The Dark Side (Or Is It Center?) of Biblical Religion

I don't precisely recall when I first read Norman Cohn's Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come (first edition, 1993), but I believe it was while I was still in graduate school. What I do recall most clearly was the disturbing effect the book had upon me.

The only book by Cohn that I had read before Cosmos was Europe's Inner Demons--a tour de force study of the paranoid manias that have periodically gripped Christian Europe, leading to the mass torture and slaughter of social outcasts.

So, when I picked up Cosmos, I anticipated a bracing read. What I found, however, was more than I had bargained for.

The thesis that I had expected to find in the book would have been straightforward enough: that "biblical religion" (the literary substrate of those world religious traditions that arose in the ancient to late ancient Near East) has a dark side insofar as it encourages a kind of utopian thinking (technically, a literary genre called "apocalypse") that occasionally erupts into waves of political and/or religious violence.

Stated in that fashion, Cohn's book promised no real surprises: after all, I am an historian of religion; this is fairly routine stuff in my trade. But, unless I mistook Cohn's message (and, having just devoured the book for a second time, I don't think I misread him), Cohn's argument is not as pedestrian as I had anticipated: for he places apocalypticism not at the margins of biblical religion (as I might have done), but at its very center--or at least the center of what biblical religion had become by the time that the author calling himself "John of Patmos" penned his visionary screed.

Given as I am to utopian inclinations, Cohn's argument created within me not a little cognitive dissonance. With Norman O. Brown, I admire the so-called "prophetic tradition" within biblical religion; indeed, I regard it as one of the latter's redeeming qualities. What Cohn demonstrates quite convincingly, however, is that the "prophetic tradition" I revere tended to be more triumphalist and exclusivist than I am usually willing to entertain. Moreover, the "closing" of the prophetic era in the post-exilic period of Judean thought and piety did not necessarily check those less than admirable tendencies in the prophets--and what came to replace prophecy (i.e., apocalypticism) made the triumphalism and exclusivism of the biblical prophets look like child's play.

Apocalyptic Troubadour:

Even the "good thought" of my beloved Zarathustra is shown to have inaugurated some of the exclusivism and triumphalism that I find so unattractive in biblical literature. No one, in Cohn's reading, has clean hands.

And while he does not discuss the rise of Muhammad's reformist movement (the precursor of what would become, in time, the world religion of Islam), the implications of Cohn's study are clear: the more one comes to recognize Islam as the third major iteration of biblical religion, the more one has to evaluate the degree to which the apocalyptic inheritance of the previous centuries of Near Eastern religious development was absorbed and elaborated upon in Qur'an, ahadith, the broader literary tradition and, more generally, in extra-literary acts and institutions that compose most of what we think of as the history of Islam.

Again, such considerations are, in one sense, routine for an historian of religion: there is really nothing new here. It is a question of emphasis--but an emphasis we would do well to consider carefully if we do not wish to distort the historical record. Even today, apocalypticism is alive and well in Islam and among Muslims--as well it should be, considering the conditions under which tens of millions of Muslims are forced to live. But is it at the center of Islamic tradition? Cohn's work on biblical religion suggests that it may be viewed in that fashion. Is this fair?

Perhaps more curious (because seemingly less justified by prevailing socio-economic and political conditions) is the rise and intensification of apocalypticism among white American evangelical Christians. How on earth they can imagine themselves to be living with a gun to their heads and their backs to the wall is truly mysterious. Then again, maybe not: for so much depends upon a given individual's perception of his or her position in the world and what attracted him or her to Lifeboat Christianity in the first place.

And then there remains the underlying psychopathology Cohn named "Europe's inner demons"...

Of course, in this case, as in all others, we must carefully distinguish between causation and correlation. Cohn does not necessarily do that but, then, his approach is more literary than not. Even so, this distinction is of the essence when contemplating the kinds of historical questions Cohn raised in his scholarship.