Aconia Paulina wanted to know if all cults would be represented in the priesthood. I said yes. Every god and goddess known to the people...would be worshipped, for multiplicity is the nature of life. We all believe--even the Galileans, despite their confused doctrine of trinity--that there is a single Godhead from which all life, divine and mortal, descends and to which all life must return. We may not know this creator...ut through intermediaries...he speaks to us...prepares us for the next stage of the journey. "To find the father and maker of all is hard," as Socrates said.... Yet, as Aeschylus wrote with equal wisdom, "men search out god and searching find him." The search is the whole point to philosophy and to the religious experience. It is a part of the Galilean impiety to proclaim that the search ended three hundred years ago when a young rabbi was executed for treason
Have there been for millennia tensions between different world views, possibly the results of our histories, neurology, psychology and child development, that have resulted in the various religions, doctrines and theologies we have?
We can focus on specific books and traditions, but they are all in contexts, gestalts, that will include some very messy stuff, like astrology and alchemy.
The vast majority of Newton's work was on alchemy. Jung's collected works discuss many varieties of this.
The ideas of good and evil may actually be understood as results of attempts to formalise, to steward, curate, anathemise, to weed, the huge varieties of experience and religious experience.
Christianity as another attempt - this time to assert "it is finished".
Let's develop an ecology of religion.
"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
Aconia Paulina wanted to know if all cults would be represented in the priesthood. I said yes. Every god and goddess known to the people...would be worshipped, for multiplicity is the nature of life. We all believe--even the Galileans, despite their confused doctrine of trinity--that there is a single Godhead from which all life, divine and mortal, descends and to which all life must return. We may not know this creator...ut through intermediaries...he speaks to us...prepares us for the next stage of the journey. "To find the father and maker of all is hard," as Socrates said.... Yet, as Aeschylus wrote with equal wisdom, "men search out god and searching find him." The search is the whole point to philosophy and to the religious experience. It is a part of the Galilean impiety to proclaim that the search ended three hundred years ago when a young rabbi was executed for treason
Have there been for millennia tensions between different world views, possibly the results of our histories, neurology, psychology and child development, that have resulted in the various religions, doctrines and theologies we have?
We can focus on specific books and traditions, but they are all in contexts, gestalts, that will include some very messy stuff, like astrology and alchemy.
And astronomy
The vast majority of Newton's work was on alchemy. Jung's collected works discuss many varieties of this.
The ideas of good and evil may actually be understood as results of attempts to formalise, to steward, curate, anathemise, to weed, the huge varieties of experience and religious experience.
The notion of man as a spiritual being was not lost on the Greek philosophers. These theologians maintained that to every man a guardian spirit at birth was appointed as the leader of his life. It was like the "Higher Self" and sometimes referred to as "The Heavenly Twin". Socrates and host of other Greek writers speak of it. The Romans referred to it as each man's "genius". These were worshipped in various cases. Alexander. Augustus. etc. The Greeks referred to it as each man's "daimon".
The Christians OTOH denigrated this concept and instead introduced the concept of the "Holy Spirit" in some sort of "corporate takeover" of the cult ideas related to human consciousness and the so-called spiritual realms. In Matthew Jesus casts the "daimon" into a bunch of pigs. The Greek spiritual terminology got demonised.
Christianity as another attempt - this time to assert "it is finished".
Let's develop an ecology of religion.
Julian on Helios and the Mother of the Gods. Momigliano like the OP assesses Julian as a pagan monotheist. The sun is the centre of the ecological engine. There is a government of gods associated with nature, but behind the scenes, and made explicit by Apollonius of Tyana (and also, incidentally, the Platonists), the One God over all.
From Apollonius's book ... "The Mystic Rites or Concerning Sacrifices.
The full title is given by Eudocia, Ionia; ed. Villoison (Venet 1781) p 57
This treatise is mentioned by Philostratus (iii 41; iv 19),
who tells us that it set down the proper method of sacrifice
to every God, the proper hours of prayer and offering.
It was in wide circulation, and Philostratus had come across
copies of it in many temples and cities,
and in the libraries of philosophers.
Several fragments of it have been preserved, [See Zeller, Phil d Griech, v 127]
the most important of which is to be found in Eusebius,
[Præparat. Evangel., iv 12-13; ed Dindorf (Leipzig 1867), i 176, 177]
and is to this effect:
“ ‘Tis best to make no sacrifice to God at all,
no lighting of a fire,
no calling Him by any name
that men employ for things to sense.
For God is over all, the first;
and only after Him do come the other Gods.
For He doth stand in need of naught
e’en from the Gods,
much less from us small men -
naught that the earth brings forth,
nor any life she nurseth,
or even any thing the stainless air contains.
The only fitting sacrifice to God
is man’s best reason,
and not the word
that comes from out his mouth.
“We men should ask the best of beings
through the best thing in us,
for what is good -
mean by means of mind,
for mind needs no material things
to make its prayer.
So then, to God, the mighty One,
who’s over all,
no sacrifice should ever be lit up.”
Noack [Psyche, I ii.5.] tells us that scholarship
is convinced of the genuineness of this fragment.
This book, as we have seen, was widely circulated
and held in the highest respect, and it said that
its rules were engraved on brazen pillars
at Byzantium. [Noack, ibid.]
LC
A "cobbler of fables" [Augustine]; "Leucius is the disciple of the devil" [Decretum Gelasianum]; and his books "should be utterly swept away and burned" [Pope Leo I]; they are the "source and mother of all heresy" [Photius]
