There are many gods

What are we really sacrificing to?

Photo by Egor Myznik on Unsplash

In this world are many gods, and they are worshipped still.

Judaism and Christianity are commonly presented as straightforwardly monotheistic religions. This is only a partial truth. Our Scriptures do indeed speak of only one God, to whom alone worship must be offered. Yet they speak also in several places of God being above other gods (see, e.g., Psalms 95.3, 135.5). Such deities as Baal and the various pantheons of the ancient Near East were acknowledged as existing, otherwise the God of Israel’s many triumphs over them would be somewhat hollow. Apocryphal Jewish literature speaks explicitly of God creating the Greek pantheon of gods by name (2 Enoch 30). And in Psalm 82, the Divine Word calls his followers “gods.”

These are not mutually exclusive positions. In simple terms, God is not one of the “gods.” God is not a being of any kind at all. He transcends all classification and genus. To describe the spirits that govern the world as “gods” is only a very weak analogy to God Himself, and one which Jews and Christians are ultimately forbidden to make. For we must not mistake the gods with God. They exist, but they are spirits of an infinitely lesser order. They are angelic in nature, but those who do not serve God and demand worship for themselves have a more appropriate name, descriptive of their genus: namely, daemons.

Made in the image of God, many of the “Sons of God,” the angels, have fallen from the grace of His service by the acts of their own free will. The saints of the Church are those who are called to take their place in the Heavenly Kingdom, governing the world in accordance with God’s will where the so-called “gods” have failed. Humans are made to become as much like God as possible – to be restored in the “likeness” of God that was corrupted in us when Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden – so that we may be “gods” by participation in His unique Godhood. In the words of St Athanasius, who fought against pagan heresies and gave his name to the Athanasian Creed recited at Mattins several times each year according to the Prayer Book, “God was made man that man might become god.” Through our incorporation into Christ — our literal “embodiment” into His Body, the Church —  we become, as St Peter puts it, “partakers in the divine nature.” The word many ancient Fathers of the Church use to speak of this is theosis, “divinization.”

But the world is still pagan, and worships the so-called gods, even if we don’t often call them that any more. And if by “god” we mean a spiritual, immaterial, entity which is beyond human control and to which we offer sacrifices and worship, then such things are very much real.

The most popular god of the modern age is Mammon. Again, we don’t tend to call him that these days. We prefer to call him the Economy. We speak of the Economy’s invisible hand, we try to trace its mysterious ways, and have long given up the pretence that it serves us. We serve it. A trained cadre of diviners descry arcane signs, illegible to the uninitiated, and try to predict what their fickle lord will do next. Seated in buildings vaster and more opulent than any ancient temple, they codify the augurs in spreadsheets and graph charts. Its theologians, the economists, form rival schools of interpretation. Their debates are as fierce and as inconclusive as those between any other religious sect or denomination, for their master’s ways are higher than our ways. The god’s prophets make a living in the news columns interpreting the divine revelations to the masses according to their favoured theological school. The leaders of the people pledge their allegiance to the Economy every election time. The Chancellor, wielding his ceremonial red box, announces solemn sacrifices at every budget: whose jobs must be cut, whose livelihoods offered up to appease the deity’s wrath. There are people who offer themselves, especially here in Japan, working literally to death for the sake of the Economy. It takes unwilling victims, too, silently and invisibly moving their hands to take their own lives for desperate fear of reprisal. An invisible, inscrutable power that moves of its own accord and demands our homage at the peril of our lives: is that not a god?

Then there is Mars, or Ares, or Thor, or any one of the myriad names by which we once called the god of War. Few use those names now. Yet he is no less real for our failure to name him. He manifests in the perpetual arms race which afflicts our nations. His most devastating incarnation of late has been in nuclear weapons. There can be no pretence that the competition to amass these is something within human control. Like the Economy, the arms race controls us. It has its own momentum. I hardly need speak of the sacrifices the god of War demands. Whether the trenches of the Great War, the many fronts of the Second, the incineration of thousands in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki, botched efforts in Vietnam and the Middle East, sustained terrorist campaigns, or the present weapons testing zones of Ukraine and Israel, the last century or so alone shows the sacrifices we are willing to make to this wild, insane deity. We sacrifice vast resources, too, for the study of his ways. We decorate the greatest scholars of his doctrine with gold stars, braid, and ceremonial hats to show their status. But even War is only a part of the pantheon that Mammon rules, and his greatest champions are only servants to the high priests of the stock exchange.

