Rousseauian Gods
What is divine power and knowledge if every God is all powerful and all knowing?
This is really hard to get started. Thank heaven this is a blog post because academic writing in this state would be hell. It feels like I’m losing touch with my deeper thoughts. But not today. Let’s see what this informal approach can give me.
In my devotions, the Fiery Lady has delegated to my Ori the task of helping me write and think. My Ori holds me together, somehow. The space the Fiery Lady holds now is an expansive one, in the literal sense of "giving space" for me to work out my existence, with my Ori's help. Who is more powerful, the Fiery Lady or my Ori?
The easiest answer is that it is the Fiery Lady, given her seeming higher universality. But then, it is very easy to consider a counter-factual. It is possible that in some other configuration, that my Ori could be the more universal principle and the Fiery Lady be who I most directly work this out with. Indeed, this state of affairs does and has come about in my life, and will probably come about repeatedly in the future. Their positions are flexible, perhaps simply because they are not defined by their ontological positions relative to me.
I think this is something very common in religious devotion, usually polytheisms, although the term is supposed to be flexible also - basically religious traditions that admit a multiplicity of deities or divine entities, the words also being flexible.
I think this is because when considering these entities, we consider them not only in their relationships to us, but also in themselves, as subjects; what Steven Dillon would consider their ineffability; that is, the fact that they can only be described in terms of themselves. They, in that moment at least, are not explained by anything "higher". On a mundane level, this is how we can consider the fact that the President of a country could be the most politically powerful individual there but also that he is not the position or post, and is as much an individual as all of us. The Individuals construct the universal. Superlatively, this is true of Gods as well. Given their peculiar individuality, they construct the metaphysical worlds we live in, which Ofcourse, is not exactly the same kind of construction we are doing.
To understand this, we have to see that when considering a God in their ineffability, we are seeing them as a centre, where all things converge. Everything "conspires" in them. The worlds suddenly revolve around them, including you. For those who are into romance, well, this looks familiar, with good reason. This centering also includes other Gods. It is not the case that this is a sectorian monotheism. Each God can be considered this way. The only way to make this an ultimate monist monotheism would be to assume that a universality can hold and explain all these centres, which in turn fails to grasp the very point of an absolutely ineffable centre, which is that it has no higher explanation.
This ineffability can be discovered in a God regardless of place on any system, Insofar as ineffability is not mere universality, but unity as individuality considered as the working out of the first principle that is "the One" as the principle of individuality. Thus, My Ori is ineffable. This is why he can be flexible. He is the unity of all things. The Fiery Lady is ineffable, she is the unity of all things. It is a perspectivism, which always leaves room for more beyond any system.
This is the way in which Gods have power, and knowledge. What indeed is metaphysical power but the ability to unify? To give existence by making something "one"? What is ultimate power but the power to give all things such self unification? But do the Gods unify each other? Not exactly.
Qua ineffable, Gods do not participate each other. Instead, one might say that Gods that are part of the unified field of some centred God are not Gods considered qua ineffable, but instead considered as "accomplices of unification". We might say they "aid" the centred God's unification. In short, they are instruments of power. Indeed, given their primary place in any theistic system, one might say the primary expression of power of a God is other Gods. Because of this, they are also the primary expression of the God's knowledge, as to know is first to recognise a unity, since you cannot know what is not known as “one thing” in some way. The uniqueness and ineffability of each God is "spatious" enough to accommodate this, and it does accommodate it, making it an expression of that God's "will", the God also assents to be the power of another God, the knowledge of another God, a willed choice that is also ineffable, that is, explained by nothing higher, or even lower. For we do not just know abstract essences or qualities, but the individuals in which they inhere, the only places where they can have integrity to hold themselves together, for each concept implies a great many others. It is this that makes the theologies and ontologies flexible and numerable.
So, it is at best a mistaken or limited statement to claim that the polythestic theologies cannot be consistent with every God being all powerful or all knowing. Perhaps our models of knowledge are too monist, and perhaps a tad authoritarian and exclusive. There is more. There is always more.