ONE GOD, HIS SON, AND HIS MANY SPIRITS
I
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
John 3:16
“In the spatial world where we live, every value is related in some way to a sacred Center, which is the place where Heaven has touched the earth; in every human world there is a place where God has manifested Himself in order to pour forth His grace.”
Frithjof Schuon [1]
The message of this post is simple: God, in his infinite mercy, manifests in many forms in many places in order to lead men back to himself. This post explores what is commonly called “polytheism” with this in mind, using the equally problematic word “Monotheism” and the Christian understanding of Trinitarian salvation as a hermeneutic and with the tacit understanding that I’m to a great extent generalizing and shortening concepts that are definitely more complex and nuanced, so I beg your pardon in advance for any errors in detail.
The highlighted statement in the previous paragraph is immediately controversial, because, for most people, their understanding of religious exclusivity is basically “My religion is the way, all others are at best approximates, or at worst demonic counterfeits”, or so the assertion goes. There are as many approaches to my response as there are legitimate religions, but they all have the same substance. Mine is from the Christian angle, since that’s the religion God deemed fit to guide my salvation. If you want an in depth look at this “perennialism”, I recommend “The Essential Frithjof Schuon”, which goes into far more detail than I can here. He covers this from the general aspect and then goes into the major world religions themselves.
My justification for accepting “perennialism” in this form is that I cannot in good faith look at other religions, with their vast “universes” of meaning and virtuous sages, who become sages and saints because of, and not in spite of, their religions, and call what they practice a “proto-christianity”, first because it denies the facts behind their virtue, second because it disrespects the sages themselves. I believe it is firmly in keeping with Christian duty to give them the benefit of the doubt, and learn from them on their own terms, to love them who are my religious neighbours as myself, and treat them as I would want to be treated. I wouldn’t want anyone to call the in depth Christian religious knowledge I have been searching and reading a “Proto-Islam” or something similar, so I won’t do that to others. So far, with what I am learning, my suspicions are confirmed, and it has helped me to look back at my own religion with far more clarity, correcting misconceptions. In loving the other religions, I found mine anew.
As a Christian, I believe no one goes to God except through Christ, and to be virtuous is to know God, for to be virtuous is an outgrowth of love for God and neighbour, and to love is to know God (1 John 4:7). If these men are virtuous through their tradition, then that verse cannot simply apply only to Christ as manifest in first century Palestine. If it applies to them through their tradition, their tradition cannot be an “approximation” of Christianity, because that tradition either denies this explicitly (like Islam), and because of the exclusivity of the religions themselves. This is what I term the “argument from results”, although Schuon call it “argument of the moral efficaciousness of Divine Legislation”, in other words: “By their fruits you shall know them” (Matthew 7:16). So they are all exclusive, because by virtue of He who establishes them (in other words, “transcendentally”, and not by their historical form and creeds, even if through them), they are all “one way”. In Schuon’s words:
“…a given religion in reality (God) sums up all religions and that all religion is to be found in a given religion, because Truth is one.” [2]
Christ is the way, but that is the Christian way of putting it. Christian doctrine is different from Islam and Islam is different from Hinduism. This is not a claim to the contrary. They are different, but the truth they express, a truth that ultimately transcends words, is the same. To object to this on doctrinal grounds is to take words for absolutes, rather than gates to absolutes, for there is nothing, in Islam’s doctrinal understanding of God for example, that contradicts the Trinitarian understanding of God as put forth in our creeds. When one reads about the various Hindu understandings of God, some parallel Trinitarian theology, others Islamic theology, and in a way seems to be a way to reconcile the two. I know Christians have this view of Hinduism that borders on the ridiculous. It is similar to how Yoruba Christians often view their ancestral religion, but it has to go. In the case of us Yoruba, it is the inheritance of western imperialism that makes us functionally hate ourselves, in the case of the west it is simply misunderstanding and the classic hatred of the other. The Christian is courageous, and even though most people don’t need to know the intricacies of other religions, it would be unwise to despise possible allies in this anti-religious world; and for those who love to know, to despise the unique opportunity the current “Global village” gives us to enrich our own tradition.
II
“For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.”
John 3:17
“It is not Apollo who is false but the way of regarding him.”
Frithjof Schuon [3]
“The diversity of sacral manifestations is nearly always linked to the Idea of a unity so hidden and obscured that it must be mediated by diversity”
John Milbank [4]
A big challenge of so called “polytheism” is that it is hard to define. If we take the classic example of the Greeks, although they worshipped many gods, they knew of Ho Theos, that is, “The God”, the divine source of creation. Similarly, Yoruba people know of “Olodumare”, who is basically the same entity, even though there are various “orishas”, gods and spirits, whom you “appease” with gifts. So, in the purest sense, “idolatry” does not equal what many understand to be “Polytheism” directly, because this “Polytheism” looks a lot like “Monotheism” if you understand the gods in their correct relation to God. Christian scripture describes idolatry as “to exchange the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles” (Romans 1:23). This doesn’t condemn images as such, as the Old Testament records images in the temple, it is rather to mistake those images for the image of the True God, who (as Father, or in Islam, Allah) cannot be seen. It is to collapse the Creator-creature distinction, and this is what Greek religion ultimately did. To bow before an image isn’t inherently wrong, many Christians bow to icons. However, to mistake the image for the reality it imperfectly reflects, and in the case of polytheism, to mistake the subordinate reality, which is simply the gods as understood as intermediaries, with Ho Theos itself, is their idolatry. The degeneracy of the religions antiquity is not an indictment of the religious symbols themselves, but the way they are regarded:
“A mentality once contemplative and hence in possession of a sense of the metaphysical transparency of forms had ended by becoming passional, worldly and strictly speaking superstitious. The symbol through which the reality symbolized was originally clearly perceived - a reality of which it is rigorously speaking an aspect- became in fact an opaque and uncomprehended image or an idol, and this decadence of the general mentality could not fail in its turn to affect the tradition itself, enfeebling it and falsifying it in various ways; most of the ancient paganisms were characterized by intoxication with power and sensuality.” [3]
In other words;
“Here the refusal of idols seems less a matter of denying the existence of their represented divinities, or the possibility of a local sacral presence, than of questioning the efficaciousness of inanimate artefacts. What is being denied is their magical and divinatory capacities, and hence the association of the divine with the fixed, regular, impersonal and automatic. The inflexibility of idols, as of the power they manifest, renders them ultimately impotent, and not manifestatory of the divine." [4]
The case of Hinduism seems to be that in which this forgetfulness has not taken hold. Schuon attributes this to its self-renewing nature that manifests through its Avataras (Avatars), unlike the ancient paganisms, in which their continued effort to grasp the “golden age” or “paradise” led to more and more degradation, farther away from the very paradise they distantly remember. A similar case to Hinduism may be found in the Yoruba traditional religion, where the gods take human form, and actually this seems to be the principal way they were known. Although it could also be said that they simply haven’t had time to degrade.
How are we supposed to make sense of this Christianly? A hint is in the role of subordinate divinities, which is mediation. As mediators, they participate in, and could be said to be manifestations of the aspects of, the one Logos. As angels are, in a sense, simply manifestations of the roles and aspects of the one Logos, so are the gods aspects of the mediatory role of the one Logos. In the aspects they manifest, they are God, but as simply aspects and not the Logos itself, they are not God. Just as Jacob can wrestle with an angel and say he wrestled with God, so can a man see Zeus and say he saw God:
“…the divine Principle is at the same time one and multiple; the gods personify the divine qualities and functions and, at the same time, the angelic prolongations of these qualities and functions. …If God gives us life, warmth, and light, He does so by way of Helios or inasmuch as He is Helios; the sun is like the hand of God, and is thus divine; and since it is so in principle, why should it not be so in its sensible manifestation?...it is, for God, a way of deploying Himself, ”outside Himself”.” [1]
This deployment “outside Himself” is in order to “return”, along with all creation, back to its source, the Father. If you’re perceptive, you can see the Trinitarian theology between the lines. No one god, angel, or aspect is fully the one Logos, and in this sense the Monotheisms are greater than the Paganisms that forget their source. The Logos, the “Word”, “Christ”, as Jesus (and for Muslims, as Koran), not Zeus, is the full revelation of the Father, for Zeus is but an aspect and a fragment, whom with his fellow aspects all kneel to Christ. However this subordination reveals that these aspects are a part of the Logos’ descent into creation, and when Christ is done, they will all return to Him, the heavenly archons will bow, and their kingdoms, which were not really theirs in the first place, will be turned over to Christ, who will turn them over to the Father, and God will be all in all. Then we will proclaim “The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever!” (Revelation 11:15).
III
“For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.”
John 3:18
“In the sapiential perspective divine redemption is always present; it pre-exists all terrestrial alchemy and is its celestial model, so that it is always thanks to this eternal redemption—whatever may be its vehicle on earth—that man is freed from the weight of his vagaries and even, Deo volente, from that of his separative existence; if “my words shall not pass away” it is because they have always been. The Christ of the gnostics (to the extent they got Him right) is he who is “before Abraham was” and from whom arise all the ancient wisdoms; a consciousness of this, far from diminishing a participation in the treasures of the historical Redemption, confers on them a scope that touches the very roots of Existence.”
Frithjof Schuon [1]
All this is not to disparage or water down my religion, it is rather to put it in its proper place. The priorities of exclusivists are often mixed, they mistake the vehicle of revelation for the revelation itself, taking the syntactical precision of dogma for the fullness of truth. In reality, dogma is supposed to be transparent, a lens and not the light itself. It is when the lens is flawless that it refracts light the best, and there are many ways to refract that light perfectly. The uniqueness of the Christ event is because of the transcendent reality (or light) it traces, not the bare facts (or lens) of the event itself, which is unintelligible without that reality:
“It is necessary to repeat once more—as others have said before and better—that sacred facts are true because they retrace on their own plane the nature of things, and not the other way round: the nature of things is not real or normative because it evokes certain sacred facts.”[1]
In other words, Jesus did not reveal a salvation contingent on history, on specific events, rather he revealed a salvation that history itself is contingent on, and therefore cannot help but manifest it, and not just in the monumental events in Palestine, but also monumental events in Arabia, in India, and wherever men are, each “unique” in its form of manifestation according to providence. Hence the question “How are those who have never heard of Jesus saved?” is answered “through his manifestation in their particular religious context”, provided the revelation is genuine (i.e. its essence is unity with God, that is, Theosis, which can be expressed as virtue, prayer, and other pious acts). It’s pretty simple really, Jesus said he came for the sick and the lost, if one in another religion manifests virtue, that is, the sign of Theosis, or “fruits of the Spirit”, he isn’t sick, or lost, rather he/she is in the shepherd’s pen, and why would you risk the wrath of the shepherd by luring away his sheep like wolves?
Schuon, F., LIGHT ON THE ANCIENT WORLDS A New Translation with Selected Letters Frithjof Schuon.
Schuon, F., & Nasr, S. H. (2005). The essential Frithjof Schuon. In The library of perennial philosophy. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0513/2005014071.html
Schuon, F., UNDERSTANDING ISLAM.
Milbank, J. (1997). History of the one god. 371–400.