When the church year began, I had not planned to preach about Akhenaten, onetime pharaoh of Egypt. In fact, none of the pharaohs was on my list of likely sermon subjects.

I did make reference to Akhenaten in a sermon earlier this fall, though not here. I gave a homily one Sunday afternoon at our church in Plymouth to a large group of UU religious educators who had gathered from all over the continent to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of their professional association. The worship service featured two homilies, one by a religious educator, looking ahead, after a homily by a parish minister who could look back over the last half century of UU religious education.

That was me. As it happens, I was in the kindergarten of the Unitarian Church of Urbana, Illinois, when the association was formed, and I received the religious training the association's members helped to provide. Then my own children did, and my grandchildren soon may, too. So I could thank them, but I could also lead the older among them briefly down memory lane, recalling my days with Martin and Judy, Jesus the Carpenter's Son, Moses, and Akhenaten, Child of the Sun.

Those were all books we read in the 50s. I got a knowing little laugh from the crowd when I noted that I was probably the only person at the Grant Elementary School in Roselle Park, New Jersey, student or teacher, who knew anything about Akhenaten until my sister came along. and I knew a lot.

So I was all ready when, out of the blue, Akhenaten started showing up in the news and in advertisements as one of the three stars of the newest show at the Museum of Fine Arts, one that opens today. I had even preached on the fellow once before here, years ago, and while I was missing a page, I knew that sermon might serve to remind me of any points of the Akhenaten story I could have somehow forgotten in the last seventeen years.

 I might as well tell you right up front that the story is ambiguous in its import and that attempts to mine it for easy gems of inspiration run amuck. But at least it will help provide some context for this major exhibition that is focused in part on someone we have been known to think of as the world’s first Unitarian Universalist. I only hope there hasn’t so much news on the show by now, you already know as much as I; and that when you get to the show, it doesn’t turn out I’ve been wrong all these years.

 I think it’s pretty safe to assert, however, that the object of our attention this morning, the pharaoh Akhenaten, was born Amenhotep IV, son of Amenhotep III, also referred to as Amenophis III. The elder Amenhotep was also referred to an Amenhotep the Magnificent or the Splendid. He was pharaoh of Egypt during one of the periods of its greatest power and prosperity. In time, however, magnificent though he may have been, Amenhotep III went the way of all flesh and was succeeded by his son, the aforementioned Amenhotep IV, later known as Akhenaten.

At least since 1939, Akhenaten has occupied that unique place in the pantheon of Unitarian Universalist church heroes, the place of being not necessarily the most noble nor profound nor influential but of being simply the most ancient of all those whose names we sometimes revere and whose memory we regard with sectarian fondness. It was, after all, sometime around 1376 B.C.E. that Akhenaten came to power. That other date, 1939, marked the date of publication of the book, Child of the Sun, by Margaret Dulles Edwards, which was long popular in Unitarian and Unitarian Universalist Sunday schools and still may be found in Sunday school libraries, which is where I found this copy, in our own. My suspicion is that Ms. Edwards by that single effort elevated Akhenaten to his current place as a part of our history.

It was only in the generations immediately preceding 1939 that it had become possible to reconstruct Akhenaten's life and thought to the degree that Edwards was then able. The intervening years have produced yet further information as archeology has become increasingly able to speak with authority about what is apt to have happened over there back then.

Among the key finds were a sizable portion of the correspondence between Akhenaten and his generals and foreign rulers; the gradual reconstruction of Akhenaten’s capital city, Tel el Amarna; and the discovery in 1922 of the tomb of King Tutankhamen, popularly known today an King Tut, who was, as it happens, Akhenaten's son-in-law and successor. Tutankhamen is another of the three figures featured in the MFA show.

The third is Akhenaten’s wife, Queen Nefertiti. These days, her name is better known than that of her ruler husband, because of the beautiful statue of her head that was found in the sculptor’s shop during the digging at Tel el Amarna, the capital city that Akhenaten had built. The bust is one of the great art treasures of all time. It is one of the few lasting rewards of the freedom that Akhenaten introduced to art that we have a head of Nefertiti that conveys personal details instead of the stylized art that so commemorates the lives of the other Egyptian mighty with boring conformity.

Now we’re getting closer to Akhenaten himself. One thing he did was to overturn the artistic conventions that had persisted and calcified in Egypt over countless generations. But that was only a part of the re1evolution that Akhenaten attempted. And it’s hard to know just where to proceed in telling it all, which factor or other to pick from out the life of this incredible person that makes him somehow a religious brother to us.

One could, for instance, put it this way: like many a UU today, Akhenaten was a heretic. He would not go along with the prevailing religious beliefs and customs. This is not a strained point, contrived to draw him into our camp. No, this is precisely what Akhenaten did and what is most notable about his reign: he refused to accept the religion that Egypt had known and lived by since time unremembered, and he attempted to institute in its place a religious system that was wholly new, or mostly so. He took on the priests, whose power had long been extremely extensive. He bucked the religious establishment.

Now obviously it is easier to buck the establishment if you are yourself an establishment even bigger, putting Akhenaten in a different category from, say, Michael Servetus, who bucked Calvin and got burned at the stake for it. No one was going to burn Akhenaten, or even stand in his way when he announced that there would be a new faith in the land, and a new capital created to embody its faith. And that is just what happened. Akhenaten helped lay out and oversee the construction of the capital city of Tel el Amarna, down-river from the old capital of Thebes, half-way to the Mediterranean.

