Abraham and the West

We start with these questions for reflection:

Does the European mind rotate around the Absolute?

Did it ever?

Is it centered around it? Was it ever?

Is everything relative to that Absolute?

Everything such as church, family, country, nationality, color of skin, et cetera.

Was it ever the case when everything was relative to the Absolute?

Now, in another way, and it cannot be overemphasized for we are trying to do justice for both Abraham's Monotheism and Western culture, we say this :

The Truth that shalt set everybody free which God entrusted to Abraham before the Law of Moses, the Way of Jesus and Muhammad’s Shariah, that Truth, has it ever been introduced to the West as Monotheism per se?

That is:

God as such and Man as such;

God as the Absolute, the Infinite;

The Beyond Being, Becoming, Existing, Names, Numbers, Images, Space, Thought, Time, Gender, et cetera, yet the Source of them all;

The Mono Theos, the One God Is, Is Not , and beyond any Is-ing all-together.

Known, Un-Known and ultimately Un-Knowable.

Creator of Good and Evil, Heaven and Earth and what lies between and beyond them.

And Man, as Adam, as Anthropos, as God’s Agent of Transcendence in God’s Scheme of Creation.

God’s Steward in God’s Kingdom and the Vice-Regent of God’s Regency over All.

Man (he and she) is a fellow sister and brother human-being no matter how different they may seem to be from “us”.

Has the above been understood and practiced by the West?

Was it even introduced to it?

Unfortunately the answer is a resounding: No.

For judging by history, Europeans had never been adequately trained in this doctrine of Monotheism on a mass scale, neither in its exoteric practical aspect that is the right doctrinal and ceremonial formulation of how to walk the talk within One God-One Adam frame of ref­erence in the world, nor initiated in its esoteric specula­tive one that contemplates the mysteries of God’s Wisdom.

The Jews did not bother to make it their task to preach Love God & Neighbor to the gentiles, for they had already fallen into the Henotheistic trap of monopolizing god and nationalizing prophecy. That is, the One God-One Adam principle of the Greatest Commandments became: My God Yahweh and My Adam the Jew.

And the Council of Nicaea left no hope for Abrahamic Monotheism to reach the European mind unadulterated by equating Jesus with God.

What the Western­ers ended up with in their understanding of Abraham’s vision was a “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not” Law of Moses, which they did not need to follow, for supposedly Pauline teachings had already told them they had a Way to salvation in the “Incarnated God” : Jesus Christ.

Now add to that the troubles that came ashore between the two, Christians and Jews, plus the confrontation between Eu­rope and emergent Islam, then one should be able to construct the background of the past and present absence of the Abrahamic monotheistic perception in the West.

We say Abraham and the West never got a chance for a fair hand­shake. And we stress the fact that the West was left untrained in how to im­plement Abraham’s vision into practice by starting from One God and One Adam.

Hence, returning to our agitators of "Islam and the West," we say they fell short on understanding Islam's legacy as an Abrahamic continuation to what came before it.

In the final analysis, their oversight reflects the whole Western frame of mind about the subject of Monotheism per se, of Abraham's and beyond.

It is in the confusion about Abraham's Monotheism lies the whole issue of why the confusion about Islam in the West.

For it is in Abra­ham's perception that we should start seeking the answer as to what he and his grand­ kids were all about within the context of the Ancient Near East, the area between the Nile and the Euphrates.

And so, we close this post as we started it, with reflections:

Did the West ever get to touch Abraham’s Monotheism without its affiliation with the Judaic Law and the Christian Way?

Was Monotheism-as-such, as a doctrine unto itself, ever introduced to the West?

Is it not the time for the West to ask itself anew:

What is Monotheism?

* * *

There is a third form of human faith [beside polytheism and henotheism] with which we are acquainted in the West, more as hope than as datum, more perhaps as a possibility than as an actuality, yet also as an actuality that has modified at certain emergent periods our natural social faith and our polytheism.

In all the times and areas of our Western history this faith has struggled with its rivals, without becoming triumphant save in passing moments and in the clarified intervals of personal existence.

We look back longingly at times to some past age when, we think, confidence in the One God was the pervasive faith of men; for instance, to early Christianity, or to the church society of the Middle Ages, or to early Protestantism, or to Puritan New England, or to the pious nineteenth century.

But when we study these periods we invariably find in them a mixture of the faith in the One God with social faith [henotheism] and polytheism; and when we examine our longings we often discover that what we yearn for is the security of the closed society with its social confidence and social loyalty.

It is very questionable, despite many protestations to the contrary, despite the prevalence of self-pity among some modern men because "God is dead," that anyone has ever yearned for radical faith in the One God.

H. Richard Niebuhr, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, p. 31