[This text originally appeared on my blog in four parts, as: 'Philosophical Thought in Greece and Babylonia' I-IV, during the winter of 2018-9. The parts are now stitched together. A fifth part has been added (December 2019), which brings the essay to a conclusion]
There were many more subjects dealt with in my first book (The Sacred History of Being) than the chapter listing suggested. It was designed to be worth reading, but it isn’t constructed as a through narrative. It can be read like that, but the structure is actually fugal: echoes of the same ideas come up throughout the text in different guises.
One of these ideas is the significance of what is ’whole’ in
ancient thought, and the role it seems to have played in the development of
ancient religion (the connection between physical and transcendent reality, a
matter of great importance to the ancients, was understood to be made possible
through the nature of wholes and totalities). Another is the idea that the
nature of reality can only be one, otherwise the integrity of reality would be
fatally compromised. A third idea which plays a part in this fugue is the
irrational nature of the ur-reality. We see this fundamental irrationality
expressed in physical reality through the irrational nature of mathematical
constants. The closer we look at the building blocks of physical reality –
geometry, mathematics and physics – The more we understand that these actually
point back to an ur-reality which is deeply irrational. However large parts of
physical reality can be described and modelled in terms of geometry and
mathematics. A fourth question is discussed – if reality is necessarily one,
otherwise the fundamental nature and integrity of that reality is rendered
impossible, how is it that the universe in which we live is full of
multiplicities and things which are different from each other? How can this be
if reality is one?
The fourth question is closely allied to one of the most
profound questions which can be asked, which is ‘how is it that there is
something rather than nothing?’ This question was asked in antiquity, as it is
still sometimes asked. But the answer to that question received a more intelligent
response in antiquity than it does now. We know about its importance not so
much from direct references, but from the fact that that ancient writers become
very coy when discussing matters of creation, and often do not give
satisfactory answers. Most historians simply assume that this is a reticence
surrounding the particular doctrine of particular cults, and that the
phenomenon does not point to a way of thinking about the generation of the
physical world which is rooted in philosophical questions about what reality
is. Instead they dismiss the importance of reasoning in connection with the
creation of the physical world as having nothing to do with universals, because
(‘as any fule know’) that kind of abstract thought was absent from the human
race until the advent of the Greeks.
One of the ways to test this assumption is to assume, for
the purposes of argument, that the opposite might be true: that bodies of
thought before the Greeks are actually built on abstract and universal
propositions derived in the course of philosophical inquiry. And mostly on a
basis of logical thought. The results which emerge from this approach are often
quite startling: a great deal of thought from before the time of the Greeks
starts to make sense. And strong parallels emerge (another one of the themes
of The Sacred History of Being) in the Babylonian liturgy of the
New Year Festival (the Enuma Elish), between early Greek and
Babylonian/Assyrian thought.
Another thing which historians of ancient thought do is to
assume the simplest interpretation of the details of ancient religion is likely
to be the correct one. So, the gods have a variety of origins – deified
individuals, local totemic deities, and the personification of the powers of
the natural world. Storm gods and Sun gods are a gift for this kind of
interpretation. But again, the assumption can be tested by assuming the
opposite: that there is some kind of philosophical basis to ancient gods within
particular cultural groupings. The parallels across several cultural groups in
the ancient world are often striking. Close examination of the rituals for
installing gods (where we have them) are particularly revealing. Are these
rituals designed to install gods on the earth, or in some transcendental realm,
such as Heaven itself? Very few specialists deal with these materials, because
the answer to that question is quite clearly the latter. Yes, there is a
carefully crafted image of the god on earth, in his temple, but it was
understood by the Mesopotamians to be a particular image of the god on
earth, who has his essential reality in Heaven.
So what is going on here? The difficulty is
compounded by the fact that the craftsmen undertaking the work are granted
a temporary divinity, without which they could not create a god. And
afterwards, their divine status is removed through another part of the ritual,
and they make public denial of their involvement in the creation of the god.
