Commentary XXII

Nation States as Gods?

Personification of the Americas in Meissen porcelain, c. 1760, from a set of the Four Continents. (Source: Wikipedia)

Schmitt’s definition of the Sovereign as “he who decides on the exception” in his Political Theology is perhaps one of the most salient and powerful definitions of any term out there. The exception is the boundary, the edge, the “just beyond”, and the sovereign is the one who measures where it begins. The Sovereign is the one who measures, who gives the limits, and by so doing, transcends those limits. What is most fascinating about this definition is how it describes Gods quite well. This is Radek Chlup:

“While not denying the reality of this type of chaos, I am trying to draw attention to a chaos of a completely different kind, which we might perhaps call antistructural chaos (in the sense introduced by Victor Turner). Whereas residual chaos corresponds to what has not (yet) been ordered, antistructural chaos is rather an inevitable by-product of ordering. It is something that is only produced as a result of the human effort to subsume things under systems of classification, namely whenever these systems start to strike their limits. Antistructural chaos is itself a cultural creation, one that has as its task to secure order by transcending it, in this way supporting it from without. It is my contention that the gods differ from nonreligious classification markers precisely by having an antistructural dimension.

What this implies for analyzing individual gods is that it is only by identifying their antistructural elements that the gods can really make full sense. It is still crucial of course to analyze the positive functions and attributes of each god and try to find a system behind them. However, it is equally important to focus on those aspects of the god that seem to negate the very order he or she helps to establish. Whereas the residual chaotic elements are usually found on the periphery, in the realm of the local and particular, the antistructural elements are to some extent always located in the center and can be spotted even in famous versions of the god’s myths and in his or her typical attributes and functions. I believe it is only by taking them into account that we can understand the unifying structural themes that bind all the aspects of the god together. Indeed, it is precisely this unifying ability that can be used as a test that we are on the right track in our attempts to identify the antistructural core of the god in question.”[1] (Emphasis mine)

The Gods are sovereign over Being by giving “Limit” through the power of “Infinity” or “Unlimited”, both of which are “beyond Being” as well, insofar as they condition it. They transcend it in the very midst of its subsistence. In myth, these limits can be quite visceral. The Gods can be incestuous, many heroes die untimely due to the extreme lives they live, etc. These define the limits of what is acceptable, and humans themselves are not expected to emulate these. The myths are not “literal” in a crude sense, yet they are not merely allegories. They are “symbols” that reveal the structure of being generated and maintained by the Gods in which we participate, structures that the Gods exceed insofar as they are sovereign. But the point of this comparison between Schmitt’s political theory of sovereignty and Chlup’s illuminating description is not really to endorse Schmitt, but to lead to a more tight comparison and perhaps a kind of identity between the modern state and Godhood, as well as an identity between Godhood and certain other forces in our world today. I have repeatedly referenced Antonio Vargas’ translation of “agathotēs” as “Value” instead of the more standard “Goodness”. I really like the translation because it clarifies certain important meanings of the term that get lost in translation and in discussions about things like theodicy. I’ll reproduce (for the umpteenth time on this blog) a section of his endlessly fascinating post titled “An Henodological Find”:

“Proclus has already shown in prop. 114 that every god is a divine unity and in prop. 115 that every god is beyond being. The purpose of this proposition is to show that it is also a value beyond being, i.e., it is a Value, it is not a being that has value through a property or whose essence is valuable. Thus, for instance, a god of purity does not have purity as a virtue (even in a maximal way) nor is its essence somehow pure, rather it just is the standard “purity.” Of course, gods are usually more complex than this, so the values are not so much like “purity” and “protection” and the like but things such as “Apollonianess” and “Dionisiacality”. (I think the Nietzschean contrast is a good way of thinking about how gods can be values, its only problem is that it stops at two gods.)

