Cosmotheism, Totality, and the Transcendental (Complete)

[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 1^st 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 14^th 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 1^st 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 1^st 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 1^st 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?’

1 Polytheism, Monotheism, and The Cult of the Aten

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 1^st 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 19^th 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 19^th 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 5^th 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.

The Destruction of Ancient Astronomy

There is a tide in the affairs of men./Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;/
Omitted, all the voyage of their life/Is bound in shallows and in miseries./
On such a full sea are we now afloat,/And we must take the current when it serves,/
Or lose our ventures./ (Brutus to Cassius, in Julius Caesar Act 4, scene 3, 218–224)

Of course that didn’t work out well in the end, since they chose to fight Octavian at Philippi, and lost. The point is however that everything has a tendency to follow an arc through time, and it is very difficult to preserve an insight or a way of thinking over an extended period. Or an empire. Or anything at all.  And sometimes the tide is in favour of your opponents.

We can look at what happened as a disaster of sorts. But it is also something of a miracle that so much survives, in some shape or form. The astronomy was still intact in the civilizations of South America when the Spanish arrived, followed by the missionaries, and there is still information circulating in the populations, as the writer and anthropologist William Sullivan found out (The Secret of the Incas). Despite the efforts of the Spanish priests to root it out. 

Why did the Christians take against astronomy and astronomical lore? There are two ways in which to look at this question. 

The sky, imagined as a moving image of god, or eternity, is one, and what it is. This seems to have been a deeply rooted idea from time immemorial, and it surfaces in the writing of Plato, and in the later Platonists. The oneness of the image is perhaps the main reason for its identification as an image of god. Another is that it was understood to be forever beyond our reach. But in addition, it contains other images, some of which were identified and described as gods. Not all of them were anthropomorphic deities, but by virtue of their presence in the heavens, all of them had a kind of divine status.

So, the heaven represents what is one and divine, and at the same time contains a plethora of gods. For the Christians, and not just the early ones, that must have been a disturbing thing to contemplate.

Polytheism is one of the most difficult things for human beings (in the modern west) to deal with, both within academia, and in the population at large. Historians and theologians argue that polytheism arose before monotheism, and that it represents an earlier and more barbarous form of religion. And yet, the idea that they both have their reality somewhere in a moving image of God is there in the sky above us.

Scholars will argue that polytheism shows that early man was not thinking of the divine in terms of a single overarching abstraction, which could be imagined to be responsible for the creation, for existence, for generation, etc. And yet, if the myths concerning the gods who belong to a polytheistic pantheon are explored, we find evidence of abstract thought, ideas of creation, the generation and ordering of earthly reality, etc. Instead, it will be argued that the polytheistic gods are representations of things which were important in human society, and which needed to be placated. Therefore they can be interpreted as personifications of natural forces (the existence of storm gods is usually regarded as a clincher), or representations of tribal gods or totems, later integrated into a pantheon which reflects the society built up from earlier and looser groupings.

None of that is impossible, and in many cases, that might be the best explanation. But it is a lazy way to look at intellectual and social history, when there is in existence clear evidence that monotheistic and polytheistic patterns of thought once both belonged to the same model of reality.

One of the most ancient of questions is ‘why are there many, if there is one?’ Thousands of years of theological and philosophical thought were shaped by that question. Considering that the one (or Being itself) is the only truly real thing, does not force us to deny the existence of multiplicity. But it does create a problem, in that it is not easy to find the explanation for multiplicity. One of the ancient arguments was that since only the one was truly real, the world of physical reality was an illusion – a set of subjective perceptions of Being which stand between us and an understanding of Being itself. 

This multiplicity also can be interpreted as the product of the divine’s understanding of itself. In which case, we are part of the working out of what the divine is. Mythology and polytheistic conceptions can be understood as the articulation of that working out.

