CAPÍTULO II MARCO TEÓRICO
2.3. EVOLUCIÓN DE LOS EMPRENDIMIENTOS GASTRONÓMICOS EN ECUADOR
This monotheistic concept of religion probably did not emerge in its pure form until late antiquity in the struggles for contradistinctive self-definition involving Judaism, Christianity, and Gnosticism.9 Even if Moses—the “symbolic Moses”—is not to be associated with that emer-gence, the concept of the “Law” and of entering the Law by way of commitment and conversion, which is precisely what the name Moses stands for, he nevertheless laid the groundwork. It created a new form of normative identity based not on birth, place, descent, citizenship, or other biological and/or political ties but on adherence to a complex of laws, rules, and beliefs. Although it is true that Judaism never overcame the ethnical or biological determinators of belonging and identity, and that only Christianity broke with these ties, the original impulse to make identity rather than biology or politics a question of commitment, for-mation, memory, and obedience or observance can be traced back to the Deuteronomistic concept of “Moses.”
This impulse is part of that greater move of “staying back and look-ing beyond” which is the hallmark of the “Axial Age” or, to use Benja-min Schwartz’s phrase, the “Age of Transcendence,”10the act of going beyond the given. Polytheism, or “Cosmotheism,” may be characterized as a theory of the given capable of making people feel totally at home in the world. It was this principle of “feeling at home” that made poets, artists, and philosophers of the eighteenth century look back nostalgi-cally to paganism and that is already prominent in the Hermetic text I quoted at the end of chapter 2. Monotheism laid the foundations for an alternative principle of “naturalization,” or feeling at home in an invis-ible world that was not “given” but rather promised and mysteriously
emergent. This holds true both for “inclusive” (all gods are One) and
“exclusive” (no god but God) monotheism. Monotheism is the response to experiences of estrangement and alienation that made people lose their sense of feeling at home in a world that had turned hostile and in-hospitable. These were people who had been deported from their home countries; oppressed by foreign domination; and had suffered various injustices, including corruption, exploitation, wars, conquests, political and economic crises, and instability.11Hegel’s dictum that the periods of happiness constitute the empty pages in the book of history holds true not only for political history but also for the history of religion.12The Bible, it is true, is full of praise for the beauties of the world, which be-speak the greatness of its creator. Moreover, the notion of nature as the other book of God had been prominent in Christian tradition since the twelfth century. There is much to be said in support of even biblical re-ligion being concerned with making human beings feel at home in the world, placing them—being fashioned in the image of God—above all other creatures. The Hebrew Bible is polyphonic, a book of many voices, and the origins of monotheism constitute only one of these voices. It is this voice, however, that changed the Western world and constitutes the greatest cultural event in its long history.
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henever its idea of truth is conceived of as something both absolute and scripturally revealed, that is, “given,” the intolerance inherent in monotheism is irreducible. The concepts of the “absolute” and the“given” are mutually exclusive. Anything “absolute” is categorically transcendent and hidden, and anything “given” is categorically relative and open to transformation. Concrete religions such as Judaism, Chris-tianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism belong within the sphere of the
“given” and draw their legitimacy not from their (exclusive) possession of but rather from their (common) relation or aspiration toward Truth.
This concept approximates the eighteenth-century concept of religio du-plex, the distinction between popular (exoteric) and elite (esoteric) reli-gion. In its modern form, the position of popular religion is held by the various concrete religions, with their irreducible and irreconcilable dif-ferences. The position of elite religion is held by various forms of highly compatible, albeit nonconvergent, forms of religious “wisdom” or “deep religion,” as represented by such sages as Albert Schweitzer, Mahatma Gandhi, and Rabindranath Tagore. There are many concrete, or “sur-face,” religions but only one “deep” religion. This attitude toward reli-gious truth roughly corresponds to the eighteenth-century ideal of
tolerance as expressed, for instance, in Lessing’s parable of the three rings in Nathan der Weise. However, Christian theologians such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer—who rejected the term “religion” alto-gether as applied to Christianity because of its inherent plurality and ensuant relativism—claimed for Christianity itself the status of deep re-ligion. The latter, however, can never assume the form of an articulate system of norms and dogmas. Deep religion focuses on a point beyond the Mosaic Distinction between true and false religion. Surface, or con-crete, religions always exist in the plural. There is no “one religion” any more than there is “one civilization” or “one language”—and the ex-tant religions must acknowledge their status. The partial analogy of lan-guage may prove helpful. Although there is no single human lanlan-guage but rather a plurality of concrete human languages (Fr. langues), there is only a single human capacity for speech (Fr. langage). Correspondingly, although there will always be an irreducible plurality of human reli-gions, there is only one common human capacity for religion and one common search for universal truth.
