Morality

[sdi]

Morals are a human concept. Gods don't have morals. They have natures:

• Does Luna grant nourishment only to the meek?

• Does Mercury grant eloquence only to the honest?

• Does Venus grant pleasure only to the faithful?

• Does Sol grant life only to the happy?

• Does Mars grant strength only to the protective?

• Does Jupiter grant wealth only to the merciful?

• Does Saturn grant longevity only to the ascetic?

Comments

ELI5?

[ehu]

Help, I'm lost here. (Unsurprising to me as I am not very smart)
so here are my probably pretty dumb questions:

How do we know what 'concepts' are not human?

How do we know that the gods don't have morals?

Re: ELI5?

[sdi]

Let me start with your second question: even if reason can't go very high in the hierarchy of being, we can at least use it to study things the same way we study the sciences or mathematics. So let's apply some logic!

We will start by supposing the Neoplatonic axiom that every god is good. (This is because we are connected to Good via the gods: that is, they are our definition of good.)

Let us next suppose that the gods are moral. Morality means that some things are good and some things are bad. (You should do X but you should not do Y, etc.)

Let us further suppose that it is bad to encourage a bad action. (If you encourage bad actions, you will get more bad actions, which is itself presumably bad.)

What do these three mean? Well, if a god encourages a bad action, it would be bad. But a god cannot be bad. So a god cannot encourage a bad action.

Now, let us consider the Sun. We will suppose it is a god on the basis of tradition. (For example, Apuleius says, "there is not any Greek, or any barbarian, who will not easily conjecture that the Sun and Moon are Gods; and not these only, as I have said, but also the five stars.") But the sun shines on both the good and the bad alike. But we have already said that a god cannot encourage bad actions, and the sun is a god, therefore the sun cannot shine on the bad. So we have a contradiction and one of our suppositions must be false.

So what have we supposed so far?

1. Gods are good.
2. Gods are moral.
3. It is bad to encourage bad.
4. The sun is a god.

At least one of these needs to go! 1 and 4 seem ironclad (and anyway I have personal experience supporting these), and 3 seems to at least be self-evident (certainly, I assume it when I try to raise my children!), and so it appears that we have to throw out 2, and this is what I was hinting at in my original post.

As for your first question, I don't think it's possible to make a comprehensive list of what concepts are superhuman, but we can investigate individual things or categories of things, like I have above. Anything that pertains to space and location, for example, is limited to the sensible world, and so only sensible beings like us and the mundane gods (like the Sun, Moon, and planets) have a spatial location; souls and the intelligible gods (e.g. Apollo, Diana, etc.) therefore do not exist in space and are, in a sense, everywhere at once.

Does that help?

Re: ELI5?

[ehu]

First of all, thank you for taking the time and caring enough to respond, and not only respond, but respond clearly and with some very interesting and helpful detail! Being allowed to visit with your musings, which I have found intellectually stimulating and which have opened up many a wondrous philosophical vista over the years, has been a joy and a rare oasis in the wasteland of the web.

As I at best have a very basic understanding of even rudimentary logic, and am more or less a complete dunce when it comes to formal 'reasoning', there seems little point in me attempting to comment on your generously provided example.

Being foolish, I will nonetheless state my uneasiness at wielding terms pertaining to the divine in what to my childish eyes looks like some sort of mathematical word problem.

Brother sun is indeed a mighty one, and I give thanks for the light he shares so freely.

A cursory look at the etymology of morals led me to 'mos' and 'ethos'..

We humans seem to be the ones in need of such things, so despite not being able to fully parse or agree with your line of reasoning, I do feel that the sun is well beyond our grade level and at most might imagine that he has mastery of that which for us is barely discernible as something that can be learned.

Thanks again for bearing with me, and yes, I do feel your answer was helpful!

Re: ELI5?

[sdi]

You are welcome, and thank you for the kind words! To be quite honest, it was a really good exercise for me to go through it point by point... while I have training in formal logic—I studied computer science at university, so it comes with the territory—I'm really more of an intuitive sort of person, and so taking the time to go back over a realization I had come to intuitively with the use of logic was both fun and helpful to me, too.

Regarding your unease, that's quite reasonable. Do you want to know my real reason for posting this? It wasn't to put the gods in a box! Rather, I'm tired of people saying "you should do/say/think/be X so you can go-to-heaven/escape-the-wheel-of-rebirth/evolve/etc." Spiritual people get so bent out of shape about good and bad and right and wrong and so on. So my point in all this is that the gods don't care about how much of a goody-two-shoes anyone is. Children don't try to grow up, it just sort of happens on its own. In the same way, while being a human is just horrible, you don't escape it by doing this or that—it'll just happen on its own. Don't stress, just let yourself ripen in your own time.

[causticus]

The main issue I see here is that "Gods" (translated from "Theoi") is a vague term that can mean different things, and encompass many different classes of beings.