Historians (with one or two exceptions) have no idea of what the basis of such
a notion of granting temporary divinity might be. And so these rituals are
generally passed over in any discussion of Babylonian and Assyrian
civilization, in favour of the more conventional view that the gods are
personifications of natural powers, and so on.
Nothing is explained by avoiding the uncomfortable nature of
the evidence. Addressing the evidence is the only way to understand what is
involved. There are several clues, such as the description of Marduk as the
totality of the gods, in the Enuma Elish (in the section known
as ‘The Fifty Names of Marduk’). Each of the descriptions of the fifty gods is
a humanly crafted definition of what they represent, and their importance for
the good order of the world. As the totality of the fifty, Marduk is the head
of the pantheon of gods. He represents the whole of Mesopotamian divinity.
Is Marduk therefore reality itself? The answer is both yes
and no. The Enuma Elish contains descriptions of two creations
– the second rational, the first irrational. And Marduk is not present during
this first creation. The first creation is described as a hail of
composite creatures, with the bodies of animals and the heads of men. It is
destroyed because it is irrational. Marduk then creates good order in the world
so that man may live, stretching out the surface of the earth and creating the
places of refuge (implying that he was responsible for the creation of ordered
space and the physical dimensions as we know them).
So, as in other ancient descriptions of creation, there is a
stage in the process which is difficult to fathom, and which participated in
irrationality, and in chaos.
The Greeks were cautious in their discussions of the arche,
at least in public, probably for this very reason. They sometimes passed over
this stage altogether in silence, in their divine genealogies. But this evasion
tells us that their conception of reality was that reality was a plenum, and
that it was not, in itself, good. A well ordered world emerged from
that initial state of reality, through the presence and action of the gods. In
Mesopotamia, the gods had the power to secure the good order of the world
through the ‘fixing of the destinies’. The Greeks had a similar concept, in the
three fates.
The Sacred History of Being contains an extract
from a discussion of the complexity of our understanding of the One by the
Platonist Thomas Taylor, who was a contemporary of Shelley and William Blake.
Taylor's text outlines the difficulty which surrounded the discussion of this
subject in antiquity. After quoting the text, I wrote that Taylor’s comments
show:
…how far Platonic argument about Being and the One can be pushed, and also [shows] how far Plato understood the limitations of argument about Being, and knowledge itself. This is a thousand miles beyond the level of sophistication of discussion of the nature of reality by Anselm and by Descartes. In practice their discussions of the subject lack clarity, and actually never proceed beyond ideas and notions associated with Being. So the ideas of 'Greatness' and 'Perfection', which figure in Plato's dialogues as attributes of Being, are the core of their arguments, and the limits of their conception of the Divine.
Another reason for including this text is that it shows just
how dangerous this doctrine is, and that its dangerousness was fully understood
in antiquity. If an ultimate ineffability is wrapped around the idea of Being,
and it cannot be fathomed or known, it is easy for the 'idiotical ears' to
assume that their religion is a pious fraud based on a doctrine which has at
its core no divinity at all.
The primal chaos at the heart of Being of course makes
perfect sense within a model of the world in which the difference between the
subjective and objective is ultimately an illusion. We participate in Being,
and in creation. Reality is what we make of it. Without such an understanding
of this model of reality, the description of Being and reality served and
discussed in the ancient temple school could only mean to 'the idiotical ears'
that the priesthood held that there is no god.
[TY, December 21, 2018]
The conventional wisdom, at least since the European
enlightenment in the eighteenth century C.E., is that the phenomenon of
monotheism is an idea which emerged from a preceding general inclination to
polytheism among the human race. It is also conventional wisdom that we know of
no instance of a monotheistic religion before the instances which are regularly
cited to support this narrative. This emergence is short on evidence, and the
evidence we have is less than clear in terms of context and implications, but
is nevertheless a key assumption for historians of thought, and for
theologians. It is assumed that the appearance of monotheism represents a
negative and critical reaction to aspects of polytheism, and marks a great leap
forward in human thought.
