Gospel & Universe ♒️ The Currents of Sumer
Rewind & Fast-Forward
The Unity of Religion - The Afterlife & Grace
♒️
The Unity of Religion
I’ve suggested in the last ten pages that getting rid of a zero-sum attitude toward Mesopotamian civilizations can be difficult, because 1. these Mesopotamian civilizations are poorly understood, largely as a result of the 2,000 year disappearance of cuneiform, along with the scarcity of Assyriologists; 2. Jewish writers saw themselves as superior to their polytheistic neighbours, and described them in negative ways; and 3. Christians inherited the negative perspective of the Jews.
Getting rid of a zero-sum perspective allows us more scope to read theology backwards, so that later ideas about mythic narrative, the universe, Creation, and monotheism can be spotted in earlier forms in the Ancient world. In particular, we can re-think Yahweh’s drowning of the world in terms of the dynamic between Enlil and Ea, we can re-think the relation of the stars to Jewish history in terms of Babylonian astronomy, and we can re-think Jewish versions of Creation and monotheism in terms of Marduk’s primordial battle with Chaos and Marduk’s elevation above the other gods.
Throughout all this I’ve suggested that opening up the Bible to radical questioning and to a deeper appreciation of ambiguity and diversity requires a new look at the biblical narratives themselves (as we see in Enns) and also a positive-sum attitude toward the Mesopotamian civilizations of Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, & Assyria (as we see in Bottéro). This opening up and re-evaluation is bound to bear a great deal of fruit, given that the Mesopotamians gave the Jews much of their math & language, city-states & city-state deities, warfare & legal codes, mythological narrative, religion, astronomy, etc.
In my arguments I assume that theology shouldn’t be a zero-sum game that aims to make one system look better or more original than another. Rather, it should be a mutual endeavour to get as much as we can from the wisdom and theological literature of the past. My prescriptive position on this comes from my agnosticism, and also from an eclectic and ecumenical approach to comparative religion, which expands the spirit of Christian ecumenicalism to include other religions, including former — and formative — religions. Another way of putting this is that my position comes from my deep agnostic lack of faith in any one religious system, yet also from my even deeper abundance of faith in the benefits of critical thinking, openness, and inclusivity, including what we assume to be rational as well as what appears to be irrational.
From this eclectic, ecumenical, agnostic viewpoint, religion isn’t a group of mutually exclusive beliefs. Rather, it’s a human enterprise, one which changes through time and across geography. To get the most of this diversity, agnostics are skeptical of any dogma or systematized belief structure which claims to be the most original, the most authentic, the most authoritative, the best, ultimate, final, etc. They’re also skeptical of any ‘archetypal’ system that equates diverse traditions along the lines of specific underlying models. They see the unifying, systematized mythologies of Jung and Joseph Campbell as subject to T.S. Eliots’ warning: “knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, / For the pattern is new in every moment. / And every moment is a new and shocking / Valuation of all we have been.”
Finally, agnostics who are interested in an expanded definition of religion are skeptical of any ‘evolutionary’ system that sees progress of the animism —> polytheism —> monotheism variety. It may be tempting to take this word evolution and argue that ‘primitive’ animist and polytheistic religions evolved into ‘more advanced’ monotheistic ones. From this perspective, monotheism is seen as a way of thinking about the universe where Nature operates as one big guided system, with a hidden (gnostic) meaning and goal. The problems involved in putting monotheism above polytheism in regard to the diversity of Nature are multiple, as I argue in these pages and in 🌎 East & West 2, ✝️ Abraham's Vice, 🍎 Golden Calves & 🍎 The Holy Bin. One of the main problems is that the operations of Nature are just as clearly articulated, unified, and in line with the human condition (of not knowing) in polytheism as they are in monotheism. For instance, Aurelius’ view of Nature is at once polytheistic, unified, and sensitive to the needs of humanity:
Nature gives all and takes all back. To her the man educated into humility says: ‘Give what you will; take back what you will.’ And he says this in no spirit of defiance, but simply as her loyal subject.
The time you have left is short. Live it as if you were on a mountain. Here or there makes no difference, if wherever you live you take the world as your city. (Meditations 10:14-15)
If one wants to find a rational and unified explanation for our existence, one might even discard religion and notions of Mother Nature altogether, and see the integrated flow of Nature operating in the overlapping and interpenetrating fields of astronomy & geology, botany & biology, zoology & primatology, geography & history, evolution & genetics, etc. All this to say that the use of the word evolutionary in the domain of religion causes more problems than it solves, and tends to open up a can of scientific worms, which inch their way across the table, across the floor, and back into the earth.
♒️
Taking an eclectic and ecumenical view of religion, agnostics try to remain open to the ideas they find beside their own, before their own, and however far away in time and space. They try to be critical and receptive, skeptical and accepting at the same time. In this way, they’re hopefully less likely 1. to mistake what’s true for one people at one time for what’s true for all people at any time, and 2. to ignore an insight just because a) it doesn’t come from an established, reputable, or revered source, or b) it does come from such a source. As the legendary Valmiki writes in the Yogavasistha: “Even a young boy's words are to be accepted if they are words of wisdom; otherwise, reject them like straw, even if they are uttered by Brahma the creator.”
Some theists may see this openness — this critical thought that aims to open every door, window, sky light, ship portal, and trap-door — as opening into a meaningless, even sin-filled void. That’s how Pascal sees it, although I disagree with him when he argues that without belief we fall into the endless abyss of our own limitations, our error and our sin. As I argue in ✝︎ Pascal 3: God & Infinity, I think that in this openness, uncertainty, and ambiguity lies the same infinity that houses a seed, a tree, a world, a star wall, and every possible cosmos that a Power like God might choose to create.
♒️
The Afterlife & Grace
Looking closer at Mesopotamia also allows us to see the complexity and ambiguity involved in understanding the afterlife. In ✝️ Systems of Dread & Hope (in the next section, ✝️ The Cross) I suggest that the Christian notions of judgment and eternal life most likely derive from the Egyptians, who were far more optimistic about the afterlife than the Mesopotamians and the early Hebrews and Greeks. This argument picks up somewhat from the one I made in ♒️ Friendly Gods, where Gilgamesh gives us the brutal effect of no afterlife and the Bible retroactively provides the cause: human sin. The New Testament also stresses the immediate remedy to erase that sin: the embodiment of God’s Grace in the person of Jesus, who gives us back eternal life.
In the final pages of this chapter I’ll look further into this topic of Grace, first generally and then in the context of Mesopotamian religion. In ♒️ Grace: The Most Positive Sum I’ll define Grace in an agnostic way, which allows for doctrinal, non-doctrinal, and secular approaches. Then in ♒️ Myths of Sin & Divinity I’ll use Bottéro to explore a fundamental question that follows from my wide definition: Do humans possess a divine spark, that is, one that would allow them to transcend the eternal darkness of the grave? I’ll offer an ambiguous, typically agnostic ‘answer’ to these questions: while the Bible gives us an answer to the nihilism of the Mesopotamian afterlife, there’s a large ambiguity here, since the Mesopotamians also imagined that humans are partly divine.
In ♒️ Grace: The Most Positive Sum I’ll explore the best of all possible scenarios — a positive sum of the different Graces of different religions. Then on the final page of this chapter, ♒️ The Return of Enlil, I’ll suggest the opposite scenario, one in which things don’t add up and in which the account slides far into the negative register. Combining Yeats’ rough beast which slouches toward Bethlehem with the current nastiness of the Ukraine War, I imagine an apocalyptic scenario, the worst of all possible outcomes: a Graceless Deity who exercises all the the angry, jealous, and destructive tendencies of the Mesopotamian high god Enlil. And yet I can’t help but temper this grim possibility with a hint that the benevolent Christ-like god Ea may have something to say about all this, after all. ♒️ Post & Other Scripts lies between the two scenarios, and highlights the predicament of human bewilderment, fear, and hope as well as the earnest spiritual struggle I explore in 🇫🇷 The Priest’s Dilemma, starting with Rivers of God.
♒️
Next: ♒️ Grace: The Most Positive Sum
Table of Contents - Annotated Contents - Layout - Core Beliefs