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Person, attribute, and “affecting presence”
The term ‘person’ has a many-layered set of philosophical and theological meanings. In order to use the word in the context of Mesopotamian religion, it is important to give it a generalized meaning that can be accepted outside of the philosophical milieu or a Christian framework. History can address and assess perception, but not the reality behind the perception.
The term ‘affecting presence’ (as developed in Armstrong 1971) can be helpful to this end. It refers to the perception that some tribes studied by Armstrong have of a “source”, which they do not call “god” or “fate”, but which points beyond, toward something that is felt as a presence affecting them. It is an interesting concept because it implies an active reality (not passive as in fate) that affects people in a coherent way.
What we might call a “cult” would be in juxtaposition or contrast with this presence. A cult tends to be short-lived, and exists within a self-contained group, whereas traditions like those studied by Armstrong, or the biblical tradition, are coherent in time and space. They are communicated across time, and also beyond their immediate geographical sphere. On the contrary, a cult is short-lived and dies out. The term “affecting presence” speaks to the reality of what makes this continuity possible. We may name it god, and hypothesize that there is a person behind this “affecting” that affects us.
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Polytheistic perception of the “affecting presence”
While the “affecting presence” is a theme common to both polytheism in Mesopotamia and monotheism in Israel, the perception is different in the two systems. The gods in polytheism are attributes of a generic divine reality that is unknown. The attribute becomes personified. See Jacobsen’s Treasures of Darkness, especially chapter 4. Excerpts here.
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Monotheistic perception of the “affecting presence”
In the monotheistic perception, divine reality includes everything. Therefore it is the inferred cause of the perception of a presence: it is a subject that includes all the attributes that can be named, and more besides. It cannot be fragmented. Another way to put it would be to say that the attributes are in the perception, not in the subject itself, as can be seen in the notion of a living god, a faithful god, which point to the dynamic nature of this subject. The “living god” of Israel is the trigger behind multiple examples, such as the story of Abraham, Isaac, Job… and thus demonstrates coherence in time. Another interesting characteristic of this way of conceiving the divine is that there is always a promise that is realized in ways that are different than the initial understanding of what the promise means. The story of Isaac is an emblematic case of this. Paradoxically, the more problems there are, and the more breaches of trust, the more the “affecting presence” in Israel is felt to be faithful. This quality is lacking in Mesopotamian polytheism.
The only place in Mesopotamian literature that approches the biblical perception in this sense is in Ludlul, as I argued in “Job and Not”. In Ludlul, there is a sense of giving personality to fate. In many other places, syncretism is present, and some gods take on the characteristics of others. But it is always a question of assuming the characteristics of others, of merging things that are distinct. It is not a primary source, the unique source that unifies everything else, as in the biblical perspective. One salient example is in morality: the gods of polytheism expect only a service; morality is not intrinsically linked to the gods. In the biblical perception, God expects moral behavior and a response of personal love. This is where the notion of personality comes across particularly clearly. This notion is coherent in time, even within moral incoherence, and grounds my proposal of a semiotic understanding of God and monotheism which goes beyond a merely lexical overlap, to refer to a substantial difference.
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Agency
Refer to Critique, under Themes, “Agency”.
Materiality of divine agency: see Pongratz-Leisten 2015.
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