The evidence comes entirely from religious contexts, but
this does not seem to matter. It is a great leap forward whether or not you are
religiously minded, a professional theologian, a historian of cultural ideas,
or even an outright atheist, because it marks the arrival of the ability to
think in abstract rather than concrete terms. After this, it was possible for
human beings to think in terms of universals rather than in assemblages of
essentially unconnected particulars. It does not matter how the change is
dressed: the human race was emancipated from an irrational concern for
personification of natural forces, and the other ways in which a religious
pantheon, or a sequence of genealogies, might have been built.
The two instances which are taken to show the emergence of
monotheistic patterns of thought are:
1): the Hebrew insistence that Yahweh stands alone, and that ‘there is no other god beside me’. This insistence dates – in textual terms - back to the middle of the 1st millennium B.C.E., since we know, largely from internal evidence, that the text of the Old Testament was heavily redacted in the fifth century B.C.E., and reflects the views of what appears to be the victorious ‘Yahweh only’ faction in a long-running theological and political struggle concerning the nature of the Hebrew religion.
And:
2): The religious revolution which is supposed to have been wrought by the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten in the 14th century B.C.E., in which the plethora of divinities and the religious cults attached to them were replaced with the worship of the god ‘Aten’ alone.
I wrote extensively about Hebrew monotheism in the chapter
‘The Idea of Being in Israel’, in The Sacred History of Being (2015),
and the influence of Mesopotamian ideas of divinity (principally Babylonian) on
Hebrew thought. There are many clear references to Babylonian concepts in the
Old Testament, often in the form of parodies. The Hebrews certainly encountered
Babylonian religious thought and practice during their exile in Babylon. The
extent to which this was a significant influence on their thought and practice
before the period of exile is hard to determine however, since there is very
little evidence to illustrate the nature of Hebrew religious thought before
that time, both in terms of datable textual references, and archaeological
remains. We do not know whether polytheism was a Hebrew practice in the first
half of the 1st millennium BCE, because there is no unequivocal
evidence remaining for that period. Other individuated Hebrew gods
are unknown to us in the textual and archaeological records, though there are
references in Hebrew texts to the worship of both foreign and Canaanite gods
(Baal being one of the most conspicuous). Yahweh is however sometimes referred
to as ‘El’, and occasionally with the plural form ‘Elohim’. Which might be
taken to imply a multiplicity of gods.
There is a great deal of evidence however which shows that
argument about the nature of the divine took place, and some of that may have
been prompted by the importation of foreign deities and foreign cult practices.
These arguments, and their potential implications for the nature of Hebrew
thought about the divine, were also discussed in ‘The Idea of Being in Israel’.
This argument about the nature of the divine is rarely read
by scholars in terms of a philosophical debate. There is no connected
discussion available to us relating to these conjectural debates, if that is
what they were, and scholars are disinclined to address the detail which does
exist in terms of a philosophical understanding of the divine.
As for Akhenaten’s religious revolution, some biblical
scholars have argued (over many years) that Moses brought monotheism to the
Levant at the time of the Exodus from Egypt, and that there is a lineal
connection (of some sort) between the supposed monotheism of Akhenaten, and the
Hebrew conception of Yahweh. We are told in the Pentateuch that Yahweh is the
one true god, but, as already mentioned, these are texts which were redacted in
the middle of the 1st millennium B.C.E. These texts reflect the
interests and beliefs of the victors – the ‘Yahweh only’ group. The
truth may be quite different. Since we have no reliable evidence for Hebrew
conceptions of the divine in the first half of the 1st millennium,
what can be said of their conceptions of the divine in the second half of the
second millennium B.C.E.?
In any case, are we clear about the difference between
monotheism and polytheism? To adherents of the idea that the passage from
polytheism to monotheism represents a cultural evolution, the answer is
obvious: monotheism is a move away from local and tribal gods, and a move
towards a grander and more abstract conception of the divine. However
imperfectly understood. This eventually led to the development of articulate
discussion of the philosophical nature of the divine among the Greeks.
But this narrative is entirely based on the two
examples discussed above, and our understanding of what was going on in
both cases is very thin. It is possible to impose the narrative of a cultural
evolution on these examples, and this is what is done. But there is no
conclusive evidence that this narrative represents the actual cultural dynamics
at play in the second and first millennia B.C.E.
I’ve already shown in my essay ‘Polytheism, Monotheism, and
The Cult of the Aten’ *1 that Akhenaten did not set out to obliterate the cults
of the traditional gods of Egypt, and that there is no evidence that
Akhenaten’s worship of the Aten attracted early hostility from the traditional
cults. This does not mean that there was no tension between the new cult and
the other priestly establishments. We do know that in the end, both Akhenaten’s
supporters, and the priests of Amun, were enthusiastically hacking out
references to their respective divinities from the monuments. But we have very
little unambiguous information about how this situation came to pass.
In fact there is another narrative available concerning
Akhenaten’s religion of the Aten which has not so far received much attention.
Why is this? The existing narrative supports the simple idea of the development
of monotheism as a form of reaction to what had become unacceptable aspects of
polytheistic belief. This narrative has a great hold on scholars,
even if not all the available evidence provides clear support for it. The other
narrative about Akhenaten’s religious revolution suggests something quite
different – that the worship of the Aten was not just a newly minted
preoccupation of Akhenaten, and to lesser extent his father, but that his
revolution was an attempt to restore a very old body of thought in Egypt.*2
If that is the case, then the modern narrative we have
constructed, on the basis of a very partial understanding of the evidence, will
necessarily collapse. For one thing, monotheism will have been shown to be very
old, and indeed be an Egyptian way of thinking about reality which stretches
back to the earliest dynasties. For another, the idea of a cultural evolution
from polytheism to monotheism will no longer be tenable, if monotheism is an
idea which is thousands of years old. And in addition, if monotheism has an
extensive history in Egypt, alongside an equally extensive history of
polytheism, we would need to ask, ‘how could this be?’
2 Discussed in 'The Horizon of the Aten'
(forthcoming).
[TY, December 26, 2018.]
We can never know exactly when the idea of Being, or, as we
may characterise it, the most abstract possible conception of the nature of
reality, first entered human consciousness. It may have been an idea which was
conjectured as long ago as the Palaeolithic period, or as late as the early
Neolithic.
However, for those who accept the western convention that
the abstract conception of Being as the foundation of reality itself was first
broached by the Greeks in the middle of the 1st millennium
BCE., the very idea of its earlier presence in human consciousness is an
absurdity. The Western convention explains very little, is not supported by the
available evidence, but it serves the purpose of closing off from our
consideration even the possibility of a much longer history of the idea of
Being. And for the gigantic, sprawling edifices of Western philosophy and
religion, this is, for the most part, a comfort.
Yet the evidence for a much earlier presence of the idea of
Being in civilization is far from invisible, except to those for whom (prima
facie) the idea of an earlier existence for the concept can have no
reality. Historians are disabled in their critical understanding of antiquity
by the fact that the contemporary episteme – the intellectual frame in which
ideas can be thought and discussed - excludes the possibility that the idea of
Being is truly ancient.
It was suggested in the late 19th century
that the idea of Being was of no importance, since it was not possible to say
anything about the nature of Being with any certainty: it was beyond having
anything predicated of it. That alone made it possible for scholars to ignore
the question of Being, whatever role it might have had in ancient cultures. The
modern west had reached the point where ancient ideas made so little sense in
terms of a modern understanding, that the idea of Being was simply passed by.
In antiquity the conception of Being was understood to be
coterminous with reality itself. Hence the suggestion in the Babylonian ‘Enuma
Elish’ that the dimensions of physical reality were stretched out of this
primal and transcendent reality. In such terms, it is impossible to dismiss
Being as an idea which does not need to be addressed. However, the idea of a
reality beyond physical and sensory reality was effectively dismissed in the 19th century.
What we could see, measure and weigh was the only reality we could engage with.
What might lie beyond the scalar and vector values was not something which
could be rationally addressed. In fact the conception of a transcendent reality
disappeared altogether from the range of things which might be known and
understood, at least in terms of real knowledge. If divines and mystics still
wanted to talk about these things, they were free to do so. But their
discussions were treated as so many varieties of nonsense, and were not worthy
of consideration.
