Three responses to crisis
Prophets, priests, and mandarins
I’m Bryan Kam. I endeavour daily to make philosophy accessible and relevant. To that end I write this newsletter and host a podcast called Clerestory. I’m also writing a book called Neither/Nor and I’m a founding member of Liminal Learning. In London, I host a book club, a writing group, and other events. My work looks at how abstract concepts relate to embodied life, and how to use this understanding to transform experience.
When the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem's First Temple in 587 BC, something unexpected happened—Judaism became more monotheistic, not less.
At my discussion group recently we discussed an old favourite of mine, a podcast on the excellent Historiansplaining podcast which discusses the history of Judaism, and deconstructs the concept of “religion.”
I became interested in Biagetti’s claim that, after the Babylonians destroyed the first temple in the Siege of Jerusalem (587 BC), Judaism became more monotheistic. This comes out of one branch of three possible responses to crisis, which are, broadly, to welcome change (prophets), to try to return to old authority (priests), and to try to explain the crisis (mandarins).
Wait, what? Wasn’t Judaism always entirely monotheistic?
In Biagetti’s argument, no.
Judaism had previously been primarily henotheistic, which means that the Israelites worshiped one God above others, but they don’t necessarily deny the existence of other gods. This seems to line up with the first commandment, i.e., “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:2–3). Or see Genesis 3:22 for an apparent multiplicity in God, or Psalm 82 for God’s “divine council.” The podcast is well worth listening to if you’re interested in this question.
One of the aspects of Biagetti’s account that interested me is the fact that the response to the destruction of the temple was to “double down,” as Biagetti says, on there being only one God.
The covenant between God and the Judeans had said that if the Judeans kept his commandments, He would give them the land of Canaan, protect them against their enemies, give King David an eternal dynasty, and choose the Temple of Jerusalem as His earthly residence. So when the Babylonians destroyed the Temple, this created a profound theological crisis. I might have predicted that this would make them less monotheistic. I wanted to understand this crisis, and especially how God’s apparent breaking of the covenant could lead to more monotheism.
I’ve noted that rationalistic responses to situations often lead to doubling down on strategies which have failed. See Thinking and Sensing for what I mean by “rationalist.” I’ve literally used the term “doubling down” so I found it fascinating that Biagetti used the same term.
To better understand this paradox, I went to find his sources, and wound up at Römer’s Invention of God (2015). This is a profound piece of historical work which looks exactly at this question. How can the God who is the individual God of a small group of Israelites become the universal and unchanging God?
Here’s Römer on the different responses to the crisis. He transplants a categorical schema from writing on the French revolution to explain how Judeans responded to the destruction of the Temple:
Different groups in the Judean aristocracy tried to deal with and overcome the crisis by producing ideologies that endowed the fall of Judah with theological meaning. We can order these attempts according to a model proposed by Armin Steil.1 Steil, who was influenced by Max Weber, developed his model by analyzing the semantics of crisis in the context of the French Revolution; however, this model is also very helpful for understanding the reactions to the fall of Jerusalem that we find in the Hebrew Bible. Steil distinguishes three types of attitude toward a crisis: that of the prophet, that of the priest, and that of the mandarin. The prophetic attitude consists in declaring the crisis to be the beginning of a new era. The main proponents of this attitude are members of marginal groups, who are nevertheless capable of formulating and communicating their convictions. Conservative representatives of the social structures that are collapsing are more likely to adopt a priestly attitude. For those who take this posture, the way to overcome the crisis is to return to the sacred origins of society, given by God, and to ignore the new reality. The mandarin posture expresses a choice by high officials, who are trying to understand the new situation and accommodate themselves to it in order to preserve their existing privileges. The “mandarins” try to objectify the crisis by giving a historical account of it that explains the collapse of the old social structures. (p214)
In short, prophets arise who welcome or at least accept the crisis as a sign of change to come. Priests try to use myths to return to former authority and origins. And mandarins construct a history to explain why this crisis has happened. In Römer’s telling, from which I suspect Biagetti draws, this meant interpreting the destruction of the Temple not as evidence of God’s weakness, but of God’s wrath; God used the Babylonians to destroy His own Temple because the Judeans had not been faithful enough. This is the step that allows more monotheistic views to arise.
It was primarily through the mandarin response that monotheism intensified. By constructing a historical narrative that reframed the destruction of the Temple as divine punishment rather than divine weakness, these scholar-officials transformed Yahweh from a national deity competing with other gods into a universal God controlling all nations—including the Babylonians themselves. This reinterpretation, found particularly in exilic prophetic texts like Ezekiel and Deutero-Isaiah, preserved God’s power while accounting for national defeat.
Here’s a handy table which Römer provides:
I think it’s not much of a stretch to see that in today’s crises, there are prophets who see the crises as a sign of new things to come. There are also priests, who try to protect the old order. And there are mandarins who are trying to construct a history that makes the present an inevitability from the past.
What contemporary crises do you see these three responses playing out in today? Can you identify the prophets who welcome change and see opportunity in disruption? The priests who appeal to tradition and try to restore past structures? The mandarins who construct historical narratives to explain how we arrived at our present situation? I'd be curious to hear which examples come to mind for you, and which response you find yourself most naturally gravitating toward.
I’m very keen on the study of history, but there are, according to the late Thomas Kuhn, two types of history: Whig history, which explains the present in terms of the past, and “hermeneutic” history, which attempts to explain the past on its own terms. In the paper we wrote recently, we refer to the former as “present-focused history” and the latter as “past-focused history.” This divide appears in Römer, too. He calls “past-focused history” “historiography”:
There are many other instances in antiquity of a connection between a crisis and the writing of history. Thucydides wrote his History of the Great War between Sparta and Athens in the fifth century, and addressed it to “those who desire an exact knowledge of the past to help them interpret the future” (1.22). Similarly, Herodotus composed his History in order to present the general reasons for the wars with Persia and the reasons for the individual dramatic events that occurred during these wars. Obviously, the Deuteronomistic history is not a work of historiography in the modern sense of that term-for instance, in the sense in which the nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke claimed that history must be devoted to finding out “what really happened.” The Deuteronomist history is, nevertheless, a serious attempt to construct the past so as to explain the present. (p216)
This historiographical distinction helps explain why the mandarin response was so effective—it was essentially “present-focused history” that reinterpreted the past specifically to address the theological crisis of the present. The Deuteronomistic writers weren't primarily concerned with what “really happened,” but with constructing a narrative that preserved theological meaning in the face of catastrophe.
What fascinates me about this historical transformation is how theological crisis became an engine for religious intensification rather than abandonment. The mandarin response—constructing a new historical narrative that preserved divine authority while accounting for catastrophe—demonstrates how humans reinterpret reality when confronted with evidence that challenges core beliefs. This pattern of “doubling down” appears throughout history, including in our contemporary crises. Understanding these dynamics can help us recognize similar patterns in our own responses to collective challenges.
As always, I’d love to hear from you.
Bryan
P.S. If this conversation resonated with you, please share it with someone who might benefit from it. Please also like it, subscribe, or support me on Patreon or Ko-Fi!
Armin Steil, Krisensemantik: Wissenssoziologische Untersuchungen zu einem Topos moderner Zeiterfahrung (Opladen: Leske & Buderich, 1993).