Now, what’s particularly interesting for understanding the status of Proclus’ gods is the contrast he draws between considering the gods as things that have “gone forth” from the primary and considering them as gods. According to the former persepctive the gods merely have the character of unity and value (they are ἑνοειδής and ἀγαθοειδὴς), whereas considering the gods “as gods” is to consider them as unities and values themselves (ἑνάδες καὶ ἀγαθότητες). This distinction is possible because “god” is not synonymous with “unity” in Proclus: 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!”. It makes sense, therefore, that the god qua god is a unity, since it is the divine unity that makes all that is incorporated divine, whereas what incorporates it merely has “the character of unity.””[2]

It is hard for me to overstate how brilliant it is to read Proclus’ arguments for the identity of Unity and Goodness as the identity of Unity and Value. A unity is a value and a value is a unity. To be unified is to be made valuable. The highest “unifieds” (“unifieds” are participants in unity) are the valuable ends: the forms of the animals, the forms of the virtues, the transcendental form of Beauty, etc. You can really see the aspect of Platonism that participates in the general ancient milieu (even beyond the Mediterranean) that sees the basic unit of intelligibility as the living being. As mentioned in the last post, Proclus argues that every Henad (a Unity or Value) has a primary participant, a being that, apart from its participation in being, directly participates a God qua unity/value. This being realizes the God as their Self, and it does so necessarily as well as freely (this distinction collapses here). Their distinction from ordinary beings is that this realization is coterminous with their realization of a distinct and unique taxis or class of being, as well as (in the case of those realized Gods in time) them always being realized. Apart from this, the God realized directly is also embodied indirectly in the participants of that being, and in the associated symbols of the God, and more diffusely in the entire universe considered according to the value that is the God. That is, every God is a value for the entire universe, visible and invisible; or as Proclus puts it: “Every god embraces in his substance the function of exercising providence towards the universe; and the primary providence resides in the gods.” (Prop. 120, Dodds trans.)

It is here, in the midst of all these ideas about Gods, that one can take a second look at modern states and their economic institutions, and wonder whether we shouldn’t treat the Christian accusation of “idolatry” leveled at Statists more seriously, not to endorse their accusation – as I think “idolatry” is a rhetorical accusation without much substance – but to see what they recognize as indicating something quite real. See Ayodeji Ogunnaike’s explanation of the notion of Àṣẹ (spiritual potency):

“Another student favorite is a demonstration with a $100 bill. To particularize their worldviews and demonstrate how a practitioner of Yoruba religion would not perceive our conceptual distinction between religious and secular domains, I hand a student a $100 bill and ask her to tear it up. This command evokes a wide range of reactions, but there is always palpable tension, particularly on the part of the poor student holding the money. When I argue that it is merely dyed patterns on plant fiber and that they should obey their professor, the students protest and explain why it is a terrible idea and nobody should do it. I then explain that they are right to recognize that in American society, dyed plant fiber holds a great deal of àṣẹ—even more than those dyed with $1 patterns—and that as a “sacred” object, it has a wide range of powerful ritual uses, not to mention its destruction could invite the powerful wrath of the US government. This exercise usually helps students to contextualize their own experience with power/sacred objects whether they are explicitly religious or not and to take a more productive and respectful stance toward the ritual paraphernalia that is always a part of my courses.”[3]

I don’t think this is a mere metaphor (and I don’t think Ogunnaike intends it as a mere metaphor). I think this is one of those moments where we can recontextualize the experiential world of the ancients (that we often reflexively call “superstitious”) in ours. We inhabit metanarratives that hide this dimension of things. The “United States of America”, in my reading, seems to tick all of the boxes for a “Value” in the Proclean sense, a God around with things, including its government, participates. Indeed, this is not a strange thought. States (and especially city-states) are known for their patron deities, for whom they are often named. Athens is one of the most famous, named as belonging to Athena; there is also Jerusalem, with such iconic significance as to require a heavenly original. Today, there are Saints for nations. Apparently, Nigeria is consecrated to the Virgin Mary, which is very interesting considering my current religious practice. Nigeria is also consecrated to St. Patrick. It is not unusual for a place to have more than one patron. The point is the fact that such consecration exists, and exists without needing it to be recognized, because, like in the issue of modern nation states, their power is felt nonetheless, as seen even in our behavior. The cycles of education, indoctrination, the formation of the subject throughout their lives in the state is entirely consistent with daimonic activity, the presence and persistence of a God in time. The institutions that make this happen are embodiments of daimons that are themselves participants in Gods qua being that realize a Self that is a Value. The patron God of the Unites States does not need to be named “United States”, anymore than the God(dess) that embodies the form of Beauty or the Sun need to themselves have “Beauty” or “Sun” as a proper name (although sometimes they do), but their power can be felt nonetheless. However, if I can wager an identity for the Deity, the Value beyond being who unifies the Valuable end that is the United States, I would propose either “Lady Liberty” or “Columbia”. They can be considered the same, or the former as a personification of the latter’s aspect, or simply different Gods. It is important here to specify that the God that the State embodies is distinct from the government that participates in its daimons. The State as an ideal that embodies the God is immutable, while the government isn’t. I would say it is important to maintain this difference. It is also important that there are many other Gods present here as well. Indeed, this is perhaps the limitation of solely relying on Schmitt, as what he proposes is a kind of “monotheism of the sovereign”, a defect that affects all modern nation states, often to disastrous consequences. As Steven Dillon says, “To be a henad is to be a way of being a multitude of henads”[4]. The Deity that is embodied by the Unites States has within it so many other deities; deities of Capital, deities of Sport, deities of War, etc. We live in a world of deities. What is a multinational corporation other than a really powerful embodied daimon of Capital? Capital is itself a God, a Value (and it would be an interesting adventure to work out the implications of the homonymy between “Value” in the financial sense associated with Capital and “Value” in the “unificatory” sense in Proclus’ metaphysics), the question for a Platonic Polytheist being how one might participate in such Gods more sustainably, if at all. This is so for every State, and the health of a society is dependent on how well we integrate with our deities. As Antonio says:

