The Gods Problem
Defining gods according to antiquity's mythological traditions and philosophic sentiments.
Defining Gods - The Lazy & Extreme
“Now God, being all good by nature, produced first the Beings that most resemble Himself, secondly, those of a middle likeness to Himself, and thirdly, those who of all the Beings that resembled Him, participate the least in His divine image.” - Hierocles, the Golden Verses of Pythagoras
The definition of God in the modern world has been subjected to a set of predominant viewpoints, rarely disentangled from the tropes and thematic confinements of popular religion. Even today there are allegedly educated people who still pass off God as some sort of wise and enlarged humanoid hovering above the world, or those who become fixated on the judgment of a cruel God reminiscent of sections in the Old Testament, where specific beings are punished with suffering and yet somehow remain under the umbrella of God’s eternal love and forgiveness.
When we address the origins of monotheism, we often associate it with the insights of Moses or the solar religion of the Pharoah Akhenaton. However, we find that the perception of a monotheistic God varies depending on the civilization and the individual that worships it. These variations can range from a personal deity who is directly involved with the lives of every individual, or a diety that is beyond all capacity to understand, one that encompasses and permeates all things but takes no active role in the material world.
Between these extremes, we have heard nearly every definition or supposition about “God” that could be created. This sets us up for confusion, and we find ourselves repeating what’s been distilled from church and scripture, and adapted for easy digestion. Inherently there is nothing wrong with this if caution is invited to sit on one’s shoulder, as it should be when addressing any “religious” belief system. What’s more, if we aren’t exposed to the viewpoints of philosophers and thought-leaders throughout history who were directly involved in the refinement of spiritual ideas, we will not benefit from what problems they believed to have sorted out once and for all.
Considering the difficulty of summarizing the one being responsible for all that is, and knowing that nature offers a wide spectrum indeed, it wouldn’t be foolish to perpetuate the visible and invisible worlds with a troop of divine beings. The sun and the moon, the water and the earth, the pleasant and grotesque; there are countless distinctions to be drawn in the world which has led many to believe in the existence of numerous deities, each allotted their own realm of control and influence.
We should be cautious about the typologies of polytheism, pantheism, and monotheism especially when we notice that monotheisms rarely exist without their angels and demons, and polytheisms without their supreme deity somewhere at the origin of things. Given the extreme level of categories and apparent contradictions in mythology and personal spiritual beliefs, it would help to provide the modern thinker with perspectives about the gods as they were given by the minds who lived in their time.
“God, however, is not a name to God but an indication of what we conceive of him.” - Sextus
In the ancient world prior to the second millennia BCE, we are hardpressed to find instances of a singular God without an accompanying hierarchy of deities and subsidiary angelic entities. In ancient Egypt, we are confronted with a creation story that indicates a monotheistic set-up cloaked in a polytheistic distribution. From the One comes the Many, and from the Many can the One be known. Born out of the ineffable first God arrives the proceeding deities who serve like functionaries across the spectrum.
There is an intelligence to the idea that the One God can not be defined without being defiled. Certainly, all definitions fall short of ensnaring an all-encompassing principle. Divinity is everywhere at once, much like the faces the world civilizations have given it. If God already moved in all things, then all things subsisted in a divine capacity and could just as well be specified and worshipped according to their peculiar natures.
Humanity is unsatisfied with stagnant ideas, and our cravings for novelty don’t merely surrender when it comes to mythological procedures. To point out the situation, there is an interesting passage on Heracles in Herodotus (5th Century BCE) that demonstrates the changeable nature of a god, and how at times humans either took the name of a deity or a human was deified for any myriad of reasons.
