"Pagan Monotheism"

"In 1999 Athanassiadi, Frede and their colleagues re-examined the ‘trend towards monotheism’, already emphasised in studies from the first half of the twentieth century, which wittingly or unwittingly followed the direction of Christian apologetic argument in late antiquity." (Nicole Belayche, "Deus deum... summorum maximus (Apuleius): ritual expressions of distinction in the divine world in the imperial period", in One God. Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire, p.141-142)

I'm not sure whether Belayche means to say that only the early 20th century or also the more recent literature propagating the existence of "pagan monotheism" in late antiquity follows Christian ideology, but in light of her view that many religious practices subsumed under this category should rather be associated with "an intrinsic quality of polytheism, which was pluralist and capable of organising the pantheon according to hierarchies that varied according to the contexts" (Belayche, p.166), she might mean the latter. It would be easy to substantiate the claim at any rate*, as much of the "The case for pagan monotheism in Greek and Graeco-Roman antiquity," as Michael Frede puts it in the title of his article in the same volume, rests on the judgements of Christian writers like Augustine, and on accepting the force of Augustine's argument—that if the pagan philosophers were consistent, they would see that their position already amounts to monotheism, and they should therefore cease to worship anyone but God and convert to Christianity.

"These essays articulate intelligently and clearly what St. Augustine himself knew so well: 'if the pagans mean that the gods are immortal, but, at the same time, created by the supreme God and that they are blessed, not by themselves, but through adhering to him who made them, then their meaning is the same as ours, whatever title they use . . . the fact that they give the name 'gods' to creatures who are immortal and blessed in the above sense, there is here no dispute between us' (De Civitate Dei, IX.23)." (D. V. Meconi, review of P. Athanassiadi and M. Frede, "Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity")
Dechristianized, the current argument does not go as far, but it still claims that, intellectually, late antique pagan philosophy was monotheistic, or effectively monotheistic. This is helped by the fact that we unconsciously (or, in the case of those arguing for "pagan monotheism", consciously) read essentially the entirety Greco-Roman philosophy as monotheistic or tending towards monotheism. There are many reasons for this. One of them is that, perhaps already in the Academy or the Peripatos, but certainly from the Stoics onwards, there is a tendency to call the highest divine principle ὁ θεός, "the god", typically translated as "God"; but it never implies exclusive godhood. I believe (but have not yet traced this with any certainty) that the usage goes back to the fact that Plato uses "the demiurge" and "the god" interchangeably in the Timaeus. This is because in that dialogue, the identity (or, in fact, the unity) of the demiurge is irrelevant; he serves a function that must be fulfilled in Plato's cosmology, but he is a placeholder more than a specific entity. But it appears that "the god" caught on as a term for a demiurgically active entity of some ontological primacy, and from the Stoics onwards, it became the assumption of most philosophers except the Epicureans and Sceptics that the first principle (if there was only one), or the greatest of the principles (if there were more than one) would also be "the god". This is not the same as to say that all references to "the god" in Stoic and later philosophy refer to this sort of entity; many are generic and would be better translated as "the gods" (but they almost never are).

It is not right to say that the primacy of ὁ θεός was a shared assumption between monotheists and polytheists, because the monotheists' assumption was that ὁ θεός, like modern English "God", implied unity, singleness, uniqueness. This is not as natural in Greek as it is in English, as unique entities do not usually take the article; thus, it is Ἥλιος, lit. "Sun", and not ὁ Ἥλιος, lit. "the sun". The usage of Θεός, without article, occurs in Jewish and Christian texts as a consequence of the understanding that θεός inherently means a unique entity, but at the time of the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek as the Septuaginta, the form ὁ θεός was used, including in passages where the original Hebrew had ’Ělōhîm as a proper name and not as a common noun (i.e. without article). As a consequence, in Jewish texts and common speech, ὁ θεός was embedded in phrases in which it acted as a proper name, and this came to be understood as part of the general meaning of the word, if it was correctly understood**.

On the other hand, in many pagans' understanding of "the god", even in reference to the single highest principle of some philosophical systems, the concept was felt to even guarantee the existence of a plurality of gods. The argument that "the god" can only be the highest god if he rules over others who are his peers occurs in the Pseudo-Onatas' defense of polytheism and in Celsus' polemic against Christianity; while Stoic "proofs of God" treat a proof of the existence of the one cosmic god, "the god", as proof of the existence of multiple gods also (P. A. Meijer, "Stoic Theology: Proofs for the Existence of the Cosmic God and of the Traditional Gods: Including a Commentary on Cleanthes' Hymn on Zeus"), just as Plato, in proving the divinity of the stars, feels that he has established the existence of the gods, not just of astral gods (Gerd van Riel, Plato's Gods). Dio Chrysostom and Theon of Smyrna take the model of a highest god above a plurality of gods

