The God with a Thousand Faces

Out of many, one.

Polytheism has always bothered philosophers. It causes problems: if the gods can bicker, which one of them is right? If that’s a meaningless question for them—if there is no “right” beyond the gods’ own whims—then it’s a meaningless question for us, too. No cosmic referee means no absolute standard of good and evil.

But if there is a cosmic referee, then isn’t he the most truly divine? If Zeus gets to make the final judgment call in a dispute between Poseidon and Athena—and in all other such cases—then the godhead of the others is at best provisional. That might be the implication of the famous fifth line of Homer’s Iliad: through it all, Dios…eteleieto boulē. “The plan of Zeus was moving toward its end.” All gods are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Or else maybe the final boss of the pantheon is rather more faceless: maybe the gods themselves, when in need of arbitration, invoke absolute ideals of “justice” or “truth.” But then the gods’ own power can hardly be called absolute. If “justice” or “truth” is what really calls the shots around here, why go through the middle man? Why pray to Zeus when you can refer directly to the principles that run the world, however clouded they may be in abstraction?

These sorts of questions got Socrates in trouble. Plato’s Euthyphro is probably the most straightforward (and therefore dangerous) statement of the case. One wishes throughout it that Socrates were not making himself quite so clear. Because the gods did serve a purpose, beyond mere convention or social regulation. They accounted for the fact that the world really is storm-tossed by superhuman forces, rotten with competing powers that seem at times to contradict one another.

An earthquake is stronger than a man; so is a plague, a fire, or a flood. But fires and floods don’t give the impression of being specially aligned in their aims or courteous to one another. Sometimes they work together, sometimes they undermine or destroy each other—you know, sort of like a bunch of squabbling brothers and sisters. At this level, polytheism expresses quite adequately the human experience of the natural world.

Except that it’s horrifying. Those who pondered the gods of Olympus long enough saw past the smooth planes of their serene faces to a stomach-turning void beneath. The human soul needs solid ground to stand on; the human gaze peers out into the universe for a pair of eyes that can meet its own. Instead, in the secret chambers of the holiest temples, men found only darkness at the root of all things.

Democritus of Abdera, the philosopher known for his devious grin, said it best: “things are sweet and bitter by convention; by convention they are hot and cold; by convention there is color. But in reality: atoms and void.” What if the gods of the natural world don’t have or want an undisputed ruler? What if the human longing for absolute truth is just that—an exclusively human longing? What if it gets no answer from the universe but atoms and void?

We know it isn’t so. The world does answer back, improbably and strangely, to the reason that we find embedded in the mind. The cosmos does have an order—that’s what the word cosmos means. Fires, floods, and plagues are not the only powers in the world—in fact the faith of philosophers like the Stoics was that even rainfall and combustion answer to the logos, the rational order of things. The logos was more real even than Zeus.

Or else perhaps it was Zeus. Logos wore many faces, and its workings were known by many names. That was the premise of Stoic theology: the true godhead was one, though his many powers were known variously throughout the world. “People give him various titles by fastening onto particular aspects of his nature” (Diogenes Laertius 7.147).

This phenomenon—known in some circles as “pantheon reduction” or “henotheism”—was not unique to the Stoics. In the fearsome courts of the Assyrian Empire, it was possible to meet men with the name Gabbu-ilāni-Aššur: “Asshur is all the gods.” Scholars dispute how widespread or definite the idea was, but it was certainly there, in the back of the mind at least. It was a suspicion that went by many names: logos, Ahura Mazda, Aten. Somewhere perhaps in the unseen reaches, presiding over even the forces of nature, there loomed the veiled face of a god of gods.

Nature worship is back in vogue these days; so are atoms and void. And so, for that matter, is chaos. “Move over Moses and Zoroaster: Manhattan has a new female lawgiver,” announced a New York Times headline upon the erection of a golden icon above the Flatiron District Courthouse, flailing her tentacled appendages. Public art in the current year is characterized by tangled coils of precious metals, almost-human contortions, detached limbs.

The forces of nature are supposedly under our unprecedented control—except that one wonders increasingly whether it isn’t the other way around. Politically, every house is divided against itself; no center seems to hold. Small wonder that a civilization in this state would start to dream dreams of the old gods again: they are the overlords of our conflict-riven world.

But even the old gods are haunted by the ghost of their lost master. Today, as always, polytheism is not enough. Somewhere over the battlefield of deities political and natural, presiding even over a world in fragments, there stands a God of gods. He is ready in his mercy to pass a judgment that resolves the contradictions of the lesser pretenders to his throne. When we see what their caprice really looks like, we may come as our ancestors did to long for his reign.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer