Where Have all the Good Gods Gone?
Theos in the Contemporary Age
So far, I’ve produced two essays and one article from my new foray into writing. I’m enjoying the Substack interface, and try to treat writing here as a dialogue that I am dictating to an imaginary ‘amanuensis’.
In antiquity, the amanuensis was a type of employee (both slaves & free humans held this post) within the Roman Empire. They performed a job akin to that of the 20th Century secretary, in that they recorded and structured the dictations of their employer.
This was an important role, an amanuensis was seen as adding value beyond that of most other workers - who were seen as mere ‘instruments of production’ to be ruled over.
I. The Amanuensis
The most interesting explanations I’ve seen of the duties of an amanuensis come from American writer Neal Stephenson’s speculative fiction tome Anathem (2007). In this epic novel, we follow an order of thinkers who live in a philosophical monastery.
The world they inhabit is ‘futuristic’ from our standpoint as readers, but the protagonists and their monastery have an ‘ancient’ lifestyle that constrasts with the other inhabitants of this ‘future’.
Orolo had asked me along to serve as amanuensis. It was an impressive word, so I’d said yes.
Through drizzly eyes, I looked at the leaf in front of me. It was as blank as my brain. I was failing.
But it was more important to take notes of what the artisan said. So far, nothing. When the interview had begun, he had been dragging an insufficiently sharp thing over a flat rock. Now he was just staring at Orolo.
“Has anyone you know ever been ritually mutilated because they were seen reading a book?”
Artisan Flec closed his mouth for the first time in quite a while. I could tell that the next time he opened it, he’d have something to say. I scratched at the edge of the leaf just to prove that my quill had not dried up. Fraa Orolo had gone quiet, and was looking at the artisan as if he were a new-found nebula in the eyepiece of a telescope.
As the quote above shows, one of the main roles of an amanuensis is to record dialogues between a philosophic interlocutor and their subject.
While one would think that this role could be performed by a ‘recording device’ instead of a human consciousness, later in Anathem our hero, Fraa Erasmas,1 is disabused of this simple notion.
I say “we,” but I didn’t expect to do much talking. “Why am I here?” I’d asked Fraa Jad, as we had approached the gate of the building that floated in the center of Orb One.
“To serve as amanuensis,” he had replied.
“These people can build self-sufficient intercosmic starships, but they don’t have recording devices?”
“An amanuensis is more than a recording device. An amanuensis is a consciousness-bearing system, and so what it observes in its cosmos has effects in others, in the manner we spoke of at Avrachon’s Dowment.”
“You’re a consciousness-bearing system. And you seem to be much better at playing this polycosmic chess game than I am. So doesn’t that make me exiguous?”
“Much pruning has taken place in recent weeks. I am now absent in many versions of the cosmos where you are present.”
“You mean, you’re dead and I’m alive.”
“Absent and present express it better, but if you insist on using those terms, I won’t quibble.”
“Fraa Jad?”
“Yes, Fraa Erasmas?”
“What happens to us after we die?”
“You already know as much of it as I do.”
II. Where Have All the Good Gods Gone?
In the contemporary world, where theories instead of logic dominate general understanding, it is easy to accidentally adopt a faulty theory without examining the internal logic proposed by the theory against reality.
By imagining this ‘amanuensis’, I’m attempting to bring in the idea of an ‘observer’ to my writings that would keep me honest and challenge me if my reasoning was faulty. This is especially important for the task I’ve set this essay to exploring: “Where Have All the Good Gods Gone?”
In particular, what spurred me to write this essay was watching the music video for American songwriter Paula Cole’s Where Have All the Cowboys Gone? (1996)
“Where is my John Wayne?
Where is my prairie song?
Where is my happy ending?
Where have all the cowboys gone?
Where is my Marlboro Man?
Where is his shiny gun?
Where is my lonely ranger?
Where have all the cowboys gone?”
With this thematically complex and catchy song, Cole explores the sacrifices she would make to get her romantic ideal of a man. As a songwriter who had produced and directed an entire film about this very subject,2 I was intrigued by the premise and the execution.
Cole appears to be pointing with nostalgia to an ideal that existed in the past (the mythic heroes played by John Wayne), and had been promised to her while growing up as the romantic ideal of a man.
However, the sacrifices she made in pursuit of that ideal were for nothing; the real man she made those sacrifices for was not John Wayne, instead he was an ordinary man who drank too much and came home late.
