On Gods, Modernity, and Objects

An essay with little structure and less aim, centered on the notion of divinity

Way back in the day there was a (now-famous) deity who said, “I am the lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me.” It is common for modern Christians to think of this as an invocation to keep God at the center of one’s life, to make sure that God is not superseded by money, power, or even relationships.¹ There is good reason, however, to believe that God meant what he said quite literally. There is reason to believe that he was a jealous lord, concerned that his chosen people might turn their attention to one of the many rival gods available to them. Not such a crazy fear given that the world of the Old Testament is rife with competing deities: Moloch, Marduk, and Baal. And of course, when Moses came down from the mountain, having dutifully recorded the commandments, he finds an undutiful people worshiping the Golden Calf, which was not just an idle idol but a representation of a sacred, deific bull.

The marketplace of gods was busy in those days, and the competition for worship got intense. This is evident in myths where gods regularly clash over mortal followers even as they jerk them around. Yahweh takes everything from Job and then pummels him into submission in his speech from the whirlwind. According to Apollodorus, when Poseidon lost the competition to be the chief god of the Athenians, he flooded the entire region of Attica.

This marketplace is also evident in the historical record. Cyrus, founder of the Achaemenid empire, justified his invasion of Babylon as an attempt to reinstall the authority of the god Marduk over a wayward people. Though Cyrus invoked and performed the rites of Marduk, he also rebuilt the temple of Yahweh in the Levant, made sacrifices to the Greek deities, and regularly engaged with many other local gods. Such pluralism was the norm at least into the period of the Roman Empire where the worship of Isis could be just as important as Jupiter depending on locality. 

Monotheism, clearly, was a controversial innovation and the monopoly of God had to be enforced. One of the primary contributions of the prophet Elijah was to make the worship of Yahweh exclusive among the Israelites by challenging the 450 priests of Baal to a battle of gods. The Baalites butchered a bull and called on their god to roast it which he failed to do. Elijah then quipped that Ball must be “relieving himself” and tells them literally to cry harder. No such issues with Yahweh who roasts Elijah’s bull very promptly, impressing the great mass of the people. The book of Kings then reads: “And Elijah said to them, ‘Seize the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape.’ And they seized them. And Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon and slaughtered them there.”² Tough stuff.

This was a harsh break from pre-historical belief. The Ur-faith of hominids was Animism - the attribution of personal intentionality to natural objects and phenomena, not just plants or animals but also rivers, trees, and lightning. The position of humans to these perceptions was complex, but it certainly didn’t require their submission to a singular authority.

It is highly plausible that when Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis looked at the natural world, they saw purpose and soul. To this day, animism is one of the few beliefs found in almost all hunter-gatherer societies. It is not totally gone even in our uber-rationalist world. Piaget famously argued that children are intrinsic animists until they reach a certain level of development.³ Whether or not this is true is way beyond my pay grade and gets annoyingly semantic. Besides, adults are perfectly capable of animism. We gravitate to anthropomorphizing in our language. We find ourselves apologizing to objects or feeling bad for throwing them away. This is not elevated to the level of belief of course, but the instinct is there.

When employed as a literary device this is called the ‘pathetic fallacy’ which is just a terrible name. John Ruskin coined the term, but we shouldn’t entirely blame him. By pathetic he meant something closer to pathos than pitiable. Still, his essay proposing the phrase depresses me. He condemns as a second-rate poet “the man who perceives wrongly, because he feels, and to whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose”. Ruskin sees a place for anthropomorphizing, but only where the poet already has strong “government” of the impulse and is only temporarily overcome. He condemns Coleridge (!) as morbid for the following lines: “The one red leaf, the last of its clan, // That dances as often as dance it can…” I say, let the leaf dance.

In the Near East, even as religions formalized and certain gods were elevated hierarchically, the distinction between nature, man, and spirits remained paper thin in many cultures. Take Greece. Is Hera qualitatively different from a naiad? How distinct is a naiad from the river gods called potamoi? Is the potamoi just the same as the river itself? And where does man fit in? If Deucalion, the survivor of a great flood, is the father of all men, but is himself the son of the titan Prometheus, then are all men titans? If gods can copulate with men and produce godlike but mortal children, what are those children?  Divinity appears everywhere: continuous, dynamic, and flowing. The latent power of spirit could be sometimes manipulated but must always be respected.