In antiquity, the infinite, or Being itself, was not seen as
inaccessible. That is clear from the texts we have. But it does not mean that
connection with the Infinite and Being was regarded as unproblematic. The
difficulty was the result of a collision between the logic of the immanence of
the divine, and earthly logic. According to the latter, it is impossible for
the divine to intersect with physical reality, since something cannot be other
than it is. At least according to Aristotelian logic. Plato can not be
interpreted the same way.
As we cannot know the origins of monotheism, we cannot know
the origins of polytheism. We have to accept that. It is too far in the past.
And indeed, there may have been no single origin for polytheism; no identiable
path by which the human mind and human experience shaped man’s encounter with a
plurality of gods. Generally we imagine how polytheism came to be: as the
result of political and social struggles in antiquity, with the creation of
pantheons of gods, whose existence mirrors in large part, earthly experience of
powers, exalted into entities who have their existences somewhere quite remote
from human experience. They are in some way in notional control of all aspects
of ancient life, and are often deeply unfathomable in both their natures
and in their behaviour. Therefore they give rise to a sense of awe and
sometimes terror in the human mind.
This way of looking at the origins of polytheism assumes
that there is no transcendental aspect to polytheism, and that polytheism is a
phenomenon which precedes both the first discussions of the
idea of Being, and the idea that there is a transcendental reality which was
understood to stand behind the world of appearance.
These two propositions stand behind the modern
interpretation of the meaning and function of the gods in antiquity, and both
propositions were occasionally entertained in antiquity itself, particularly
from Hellenistic times onwards. We assume that this way of seeing and
understanding the gods, which is our modern understanding, was as correct then
as it is now, even if other ideas were current about the gods, and how the
human race might engage with them, as though they were truly real. For the
anthropologist and classicist James Frazer, the idea of discussing Being, now
as well as in antiquity, is nonsensical. It is an abstraction about which it is
not possible to say anything. For Frazer, Being is an unattainable abstraction,
and for all practical purposes, it does not profit us to discuss it in any way.
And yet… Frazer himself noted that the idea of Being was
clearly regarded as a proper subject for discussion by some of the earliest Greek
philosophers – Anaximander, Hesiod, Heraclitus, and Pythagoras, for example, as
well as for later figures, such as Parmenides and Plato. If the discussion of
Being is a corollary of the emancipation of the human mind from irrational
patterns of thought, normally imagined to be a major landmark in Greek
civilization, the fact that there is a continuity of discussion around the idea
of Being long before the development of the Athenian intellectual hegemony -
via Plato’s Academy, and Aristotle’s Lyceum – is something which requires an
explanation.
There is no such explanation available to be considered as
long as we persist in the presumption that there is no conception of the
ultimate abstraction of Being before the 5th century BCE, which
even the Greek evidence contradicts. Greek genius? I cannot write that without
a sense of irony. It is an explanation which explains nothing, but draws
attention to the fact that either we have nothing useful to say about the
intellectual achievement of the Greeks, or that we choose to remain within our
modern episteme.
We also need to escape the notion that the intellectual
achievement of the Greeks owed nothing to contact with other cultures – again a
view based on the presumption that there was no concept of the ultimate
abstraction of Being anywhere else before the Greeks. Isocrates credited the
Egyptians with the discipline of philosophy. Aristotle indirectly referenced
the Egyptians by suggesting that philosophy may have begun with a professional
class with time to think, by which he clearly had in mind the Egyptian
priesthoods. And we know something of the cultural contacts (both intellectual
and commercial) that the Greeks had with Egypt. Solon visited Egypt and talked
with the priests. Pythagoras did the same, and also spent time in Babylon. The
historian Herodotus wrote extensively (if often inaccurately) about Egypt, and
went so far as to claim that the names of some of the Greek gods came from
Egyptian sources.
