Four Uses of the Gods

The line between monotheistic and polytheistic religions is fuzzy at best. Islam and Judaism claim monotheism but employ angels--immortal, invisible beings with supernatural powers, identical in form and function to the pagan gods. The distinction between Gabriel bringing a message from Allah and Hermes bringing a message from Zeus is not obvious. And Christianity supports a throng of angels, devils, saints, and trinitarian persons rivaling the Greek pantheon. Monotheism is identified, not by the number of gods in the ancient sense, but by subordination of them all--even the loose cannons called demons--to a supreme God. But that description also applies to many polytheistic religions.

Cultures as diverse as Hindu in India, Algonquian in the United States, and Igbo in Nigeria recognize a single source of Being or Great Spirit--called Brahman, Manitou, and Chukwu--but emphasize that Being is genderless and transcendent, unknowable except through its manifestations. Gods are understood to be faces or emanations of the One. They don't exist independently, any more than humans do. Hindus do not worship gods as God, but as aids for comprehending a Being beyond duality. Members of one family may each have a favorite deity or change deities according to season and circumstance. The devas are relativistic, shifting windows into a transcendent absolute, a vision expressed by saying that there are thousands of them.

Krishna, speaking as an avatar of Brahman, says in the Bhagavad Gita, "Even those who worship other deities, and sacrifice to them with faith in their hearts, are really worshipping me, though with a mistaken approach. For I am the only enjoyer and the only God of all sacrifices" (p. 102). This avoids the cognitive dissonance of the Abrahamic faiths that insist that God is the one and the only object of worship but, in their classic theologies, acknowledge a God beyond human understanding while still personifying and gendering "Him." They confound the divine being with human images of worship, verbal idols such as Father, Lord, and King.

The uses of the gods demand that most of them operate at this level, as images in our heads and sounds in our mouths despite the inadequacy of these things to represent the transcendent. This seems consistent across all religions, whether polytheistic or monotheistic When a Christian prays for rain, she prays, not to indescribable Being that only the blessed dead can see--the God of the theology--but to a homelier being, a guy with ears to listen and invisible hands to push clouds. This finite person (or idol of the mind) is scarcely different from any other weather god.

1. Wish-granting. Jacob Grimm describes Odin as the "all-pervading creative and formative power" among the Norse gods (p. 133). His name relates to an older form of wish, which signified "the sum total of well-being and blessedness" (p. 138). In later medieval poetry, Wish was a synonym for God (p.142), and wish-granting in this sense is the most obvious divine function. I've already written about petitionary prayer, which begs favors for ourselves, and intercessory prayer, which begs for others. And of course there's imprecationary prayer or cursing. All three ask a god to exert power in a preferred direction--to cause X rather than the original plan Y. Of course, the pious add "thy will be done," but there's no point in praying unless you expect your prayer to nudge a god in the preferred direction--to promote otherwise unavailable health, rain, success, safety, or the like.

Such prayers aspire to influence divine wisdom with private wisdom. We pray for personal goods, not for universal Good. The ancient Stoics called such personal goods preferable indifferents. They are preferable if they can be virtuously achieved--indeed, most of the business of life is to promote them--but they are indifferent in that they don't bring happiness. Almost everything we pray for is an "indifferent," including life, health, wealth, power, fame, comfort, success, safety, family, friends, knowledge, and love (Inwood pp. 78-87). We know people who have these things and are not content. The Buddha taught that chasing such things as if they brought happiness is the kind of desire that makes ordinary life dukkha, or suffering.

Personal goods aren't ultimately good for two reasons. First, their happiness-producing power fades with familiarity--the paradox of a beggar delighted by having a twenty-dollar bill while a billionaire is gloomy over having fewer millions than he did yesterday. No amount of wealth makes a person happy because larger and larger doses are needed to deliver the same buzz. Second, preferable indifferents are often competitive. My rain is your drought. My gain is your loss. Soldiers aren't shy about praying to kill an enemy--indeed, delivering victory was a primary function, not only of Odin, but of Yahweh. Even when there's no clear reason for the gods to favor us (and we are quick to manufacture reasons), even in mundane situations such as a ball game or business deal, it's only human to pray for goods that can't be Good because they are balanced by inevitable evil for others.

Polytheism, with its dedicated temples and specific functions, has a wish-granting advantage. Sacrificing to the rain god if you want rain makes more sense--or, at least, provides greater clarity--than knocking on the door of Absolute Being, soliciting a shower from the architect of the Big Bang. You don't visit the governor to renew your drivers' license, and, if this were normal, there'd be worse lines than at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Praying to Jesus, who is at least human, provides clarity in Christianity (along with the system of specialized patron saints).

Compartmentalizing the powers of the One into figures with special functions--gods and saints of cities, trades, and forces--relieves the cognitive dissonance that afflicts the Abrahamic faiths, which describe God as utterly transcendent and yet chat with him as if he were human. Hindus do a better job of respecting the absolute transcendence of divine Being by having no temples to Brahman, praying and sacrificing to gods who symbolize his powers.

2. Law-making. God's function as maker and enforcer of moral law is central to the traditions of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammed and so embedded in European thought that Deists saw it as proven by reason. Recall Dostoyevsky's famous line in The Brother's Karamazov, "Without God and the future life . . . everything is permitted." This is a line from fiction, and I've converted it from a question to a statement, but evangelicals often equate a lack of religion with moral bankruptcy, blaming the removal of public prayer from schools for increases in crime. The connection between God as judge and private morality isn't limited to evangelicals. The Catholic philosopher Max Scheler began his 1921 treatment of religion, On the Eternal in Man with these words: "Behind the stirrings of the conscience, its warnings, its counsel, its condemnations, the spiritual eye of Faith is ever aware of the outline of an invisible, everlasting judge" (p. 35).

