The Keys of the Kingdom: Binding and Loosing in Heaven and Earth

Where are my books going? What is the point I’m trying to make by writing them?

There is something very important about the way the cosmos was understood in antiquity, which has been lost almost entirely. But not actually entirely, as I have found out in conversation with readers since my first book was published in November 2015. Some readers seem to grasp the ancient understanding almost intuitively, without having to know how it can be approached at a technical level.  Others arrive at the knowledge as the result of logical argument. It is also possible to approach the knowledge on the basis of the study of ancient literature, liturgy, philosophy, and iconography.

My own way into the ancient understanding began perhaps with discovering the statement Matthew 16: 19 concerning the ‘Keys of the Kingdom’, which is a phrase used only once in the Bible.

 “ whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven”

I first read this when I was about fifteen, and at school, and wondered at what it could possibly mean. It remained a mystery to me for some time – it would have been an entirely fruitless business to bring it up in our religious instruction class. The full passage extends from Matthew 16, verse 13-20, which I quote here:

13 When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”
14 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
15 “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
16 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
17 Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven.
18 And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.
19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
20 Then he ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

This passage concerns the knowledge that the Son of Man is in  fact God incarnate. Jesus asks questions of his disciples about their understanding of who he is, and they reply with different interpretations. All except Simon Peter answered by suggesting he is one of the prophets. Simon Peter on the other hand, identifies him directly as the Messiah, and declares that he is the Son of the living God.

Jesus declares that Simon Peter is blessed, on account of this identification, "for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood” (i.e., by anything or any experience with roots and nature in the physical and secular world), “but by my Father in heaven”. He then proceeds to proclaim this idea as the rock on which “I will build my church”. There is a pun here of course on Simon Peter’s name – Petros - which means ‘rock’. But the meaning of the passage is that the Church (ekklesia) is to be built on the idea that whatever is bound on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever is loosed on earth will be loosed in heaven. This power constitutes the Keys of the Kingdom (of God).

Peter here represents a personification of the Church, but it is the Church itself which is important, and whose nature is being defined. Jesus is saying is that there is an essential identity between Heaven and Earth, and between the Father (in Heaven) and the Son (on Earth). However difficult a concept this may be to grasp, since it seems to defy logic. Simon Peter does grasp this, and he is made blessed and holy by this understanding.

As I said, this remained a passage which was hard to fathom for many years, despite the fact that it came to serve an important function for the Catholic church, in that the Church knows Saint Peter as the first Bishop of Rome, and claims that the power of the 'keys of the kingdom of God' is therefore invested in their Church. But its meaning is so much more interesting than that.

It is in fact a passage which parodies the Mesopotamian understanding of the relationship between gods in heaven, and incarnations of the gods on earth. I’ve written extensively about this in The Sacred History of Being. Babylonian priests could set up gods in heaven, and on earth, and they had a complex ritual process (lasting three days) which allowed them to do this. Close study of the texts associated with this process tell us a great deal about the logic which underpins it, and indeed the priests have the power to both create and to decommission gods both in heaven and on earth.

The king in Babylonia, as the living representative of Bel/Marduk on Earth, had the power to confer a temporary divinity upon the workmen making or refurbishing the divine images, which power could then be removed when they had finished their work. Part of the ceremony involved the ritual parody of their hands being cut off with a knife of tamarisk wood, symbolising the removal of their capacity to make gods. Which was their ability to join together divinity in heaven, and divinity on Earth, and to bind and loose in two worlds.

The holiness code in Leviticus confirms this interpretation that there is, for some reason which is hardly ever spelled out, an essential identity between heaven and Earth

“I am the Lord your God. If I am Holy, then you must be Holy”. (Leviticus 19.2).

Many in the modern world struggle with the idea of the incarnation of the divine on earth, and divinity made flesh. It was a struggle for many in antiquity also, hence the importance that faith (without understanding) came to have.  There are real answers out there to this question however, which illuminate much about ancient thought, religion, liturgy and literature, and they are worth spelling out.

The Making and Renewal of the Gods in Ancient Assyria

A key chapter from The Sacred History of Being, published in November 2015. This chapter will be quite perplexing for readers who imagine that the important aspects of ancient religious practice, its preoccupations and purposes, are essentially the same as those which we are accustomed to in the later Abrahamic religions. Modern religion in fact bears very little relation to ancient religion, except in terms of some generalised concepts and vestigial remains. 

As far as the ancient Mesopotamian religious elite was concerned, it was within their power to both create divine images, and to set them up in Heaven. Strange? It is to us. But we don't make this conception unimportant by refusing to address what the evidence tells us. This chapter gives an indication of the extensiveness and detail in the evidence which has emerged from the ground over the past 150 years or so. 

The evidence for this strikingly different understanding of the nature of reality is largely ignored (currently), except by specialists in a relatively narrow field. It is hard to understand, and without an understanding of ancient philosophical ideas about the world, virtually impenetrable to modern scholarship. I've given some reasons in the chapter why this is so. 

This is just one of the puzzling areas of Mesopotamian civilization. There is elsewhere on this site a collection of divination texts, with the title 'Who will Appear Before the City?'. Equally strange, they concern conversation with Shamash the Sun god, about what will happen in the future. 

Thomas Yaeger, February 20, 2018. 

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"Enki's beloved Eridug, E-engura whose inside is full of abundance! Abzu, life of the Land, beloved of Enki! Temple built on the edge, befitting the artful divine powers!" 

 'Enki's journey to Nibru.'  [i]

I have argued that the practice of philosophy in Greece is rooted in the context of religious ritual, and that philosophy as practised and discussed by Plato had as a principal purpose the exposing of a paradoxical quality in reality, in that reality has a two-fold nature (containing the limited, existing in time; and the unlimited, which participates in eternity), and that the world of experience is in effect an illusion within the ur-reality. As a consequence, the world as it presents itself is a series of images of Being, which point to its ineffable and invisible nature. Plato also spoke of the heavens as a moving image of eternity, patterned after the nature of Being, the 'most fair' image of divinity after which to pattern the world and everything contained within it. He also intimated that what applied to the reality of the Forms also applied to the 'revered and holy' images of the gods. This is possible because of the two-fold nature of reality. Things can be made holy, and holiness can be withdrawn.

So Plato was not talking entirely abstractly about Ideas and the Forms. They can have both concrete form on earth as well as a presence in Heaven. This suggests that in Ancient Greece, there was ritual practice associated with the making of divine statues, built on the precepts of the transcendent theology of the divine cults. Unfortunately, none of the rituals which might have existed have survived from the Greek cultural context.

The presence of a theory of Being in ancient Assyria has been demonstrated to be likely, on the basis of the clear similarity between the structures of the Jewish Kabbalah and the Assyrian Sacred Tree. The following chapters seek in addition to establish relationships between what Plato had to say about the creation of the world and its patterning, and ritual practice concerning the making of gods in Assyria. We have good detail for the latter. If the Assyrians understood the concept of Being as the root of reality itself, then the relationship of the forms of things to a wholly abstract concept of Being in Assyria should show parallels with the discussion in Plato.

The reconstruction of the Mis Pî ritual and its associated incantations mainly comes from the Neo-Assyrian or Neo/Late Babylonian periods. So that is from the 8th to 5th century B.C.E, although there are some fragments from Uruk dating to the 2nd century.  [ii]  These tablets come from Nineveh, Assur, Babylon, Sippar, Nippur, Kalhu (Nimrud), and a small number of other, more widely spread locations. The majority come from Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh, and so date from the 7th century B.C.E. Their colophons confirm that they were the property of the library. Some of the texts from Nineveh are copies of texts originating elsewhere, but the tablets do not often give the sources. Full details of the existing texts are given in The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia, SAALT1, 2001, p27 - 29.

The following text concerning the preparation for the renewal of divine images, dates from the latter days of the reign of Esarhaddon (680-669 B.C.E.), and describes the process of the renewal of the cult images from the initial consultation of the oracles, to the final installation of the images.  [iii]

When in heaven and on earth signs favourable for the renewal of the (statue of) the gods occurred,  [iv]  then I, Esarhaddon, king of the universe, king of the Land of Assur,  the apple of Assur’s eye, the beloved of the great gods, with the great intelligence and vast understanding,  which the great Nudimmud, the wise man of the gods, bestowed on me,  with the wisdom which Assur and Marduk entrusted to me when they made me aware of the renewal of (the statue of) the great gods,  with lifting of hands, prayers, and supplication, (I) prayed to the divinities Assur, king of the Gods, and to the great Lord Marduk.

