The statue of Emperor Constantine will not be removed from outside York Minster. Credit: Loop Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Towards the end of his life — and while suffering from throat cancer in London, having fled from the Nazis — Sigmund Freud embarked upon his most controversial and, to some, weirdest book: Moses and Monotheism (1939). Moses, he argued, wasn’t Jewish at all. He was Egyptian. The whole story about him being hidden in the bulrushes by his Jewish mother, discovered by the Pharaoh’s daughter and brought up as an Egyptian prince, was an elaborate and unconvincing cover story to disguise the simple truth that Moses was, in fact, one of the hated Egyptian overlords. Moreover, Freud contends, the monotheism that Jews regard as their own principle discovery, was, in fact, borrowed from the Egyptians.
Quite understandably, many Jews find Freud’s highly speculative account of their origins deeply offensive. The whole exodus story is supposed to be about how the Jewish people escaped slavery in Egypt and discovered their freedom in the promised land. This story has inspired oppressed people the world over. Exodus freedom was the story that was turned into song and kept the flame of hope alive for African American slaves as they dreamed of justice. The idea that this exodus revolution was itself led by one of the hated overlords, by the Pharaoh’s son himself, is never going to be a popular idea. And Freud had precious little evidence — Biblical or otherwise — to back it up.
It was the Palestinian writer Edward Said who helped me understand Freud’s most difficult text. In a brilliant lecture, ‘Freud and the Non-European’ given at Freud’s old house — now the Freud Museum in Hampstead — in 2003, Said warned us not to expect Moses and Monotheism to be tidy. Freud maintained an “irascible transgressiveness” even towards the end of his life. And Moses and Monotheism is grumpily and defiantly incomplete, messy, confused even.
But intriguingly, the form matches the argument. For, according to Said, what Freud was trying to do in describing Moses as Egyptian was to undermine the idea that Jewish identity — or any other identity for that matter — has uncomplicated origins. To describe Moses as Egyptian is to deny the idea that there is such a thing as some ‘pure’ origin.
Psychoanalysis, among other things, is in the business of exploring the stories we tell about who we are. In his last written work, Freud is warning us that these stories will never be neat, urging us to be distrustful of the desire for uncomplicated or uncorrupted beginnings.
Said writes:
“even for the most definable, the most identifiable, the most stubborn communal identity — for Freud, this was the Jewish identity — there are inherent limits that prevent it from being fully incorporated into one, and only one, Identity.”
He goes on:
“Freud’s symbol of those limits was that the founder of Jewish identity was himself a non-European Egyptian. In other words, identity cannot be thought or worked through itself alone; it cannot constitute or even imagine itself without that radical originary break or flaw which will not be repressed, because Moses was Egyptian, and therefore always outside the identity inside which so many have stood, and suffered — and later, perhaps, even triumphed.
The strength of this thought is, I believe, that it can be articulated in and speak to other besieged identities as well — not through dispensing palliatives such as tolerance and compassion but, rather, by attending to it as a troubling, disabling, destabilizing secular wound — the essence of the cosmopolitan, from which there can be no recovery, no state of resolved or Stoic calm, and no utopian reconciliation even with itself.”
Moses and Monotheism is intended as a spanner in the works of the perfect story of where we come from. It was the argument that came to mind when I took Tom Holland’s Confession a few years ago. Holland made the fascinating point that the empty sands of Arabia present a kind of pure and perfect beginning out of which a religion like Islam, concerned especially with purity, might readily imagine itself to have emerged from.
The way Holland explained it, the desert felt like the Islamic equivalent of the virgin womb: undefiled, pure, holy. The perfect place for a perfect beginning. And in challenging this account of Islam’s origins, as Holland did in his controversial 2012 documentary Islam: The Untold Story, he was courting a similar hostility to that which Freud received after describing Moses as one of the hated Egyptian overlords.
One of the things I have especially appreciated about the Church of England is that a narrative about purity of origins is not available to it. The Church of England was created because Henry VIII was a megalomaniacal sex-pest whose ego was so huge and fragile he would take no lessons from the bishop of Rome. In the course of its foundation, this new church was complicit with the destruction of the monasteries and an infrastructure of care that sustained the poorest in our society. The Church of England was born in shame.
And what is true about the Church of England is doubly true of the Anglican Communion. The worldwide Anglican Communion was the religious by-product of British imperial expansion. The church may like to tell the story of William Wilberforce and its part in the struggle against slavery. But many of its clergy owned slaves, and one of its largest mission agencies was funded for over a century by a slave plantation in Barbados. Slaves in that plantation were branded on the chest with the word “Society” to indicate they were the property of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Income from that plantation was used to fund missionary activity converting Africans to Christianity.