We also know now of the cultural impact of the empire of
Assyria on Greece, partly through the close proximity of Ionia with the kingdom
of Lydia, a client state of the Assyrians, and through the direct capture of
Athens by the Assyrian king Sennacherib, some time around 700 BCE. There was a
temple to Assyrian gods built in Athens, according to the Greek writer Abydenus,
and so there would have been Assyrian temple personnel present for a
significant period of time, during which there was the possibility of a
significant exchange of ideas. We have long known that many notions of the
presocratic philosophers echo similar Mesopotamian ideas.
[TY, January 10, 2019]
How can we have polytheistic and monotheistic ideas
apparently existing side by side, within the same cultural contexts? This seems
to have been the case in ancient Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, and perhaps also in
ancient Greece. Plato often referred to ‘ho theos’ (God), rather than ‘the
gods’, yet the cultural context was polytheistic. This is a mystery if we are
yoked to the idea of a cultural transition from polytheism to monotheism within
historical time. That the evidence from these cultures, does not, on
the face of things, provide support for this idea, suggests strongly that this
modern and simplistic model of ancient cultural development is deficient in
explanatory power, and is more than likely plain false.
It is far from straightforward to disentangle the elements
of this issue, so that we might come to a practical resolution as to what is
actually going on. It is however useful to discuss some of the
issues which stand between us and an understanding.
One of these of course is our modern preconception of what
it was possible to think before Jaspers ‘Axial Age’. The very concept of an
axial age speaks of a desire to close off detailed study of thought before
classical Greece.
Why would we want to close off the analysis of earlier
patterns of thought? The answer is that we consider that such patterns are
irretrievably irrational in nature, and offer no rational insights into
patterns of thought in antiquity. They may be intelligible in terms of the
language of mythology, and in terms of the logic of poetry, but their
literature is essentially pre-rational, and so is best approached in terms of
disordered, and even pathological thought.
Another is the idea that it is only with the capacity to
engage in rational thought, is it possible to
contemplate abstractions such as ‘Being’ and the ‘Infinite’. Before the
classical period, we conceive that man did not contemplate Being or the
Infinite, at least in rational terms, whatever inchoate inklings they may have
had.
One of the issues with the scholarship which addresses
thought from time before the Greek contributions, is that it is generally assumed,
rather than evidentially determined, that there is no
transcendentalist aspect present in ancient religions. What is missing is not
defined in the context of ancient thought however, because there is
nothing to be defined. Transcendentalist patterns of thought belong to
later - and western - intellectual traditions.
It does not however take much effort to show that this is a
false assumption, and that the interpretation does not account for the range of
evidence which is available. For example, the Assyrian god Ashur was understood
in a number of ways, including simply as the local god of the city of Ashur –
recognised as powerful because his city was powerful. However Ashur
was also defined as the totality of the other gods. In which case he could be
understood in terms of a grand aggregation of the properties and attributes
associated with the other Assyrian divinities. This idea has been entertained,
in this simple form, also for Egyptian polytheism, using the term ‘cosmotheism’
to mark out this species of thought concerning the ‘pre-axial gods’. In other
words, the definition of the supreme deity in the official pantheon of gods is
a plain summation of everything associated with the divine pantheon.
This also is how Marduk appears to be presented in the
Babylonian New Year Festival – Marduk is the principal god in the Babylonian
pantheon, and a section of the liturgy of the festival assigns him fifty names.
These names are the other gods: they are listed for recitation, and the main
characteristics are described and their principal functions are defined.
Together, these gods, their descriptions and their functions delineate all the
proper characteristics of divine kingship. As the supreme god, Marduk is also
the perfect model for kingship in the Babylonian state.
This is how the literary and ritual texts can be, and are,
read by the majority of scholars interested in the subject of ancient divinity.
The starting point is that there is no transcendentalist aspect to the ancient
understanding of the divinities in the pantheons of Assyria, Babylonia, or
Egypt. If there is something approximating to a transcendentalist conception of
the supreme deity, we cannot fathom it – and in any case, it will not be a wholly
rational conception which would stand up to scrutiny. The idea will necessarily
be vague, inchoate and imprecise, and will have no significant range of
function associated with it. Such a loosely defined transcendentalism will
perhaps signify only an exaltation of the status of the god, in the same way
that in ancient Greece, divine status could be accorded to human individuals,
without it being understood that the individuals had actually become divine.
