Implicit in Christian monotheism was a critique of pagan polytheism. According to the Christians, the Greek and Roman gods were human inventions. Look at the gods of Homer. Each of them seems to embody a human quality: Aphrodite is the goddess of sexual desire, Ares is the god of conflict, and so on. The gods have the same petty vanities and jealousies as their human counterparts. Their virtues are human virtues writ large. As classical scholar Mary Lefkowitz puts it, “The life of the gods is a highly idealized form of what human life would be if mortals were deathless, ageless, and strong.” Ironically, this criticism of invented deities, which seemed valid when it was launched against ancient polytheism, is today leveled against Christianity. As Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins would have it, the Christians too have invented their God. But the Christian God is not like human beings at all. He is outside space and time. He does not have a body. He is a purely spiritual being. He can be comprehended only dimly by humans, who resort to anthropomorphic images and analogies.
Monotheism was a hugely important idea, but as we can see from how Islam is interpreted today, it is an idea that can be used to justify theocracy. By theocracy I don’t mean rule by priests. I simply mean that God’s law extends to every sphere of society and human life. This was the case with ancient Israel, and this has indeed been the Islamic tradition. The prophet Muhammad was in his own day both a prophet and a Caesar who integrated the domains of church and state. Following his example, the rulers of the various Islamic empires, from the Umayyad to the Ottoman, saw themselves as Allah’s vicegerents on earth, charged with establishing Islamic rule worldwide and bringing all the lands they could under the authority of Islamic holy law. Historian Bernard Lewis writes that “in classical Arabic and in the other classical languages of Islam, there are no pairs of terms corresponding to ‘lay’ and ‘ecclesiastical; ‘spiritual’ and ‘temporal; ‘secular’ and ‘religious: because these pairs of words express a Christian dichotomy that has no equivalent in the world of Islam.” Even today in strict Islamic states like Saudi Arabia we see that Islamic law (or sharia) extends beyond religious law to commercial law, civil law, and family law.
