God

Okay, let’s start with an easy topic that we can all agree upon.

 

God (or "the gaseous vertebrate," as James Joyce once called him) has for long been a very important concept in the history of humankind. As a matter of fact, it has been one of the most important and key concepts for virtually all civilizations, although different cultures understand and express the basic concept differently. Of course, all these concepts are fundamentally incorrect except for yours. (Actually mine.)

What makes "God" such a big concept in human culture? Do you really have to ask? I mean, what could be bigger? (SuperGod?) Let’s look at it like this. If God exists, then He is the biggest, most important thing that there is, and without Him, we wouldn’t even be here having this discussion. On the other hand, if He doesn’t exist, then according to the previous statement, we really aren’t here having this discussion. That is, unless He doesn’t exist - which means He doesn’t need to, and everything is just fine without Him. But according to many philosophers and theologians, "God" is defined as "necessary existence." So that by definition, He has to exist, right? Then what’s there to argue about? Well, maybe there’s no such thing as "necessary existence." Hmm. Does that just leave "unnecessary existence?" Is that us? I’m not sure.

See why people have such a God-damned tough time about this concept? And they don’t just argue about the concept, they really get hot and steamed about it. Quite often they actually start wars and commit terrorist actions about it. (Talk about poor arguing skills!) What if, instead of the term "God," we used the term, "ultimate essence?" Can you see people going to wars about the correct definition of "essence?" I suspect they would probably get bored very quickly and go watch TV or something like that before the argument even started getting heated. Why is "God" such a hot button, anyway?

Might I humbly suggest that perhaps we - or at least very many of us - don’t have a very clear and consistent idea about what the concept of God actually means? (No, I didn’t mean you - I meant everybody else.) Why don’t we just have a little bit of a closer look at what the concept of "God" actually does mean? (Is there still anyone reading this? Thought not. Then, I’ll continue.)

Just what the hell is "God," anyway?

 Oh, God. Okay, first we have to make a distinction between "God" and just "gods," don’t we? I mean, whatever they are, they aren’t the same thing, are they? Or are they? Couldn’t you, just in principle, have two Gods? In Zoroastrianism they do. Really.

In case you didn’t know, Zoroaster (also known as Zarathustra to some of his close friends), was the great prophet of what would become ancient Persia. Somewhere during the 1st millennium BCE (some say the 6th century, although others claim it was long before) Zoroaster came to the conclusion that there were two deities at constant war with each other in the universe. One of these Gods (or ahuras, as they called them) was good. I mean, really good. His name was Ahura Mazda, which means something like "Light of Wisdom," or "Wise Lord." Ahura Mazda (according to Zoroaster) was wholly good. He was uncreated, benevolent, wise, and the upholder of truth, justice and the American Way. (No, wait, that’s Superman.) Ah, but Ahura Mazda was the upholder of Asha: the sacred principle of truth and justice which was supposed to rule in the universe. (Think of "the Force," but without a dark side.)

Unfortunately, however, Ahura Mazda wasn’t alone in the universe. He had an evil enemy (this is getting good!). His name was Angra Mainyu (literally, "angry man," but generally translated as "Destructive Spirit"). He was a real bastard. He actually created death (asshole!) and was the embodiment of everything evil and nasty. He tempted men and made them do bad things like steal cattle, rape, kill and not pay their taxes. He also created evil demons to do his bidding.

Now, these two Gods, as you could well imagine, did not quite get along. According to Zoroaster, who wrote the Gathas (the sacred texts in the Avestan language), the universe was a mighty battlefield between Ahura Mazda (the force of Good) and Angra Mainyu (the force of Evil). Now, Angra Mainyu, was the embodiment of chaos, and so he absolutely hated Asha and everything else Ahura Mazda stood for. Each one of them acted through humankind, and eventually there would be this enormous war which Ahura Mazda was destined to win, evil would be vanquished, the dead would arise, and Angra Mainyu would be thrown into hell. Finally, the savior (the Saoshyant) would arrive and everybody would live forever and be happy.


Any of this sound familiar? 
 You know, it’s kind of funny, but the ancient Hebrews had no concept of Satan or the devil until after they returned from their captivity in Babylon. Nor did they have any kind of eschatological (end of the world) doctrine or an idea of a Messiah. You see, Babylon was conquered by the Persians, who were really good to the Hebrews, and let them go back and rebuild Jerusalem and their Temple. You don’t think they brought any ideas back with them . . . nah, forget it, that’s silly.

