Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jan Assmann is Professor of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg. He is the author of many books, of which the following have been translated into English: Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt (2005), The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs (2002), The Search for God in Ancient Egypt (2001), and Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (1998).

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RELIGION AND CULTURAL MEMORY

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface........................................................................................................................ixIntroduction: What is "Cultural Memory"?.......................................................................................11. Invisible Religion and Cultural Memory......................................................................................312. Monotheism, Memory, and trauma: Reflections on Freud's Book on Moses........................................................463. Five Stages on the Road to the Canon: Tradition and Written Culture in Ancient Israel and Early Judaism.....................634. Remembering in Order to Belong: Writing, Memory, and Identity...............................................................815. Cultural Texts Suspended Between Writing and Speech.........................................................................1016. Text and Ritual: The Meaning of the Media for the History of Religion.......................................................1227. Officium Memoriae : Ritual as the Medium of Thought.........................................................................1398. A Life in Quotation: Thomas Mann and the Phenomenology of Cultural Memory...................................................1559. Egypt in Western Memory.....................................................................................................178Notes..........................................................................................................................191

Chapter One

1. Preliminary Remarks

In recent decades it has become increasingly clear that the concept of "tradition" does not reveal its own meaning in a transparent way. Concepts such as traditio, paradosis, and gabbalah refer only to the process, the technique of handing down and receiving as such, without reference to the driving forces, interests, and needs that motivate this incessant labor of passing things on and adopting them. Two concepts that have been placed in the foreground in research in the sociology of culture in recent decades appear to me to be especially well suited to shedding new light on the problem of the function of tradition. One is the concept of "invisible religion," introduced by Thomas Luckmann. The other is the concept of memory that has been made so productive for cultural theory in the writings of Freud, Warburg, Halbwachs, and others, particularly in the form of "cultural memory" that we find, for example, in the volume edited by Aleida Assmann and Dietrich Harth with the title Mnemosyne. Both concepts refer to the knowledge shared by a group, the question of its extent, elaboration, and transmission. The concept of religion highlights the binding character of this knowledge; the concept of memory emphasizes its ability to establish connections and constitute identity.

Invisible religion relates to individual religions much as "language" relates to particular languages. It designates the general, functionally determined framework that the individual religions fill out in their own particular way. To that extent the analogy with language is valid. But in the case of religion there is a further factor that has no parallel in language. Invisible religion is not merely an abstract function standing above the many specific religious systems. It also exists within a given culture as a higher and ultimately validating framework of meaning for the different fields of cultural practice, communication, and reflection that have emerged as distinct forms within this framework or "world picture" and to which this "visible religion" belongs as one field among others specific to this culture. Thus Luckmann's concept of an invisible religion leads to a distinction within the concept of religion. For simplicity's sake we can label them IR and VR. IR is the higher, invisible religion that determines the relationship of the individual to society and the "world." VR is the religion that has become visible in the specific institutions of the cult and the priesthood and that is responsible for the tasks involved in transactions with the sacred and the administration of the sacred properties associated with them.

What Luckmann makes clear in his essay is twofold: (1) The failure to make this distinction between IR and VR leads to an ethnocentric narrowing of our conception of religion, since we tacitly base our definition of religion on the familiar characteristics of VR and thereby mistakenly "identify religion with one of its particular forms" (2). We can speak of processes of secularization, loss of validity, and marginalization only with regard to VR-that is to say, the religion of the institutionalized churches-but not with regard to IR.

The following contribution is concerned with this intracultural tension that we have described as the tension between IR and VR. With Luckmann we understand by IR "symbolic universes in general," and by VR, a "religious cosmos in particular" (43), and inquire into the forms of its social objectivation. I would like to begin with the example of the ancient Egyptian conceptual world and attempt to show how both Luckmann's distinction and the resulting tension between the comprehensive and the specific can be clearly seen. In the process I shall treat the concepts "invisible religion" and "cultural memory" as largely synonymous. I then wish to take a further step and sketch in the transformations of cultural memory that emerge from specific applications of writing.