“The germ of this idea occurred to me when preparing a presentation on “guardian deities” of cities in Proclus. Surely, I realized, this expression has it backwards: a god is not the guard of a city as if the city were more precious than the god; the city exists for the sake of the god and it is insofar as it fulfills its function that it is protected and guarded. So it is wrong, technically to say that each city and each clan has its guardian deity - rather it is the deities who control the human groups, just like the individual humans control their own bodies. A multi-generational, stable human group for Proclus is a great living being, the body of a daimon, of a spirit.”[5]

Against the Christian accusation of idolatry, most extreme in the positions of groups like the Jehovah’s witnesses, there is a healthy worship of the state as a God, as distinct from the worship of its government just as there is healthy worship of Christ as distinct from the worship of the institutions that (problematically) embody him. But this worship is the worship of the Deity and not a concept of the ideal. It is not mere patriotism, which is animated by the concept as an image of the ideal in the citizen. That is good in its sphere. Neither is it nationalism. What we are referring to here is proper devotion. Antonio adds:

“There must be as many human groupings as there are deities, and human society must be so complex and admit of so many interlapping and interlocking groups in order to mirror the unity and multiplicity of the gods. This is a political philosophy that follows from the vocation of human beings as rational, mortal worshippers of the gods. It does not, crucially, aim to make all humans into saints, into pure souls, even into philosophers. The philosopher for Proclus is already on his way out of the human condition, he is really an exception, Proclus himself clearly has a death wish from Marinus’ account of his biography. It is only by a Christian bias (and the megalomania of youth) that one reads the Neoplatonists say “we should flee matter and join the gods” and says “I MUST abandon my body”. The philosophers are few, the temperament is not given to all, their vocation is not universal. The universal vocation is prayer and to do that we must find each our unique gods.”[6]

It is interesting here that the security for diversity is the diversity of the Gods. It is as Butler says, the One is “the ultimate archē a principle of pure multiplicity,”[7] because the point of the first principle is to secure the irreducible multiplicity of existents, starting with the polycentric multiplicity of the Gods, in whom our multiplicity, even our political multiplicity, participates.

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[1] Radek Chlup, “On the Nature of the Gods: Methodological Suggestions for the Study of Greek Divinities,” accessed September 15, 2024, https://www.academia.edu/92067512/On_the_Nature_of_the_Gods_Methodological_Suggestions_for_the_study_of_Greek_Divinities.

[2] Antonio Vargas, “An Henadological Find,” Substack newsletter, @philoantonio (blog), December 5, 2022, https://philoantonio.substack.com/p/an-henadological-find.

[3] Ayodeji Ogunnaike, “My Experience with Ifá and Traditional Yoruba Pedagogy,” in Embodied Pedagogies in the Study of Religion (Routledge, 2025). p. 160-61

[4] Steven Dillon, Pagan Portals - Polytheism: A Platonic Approach (Alresford: Moon Books, 2022). p. 18 (kindle pagination)

[5] Antonio Vargas, “Proclus on the Vocation of Humanity,” Substack newsletter, @philoantonio (blog), February 15, 2023, https://philoantonio.substack.com/p/proclus-on-the-vocation-of-humanity.

[6] Vargas.

[7] Edward P. Butler, The Way of Being: Polytheism and the Western Knowledge System (Notion Press, 2023). p. 90