So why do I say that this shameful past is something that I have “appreciated” about being a priest in the Church of England? It was a hard word to pick. But Christianity is fundamentally the story of redemption. That is what is so appealing about it to a sinner like me. And redemption doesn’t work by pretending we have a beautiful past.
I’m quite sure Freud was wrong about Moses. But I think he was exactly right about people. And the reason I “appreciate” psychoanalysis nearly as much as I do the Church is that it works by the uncovering of a shameful past, something we deny to ourselves, of what Said calls the “wound”, so as, at the very least, to help us to find some way of facing it, of living with it. Many will disagree, but I also think of psychoanalysis as a quasi-redemptive exercise.
So let’s not pull down the statues to our shameful past. Both religiously and psychologically, they remind us of how much work we have to do, of the complicity of the faithful with the forces of evil, of how even our best intentions can be requisitioned by darkness. From here there is “no state of resolved or Stoic calm, and no utopian reconciliation even with itself”. That’s too easy. We can never have that, nor do we deserve it. No, we seek redemption. And we must search for that while surrounded by the statues that condemn us.
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SubscribeGiles, I think you have failed to notice that the BLM movement sees whiteness of skin as an extra original sin. It sees it as an added layer on top of what comes with the usual package of being human. There is no redemption for it, there is no atonement, no contrition, Christ did not die so that we might be forgiven it. There can be no healing.
If this were not the case the BLM movement would recognise the tribal violence that saw blacks selling each other into slavery. It would acknowledge blacks also owned slaves. It would acknowledge that whites owned white slaves. It would acknowledge blacks are currently being sold in slave markets in Libya. It would acknowledge they were working in cobalt mines. It would recognise they were being traded from parts of Pakistan and Bangladesh to labour in Dubai. It would recognise the on going problems with slavery in India. It would recognise that black males were castrated in the Ottoman Empire, which is why there is no black diaspora in that part of the world. And it would be calling on the Churches to use their current power in the world to bring these things to an end. It might even be calling for an end to people smuggling which sees people trafficked over the Channel and across the Mediterranean.
But BLM does not interest itself in slavery in general, or people trafficking, because there is no compensation to be won from the Turks or the African tribes or those making money on the current Libyan slave markets, or the Mafia running trafficking rackets in the Middle East and Britain and Europe. BLM is only interested in your white ‘liberal’ guilt because the Church is wealthy. It doesn’t require your redemption. If the C of E believed it could ever be redeemed from its sin of historic slave owning then it would believe there would come a time when it could stop paying compensation. That is why the sin is not spoken of in terms of the historic acts of enslavement, but in terms of skin colour, ‘white privilege’ BLM have no interest in acknowledging there could be any means by which the Church could make full amends, there must be no closure. That would be killing the goose that BLM believes will go on laying the golden egg forever.
Gosh, you really took us on a long roundabout trip there. Don’t worry, no one is placing any kind of personal responsibility for the slave trade on you as an individual, relax.
A couple of months ago, a group of policemen in the USA asphyxiated a black American citizen in the broad light of day in front of of witnesses. The BLM protests are mainly about the outrage at that kind of thing regularly happening and worse, the culprits getting away with a slap in the wrist.
On top of that, we have the fact that the USA were largely built on the foundation of the work done by African slaves and the fruits of that work still now are benefitting white America disproportionately.
Now, of course you can go on a trip of the dark recesses of the human heart, black and white, and the obscurities of the African slave system to quieten down the feeling that actually, you don’t like BLM that much but some can see what you’re doing here.
Well I am glad someone has said it. I have a strong Jewish identity but it is more steeped in a familial history from the 19th century (not sure how to get back to the 18th). As historians have pointed out there is actually no hard evidence to back up the migration of Jews from Egypt to Canaan. What is intriguing is that Moses went out of his way when he chose the Sinai route. If you look at a map of ancient Israel and where the Jewish population dwelled there is a much more obvious and shorter route to the Promised Land. As for Henry VIII, as an historian myself, it is clear that the Anglican Church’s foundation was based on a desire to move on. Divorce and murder seemed the easiest way out.
But Henry VIII wasn’t a sex pest: he needed a male heir.
Returned from the Babylonian captivity around 530 BCE the priestly caste set to work creating a monotheistic theocracy out of the disparate remnant of Judah, creating a centralized cult and mythology. Similarly, after the barbarian war lords of the disparate independent fiefdoms had finally shaken down at Bosworth field to the last man standing, Shakespeare set to work mythologizing an English history to justify the Tudor succession and create a centralized civic religion.