2. Invisible and Visible Religion in Ancient Egypt: "The Egyptian Triangle"

Ancient Egyptian culture confronts us with a model that explicitly fleshes out Luckmann's distinction between visible and invisible religion. That is surprising because on the basis of our own religious tradition we would have supposed that visible religion-VR-would claim a competence, indeed a monopoly of interpretation that includes IR too, in other words, the whole "world" as the totality of reality and the norms and values contained in it. We might have supposed therefore that the norms that govern the conduct of the individual and his orientation in the world, and the purely theoretical distinction between IR and VR in the concrete conceptual world of the Egyptians, would have collapsed into a compact religious concept. That is the precise opposite of what happened. What, after reading Luckmann's essay, we might think of as specific to modernity, namely the drifting apart of visible and invisible religion, turns out to characterize an early stage of culture. Looked at from the vantage point of Egypt, the cultural process in fact runs in the opposite direction, toward a progressive unification of religion. The initial differentiation between invisible religion, which is responsible for a view of the world as a whole and is not capable of being institutionalized, and visible religion as one of the institutions responsible for keeping the world going, gives way to a model that makes the institutions of visible religion responsible for the universe.

The Egyptians had a concept that comes close to what Luckmann calls invisible religion: maat. Maat signifies the principle of a universal harmony that manifests itself in the cosmos as order and in the world of human beings as justices Such concepts exist also in other cultures to describe the totality of meaningful order on the highest plane of abstraction. Examples are the Greek concept kosmos, the Indian dharma, and the Chinese tao. What distinguishes the ancient Egyptian idea of maat is its coupling with political power. The king is responsible for ensuring that maat rules on earth. Without the state, the symbolic universe would collapse. However, the state is not the institutionalization of maat. This is not capable of being institutionalized or objectified, that is, codified. What we are confronted by is a hidden theme that manifests itself in its success, not a fully articulated norm. What maat is can be gleaned from the texts of the wisdom literature where it is presented casuistically, not apodictically; it is not found in a code of religious or juridical rules in the narrower sense.

This framework for a meaningful order that the king is supposed to uphold breaks down into two opposing cultural spheres of "law" and "cult." These are the spheres in which maat-which is otherwise a higher, invisible form and as such is not capable of being institutionalized-is made visible. The text that unfolds this conception deals in a very fundamental way with the relationship between Re, the sun god and the god of creation, and the king:

Re has installed the king on the earth of the living for ever and ever so that he may give justice to mankind, and please the gods, so that he may create maat and drive out isfet. He (the king) brings divine sacrifices to the gods and offerings to the dead.

This text distinguishes between "law" and "cult," the "moral and legal" cosmos and the "religious cosmos" as the two spheres through which the kings uphold the world, and both are brought together in the higher concept of making maat a reality. The king-the political order, the "state"-has been placed on earth by the Creator himself with the general task of bringing maat-justice, truth, order-into being and expelling its opposite, isfet-violence, lies, and chaos-which normally reigns supreme on earth. It is this that I would like to call religion in the broader sense, IR. Here religion is not contrasted with some "secular" order or other, but rather stands for order as opposed to all forms of disorder. That is the first, primordial distinction. In Egyptian terms it is the contrast between maat and isfet. Maat contains the idea of the all-inclusive divine or religious foundation of all order. On this plane religion can be equated with order as such. Here sacred order is not opposed to profane order, but order is sacred as such, in contrast to disorder. All order is sacred. We can see this from the example of the order of time. For us it is self-evident that both profane everyday time and ecclesiastical time have their order. We may even believe that profane time is more strictly regulated by hours, minutes, and seconds than the religious order of time. Formerly, it was the other way around. And a lot earlier still, the order of time was exclusively religious in nature. In Egypt the measurement of time was reserved exclusively for priests; clocks were cult instruments. The calendar was a calendar of festivals; the names of the months were based on the chief festivals. It was religious rites and not everyday life that called for the precise measurement of time. Only gradually did a secular temporal order start to emerge. Order as such was originally a religious phenomenon, established, framed and maintained by rituals, festivals, gods, and myths.

Within IR, however, we now see a second distinction introduced: "administering justice and pleasing the gods." Here, men and gods, law and cult are contrasted and this draws a line between the sphere of the social and political order, that is, "justice," and-once again-"religion" (for after all that is what is meant by "pleasing the gods"), but now in a narrower, more specific sense. That is VR, divided once again into cults of the gods and the dead. This "moral and political cosmos" is contrasted with the "religious cosmos" as something else, something that is not religion in the narrower sense. This sphere too has a religious foundation, but it has nothing to do with placating the gods, with cults, theology, and the priesthood. Instead, it forms its own "sub-universe of meaning" to use the terminology of The Social Construction of Reality. We encounter here a structure that I would like to call the "Egyptian triangle":

