Should religion develop through specific stages? Would its development have been arrested if society had not progressed?
When Everard asks Deirdre what her religion is, she seems initially to find the question "...almost meaningless." (p. 195) So her people have not yet developed our distinction between religious and secular. They retain a Pagan acceptance of multiple pantheons as familiar aspects of everyday life:
the educated think that the Great Baal made the lesser gods;
but the Afallonians maintain ancient cults;
and they respect the most powerful foreign gods in order not to risk their anger.
Tolerant but backward. I respect my Christian and Muslim neighbours but not because I fear their gods!
Let's consider stages of religion. Natural, then social, forces were personified as gods, i.e., deified. There were two routes from polytheism to monotheism: one god is supreme or all gods are one. The prophets made one god supreme. The Fourth Gospel deified the Son and personified the Spirit but remained monotheist. Thus, the one God became the Trinity. Other triune deities are:
Trimurti (Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva = Creator, Preserver, Destroyer);
the Triple Goddess (Maiden, Mother, Crone).
Contemplatives intuit reality as either personal or impersonal. (I was indoctrinated in Trinitarianism but am now contemplative impersonalist.) Arguably, an ultimate stage of development is understanding and control of external forces leading to cessation of their personification, hence atheism. We have atheism but coexisting mainly with alternative monotheisms. The Afallonians are only just approaching the transition from polytheism to monotheism.
1 comment:
The thing about "all Gods are one" stages (eg., in modern Hinduism) is that they don't -supplant- outright polytheism, they -supplement- it.
That is, those of a certain type of intellectual cast of mind can say the stories are all really about facets of One God...
... while ordinary people can go right on worshipping Zeus or Krishna or Thor or whatever.
(Saints filled this role in early Catholicism -- St. Olaf took over many of Thor's attributes in Scandinavia, for example.)
Everard points out in DELENDA EST that the monotheism which remained dominant in Christianity was important in the rise of science because it thoroughly inculcated the idea of a single, universal no-exceptions "law" governing everything.
And in Latin Christendom you can already see the "retreat" of the supernatural in say, Aquinian theology. It gets increasingly concentrated in one point; in the 18th century, all that was necessary was to remove that, and voila, you had seclarism.
In a religious context closer to animism, where supernatural forces are "known" to be omnipresent and ubiquitous, that's not a likely progression of ideas.
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