In short, the problem with eclecticism is that it seems just too dang unprincipled to be viable.
I have written before about how I get to feel claustrophobic with boxed religion. Although I was specifically talking about religions that present the whole package–theology, practice, etcetera–in one neatly-defined package with firm orthodoxy-borders all the way around it so that everything in the box is prescribed and everything outside the box is proscribed, I feel similarly about conceptual boxes on a smaller scale. This is part of why I can’t go with a reconstructionist religion like Hellenismos or Asátrú. Even having experienced intense mystical contact with gods from Greek mythology, a single flavor of paganism is just not sufficiently spiritually fulfilling.
The thing is, although I see the value in picking one direction and sticking with it, I genuinely feel spiritually moved by the Celtic and the Norse as well as the Greco-Roman. Maybe it’s a heritage thing; my ancestors were Celts, Teutons, and Vikings, and my cultural ancestors are the Greeks and Romans. I am a fusion of multiple strands of paganism, so it is only natural that I should feel some attachment to each of them. And again, while I can see that there could be personal benefit in picking just one, I don’t think I am capable of doing that. My connection to these three (at least) mythical-cultural traditions is not one that allows for picking and choosing. It is sufficiently strong so that I would feel that I was denying a part of myself if I left one of them behind.
(Interesting: three traditions. Possible Druidic significance?)
In short, while I acknowledge the probable spiritual benefits gained by embracing one tradition exclusively, it is vastly outweighed by the sense of deep personal spiritual connection that I feel to each of these three: they touch my heart, mind, and soul in a deep and primal way. It’s basic economics of the soul, really: what I stand to gain by specializing is worth less to me than what I stand to lose by specializing, so I choose not to specialize.
On the other hand, I look down on eclecticism. I think of it as unprincipled, ridiculous. If you can have three different mythic traditions, why not four? Why not ten? Why not all? Why not just take whatever you want from whatever tradition you want?
The questions actually aren’t completely rhetorical. I think it’s worth asking whether picking and choosing is a big deal, especially given that we’re going to pick and choose to a certain extent no matter what. In the end, though their reasons may be subtle and complicated, everyone is going to choose the religious expression that most suits them. I’m not Muslim after all, because on some level and for whatever reason, Islam does not suit me. If not for some permutation of personal preference then we would have a much harder time picking a religion. What metric would we use to decide what we believe, even if we stayed in the religious tradition we were born into?
But at the same time, I think that the idea of submission is incredibly important to religion. One of the most religious utterances ever made is “not my will but thine be done.” The ultimate spiritual experience is mystical union with the divine, where the self is swallowed up into somehting greater. Self-denial, putting aside your own special narcisissm in favor of something greater and higher, is at the heart of religion and real spirituality.
If you’re just ordering whatever you want from the menu and cobbling together a religious gumbo from whatever concepts, practices, and gods suit your fancy, then you are really not worshipping a Deity at all, but in a twisted way you are actually worshipping yourself. Real gods demand that we grow and change in order to worship and experience them. Real religion has to be fundamentally transformative; otherwise it’s just a sociocultural phenomenon that serves no individual spiritual purpose. And in order to be transformative, religion has to be demanding. On a certain level, God is undamentally alien to humans, and in order to experience God, humans have to be willing to bend and be shaped to be able to meet God partway. If you’re assembling some kind of a FrankenGod from a pile of divine characteristics, then all you have is an imaginary god born of individual fancy. Your own fancy. That’s what you are worshipping.
So how to reconcile this with the undeniable fact that people pick and choose when it comes to religion, and with my personal spiritual connection to multiple strands of paganism? I don’t really know, but I feel like there’s a line between the extremes that can be walked. If we recognize and embrace the tension between these competing religious metavalues or realities or whatever, then maybe there’s a way to navigate them and even benefit from them without being torn apart or thrown one way or the other.
Incidentally, Tony Lamb has a good post on the topic at the Association of Polytheist Traditions.
Sailing to Byzantium 