Ei(aa)roneia: The Politics of Religion in the Cantar de mío Cid

Abstract

The pertinence of religion differs widely in the great epics that have survived until today. In the Iliad and the Aeneid, the question is almost negligible. Religious difference does not present a vital problem within a polytheistic culture. Every community, in victory as in defeat, is able to reconcile its own belief with that of the other party by conceiving of the others’ gods as identical in substance to their own gods. Just as “apple” is mēlon in Greek and pomum in Latin, the goddess of love is called Aphrodite in the Greek, Venus in the Roman and Ishtar in the Semitic world. The difference is primarily in labeling and not in essence. It is a matter of conventions established according to differing traditions, but not about a difference in truth. This situation changes with the rise of monotheism. The shift is intensified by the fact that the move to monotheism is accompanied by a medial reset of the site of religious truth. Within the monotheistic systems, belief is based on texts that are supposed to give a definitive description of God’s will. The exclusivity of truth that is linked to the idea of the one and only God and to the alleged fixation of God’s will within a text accessible to humans contravenes the ideological flexibility of the age of polytheism and makes religious difference into a virulent, even vital problem. That said, one would have to emphasize that there is much variation as to the role of religion in epics that date from Christian times. In the Edda, Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied, problems of religion are of minor relevance. This may be due to the fact that whereas the written versions that still survive today date from Christian times, the