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PaperclipPerfector
2mo ago
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An interesting way of reading early Abrahamic religious texts: forget God as a cognitively-stable conception of a Being with attributes, and consider God as the placeholder for maximally persuasive and potent language. I’ve always wondered why the Old Testament had zero interesting philosophizing about God; instead of saying God is omnipotent, they will spend paragraphs about how God “stretched out the heavens and trampled the waves of the sea”. Why the incessant poetry? Why is there no describing God philosophically or as a set of assertions etc, when this would be an obvious thing to do and include in your sacred texts? I think now it’s because their focus was on powerfully persuasive language, and not the “entity” God per se. God is essential for the use of the powerful language — the Word, if you will — but actually of no use outside of potency and persuasion.
You could reverse engineer a lot of religious language with this question: “what repute and metaphor and story can I use to make someone pay attention to what I am telling them?” The language would have to be universally understood if you’re attempting a central text. Everyone understands the world, so God is its creator; they understand death, so God keeps one from the grave; or maybe they understand a certain social archetype, and so God “awoke as from sleep, like a strong man shouting because of wine”. God is the combination and crescendo of potent / persuasive felt language, and in a funny way, his power is reduced by abstracting him. “God is omnipotent” is not something that actually comes with a feeling or memorable mental image, so it is useless. It’s like the composer Tavener’s piece the Whale. If you merely describe the scientific details of a whale, it means nothing. If you write Moby Dick, it means everything.
Maybe it wasn't just poetry? There's reason to believe that people at the time really did believe that the sky was a dome. And battle with the sea was a common trope for deities.
But that kind of makes your point I suppose; the language used to describe God was aimed at convincing people in that milieu so naturally the cultural touchstones of the time would be used, even if they're also subverted at times (Leviathan is the mere pet of the God of the Book of Job, not an equal foe of the sort ANE gods fought for cosmic dominance).
I like to think of monotheism as an argument that just got out of hand.
The Biblical authors wanted to center Israel around the worship of one God and one Temple so they did what others in the region did and made him a national God and dissed other gods constantly.
When that didn't work they just kept doubling down and making God more powerful and having him absorb more and more of the portfolios of other gods to eliminate the competition. Gods are explained in terms of phenomena people care about (like fertility and rain, there's a reason Baal was popular) but it's more that Yahweh just kept cannibalizing existing gods and metaphors than they made those up for him. Which is why he's discussed in so many contradictory ways.
The Israelites eventually found that the most stable equilibrium was denying even the existence of all other gods by positing a maximal, singular God that unified all those portfolios instead of just calling them wussies.
But the elements that were persuasive in their original milieu are still there, despite any theological awkwardness they may produce.
Even if we ignore the poetry of the cosmos, poetry and metaphor are the primary (if not exclusive?) way of talking about God in ancient Judaism and Christianity. God is shield, sun, hiding place, shepherd — yet also the Ancient of Days whose word causes his servants to tremble… usually these poetic instantiations don’t intermingle. The psalm that hypes up God as shepherd isn’t the psalm that hypes up God as vanquisher of foes, which isn’t the psalm that begs God with a broken spirit / heart… what unites every poetic block is that in a given context and with a given focus, God is the potent and compelling thing considered. For fear of sins, his punishment is described potently; for love of living, his mercy and created beauty; etc.
That’s probably a good theory of origin for monotheism
Sure. I guess I'm just asking to what degree sometimes "poetry and metaphor" are just what a God does. If you start from the idea of an omnipotent god then it has to be metaphor, just chosen to convince. If you start from a polytheistic world that collapsed into monotheism gods really did do the things they were said to do . Baal really did ride clouds.
I guess to me it's more of a two-stage process. This:
Happens first to the polytheistic gods. Each of these things gets a god. Baal is potent because rain is important and he's rain. So worship Baal (he really will make it rain). This gets absorbed by Yahweh, then it collapses from both metaphor and fact into purely metaphor. Because once Yahweh is omniscient and omnipotent he can make it rain, but doesn't really ride clouds or stride across the floor of heaven with his feet.
We should expect this if God is gradually eating porfolios. El is the old benevolent "Father of Years", Baal is the vigorous god, the "rider of clouds" who trampled the Yam the sea. They weren't assimilated simultaneously or uniformly.
Being a potent and compelling thing worthy of worship is what it means to be a god. You dump all those stories into one pot cause you don't want to deal with anyone else's god, you get a mess with the only common element being potency.
I agree mostly but “poetry and metaphor are just what a God does” stands in stark contrast to the modern understanding of the divine, which is philosophizing for the theologian and assertions (with maybe some music) for the congregant. We attempt to philosophize something that is inherently poetic-potent, like trying to bottle lightning, which creates a vastly different feeling of the divine phenomenologically. Today there is very little hyping up of God for the purpose of hyping and basking in that potency, which from the ancient texts is just kind of how they did worship. That the earlier gods were potent in a given capacity (of the sea, of war) makes me think that this is the root kernel of religious language, rather than a way that humans merely expressed the root kernel (the expression is the substance, not just a consequence of their root religiosity). It goes beyond mere assimilation of rival stories.
And from the perspective of identity and behavior transmission (you should be this and do this), this is important to dwell on. Saying “God is omnipotent” or “God loves you” does not change a human’s identity or behavior, because it lacks potency and signifies nothing real. Poetry and stories are potent, as are art and architecture, and this is where divinity lies, not in assertive or philosophical language. If religion is truly about inculcating behavioral and value changes, then theology matters zero, potency matters 100%.
Because all other gods are dead. Yahweh's deeds were his resume in a competitive market. But the market has shifted.
The choice now is one God of varying flavors or the No-God. Everyone arguing for the former takes divine potency as fact so the debate is on other lines (whether God is moral, which God is coherent). The No-God simply puts forward a rival theory to divine potency. You have to start with philosophical argument and assertions to even make room for God.
I suppose the more naive and unpoisoned by modernity a religious community is , the more we should expect unabashed glorying in God's potency. Some people do still think hurricanes are just a form of divine moralizing so...
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Hmm very interesting take! I always like your... unique ideas about scripture, heh.
This one has a benefit of describing the concept of deity sociologically: what is that which when described is most compelling to the subject? A secularized Anselm’s ontological theory. If the language is sufficiently compelling, you will modify your identity and behavior, which is the intended result of religious systems. We can tie this into the studies on awe as a learning mechanism with its reduced default mode network etc. The Abrahamic God elegantly combines the innate awe-reaction to the natural world (the Red Sea) with the prosocial submission to a perfect human-like presence (he parted the Red Sea, for your safe passage).
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