The following passage concerning the right to make gods we have already encountered. I repeat it here, within its original context:

 “Whose right is it, O great gods, to create gods and goddesses in a place where man dare not trespass? This task of refurbishing (the statues), which you have constantly been allotting to me (by oracle), is difficult! Is it the right of deaf and blind human beings who are ignorant of themselves and remain in ignorance throughout their lives? The making of (images of) the gods and goddesses is your right, it is in your hands; so I beseech you, create (the gods), and in your exalted holy of holies may what you yourselves have in your heart be brought about in accordance with your unalterable word”. 

Again, as is common in the translation of texts which seem to make little sense without minor emendation, this translation inserts words apparently required in English to render the meaning clear. Thus the line which says “…the renewal of the (statue of) the gods occurred” actually ought to be rendered “….the renewal of the gods occurred,” in order not merely to be strictly faithful to the original text, but in fact to enable us to understand what the text is actually saying. Likewise with the sentence “the making of (images of) the gods and goddesses is your right,” the rendering ought to be simply: ”the making of the gods and goddesses is your right.” We are dealing with a pattern of belief which employs images towards the worship of its divinities, and understands these images as actualisable representations of that which cannot be represented as an image, since that image transcends all of the categories of our understanding. The gods can have existence in this physical world precisely because of this transcendent nature.

Such existence defies common-sense, but it does not defy the logic of idolatry. Just as for some modern worshippers there is no necessary contradiction between a divinity who is transcendent in nature and yet immanent, in antiquity there was no necessary contradiction between a transcendent god and his incarnation in a cult image. The idea – by its elusive nature - was always subject to criticism, and latterly ridicule, both within and beyond the cultural grouping which supported such a notion, but it made sense within the implex of ideas around the role of the cult image.

The passage referring to Esarhaddon as: ‘the beloved of the great gods, with the great intelligence and vast understanding, which the great Nudimmud, the wise man of the gods, bestowed on me, with the wisdom which Aššur and Marduk entrusted to me when they made me aware of the renewal of (the statue of) the great gods,’ yokes together the idea of knowledge with kingship, and also with divinity, since the gods Aššur and Marduk made him aware of the need for the renewal of the great gods. He has the ‘great intelligence and vast understanding’ of ‘the great Nudimmud’, who  is in fact the god Ea, often identified with Enki the trickster god, but also the god of craftsmen. ‘Nu.dim.mud’ is one of Ea’s epithets, meaning ‘fashioner of images’.

We have already discussed the interesting equation between knowledge and ‘vast understanding’ and its contrast with the non-royal, non-divine ignorance which is the common lot of mankind within this model - the “deaf and blind human beings who are ignorant of themselves and remain in ignorance throughout their lives…”, and also Esarhaddon’s allusion to one of the theological questions of the day, by asking ‘Whose right is it, O great gods, to create gods and goddesses in a place where man dare not trespass?” Clearly however this is Esarhaddon’s task, and no-one else’s. It is a royal task, communicated to Esarhaddon by divine command, and not easy to perform: “This task of refurbishing (the statues), which you have constantly been allotting to me (by oracle), is difficult!”

The text continues with details of the means by which the gods are to be renewed.  Esarhaddon says:

Endow the skilled craftsmen whom you ordered to complete this task with as high an understanding as Ea, their creator.  Teach them skills by your exalted word; make all their handiwork succeed through the craft of Ninshiku.

Ninshiku is yet another name for Ea, a late form from post-Kassite times, though based on the Sumerian Nin-ši-ku.  [v]  Esarhaddon is asking that the workmen be endowed with all the qualities of understanding and skill associated with Ea, the god of the craftsmen (i.e., the god also known as Nudimmud). This is tantamount to the request that the craftsmen have at least a temporary divinity for the duration of the renewal of the gods. The craftsmen have the excellence of the craftsman god only for a limited period, and for a precise purpose. They are therefore in a sense demiourgoi, like Plato’s craftsman in the Timaeus, able to fashion an image after the nature of the divine, while not being wholly or permanently divine themselves. Except that in this case, the gods themselves (aspects of the transcendent divinity) are being created.