One must only look into the polemical and apologetic literature, both the Christian and the pagan, to see that both sides are working very hard to bolster the claim that they have the proper understanding of what "the god" means. The Christian attempts to show this for pagan literature are hardly convincing. We only need to go back to the quotation from Augustine to see that it is less than honest, and cannot, even by selective excerpting, be made into a neutral statement. The vantage point is that of the proselytizer: to say that, besides the use of the name "gods", there is no disagreement, masks the fact that this is exactly the point of disagreement. Augustine is right to say that, if it were not the established terminology, Christians might as well refer to the angels as gods. But as the established terminology stands, "gods" means "objects of worship", and this is precisely the point of contention. The cost of claiming agreement, whether in Augustine's or in modern academic work, is precision.

Of the schools of the time, it is well known, and has been soundly defended against other theories, that the Epicureans were polytheists (M. W. Schiebe, "Sind die epikureischen Götter 'Thought-Constructs'?"); that the Middle Platonists and Aristotelians believed in a plurality of gods, even if they had adopted the philosophical technical term of "the god" from the Stoics***—a simple word search through the works of Alexander of Aphrodisias, the last ancient Aristotelian proper, shows that he uses the plural "the gods" more than once and in the ordinary sense (with no inkling of doubt about their existence), even though historians of philosophy treats him as a monotheist; and that the Stoics believed that "the god", while one conscious entities, contained other conscious actors within it, including gods (not immortal, but as long-lived as a world-cycle), daemons, the souls of virtuous sages, and living humans. To claim that, either in Platonism or in Stoicism, the gods are only aspects or expressions of "the god", is to hold them to a different standard than any other element in the cosmology. I have never seen the point raised that there is really no Stoic ethics of interaction with other humans, as all interactions one has are only with aspects of "God".

"But the fact that there is a sense, the ordinary Greek sense of ‘god’ or something close to it, in which they can be called ‘gods’ does not obliterate the radical difference between them and God. These gods are not the gods of polytheism. The latter do have a power of their own, though only a limited one. In their sphere of power they can act and interfere on their own account. If Poseidon brings about a shipwreck, it unambiguously and unqualifiedly is Poseidon who does this. But things are quite different with Chrysippus’ astral gods. They are creatures of God. They have been created in order to do certain things and have been given the powers to unfailingly do what they are meant to do, for instance to act in such a way as to maintain life on earth. But they do not have a power of their own. The power they have has been given to them by God. They do not act on their own account. If they do maintain life on earth, it is not unambiguously and unqualifiedly they who do this. It is God who maintains life on earth, hence Zeus is said to be the ultimate source of life of all living beings, including us. But he does this through the stars who are his agents. This is part of what he has created them for. So all the power is still his; but he delegates it, as it were, to agents he creates who will act in his name and on his authority. So the status of God as a monotheistic god is not in the least compromised by these minor gods. He still is an all-powerful, all-knowing god who rules over beings down to the smallest detail. It is just that he has created for himself agents to do the work for him who will execute his will without fail. And that this is so becomes clear if we see that the minor gods do pass out of existence, namely in the total conflagration, once they have done what they were meant to do. Polytheistic gods do not pass out of existence." (Frede, p.73-74)

It is as if Frede had deliberately taken Augustine as his starting point; his gods created by God are exactly how Augustine sees pagan theology. They are not how the Stoics saw their own theology. It is certainly misleading to call the gods "creatures of God": the expression has Christian overtones of creation ex nihilo, and nothing of the specific relation between "the god" and his parts in Stoicism. Not only do the gods depend on "the god", who rules them; he also in a way depends on them, as they are his parts. "All the power is still his" because he is the all; but the parts, such as the gods, have a part of the power; to say that when he acts, "he does this through" the gods is like saying that an academic's hand does not write, the academic does it through the hand: in fact, both are true. And, in fact, both "the god" and the gods are gods.

The polytheism Frede takes for granted is also a scholarly invention. Surely in traditional Greek polytheism as we see it in Homer, Zeus' authority is usually taken to be impossible to counteract, and Fate or the Fates, too, cannot be overcome by any of the gods. Inb4 Zeus' character shows "monotheistic tendencies": even Zeus, doubtless the ruler of the gods, trembles before Nyx; she has perhaps greater power, but she does not exercise it. To reduce the complexities of the relations of power (and otherwise) between the Greek gods to either "quasi-monotheistic" or the (imagined) opposite of monotheistic is completely unnecessary and unjustifiable.

To claim that "[p]olytheistic gods do not pass out of existence" is to admit to not having read the fragments of Anaximander and Alcmaeon, who speak of long-lived, not immortal gods.