Anyway, to get back to the main point, it seems like at some time, somewhere in ancient Persia, somebody believed that there were two Gods. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Pete, there’s a lot of theological disagreement about the relative ontological status between these two figures in the history of Zoroastrianism itself. And yes, you’re right. Some scholars believe that Ahura Mazda was prior and Angra Mainyu was a secondary force, along with Spenta Mainyu (the positive force), while Ahura himself may have either been an anthropomorphic figure or even possibly pantheistic, approximating the Indian concept of Brahman. Yeah, yeah, you’re right, Zoroastrianism was probably more fundamentally monotheistic than henotheistic.

But that still brings us back to the distinction between "God" (capital G) and "the gods (little g)."

Now nobody believes in "the gods" anymore, because they don’t have a capital G, right? (Yes, neo-paganists, but let’s ignore them for the moment.) In seems like way back in the old days, not just in Rome and Greece, but right there at the start of civilization, back in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt (not to mention Canaan), everybody believed in "the gods." They were big news. As a matter of fact, do you know what the reason was, according to the Mesopotamians, that people were created? It was because "the gods" didn’t want to work, so they made humans to grow their food for them and feed them. That’s a fact! And there were a bunch of them, too. Lazy bastards.

Anyway, this was one of the earliest - if not the earliest kinds of theism. What is theism? Well, if you look it up, then formally, theism actually means the belief in one and only one God. So I guess all the polytheists weren’t theists after all. (This is getting confusing.) All we know for sure about the polytheists is that they were wrong. For hundreds of centuries. Just dead wrong.

Let’s take a closer look at polytheism for just a moment.

Polytheism: the more the merrier!

Ancient humans, especially in the new urban-oriented parts of the world known as "civilized" seem to have a very complicated view of the divine. And who could blame them? There was so much going on - there had to be a different god for everything!

Just take Mesopotamia, for instance. Now this is the oldest religion in written history. (We have to guess what neolithic religions were like from watching westerns and Tarzan movies.) Mesopotamian religion had over 2,000 gods! You have to pray to (and feed) every single one of these fuckers? Talk about religious guilt! I mean, somebody’s always going to be mad at you.

Now, before we start getting overwhelmed, we have to remember that Mesopotamia was made up of lots and lots of medium to large-sized cities. And each of these cities had its own patron god. So you weren’t necessarily bound to worship all of them. As a matter of fact, since these cities usually seemed to be fighting one another, you probably weren’t even supposed to like all of them.

Still, there were all kinds of individual gods. There were the really big gods: Anu - god of the sky, Enlil - god of the wind, Enki - god of the earth, and Ninhursag - the goddess of gettin’ it on! Then there were house gods, market gods, rain gods, mud gods. You name it, Mesopotamia had a god for it.

Every now and then in Mesopotamia, an empire would come along. And so the patron god(s) of the conquering power would get quite a bit more important, a little big for their britches, so to say. The first really big empire was founded by Sargon of Akkad around 2335 BCE. Sargon was the first person they ever called "the Great." (Before that, the best a ruler could be was "Adequate".) Sargon advanced his own gods, and even put his daughter in charge of the priesthood and the Holy Prostitutes of the goddess Innana (not everything in ancient religion was bad). Then came the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and so on and so forth. Each wave of new conquerors had their own special deities.

Take the Babylonian Empire. Please. Their big patron god was named Marduk. His claim to fame was that he had defeated Tiamat (another chaos monster), and created the world out of her body. (Why not?) And the cool thing was that every new year, all the people would get together with the priests and act the whole thing out under the direction of the priests. We still have copies of the ceremony - it was called the Enuma Elis. And the major difference between their new year and our new year, is that if they didn’t perform this ceremony just right, creation couldn’t start over again, and there couldn’t be a new year at all. Everything would just disappear! (Talk about being part of something important . . . now that’s a holiday you can’t just blow off.)

Where am I going with all this? Okay, I guess I’m trying to make a few main points here. First, early civilized humans felt that life was really complicated, and that there were a lot of competing powers at work in the world, and since people tended to see these forces in kind of an anthropomorphic manner (which, come on, is really only natural - didn’t Woody Allen say, "I’ve got to model myself on someone!"), they really felt like they had to put forth a lot of effort to get these forces to work right for them. Everybody around them believed in the same things, especially the priests and the king, essentially anybody you’d want to be seen sharing a cocktail with. There weren’t any scientists around (plenty of astrologers, though) to say that this was all bullshit. All this stuff made sense to these people. And hey, it worked! The year started over, didn’t it?