Esarhaddon’s text continues with details of the means of oracular transmission of the gods wishes to the king:

I arranged diviners in groups in order to obtain a reliable oracular pronouncement about entering the bīt mummi. I performed divination (in order to determine whether the renewal should be done) in Aššur, Babylon (or) Nineveh. To determine the experts who should do the work and their initiation, I decided that each group should decide for itself separately; and still all the extispicies were in perfect agreement; they gave me a reliable, positive answer.

In other words, the oracular inquiries made by several groups of diviners produced answers which arrived together at the same time and agreed about the same issue.

Esarhaddon tells us that the oracular answers ordered him to enter the Bit Mummi in Aššur,

The capital, city, the dwelling of Aššur, Father of the gods; they indicated to me the names of the artisans (fit) for completing the work. By authority of a reassuring and favourable oracle, the diviners ordered me to do this work as follows:  “do it quickly, pay attention, and be careful; do not let up, do not direct your attention elsewhere”.  I trusted their positive and unchangeable oracle; I placed full reliance (on it).

It would seem from this text that there were at least two sets of oracular responses involved – those which ordered Esarhaddon to enter the Bit Mummi in connection with the renewal of the gods, and a second grouping of responses which were given within the precincts of the Bit Mummi, which named the artisans who were to undertake the work, and therefore those who were to be given a temporary divinity for the purpose of renewing the gods. Esarhaddon’s will is not to be focused on any other activity than this renewal.

In a favourable month, on a propitious day in the month of Shabatti, the favourite month of Enlil, I entered the bit mummi, the place where refurbishing was done, which the gods had chosen.

Among the epithets of Enlil (Sumerian ‘Ellil’) is ‘king of the foreign lands’, and the center of his cult was the temple E-kur, the ‘mountain house’, at Nippur. One of the images associated with Enlil is ‘merchant’ which suggests association with transactions.  [vi]  Arranging the work for the month of Shabatti, Enlil’s favourite month, would therefore be seen as propitious for work so definitively connected with the otherness of the gods in heaven.

I brought carpenters, goldsmiths, metalworkers, stone-cutters, “skilled artisans knowledgeable in the mysteries” into the temple which Shamash and Adad had indicated through divination. I installed the craftsmen there.

The work by the artisans is to be done in a place of both mystery and knowledge. We might infer from the choice of this place by the gods Shamash and Adad that the place in which the renewal is to happen is not fixed.  [vii]  The choice of the Bit Mummi is therefore likely to have a special significance for this occasion of renewal. The craft of making cult images, of the manufacture of the gods, is a religious mystery, knowledge of which is granted only to a limited group, who are installed in the chosen temple.

Red gold, mined in the mountains, which no one had as yet worked for artistic purposes, countless precious stones, not yet cut…., native to the mountains and upon which Ea had generously bestowed his splendour so that they might be fit for the lordly deities, I prepared in abundance for the shrines of the great gods, my lords, and for the bejewelling of their divinity, I gave (all these costly materials) into the pure hands (of the craftsmen).

Emphasis is laid on the fact that the materials which are to be used for the renewal of the gods have not yet been worked for such purposes – in other words they have not already served as materials for another form. They are as gifted by the gods – ‘upon which Ea had generously bestowed his splendour’, and therefore suitable for the work of the renewal. The Red gold, mined in the mountains (kur – a place of otherness), has not been worked, and ‘precious stones, not yet cut’, for the ornamentation of the divine images, Esarhaddon ‘gave…. Into the pure hands’.