Your bulleted points seem to be true when we're talking about planetary spirits and intelligences. Not so much when talking about the personal gods people have interacted with throughout the ages, at least according to accounts (both ancient and contemporary) of such interactions. These personal entities seem to have distinct personalities, discernable likes and dislikes, and sometimes will punish mortals for various transgressions.

In the myths and historical accounts there are examples of the Gods punishing mortals for what appears to be moral transgressions. A human acting with an extreme degree of hubris seems to be what ticks off the Gods the most (Apollo was known to curse an entire family lineage for this offense). Or even something seemingly-petty like Agamemnon hunting a deer stag sacred to Artemis (Sacrifice of Iphigenia). Now, I know these are just stories and that later Platonists frowned on such stories, but I think a lot of these "vulgar" tales have a basis in ordinary human experience of the spirit world; the Muses don't seem to play favorites when it comes to whom they inspire; the haughty intellectual may even be worse off in this regard.

So I can safely assume here that you are using Theoi in a very technical Platonic way. Which, to me, seems to point toward the most abstract (and removed from human experience) aspect of a deity. And that the "personal gods" of human experience might actually correspond with beings lower on the celestial hierarchy that folks like Iamblichus and Proclus spoke of (and that Pseudo-Dionysus pilfered into Christianity); in other words, speaking of beings corresponding to angels and daimones. Thus the most abstract notion of a God may not have any type of "morality" a human can conceive of; yet the manifestations of a God much closer to the human level can be said to have morality of some sort. Make sense?

[ehu]

An enriching elaboration! Thank you for sharing this perspective and those details.

Speaking of Christians and their pilfering ways ;)
Have (either of) you read _That Hideous Strength_?

[sdi]

I haven't, I'm sorry to say that my experiences with Lewis haven't been good ones.

[causticus]

You're welcome. And...nope, I have yet to read any C.S. Lewis.

[sdi]

Yay, excellent!

Yes, I am being technical, and yes, you are quite correct that personal "gods" (in the Platonic tradition, "dæmons," and which we typically call "angels" nowadays) are "better" than us but "worse" than the gods. (Indeed, per Plato, gods are impersonal and cannot be interacted with in a personal manner; to interact with Venus, say, is to love, rather than speak to a particular being—though of course one can speak with angels in the "retinue" of Venus, so to speak, and I think these are the "Athenas" and "Apollos" and so on we see in Homer, for example.) Angels have a pneumatic vehicle (an "imaginative body")—this is the means by which we interact with them, they speak to our own imaginations—and this is a sensible thing, prone to corruption and decay. So while they are less prone to corruption than humans, they are not perfect like the gods are—and, as you say, would indeed have morality of a sort (presumably different than ours, though I haven't seen a discussion of it and haven't spent much time thinking about it, but it seems worthwhile to try and do so).

[causticus]

Excellent, indeed :)

I have to say that I'm a big fan of this categorization scheme. I think it can help sort out a lot of the unfruitful scuffles that take place among present-day polytheists, i.e. the endless debates about "soft" vs. "hard" polytheism; and universalism vs. particularism. Silly notions like Gods being the exclusive property of specific tribes and ethnic groups seem to evaporate into the aether when we realize that the higher aspects of Gods are indeed universal, and that specific manifestations of Gods take place on the aforementioned lower tiers of the celestial hierarchy. So at the end of the day, hard and soft polytheism can both be correct.

[sdi]

I agree!

If I recall correctly, Manly P. Hall makes exactly that point in his introduction to Journey in Truth—the beauty of Neoplatonism is that it is a framework in which both unity and diversity can be incorporated and celebrated. I don't think I'd go as far as him—he considers Neoplatonism universalizing, while I think it's a pretty quirky (albeit very useful) worldview—but it certainly has a way of making arguments like the ones you mentioned melt away...

Can Gods be hypocrites?

[emmanuelg]

Hmmm! This may touch on a topic that has been a bee in my bonnet for some time!
Can Gods be hypocrites?
In other words, can they (or do some of them) make rules that they themselves turn around and violate?
I noticed a while ago that soon after YHWH issued the Ten Commandments (including 'Thou shalt not kill') he orders the Israelites to commit genocide on the Canaanites. People that don't go along with this are themselves killed.
Most theologians seem fine with this. Justifications include variations of;
YHWH is a different order of being, so even the rules he applies to us do not apply to him.
The Canaanites were especially evil, and had to be destroyed so that Israelites could maintain their purity.
So then, if they were that bad, why would YHWH involve anyone else? Why didn't YHWH just wipe them out himself?
So applying the idea that Gods have natures, and not morality, it could be that it's just in YHWH's nature to induce his followers to commit genocide.
Or, backing off from that a bit, it could be that the human leadership of the YHWH-followers are sometimes psychopaths, and abuse their positions to incite genocide when it suits their purposes.
Genocidal tendencies could also be a characteristic of Monotheism. Certainly Judaism, Christianity, and their heresies such as Marxism, and Islam, periodically do genocide against one or another group. I don't know enough about Polytheism to say whether Polytheists go on the warpath like that.