You see, a lot of people think that ancient people believed in gods because they were ignorant and superstitious, but that’s just being snooty. Within their frame of reference - which, when you think of it, was quite broader than the people in the preceding 100,000 years or so - the idea of the gods wasn’t just an explanation for why things happened. They provided a way for folks to express the meaning of life in a really important way, and to stay involved. Hey, you weren’t just a wheel-maker or a cuneiform instructor. You helped keep the universe alive! And that’s really important.

Many people who are critical of religion, I think, tend to look at it from a place of superiority. Do you really think you could have done better? You think you could have built the first civilization? Seems to me that they pulled off a pretty remarkable feat. And people aren’t going to go to all this trouble to build cities and empires, erect pyramids, create literature, make art, etc., just to make a living. Hell, it had to have been a lot easier just sitting around in the trees, eating fruit and bugs.

No, people went to the trouble to do all of this magnificent work, creating ziggurats, palaces and temples because they felt inspired. They were part of something bigger. It lifted everybody up out of the world of the ordinary and placed them right there in the center of the universe, helping out the gods, keeping the stars burning, making the sun go ‘round, causing the crops to grow. Why, you were somebody. And so was everybody else. Everyone had their place, did their job, made their sacrifices, conducted their rituals, and the city and the empire and the world and the cosmos, could all go about their business.

That’s another great thing about these olden-olden times. I mentioned astrology a moment ago, but this was really something important to the Mesopotamians. You see, the way they looked at it, there was the cosmos. That’s where the stars and the moon were, the place where the really big gods hung out. That was the Macrocosm. And the city, which was the earthly home of the gods, was based upon it, even designed around it. That was the Mesocosm. On earth as it is in heaven. And the Microcosm? Hey, that was you, buddy. You mattered. Maybe not as much as the priest or the king, but you mattered. You were part of a great whole, something much bigger than yourself, the biggest thing imaginable, really.

And that, my friends, is what we call . . . a sense of transcendence.

Wow.

Yeah, it was a lot of work, yeah it was a stratified society. But you had an important function. And the festivals were really great. They drank beer and everything! Sure, there were wars. There still are. But at least things made sense. You knew what to do and why you did what you did. How many people can say that today?

Now, I’m not arguing that these Mesopotamian (or Egyptian) folks were better off than we are, nor do I think we should go back to those crazy days. To be honest, life has to have been a mixed bag back then. But isn’t it always?

What I’m saying is that polytheistic religion wasn’t just something that people used to explain a world that they couldn’t scientifically understand. We sometimes look at it that way because science is so centrally important to our culture. No, it was a whole way of life, a way of living, a way of looking at things organically, something that intimately involved you and your whole family with the destiny of mankind and even with the gods above.

Religion is complicated, and it satisfies all kinds of needs. And early civilization was very complicated, and people had to be creative. They were making this stuff up as they went along, remember. It was no day at the beach.

You know, the more you think about it, the more amazing it is just what people accomplished in the early millennia of civilization. They really needed all the spiritual resources they could get. That’s why, I think, that those prophets and priests in the Bible had so much trouble trying to get their people to worship just one god.

Just one god? Where the hell did that idea come from?

Henotheism: a new word for some folks!

Actually, most of those people that you read about in the Bible weren’t monotheists. Most Biblical and archaeological scholars agree that the Hebrews really didn’t commit to the idea of there being one, and only one God until some time after they got back from their forced exile in Babylon. (Remember, the Persians let them come back?)

What am I talking about? Okay, look at it for a moment. Look, for example at the Ten Commandments. What’s the first one? "Thou shalt have no other god before me." No other god? Well, why even bring it up if there weren’t other gods? Of course there were other gods. There were gods everywhere!

Remember we said that the cities in Mesopotamia each had their own patron deity? Well, that was true with nations, kingdoms, and empires as well. Babylon, as we noted, had Marduk. In the Levant, or what we call the Middle East today, one of the big local gods was named Baal. Every nation had its own patron god. In Moab, they worshipped Chemosh. In Edom, Qaus. And both of these gods were members of the Canaanite pantheon that was headed by the king god of all gods and humanity: El. El was the top guy. And he was married to Asherah, often just known as "the Goddess."

Guess who else was in that pantheon. I’ll give you a hint. Sometimes the Bible calls him Elohim. And what does "Elohim" mean? It means "the sons of El."