‘Splendour’ here is indicated by ME.LAM/Melammu.  [viii]  Black and Green suggest that it connotes a ‘brilliant, visible glamour which is exuded by gods, heroes, sometimes by kings, and also by temples of great holiness and by gods’ symbols and emblems’.  They also suggest that ‘while it is in some ways a phenomenon of light, melam is at the same time terrifying and awe-inspiring’. Further:

Gods are sometimes said to ‘wear’ their melam like a garment or a crown, and like a garment or a crown, melam can be ‘taken off.’ If the god is killed, his melam disappears. While it is always a mark of the supernatural, melam carries no connotation of moral value: demons and terrifying giants can ‘wear’ it too.

[i] Black, Cunningham, Robson, Zόlyomi, The Literature of Ancient Sumer, 2004, p330


[ii] The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia, SAALT1, 2001, p27.


[iii] The Esarhaddon text comes from Borger’s Die Inschriften Asarhaddons, Königs von Assyrien. AfO Beiheft. 9. Graz. It is reproduced in translation in C.B.F. Walker and Michael B. Dick’s The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia, SAALT1, 2001 p25-27.


[iv] Note 79 on page 25 indicates that the astronomical sign meant here was the heliacal rising of Jupiter. The omen is discussed in detail in Borger 1956: 17-18. Note 79 also suggests a comparison with an omen declaration given to Ashurbanipal CT 35 pl.13-15, line 23 , which runs: ‘I commissioned you with the renewal of these (images of the) gods and of their temples (as before the words supplied by the translator in brackets should be ignored). The astronomical omen also had to be confirmed by a liver omen.


[v] C.B.F. Walker and Michael B. Dick’s The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia, SAALT1, 2001.p25, n84.


[vi] Black and Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, ‘Enlil’ p76.


[vii] Shamash and Adad were invoked in Babylonian extispicy rituals see Black and Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, 'Utu', p184 . It is possible that the instruction to use the Bit Mummi as the place for the renewal of the gods was received through divination by liver. Interestingly Plato’s account of the liver in the Timaeus describes the organ as reflecting the reason, which is a reflection of the reason of the heavens, exactly as it might have been regarded here (revealing the wishes of the gods Shamash and Adad). See also Black and Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, 'melam' and 'ni', p 130-1.


[viii] C.B.F. Walker and Michael B. Dick’s The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia, SAALT1, 2001.p26, n86. It can be understood in terms of a visible counterpart of the 'me' of the gods.

Intentionality, Conjecture, and what is Holy

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

This was originally a suppressed chapter (to use the jargon) from The Sacred History of Being (2015). I removed it, together with some other chapters along the way, in order to focus the argument of the book more tightly. It looks at the role of intentionality in establishing commerce with the Divine, and the essentially phenomenological nature of how the Divine is both made and known by us. It draws parallels between the creation of gods in antiquity, and the setting up of saints in Heaven. Both represent instantiations of what is Holy.

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It is unclear that the realm of the divine has reality. It is real, and at the same time it is not.  The only argument for the world of existence is that it is a poor copy of the divine world. And the divine world is uncertain. So how ‘real’ is the world of existence? What is the way out of this dilemma?

The answer is intentionality. The objective world is subject to change, as is the understanding of men. We cannot know the full properties of God, because, among other things, God is transcendent of human understanding. How can mortal man then understand the properties and nature of the divine, and how can the gods have a genuine involvement in the world? The answer arrived at, it would seem, is that the human understanding does not need to encompass the actual nature of the divine in order to have commerce with it. 

This is an exceptionally important point, since, beyond legitimizing commerce with the divine despite the definition of God as beyond human understanding, it also provides the intellectual basis for the creation of multiple gods. Essentially therefore the idea of isolating the properties of God, insofar as they can be understood, was understood to be a way of accessing the nature of these properties, and therefore to allow operations to take place, establishing a commerce between the divine and the world of change.

Intentionality explains why the ancients created a multiplicity of gods. If the divine itself cannot by definition be completely defined and understood, at least certain properties and attributes can be understood. These can therefore be defined and named as ways of accessing the divine. This does not at all conflict with the idea that the reality of the divine is in question. Instead this view argues that there is in fact a subjective component in the reality of the divine, at least insofar as it is possible for us to have commerce with it. That is to say, some aspects of the divine are accessible to the human mind. We cannot prove that it is real or that it exists in any sense, but despite this uncertainty, there are certain properties of the divine which are indisputable. Proof of the whole nature of the divine is unimportant, since this cannot, by the definition of the divine, be demonstrated.. We might then say that all connection with the divine therefore is an act of faith rather than certainty. The nature and power of the divine can be understood, defined, invoked and accessed by man.

