Dec. 1, 2013
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the
Earth. And the Earth was without form, and void, and the spirit of God hovered
over the waters. And God said “Let there be light,” and there was light.
These are familiar words to most of us, the first
lines of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. It establishes the primacy and
power of God at the very start, as he wills into existence the heavens and the
Earth.
Now, there is good reason to believe, as most
scholars do, that these words are not the oldest in the Bible despite appearing
first. Nevertheless, they are there in those opening lines for a reason. Jews
and Christians who seek to read their scriptures from start to finish encounter
their singular God right away, in all his omnipotent glory, the one who makes
worlds through sheer force of will. The first chapter of Genesis brings God
forth in power, might and majesty, which colors every subsequent story about
him. Muslims also share this mythology, with some variations added in the
Koran.
Now, consider some words that may be less familiar,
the story of creation that the Hellenic poet Hesiod relates in his work called
Theogony.
At the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure
foundations of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and
dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros, fairest among the
deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels
of all gods and all men within them. From Chaos came forth Erebus and black
Night; but of Night were born Aether and Day, whom she conceived and bare from
union in love with Erebus. And Earth first bare starry Heaven, equal to
herself, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever-sure abiding-place for
the blessed gods. And she brought forth long Hills, graceful haunts of the
goddess-Nymphs who dwell amongst the glens of the hills. She bare also the
fruitless deep with his raging swell, Pontus, without sweet union of love. But
afterwards she lay with Heaven and bare deep-swirling Oceanus, Coeus and Crius
and Hyperion and Iapetus, Theia and Rhea, Themis and Mnemosyne and gold-crowned
Phoebe and lovely Tethys. After them was born Cronos.
The differences between this polytheistic creation
story and the Judeo-Christian monotheistic one are apparent in this comparison.
There is no single God creating things. Hesiod tells us that Chaos “came to be”
without further explanation, and through sexual union in the divine realms came
Earth, night, day, heaven and ocean. These are the primordial gods of the
cosmos, and from them come still more divine powers.
In an Egyptian creation myth, water exists before
anything else. The god Ra emerged from the chaotic water and began to give it
form, creating other gods and shaping the cosmos. In some mythologies, such as
the Norse, Babylonian and Hindu, creation requires the sacrifice of a first
being.
When we talk about different religions, when we
compare faith traditions or individual beliefs, one of the aspects that we
consider is the view of the divine power. We talk about monotheism, atheism,
polytheism, pantheism and other prefixes for the word theism with an assumption
that we all understand the definitions. One God, many gods, no gods, etc.
However, the really important contrasts between these perspectives are not
merely mathematical. It’s not about multiplying the number of deities from one
to many, or subtracting from one to zero, not in its essence.
The creation mythologies provide an immediate
example of this. The God of the Jews – and later, Christians and Muslims – is
shown from the very first words of the scripture to pre-exist. Before anything
else was, God is. God creates the heavens and the earth and then gives them
order and form. God is omnipotent, able to create a universe from nothing. God
decrees the way things are to be: there is to be light, darkness, a sun and
moon, land and water, plants and animals and, ultimately, human beings.
None of this way of thinking has a place in Hesiod’s
story. There is chaos, and it organizes itself enough to bring forth the Earth
and the power of love – Eros – from which comes all else. We see a similar
pattern in other mythologies, no matter what specific stories they tell. The
gods may shape the entire cosmos after they come to be, but they do not exist
apart from or before its essence.
So what difference does this make? Isn’t this still
basically about a number?
In our lives, we experience death, pain, injustice.
People lose their livelihoods or their lives. People are persecuted for their
beliefs, or their race or sexuality. Natural disasters injure, kill and
impoverish billions of people. Epidemics of disease, or famine and drought,
cause untold suffering, sickness and death. In every way, the world is less
benevolent and more capricious than perhaps we think it should be. Explaining
why this is the case is a challenge for any theistic religion.
For the past few millennia, in the Western world
anyway, the most common religious answer has been that this world is only an
imperfect, fallen creation in need of redemption. Religion has offered a set of
principles to effect that redemption, the salvation of the world, principles
derived from the revelation of God rather than our own senses and observations.
The material world is profane – that is, ordinary – while the sacred lies in
heaven, in the God who created the universe but stands outside of it, transcendent.
The extent to which anything in the world can be
held sacred, in this view, is only inasmuch as it reflects the will of God –
obedience to God’s laws, submission to God’s sovereignty. It could be argued
that this is the basis of a moralistic approach to religion, a binary division
of right and wrong, sacred and profane, godly and ungodly, virtue and vice, sin
and righteousness.
This dualism is the prevailing view of the world
today, and it pervades even schools of thought that reject the idea of deities.
Atheism is usually defined as the lack of belief in God, or a belief that there
is no God. It is contrasted to the monotheism of Judaism, Christianity and
Islam and left at that.
As much as this monotheistic dualism has dominated
the western world’s view of the world for thousands of years, it was not always
this way. Polytheism was the norm for a long time. Even the ancient Jews,
generally assumed to have been monotheistic from the start, were actually
polytheists – they believed the god Yahweh was one of many gods, the one who
had chosen them as his people and forbidden them to worship the gods of other
peoples. The idea that Yahweh was the only god, and the supreme omnipotent
creator of the universe, developed much later in Israel’s history.
In the mythologies of most polytheistic religions, the
gods are usually born from the universe; they are within it, part of it, not
its external creators. To the polytheist, all of nature reflects the sacred,
even the things that seem harsh, violent or tragic.