My word!

Well, who then was . . . Yahweh?

Okay, this is all going to get a bit technical and confused here. You see, scholars disagree about just who wrote the different parts of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), and just where, when and why it was written. Now, I don’t want to get too deep into this whole subject right here, but in the Torah (or the Pentateuch) - that is the first five books of the Bible, known to Jews as "the Law" - there are at least two distinct ancient narratives that have been stitched together. And sometimes they tell the same stories with different details (and some different facts). Biblical scholars have known about this for nearly 200 years, by the way.

One of these writers, who is believed to have lived in the southern kingdom of Judah, refers to God as Yahweh (or actually the Hebrew tetragrammaton "YHWH." )This is known as the "Jahwist source," or J, for short. Another writer, with a completely different writing style comes from the northern kingdom of Israel, and he (or she?) refers to God as "Elohim." This is known as the "Elohist source," or E.

There are at least two more narrative layers stitched together to make up the Torah, at least according to what is called the "Documentary Hypothesis." A third writer is known as the Deuteronomist (or D). This writer composed the entire book of - you guessed it - Deuteronomy. And finally, there is a fourth layer that some scholars think came last, though some put it earlier, and that is known a P, or the "Priestly narrative," written by one or more members of that part of the ancient Hebrew community.

Sometime either during the Babylonian exile, or just after, all these layers were pieced together by a Redactor (R) to create the Torah we know today. Many believe this was done by the Biblical character known as Ezra, who lived in the 5th century BCE, and is depicted as reading the Torah - for the first time! - to the people who had returned to Jerusalem. I suppose we shall never know for sure.

Well, now that I’ve told you more than you want to know, let’s go back to the first two sources I mentioned: J and E.

Now, Elohim ("sons of El") could just be a general term for a divinity, but E seems to be referring to a particular one. But even E switches over to the name "Yahweh" after this god reveals himself to Noah through the burning bush.

So once again, who is this Yahweh, and where did he come from? "Yahweh" means, literally, "I am who I am," so this doesn’t really tell us anything. Many scholars believe that this god came from the south, and in the earliest narratives of the Bible he is seen primarily as a warrior god.

Wherever he came from, and however he got there, though, one thing is for certain. At some point, he was adopted as the "official" god of the state of Israel.

Let’s get back to that word: "henotheism". What it means is, "the belief in and worship of a single God while accepting the existence or possible existence of other deities that may also be worshipped." And for a very long time, that was exactly the situation in ancient Israel. People worshipped Yahweh, but they also worshipped Baal and Asherah, and no telling how many other deities.

So how and when did the Hebrews become "monotheistic?"

The Biblical history, especially from the Deuteronomist (who was probably writing during the Exile) continually stresses the conflicts between Yahweh and some of the Israeli kings who allowed people to worship other gods. Tales of ancient prophets like Elijah attack Baal-worshipping for example. You see, according to the Covenant (contract) that Yahweh made with the Hebrew people, he was supposed to be their only god.

Scholars disagree on exactly when and how this happened. But a large number of them agree that it was part of the general theology that was developed by priests and prophets during the Exile to explain the conquest of Jerusalem by Babylon. Yahweh had allowed his people to be defeated because they had disobeyed, and were continually worshipping other gods.

Notice that even here, no one is claiming the Yahweh is the only god there is. They are just saying that he is the only one that Israel is supposed to worship. So just when and how did this desert god who was the patron deity of this small nation of people become transformed into the one and only, true and almighty, universal God of all being, without any peers? Good question.

Hebrew monotheism

Biblical scholars and archaeologists pretty much agree that even by the time of the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 597 BCE, even the most advanced citizens of Israel were at best "monolatrists." That is, they worshipped only one god, even though they accepted the existence of others. How does "monolatrism" differ from "henotheism?" Good question. While the good, old-fashioned henotheism lets you worship other gods along with your main God, monolatrism don’t. Not even a little bit. You dance with the one who brung ya. Period.

A number of priests and prophets, especially after the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE by Assyria, had been pushing for worshipping Yahweh alone. By this time, all that was left of the Israeli nation is the small Kingdom of Judea in the south, with its Temple and royal court in Jerusalem. After the Babylonian smackdown, just about everyone who was anyone in Jerusalem got carted away to far-off places in the Empire.

This was very disheartening, as you can well imagine. Not only had Israel’s god let them get defeated, but he let his own Temple be destroyed. All worship in Jerusalem centered around the Temple - as a matter of fact, since the time of the Deuteronomist reforms, it was the only place you were allowed to make sacrifices. Now what?