This ‘mythic ideal’ is what Theos represents in the monotheistic conception of God and the polytheistic conceptions of Gods. Here is the Oxford Classical Dictionary definition:3
Theos is the common word denoting a god, especially one of the great gods (see olympian gods). Although often referring to an individual deity in his anthropomorphic representation, the term is rarely used to address a god: no vocative exists. The term is often used instead of the proper name of a god, e.g. when the god's name is under certain restrictions or reserved for direct dealings with the deity, as in the mysteries: τὼ θεώ is the normal expression there for *Demeter and Kore (*Persephone), ὁ θεός and ἡ θεά are Pluto (*Hades) and Persephone. It is also employed when identification of an individual god is precarious, for instance in the case of an *epiphany or vision, or as a comprehensive reference to any inarticulate, anonymous divine operator (θεός τις, θεοί: ‘some god’, ‘the gods’); it alternates in Homer with δαίμων (*daimōn) to denote some unidentifiable divine operator.
As we can see, Theos is not a word used to invoke specific Gods. It is instead the “common word” that is used to describe Gods when the specific nature of the ‘God’ one is dealing with is “under certain restrictions” or otherwise unclear.
However, that was back in the time of polytheism, where Gods were believed to be ‘warring forces’ in a sort of ‘harmony’ that maintained the ‘natural order’ of reality. The majority of modern religions are monotheistic and only have a singular God, one whom they claim is the sum total of the ‘natural order’ and yet greater still than ‘reality’ itself.
It is my feeling that the main reason for the ‘polarization’ problem of contemporary discourse is that humans rarely define their terms properly. Theos is the perfect case and point of the problem of muddled term usage in action.
Theos used to be a common term for the ‘mythic ideal’ as represented by the multitude of ‘Gods’ or ‘forces’ at play in reality. However, as Christianity and other monotheistic faiths have pushed polytheism out of religious discourse, Theos is now used to describe the singular God of monotheistic faith.
Monotheism tends to assume a benevolent or ‘good’ God to have created the universe, and that all of the ‘forces’ present in the world are manifestations of this singular ‘God’. These religions normally have a canon of Saints, Angels, Prophets and other figures that are used to represent a specific virtue of ‘God’, but these canonised forces aren’t assumed to have the same autonomy that the Gods of polytheism had.
i. Grand Theory
This conception of Theos as a singular, universal ‘mythic ideal’ or ‘God’ is a big problem in contemporary thought. Humans have largely lost any sense of a personal and direct relationship to the logic of ‘God’, ‘Karma’, ‘Dao’, or any other type of ‘naturally occurring law’, instead having an indirect relationship to Logos through a religious presentation of Theos as the singular ‘God’.
Without a proper understanding of the difference between Logos (the inherent ‘natural order’ of reality) and Theos (The ‘God’ or ‘Gods’ with which this ‘natural order’ is represented), it is easy for one to trust in a Grand Theory to encompass reality in the absence of a belief in a ‘God’ or ‘Gods’.
The term Grand Theory was first coined by American sociologist C. Wright Mills in his book The Sociological Imagination (1959). His book is a critique of Structuralism as an approach to sociology but, despite Mills’ work, Grand Theory has continued its rise in popularity amongst academic thinkers in the decades following his publication.
In 2009, the fifth edition of The Dictionary of Human Geography was published and it had this to say about Grand Theory thinking:
Indeed, Barnes and Gregory (1997a, p. 64) claimed that much of the late-twentieth-century history of Anglo-American human geography had involved ‘the search for a single or tightly bounded set of methodological [and theoretical] principles that, once found, would provide unity and intelligibility to the disparate material studied. When located, such principles would function as a kind of philosopher’s stone, transmuting the scattered base facts of the world into the pure gold of coherent explanation. No matter the kind of phenomenon investigated, it could always be slotted into a wider theoretical scheme. Nothing would be left out; everything would be explained.’
The search for a Grand Theory is present in pretty much every supposedly ‘empirical’ discipline of contemporary academic thought.
To me, the most egregious example is the ‘Theory of Everything’ that Stephen Hawking and other Physicists have tried to generate.
This Grand Theory or ‘Theory of Everything’ in Physics bugs me because, after getting his PhD in Physics, my Dad left the field due to the rise of String Theory as a Grand Theory solution to various dilemmas of Physics. My Dad’s final thesis had largely denied String Theory as a proposed solution to these dilemmas and, by the time he finished the thesis, he no longer held any interest in further academic pursuits.