The following passage shows best how circular Frede's argument is: "we cannot, or at least should not, call this position polytheistic. For the minor gods of Chrysippus are not polytheistic gods, and regarding them as polytheistic is incompatible with the belief in a monotheistic god which Chrysippus’ demiurge clearly is, given the way we tried to elucidate the notion. Hence we should think of Chrysippus as a monotheist." (p.74) We should not call Chrysippus' gods (they are not minor gods, they are gods) "polytheistic", because polytheism is incompatible with monotheism, and Frede has defined that Chrysippus' position is monotheistic because he feels that it resembles the position of Christian monotheists. How speaking of a plurality of non-polytheistic gods avoids self-contradiction remains unclear.

Apparently what is meant by this is what I have seen in assertions of monotheism by some Hindus: the gods are symbols, names of the one God. "One can believe unequivocally that there is one sense of the word ‘god’, the most proper, strict, appropriate, enlightening sense of the word, in which there is just one god, but also believe that this one god manifests itself in many ways and that these different ways correspond to the different gods of traditional cult, and hence without reservation participate in their cult and support the maintenance of these cults arguing that ordinary citizens in this way do worship God, though they themselves do not understand this." (p.55)

It may be right to say that, for the Stoic, the word "god" somehow applies slightly more to "the god" than to the rest of the gods, but again, they did treat them as members of one class in their proofs. It was not only that the many gods were aspects of "the god" (all things were, after all), it is also that they shared significant properties with him. And it is also wrong to think that an educated pagan would have been worshipping only the highest god by various names, while his less educated coreligionists took them to be separate entities. A Stoic could worship "the god" under a variety of names, but he could also worship a host of other gods under various, perhaps even some of the same names. A look into Cornutus will show that not all divine names were felt to refer to "the god", and it should generally be taken into account that, if the Stoics interpret Homer to mean Y when he uses the divine name X, this does not necessarily mean that X is Y. It is the method ascribed to the first defender of Homer, Theagenes of Rhegium, to understand his myths as referring to the elements etc. rather than the (existing) gods (just as the Romance of the Rose uses the rose as a symbol, but does not suggest that roses are in reality something else than flowers).

As I said, it may be right to say that "god" somehow applies more to "the god" than to others—but, we must remember, only in a philosophical context. In poetry, a Stoic would still use the name Zeus for "the god". That "the god" should be used as the name of the highest god is entirely contingent, and depends (it seems to me) on the accidents of the way that Plato used this word in the Timaeus. That in current discussions of theology (and in ancient Christian ones), it is felt that "deity", a unique creator god, and the specific god whose name is God are all essentially the same concept is also contingent: I have pointed out in a previous post that it depends on the accidents of what sort of language was available to the Hebrew-speaking "Yahwists".

It is equally contingent that, like ’Ělōhîm, so ’Ēl was the name of a specific Canaanite god, while ’ēl meant "god"; or that Allāh is a contracted form of al-ʾilāh, "the god". In the case of ’Ēl, he was in some sense the highest god (the ruler of the gods), but this position was not as stable in Canaanite mythology as it was in Greek thinking; Ba‘al and other gods occupied it. He was the father of many gods; but he was not the first god, and besides the sons of ’Ēl, there were the sons of Ba‘al; there was even, in (the god lists of) Ugarit, the council of Ba‘al besides that of ’Ēl. Allāh acquired the meaning of "the only god" only by serving as the word used to translate God from Judaism and Christianity (i.e. probably Aramaic ˀĕlāh and Greek ὁ θεός, both translating Hebrew [ha-]’ĕlōhîm / [ha-]’ēl). His cult was less widespread in pre-Islamic times than that of Allāt, at least in the regions we have much epigraphic evidence for, but not even she, in spite of her name, a contraction of the phrase for "the goddess", was anything but one particular goddess. The list of seeming parallels to a paradigm of "one God and many gods" could be multiplied, e.g. with proto-Indo-European and Mongolian religion, but we will always find some divergences that make all the difference.

In sum, I hope I have shown that to call one's highest principle "the god" does emphatically not mean that "one only believes in one god." (p.55) and that a denial of the validity of the category of "pagan monotheism" is the consequence of paying careful attention to the evidence that is available to us, and not, as Frede seems to suggest, a symptom of anti-pagan prejudice.

As a representative of what he sees as the position of his opponents, he cites Martin Nilsson's history of Greek religion: "on the one hand, Nilsson says that the monotheistic idea arose early in Greece, that there was a strong tendency towards monotheism in Greek religious thought which in late antiquity even became overwhelming, and that the spread of Christianity was greatly helped by this tendency towards monotheism. On the other hand, Nilsson says right from the beginning (p. 569) that ‘the so-called monotheistic gods’ of the pagans were just that, so-called monotheistic gods, and that paganism never managed to arrive at the espousal of a fully monotheistic god. [...] I just want to point out that I find it very puzzling why, if there was such an ultimately even overwhelming tendency towards monotheism, among pagans it should never have issued in what we properly call ‘monotheism’." (p.55)

If this is intended to already be an argument, it fails; that Nilsson seems to contradict himself does not mean that, as a consequence, pagan monotheism must have existed. Rather, the presumption (whether it is Nilsson's or Frede's, I'm not sure, as I don't have Nilsson to hand) that, if the pagans were not monotheistic, this means that they "never managed to arrive" at monotheism is blatant evolutionism: it presupposes that monotheism is in fact a natural, positive development. It seems that Frede feels he is charitable when he grants pagans the right to be called monotheists. The more natural conclusion, however, would be to say that what historians of philosophy diagnose as "tendency towards monotheism" is a misinterpretation which proceeds from the conflation in the modern concept "God" of what in an ancient pagan context are many different concepts: first cause, demiurge, all-powerful, first entity to exist, ontologically supreme entity, (source of) providence, eternally existent entity, entity worthy of worship, unique entity, single entity, (a) god, the highest god/god the highest (hierarchically), the highest god (in terms of power), only god, YHWH.

Thales, positing a first cause or a single first entity, is claimed as having "monotheistic tendencies"; so is Homer for presuming a single ruling god; Plato for (perhaps) teaching that there is a single ontologically supreme "idea of the Good"; etc. If all these are claimed as instantiating "the monotheistic idea", it does follow that not everyone who came upon it was also a "practicing" monotheist. But if we think about it for just a moment, we should be able to see that it is the conflation of all these that makes the monotheist; in fact, not even this is a good definition, because it is the coordination of this concept of God with many other ideas that makes up the religions we call monotheistic. And because probably not a single one of the concepts that make up "God" can be regarded as necessary for someone to see themselves as a monotheist, we should make the criterion for being a monotheist the connection to the historical ideology of monotheism as it originates in Judaism. For example, we might at first glance see fit to call the sophist Antisthenes a monotheist—he believed that, while convention had it that there were many gods, there was really only one—but the usefulness of the term disappears when we look back at the list. Was Antisthenes' god prior to the world, its creator, and had "the god" for his personal name? Probably not, but this will be assumed by most who read that Antisthenes was a monotheist. Saying that he had "monotheistic tendencies" privileges monotheism to the status of a timeless, trans-historical category which people approximate and sometimes reach, rather than a concept and ideology which developed at a certain time and in a certain context.

If either monotheism or polytheism has a claim to being trans-historical, it is polytheism. In a Greco-Roman context specifically, we can speak of polytheism as being the invisible default (often so invisible that we assume atheism or polytheism because a pagan author is not sufficiently vocal in his nonetheless very apparent polytheism), with some deviating from it by defining a position that opposes it; the clear-cut cases are atheism and monotheism. Because these self-define themselves as being in opposition to a belief in (many) gods, they can be treated as distinct from it. Where this is not the case, we should generally speak of debates within polytheism (and in a few cases, like that of Antisthenes, we might speak of a debate within Greek paganism), just as the conflict between polytheism and monotheism took place within Greco-Roman culture.

Notes:
*At any rate, the claim for "pagan monotheism" is being used to claim something that looks like Christian triumphalism: "Through the philosophical critique of polytheism, pagan monotheism already gained prominence and prepared the way for Christian monotheism. While polytheism does not allow for a personal relation to deity, the god proclaimed by the early Christians unites two attractive principles: he is both lord of history and lord of personal life." (Udo Schnelle, "Die ersten 100 Jahre des Christentums 30-130 n. Chr.", p. 160; my translation from German). The book under discussion here is cited in a footnote. I wonder what the characters of Greek comedies (and the Athenian average citizen they represent), who greet the local gods when they come home and call them neighbours, would say to the idea that they could not have a personal relation to their gods, and I have yet to see a passage where a pagan philosopher actually critiques a system like that looks like what modern scholars assume polytheism looks like, rather than taking their own philosophical (and supposedly revolutionary, henotheistic, monotheistic, etc.) theology to be an accurate account of (the best version of) the traditional and current religion.
**For this reason, I capitalize God only when referring to the Abrahamic term, where it is a proper name, and never use capitalized pronouns, which are a recent generalization from the capitalization of God, which reinterprets it as due to his greatness, rather than because it is a personal name.
***They also accepted some of the assumptions underlying that term, as stated above, namely the identity of highest deity and highest/first principle. Thus in Aristotelianism, the first mover becomes a god, and "the god", and in Platonism the demiurge becomes either identical to his model, in order to be both "the god" and have primacy; or he is subordinated to a higher entity, which is "the god" properly speaking. Platonic terminology like that of "the first god" and "the second god" and the like should alert one to the fact that the seeming absoluteness of "the god" is at most an assertion of hierarchical supremacy, not of exclusiveness. That doxographers and writers about philosophy like Aetius and Cicero (especially in the persona of an Epicurean attacking Stoicism)