion. But there constantly arose from
the Jewish people men who revived the fading tradition, who renewed
the admonitions and demands made by Moses, and who did not rest
till what was lost had been established once again. In the course
of constant efforts over centuries, and finally owing to two great
reforms, one before and one after the Babylonian exile, the
transformation was accomplished of the popular god Yahweh into the
God whose worship had been forced upon the Jews by Moses. And
evidence of the presence of a peculiar psychical aptitude in the
masses who had become the Jewish people is revealed by the fact
that they were able to produce so many individuals prepared to take
on the burdens of the religion of Moses in return for the reward of
being the chosen people and perhaps for some other prizes of a
similar degree.

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C

THE ADVANCE IN INTELLECTUALITY

   In order to bring about lasting
psychical results in a people, it is clearly not enough to
assure
them that they have been chosen by the deity. The
fact must also be
proved
to them in some way if they are to
believe it and to draw consequences from the belief. In the
religion of Moses the Exodus from Egypt served as the proof; God,
or Moses in his name, was never tired of appealing to this evidence
of favour. The feast of the Passover was introduced in order to
maintain the memory of that event, or, rather, an old-established
feast was injected with the contents of that memory. Nevertheless,
it was only a memory: the Exodus belonged to a hazy past. In the
present, signs of God’s favour were decidedly scanty; the
people’s history pointed rather to his
dis
favour.
Primitive peoples used to depose their gods or even to castigate
them, if they failed to do their duty in securing them victory,
happiness and comfort. In all periods kings have been treated in no
way differently from gods; an ancient identity is thus revealed: an
origin from a common root. Thus, modern peoples, too, are in the
habit of expelling their kings if the glory of their reign is
spoilt by defeats and the corresponding losses in territory and
money. Why the people of Israel, however, clung more and more
submissively to their God the worse they were treated by him - that
is a problem which for the moment we must leave on one side.

   It may encourage us to enquire
whether the religion of Moses brought the people nothing else
besides an enhancement of their self-esteem owing to their
consciousness of having been chosen. And indeed another factor can
easily be found. That religion also brought the Jews a far grander
conception of God, or, as we might put it more modestly, the
conception of a grander God. Anyone who believed in this God had
some kind of share in his greatness, might feel exalted himself.
For an unbeliever this is not entirely self-evident; but we may
perhaps make it easier to understand if we point to the sense of
superiority felt by a Briton in a foreign country which has been
made insecure owing to an insurrection - a feeling that is
completely absent in a citizen of any small continental state. For
the Briton counts on the fact that his Government will send along a
warship if a hair of his head is hurt, and that the rebels
understand that very well - whereas the small state possesses no
warship at all. Thus, pride in the greatness of the British Empire
has a root as well in the consciousness of the greater security -
the protection - enjoyed by the individual Briton. This may
resemble the conception of a grand God. And, since one can scarcely
claim to assist God in the administration of the world, the pride
in God’s greatness fuses with the pride in being chosen by
him.

   Among the precepts of the Moses
religion there is one that is of greater importance than appears to
begin with. This is the prohibition against making an image of God
- the compulsion to worship a God whom one cannot see. In this, I
suspect, Moses was outdoing the strictness of the Aten religion.
Perhaps he merely wanted to be consistent: his God would in that
case have neither a name nor a countenance. Perhaps it was a fresh
measure against magical abuses. But if this prohibition were
accepted, it must have a profound effect. For it meant that a
sensory perception was given second place to what may be called an
abstract idea - a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality or,
strictly speaking, an instinctual renunciation, with all its
necessary psychological consequences.

