Ancient India: The Citadel of Disaffection
How Jainism, Hinduism, and Buddhism trump Western religions
In the history of religion, the transitions from animism, through polytheism and henotheism to monotheism amount to a gradual ensconcing of God in a sacred domain which is supposed to be impervious to our profane machinations.
In the Jewish case, which informed Christianity and Islam, this theological move was motivated by the peculiarities of Jewish history: Jews were perennially on the bottom in contests of realpolitik, but they discovered a way to salvage their pride in their culture, by using the literary character of a transcendent God as a symbol of their tragic righteousness. Just as the ancient Jews were aloof and alienated from dominant societies, such as Assyria, Babylon, and Macedonia, their myths and legends promoted an image of God as being divorced from the natural order.
For Jews the oneness of God didn’t entail mystical monism or pantheism; instead, the sacred had to be kept separate from the profane, the pure from the impure, and goodness from evil. That duality was forced on Jews initially not so much by prophetic revelations, but by the inescapable political reality that throughout Jewish history, the strong had dominated the weak.