The point here is that the idea of many gods is deeply disturbing to many human beings, and not just for doctrinal reasons. It is disturbing because there is a deep seated, rarely formulated, and mostly unconscious conception in us that reality (however that is understood) must be itself, and itself alone. The corollary of that is that multiplicity enshrines falsehood and error. Add to that the general view that we are getting smarter over time (the myth of progress, which J.B. Bury wrote about in the twenties) and that we left error behind when (in the west at least) we embraced monotheism instead of polytheism (the concept of the trinity notwithstanding).

This body of ideas spills out into political and social notions (not always in a bad way – many socio-political creations in antiquity owed their origin to discussions of the nature of the divine, and its manifestation in physical reality. The unification of the poleis in Attica is a case in point – the administrative, political and liturgical functions of the state were expressly modelled on the natural divisions of the year).

The political and theological development of the Hebrew kingdoms in the first half of the 1^st millennium B.C.E. is mostly unknown to us, since the texts were redacted in the 5^th century B.C.E., and reflect the views of the winners of the hegemonic struggle. But we can tell from the later history the general outline of the trajectory of change. Early on there seems to have been a considerable amount of freedom of religious worship in the Hebrew kingdoms (these were also modelled on the natural divisions of the year) until they came into severe conflict with Assyria. After that political and religious power became ever more concentrated in Jerusalem. One god, one power, one place of religious observance, one source of the law, etc.

Christianity, gifted to us partly as the consequence of a similar concentration of power in ancient Rome (another story), took over the idea of a single omniscient god, who was also able to become flesh and blood and walk on the earth (and on water too, which image reflects Babylonian iconography). All the other gods became, in the end, falsehoods, demons, devils, and in the pages of Tertullian, a species of fornication, which he reckoned to be the principal nature of sin, which embraced all others.

Hence the antipathy to astronomy, and the gods from cultures who foolishly embraced a multiplicity of them. Despite the fact that, the Christian scriptures, as well as the Hebrew ones, are full of astronomical and mythological imagery, and characters who were once understood to have their essential reality in the sky. 

Thomas Taylor and the Ancient Theology

This is the main text of Thomas Taylor’s introduction to his translation of On the Mysteries by the Platonist philosopher Iamblichus. I’ve removed all the footnotes, modernised Taylor’s orthography, and the paragraphing. So it is much easier to read than it is in its original form.

I read On the Mysteries in this translation before I learned to read Greek. Once read it is impossible to unsee its argument, and the important information it gives us about ancient thought. Iamblichus wrote centuries after Plato, but Taylor suggests that he was drawing on a body of information which was known to both Plato and Pythagoras, and I think that, broadly speaking, he is right. Plato makes a lot more sense if you read Iamblichus first (Proclus too).

Taylor wrote at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in London. There were interesting people around at the time who he knew (Blake, Shelley, etc.), but classical scholarship was largely happening in Germany. However German scholarship was engaged in a project diametrically opposed to Taylor’s – they were attempting to take ancient Greek culture entirely out of the run of other civilizations (Egypt, Babylonia, Israel) as part of a Eurocentric political agenda, whereas Taylor argued that the was a profound commonality shared by these cultures, based on an ancient theology which underpinned ritual practice, divine worship, and the development of Greek philosophy. The study of Egypt and the ancient Near East still suffers as a consequence of that Eurocentric agenda. However, much interesting information has come out of the ground since the early nineteenth century, and much of it supports Taylor’s argument, which is given shape and context by Iambichus’ book.

What is most radical about both Taylor and Iamblichus, is the suggestion that ancient polytheism is actually a product of a form of monotheism, built on philosophical argument concerning the nature of reality, the nature and function of the soul, the significance of divine worship and religious ritual, and the pursuit of knowledge.

Thomas Yaeger, April 12, 2019

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***

It appears to me that there are two descriptions of persons by whom the present work must be considered to be of inestimable worth, the lovers of antiquity and the lovers of ancient philosophy and religion. To the former of these it must be invaluable, because it is replete with information derived from the wise men of the Chaldeans, the prophets of the Egyptians, the dogmas of the Assyrians, and the ancient pillars of Hermes; and to the latter, because of the doctrines contained in it, some of which originated from the Hermaic pillars, were known by Pythagoras and Plato, and were the sources of their philosophy; and others are profoundly theological, and unfold the mysteries of ancient religion with an admirable conciseness of diction, and an inimitable vigour and elegance of conception. To which also may be added, as the colophon of excellence, that it is the most copious, the clearest, and the most satisfactory defence extant of genuine ancient theology.

