Pagans and Prophets

The prologue and first chapter of No god but God deals with pre-Islamic Arabia and the birth of Muhammed. It's interesting that 600 years after Christ, and nearly 200o years after the birth of Judaism, that these religions were still dealing with those pesky lesser gods that Moses and Saul and David sought so hard to eradicate. The pagan gods in the Hebrew Bible are like cockroaches - no matter what method you use, you just can't get rid of them. The entire Hebrew Bible - from Genesis on - is a war against the other gods that Yahweh is jealous of. It makes you wonder what's so threatening about them that entire genocides have been committed to erase them, and what's so attractive about them that they keep resurfacing in the hearts of their believers anyway.

The way that the pre-Islamic Arabs dealt with this is what Max Müller calls henotheism, which Aslan defines as "the belief in a single High God, without necessarily rejecting the existence of other, subordinate gods" (8). The Arabs called their High God Allah, but believed he was the same as Yahweh, the God of the Jews. Any cursory study of the Hebrew Bible will show that the beliefs behind those books are strongly henotheistic, and that Yahweh himself acknowledges the existence of other gods. The first commandment ("You shall have no other gods before me") directly implies the existence of the other gods, and the rest of the Hebrew Bible is a war on those other gods. But even the warriors for Yahweh have idols in their houses, thus breaking the second commandment. Jacob and Rachael steal her father's household gods (though Jacob denies knowledge of it), and David has a teraphim in his house which his wife uses as a decoy to help him escape from Saul, who wants to kill him. And yet these are two of God's favorites. Jacob is renamed Israel after wrestling with God and almost defeating him, and David is given the kingdom of Israel and constantly forgiven for multiple crimes against God, routinely breaking at least six of the commandments. So while the Hebrew God does demand to be first in the hearts of his worshippers, he does not imply that he is the only god. Quite the opposite, actually.

Of course, as Aslan notes, all religious stories are sets of symbols and metaphors to help us better understand our connection to our community, the universe, and ourselves, and so one could say that the idols represent those attractions which pull us away from God: money, sex, power, television. And to that extent, we are still a deeply henotheistic culture. Christians go to church and Jews to synagogue to promise their eternal love and obedience to God, but then spend the other six days of the week serving the lesser pagan gods, who creep slyly back into the corners of their lives. No one calls them gods now, but their function is much the same.

One of my favorite stories in the Bible is when Elijah tries to quit his job as God's prophet. He tells God he is sick of it - that no one wants to hear what he says, and that they are trying to kill him. I believe, based on my study of the Hebrew Bible, that the first requirement for an authentic prophet is reluctance. Moses begged God to choose someone else. Jonah tried to escape from God and ended up in the belly of a whale. An enthusiastic prophet would be a false one. The weight of prophecy is unbearable, and is almost always unrewarded. Moses was the chief example of this, spending most of his life serving God, only to be denied entrance into the Promised Land on a technicality. Muhammad was also reluctant. Aslan notes that after his first revelation (which crushed his chest until he could no longer breathe), his first thought was to kill himself (37).

Elijah actually tried to kill himself, by lying down to die in the desert. But an angel brings him food and water. He runs away to a cave, but God doesn't take no for an answer. "It's a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God," as Saint Paul reminds us. Job knew this, and William Blake's painting of the encounter, as one of my students remarked last year, looks like God is raping him.

In the cave, Elijah demands that God speak to him. And a windstorm comes, and an earthquake. Then a great fire. But God is not in those. We often forget that is not how God operates. Finally, God arrives in a "still small voice." This might be the most illuminating phrase in the entire Hebrew Bible. The voice of God is not thunderous or terrifying. It is more silent than anything - more quiet than your television, than your radio. More quiet than your thoughts. That's why the true voice of God can only be heard in deep meditation; but once heard, it will not be ignored.