It seems to us like the Israeli religion should have crumbled and fell apart during the heart-wrenching years of exile. But, strangely, it didn’t. Instead, seemingly against all odds, thousands of miles from home, with nothing to go back to, the religion of the Hebrews not only held them together as a people, but it began to grow, philosophically and ethically, into what would eventually be known as modern Judaism. By the time Persia conquered Babylon and allowed the exiles to start coming home and rebuild their Temple - or pretty soon after - it was fairly well established in the people’s minds that not only was their god the god, he was the only god. From now on He would be God - with a capital G!

Now, to really tell the story of this transformation and to tell it well, you really have to take the time to produce all the Biblical and archaeological evidence available, and I just don’t have the time, space or scholarly equipment to do it a fair job here. Like with just about everything else, the experts disagree, and there is no really strong, established timeline or chronicle of events and ideas. But it is pretty much agreed that the notion of Israel’s god being the "one God" of all the nations and even the entire universe, was developed and pushed by certain prophets and priests in the exile itself.

Many Biblical scholars believe that this is when the famous first book of Genesis, with the extraordinary creation story we all know story was written. This all-powerful deity didn’t need to fight a war against a chaos monster like Tiamat to bring the earth and its creatures into being. All He had to do was say, "Let there be . . .", and bam! it was done! This was a God that existed completely outside of Nature itself, He wasn’t an incarnation of it like the old gods. This God was completely transcendent of all ordinary being, which was in fact, his "creation."

This was an enormous conceptual jump to a bold new concept of deity. But the Israelis made it. In the end, this was their genius, and their timeless gift to the civilizations not only of the Near East, but eventually, of the entire Western world. This was the glorious and transcendent vision of God that would be developed by Rabbinical Judaism and would be inherited by Christianity, and later, Islam.

Meanwhile, in ancient Greece . . .
 The Greeks of the 6th century BCE were polytheists, pretty similar in nature to the Mesopotamians long before them. They even still had some of the same gods, although their names had changed. Greece, of course, had its own mythological traditions, and some pretty snazzy writers as well (Homer, Hesiod . . . not bad for a literary start.) Unlike the Israelis, the Greeks would never have a really big religious revolution.

But starting about the same time that the Hebrews were undergoing their radical reform, beginning in their exile, some smart Greeks, first in Asia Minor and Italy, and then finally in Athens, were working up an exciting new project in human thought: they called it "philosophy!"

The pre-Socratics

Once again, this is a whole story in itself, and I’m eventually going to tell it. But here we’ve got to cut to the chase. The first Greek philosophers are called the pre-Socratics because they came before Socrates. Now, of course they didn’t know that they came before Socrates, or that Socrates would eventually come along, so they may not have bothered to philosophize at all. But despite all their different theories about reality - and there were a bunch! - the pre-Socratics were all pretty much concerned with explaining what everything was, how it got here and how it worked. And they were doing it without any reference to gods or mythology at all - now that was different!

Hence, these early Greek thinkers are the ones who not only introduced the idea of free speculative philosophy into the Western world, but they introduced the very notion of science itself into the mix of civilization. To say that we owe a lot to the Greeks is an incredible understatement. Art, literature, architecture, Mediterranean cuisine, you name it. But for now - at least for as far as the concept of "God" goes - I’m going to say that philosophy was the most important.

The pre-Socratics never came up with the idea of God. They did come up with the idea of "the One", though, which was pretty close. Actually, all their arguments kind of cancelled each other out, and eventually they reached pretty much a dead end. But their early cogitations did not go to waste, however. Aside from all the various merits that their philosophies had, it’s pretty much agreed - historically, that is - that their greatest achievement was the impact upon the Big Three of Greek philosophy . . .

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle

Now, I plan to spend a lot of time writing about all three of these guys in a lot more detail, so don’t get too upset if I just jump on some main themes here. (Don’t worry, we’ll eventually get to all the technical questions about Greek philosophy that everyone’s dying to hear.)

Socrates was an Athenian. And when he was young, he got interested in philosophy, and he wanted to learn everything, but he found all the pre-Socratics’ arguments conflicting and confusing. He was just about to give up, when he heard about a new guy in town named Anaxagoras. See, Socrates heard that Anaxagoras had claimed that "mind" (Greek: nous) had started everything going. This excited Socrates because he figured that if "mind" was ordering everything, it would not only order it for the best, but it would be rational, and therefore understandable. One he got Anaxagoras’ book home, however, he discovered that the philosopher just used the idea of "mind" to kick things off, then he went off on physical speculations about the world like everyone else.

Disappointed, Socrates decided that neither Anaxagoras, nor any of the other philosophers, knew anything. So he started walking around Athens asking people if they knew anything.

Socrates was really more interested in ethics than he was in physics, actually, so he mostly asked people questions about virtue. Questions like: What is justice? What is courage? Beauty? Friendship? Piety? Wisdom? And all the Athenians, who thought they knew everything, would tell him. But Socrates wasn’t easily satisfied, and it wasn’t hard for him to find lots of big gaping holes in their answers, which he would quickly point out to them and ask them to start over again. Eventually, he would do this until the person he was talking to got completely confused and realized that he didn’t really know what he was talking about, and looked like a complete idiot. Socrates soon concluded that nobody knew anything, and that he himself (Socrates) was the wisest man alive because at least he knew he didn’t know anything!

Socrates kept on doing this until the Athenians eventually put him to death.

But one of his followers, a kid named Plato, got really inspired by what Socrates was doing. You see, Socrates wasn’t just looking for an answer of this kind of thing or that kind of thing - he was looking for a universal definition. In other words, if somebody could actually answer a question like What is justice? or What is beauty? in a way that it covered every individual instance of justice or beauty, then you would actually have real knowledge - that is, knowledge that didn’t change.

Plato carried on Socrates’ project - though he wrote dialogues instead of bugging people on the street so he would live longer. And eventually Plato pushed Socrates’ ideas just about as far as they would go. Eventually, he came up with his famous Theory of Forms.

Okay, I know I can’t really get into this whole massive theory right here. We’ll talk about all this later, I promise. But to break it down as simply as possible, Plato decided that these "universal definitions" that Socrates had been looking for were actually the highest reality of all. They were immortal, transcendent, non-material, universal Forms that existed before everything else did, and were the ultimate reality upon which everything else was imperfectly based. And they were all united together hierarchically under the one, great Idea of the Good.

Well, can you prove he was wrong?

Plato started the Academy, which was the first university in Europe. And here he taught mathematics, dialectic, and ultimately he taught about the Forms.

After Plato died, one of his best students, Aristotle, decided that Plato must have had it all wrong about the Forms. One big problem, among others, was that it was hard to say just what the Forms were, and perhaps more importantly, just what was their relationship to changing, physical, material reality?

Aristotle thought he fixed the problem by locating the Forms - or just form, to his way of thinking - inextricably bonded with matter in actual individual things. Then he went on to invent formal logic.

Now, eventually Aristotle got so carried away by logic that he got into some real problems. Take his Problem of Causation. Please. (Okay, I’ll stop.) Aristotle reasoned that everything that existed had a cause. But if you kept pushing this idea back far enough, you came to the question: what was the first cause that started everything else going? Aristotle reasoned that there had to be an Unmoved Mover that started the whole chain.

In other words, Aristotle decided there had to be a God.

Now, Aristotle’s God was a lot different from the God of the Hebrew prophets and priests. First of all, He didn’t really do anything - he just sat around and thought. Not only that but he only thought about thought. You couldn’t really pray to Him, you could just reason about Him. Basically, Aristotle’s God wasn’t so much of a real deity as he was a logical necessity.

Okay, so what do all these Greek philosophers have to do with the Judaic concept of "One God?" What did Socrates’ universal definitions, Plato’s Theory of Forms and Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover have to do with the great God Yahweh?

Funny you should ask.

The great Hebrew-Greek synthesis

Aristotle had students, too. And one day one of them went a little funny in the head, and he went and did a silly thing. He conquered the world. His name was Alexander. And just like Sargon, he had the same last name: "The Great."

One of the many places that Alexander conquered was ancient Israel and the city of Jerusalem. We’re all the way up to the 4th century BCE by now, so the new Judaic teachings had had a good couple of hundred years to sink in, and the people had them pretty much engrained in their culture and history. Greek polytheism didn’t rub off on them, and as for philosophy - well, to be honest, most of Alexander’s soldiers weren’t really up to snuff on the latest thinkings.

