AFAICT, even though monotheism is less fundamental, it has outperformed polytheism in the past millennia or so, so the vast majority of religious people in the world (at least outside India) can be considered monotheistic. Even the “official” Hindu belief is that all the gods are emanations of one true god, which doesn’t seem to necessarily be the historical view. What about monotheism makes it so preferable to polytheism? I would guess that polytheism makes more logical sense from a pre-scientific POV, and most of the change happened before modern scientific understanding. Secondarily, why isn’t dualism more common? It seems to be more coherent than monotheism and it doesn’t have the same theological problems such as the problem of evil.
AHQ: Why did monotheism generally replace polytheism?
- Thread starter KaiserWilhelm
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A lot of polytheistic religions are henotheistic, acknowledging worshiping solely a supreme deity but acknowledging the existence of others. early Judaism is believed to have been henotheistic, but later shedded the other dieties, which leads to the most important reason IMO that polytheism and henotheism largely subsided after antiquity: exclusivity. Abrahamic faiths are very cut and dry on the definition of their believers, which makes it very important for the state to support and propagate, as it gives believers specific rights and privileges. Constantine successfully was able to redefine the meaning of “Roman”, those who were not followers of the Great Church were not Roman and could not be Roman. One Church for One Emperor.
Now from a historical context: the Jewish population during the early Roman empire was significantly larger than many are led to believe, and hence the public also had significantly large awareness of the Jewish religion than we are lead to believe. Jews werent just located in Judaea, but they had large populations in pretty much every city and town in the Roman East. In Colossae, the public worshipped the Abrahamic angels. In large parts of Anatolia thr public worshipped Zeus Hypistus, basically Greek Yahweh. Greek Roman literature and the Bible also both mention the class of believers known as “God-fearers”, followers of Judaism who were not Jews because of circumcision or other beliefs who eventually became Christian due to the Paul’s teaching of the New Covenant. Thus from this high general awareness the Church could rapidly expand and reach a high level of organisation. Furthermore Neoplatonists even pushed towards a philosophical monotheism with their belief in the Monad, so the educated class even had basic awareness of monotheism as well.
For Islam, many people use Jizya as a reason, but i personally disagree especially in the . Islam propogated because of massive changes in agricultural practices in the Near East and Mediterranean that were spread by the Arab conquests. Areas that had never been cultivated or inefficiently cultivated were settled, and the settlers converted to the faith of their masters. The perfect example of this is Bengal, where the the population became Muslim because of the area essentially being an empty jungle before the Sultans began clearing the land. A similar process happened in Sicily, where the Arab conquest restored the island to being a breadbasket and of course it rapidly became Muslim in the course of 2 generations.
There is no "official" Hindu belief because there is no "official" Hinduism.
Polytheism was systematically and deliberately eliminated through various means; conquest, economic pressure, colonialism, and so on. The spread of monotheism wasn't natural. In India, for example, Muslim dynasties conquered nearly the whole subcontinent and forcibly converted a ton of people. Conversion by the sword was very common - look at Charlemagne in Saxony, a thirty year conquest.
This idea that "monotheism is inevitable" is just stupid and ahistorical. There were henotheistic cults within polytheistic religions and some random psuedo-monotheist offshoots here and there but there is no pattern showing polytheist religions coalescing around single deities. Christianity and Islam spread through blood and politics, not because their ideas were inherently more sensible.
Practicing Christians usually know that as this is one of the better known Bible passages:
We are Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya near Cyrene, as well as travelers from Rome, 11 both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs, yet we hear them speaking in our own tongues of the mighty acts of God.
As far as monotheism vs polytheism, it's easier to keep up with just one deity. That's going to create some pressure toward choosing one and sticking with it.
I think it's less about polytheism vs monotheism (there are many shades of degrees between the two, like dualism, monolatrism, etc) and more about orthopraxic religion having significant issues in competition with orthodoxic religions - religions in order to be competitive in multiple political settings outside of their original one must have a more universalist scope of relevance.
I don't think Monotheism replaced Polytheism specifically because it's monotheistic.
After all Judaism and Zoroastrianism never really replaced the polytheistic religions they coexisted with.
I think Christianity and Islam doctrinally speaking did a better job at appealing to the masses than most polytheistic religions did
After all Judaism and Zoroastrianism never really replaced the polytheistic religions they coexisted with.
I think Christianity and Islam doctrinally speaking did a better job at appealing to the masses than most polytheistic religions did
Zoroastrianism destroyed/absorbed whatever pre-Zoroastrian polytheistic beliefs (probably) existed on the Iranian Plateau so thoroughly and effectively that we mostly know they're there because of comparisons with Hinduism and traces in the existing Zoroastrian documents (although this is strongly amplified by the fact that a lot of Zoroastrianism was destroyed/absorbed by Islam...). It would be like working out what the Greco-Roman pantheons were like through comparisons with the Scandinavians and a few saints who seemed to be remnants of pre-Christian deities.
It didn't really. Advaita Vedanta is a philosophical school, it isn't a mass movement like Shaivism or Vaishnavism or the worship of Rama or Krishna. Christianity triumphed over Rome because it explicitly combined the two into a compelling mythos and organization which captured the minds and hearts of Rome. Islam as well triumphed because of the same combination of mass movement with the idea of one god.
Monotheism is both simpler and less reductionist. Dualism is fits too well and leaves no agency to man, nor room for mystery and depth.