Mammon and War are served by the gods of chaos and rage who rule, much as the dragon-serpent Tiamat of old ruled the oceans. The serpent’s undulations move waves not just of sea but of souls. There is something more than a collective human will that stirs the anger of the tens of thousands who have protested in our cities these last few years for their many causes. Every activist group has its priests, its cultic uniforms, its flags, scarves and headdress. Sometimes this is entirely conscious: think of the QAnon shaman or the robed acolytes of the Extinction Rebellion. And they have their scholars in the academy, too, arguing over their Marxian talmud and hadith of radical destabilisation, the total disruption of any normativity, the overthrow of all hierarchy, armchair activists who cheer on violence done against innocents, as long as the higher end is served. They think themselves the enemies of Mammon even as they take his pay and use his machines to propagate their dogma. They want to stop consumerism by iPhone, to quell ecological devastation by closer communion with the spirit of technology that caused it. They promote belief in a hierarchy of invisible powers, demigods of class and race and gender, and vie for the overthrow of the higher by the lower like latter-day Titans rounding on their sires. Power receives their highest veneration, a fate-like force by which they believe the whole world to be governed, and which they think they can tame. But that power soon devours its advocates as shows its true nature as chaos. The ones who cancelled others are themselves cancelled by the next generation of the faithful, animated by the same unruly spirit of rage. Each generation of activists commits patricide against the last. Those who worship chaos unknowingly find themselves washed away by the next tsunami.

We really do worship many gods. They are idols, made by human hands, and yet we have invited spirits in to animate them which we find ourselves unable now to exorcise. And yet still we press on with our idolatrous making. Still we think that we might make one great god to rule them all, one Ring of Power, that we might invoke one greater spirit who will at last serve us, rather than us serve it. Certain servitors of Artificial Intelligence in their Holy Valley of Silicon venerate AI in unironically exalted paeans of praise. Some speak of invoking an unknown spirit into the world; of crafting not just a god, but the one and only God: a singularity. Some of the new god’s prophets think that he will serve us, as though Babel had never happened, as though we had never tried this before. Others think not only that we will serve him, but that we should. Transhumanists foretell a new species, a hybrid of man and machine augmented by the technologies the new gods will teach us. Posthumanists argue that we should resign ourselves to replacement by our evolutionary superior, that we should be content to let it do us what we allegedly did to the Neanderthal. Both of these technocratic theologies concur that the abolition of gender difference is a vital step towards the abolition of distinction between human, animal and machine. As early as the 1990s, the transhumanist Donna Hathaway actively advocated sexual parternships between humans and animals and romantic love between humans and machine. Now, the latter at least has become a reality, as deluded people fall in love with AI avatars online. There are already Episcopalian clergy calling for blessings of polyamorous unions. Perhaps they will be the at the cutting-edge of AI-human nuptials, too.

In the ancient stories, technology and power were always in the hands of the gods. Adam and Eve received protective leather clothes from God, Tubalcain learnt metalwork from fallen angels, Prometheus stole fire from the gods. In each instance, though, the boon was associated with a curse. And as the boons increase, so do the curses. We become increasingly reliant on each technological advance, and increasingly vulnerable to its absence. It strengthens but it weakens. The deleterious effects of weaponry and smartphones are obvious enough already. The full impact of AI reliance and addiction remains unknown, but precedent should warn us to be cautious in the extent of our use of it. We will not, of course. Because it, too, has already become an arms race. It now has its own momentum, like money, like nukes, like chaos.

The only way to resist it, insofar as we are able, is by a deliberate turn from the artificial to the real. There is nothing much more real in this world than bread and wine shared with others. But the reality into which that sharing incorporates us is more real still, and certainly realer than the false gods with their false promises. The hope that they offer is laced with despair, addiction and sacrifice of the weak. The hope that God offers is of a sacrifice already complete and which leads to joy in this world and eternal, bodily life in the next. It makes us truly divine, by our participation in God, who through the Ascension of His Incarnate Word has raised our humanity, body and all, higher than any gods, beyond the heavens, and into the glory of His Triune life.