Viewed in this way, we can see that each of the gods we encounter in ancient accounts represents a slice through the nature of divinity, so that one god has a special interest in one thing as opposed to another, a special set of characteristics or attributes, which more directly can be understood than an abstract and indefinable numinous concept of divinity. However the underlying numinous concept, in fact the objective numinous reality itself, requires to be real and present as the ground of being behind the multiplicity of gods. 

This explains the phenomenon of henotheism, found in ancient polytheism. Pharaoh, for example, as the incarnation of the the divine on earth, could ‘appear’ as himself, or could appear in any appropriate form of the divine. When smiting his enemies for example, he might appear as ‘Montu, in his great form.’ He might be depicted on a temple wall as Montu, rather than in the form of the king. It might also be the case that a divine pronouncement might involve the speaker moving successively from the voice and vocabulary associated with one god, to the mode of speech associated with another god, as appropriate. This has been found in Assyrian records, where someone recorded in a state of divine possession, speaks successively as the voice of different gods.

Considered in this way, the divine world is filled with a variety of gods. Some of these have been defined, and subsequently invoked. Other aspects of the underlying divine reality have not been defined or invoked, and remain as possibilities. In the world of existence, the divinities which have been defined were given representation in the form of images and statuary.

None of this should be taken to imply that polytheism initially arose from such a complex and philosophically subtle theory as this. We have much information about the growth of local pantheons in the near east, and the way in which local gods were absorbed into state pantheons, given increased importance over time, or diminished in importance, according to requirements. They would be given family relationships which they did not possess when they first arrived, and gain attributes and characteristics which they did not have when they were first born in the smaller urban centres. 

We cannot easily know to what extent there was an intellectual model behind the creation of polytheistic belief and worship from its first appearance in the archaeological and textual record. It is likely that much of what has been written about ancient polytheism from an anthropological perspective is probably correct, and valuable to our understanding. It is just that the account is incomplete from this limited perspective, and anthropologists have hardly ever seriously considered the possibility that some intellectual ideas might underpin the phenomenon as well.  

Those notionally equipped to explore this territory, the specialists in ancient philosophy and perhaps theologians, have had many reasons to stay out of this territory. For them, the possibility of the ancient presence of a sophisticated intellectual model, based on logical argument, is not something which can be easily entertained. This is something which belongs to the Greeks. Though the Greeks were polytheists, their polytheism antedates the beginnings of philosophy in the historical record, and therefore polytheism has no bearing on philosophy, or vice versa. Many writers on both Greek religion and philosophy have found this arrangement to be conveniently tidy and a boon to scholarship. But it is not the case.

Shortly before I began this work, Pope Benedict visited the UK in connection with the Beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman. When I read the details of the process of Beatification (essentially of making saints), I was struck by the resemblance between the idea of this in the Catholic Church, and the idea of setting up gods in antiquity (which will be explored in more detail later on).  The idea is that someone has to request (in ancient parlance this would be to ‘invoke’) the assistance of a person, now deceased, who showed especial virtues in life, and has to receive a response to this request which amounts to a miracle.

This is worth unpicking in detail, in order to understand the logic which is involved. It is not clear why someone would invoke someone less than the divine itself, if the divine is on offer, unless the virtues of a lesser being seem more appropriate. In other words, the prospective saint offers what looks like a channel which is more likely to be successful than the supplicant making a direct appeal to a God who is both difficult to define, and to know. 

The Catholic Church itself promotes the idea of sainthood, and unambiguously points at likely candidates. Newman has been one of those for quite sometime. Two miracles are required for the final elevation to sainthood. Why miracles? Because miracles are defined as things which cannot be accounted for in terms of earthly understanding. These may (in the extreme) be things which defy our understanding of physics, but ordinarily are occurrences such as unexpected remission from terminal illness, which ‘defies’ orthodox medical science. This was indeed the case for the supplicant who invoked the assistance of John Henry Newman.