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

What we can now observe, in the course of Egyptian and ancient Oriental history in general, is the gradual erosion of this distinction, the increasing porosity of the frontier between the two worlds of submeaning or systems of action, "cult" and "justice." In the framework of the system of "justice," social relations always tend increasingly to be interpreted as religious relations, as relations between God and man. In extreme cases that leads to the dissolution not only of justice as a system of action, but also of the cult as a system of action. In that event a new type of religion arises that no longer has room for the distinction between VR and IR. God can no longer be placated just by the cult; he also and above all demands justice. Justice becomes the foundation of the relation to God. That leads to what Max Weber called the "methodical conduct of life." The whole of life is now placed in the framework of the relation between man and God, that is, of religion in the narrower sense, and subordinated to the requirements of justice. The concept of justice thus ceases to be the foundation of a sphere outside specific dealings with the divine; it is incorporated into a relation with God and in this sense it is theologized. When this stage has been reached we find ourselves confronted with a new form of religion, a "secondary" religion. We mainly think of the course of the history of culture as a path toward ever greater differentiations. In the beginning is an undifferentiated totality of order from which the individual orders of the religions, politics, law and the economy, the arts and sciences emerge as independent or "autonomous" value spheres (Max Weber) via processes that last for centuries. Here, we have the opposite development. Secondary religions arise from a process of de-differentiation. What had previously been divided by the line drawn between cult and justice now collapses into one thing. Concepts that had previously belonged in the sphere of justice are now inscribed theologically in this process of de-differentiation.

Today we mainly live in or with "tertiary" religions that have emerged as a result of the processes of differentiation from secondary religions that we have referred to. In consequence we look back at the secondary religions and tend to regard them as providing the paradigm of religion in general. Many students of religion unthinkingly apply such concepts as faith, confession, parish, church, and others that belong entirely in the realm of secondary religions, to primary definitions of religion and thus arrive at those anachronistic definitions of religion to which Luckmann objected.

Thus, like Luckmann, the Egyptians drew a distinction between visible and invisible religion, and this distinction enabled them to form a relatively secular notion of justice as the totality of norms that regulate the harmonious nature of social existence. I would hazard the guess that most, if not all "primary" religions are based on this distinction and that one of the defining characteristics of "secondary" religions is that they abolish this distinction. In this respect primary religions are differentiated: they are based on a supreme concept of a sacred order within which "a religious cosmos" appears as a VR with limited claims to be a meaningful subworld. Secondary religions, in contrast, elevate this religious cosmos to the rank of an ultimate reality that determines all knowledge and action and thus annuls the distinction between the different planes of IR and VR. At bottom, Luckmann's theory of an invisible religion is a plea for the reintroduction of the distinction. Or alternatively, it is an acknowledgment of the fact that in the course of modernization the old distinction has made its reappearance, only this time with changed significance.

3. Transformations of Cultural Memory

In what follows we shall inquire into the driving forces that underlie the abolition of the primary distinction between visible and invisible religion and the origins of "unified" or de-differentiated religion. I would like to describe this process as the "theologizing of cultural memory." Knowledge of the world in the comprehensive sense of an ultimate framework of meaning can be described very accurately as an invisible religion, since there can be no doubt that what is at issue here is carefulness, attentiveness, obligation, reverence, "stopping and thinking," "prudence"-in other words, everything that is implied by the Latin concept of religio. But no less important are continuity, identity, and the imagined presence of the nonsimultaneous, that is, whatever can be described by the concept of memory. Cultural memory can be understood as the "institutionalization" of the invisible religion (in the sense in which it occurs in Berger and Luckmann), that is to say, the totality of the forms in which a comprehensive symbolic world of meaning can be communicated and handed down. If we speak of cultural memory in what follows this is not to abandon the object of what Luckmann calls invisible religion, but only to shed light on it from a different angle. We are concerned in the first instance with the question of "the maintenance of symbolic universes over the generations," that is, of tradition in the sense of the continuity of meaning, "world," and identity.

Luckmann closely linked his concept of the invisible religion with the process of individuation, the formation of a personal self. According to Luckmann, a biological organism "becomes a Self, by embarking with others upon the construction of an `objective' and moral universe of meaning" (48-49). In the absence of such a universe, immediate, individual experiences "cannot be integrated into a socially defined, morally relevant biography" (48). Collective and individual identity, society and self, cultural and individual memory, the social origin and individuation of consciousness and conscience mutually condition each other and form two sides of the same culturally objective and socially mediated knowledge. The possibility of developing a personal self and a meaningful biography is predicated on a stable worldview (that is, what the Egyptians call maat). This stability in turn is a function of cultural memory, the symbolic and institutional, in short, the cultural forms in which this worldview is objectivized, continued, and practiced.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from RELIGION AND CULTURAL MEMORYby Jan Assmann Copyright © 2000 by Verlag C. H. Beck oHg, Mnchen . Excerpted by permission.
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