However, we should look closely at what is being described
in texts relating to the divine. In the case of the Enuma Elish, each of
the gods in the pantheon which are embraced in the nature of Marduk, king of
the Gods, represents an excellence, whether in the construction of quays and
harbours, the detection and restoration of lost gods, the making of divine
images, of farming and cultivation, of cattle husbandry, etc. Each of these
gods represents the good things which are necessary for the good order and
prosperity of the Babylonian state. And they are the most excellent exemplars
of these necessary things.
[Final part added, December 29, 2019]
Excellence in Mesopotamia was understood to be a virtue,
just as it was in ancient Greece. We can see this clearly in the autobiographical
remarks made by the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, when he recounts his training
as crown prince, in preparation for becoming the successor to his father,
Esarhaddon. He tells us of his skill as a spear thrower, and of his skill at
oil divination. He tells us of his skill in mathematics, and that he is able to
read the obscure cuneiform of tablets ‘from before the flood’.
By demonstrating his excellence at these things,
Ashurbanipal showed that he merited the status accorded to him by his father
Esarhaddon, who was the representative of the god Ashur on earth.
In a sense Ashurbanipal’s collection of excellences mirror’s
Marduk’s embodiment of the lesser gods, as described in the liturgy of the Enuma
Elish, all of whom are exemplars of things essential for the good conduct
of the state and the upholding of the universe by the king.
It is possible to look at this kind of listing of
embodiments of excellence purely as a description of what is desirable in both
the gods and in earthly kings. That is the essence of the cosmotheist argument –
the various excellences are descriptive, and provide a reminder once a year (in
the case of the performance of the liturgy of the Enuma Elish) of what the
necessary excellences are.
However we need to remember that liturgy and ritual in
antiquity were understood to be performative, rather than simply descriptive.
In other words the performance of ritual served a function In the case of the Enuma Elish,
performing the text was understood to contribute to the upholding of the good
order of both the earthly world, and the state of the cosmos. Modern scholars
of course do not believe such a thing, and have difficulty fathoming the
ancient understanding of the efficacy of ritual. But it is clear that in antiquity, for the courtly
and scholarly classes at least, they held that ritual was performative and
effective. We are told by the Greeks (and not just by Aristotle), that the pursuit
of excellence is something which should be done for its own sake. Meaning that such
a pursuit was understood to serve an important function.
We get clues about this when Plato talks about the harmony
of the soul, and relates the idea to the good order of the polis, and the
structure of the state. All of which is achieved through the pursuit of excellence,
even at the level of craft activity. The soul and the society reflect each
other, and each is, if things are in order, an assemblage of excellences. By
extension, both reflect the good order of the cosmos, and the perfection of the
gods.
This is not a cosmotheistic assemblage. Cosmotheism
essentially argues that the idea of assemblage which a divine pantheon
contains, is a fiction, since the assemblage does nothing in itself, but merely
serves the purpose of creating a superficial sense of totality and completeness
in the divine world.
In fact the function of the assemblage of the divine excellences
embodied in both the gods, and in society, serves the function of binding the
divine and human worlds together, and establishes a continuity between them. In
addition to that, the assemblage of excellences opens the possibility of commerce
between the human and divine worlds.
This issue was of fundamental importance
in both ancient Greece and in Mesopotamia. Plato focussed on the importance of
a commerce between worlds in the Sophist, because otherwise all of the
rituals and observances, the creation of images of the gods and their
installation in Heaven, the sacrifices to them, and the divination of divine
will, would be both completely meaningless, and impossible, if the two worlds
lacked a connection, and a commonality.
In the Sophist, in the presence
of the Eleatic Stranger, Plato did not provide the detail of the argument for
the connection between the worlds, but merely said that they must agree with each other that it
must be so. But the detail of the argument can be found elsewhere in the Sophist,
particularly when Plato is discussing the battle of the Gods and Giants . That
section repays close study.
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