~by David
Aiken~
§ I can think of few topics more appropriate to the
spring season in the West than Dead and Dying Gods. The season is especially
festive for Christians, of course, coming off six weeks of famine-defined Lent,
which culminates in Easter festivities and a surfeit of chocolate bunnies,
colored eggs, and the Holy Week, which prepares the way for Whitsun (Pentecost)
and the descent of the Dove. Apparently in the UK the
Christian Whitsun has borrowed some aspects of the Pagan festival of Beltane,
the Walpurgis Nacht of Faustian fame, which falls at the half-way point
between All Hallows Eve (October 31st) and the beginning of summer. Summer is
traditionally ushered in by the June solstice on the 21st.
 |
| Grunewald |
For those in the
Jewish faith tradition, this season marks the beginning of the Feast of Passover,
which commemorates the life of a people over whom the Shadow of Death has
passed.
In this springtide season, then, during which men’s
fancy seems to turn away from the dying and the dead, and to lightly turn to
thoughts of God, the question for our reflection concerns the possibility of
verifying authentic religious experience in a period of existential intellectual crisis. The short and honest answer to this question is
that, although everyone seems to have an opinion, no one actually knows
anything for sure. However, what the
Reasoning Man does absolutely know about the possibility of authentic
religious knowledge in every period, including those marked by
existential silence, is that the onus remains on the Magical Man to demonstrate to all and sundry that
Gods are somehow relevant to human
existence, which is to say that they can in fact be experienced.
Insufficient to this task is any pretend-answer that seeks to pawn off on the
philosophically shortsighted some religious ritual of faith, which is nothing
but a metaphor for interpreting an inexperience or a lack of some
quantifiable experience. It is necessary for the Magical Man—the religiously
minded—to bring to the round-table of thoughtful citizens neither metaphor nor
psychology (i.e., some vague notion of “belief” as a precondition of
psycho-experience), but rather some real, verifiable human evidence for an
experience of the Gods.
Let us also be quite clear by saying that although a Socratic philosopher’s naturally
skeptical nature is fairly indisposed to the more philosophical concept that
gives support to the idea of “Deity,” such a Socratic fellow is not necessarily
opposed to the possible historical existence of Gods. So, the odd ‘Socrates’
wandering around in the world can be sure that any Divine Critters, who may potentially
also be fellow-wanders in this wilderness, will forgive them if they presume to
be so intellectually bold as to pose questions concerning Their relevance
and/or existence, and concerning how men might acquire knowledge about such things…
But, then, is it not reasonable to suppose that Such Enormities as Gods must be
big enough to get over a little philosophizing from a pissant ‘Socrates’?
Yet, let us suppose
that the case is truly as Plato has said, quoting
Heraclitus (B 83), that “The wisest of men, in contrast to God, appears as an
ape in wisdom and beauty and all things.” How is it,
then, that Gods really cannot tolerate the pint-sized and irritating musings of
thinking ape-like humans, although this is certainly the case if we believe the
story of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11). If it is indeed true that Gods work on a
short ego-leash, then the author of this essay and its readers had better watch
out for the bolt of lightning coming our way if we dare to continue reading—for
friendly fire is just as deadly as if the bolt were meant for another! The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was intended for
just such as this author, whence the name of our Phrontisterion URL: nonimprimatur.
[The following
is condensed from peer-reviewed, internationally published research entitled, “On
the Death of God. A Post-mortem Reflection on a 'Life’,” which is archived at Phrontisterion, or here. This
research is scheduled for full publication in summer 2019 in the Zeitschrift für Religions- und
Geistesgeschichte ZRGG 71,3 (Brill).]
§ Other prophets of the Death of God… and other
Dead and Dying Gods.
Similar to generic
dying God stories typical to agrarian cultures, announcements of the death of a
God in the western world may also perhaps be seen to follow cycles. A first
important announcement occurred in the mid-first century, at sea off the
western coast of Greece, with the proclamation
that the Great God Pan was dead. Some believe that this moment marked the
beginning of the end of the pagan era. The announcement was heard a second
time, in the late 19th century, when Nietzsche’s Zarathustra,
returning into the world of men from a self-imposed exile, encounters a holy
man in the wood worshipping, says the Heiliger, “the God who is my
God”-- a statement that leaves Zarathustra wondering at the fact that this holy
man had not heard in his woods that God is dead. Nietzsche mitigates the
matter-of-fact flatness of Zarathustra’s wonder by also composing an exalted,
quasi-mystical dirge in the now-famous madman story from the Gay Science.
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
How shall we comfort ourselves, the greatest of all murderers? … Is not the
greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods
simply to appear worthy of it?