Alexander died in 323 BCE, but he left behind him an enormous empire that pretty much got split up between his generals. But a lot of Greeks migrated East and set up new cities. All these Greeks in the Near East eventually had quite an effect on the overall culture of all these areas, however. It is a process that historians call Hellenization, and arguably, it had just as much an effect upon the Greeks as the Greeks did on the Easterners. Once the dust had cleared, there was basically a whole new civilization built out of the blend. It was divided up politically, but it spread all the way from Italy to Persia, including the old kingdoms of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and even little Judea.

Nobody really knew what to call it. We call the whole shebang "The Hellenistic Era." And it lasted until the Romans came and conquered everything in the 1st century BCE.

A lot of Jews scattered and migrated in this period. And while they kept their religion and traditions intact, their mixing with the Greeks in many of these new cities opened them up to a lot of new, Western ideas. Like spanakopita and wine. And sometimes even a little philosophy.

Alexandria

One of the greatest of the new Greek Eastern cities was built in Egypt. It was called Alexandria. (Guess who named it?)

It was from Alexandria that one of Alexander’s general’s family, the Pltolemies, reigned their big cut of what was left of "the Great" one’s empire. They not only ruled Egypt, but also up into the Levant, including the little Kingdom of Judea. Now, fortunately for everybody, the Greeks weren’t like the Babylonians, and they basically just left the people in their territory alone to do whatever they wanted. They engaged with trade, and it wasn’t too long until Alexandria had an integrated economy with Jerusalem, and the Greeks and Jews got along pretty well. As a matter of fact, a lot of Jews moved to Alexandria, and well, cultures started to fuse.

The Hebrew Bible got translated into Greek in Alexandria. Known as the Septuagint, it introduced the idea of monotheism into many Greek minds for the first time. And for the Jews? They got their first taste of philosophy from the likes of Plato and Aristotle. (Mostly Plato).

Some Jews were so impressed with Plato that they concluded that he must have gotten his insights from reading the Bible. He hadn’t, of course, but the new ideas started working on both sides of the fence, and Alexandria was soon a virtual hotbed of percolating ideas. Alexandria eventually boasted the largest library in the world, and scholars and intellectuals set up shop all over the city.

Philo

One of my favorite guys of this era was a Hellenized Jewish philosopher called Philo of Alexandria. He lived from about 25 BCE to around 50 CE, and a lot of what he wrote would have a huge influence on the later founders of Greek Christianity.

Philo’s big goal was to try to harmonize the God of the Hebrew Bible with the principles of Greek philosophy. Philo was among many of the era who said that the Bible shouldn’t be interpreted literally. It was the expression of the experience of a people, and it spoke of philosophical truths in allegorical terms. Philo realized that if taken literally, the Bible could not be properly understood in all of its richness. Most importantly, it made the idea of God seem too anthropomorphic and foolish.

Philo used some of Plato’s ideas to help develop some novel and penetrating ideas about God, in the relatively new speculative science called "theology" (or the "logical" - as in Greek "logos" - study of God).

Now, of course the Rabbis had been theologizing about God for several centuries now, but the addition of the Greek ideas definitely brought some novel luster to the old subject.

For example, Philo identified the Greek philosophers’ vision of wisdom and reason - and especially Plato’s Idea of the Good - with the God of the Bible. The Bible couldn’t be taken as factual history. It was actually God’s Holy Wisdom coming alive in the imagination of the ancient Hebrew writers.

Philo’s philisophico-theological definition of God would be very influential in Western history down through the centuries. He rejected all the anthropomorphic descriptions of God’s doings as allegory meant to drive home divine wisdom. The "real God" was more like Plato’s Forms. He wasn’t material, he didn’t move or change. God didn’t exist in space or time at all. He was completely transcendent and was the ultimate cause of all material being.

But at the same time, Philo insisted that God was immanent - that is, He existed within the world as well. All people, in fact everything that existed, was a manifestation of God Himself. In Philo’s mind, there was a complete harmony with the transcendent idea of God and with His inner nature, which expressed itself as goodness and justice among people.

Whenever I hear fundamentalist ranters, whether they’re Christian, Muslim or Jewish, going on and on about what God "says" and "wants" and "tells them to do," I really wish I could sit down and share a little Philo with them. I think it might do us all some good.

Plotinus

Jumping ahead another century or so, there was another Greek philosopher in Egypt who would also have an extraordinary impact upon the thinking of Jews, Christians and Muslims throughout the centuries.

Plotinus was not Jewish, but pure Greek. His biggest influence was the philosophy of Plato, which through his interpretation and extension, he basically created a new conceptual model of theism that any of the Near Eastern religions could use.

