Printed in the Spring 2023 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "From the Editor’s Desk" Quest 111:2, pg 2
It is said that a sign of the turning of the age is that the old gods are mocked.
We certainly see this happen in classical antiquity. We date this period from roughly 700 BC to AD 500, an era that marked the height of Greco-Roman civilization. But it was also the final flowering of a Mediterranean civilization that stretched back millennia, through the Bronze Age and beyond. In the final period, the old gods were increasingly mocked.
In the fifth century BC, the Greek philosopher Xenophanes remarked that if horses had gods, they would make them look like horses—a jibe at the beautiful but anthropomorphic statues of the Olympian deities. Later on, in the first century of the Christian era, someone (probably the younger Seneca) wrote a satire mocking the Roman deification of dead emperors entitled the Apocolocyntosis (or “Pumpkinification”) of Claudius. Seneca jabs at the gods themselves: Janus, with his two faces, is described as “a brilliant fellow, with eyes on the back of his head.” The satirist Lucian continued this tradition of mocking the gods in the second century.
By the fourth century, Christianity was in the ascent, and popular allegiance to the old gods dropped remarkably fast—over only two or three generations. In her brilliant but disturbing book The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey shows that the surviving statues of the Greek and Roman gods are broken—with arms, noses, and heads missing—because they were defaced by the Christians.
Once the idols are smashed, nobody puts them back together again.
We see the same thing in the present. We can trace modern sarcasm toward religion at least as far back as Voltaire in the eighteenth century. The process advanced rapidly in the mid‒twentieth century. Today God, Jesus, Christianity, the Bible, and the churches are ridiculed in a way that recently would have been unthinkable in any quarter.
A person coming to our era from even sixty or seventy years ago would be incredulous to see such things, but we shrug them off, and even laugh ourselves. The old gods are mocked. One century’s sacrilege is another century’s comedy.
These upheavals in the religious sensibilities of humanity are upsetting to conservatives, but they illustrate one supreme truth: all images of God are merely images. This holds as true for theological concepts as it does for paintings and statues. God, the Absolute, does not change, but our concepts of it can and must.
Xenophanes’ jibe cuts both ways. Yes, we are bound to conceive of the divine in anthropomorphic terms, because we are humans. But precisely because we are humans, we must be authentic to our own experience as humans—and that appears to include viewing the divine in human terms and concepts. We can leave the religion of horses to horses.
“For in heaven they keep changing dynasties,” wrote the American author James Branch Cabell. Since our concept of our own humanity changes and (one hopes) evolves over time, so will our images and concepts of the divine. This process will include breaks and disruptions that are likely to be painful for many.
My British friends Cherry Gilchrist and Gila Zur have produced The Tree of Life Oracle, a fortune-telling game based on the Kabbalah. One of the cards in the deck is “The Veil,” and this is its interpretation:
When the veil descended, men revered what it covered. And as time went on it seemed to hide more and more and was revered still more. Then, when it was heavy with age, young men fresh and arrogant demanded the removal of the veil and demanded to see what was hidden. For they said that whatever is hidden from the people cannot be for the common good. In the thunder and lightning of indignation, the veil was torn down. Nothing lay beyond. At first the young men were startled, but then they laughed jubilantly at the absurd fraud they thought they had uncovered. And the old men grieved, cursing the young men because they had destroyed the veil.
Richard Smoley