Instead, while completing his thesis, Dad had performed field work in weather modeling with computers. This seemed far more interesting than Grand Theory debates, so after graduating he spent the rest of his life working in computer programming and network engineering.
III. Hortus delicarum
While the Monotheistic conception of God instead of Gods has dominated religious thought amongst humans for a long time, the education system did not used to be dominated by Grand Theory debates.4
These contemporary Grand Theory debates, where academics have ‘pet theories’ that are the foundation of their academic career then argue over which ‘pet theory’ is ‘correct’, rarely accomplish much. This is because these debates don’t tend to be based in good faith and logical argument, but in other rhetorical devices such as ad hominem attacks.
Because of this, genuine debate is quickly replaced by name calling and slanderous character assassinations.
However, there used to be a form of education that helped people to hold a ‘unified theory’ without the willful ignorance of logic and empirical evidence held by most Grand Theory thinkers. This was the form of pedagogy represented by the Trivium & Quadrivium.
As medieval European society already had a unified ‘Theory of Everything’ in ‘God’, there was no need for thinkers of this time to develop a new Grand Theory.
In fact, developing a Grand Theory not based in ‘God’ was the kind of heresy that could see one become the subject of Catholic inquisitions.
Instead, proceeding from the assumption that there was an underlying ‘Holy Spirit’ that emanated from ‘God’ and shaped his ‘natural order’, instruction in the Medieval era focused on teaching students how to become more adept at seeing and categorising the phenomena which emerged from the ‘nautral order’.
In 1167, Herrad of Landsberg (a Catholic nun in Alsace) began working on developing her illuminated encyclopedia Hortus delicarum, Garden of Delights, as a pedagogical tool for young novices at her convent.5
Her work contained 324 folios that distilled “the nectar of the various flowers plucked from Holy Scripture and philosophical works” to edify nuns on an understanding of these different streams of thoughts.
It also contained more than 600 illustrations such as Philosophia et septem artes liberales.
These illustrations packed a lot of meaning into them, so to get at her concepts I’ll re-present sections of Philosophia et septem artes liberales along with a detailed description of what knowledge is encoded in this illustration.6
To Philosophy's right is an inscription which says that "seven streams of wisdom, called the Liberal Arts, flow from Philosophy." To her left the inscription asserts that the Holy Spirit inspired seven liberal arts: grammatica, rethorica [sic], dialectica, musica, arithmetica, geometria, and astronomia. The legend on the inner circle tells us "I, Godlike Philosophy lay out seven arts which are subordinate to me; by them I control all things with wisdom."
Arrayed around the circle are the liberal arts. Three correspond to the rivers which emerge from Philosophy's left and are concerned with language and letters: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. Together they constitute the trivium.
The four others, which emerge on Philosophy's right, form the quadrivium, arts which are concerned with the various kinds of harmony: music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy.
Each of the seven arts holds something symbolic, and each is accompanied by a text displayed on the arch above it:
The large ring around the whole scene contains four aphorisms and the stages through which Philosophy works (investigation, writing, and teaching): What it discovers is remembered; Philosophy investigates the secrets of the elements and all things; Philosophy teaches arts by seven branches; It puts it in writing, in order to convey it to the students.
Unfortunately, this philosophic synthesis of pedagogy outlined by an abbess in the 12th Century has little bearing on University education in contemporary society.
The modern Grand Theory movement has little use for the pedagogy of the Trivium & Quadrivium and, despite being initially presented by a woman,7 I have witnessed this pedagogy be called ‘oppressive’ and ‘patriarchal’ by contemporary academic thinkers.
As a poetic artist I hold my own objections to her pedagogy, mostly that I don’t believe my art to be frivolous. My personal feeling is that overbalancing towards the ‘white dove’ of the ‘Holy Spirit’ and not listening enough to the ‘black birds’ of ‘magic’ is too ‘pure’ an approach for one to actually create meaningful art in the real world.
That being said, many artists do listen too much to the ‘black birds’ and not enough to the ‘white dove’. In fact, one could say that artistic endeavour is a perpetual attempt to balance the ‘black birds’ with the ‘white dove’.
Despite my nitpicks, I find the Trivium & Quadrivium to be a highly useful lens through which to examine the world. Unfortunately, the rise of Science (and particularly Scientism) has further corrupted the contemporary human understanding of Logos and its relationship to Theos.
IV. The Death of God
The German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche was a complicated and articulate man who developed a major fear while living in 19th Century Germany.