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   This may not seem obvious at
first sight, and before it can carry conviction we must recall
other processes of the same character in the development of human
civilization. The earliest of these and perhaps the most important
is merged in the obscurity of primaeval ages. Its astonishing
effects compel us to assert its occurrence. In our children, in
adults who are neurotic, as well as in primitive peoples, we meet
with the mental phenomenon which we describe as a belief in the
‘omnipotence of thoughts’. In our judgement this lies
in an over-estimation of the influence which our mental (in this
case, intellectual) acts can exercise in altering the external
world. At bottom, all magic, the precursor of our technology, rests
on this premiss. All the magic of words, too, has its place here,
and the conviction of the power which is bound up with the
knowledge and pronouncing of a name. The ‘omnipotence of
thoughts’ was, we suppose, an expression of the pride of
mankind in the development of speech, which resulted in such an
extraordinary advancement of intellectual activities. The new realm
of intellectuality was opened up, in which ideas, memories and
inferences became decisive in contrast to the lower psychical
activity which had direct perceptions by the sense-organs as its
content. This was unquestionably one of the most important stages
on the path to hominization.

   We can far more easily grasp
another process of a later date. Under the influence of external
factors into which we need not enter here and which are also in
part insufficiently known, it came about that the matriarchal
social order was succeeded by the patriarchal one - which, of
course, involved a revolution in the juridical conditions that had
so far prevailed. An echo of this revolution seems still to be
audible in the
Oresteia
of Aeschylus. But this turning from
the mother to the father points in addition to a victory of
intellectuality over sensuality - that is, an advance in
civilization, since maternity is proved by the evidence of the
senses while paternity is a hypothesis, based on an inference and a
premiss. Taking sides in this way with a thought-process in
preference to a sense perception has proved to be a momentous
step.

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   At some point between the two
events that I have mentioned there was another which shows the most
affinity to what we are investigating in the history of religion.
Human beings found themselves obliged in general to recognise
‘intellectual’ forces - forces, that is, which cannot
be grasped by the senses (particularly by the sight) but which none
the less produce undoubted and indeed extremely powerful effects.
If we may rely upon the evidence of language, it was movement of
the air that provided the prototype of intellectuality, for
intellect derives its name from a breath of wind -
‘
animus
’, ‘
spiritus
’, and the
Hebrew ‘
ruach
(breath)’. This too led to the
discovery of the mind as that of the intellectual principle in
individual human beings. Observation found the movement of air once
again in men’s breathing, which ceases when they die. To this
day a dying man ‘breathes out his spirit’. Now,
however, the world of spirits lay open to men. They were prepared
to attribute the soul which they had discovered in themselves to
everything in Nature. The whole world was animate; and science,
which came so much later, had plenty to do in divesting part of the
world of its soul once more; indeed it has not completed that task
even to-day.

   The Mosaic prohibition elevated
God to a higher degree of intellectuality, and the way was opened
to further alterations in the idea of God which we have still to
describe. But we may first consider another effect of the
prohibition. All such advances in intellectuality have as their
consequence that the individual’s self-esteem is increased,
that he is made proud - so that he feels superior to other people
who have remained under the spell of sensuality. Moses, as we know,
conveyed to the Jews an exalted sense of being a chosen people. The
dematerialization of God brought a fresh and valuable contribution
to their secret treasure. The Jews retained their inclination to
intellectual interests. The nation’s political misfortune
taught it to value at its true worth the one possession that
remained to it - its literature. Immediately after the destruction
of the Temple in Jerusalem by Titus, the Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai
asked permission to open the first Torah school in Jabneh. From
that time on, the Holy Writ and intellectual concern with it were
what held the scattered people together.

   This much is generally known and
accepted. All I have wanted to do is to add that this
characteristic development of the Jewish nature was introduced by
the Mosaic prohibition against worshipping God in a visible
form.

   The pre-eminence given to
intellectual labours throughout some two thousand years in the life
of the Jewish people has, of course, had its effect. It has helped
to check the brutality and the tendency to violence which are apt
to appear where the development of muscular strength is the popular
ideal. Harmony in the cultivation of intellectual and physical
activity, such as was achieved by the Greek people, was denied to
the Jews. In this dichotomy their decision was at least in favour
of the worthier alternative.