I accept the issue of the flawed ideal of a “Pure Birth” for one’s narrative, but as a side issue, the idea of Moses being a gentile is just silly in respect of the mythological values of the OT stories pointing to fulfilment in the NT. Especially after reading How God Became King by N.T.Wright for the 3rd time. Whatever his factual identity, Moses role in the story is Jewish! We need to learn how to see the Christian story as a real and inseparable expansion of the Jewish story. God is not Jewish (!) but the Jews are the prototype, the model, of God’s vehicle of blessing to the world. Their temple is the prototype of intersection of the created and uncreated realms. Their promises are fulfilled in Christ. In the sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Here’s Moses”, just as in healing and raising the dead he says, “Here’s Elijah”, just as in breaking the Sabbath he says, “Here’s King David”, etc. etc.
Self-hating, atheist Jewish founder of psychoanalysis and Palestinian activist philosopher say that the origins of Judaism are fake. No sh*t Sherlock. Otherwise Fraser’s main thesis is right on the money; redemption, forgiveness. Nothing else will work.
“So let’s not pull down the statues to our shameful past.”
This is the paradox: the surge of iconoclasm is being led by progressives. But these same progressives have a bizarre obsession to scour the past and crucify”or should I say, cancel”our ancestors by today’s moral and social standards.
The concept of progress operates on a simple formula: past=worse, present=better. To claim to be progressive, but then sanitizing your past is sawing off the branch you’re sitting on.
To the small extent that the purpose of statues even has anything to do with serving as a moral barometer, they are far more tributes to our progress than they are threats to it.
Which begs the question, is iconoclasm really about progress or power?
Origins do depend on co-mingling, it’s true, but did we need Sigmund ‘Stopped Clock’ Freud to tell us this? The story of the baby cast adrift in a reed basket goes right back to Sargon of Akkad.
Freud had already had some whacky ideas before his final decline; see for instance his numerological collaborations with Dr Wilhelm Fliess. Completely and utterly hatstand.
“The Church of England was created because Henry VIII was a megalomaniacal sex-pest whose ego was so huge and fragile he would take no lessons from the bishop of Rome. “
At this point I stopped reading – is this a serious article in a serious forum?
I do wonder.
I’m Catholic and would add to Henry’s charms syphilitic and likely brain-damaged; ‘sex-pest’ is too kind.
That was a bit sensationalist, wasn’t it..
Well, yes it is, dealing as it does with the human need for redemption, be that expressed in religious terms or in more down-to-earth practical and reforming ways, neither of these being best served by denying our imperfect origins, or pretending we are better in our time than certain commemorated forebears were in theirs. No need to stop reading just because of a little bit of OTT journalism!
Funny that but Hitler declared that Jesus wasn’t a Jew (but Paul of Tarsus – the inventor of Christianity, certainly was). Many Jews accept that the Exodus is a fairly tale in the same way a majority of Christians view the Virgin Birth. As for the crimes of the Church – getting through the 10 substantial volumes of Karlheinz Deschner’s “Die Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums” (The Criminal History of Christianity) is a bit of a tall order for me. But it says it all in the title. If Christianity were a political party – with a history like that – who would join it?
Wow…..just a few more steps and the Anglican Communion can follow Sabbatai Zevi down the road to redemption through sin.
By the time his career was winding down, Freud was more concerned with making damned sure that his community would thenceforth – recognize that their guiding scripture would be the Talmud and not the Torah. That he was successful in this effort was promptly proven out by the Frankfort School, which picked up the torch and has been burning down Western Civilization ever since.
…and, of course, Jesus Christ was a Jew.
..only on His mother’s side 🙂
Giles,
You have forgotten that the Pope often allowed a King to divorce – particularly if there was no heir ( or male heir). There were no doubt various excuses, but I suspect that the main concern was, that with no male heir, the risk of civil war was real.
In the case of Henry, it is important to remember that The Pope could not act independently. The Emperor Charles V (Catherin’s nephew) had an army in Rome.
Finkelstein & Asher’s THE BIBLE UNEARTHED proves that Moses, the Exodus story, is fiction cum proto-plagiarism, demonstrating Heidegger’s thesis that Dasein is interpretation through & through. But what isn’t self-mythology is (Merleau-Ponty) “body”. Dasein has to cope with the thrownness of his own body, “that awkward bear that goes along with me.” So he covers the embarrassment with a redemptive narrative. To its credit doctrine and scripture have always thematised “fallenness” (Original sin) as a primordial structure of Dasein.