“So then my inquiries show clearly that Heracles is an ancient god, and those of the Hellenes seem to me to act most rightly who have two temples of Heracles set up, who sacrifice to the one as an immortal god and with the title Olympian, and make offering to the dead to the other as a hero.” - Herodotus, the Histories
As Mas Muller pointed out about the Persian prophet, “The question is whether Zoroaster was a man converted into a god, or a god converted into a man.” Much like life itself, gods and their definitions are subject to an eternal flux and not often perceived as they were when first introduced into a culture. Jesus, for instance, is prayed to as the Lord and Savior by many Christians, regardless of whether or not such prayers should be more properly directed to God the Father. Christians who are still compelled to believe that Jesus was the One God incarnate in a historical man, seem to have fallen short of one too many history books that demonstrate the number of so-called prophets and philosophers who were also equated with a diety.
Pythagoras was considered by some to be the son of Apollo, Alexander the Great to be the son of Zeus-Ammon, and Apollonius of Tyana was attributed with much the same miracles as the Christian prophet. But none of the pagan philosophers reminiscent of the Neoplatonists, Pythagoreans, or Stoics would have been so bold as to claim a man was the literal One God descended in material form. Gods were distinct in every culture in terms of how they were defined and worshipped, and we should not fall under the assumption that the priestly, literate, or philosophic classes would have studied the gods in the same manner as the common populace.
Gods were bargained with, to an extent, as the sacrifices of animals and plants at the temple indicate. Yet if a god is incorporeal and unembodied how could trade be made with something physical? We find the prevalent perspective of gods as embodied beings not registering well for a mind like Iamblichus, who tells us :
“…the celestial divinities are not comprehended by bodies, but contain bodies in their divine lives and energies; that they are not themselves converted to body, but they have a body which is converted to its divine cause; and that body does not impede their intellectual and incorporeal perfection, nor occasion them any molestation by its intervention.” - Iamblichus (ca. 242–ca. 325 CE)
Iamblichus confirms that we have attributed our own base characteristics to the gods and treats their symbols and images as, at most, a rude form of their true energies, and asserts that the genuine nature of the gods was unavailable. But to the initiated, their symbols served as meditative objects whose purpose had to be earned before it was known.
“This therefore, is nearly the cause of our aberration to a multitude of conceptions. For men being in reality unable to apprehend the reasons of sacred institutions, but conceiving that they are able, are wholly hurried away by their own human passions, and form a conjecture of divine concerns form things pertaining to themselves.”
Refinement
“When, therefore, thou hearest the myth-sayings of the Egyptians concerning the Gods—wanderings and dismemberings, and many such passions—thou shouldst remember what has been said above, and think none of these things spoken as they [really] are in state and action.” - Plutarch, Greek Historian (46 - 119 CE)
What does the worship of a particular deity entail? Prior to a battle, we could imagine that appeasing the god of war would be a practical step in the right direction. If the very energy that infuses warfare entirely can possess the warrior in the midst of combat, what does that actually mean? Do we imagine a human-like figure dwelling in another dimension who sends invisible energy to pervade the summoner? Or, more appropriately, do we conceive that locked inside each of us are behaviors and states of being we can embody to meet the journey of life with adequate responses?
A writer and orator in the ancient Greek world might worship Hermes on account of the god’s mastery over language. And we would be careful with our words if we were a Phoenician trader approaching the border of a Greek state, where there were often herms erected in the god’s name. As Hermes became also the god of trade and commerce, language reminiscent of the god’s skill could be employed to reach the intended result. Conceiving Hermes in this way makes the stories about his many tricks, deceits, and amusing trades come to life beyond the tale in the Homeric Hymns. And how else could we relate to a god without their being personified into a narrative and emotional structure?
Moreover, the state of being that accompanies a warrior in combat is not the same that indulges in casual oration or creative writing. It isn’t as if one god dies when we activate the other. All the gods are already enmeshed in the forms of our world and its sentient life. It is the thematic model of a human’s intelligence and behavior that draws them out of us, gradually providing human stereotypes to these alleged divinities for the utility of oral tradition.
If we are born into a skill set we would not be wise to forsake the god that has control over it. Instead, we would rather activate the god inside ourselves most suited to bring out the traits resembling it. In that way, we synchronize with the right gods and find new relationships in reading their respective stories.
