Sacred Origins of Profound Things by Charles Panati

Author:Charles Panati [Panati, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101656075
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 1996-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

MONOTHEISM CATCHES THE GREEK FANCY:

GREECE, FOURTH CENTURY B.C.E.

The Jews really practiced what’s called ethnic monotheism—there is One God, and that God belongs only to his Chosen People. The Greeks saw this as limited.

Greek philosophers, beginning in the sixth century B.C.E., broadened Judaic ethnic monotheism in a direction that would influence Christianity, and later Islam. Basically, the Greeks said: If there is only One God, He then must be the Creator of everybody. And belong to everybody. It was a democratic notion.

The Greeks previously had been pure polytheists. But monotheism impressed them as a sophisticated idea. And philosophically they had been moving toward the idea of “the unity of all things.”

The single best-known document to express the Greek shift toward monotheism is the fourth century B.C.E. hymn to Zeus, by the Stoic philosopher Cleanthes. It praises Zeus as the essence of divinity, creator and ruler of the cosmos, omnipotent, the giver of every gift, father of all mankind. Monotheism was taking hold.

“ISMS.” It’s interesting to note that in the East, no local form of monotheism evolved; any notion of a single, exclusive god was an import from the West. Although in many cases one god eclipsed others in importance—Shiva or Vishnu, for instance—the emphasis never negated other deities.

Two basic “isms” have offered differing views of God for centuries:

DEISM, posited by the Greeks, claims God created the world, set it in motion, and stepped back to watch passively—perhaps bemused. This view would deny all claims of divine providence, miracles, and God’s intervention in human affairs.

Furthermore, deism (from the Latin deus, “god”) claims that the laws of nature and moral laws are discoverable by man, through the use of man’s own rational powers; revelation from God is unnecessary.

THEISM is the basis for the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It regards God as the Creator of the world, who continues to work with his power in the world.

But the Greeks did not buy the idea of God’s absolute dominion over nature and over man. Yes, monotheism was clever as a concept, good for consolidating the many gods in a pantheon, but the One God could not be all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present.

For the Greeks, the monotheistic God served as a unifying principle, in the abstract, satisfying their love for “the unity of all things.” The Jewish God was a personal, knowable Lord, but in Hellenized monotheism, God is absolutely unkn’own: deus absconditus, “god concealed.”

The word “theism” is rooted in the Greek theos, “god.”

PANTHEISM, an entirely different “ism,” is found in the East. Pantheism holds that God is the world, identical to it and indistinguishable from it. Its essence is found in Hinduism, where God—or Brahman—is the sole reality; the world of human sense experience is mere appearance. Illusion.

Origin of the word “pantheism”: Greek pan, “all” + theos, “god.” The word was coined in 1705 by English deist J. Toland. Its roots lie in the much older word “pantheon,” home of “all of the gods.”

Early Christians, as we’re about to see, borrowed aspects of monotheism from the Jews and from the Greeks and gave it a unique triple twist.

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