One usually hears Judaism, Christianity, and Islam referred to as “the three great monotheistic religions.” Apparently, however, that noted deity Yahweh would disagree: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20, 2-3).
That second verse is a simple imperative; there really is no way of reading it other than literally. Yahweh acknowledges the existence of other gods besides himself. He subscribes to what Max Müller called henotheism, which means giving pride of place to one god over all others. Yahweh is the god of Israel and he insists that Israel honor him above the gods of other nations and tribes.
I’m a Catholic, and we Catholics have sometimes been accused of closet polytheism, what with our veneration of saints and fondness for relics and statues and holy water. In fact, the church, as it spread, adapted and accommodated itself to pagan customs. Many ancient churches are built on sites that were once pagan shrines. Catholic thought was also much influenced by a Fifth Century Syrian monk who called himself Dionysius the Areopagite [1], and who thought that, in addition to all the visible creatures inhabiting the world, there were also all manner and levels of invisible preternatural beings, the best-known being angels.
The question I would like to address, however, is this: Who came first, God or the gods? It seems altogether likely that it was the latter. But what is interesting about that, it seems to me, is how it suggests that mankind’s initial encounter with and understanding of the world was interpersonal (as it still is among so-called primitive peoples).
We take it for granted now that everything — including ourselves — is mostly the product of impersonal forces. This is a pretty recent outlook, but is now nearly universal. And yet, increasingly, there seem to be all sorts of misgivings about it. Proponents of anthropogenic global warming, for instance, blame the industrial revolution for the problem they think they have identified. They claim to have identified that problem by means of science, the same science that gave us … the industrial revolution, the factories, the SUVs.
This ambivalence is evident in a piece by Luisetta Mudie called “Climate Change and the Poetic Imagination.” [2] In it, if I understand her correctly, Mudie seems to accept the science of AGW and suggests that we must start imagining things differently if we are to cope with it effectively. “Science,” she writes, “cannot get very far with climate change divorced from its partner, the Mature (not classroom) Imagination.”
The problem with this is that we simply cannot will ourselves to do that. In fact, that is the problem with the way we moderns go about things: We come up with an idea that we think will solve a given problem, then go about trying to put said idea into practice. This is a far cry from the interpersonal engagement with the world we once enjoyed.
It is worth noting that language was born out of just that interpersonal engagement. As that engagement was supplanted by an increasingly abstract view of things, our words grew more and more detached from things even as we ourselves did. We became subjects stranded in a world of objects, in Housman’s phrase, “lonely and afraid in a world [we] never made.”
We do not need a new way of thinking or speaking or imagining. We need to rediscover an old way of being in order to restore to our thinking, speaking, and imagining something of their original freshness. That is something neither reason nor science can help us with. Maybe we need to get reacquainted with those other gods that the first commandment reminds us of.
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Frank Wilson [5]
Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts [7])
- An illusion of precision [8] - September 9, 2015
- Watching the passing scene [9] - October 28, 2013
- To see like a child [10] - June 26, 2013
- Riffing and digressions [11] - January 21, 2013
- Life is a parenthesis between one darkness and another [12] - September 13, 2012