You do not need me to tell you that this view is not in vogue in 2024.⁴ In our most important centers of power and knowledge it is almost entirely unacceptable to use spirit as a justification for action: universities, hospitals, engineering firms, financial institutions.⁵ How did we get here?

It started when Monotheism drove the uncoordinated polytheists right into the ground. Jesus gave to Caesar what belonged to Caesar and separated the spiritual and political world. St Paul threw the doors open to the gentiles and universalized God. Constantine found these to be useful ideas and forcefully requested that everybody agree. The Manicheans put up a good fight, claiming that there were at least two gods, but St Augustine took care of that nonsense.

By the middle-ages theologians had hoovered up all the spirit that was left distributed in the world and sent it right up to heaven. Still, divinity was capable of descending for long enough to be dispensed via the sacraments, even made literally manifest as the body and blood of Christ. At the same time, material changes began to bubble up under the surface. Monks were building clocks that captured the hours and disciplined the mind. Glass makers were grinding lenses that revealed what God-given sight had always missed. Navigators were finding whole continents that the Bible had never even mentioned. Artisans were using olive presses to squeeze out the written word onto a strange Chinese invention called paper.

The labor of these craftsmen provided a substructure for all kinds of new thought. Luther used it to kill the sacraments. Hobbes used it to replace God with the sovereign. Descartes used it to sever body from soul.⁶ Spinoza used it to scrub the last traces of man from the image of God. Suddenly, there were deists, pantheists, and even atheists. So many in fact that whole governments went secular in the 18^th century. From the Americans, there was the 1^st amendment. From the French, there was laïcité. From the English, there was a lot of hand wringing.

Over the next two centuries belief was sapped of confidence, especially in the public sphere and in intellectual circles. Theology was the “queen of the sciences” in medieval universities and is barely even taught in contemporary ones. Professional and office life is atheist by default. Even in the United States, an unusually religious nation by the standards of the global north, three in four people say that religion should be kept separate from politics.

Within many religious spaces, dogma has lost importance and more fundamentally, God has been made exceptionally abstract. As a little Catholic child in a little Catholic school, it sometimes became important that I draw God. A big task for a small guy and a confusing one as I had absorbed my parents’ theological opinions, particularly their view that “God is absolutely not a big, bearded man in the sky.” My solution to this problem was to draw three concentric circles. Red in the middle, then orange, then yellow. Voilà. Behold. The lord your God.

We are all cafeteria Catholics now, though the official victory of desacralization is less complete than it might seem. 83% of Americans believe they have a soul in addition to their physical body. 38% say they have experienced communication from beyond the grave. 30% agree that they have “personally encountered a spirit or unseen spiritual force”. About half of us say that animals, graveyards, or parts of nature can have “spirits or spiritual energies”. The victory of materialism, as I’ve tacitly suggested, is above all a component of public life and elite culture, the kind of stuff that will get recorded as History even as it fails to capture so much of the texture of inner life.

My feelings about all this are complicated.

The long journey from animism to monotheism to materialism has been concurrent with real progress. Our strict and materialist understanding of the world has produced remarkable results: antibiotics, moveable parts, pasteurization, indoor plumbing, vaccines, trains, the internet, and remarkably low rates of pre-adult death. We are also less violent than our animist predecessors. It is hard to be sure, but certain smart cookies believe that when homo sapiens first emerged, we killed each other quite a lot. About 1 in 50 deaths was caused by another homo sapien. Today that number is less than 1 in 10,000. Even more remarkable is the amount of food we produce, more than enough to sustain growing populations. So much, in fact, that many places face a problem of food waste, an issue inconceivable in pre-modern societies. The gains are fragile, as I’ve argued elsewhere, but I have hope that we are not going back.

Even without all these social considerations, even within my private life, it is not easy for me to embrace what smacks of the spiritual. I do not believe in witches, or ghosts, or even a soul beyond the physical body. Yet, the world enchants me enough that spirits creep in at the edges. The most common is a kind of animist anthropomorphizing. Trees are homies. Bugs are little men. Cars are oafs. Etc. Hardly rational, sort of true.