In his influential book Jerusalem, or, Religious Power and Judaism (1783), Moses Mendelssohn rejects the concept of “revealed truth” with regard to Judaism:
I believe that Judaism knows nothing of a revealed religion, in the sense in which it is taken by Christians. The Israelites have a divine legislation: laws, commandments, statutes, rules of life, instruction in the will of God, and lessons how to conduct themselves in order to attain both temporal and spiritual happiness: those laws com-mandments, etc., were revealed to them through Moses, in a mi-raculous and supernatural manner; but no dogmas, no saving truths, no general self-evident propositions: Those the Lord always reveals to us, the same as to the rest of mankind, by nature, and by events; but never in spoken or written words [of revelation].13
He goes on to distinguish between three kinds of truth:
1. Religious dogmas and propositions of immutable truths of God, of his government providence, without which man can neither be enlightened nor happy. These were not forced on the belief of the people, by threats of eternal or temporal punishment, but suitably to the nature and evidence of immutable truths, recommended for rational consideration. They needed not be suggested by direct revelation, or promulgated by words or writing, which are understood only in this or that place, at this or that time. The Supreme Being revealed them all to all rational beings, by events
and by ideas, and inscribed them in their soul, in a character legible and intelligible at all times, and in all places.
2. Historical truths, or accounts of the occurrences of the primitive world, especially memoirs of the lives of the first ancestors of the nation; of their knowledge of the true correction immediately following thereon; of the covenant which God entered into with them, and his frequent promise to make their descendants a nation dedicated to himself. These historical truths, contain the groundwork of the national union; and, as historical truths, they cannot, according to their nature, be received otherwise than on trust; authority alone gives them the necessary evidence. And they were, moreover, confirmed to the nation by miracles, and supported by an authority which sufficed to place faith beyond all doubt and hesitation.
3. Laws, judgments, commandments, rules of life, which were to be peculiar to that nation; and by observing which, it was to arrive at national—as well as every single member thereof, at individual—
happiness. The lawgiver was God himself; God, not in his revelations as Creator and Preserver of the universe, but God, as Lord Protector and ally of their forefathers; as the liberator, founder, and leader, as the king and ruler of that people. And he gave the laws a sanction, than which nothing could be more solemn; he gave them publicly, and in a marvellous manner never before heard of, whereby they were imposed on the nation, and on their descendants for ever, as an unalterable duty and obligation.
These laws were revealed, that is, they were made known by the Lord, by words and in writing. Still, only the most essential part thereof was entrusted to letters; and without the unwritten laws, without explanations, limitations, and more particularly definitions, even these written laws are mostly unintelligible, or must become so in the course of time; since neither any words or written characters whatever retain their meaning unaltered, for the natural age of man. (90–95; summary and italics mine)
Mendelssohn reserves the concepts of revelation and exclusive truth for the last type of truth, the specific rules of Jewish life. This corresponds to what I call “concrete religion.” In addition to the irreducible plurality of concrete religions, there is one general human religion based on the natural revelation of immutable truths common “to all rational beings,”
corresponding to my concept of “deep religion.”
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ow can “deep religion” be practiced in modern life, and how may human beings relate to it? Certainly the eighteenth century’s way oftranslating the distinction between surface religion and deep religion into the concept of religio duplex—with its distinction between the popular or public religion of the church and the elite religiosity of secret societies—
is no longer viable. Lessing was a freemason, and his parable of the rings is based on the Masonic experience. Nevertheless, it seems fully appli-cable to our modern civilization, which lacks secret societies—at least in the eighteenth-century sense. What we need is a form of “wisdom” that enables us to look past the surface forms of concrete religions, with their irreducible differences and distinctions, and focus upon that tran-scendental point beyond these distinctions in relation to which true tolerance—that is, recognizing relativity without resorting to banality—
becomes possible. God is different not only from “gods” but also from any representation that any concrete religion can produce. It is this ab-solute divine difference that precludes any intolerant insistence on the exclusive possession of truth. However, one must not forget that it was biblical monotheism that taught Westerners the divine difference.