At the time, his nation was widely considered to be the most ‘advanced’ scientific nation of the era.8 However, the revalation that brought him to the famous phrase shown above detailing the ‘death of God’ was drawn from his observations of contemporary life in this ‘scientific’ nation.
He noticed that most people, particularly his academic peers, only paid lip service to ‘God’ and instead chose to largely rely on Science to provide answers about the fundamental nature of reality.
Since he wrote about this, the ‘death of God’ has gained momentum and it is my contention that the Grand Theory movement has been birthed by humans trying to grapple with ‘God’s death’.
In the wake of Nietzsche’s writings, many other thinkers have set themselves to the task of determining how humanity might deal with the problem of logic in a world where the theory of God (a logical being who created the universe) could no longer be seen as valid.
The most insightful writer I’ve read on the subject is German polymath Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlande (1918 - 1922):9
“Every ethical system, whether it be of religious or of philosophical origin, has associations with the great arts and especially with that of architecture. It is in fact a structure of propositions of causal character. Every truth that is intended for practical application is propounded with a "because" and a "therefore." There is mathematical logic in them - in Buddha's "Four Truths" as in Kant's "Critique of Practical Reason" and in every popular catechism.”
“A systematic morale is, as it were, an Ornament, and it manifests itself not only in precepts but also in the style of drama and even in the choice of art-motives.”
“Each is an image of the particular and unique morale which arose out of the waking-consciousness of the Culture.”
In his lengthy and erudite two volume series, Spengler examines the history of the world through a wide variety of lenses to see what might happen now that the Faustian world of recent history is fading. He contends that the inevitable ‘Faustian’ bargain of forsaking ‘God’ is the beginning of the end for this ‘civilization’.
However, he posits that a new form of civilization - one predicated on an entirely new mode of reasoning - will emerge from the declining Faustian civilization. In particular, he astutely examines many of the phenomena that we now categorise as part of the ‘Culture Wars’ of the 21st Century:10
“Thus the Destiny-idea manifests itself in every line of a life. With it alone do we become members of a particular Culture, whose members are connected by a common world-feeling and a common world-form derived from it.”
“A deep identity unites the awakening of the soul, its birth into clear existence in the name of a Culture, with the sudden realization of distance and time, the birth of its outer world through the symbol of extension, and thenceforth this symbol is and remains the prime symbol of that life, imparting to it its specific style and the historical form in which it progressively actualizes its inward possibilities.”
“And therewith an old philosophical problem dissolves into nothing, this prime form of the world is innate in so far as it is an original possession of the soul of that Culture which is expressed by our life as a whole, and acquired in so far that every individual soul re-enacts for itself that creative act and unfolds in early childhood the symbol of depth to which its existence is predestined, as the emerging butterfly unfolds its wings.”
Spengler’s writing is very dense, and filled with German word conjunctions that look strange upon translation to English, but essentially he posits that a new ‘Culture Soul’ will emerge amongst humans organically to solve the ‘God’ problem of Faustian civilization.
Once this coherent ‘Culture Soul’ emerges, then the difference between Form and Actuality11 that is the subject of the first volume of his work will cease to be a problem. The new ‘Culture Soul’ will be experienced by every human in the natural course of their lives, and thus there will become a ‘morality’, ‘ethic’, and ‘logic’ which is personally understood by every member of this new civilization.
This to me is the crux of what is happening in our current ‘Culture Wars’.
In it, many different ideologies (most of them based in some Grand Theory or another) are fighting to gain supremacy amongst humans as a dominant belief system. The main fuel for this war is the pride of status-seeking human thinkers that sense a ‘moral vacuum’ in contemporary life and are rushing to be the ‘hero’ that solves this quandary.
My concern is that many of these Grand Theories are logically fallacious, even if the thinkers propagating them don’t want to hear about their errors of logical reasoning.
The problem is that if ‘God’ or the ‘universe’ is truly logical, then these theories which are not based in logic will not successfully form a new ‘Culture Soul’ for the ‘civilization’ of our age to use in our actualisation process.
V. Mind and Nature
So, where have all the ‘Good Gods’ gone?
I have no ‘grand answers’ or Grand Theories to opine how the ‘Culture Wars’ will end and what ‘Culture Soul’ will emerge from it, nor would I be foolhardy enough to make an attempt at providing one.12
Instead I leave the reader with one final line of philosophic inquiry to consider. This philosophy is that of British cyberneticist Gregory Bateson and was expertly expressed in his final book Mind and Nature (1979).
