Modern Divinity
Behind the Scenes

Short-term, such manifest pseudo-divine puppetry works. Sort of. It intimidates the enemy. Sort of. It offers anodyne comfort, brief consolation to ourselves and those we care about. Sort of.

Best of all, the puppetry throws up a mise-en-scene where all manner of excellent, excelling art can flourish for the delight and edification of countless generations to come (all those Sistine murals etc., all those Bach cantatas etc., and even one Handel Messiah, plus all manner of glorious buildings some of which come within spitting distance of being tasteful).

Long-term, alas, this panoply of primitivism turns out to be a poorly painted scrim which its makers and its audience mistake for the real thing, failing to notice its fragility, its two-dimensionality, and the far profounder reality proceeding as ever apace and dimly lit behind it.

There, the real gods play, loll, gambol (and, yes, at times gamble, with us as chips), plot, meander, frolic, fornicate, and in general do everything except die. Which should come as no surprise (though, when they finally become apparent, it always does: Surprise! Earthquake time! Hurricane time! Plague time! War time! Meteor time!).

Literalists as usual will be the death of us. Try to talk about real gods and here come the literalists, trotting out childhood images from reading-readiness picture books whose images are to divine reality as kindergarten arithmetic is to quantum physics. "Please," they say, "Do not insult our modern intelligence by talking of gods and other such excrescences of the primitive mind!"

Actually, of course, it doesn’t matter a whit whether we talk of them or not. Or whether we mis-characterize them or not. While it is true they (some of them, anyway) are not entirely above responding to a bit of well-intentioned human attention, on the whole they are as aloof as, well, the second law of thermodynamics (which after all is only Eris in disguise).

Our ignoring of, and ignorance of, them hurts only us because such blindness means we’re just not with your larger cosmic program which their many modes of existence helpfully hint at.

Beware, o beware the literalists, who wouldn’t know a metaphor if it bit ‘em on their Lycra-tucked, lypo-suctioned asses. You want Olympus? With Laurence Olivier as Zeus and Maggie Smith as Hera? Go right ahead. Believe, simpleton, believe the pretty pictures for all you’re worth.