I have been too busy for much systematic writing. I mostly have ideas written down for whenever I can put them together in a bigger essay. But some are just not big enough for their own articles, at least not yet, hence this post. So, here we go.
I
I used to labour under the identification of apophaticism and Platonism’s understanding of “the One”. Now I think that to the extent that apophaticism denies or subordinates the many irreducible Gods, it is opposed to Platonism. It is indeed possible to argue for the irreducibility of a God to any ontological determination. However, what makes Platonism distinct, especially in Plotinus and his successors, is that this is true of every God, which gives positive articulation of the first principle in their existences. It is indeed proper to affirm that YHWH is “beyond being” and all Gods are “in Him”. But this is true because “they [the Gods] are each a way of being one another.”[1]. The radical decentralization of “Being itself” away from it being a totalizing overlord to being the first manifestation of each God makes Christian apophaticism trivially compatible with polytheism at best and undermines the project that uses the latter to incorporate other Gods into the Christian project via absolute subordination, and similar projects.
II
The logic of “ancestor worship” is very strange to my former monotheist mindset, shared by many of my fellow Christians. I think I can give a significant defence and articulation of its metaphysics via Platonism, but for now, I only have the bandwidth for an “overview of an overview”. Vargas says:
“a god is a self-complete unity together with the beings that incorporate (μετέχει) it. So it would be wrong to point to the sun and say “Look, a divine unity!”, but it is correct to point to it and say “Behold, a god!”.[2]
Based on this, there are two ways we can understand the Godhood of ancestors:
1. As manifestations or incarnations of a known God.
2. As Gods in their own right.
These two are not mutually exclusive, since as mentioned before, each God is a “way” of being all the others. For example, there are “Zeusaic” manifestations of Hades and vice versa. To borrow (and paraphrase) from E. P. Butler’s understanding of the logic of the Greek “heroes”[3], in both cases, mortal (taxonomically human and non-human) individuals are “sites of meaning” for the revelation of divine activity, such that even their normally morally ambiguous and even morally defective acts can be “taken up”, “redeemed” (in a sense) in its horizontal temporality being transposed vertically, as prior to the field of activity that mortal moralities emerge in, the same way myths can be morally shocking since they are describing realities prior to normally mortal concerns in terms of those mortal concerns, such as describing entropy as war or a rebellion. Each individual’s “existentiation” of a life or a pattern of life in their unique unity can be taken up into eternity as part of the establishment of a Cosmos. Indeed, this is in some sense true of every life. The implications are equal parts disturbing and fascinating.
III
There is a “refined” response to the phenomenon of so-called “Artificial Intelligence”, recently reinvigorated by the advent of ChatGPT, that sort of sees it as leading to a “computerization” of the human. Indeed, today many people think that “thinking” is just biological computation. There is a concern there that is valid in some sense. But I do not really see a positive balance to the negative reactions to the theology, or in fact to negative relations to the very activity of computation. I will not claim to understand how these technologies work in detail, but an aspect of this discussion brought to mind a “theory”; to wit:
If this is in some sense the age of the “screen”, with instant communication, entertainment, and social control by screens, one might wonder about the Gods that would correspond to this activity we participate in. I think, for ancient Greek theology, the answer is simple: Hades, the beneficent sophist, who indeed deals with “images” and “copies”[4], something integral to the digital space. In Christian mythology, I think the corresponding God is Lucifer[5], which, while I think this is a good thing, due to reasons I articulate elsewhere, Christians might not be so inclined. I think there is an opportunity to discover new Gods, using the example of Hades, and also produce new “Hadeic” theology or theology of other Gods with similar activities, for something like a “digital” spirituality, and give a firmer ground for positive religious participation in digital “spaces”, rather than simply a refined reactionary stance against an unstoppable zeitgeist.
[1] Steven Dillon, “Classical Theism: The Other Side of the Story,” The Analytic Pagan (blog), January 18, 2023, https://theanalyticpagan.com/2023/01/18/classical-theism-the-other-side-of-the-story/.
[2] Antonio Vargas, “An Henadological Find,” Substack newsletter, @philoantonio (blog), December 5, 2022, https://philoantonio.substack.com/p/an-henadological-find?utm_medium=email.
[3] Edward P. Butler, “Time and the Heroes,” Walking the Worlds: A Biannual Journal of Polytheism and Spiritwork 1, no. 1 (2014): 23–44.
[4] Bibliotheca Alexandrina et al., Host of Many: Hades and His Retinue, ed. Terence P. Ward, n.d.
[5] Oluwaseyi Bello, “Lucifer’s Unique Salvation,” Substack newsletter, A Play of Masks (blog), November 24, 2022, https://symmetria.substack.com/p/lucifers-unique-salvation.