Scheler's courtroom metaphor is culturally conditioned, contradicting Buddhist traditions that enforce morality with the law of karma, the metaphor of physical causation rather than of a judicial proceeding. For the Buddha, "what goes around comes around" is a fact of nature. Today's selfishness will bite you in your next incarnation, if not sooner. Even the gods are subject to karma. Private morality wasn't a big concern of the Greco-Roman gods. Incest and violations of the guest-host relationship could get you in trouble, but Poseidon's persecution of Odysseus and the meddling of the gods in the Trojan war were not about doing to others as you'd have them do unto you, but about accidental favoritism and humoring of divine egos.

The same can be said to a large degree about Moses' Yahweh, who favors Abraham and the twelve tribes for no obvious reason and seems more concerned with cultic loyalty and ritual purity than with charity--a concern later attributed to him by prophets and by Jesus. Mandating and judging interpersonal morality aren't functions of the gods in many traditions. As wish-granters, they reward the faithful in their temples, but may remain amoral in other respects.

3. Life-giving. Eternal life was a late-arriving belief in the Abrahamic tradition, a point of disagreement between the Pharisees and the Sadducees in Jesus time. Prior to that, idea that the favor of a god determined an ordinary person's life after death was an outlier. Most ancient religious regarded the human state after death as a natural event--persistence either as a ghost or memory in the underworld or as a reincarnated soul. Pharaohs, Caesars, or Herculean heroes might be elevated to immortality with the gods--riding the sun-boat, becoming stars, or feasting on Olympus--but working stiffs need not apply. Egyptian funerary texts, beginning with inscriptions on the walls of the tombs of Pharaohs over four thousand years ago, record magical names and incantations that the soul needed to repel demons and please gods in the afterlife, and these spells were democratized over the next millennia until they were written on scrolls in the coffins of wealthy Egyptians. But, if you needed to know these esoteric spells to prevent monsters from devouring your postmortem heart, then the prospect of a happy afterlife seems to have been denied the masses.

Later Abrahamic religions, of course, taught that good morals weren't sufficient for a happy afterlife. True belief or even group membership were required--say, belief in God, or in Jesus, or accepting correct teachings, or belonging to the One True Church. I discussed the belief requirement earlier in the form of Pascal's Wager, which presents Catholic faith as a shrewd gamble. A flowering of universalism in the last century has put Pascal's gamble in a different light. In any case, a god's job as a guarantor of the afterlife can exist separately from the function or wish-granter or law-maker.

4. World-Creating. Even a secondary god within a pantheon, a dependent creation, may grant wishes, enforce rules, and even confer immortality. But to create the universe, to be its soul or architect, is something else altogether, even if the jobs are bundled in monotheism. A creator--supported by "proofs" of God's existence such Aristotle's appeal to a First Cause and the Argument from Design--may be perfectly indifferent to prayer and morality. Isaac Newton thought that he had read this god's mind when he calculated the Law of Universal Gravitation. This is watchmaker god that Voltaire described as indifferent to the comfort of the human "rats" in the hold of his ship. This is Jefferson's god who endows "inalienable rights" and then leaves it up to governments to enforce them.

The designer god, popular in 18th century in the afterglow of the Newtonian revolution and Scholasticism, seems less obvious in the light of evolutionary biology and quantum physics. The idea of a self-organizing natural world seems at least as plausible as the idea of a inconceivably vast designer. Besides, a designer god only defers the problem. Who designed the designer? And who designed the designer's designer?

In contrast to the remote, inaccessible creator of the philosophers, the One of the mystics, also a world-source, is in a different relation to mankind because accessible to direct (if subjective) experience. This Source is both transcendent and immanent, identified both with the animating center of the universe and the soul in each person. The One, when intuitively known--perceived beyond the veil of creation--confers indescribable bliss and a sense of eternity. At least that is the promise of practitioners of Vedanta, Neoplatonism, Jainism, Buddhism, and mystical traditions in Christianity and Islam. Here we have, of course, an elite fellowship, and most monotheists fall between it and believers in the watchmaker god of the deists.

Most people who pray to a personal god draw comfort from a sense that the rain-maker also made the cosmos and is absolutely in charge and worshipful even as they beg for relatively trivial private needs. Exclusive emphasis on the creative function--dismissing miracles, morals, and immortality while still seeing the universe as a manifestation of God--is, as I've developed in my essay on pantheism, much the same thing as atheistic reverence for natural order, the religion of Einstein.

References

Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God. Trans. by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood. Vedanta Press, 1987.

Inwood, Brad. Stoicism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2018.

Scheler, Max. On the Eternal in Man. Trans. Bernard Noble. Archon Books, 1972.

Grimm, Jacob. Teutonic Mythology. Vol. 1. Trans. James Steven Stallybrass. George Bell, 1882.

Intercessory Prayer. https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/07/intercessory-prayer-how-can-that-even.html

Pantheism. https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/04/pantheism.html

Pascal's Wager. https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2019/11/pascals-wager.html

Petitionary Prayer. https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/07/praying-for-stuff-trouble-with.html

Preferred Indifferents. https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/08/divine-calling.html