This theology, the sacred operations pertaining to which called theurgy are here developed, has for the most part, since the destruction of it, been surveyed only in its corruptions among barbarous nations, or during the decline and fall of the Roman empire, with which, overwhelmed with pollution, it gradually fell, and at length totally vanished from what is called the polished part of the globe. This will be evident to the intelligent reader from the following remarks, which are an epitome of what has been elsewhere more largely discussed by me on this subject, and which also demonstrate the religion of the Chaldeans, Egyptians, and Greeks to be no less scientific than sublime.

In the first place, this theology celebrates the immense principle of things as something superior even to being itself; as exempt from the whole of things, of which it is nevertheless ineffably the source ; and does not, therefore, think fit to enumerate it with any triad or order of beings. Indeed it even apologizes for giving the appellation of the most simple of our conceptions to that which is beyond all knowledge and all conception. It denominates this principle however, the one and the good; by the former of these names indicating its transcendent simplicity, and by the latter its subsistence as beings. For all the object of desire to all things desire good. At the same time, however, it asserts that these appellations are in reality nothing more than the parturitions of the soul, which, standing as it were in the vestibules of the adytum of deity, announce nothing pertaining to the ineffable, but only indicate her spontaneous tendencies towards it, and belong rather to the immediate offspring of the first God than to the first itself. Hence, as the result of this most venerable conception of the supreme, when it ventures not only to denominate it, though ineffable, but also to assert something of its relation to other things, it considers this as preeminently its peculiarity, that it is the principle of principles; it being necessary that the characteristic property of principle, after the same manner as other things, should not begin from multitude, but should be collected into one monad as a summit, and which is the principle of all principles.

The scientific reasoning from which this dogma is deduced is the following. As the principle of all things is the one, it is necessary that the progression of beings should be continued, and that no vacuum should intervene either in incorporeal or corporeal natures. It is also necessary that every thing which has a natural progression should proceed through similitude. In consequence of this, it is likewise necessary that every producing principle should generate a number of the same order with itself, viz. nature, a natural number; soul, one that is psychical (i. e. belonging to soul); and intellect an intellectual number. For if whatever possesses a power of generating, generates similars prior to dissimilars, every cause must deliver its own form and characteristic peculiarity to its progeny ; and before it generates that which gives subsistence to progressions, far distant and separate from its nature, it must constitute things proximate to itself according to essence, and conjoined with it through similitude.

It is, therefore, necessary from these premises, since there is one unity, the principle of the universe, that this unity should produce from itself, prior to every thing else, a multitude of natures characterized by unity, and a number the most of all things allied to its cause; and these natures are no other than the Gods. According to this theology, therefore,  from the immense principle of principles, in which all things causally subsist, absorbed in superessential light, and involved in unfathomable depths, a beauteous progeny of principles proceed, all largely partaking of the ineffable, all stamped with the occult characters of deity, all possessing an overflowing fulness of good. From these dazzling summits, these ineffable blossoms, these divine propagations, being, life, intellect, soul, nature, and body depend; monads suspended from unities, deified natures proceeding from deities. Each of these monads, too, is the leader of a series which extends from itself to the last of things, and which, while it proceeds from, at the same time abides in, and returns to, its leader. And all these principles, and all their progeny, are finally centred and rooted by their summits in the first great all-comprehending one.

Thus all beings proceed from, and are comprehended in, the first being : all intellects emanate from one first intellect ; all souls from one first soul; all natures blossom from one first nature; and all bodies proceed from the vital and luminous body of the world. And, lastly, all these great monads are comprehended in the first one, from which both they and all their depending series are unfolded into light. Hence this first one is truly the unity of unities, the monad of monads, the principle of principles, the God of Gods, one and all things, and yet one prior to all.

