The religious traditions fostering modernization in Japan and the West can thus be seen as polar opposites. Where one is Jewish, Christian, or Moslem, it is impossible to worship the God of Abraham without rejecting the gods of one’s earliest ancestors. When Joshua assembled the Israelite tribes at Shechem to swear fealty to the lord, he reminded them: “Long ago your forefathers Terah and his sons Abraham and Nahor lived beside the Euphrates and they worshipped other gods” (Johua 24:2). In order to worship the God of the Bible, somewhere in history a drastic uprooting process had to have taken place. The old pagan gods had to be forsworn and the ways of one’s oldest ancestors abandoned. This was as true of Moslems and Christians as it was of Jews. Here again, Catholicism sometime mitigated the harshness of the process by identifying local deities with Christian saints. Not surprisingly the young Hegel, although Lutheran by tradition, expressed his bitterness at this alienation from his own archaic religious inheritance: Every nation has its own imagery, its gods, angels, devils or saints who will live on in the nation’s traditions . . . Christianity has emptied Valhalla, felled the sacred groves, extirpated the national imagery as a shameful superstition, as a devilish poison, and given us instead the imagery of a nation whose climate, laws, culture, and interests are strange to us an whose history has no connection whatever with our own. A David or a Solomon lives in our popular imagination, but our country’s own heroes slumber in learned history books . . . . Thus we are without any religious imagery which is homegrown or linked with our history . . . all that we have is the remains of an imagery of our own, lurking amid the common people under the name of superstition. Hegel concluded his complaint by asking: “Is Judaea, then, the Teutons’ fatherland?” The young Hegel understood the profoundly destablizing character of the uprooting involved in the conversion of the Germans to biblical religion. He also appears to have grasped that biblical religion is inherently uprooting, at least in the first generation. Biblical religion effectively begins when God commands Abram, “Get thee out of thine own country, and from thy kinsmen, and from thy father’s house, and go unto a land that I will show you” (Gen. 12:1) It is instructive to recall the young Hegel’s bitter condemnation of Abraham’s voluntary uprooting: Abram, born in Chaldea, had in youth already left a fatherland in his father’s company. Now, in the plains of Mesopotamia, he tore himself free altogether from his family as well, in order to be a wholly self-subsistent, independent man, to be an overlord himself. He did this without having been injured or disowned, without the grief which after a wrong or an outrage signifies love’s enduring need, when love, injured indeed but not lost, goes in quest of a new fatherland in order to flourish and enjoy itself there. The first act which made Abraham the progenitor of a nation is a disseverance which snaps the bonds of communal life and love. The entirety of the relationships in which he had hitherto lived with men and nature, these beautiful relationships of his youth (Joshua 24:2), he spurned. As noted, Abraham’s departure from his native land entailed unconditional rejection of the gods of that land; and all Jews, Christians, and Moslems are the heirs of their spiritual forefather’s primal uprooting.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Aug 2013 12:32:39 +0000