That voice - possibly because it is so silent - is also intensely jealous, and thus arises the need to destroy anything that threatens to drown it out. The Hebrew Bible reads like a war saga, where a relatively minor deity rises to the seat of power through the most disturbing means. Yahweh was originally the name of an Arabian volcano god. (Mount Horeb, or Sinai, the holy mountain where Moses saw God face to face, was a volcano.) Moses married the daughter of a Midianite priest during his years in the desert, and it must have been there that he first heard of Yahweh, who - from the burning bush to the pillar of flame - constantly reveals himself in the form of fire. Allah - before Muhammad claimed him - "was originally an ancient rain/sky deity" (7), and if the Arabs were right that Yahweh and Allah were two aspects of the same being, then that would explain Noah's Flood and the Red Sea.

Aslan shows that Muhammad never thought of himself as creating a new religion: "Muhammad's message was an attempt to reform the existing religious beliefs and cultural practices of pre-Islamic Arabia so as to bring the God of the Jews and the Christians to the Arab peoples (17). The God he brought was perhaps less henotheistic than the one Moses found, but it still required the extinction of other gods. The primary profession of Muslim faith ("There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his prophet") is a step toward true monotheism, but the fact that it needs to be said so often shows how persistent those pesky pagan gods still are.

So why are pagan gods so attractive that they survive the most atrocious genocides and tortures? Why did the Hebrew people continually return to worshipping false idols despite the multitude of plagues God would send to them? I am not far enough along yet in the history of Islam to know how this problem has cropped up for the Muslims, but if we take the broader, symbolic definition of gods (in monotheism, anyway) as competing interests against the true experience of the divine, then it should be obvious that Muslims, Jews and Christians all struggle with them to this day. The idols themselves have no power - they represent something beyond themselves. Usually, they represent fertility, or ways to achieve power or happiness or love. And this is a major problem in monotheism. In a belief system with many gods, a person can find a reason for the myriad experiences of his life. Tragedy and prosperity can co-exist because there are many gods competing with each other, and who may take our side in life if we please them. When tragedies happen, you do what's necessary to appease whatever being you have offended. Carl Jung viewed all these deities as projections of the unconscious, and so today, the psychologist functions as the modern shaman, helping to identify the latent forces - for good or ill - that lie buried but highly active within us. We don't call them gods today, but we treat them much the same.

Monotheism pulls all those unconscious aspects under the power of one being, and this is the problem of Job. When there is only one God, then when tragedy strikes, that God was responsible - or at least let it happen. Much of the Hebrew Bible deals with trying to figure out how the Jews must have done something to deserve their punishment, and leads to the stereotype of Jewish guilt. In monotheism - especially in those belief systems that advocate omniscience and omnipotence - God must be aware of all of our sufferings, and if there is no god but God, then there is no one to blame for those sufferings but ourselves or God. This is the theological crisis of monotheism, and one that can't really be solved. So the believer's choice - to blame God or himself - is not really a choice at all. Blaming God is blasphemy, and blaming the self is masochistic. How can a baby born with cancer be to blame for its illness? Yahweh says the sins of the fathers are to blame here, and while this may be genetically or logically true in some cases, it doesn't seem very fair. Job did nothing whatsoever to deserve his suffering, and while he is rewarded for questioning God, he is essentially given a non-answer to those questions. The other response is to blame the devil, but then we are back at henotheism.

Monotheism seems to me an untenable belief system. It simply cannot withstand the shocks it creates to its own system, and thus implodes. Islam may be the most monotheistic religion today (Muhammad rejected outright the notion of the Christian trinity as polytheistic), and I still don't know enough about it to say how it would explain a crisis like Job's, but the dilemma imposed by monotheism makes it incredibly difficult to love God. We may love God in fair weather and blame ourselves in foul, or we may decide that God is testing us, but there are still far too many tragedies without explanation (Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson notwithstanding) for us to live our lives consistently this way and still be happy. It may be possible to profess our faith in such a God, but that faith all too often falters in the face of adversity because it has not been explored to its deepest depths, and a tragedy is no time to learn how to do this. Paganism - for all its problems - at least offers a multitude of perspectives with which to view the world, and that diversity allows people to choose how they view the events of their lives. Dogmatic orthodoxy, which too often accompanies monotheism automatically, ossifies symbols which - to my taste - are really better experienced internally, as the still small voice.