No objections of any weight, no arguments but such as are sophistical, can be urged against this most sublime theory, which is so congenial to the unperverted conceptions of the human mind, that it can only be treated with ridicule and contempt in degraded, barren, and barbarous ages. Ignorance and impious fraud, however, have hitherto conspired to defame those inestimable works ' in which this and many other grand and important dogmas can alone be found; and the theology of the ancients has been attacked with all the insane fury of ecclesiastical zeal, and all the imbecile flashes of mistaken wit, by men whose conceptions on the subject, like those of a man between sleeping and waking, have been turbid and wild, phantastic and confused, preposterous and vain.

 Indeed, that after the great incomprehensible cause of all, a divine multitude subsists, cooperating with this cause in the production and government of the universe, has always been, and is still, admitted by all nations and all religions, however much they may differ in their opinions respecting the nature of the subordinate deities, and the veneration which is to be paid to them by man; and however barbarous the conceptions of some nations on this subject may be, when compared with those of others. Hence, says the elegant MaximusTyrius, "You will see one according law and assertion in all the earth, that there is one God, the king and father of all things, and many Gods, sons of God, ruling together with him. This the Greek says, and the Barbarian says, the inhabitant of the continent, and he who dwells near the sea, the wise and the unwise. And if you proceed as far as to the utmost shores of the ocean, there also there are Gods, rising very near to some, and setting very near to others."

The deification, however, of dead men, and the worshiping men as Gods, formed no part of this theology, when it is considered according to its genuine purity. Numerous instances of the truth of this might be adduced, but I shall mention for this purpose, as unexceptionable witnesses, the writings of Plato, the Golden Pythagoric Verses, and the Treatise of Plutarch on Isis and Osiris. All the works of Plato, indeed, evince the truth of this position, but this is particularly manifest from his Laws. The Golden verses order that the immortal Gods be honoured first, as they are disposed by law ; afterwards the illustrious Heroes, under which appellation the author of the verses comprehends also angels and daemons,  properly so called; and in the Iast place, the terrestrial daemons,  i. e. such good men as transcend in virtue the rest of mankind. But to honour the Gods as they are disposed by law, is, as Hierocles observes, to reverence them as they are arranged by their demiurgus and father ; and this is to honour them as beings not only superior to man, but also to daemons and angels. Hence, to honour men, however excellent they may be, as Gods, is not to honour the Gods according to the rank in which they are placed by their Creator; for it is confounding the divine with the human nature, and is thus acting directly contrary to the Pythagoric precept. Plutarch too, in his above mentioned treatise, most forcibly and clearly shows the impiety of worshiping men as Gods. " So great an apprehension indeed," says Dr. Stillingfleet) " had the Heathens of the necessity of appropriate acts of divine worship that some of them have chosen to die, rather than to give them to what they did not believe to be God.

We have a remarkable story to this purpose in Arrian and Curtius concerning Callisthenes. Alexander arriving at that degree of vanity as to desire to have divine worship given him, and the matter being started out of design among the courtiers, either by Anaxarchus, as Arrian, or Cleo the Sicilian, as Curtius says ; and the way of doing it proposed, viz. by incense and prostration ; Callisthenes vehemently opposed it, as that which would confound the difference of human and divine worship, which had been preserved inviolable among them. The worship of the Gods had been kept up in temples, with altars, and images, and sacrifices, and hymns, and prostrations, and such like ; but it is by no means fitting, says he, for us to confound these things, either by lifting up men to the honours of the Gods, or depressing the Gods to the honours of men. For if Alexander would not suffer any man to usurp his royal dignity by the votes of men ; how much more justly may the Gods disdain for any man to take their honours to himself. And it appears by Plutarch," that the Greeks thought it a mean and base thing for any of them, when sent on any embassy to the kings of Persia, to prostrate themselves before them, because this was only allowed among them in divine adoration.