Many have been the assertions that “God is dead,” and
sundry the variations on the theme: from the “flight of the Gods,” the
“Entflohene Götter”, of Hölderlin, to the contemporary God is Dead movement in
America. It seems, however, that there is always hidden within the very
language of the assertion a second proposition: namely, that the Gods, and
especially the God that surfaced in the theological traditions of the
Christians, once existed. More philosophically oriented than the German
romantics and their “Gods,” the high priests of the American Death of God
movement offered up the death of the Christian God not by talking about “Him,”
but rather, by talking about how humans seem to have transcended the need,
interest, or even the possibility, of Him. So what has been at issue in this
Death of God tradition, it would seem, is really not (the) Deity, but rather
the human (lack of) interest story.
In the light of the
various traditions of God/s in the West, then, and of Their dyings, let us
examine a different alternative—let us assume that we moderns do in fact live post
mortem Dei christiani. Let us also assume that there are plausible
intellectual justifications for why the modern world has moved beyond the
Christian faith.
In the Great Conversation, the "death of
God" thinkers have laid the theoretical foundations of an idea. For when
Plato posited the reality of the Forms to explain how things came into being
and (were) moved, it was not long before Aristotle came along to point out
that, at the end of the day, the Forms are only a theoretical model with
logical issues (e.g., their immovable, yet causative natures, present
contradiction), and that a very adequate, persuasive, and almost entirely
empirical description of reality could be posited without them. Similarly, I
would like to suggest that the modern God-is-Dead propositions and treatments
also contain an untenable logical assumption – that the Christian God ever
existed.
The
wider evidence of Western history, and not simply the evidence from the history
of the Western philosophical tradition, suggests that it is in fact the
Christian God, and very specifically The-God-of-the-Bible, who has gone
missing. And there is no need of a romantic and exalted post mortem, for
the failure of The-God-of-the-Bible, equal to that of His Alter Ego The God of
the Christians, is that as a philosophical Fiction derived from debate and
consensus, He/They never had any historical reality.
Is the Christian God, the Protagonist of the Bible,
really dead? The question is certainly of academic interest to the scholar of
religions, and also a challenge for the believer in the fides Christiana.
Evidence clearly shows that The God of the Christians is not
The-God-of-the-Bible; rather “It” is a Concept of philosophy—an
extraterritorial Deity of Logic born out of the speculations of the earliest
Platonized Christian philosophers. It could in fact be argued that Western
philosophy already reached its zenith in the first half of the Common Era with
the philosophical conception and articulation of this God, whose genealogy can
be traced in its evolution from a Hellenistic Abstraktum, to a Supreme
philosophico-religious Idea(l). This “God,” conceived very literally out of
season, corresponds to the highest ideals of western neo-platonic thought, and
bears no comparison, either in actions or character, to the
historico-geographical deities of the Hebrew Bible. There is considerable
evidence to substantiate this argument.
§ The-God-of-the-Bible.
Buttressed by
archaeology, biblical scholarship has paved a wide road for the articulation of
this argument; and much of recent scholarship received its impetus from Albrecht
Alt’s groundbreaking 1929 essay on the God of the Fathers, which was so
fruitfully furthered by the works of Albright, Gordon, D.N. Freedman, and the
Harvard scholar Frank Cross, of Dead Sea Scrolls fame. The Albright “school,”
in seeking to identify more fully the various Deities of the Bible in the light
of Their ancient Near Eastern origins, has led some to wonder whether the
Western Religious narrative has not in fact completely “lost” the Yahweh of the
Hebrew Bible in its attempt to articulate a philosophical God. Such is R.
Friedman’s recent thesis: that the Hebrew Bible is literally a record of the
disappearance of God—that it is the story of a God who has gone into
retirement, who, like the Canaanite El a thousand years before him, is become deus
quiescens.
This is a troubling state of affairs for the study of western religions.
Indeed, it is potentially a worst-case scenario. For in addition to having
perhaps identified the wrong deity as God, western religious scholars now must
consider the possibility that the Hebrew Bible may be the narrative record of a
God-become-absent from the world of men (deus absconditus).
Indeed, it has always been difficult for the missionary to make a
persuasive case for a God who is not present to defend himself publicly—the
Baalite priests of I Kings 18 learned from Elijah, much to their detriment,
that les [dieux] absents ont toujours tort.
The German Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch profiled
this argument already in a 1920 volume entitled, The Great Deception, in
which he argued that, just like the other olden gods: “the Hebrew national god
(Nationalgott) belongs also to the ‘anemic’ ones (elîlîm)—as the Old
Testament relishes designating the gods of other peoples—and it is impossible
that he should be identified … with the most-powerful GOD.” Delitzsch concludes
with this: “Israel is not the people of ‘GOD’, but the people of Jaho, as Moab
is the people of Kemosh and Assur the people of the god Asur.” In a similar
iteration in the Interpreter’s Bible one reads: “The religion of the
fathers was not the same as the worship of the thundering Yahweh of Sinai. The
God pictured in Genesis is not like the God who reveals himself to Moses in the
book of Exodus.”
(Reprised from an
original Phrontisterion essay first posted in April 2013)
No comments:
Post a Comment