"What do you believe in?"

[endymions_bower]

Q: The question "What do you believe in?", when asked to a polytheist, intuitively feels like a question that does not allow for proper articulation of a polytheist position. Perhaps it is because this question privileges orthodoxy over orthopraxy, but I don't think that could be the core objection to this question. Or I may be wrong here, and this may be a perfectly fine question.

My question is: Does the above question have any assumptions that would privilege a monotheist position, or does this question not carry any philosophical "baggage"?

A: This is a very good question, and one to which different polytheists will definitely give different answers. Certainly when a Christian or a passively-Christianized person asks us what we "believe", or "believe in", there are preconceptions behind the question that are at odds with the nature of our religions, which are not credal. But it is not that there is nothing in which we believe, in another sense, because we do "believe in" our Gods. That is, we believe Them to be real, and to be good, and to be active, somehow, in the cosmos. At the same time, however, we know that even many of those who worship the same Gods as we do may have significantly different ideas about Them, and that isn't a problem for us, typically, though in situations where stress is being placed upon the entire system (e.g., by attempts to undermine it from the outside) it may become more important to articulate what are at least "mainstream" beliefs for us and what are not.

 

Coming from an intellectual background in Platonism, I am not inherently uncomfortable with the language of "belief". Usually this word is used to translate Greek pistis, which is also frequently translated as "faith". Many people assume that this is a strictly Christian concept, but it isn't. Plato already in the Laws (966c) speaks of "faith [pistis] in the Gods". In fact, for late antique pagan Platonists pistis was one of the cardinal virtues. Ironically, it may have been partly in reaction to Christians, who were characterized as "impious" (asebês) or even as "atheists", that this virtue began to be especially emphasized, whereas earlier it was enough to be "pious" (hosios), which the average Hellene would have understood in terms less of belief than of action: doing what was considered ritually appropriate at key moments, and not manifesting contempt for the Gods. Plato, however, as we can see from diverse works, was already trying to push this in the direction of demanding that at least people who were to be in positions of authority in society ought to hold some proper beliefs about the Gods and have some ability to justify these beliefs through rational argumentation, as well (see, e.g., the discussion surrounding the aforementioned passage in the Laws). At the same time, he also recognizes that there is much we do not grasp about the Gods (see, e.g., Phaedrus 246c-d), and this is not destructive for him of piety or of belief. We should try, in his view, to hold beliefs about the Gods that would be pleasing to Them and that are true, so far as we can ascertain, and he clearly believes that this is possible; and we ought to believe as well the things that follow logically from these beliefs, and live accordingly.

 

Some polytheists will say, however, that "belief" or "faith" connotes a kind of dubious position, a state opposed to knowledge and experience, and therefore assert that we ought not to use such language. I can understand this, and in colloquial contexts I often do this as well. For obviously I am not awaiting "proof" of the existence of the Gods; I have it, to the degree that I ever sought it. I can well understand how polytheists would find all such talk completely irrelevant to their religious life. And indeed, these terms in English are distorted and perverse in their usage. We are also not commanded by our Gods to believe certain things at threat of punishment. But to say that we don't have beliefs is not correct, either. This makes it sound as though we simply perform rituals mechanically, and even if this is true sometimes it obviously has never been normative in any polytheism. Polytheisms honor knowledge, not in opposition to belief, but in continuity with it. And this is the original sense of pistis, which comes from peithomai, to be persuaded. Pistis is allowing ourselves to be persuaded by our experience; it is to be open to the Gods, rather than cloaked defensively in skepticism.

 

So as to whether the question of what we "believe in" would privilege a monotheist position, I would say not necessarily, but to your other question, of whether it carries "philosophical baggage", obviously I would have to say that it does. But then, as a philosopher I think that most questions carry such baggage, and that it is frequently not possible to avoid dealing with such baggage at least to some degree. For me, however, there is no harm in saying that I "believe in" my Gods, if it does not lead to my interlocutor haggling about whether my belief is sufficiently justified for them. For it is better that a person believe in the Gods, while not fully understanding that belief, than that they should disbelieve; but it is also better that a person should try to understand their belief than not to try.