But his kinship with modern religious liberalism, with belief of the sort that we carry on still, and proudly, almost four thousand years later, involves more than his heretical courage. His new religion was one with many elements that sound very modern and much like our own. Most conspicuous among those elements was his monotheism, his unitarian and universalist outlook on the nature of god.

Almost anywhere at that time, the question would have been one about gods, as was the case in Egypt as well. The gods of Egypt over the centuries had their ups and downs as temples competed with each other, as caprice and chance probably played their usual roles, and new combinations of gods were tried. But Akhenaten simply opted out of the whole enterprise. In its place, he posited something new, radically new. He posited one god. For him it was the one god Aten, god the sun. The implications were many and profound.

For the sun is, indeed, a suitable symbol for a universal god, a god that shines, is present in, provides to ... the whole world! Not just Egypt, but the whole world. And so Akhenaten in retrospect gets proclaimed as the first universalist. Likewise, the first unitarian, the first monotheist, the first to argue that there is one god. Few thoughts could

have been more bizarre to the Egyptian mind. Two thousand year is a long time, and for at least that long the people had been accustomed to perceiving a multitude of gods – eighty at the time just before Akhenaten -- each especially incarnate in, or represented by, some physical force or some animal and object. And Akhenaten carries that on to the degree that his is not a monotheistic god as abstract as the Western tradition will later elaborate, he is god the sun; but he is god, and that was very, very new. Not a god, but God.

      And for his God Akhenaten picked a force of special power and appeal. For the sun is universal. More than that, Akhenaten picked not the god which is known or represented or expressed in and by the sun -- that was Re, who himself later teams up with Amen to become Amen-Re, the state god of a later era. No, Akhenaten picked Aten, the disc of the sun, that very physical entity that we see before our eyes. God was not hiding up there in the sun or whatever; the older texts had spoken only of Aten as the seat of Re, the chair he sat in. But Akhenaten selects the disc itself, that is to say, the sun, the very sun.

Which has several marvelous results. For it traps god in our physical world and makes God inescapably imminent as opposed to transcendent. For much of the last two hundred years, at least the western world has lived increasingly in the sway of those philosophies and theologies that insist on God’s imminence, that God is something about this world, indwelling, rather than someone up over the clouds, who only intrudes by

crossing occasionally the enormous gap between him or her or it and us. Well, the sun is over the clouds, but its rays indwell among us daily. It is a god that brings to flower the entire world the Egyptians knew of, and Akhenaten is also known as the composer of some of the finest nature hymns.

Indeed, the sun is represented, that is to say, Aten is, by a disc with beams like arms outreached, at the end of each a small hand, representing God’s beneficence to all the creatures of the earth.

The new religion produced not only a new set of poems and beliefs, but the form and place of the worship differed greatly from the somber services of the priests of Amon held in inner sanctums of great holiness. Now the temples opened outward for the light; the celebrations were of the wondrous bounty that life by virtue of the sun's sustaining, life-giving power provides on every hand; and the formulaic incantations of the priesthood were gone.

All of the new capital at Tel el Amarna was dedicated to the values of the new religion. To take just one example, the pharaoh would have a park for hunting, of course, but it would be for observing animals, not for killing them. A sunny outlook also influenced the pharaoh’s estimation of foreign powers, a point to which we will return, unhappily.

Akhenaten along among the pharaohs prepared his tomb, not with goods to take into the underworld in which he disbelieved, but with scenes from his life in his city, with hymns he had written to Aten, and "over each scene was the symbol of the sun-disk with its life-giving rays." (Edwards 85)

For reasons like these, Akhenaten remains for many people a striking, glamorous, moving figure; and the universalistic, monotheistic, life-affirmative, form-shattering religious system he created on the banks of the Nile retains a vitality and contemporaneity that one can find nowhere else among the annals of Egyptian thought.

Yet one final way of seeing Akhenaten is as a religious nut who all but ruined the country. This, you see, is what makes it so hard to draw the easy inspiration. For while Akhenaten was building his new city and then living in it -- he never left it alive -- spinning out this lovely theology, the vassal states that depended upon him for protection, and even parts of Egypt itself were set upon and in some cases fell. The extensive empire that had reached a high point with his father, providing him the money to build his swell city, fell into dangerous economic disorder. Revisionist historians have even contested the originality of his worship of Aten, and some have doubted that the thing was monotheistic at all, really. Others point out cattily that while Nefertiti held to the faith, there are some indications that Akhenaten himself was willing to work out a compromise with the priests; and apparently it is true that toward the end of his life Akhenaten and Nefertiti separated.

What is certainly true is that under King Tut the capital was restored to Thebes, the worship of the gods and the priestly maintenance of Amen-worship as the state religion were reinstituted, Atenism totally done away with, and Amarna itself eventually leveled to rubble. King Tut, by the way, was very good at maintaining the borders and the empire flourished again.

And so one is left with an inspiration that staggers and stumbles as it struggles toward the wire. Virtually nothing of what Akhenaten did in his thirty years had lasting influence on the history of Egypt. And yet, still, for all of that, the system that he sought to found, his willingness to make radical stand against the frozen, stultified practices of his day, his penetrating religious insight, and the beauty of his poetry remain for us as a lasting legacy, even if he never managed the state as well as he nurtured his religious consciousness and his exultant love of life.
 
 

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