As author Dan McCoy puts it in his short but
profound book, “The Love of Destiny:”
Where
monotheism is a moralistic worldview, polytheism is a sacral one. The sacred is
not remote from the world; it is the very essence of the world. All that is
profane speaks to us of the sacred if we listen attentively enough, for the
world we inhabit is the very flesh of spirit, its organic manifestation. The
plural character of life, which mocks the moralist’s attempt to reduce it to an
absolute good and true side, and an absolute evil and false side, is an
expression of that which prevails on the divine plane, with its plurality of
gods and goddesses. The polytheist does not wring his hands over the struggles
and contradictions with which he is confronted, but confronts them in turn. Her
overcoming of the world and being overcome by the world is the sacred’s
overcoming of itself. She stares unflinchingly into its terror, its pain, its
ruthlessness, and its unfairness – and, understanding that these are inseparably
coupled with prosperity, joy, pleasure, and love, she is capable of seeing the
sublime at work everywhere and of affirming the whole without exception.
McCoy, I think, summarizes the really important
difference between monotheism and polytheism very well here. To the monotheist,
the world with its pain and suffering and injustice is a thing – an object to
be manipulated, to be used, to be exploited and, when it can be done, to be
fixed. To the polytheist, the world with its pain and suffering and injustice
is itself a spiritual entity, with which we must live in relationship. The
monotheist sees the world as a broken thing in need of being redeemed. The
polytheist sees the world as a living, interconnected system where pain and
pleasure, life and death coexist in necessary balance.
This is an oversimplification in some respects. Any
individual will have his or her own attitudes in conjunction with those implied
by a religious point of view, and no one fits neatly into a categorical box. As
an overall assessment, however, McCoy’s description is apt.
In a sense, religion in general is concerned with
what is sacred, that is, divine or set apart for reverence – and what is
profane, that is, ordinary, for common use. The French scholar Mircea Eliade,
who did most of his work in the mid-20th Century, notes that neither
state can exist in pure form. Eliade did not grapple specifically with
monotheism vs. polytheism; rather, he saw a divide between what he termed
religious man and profane man.
We should remember that as Eliade uses the term,
“profane” is not meant as an insult; it merely refers to a concern with the
ordinary over the sacred. As Eliade saw it, profane man has desacralized the
world. A tree is a tree, a river is a river, the sun is a ball of hydrogen.
Religious man, by contrast experiences breaks, discontinuities, that connect
the ordinary to the sacred.
However, neither kind of person can be completely
within the worlds Eliade describes. Religious man lives in the ordinary world,
and enacts rituals to establish a sacred space, a sacred time, to render
ordinary objects into something more. In our rituals with ADF, for example, we
light a fire, fill something with water and establish a representation of a
tree, or, ideally, designate a real tree. In ritual, these things become
portals to the world of the spirits, sacralized by our intention.
Profane man, on the other hand, sees the world as
entirely ordinary, yet even he acknowledges some places or times as set apart –
a birthday, the site of his wedding or his father’s grave, for example. These
are vestiges of a religious sensibility that even the most secular person is
likely to retain.
As I said, Eliade is not primarily concerned with
distinguishing monotheism from polytheism, but coupled with the work of other
scholars, we can see some connections. The monotheist, seeing the world as the
unfeeling creation of a transcendent higher power, finds his sacred time and
space in designated houses of worship – a church, a synagogue, a mosque. If he
finds spiritual power in nature, it is as the product of the Creator. Nature is
to God as the Mona Lisa is to DaVinci. The polytheist, on the other hand, finds
spiritual power in nature because it is itself divine.
I’ve been using the terms monotheism and polytheism
as a kind of shorthand here, but this divergence of worldview is broader than
that. Monotheism informed the Enlightenment and the rise of secularism, while
polytheism is related in its view of the sacred to animism and pantheism. In
any of these isms, the difference, I would argue, is less about the specific
beliefs regarding the number or nature of deity, and more about whether the
material universe is regarded as inherently sacred or inherently profane. Even
those who believe in no gods perceive the world as mechanistic or as alive, as
sacred or profane. Dan McCoy counts modern science as a monotheism, not because
of any scientific tenet regarding a deity, but because the assumptions that
underlie science arise from the monotheistic view of the world.
The person that Eliade would call “profane man”
experiences the world as a predictable place, governed by scientific laws and
rules of society. If the man believes in God, his God is transcendent and apart
from the creation. The sacred, for the profane man, may not be entirely absent,
but it is not of the world; it is reached in prayer and in church ritual. In
addition, God establishes morality and sets rules for his people to follow. And
if he has his people, there are also people who are not his people. To this
person, the world is subject to binary divisions.
The person who sees the divine power as infused in
nature – whether he believes in the many gods of polytheism, or the diffuse god
of pantheism, or a naturalistic humanism – perceives the world as a wondrous
thing, alive with potential and power, every leaf, stone and creature holding
inherent worth and identity. The sacred may not always be obvious, but it is
always present, in any place, at any time. For this person, morality is more
relative, polyvalent, not dictated by any single higher power but deduced from
a blend of empathy and self-interest.
I do not argue that one of these views is superior
to other, or even that either of these broad descriptions is likely to exist in
pure form in anyone. I only wish to suggest that, like so many things, these
simple labels for varying theologies have great depths of meaning that might
not be apparent at first glance.