Therefore,  says he, when Pelopidas and Ismenias were sent to Artaxerxes, Pelopidas did nothing unworthy, but Ismenias let fall his ring to the ground, and stooping for that, was thought to make his adoration; which was altogether as good a shift as the Jesuits advising the crucifix to be held in the mandarin's hands while they made their adorations in the Heathen temples in China. Conon also refused to make his adoration,as a disgrace to his city; and Isocrates accuses the Persians for doing it, because herein they showed that they despised the Gods rather than men, by prostituting their honours to their princes. Herodotus mentions Sperchies and Bulis, who could not with the greatest violence be brought to give adoration to Xerxes, because it was against the law of their country to give divine honour to men And Valerius Maximus says, "the Athenians put Timagoras to death for doing it ; so strong an apprehension had possessed them, that the manner of worship which they used to their Gods, should be preserved sacred and inviolable." The philosopher Sallust also, in his Treatise on the Gods and the World, says, "It is not unreasonable to suppose that impiety is a species of punishment, and that those who have had a knowledge of the Gods, and yet despised them, will in another life be deprived of this knowledge. And it is requisite to make the punishment of those who have honoured their kings as Gods to consist, in being expelled from the Gods."

When the ineffable transcendency of the first God, which was considered as the grand principle in the Heathen religion by the best theologists of all nations, and particularly by its most illustrious promulgators, Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato, was forgotten, this oblivion was doubtless the principal cause of dead men being deified by the Pagans. Had they properly directed their attention to this transcendency they would have perceived it to be so immense as to surpass eternity, infinity, self-subsistence, and even essence itself, and that these in reality belong to those venerable natures which are, as it were, first unfolded into light from the unfathomable depths of that truly mystic unknown, about which all knowledge is refunded into ignorance. For, as Simplicius justly observes, "It is requisite that he who ascends to the principle of things should investigate whether it is possible there can be any thing better than the supposed principle ; and if something more excellent is found, the same inquiry should again be made respecting that, till we arrive at the highest conceptions,  than which we have no longer any more venerable. Nor should we stop in our ascent till we find this to be the case. For there is no occasion to fear that our progression will be through an unsubstantial void, by conceiving something about the first principles which is greater and more transcendent than their nature. For it is not possible for our conceptions to take such a mighty leap as to equal, and much less to pass beyond, the dignity of the first principles of things." He adds, " This, therefore, is one and the best extension [of the soul] to [the highest] God, and is, as much as possible, irreprehensible ; viz. to know firmly, that by ascribing to him the most venerable excellences we can conceive, and the most holy and primary names and things, we ascribe nothing to him which is suitable to his dignity. It is sufficient, however, to procure our pardon [for the attempt], that we can attribute to him nothing superior." 

"If it is not possible, therefore, to form any ideas equal to the dignity of the immediate progeny of the ineffable, i. e. of the first principles of things, how much less can our conceptions reach that thrice unknown darkness, in the reverential language of the Egyptians, which is even beyond these? Had the Heathens, therefore, considered as they ought this transcendency of the supreme God, they would never have presumed to equalize the human with the divine nature, and consequently would never have worshiped men as Gods. Their theology, however, is not to be accused as the cause of this impiety, but their forgetfulness of the sublimest of its dogmas, and the confusion with which this oblivion was necessarily attended.

But to return to the present work. To some who are conversant with the writings of Porphyry, who know how high he ranks among the best of the Platonists, and that he was denominated by them, on account of his excellence, the philosopher, it may seem strange that he should have been so unskilled in theological mysteries, and so ignorant of the characteristics of the beings superior to man, as by his epistle to Anebo he may appear to have been. That he was not, however. in reality thus unskilful and ignorant, is evident from his admirable Treatise on Abstinence from Animal Food,  and his Auxiliaries to Intelligibles. His apparent ignorance,therefore,  must have been assumed for the purpose of obtaining a more perfect and copious solution of the doubts proposed in his Epistle, than he would otherwise have received. But at the same time that this is admitted, it must also be observed, that he was inferior to Iamblichus in theological science, who so greatly excelled in knowledge of this kind, that he was not surpassed by any one, and was equaled by few. Hence he was denominated by all succeeding Platonists the divine, in the same manner as Plato, "to whom," as the acute Emperor Julian remarks, " he was posterior in time only, but not in genius.