Re: Can Gods be hypocrites?

[sdi]

You are hitting on the exact same question that causticus was in his comment, above! As I understand it, in the Neoplatonic model, the god of the Hebrews, like the gods of Homer, isn't a "god" in the technical sense I'm using it here—rather, he is a "dæmon" (and I should suppose the tutelary dæmon of the Jewish nation). Ways in which one can tell are that he is personal (e.g. to Abraham, to Jacob, to the prophets), that he is emphatically not universal (rather, he is national), that he requires blood sacrifice, etc.

Because dæmons have sensible bodies (e.g. are not eternal but have lifespans, even if mind-bogglingly long ones, and require sustenance, even if relatively little), they are prone to corruption, have personalities, presumably have their own moral codes, etc.

Porphyry has very negative things to say about dæmons that require blood sacrifice, and certainly I'm also squeamish about the Abrahamic faiths, but sometimes I wonder whether it's simply that A) the age of Aries was a bloodier one than his age of Pisces or our age of Aquarius, or B) we have a tendency to greatly overestimate the value of bodies (and greatly underestimate the value of souls).

Re: Can Gods be hypocrites?

[emmanuelg]

A tutelary daimon, eh? Well that would explain a lot. And no mystery about Theodosius ordering Porphyry's books to be burned if they have information in them like this, since it moves YHWH down the ladder from Creator of All to a god-wannabe.
This contrasts, at least somewhat, with Jesus' description of a Heavenly Father, which seems like a diversion of his followers out from under the thumb of the tutelary daimon of the Israelites to something more like a god.
This could all become an interesting bit of fiction-- YHWH tricks the Israelites into following him and to committing genocides, and then shows up as Satan (and later, Alla) to expland the genocidal operations. Jesus shows up, steers people away from YHWH, and YHWH kills Jesus for spoiling his game-- And then recruits Paul to craft a theological framework to make the followers of Jesus still amenable to genocide while turning their attentions to YHWH-- Something like that would be an interesting project, as well as guaranteed to get a lot of religious people of many types very, very angry.
BTW, I am actually NOT Salman Rushdie going for a second try at world's most targeted author...

Re: Can Gods be hypocrites?

[sdi]

My goodness, EG—I have a hard enough time trying to discern the motives of mortals!

Still, I don't think it's fair to impute such motives to YHWH. It seems to me that he was on-the-level with Abraham; I think the creator-of-all-my-way-or-the-highway business came later and was probably a human political ploy (and didn't YHWH warn the Israelites about politics?); and I frankly doubt Jesus had much of anything to do with Christianity.

(I had been planning a lengthy post on that last, since I think it would be a helpful reference, but ultimately decided against it; but the short form is that it seems to me that Jesus was simply a wandering Pythagorean holy man of the sort common in the Classical and Hellenistic eras. His teachings are more-or-less indistinguishable from those attributed to Pythagoras (like the Sentences of Sextus or the Golden Verses); Pythagoras was supposedly immaculately conceived by a divine father; Empedocles was supposedly transfigured upon a mountaintop; Apollonius was famous for casting out demons and raising the dead; everyone from Pythagoras to Empedocles to Apollonius to Apuleius to Julian and half a dozen less famous names were said to have healed the sick; Plotinus had twelve disciples (including one who went rogue); the early Christians were just doing their own weird thing and had no interest in pushing others around; etc. etc. etc. It seems likely to me that the my-way-or-the-highway stuff came a few centuries later, with the likes of Constantine and Eusebius and Augustine, and was once again a political ploy.)

Funny you got me defending the Abrahamic faiths! "Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows."

Re: Can Gods be hypocrites?

[emmanuelg]

Yeah, it probably was something along those lines. No matter what, over long periods of time there is mission creep and mission drift in any organization -- Perhaps we could call it 'Egregore-Drift?'
After all, if the Republican Party could go from the Slave-freeing-liberal-party-of-Lincoln to what it is today in only 165 years, in only one country, what can we expect faiths to do over thousands of years and many civilizations? Given one's personal limitations, attempting kindness and doing the best one can with what one has may be all that can be done.
That said, I think that the lengthy post on Jesus and Christianity sounds like a worthwhile project if you are ever in the mood to do it. No rush! ;-) Just warning you though, if you bring up Charles Finney and try to defend him--that's _another_ bee in my bonnet. Plainly, I have anger issues...

Re: Can Gods be hypocrites?

[sdi]

Re: egregore-drift, I think it's something like that! In the same way human bodies get old and faulty and the soul cannot exert very good control over them, it seems to me that organizations get old and faulty and their group-souls cannot exert very good control over them.

Re: comparing the stories told about the Pythagoreans and Jesus, I'll keep your interest in mind! I still need to read Apollonius' biography, so maybe then...