Following Plato’s Idea of the Good, the really big thing for Plotinus was "the One." (We keep coming back to ‘the One.") Plotinus took the intuition of the unity of all Being, and reasoned that "the One" was the supreme reality of everything. It was completely transcendent and existed beyond all opposites, all categories, even beyond the concepts of "being" and "non-being."

But unlike Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, who just sat around and thought about thinking, Plotinus’ "One" contained all potentialities, which it in turn "emanated" to create the entire system of reality that we see around us. This was a solution to the problem of Plato’s Forms, (Plotinus’ philosophy is known today as Neo-Platonism), as they could now be seen as the midway point between the completely transcendent "One" and the actual material things that they informed as further emanations.

I know this all sounds a bit abstract and complicated - and it is - but Plotinus was thinking on an entirely conceptual and rational basis. It would not take long for theists (especially Christians) to come along and adopt some of his ideas, replacing the logical idea of "the One" with the more accessible term, "God." Thinking about the Forms like this, they could be seen as the "ideas" in "God’s mind," which God merely had to think to form the reality we see around us and give it order, structure and a fully moral ground.

Personally, I think that this is a particularly beautiful and brilliant vision, even if it’s something that can’t be demonstrated or proved. Just as metaphor, I think it gives us a marvelous picture to explain the ultimately unexplainable in a way that makes sense to us - or at least some of us. At any rate, Plotinus’ thought would have a long and deep impression on the religious mind - especially those people inclined to mysticism.

Okay, Pete - where is all this leading?

I know, I could go on and on about the history of the concept of God in Western civilization right up to the present day. And I probably will at some point. But good lord, I’ve got to start wrapping this initial article up and bring it to some kind of meaningful conclusion before I find myself writing a very long book that nobody wants to read.

I guess there are two main points I want to make. The first is that the idea or concept of "God" is something far from simple and straightforward. We throw the term around constantly, and there’s this continual clash between the "religious" groups and the "atheist" groups, not to mention the ongoing religious warfare carried out by extremists and radicals. I really feel compelled to start injecting into the international dialogue the very real notion that "God" is something that can be meant or understood in many, many different ways! If someone asks me, "Do you believe in God?" my automatic reaction is just to stop and say, "Well, just what the hell do you mean by that?" Because "God" can (and does) mean everything from an imaginary little guy who makes a flower blossom to the most profound and elegant metaphor that rings out like a great work of art. Some definitions of God are ultimately aesthetic - they don’t have what we would scientifically call "truth value" at all. Neither does music - that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a potential for extraordinarily rich human value. And arguing and fighting over what may be ultimately a beautiful metaphor for the unknowable certainly seems like a stupid waste of time to me.

The second point is that the definition of the word "God" is historically driven. It’s a fluid thing, and it changes constantly, from century to century, from cultural shift to cultural shift. It’s so broad, vast and loaded with possibilities that you’re never going to nail it down into something absolute and permanent. That’s doing it a fundamental disservice. Like all great concepts, the meaning of "God" evolves and changes over time, throughout the ages. And it always will. Hey, I’ve only gotten to the 3rd century CE. And I haven’t even begun to touch upon Eastern concepts of God as they appear in, say, India or China, and they are often radically, fundamentally different.

Look, I don’t want to make an ultimate statement or conclusion about "God" here - at least not yet (he-he!). All I’m looking to do at this point is to "up" the dialogue a little bit. We as people get so locked into yes/no, black/white, agonistic conflicts, be they religious, political, social or artistic. It’s just so beneath us. I mean, just look at the little part of the broad history of one topic that I’ve brought out here, and it’s easy to see that the world of our ideas is so multi-varied and beautifully malleable and nuanced that we just should rejoice and revel in that, keep our minds open and work to share all sorts of points of view and perspectives.

Right now, I know I’m just one guy writing a little bit about one thing, but if I can get some other folks to jump in and join me in this project, put in their own two cents, debate, discuss and yes, argue (rationally) like adults, wouldn’t that be one more step in a positive direction for the species?

For myself, at least, one of the greatest things about life is learning. It’s all about consciousness, baby. I get juiced on cognating! To me, that’s what actual transcendence really is: going from a state of not knowing to at least a state of imagining possibilities that you didn’t realize existed before.

Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Who knows? Maybe that’s not the point. Maybe the point is that we just get together and communicate with one another.

And hey - maybe, if there is a God, that’s exactly what He wants us to do.

I’ve heard crazier ideas. Much crazier.

To be continued . . .

petey