In the book, Bateson deftly examines the common logical fallacies of modern thinkers and compares them with natural processes.
I found it a riveting read, and his sharp logic challenged many of my own beliefs about the way in which thought is ordered by the human mind in reaction to the natural world one finds oneself in.
These differences between the way that nature works (considered to be logical in antiquity) and the way that people think (with theories that point at this natural logic) are indeed the cause of the major problems in the world.
We are all on our own journey to harmonise our thought patterns with the natural processes around us, so I leave the reader with these final words from Bateson’s second chapter Every Schoolboy Knows…
“Science, like art , religion , commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions. It differs, however from most other branches of human activity in that not only are the pathways of scientific thought determined by the presuppositions of the scientists but their goals are the testing and revision of old presuppositions and the creation of new.”
“In this latter activity, it is clearly desirable (but not absolutely necessary) for the scientist to know consciously and be able to state his own presuppositions. It is also convenient and necessary for scientific judgment to know the presuppositions of colleagues working in the same field. Above all, it is necessary for the reader of scientific matter to know the presuppositions of the writer.”
“I have taught various branches of behavioral biology and cultural anthropology to American students, ranging from college freshmen to psychiatric residents, in various schools and teaching hospitals, and I have encountered a very strange gap in their thinking that springs from a lack of certain tools of thought.”
“This lack is rather equally distributed at all levels of education, among students of both sexes and among humanists as well as scientists. Specifically, it is lack of knowledge of the presuppositions not only of science but also of everyday life.”
“This gap is, strangely, less conspicuous in two groups of students that might have been expected to contrast strongly with each other: the Catholics and the Marxists. Both groups have thought about or have been told a little about the last 2,500 years of human thought, and both groups have some recognition of the importance of philosophic, scientific, and epistemological presuppositions.”
“Both groups are difficult to teach because they attach such great importance to "right" premises and presuppositions that heresy becomes for them a threat of excommunication. Naturally, anybody who feels heresy to be a danger will devote some care to being conscious of his or her own presuppositions and will develop a sort of connoisseurship in these matters. Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.”
A reference to the famous philosopher Erasmus of the 15th Century. For more information about this towering intellectual figure, check out Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s Erasmus and the Right to Heresy (1951). It is available for free at archive.org.
Portrait of a Knight (2018) was my film about a lonely young archivist longing for her romantic ideal, a painting of a Knight of the Realm in her local art gallery. It was in fact co-directed and co-produced with my twin (who would likely insist I add this disclaimer).
https://oxfordre.com/classics/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.001.0001/acrefore-9780199381135-e-6379
Except for the Grand Theory debates amongst some Theologians, who are said to have spent a great deal of time debating about the number of angels that could dance on the tiny head of a pin
According to Wikipedia, the Hortus delicarium is the “first encylopedia that was evidently wrtitten by a woman”.
This description comes from http://www.plosin.com/work/HortusDetails.html and seems accurate based on my rudimentary understanding of Latin.
The specific mode of pedagogy of Garden of Delights not the Trivium & Quadrivium concept, which was much older and dates back to Antiquity. Garden of Delights pioneered polyphonic music as a learning tool and used visual metaphors to aid in knowledge retention.
In Nieztche’s lifetime, German was the lingua franca of scientific discourse. It was only in the time after The Great War (1914 - 1918) that English outpaced German to become the common language of Science today.
I don’t know much German, so I read the 1926 authorised English translation by Charles Francis Atkinson titled The Decline of the West. The quote I use comes from pages 344 and 345 of Vol 1 of the translation.
Quote from page 167 and 174 of The Decline of the West, Vol 1: Form and Actuality.
In my essay I have provided my own formulations of Theos and Logos which are similar to Spengler’s formulation of the difference between Form and Actuality. I chose these words because the focus of my work is different to Spengler’s, and I found Logos and Theos captured the things I was pointing at better.
In my previous essay Save the Cat? I did offer a satirical solution to the ‘culture wars’ in my ‘manifesto’ titled A Manifesto for the Edification of the ‘Millenial’ Kiwi Citizen, or How to Stop Worrying and Reform the C.A.T (Corporate Anarcho-Technocracy) that finds Prey amongst the Legislative, Judicial, and Executive Branches of 21st Century Governmental Politics.
However, that was a satirical piece of art that was made with the intention of mocking the fallacies of Marxist theory and the ‘eat the rich’ trend amongst contemporary thinkers. I dislike that trend, but would never attempt to seriously posit the ‘correct’ belief system that humans should have in the future.