The argument therefore runs as follows: Newman has special status in Heaven because an appeal for his assistance was answered. Because the assistance defied earthly understanding and expectation, the result was a miracle which otherwise could not have occurred. Therefore his status in Heaven is proved*[1]. Thus it is that the Catholic Church sets up saints on earth, and also in Heaven.

The Catholic Church is not based on polytheistic belief.  So it is rather surprising to find that it supports the idea that divine intervention can occur via the saints, rather than directly through the divine father, or his incarnation on earth.

The only significant difference between the Vatican’s idea of saints and the ancients idea of gods is that all of the saints are supposed to have lived human lives before being elevated to a divine status in Heaven. The ancients did not subject themselves to such an unreasonable constraint, and created gods who had never lived, and who could never have endured existence in the world. They could do this because they understood a formal and technical mechanics underpinning connection between the earthly world of existence, and divinity. The mechanics are still available to us in the records.   

It might be in order here to recap a little on the nature of the intellectual model of reality which underpins polytheistic belief, as we find it reflected in Greek texts, particularly those by Plato.

The most perfect entity it is possible for man to conceive is God. God is reality itself. The world of existence as understood by man is imperfect, and consists of imperfect representations of reality. The world of appearance as understood by man is subject to change and corruption, whereas the world of divine reality as conceived by man is eternal.

God is real. Existence is full of representations, more or less false, more or less true. Reality and existence are opposed. Man can apprehend that this is the case.

Since existence is suspended from reality, as a poor image of it, it is subject to change. Since man is an existent creature, man’s perception of reality is also subject to change. Both the nature of things which are existent, and man’s perception of these changeable things, are perpetually in flux.

Man cannot have full understanding of the nature of the divine, since, by definition, the divine transcends the world of sensible reality, and existence. It is in essence transcendental, and to the fullest extent.

However there are a number of ways in which the world of existence can access the divine reality. Several characteristic features of the divine remain in the sensible world, and retain their divine natures.  The connection does depend absolutely on the idea that the divine is complete, is total in its nature, is the ultimate limit of reality, and is the final end.  These things have analogues in the world of existence, and so there is a route of commerce open between the world of the divine and the world of existence.

Man has connection with the world of the divine through things and properties which are present in the world of existence which participate in the nature of the divine. These things include: completion, totality, the limit, the end, the perfection of a thing, a nature, a property, or an act, and so on. It also includes infinitive and superlative action, and also its extreme opposite, inaction. Greatness too, which we found to be an insufficient concept in the medieval version of an ontological argument concerning the divine, is also something which may open the way to the divine. The ancients also included ‘fame’ as one of the properties which connect man with the divine. We can explore the wide range of concepts and properties which can connect us with the divine along the way.  We shall find that justice, beauty, magnanimity, ethical and moral perfection, and honour, are also included in this list.

It is not necessary for us to have a complete understanding of the divine in order to access aspects of that higher reality. In fact a focus on particular characteristics, a ‘bracketing’ of the most relevant aspects of the divine, increases the efficacy of the commerce with the divine. Thus the intentionality of the supplicant is a factor in the opening of contact with the divine. There are other ideas associated with the strengthening of the connection with the divine which we shall explore. These include reduplication, the striking together of images and concepts, the collection or heaping up of things, especially where these result in reduplication of properties; the act of drawing near to the divine, or to the image of the divine, and so on. The deliberate opposition of ideas and images is also relevant to the business of establishing a commerce with the divine. For connection with the divine represents an alteration of state.

And to reiterate a key point, none of this proves the reality of God. It merely establishes a range of correspondences between a concept of God and a hypothetical Being who might or might not have reality. Instead, the entire intellectual system underpinning polytheism, at least in its later stages, was rooted in the paradoxical and transcendent notion of the divine, which necessarily defied human comprehension. So, there was no proof available, but within this world view, ‘proof’ conclusive to the human understanding would have demolished the entire edifice.

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[1] It is proved by the fact that it could not ordinarily have happened. This is a tacit admission that what is real, what is possible, at the level of divine reality, may be entirely contrary to what we understand as possible in the world of existence.