"Fate" and Polytheisms

[endymions_bower]

Whenever and wherever Christianity has confronted polytheisms, it has always sought to identify their Gods with Fate or some similar principle. There is always some textual basis for this, but there is also always reason to be cautious about accepting the picture thus presented, especially if there has been opportunity for Christians to do away with evidence that the pagans may have perceived their Gods as also being the active shapers of fate at least in certain respects. This then can lead to what I think of as the romantic framing of paganism, in which people accept the subordination of their Gods to fate and try to make a virtue out of it, rather than questioning it.

 

I think that fate in polytheism is one of the main issues we need to think through in theology. Why do polytheisms appear to subordinate their Gods to fate or some such principle, to the degree that they do? I look to two issues: first, "fate" can basically mean the actions of other Gods. Since it is not in the nature of polytheisms to erase one God's act by that of another, they instead see the Gods as acting within a field in which they must adjust themselves to one another. I remember a teacher of mine making a point like this about the relationship between Greek nemesis and nemein, the idea of "distribution", speaking of the use of this term to refer to the way that sheep in a pasture "distribute" themselves to occupy the space evenly. He wasn't speaking about polytheism, but the point is readily applicable.

 

The second issue I think has to do with the cosmos-affirming nature of polytheisms. Because polytheisms do not reject the complexity of the world, their Gods are naturally entangled in it, at least in part. This is the basic issue of "immanence" in polytheisms, which also gets overplayed in what I termed the "romantic framing", as though our Gods are not also, in certain respects, transcendent. (Here the sense of "transcendent" need be nothing more than "not reducible without remainder to cosmic forces".)

It is easy to see, however, how the investment of the Gods in temporal institutions makes it a simple matter for monotheisms to breeze in on the back of a broad, nonspecific critique of those institutions and appeal to anybody or any group discontented or disenfranchised in any way. This is a crucial element in proselytism, the idea that in one's traditional polytheism one is the prisoner of one's fate (caste, sex, etc.), whereas in the new religion one is "reborn" as a kind of agent-X, with no past, nothing to determine one, just one's pure will. (It doesn't matter in this context that the only choice actually empowered in this fashion is the choice of conversion, because after that everything is determined again.)