This is a shallow spirituality, but it is not an unimportant one. It invites animals and objects into the circle of meaning, involves them in our lives ethically, almost socially. For me this can manifest more deeply in certain moments when I encounter a feeling of intense commonality, one that is not linguistic or associational but feels universalizing. When I slip into these moods, I can just look at objects, think or say their names, and feel that the act is profoundly worthwhile. Sometimes when I am in the opposite mood, victimized by my own mind and mired in thought sludge, I do the same thing as an exercise, saying to myself: “Table, lamp, toothbrush, floss.” It helps a bit.

Objects can feel holy because they are immanent. Unlike the theology of an Omni God, this is a conception of divinity which draws from the equality of things rather than a hierarchy among them. A remarkably similar thought was expressed in the New York Declaration of Inauthenticity, a tortured and brilliant manifesto written by the brilliantly monikered, International Necronautic Society:

“(7.1) One temptation is to try and ingest all of reality into a system of thought, to eat it all up, to penetrate and possess it. This is what Hegel and the Marquis de Sade have in common: the desire to assimilate all reality to the subject through the power of the Concept. This is the idealistic rage of the belly turned mind where matter is soaked up into concepts that function like blotting paper. … On this view, language is a sort of murder and Adam was the first serial killer when he wandered around the Garden of Eden giving names to material things. 

(7.2) The other option is to let things thing, to let matter matter, to let the orange orange and the flower flower. On this second slope, we take the side of things and try and evoke their nocturnal, mineral quality. This is, for us, the essence of poetry… of trying (and failing) to speak about the thing itself and not just ideas about the thing, of saying ‘jug, bridge, cigarette, oyster, fruitbat, windowsill, sponge’. 

(7.3) Sponge

(7.4) Sponge”

George Saunders, perhaps my favorite author, tells us something similar:

“Everything [is] real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth.”

To think this way, that all things are infinitely dear, is thrilling. It also doesn’t make much sense. It cannot be the basis of a science, because, as the Necronauts tell us, it is antithetical to well-categorized systems. A product of my time, I also don’t think it can order a society.

Still, you have my permission to engage in this sort of thinking anyway, even if you don’t have the “government” of your impulses which John Ruskin would prefer.⁷ Enchant the world in what way seems best to you, via anthropomorphizing or love or divinity. In doing so draw a wide circle for what is worth considering. Wide enough for any given person. Wide enough for every tree. Wide enough for a sponge.

1. This is certainly the interpretation I took away from my lessons in Catholic school, though to be fair my education on the Ten Commandments was generally somewhat confused and perhaps should not be taken as representative. The big issue was that I could never get a straight answer on “Though shalt not commit adultery.” A coloring sheet led me to believe that it meant “keeping your body clean.” This along with the dictum that “cleanliness is close to godliness” meant that I long thought that bathing was a scriptural duty. Didn’t stop me from skipping showers.

2. Elijah was prone to rather extreme forms of retribution against weirdly specific numbers of people. When some local youths called him “baldy,” Elijah turned, looked at them, and promptly “called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.”

3. A riveting research paper from 1953 tried to figure out what children meant when they said that objects were “alive”. In the middle of its methodology section is the most charming list of the objects chosen for the kids to remark on: “Materials. Six inanimate objects: a burnt kitchen match, a broken dish, a pocket knife with one blade open, a comb, an alarm clock which ticked loudly, and a lighted candle; and to animate objects: a goldfish in a glass bowl, and a flower (blooming petunia in a flower pot) were assembled on a table.” How vibrant!

4. My statements from here on apply to that nebulous idea “the west” and most especially to the United States. I apologize for being myopic. I think it is better than making points about cultures I know too little about.

5. An incredibly important holdout in the United States is government where religious justifications remain acceptable to many legislative authorities.

6. I’m taking some artistic license here. Descartes did believe that body and soul intermingled in the pineal gland. Still, certainly you and I can agree that this is a diminished point of contact when compared with all the natural world.

7. Let me take a moment to make clear that I am generally pro-Ruskin™ even though he has been a bit hard done by this essay