Some Ideas Are Very Old

I was recently thinking of Akhenaton. Akhenaton, if you don't know, was the Egyptian Pharoah who probably invented (or, I suppose, discovered? Is there a non question-begging term for it? He "pioneered"?) monotheism. He lived in the 14th century BC, which is before the theoretical historical era of Abraham (usually regarded as a 12th century character, if he is indeed in any sense historical) and contemporaneous with the earliest mainstream dating for Zoroaster, who may well have come hundreds of years later.

Before Akhenaton, Egyptian religion was a mess. There was an Osiris/Horus cult in the north (which is important to this post) and a Sutekh or Seth cult in the south. Osiris and Horus were fertility gods and thus gods of life, death, and the afterlife. Sutekh was the god of the desert. The conflict between the northern and southern kingdoms of Egypt became dramatized as the conflict between Osiris/Horus and Sutekh, leading to the myth the Sutekh killed Osiris, but that Osiris' son, Horus, generated from his father's severed member, grew to adulthood to avenge his father's murder and take his place as Lord of the Gods, while Osiris took over things in the afterlife. Great stuff, but somewhat complicated by the existence of a sun-cult dedicated to Ra and the nominal supreme god, Amun. Syncretists, with their typical creativity, merged Ra and Horus into a single god, not foreseeing the potency of this idea.

The Pharoah Amenhotep IV adopted as his personal deity (a Pharoaic custom) Aten, an aspect of Ra--Ra as the Sun-Disc itself. He took the name Akhenaten, "Effective Spirit of Aten." For whatever reason--political or spiritual--Akhenaten became devoted to the idea of a singular God, a universal creator and sustainer, embodied in the Sun. He destroyed the idols of the other gods, wrote the Great Hym of Aten, and build a new capital, Akhentaten, "Horizon of the Sun-Disc."

This is already very long, and I apologize. This is the part that struck me. After his conversion to monotheism, Akhenaten engendered a son and heir who is, oddly, far more widely known than his father--Tutankhamun, or "King Tut." "Tutankhamun" means "living image of Amun," but it was not King Tut's original name--his father named him "Tutankhaten," "Living Image of the Aten," or "Living Image of the Sun-Disc," or, in his father's monotheism, "Living Image of God."

This is the old idea that inspired this post. The idea is alive today. In Cormac McCarthy's recent novel The Road, we learn early on the nature of the man's feelings toward his son, the boy: "If he was not the word of God God never spoke," a thought emphasized later when the man sees the boy "shining like a tabernacle." Even to this day we continue to connect the idea of a one true God with the idea of a father's love for his son, because we have inherited, apparently from as far back as Akhenaten himself, the idea that the existence of a personal God is bound up with the ratification and legitimization of the significance of personal human love.

That the idea is old does not, of course, make it true. But it is old indeed.