My question is: how did Islam convert West Africa and the East Indies? I'm honestly curious, since as far as I've read and heard, those two regions became Muslim relatively peacefully. Also, how did Ireland become so deeply Catholic without the sword? Or were there swords involved for all of these? IDK, honestly.
Perso-Arab traders intermarried with the locals and set up statelets in the Indonesian archipelago. The population of the region was substantially lower than it is today and much more based on city polities, with the power of the nexus city being the key to control of the flow of trade and power in the region. Once Malacca began to rise, the only way for east-west trade required Islamic traders and sailors. Similar to what I said about the agricultural expansion being key to the spread in the MENA region, the foundation of new cities along the Indian Ocean trade route and the clearing of forest created a new population that was entirely Muslim in fresh land. The rulers, either of Perso-Arab descent or local descent, ruled through Islam, permitting syncretism and using Islamic kingship values to hustify rule.
Hm, interesting. I always thought Srivijaya and Majapahit were at least as strong as the statelets that succeeded them. Hm...
Are we pretending most of East Asia and Mainland SEA doesn't exist?
A notable exception being Bali, who remained Hindu mixed with traditional beliefs, mostly because Bali consolidated rather than declining during the 15th century. Local legends says an emissary from Mecca tried to convert the Balinese king, but failed to shave the king with a blunt razor as many "Islamic miracles" of the time, unimpressed the King turned him down and remained Hindu.
The them of collapse and change is also echoed in the Mainland, where the mostly Hindu Khmer Empire gave way to Therevada Buddhism.
For further reading take Cambridge History of Southeast Asia and Java in the Fourteenth Century.
Just expanding a bit on @Lothal Islamic expansion in the Malay world also involved other factors, it is easy to just assume people in the former Majapahit and Srivijaya were Hindu and/or Buddhist, but evidence show that most the people were in fact closer to naturalistic animism than an established religion like those, in this context with the decline and collapse of the Hindu-Buddhist the commonfolk were disillusioned with the former elite's beliefs, enter Islam, a magical religion with a weird "singular" god, an "arcane" language like Arabic and deep ties with the traditional Malay trade partners in India and the Middle East, the Malays also had some weird fixation on the Alexander and Rome, with Iskandar Shah of Malacca being a notable example, further contacts with Rome (the Ottomans) further gave credibility to the new Islamic faith.
A notable exception being Bali, who remained Hindu mixed with traditional beliefs, mostly because Bali consolidated rather than declining during the 15th century. Local legends says an emissary from Mecca tried to convert the Balinese king, but failed to shave the king with a blunt razor as many "Islamic miracles" of the time, unimpressed the King turned him down and remained Hindu.
The them of collapse and change is also echoed in the Mainland, where the mostly Hindu Khmer Empire gave way to Therevada Buddhism.
For further reading take Cambridge History of Southeast Asia and Java in the Fourteenth Century.
Thinking about Zoroastrianism as the most prominent dualistic religion, even it seemed to turn toward monotheism later on, with Zurvanism. Which brings me to...
I'm not so sure about this, since henotheistic Zurvanism, postulating a single creator deity from which both Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu spawned, also became a harshly deterministic and fatalistic worldview, whereas classical dualistic Mazdaism is very insistent about free will.
the Cham followed the exact same process going from Theravada to syncro-Islam, and even Cambodia had an lIslamic kesder in the mid 1600s. The Phillipines are a notable example of the process of Islamisation being incomplete as Islam failed to organise enough before the arrival of the Spanish outside of Maguindanao. Delay the arrival of the Spanish trade galleons by like 20 years and chances are Luzon or at least Manilla will be Islamic.
"Zurvanism" as a distinct cult from mainstream Mazda-worship is really just a dead horse on Iranology that refuses to die, there is no evidence of Zurvan being any sort of cult in the Sasanian Empire, or evidence of "monotheistic" Zoroastrianism at the time for what matters.
This Iranica article speaks better than me.
True... though as a counter to that, Zurvanism seems much more strictly dualist than those who consider Ahura Mazda supreme. Also, there's Manichaeism which is also dualist and goes hard on the idea of the material world being evil and the spirit being good.
Manila, maybe, but I doubt Islam would spread that far in 20 years. Hell, the 19th century would have probably seen most of Luzon remain pagan if this land were left to its own devices.
It wasn't always the sword - I said that in my post. There were economic factors, political factors, and so on as well. For example Scandinavia wasn't invaded and converted, but they were relatively isolated and it benefited their rulers to become Christians to have better access to political marriages and trade.
Edit: Point being that Christianity wasn't chosen in these regions because it was spiritually superior in some way, it was just pragmatic. The introduction of the clergy is what ultimately transformed the spiritual landscape. People didn't decide one day "you know what, those Christians make sense, God is the one and only, praise Jebus!" The king turned Christian, traders turned Christian, their families turned Christian, and the clergy did the rest.
West Africa was mostly converted via trade and colonialism.
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If you think that you can save people's souls by converting them to your faith, it both makes you more likely to proselytize and it gives potential believers an incentive to convert (you'll be rewarded in the afterlife). That applies to both Christianity and Islam but a religion doesn't have to be monotheistic to spread that way.
I agree, though I wouldn't say conversion is ever 'just' pragmatic. It's usually more nuanced than that, and the pragmatic reasons mix with the spiritual reasons in many different ways.