The difficulties attending the translation of this work into English are necessarily great, not only from its sublimity and novelty, but also from the defects of the original. I have, however, endeavoured to make the translation as faithful and complete as possible; and have occasionally availed myself of the annotations of Gale, not being able to do so continually, because for the most part, where philosophy is concerned,  he shows himself to be an inaccurate,  impertinent, and garrulous smatterer.

***

Postscript, April 21, 2019 

I first became aware of Thomas Taylor as an important figure in the history of philosophy (and the wider history of ideas) when I was about twenty-four or twenty-five. At the time (around 1981) most of his work was generally unavailable, barring the occasional reprint of books by specialist presses (there were some of these partial reprints in the late nineteenth century, and again in the 1920s). The only practical recourse was to obtain a reader's ticket for the National Library of Scotland, since the legal deposit legislation which had been in place since the eighteenth century meant they should have copies on their shelves. 

Sure enough, they were there in the catalogue, and in numbers. I spent a lot of time in the main reading room over the next few months. The catalogue at the time was on rolls of microfilm, so it was difficult to get hard copy of the metadata about Taylor's books from there, without having to write it down. Which is what I did (the catalogue was replaced with an electronic version within a year or so). It felt like doing a form of archaeology - digging up something for the most part long forgotten, and only of specialist interest. However the reading room was warm and quiet, and I was spared  wind and rain while I dug my trenches.

Now everything is different, and spectacularly so. In the early years of the new century a massive reprint of Taylor's work was undertaken by the Prometheus Trust, which had been set up expressly to bring his works back into print. I bought these editions as and when they became available. In the end I had everything the Trust had reprinted, which included the translations of Plato and Aristotle undertaken by Floyer Sydenham, the translations of Aristotle and the Neoplatonist writers by Taylor, including Iamblichus, Porphyry, Proclus, etc., and the dissertations he wrote on various aspects of ancient philosophy, including on the ancient interest in mathematical series.

The Trust has now expanded its scope, and has reprinted English texts of other ancient philosophical writings (often with the Greek text on the opposite page, which Taylor did not supply with his editions, most probably on account of cost: some of his translations were printed in editions of only 50 copies). I’ve been adding these to my collection also.

Many of Taylor’s books are now available in digital form (several formats) from the Internet Archive,  established by Brewster Kahle. Taylor was read more in the United States, and many copies made the trip across the Atlantic. Which is why they produced poets like Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman. The Internet Archive has many digital copies of Taylor texts from American University collections, and copies also of some which found their way into libraries in India.

The editions from the Prometheus Trust cost money (though they are not that expensive). The digital editions are available free of charge. So Thomas Taylor’s work is now more readily available than it has ever been. If you want to read his work, you can.

These are the relevant links:

The Prometheus Trust. This is their complete catalogue.

Thomas Taylor’s works available from the Internet Archive can be found by following this search string. There are more than 600 items, with many duplicate copies. 

Thomas Yaeger, Easter Sunday, 2019.

[Since I posted this article, the URL of the complete Thomas Taylor catalogue has changed. The link was updated on January 24, 2020.] 

Philosophical Thought in Greece and Babylonia (IV)

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.

[This sequence of essays will continue, as and when, throughout 2019]

Philosophical Thought in Greece and Babylonia (II)

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 1^st 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 14^th 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 1^st 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 1^st 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 1^st 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?’

1 Polytheism, Monotheism, and The Cult of the Aten

2 Discussed in 'The Horizon of the Aten' (forthcoming). 

['Philosophical Thought in Greece and Babylonia (III)' will follow shortly]. 

Thomas Yaeger, December 26, 2018.