Akhénaton and the ancient monotheism
Egypt tried to get rid of the multitude of cumbersome representations veiling reality rather than translating it. That occurred at the end of the most brilliant period from the Egyptian history, at the beginning of XIVe century before our era.
The term of monotheism returns to the existence of single God (in opposition to the polytheism) but who is transcendent in the world (in opposition to the pantheist designs). Commonly, one speaks about monotheistic religions in connection with the Judaism, Christianity and the Islam (to which one adds sometimes the mazdeism or Zoroastrianism).
However, beyond the convenience of the label to indicate a set of prophetic religions which are opposed at the same time to wisdoms and the Eastern religions as well as with the territorialized religions of the ethnos group or the ancient city, it is necessary to wonder about the variety of the monotheistic designs.
Birth of the monotheism If the Judaism is the oldest great monotheistic religion, the Hebrew monotheism was not affirmed originally nor of only one block, but took form gradually through the preaching of the prophets. The oldest texts of the Bible indeed multiply allusions to practical polytheists (worship of several gods), syncretistic (worship of Yahvé associated with gods cananéens) or monolâtres (Yahvé like national or “tribal” God of the Hebrew people vis-a-vis the foreign gods); at this period, Yahvé defies the other gods without denying their existence.
It is only at the time posterior with the exile in Babylon (Life - Ve front S.J. - C.) that the biblical monotheism affirms in an exclusive way, in particular in the book of second Isaïe, which presents Yahvé like single sovereign of the Universe and proscribes the images of the other gods as idols.
The diversity of the monotheism in the abrahamic religionsEach of the three religions which claim heritage of Abraham modulates in a different way the monotheistic assertion. This one appears in the middle of the testimony of faith in the Judaism (“Listening Israel, the Eternal is our God, the Eternal is one”) or in the Moslem creed (“There is no god apart from God”). However, one should not understand the biblical monotheism like a metaphysical statement of character on the nature of God; he is initially a soteriologic assertion: Yahvé is the single saver of Israel, chosen people by him. Thus, “the Jewish monotheism is only the abstract name of a concrete report which is alliance” (Andre Manaranche).
Christianity gives place to an original form of monotheism since he discovers a complexity AD will intra as a God through the mystery of the Trinity. Christian God is at the same time like substance or divine nature and trine through three hypostases or people. The orthodoxe Christianity of the Large Church was built at the first centuries at the same time against holding of a simple monotheism which wanted to reduce the divine people to simple methods of the gasoline of God (heresy modalist) and denied at the same time filiation as a God (heresy arienne) and in the other direction against holding of a tritheism which broke with the monotheism.
The last of the cycle, the Moslem monotheism appears before just like a reaction of rejection vis-a-vis the Christian Trinity: he thus affirms with strength the absence of any internal plurality as a God. Made Coran of the shirk, i.e. of the “association” of other divinities to only God, the sin par excellence and teaches that “It does not generate and was not generated” (sourate CXII). To want to occult these differences between the real monotheism with the profit of an abstract monotheism would lead only to one philosophical deism, such as the belief in a supreme Being of a Rousseau or Robespierre.
Monotheism and monolâtrie
Out the case of the religions which are attached to the figure of Abraham, many cultures in the world share the belief in single God. One speaks, in this case of figure, monolâtrie rather than of monotheism, to highlight that the worship of only one God has only local value here, inside the ethnos group or of the culture considered, whereas the monotheism abrahamic claims with the universality.
The question of knowing which polytheism or monotheism preceded the other constituted in the history of the religions a stake of size until the beginning of the XX E century: to the evolutionism dominating, which made monotheism a late exception in a religious world marked by the prevalence of the designs polytheists, the theory of the “paramount monotheism was opposed” which drew argument from the existence of worships monolatric to support the anteriority of an original revelation which would have degenerated into polytheism. With the decline of the evolutionary designs in sciences of the religions, the problem is not posed any more in these terms today.