"The deepest difference between religions is not that between polytheism and monotheism"
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Kaufmann starts by picking a fight with the neatest classroom binary in the study of religion: many gods versus one. It’s a deliberately deflationary move, the kind philosophers use to expose a category error that’s been doing too much work. Polytheism and monotheism sound like opposing teams, but for Kaufmann they’re often the same game played with different scorekeeping.
The subtext is a critique of how “religion” gets flattened into doctrine, as if the divine were primarily a headcount problem. Kaufmann’s work consistently pushes against that: what matters is the lived orientation of a faith - whether it invites openness or coercion, honesty or self-protection, moral seriousness or pious evasion. You can have a monotheism that’s spiritually pluralistic in practice, and a polytheism that functions like an authoritarian system with one real center of gravity. The “deepest difference” is more likely about temperament and ethics than metaphysics: how a tradition treats doubt, outsiders, interpretation, suffering, and the individual conscience.
Context matters here. Kaufmann wrote in the postwar mid-century, when religious identity in the West was being weaponized as civilizational branding (and, not incidentally, when simplistic contrasts between “Judeo-Christian monotheism” and “pagan polytheism” were culturally convenient). His sentence resists that propaganda-ready sorting. It nudges readers toward a harder, more revealing question: not how many gods a religion claims, but what kind of human being it tries to produce - and what kinds it permits.
The subtext is a critique of how “religion” gets flattened into doctrine, as if the divine were primarily a headcount problem. Kaufmann’s work consistently pushes against that: what matters is the lived orientation of a faith - whether it invites openness or coercion, honesty or self-protection, moral seriousness or pious evasion. You can have a monotheism that’s spiritually pluralistic in practice, and a polytheism that functions like an authoritarian system with one real center of gravity. The “deepest difference” is more likely about temperament and ethics than metaphysics: how a tradition treats doubt, outsiders, interpretation, suffering, and the individual conscience.
Context matters here. Kaufmann wrote in the postwar mid-century, when religious identity in the West was being weaponized as civilizational branding (and, not incidentally, when simplistic contrasts between “Judeo-Christian monotheism” and “pagan polytheism” were culturally convenient). His sentence resists that propaganda-ready sorting. It nudges readers toward a harder, more revealing question: not how many gods a religion claims, but what kind of human being it tries to produce - and what kinds it permits.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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