This kind of understanding becomes all the more relevant when we unpack the fact that even under alleged monotheisms there are angels and demons to summon for their intrinsic power. It would be strange to think that we could invite the ultimate power of the One God to possess us or guide us when that God is already active within us, and yet at the same time so ineffably situated at the center-most untraceable and eternal region of existence. This echoes the anthropocentric idea that an individual is so important that the One God should stoop to intervene in their personal life. Following this logic, we find it quite reasonable to present a subsidiary region of deities and spirits more readily available to the whims of the mortal world.
We are not claiming that all civilizations thought of their gods in this light, only that there is a nuance here not often considered and easily passed over by those who already hold antiquity in superstitious contempt. But what’s more intriguing is the similarities of pantheons across continentally large spans of earth. The gods seem only to have changed in detail rather than theme. Indeed the same gods exist as much as the same emotions and pitfalls exist within the life of the individual.
At the very least we can conclude that a simplistic definition of the gods falls short of capturing the completed image. Thus we must ask ourselves whether or not the better minds of “pagan” civilizations had a useful and deeply layered perspective about their deities beyond the classic examples used to demonize them, like human and animal sacrifice.
In the Greek tradition, Hesiod’s Theogony offers the genealogy of the gods and the general tales of their upbringing and position in the divine hierarchy. The gods are conveyed much like humans, who are immortal and far more powerful, dwelling in the higher regions of Mt. Olympus yet capable of appearing before mankind in the flesh, or disguised as animals or other human beings. The gods feel desire and also make terrible mistakes as if they are exaggerated thematic elements of human life portrayed in an epic saga, tied in part to actual historical events. Many gods don magical armor or wield magical devices that go hand-in-hand with their sphere of influence.
“For the gods keep hidden from men the means of life. Else you would easily do work enough in a day to supply you for a full year even without working; soon would you put away your rudder over the smoke, and the fields worked by ox and sturdy mule would run to waste. But Zeus in the anger of his heart hid it, because Prometheus the crafty deceived him; therefore he planned sorrow and mischief against men. He hid fire; but that the noble son of Iapetus stole again for men from Zeus the counsellor in a hollow fennel-stalk, so that Zeus who delights in thunder did not see it. - Hesiod, Works and Days ( ca. 750 - 650 BCE)
Although depictions of gods in the Hesiodic and Homeric poems make for timeless tales and allowed for oral traditions to build out moral principles in their followers, when it came to the philosopher’s turn to assess the veracity of the myths, and utility of the gods themselves, a whole new dimension of meaning had to be uncovered lest the stories get thrown aside wholeheartedly. Just like the gods occupied different levels of intelligence so too do the humans that worshiped them. Certainly, as Plato alludes to in his tale of Atlantis and Homer in the Trojan War, there was an immediate connection between the Greek gods to historical events. However, the fictional elements of the gods and some of their loathsome, frivolous activities were rightly scrutinized, leaving behind a format of allegorical understanding. To see the gods as internal psychological forces, and to see their stories as meaningful symbolic narratives woven for their esoteric value seemed more reasonable than the literal approach.
Iamblichus, for one, compares the stories about the gods to the tales of old women, denying that the common populace has been given the tools to ascertain their true meaning. He pulls no punches to claim that the secret schools like the Pythagoreans obtained the keys to an inner understanding. Plato also doesn’t see much value in the myths beyond the symbolic attributes they were originally meant to convey, the historical events they tease at, or the cosmic objects they were bound to. To Plato, as evinced in his Phaedrus, the gods were intelligences that transcended the need for ascertaining truth or objective reality, because they were wholly alive inside the true and ultimate cosmos, as if dwelling in a region mankind may only travel to once the mortal shell is cast off. To achieve harmony with these divine forces, employing reason and general morality in every aspect of life became to the philosophic class a more rational approach to obtaining favor with the gods.