This one isn’t about Jesus at all, but as it’s kind of a continuation of my last post, and I’m feeling silly, well… hey, I don’t have to justify the names of my own blog posts to anyone.
Like I’ve said before, although I haven’t been blogging, I have been continuing to think things through and to engage in conversation with people about my standard topics of life, the universe, and everything. In particular, I have had some interesting discussions with my brother (who comments here periodically under the nom de plume Racticas), who is a grad student in religious studies. One of the idea sets we’ve been tossing around lately is Neopaganism.
When talking paganism, the issue of polytheism naturally comes up. Polytheism is definitely an idea that has to be accomodated rather than assimilated, because as western people we come into the picture with a fairly heavy bias towards monotheism. My Mormon background gets periodically accused of a polytheistic bent by some Evangelical critics, but even as an ex-Mormon, I don’t think the accusation is appropriate. Although Mormonism posits a comparatively limited God, believes that the members of the Godhead (father, son, and holy ghost) are completely distinct in substance, and accepts the possibility (or even necessity) of the existence of other gods coequal to, subordinate to, or even superior to Our Heavenly Father, in practice Mormonism is still thoroughly monotheistic. The existence of other gods is an academic possibility for Mormons, and the only god they deal with and the only god who has ultimate power over this world is God the Father.
I go into detail about the Mormon perspective because it’s my background and thus informs where I am now, and accusations to the contrary notwithstanding, my background, and thus my default position, is monotheistic. And I bring all of this up in order to admit my preexisting bias when I then explain why I don’t believe in literal polytheism.
Which brings me to my point: I don’t believe in literal polytheism. I have enough trouble accepting the existence of one personal god; the idea of many personal gods seems even less plausible. As figures of myth, the gods and goddesses of ancient people seem much more plausible to me as either metaphors of the human condition or as metaphoric personifications of different aspects of the transcendent divine, i.e. Masks of God. I simply do not believe, however, that there are a bunch of real literal distinct divine beings living on Mount Olympus or in Asgard or another dimension or a spiritual plane or something. I just don’t buy it.
Now that’s not to say that I think the gods and goddesses of myth (including Jesus and the Father) are useless things. If there is a real transecndent divinity, I am inclined to think it impossible to deal with it directly in any kind of meaningful way. Thus, we may need personifications and metaphors to be able to approach the divine in a way that our psyches can handle. In other words, we may be putting the masks on God because otherwise God is so far outside of our experience and existence that the unmasked God would be meaningless, inaccessible, and incomprehensible to us. I think of it like this: if a two-dimensional being existed, it could never comprehend us in our fullness as three-dimensional beings. The best it could do would be to imagine a two-dimensional representation of us, but even then it could never be a complete representation. Being two-dimensional the best it could do was approximate a certain aspect, slice, or facet (or simplified agglomeration of several aspects) of our three-dimensional reality. If God exists at all outside our psyches, then so it is with God.
At its heart, this is what Christianity is all about–God become man so that man can relate to God. Its the essence of Hinduism as well, where all things, the gods and goddesses especially, are merely aspects of Brahman.
Alternately, if “God” is just something in our heads, something embedded in the human psyche, then I still think that anthropomorphized representations of God or gods are the best way for us to make sense of it. This is the Joseph Campbell route. We make sense of existence primarily by metaphor and symbol, and that includes conceptualizing symbolic and metaphorical gods.
The moral of my story is that if I were to be a pagan of any stripe, I couldn’t be a strict, literal polytheist. And even if I were to have a mystical encounter with a god or gods, I would still strongly suspect that I had merely put a mask on something otherwise completely transcendent and incomprehensible so that I could comprehend it, as opposed to thinking that whatever god I had encountered had a real, literal, separate and distinct existence of its own. Unless it told me it did and struck me with lighning for being an unbeliever or something. I have a pragmatic streak, as well: at my house, people who didn’t believe in Santa Claus didn’t get presents from him.
Sailing to Byzantium 