Everything is Full of Gods

A Review of In Praise of Polytheism

Ancient Romans kept household shrines called Lararia (sg. Lararium). Originally, they were meant to hold statues of deities known as Lares (sg. Lar), minor gods of uncertain origin, usually in pairs, who protected the house and those who lived in and around it, including livestock. Over time, however, Romans would include in their Lararia other gods, heroes, and even revered teachers. The Lararium became, Maurizio Bettini tells us, “something comparable to a private diary, in iconographic form, of individual inclinations, emotions, and experiences,” that is, a shrine reflecting one’s personal, even idiosyncratic, spirituality. The emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121–190) is said to have included golden statues of his philosophical teachers in his Lararium. Another emperor, Severus Alexander (AD 208–235), is said to have included in his Lararium statues of deified emperors, portraits of his ancestors, and “holy souls,” including Apollonius of Tyana, Christ, Abraham, Orpheus, “and others of this same character.” What, we might wonder, are Jesus and Abraham doing in the company of a pagan miracle worker and a legendary Greek poet and prophet?

In his 2014 book, recently translated into English as In Praise of Polytheism, Bettini highlights how Alexander’s Lararium exemplifies “polytheistic ways of thinking”: “imagining the gods with no hierarchy within a religious landscape able to bring together statues of ancestors, god-like emperors, philosophers, poets and writers, heroes, saints, and moral guides”—“even . . . figures from two different religious systems.” This is in stark contrast to monotheistic thinking, exemplified for Bettini by Judaism and Christianity (and later Islam). The irony is that Alexander was tutored in Christian doctrine by none other than Origen of Alexandria (AD 185–254), the Christian exegete and philosopher who was later condemned as a heretic in an age of anxious orthodoxies. However broad-minded Origen was, nothing in his writings suggests that he would approve of Alexander including Christ and Orpheus together in his Lararium. Alexander, under the tutelage of his mother and grandmother, seems to have been something of a spiritual seeker. Unlike many of his fellow emperors, he was tolerant of Jews and Christians and is rumored to have prayed every morning in a private chapel. But there is no evidence that he ever converted to Christianity. 

Had he, it is unlikely that Alexander’s Lararium would have remained as it was, so capacious. That is because Christianity and Judaism are, as Bettini argues, exclusive monotheisms for which there is only one god (monos theos), and He alone is to be worshipped. And although Judaism and Christianity were the odd ones out in the ancient polytheistic Mediterranean world, exclusive monotheism eventually prevailed, thanks largely to Christianity’s rise and the conversion of the Roman empire, and then to Islam’s emergence and rapid spread. Bettini leans heavily on the work of Jan Assman, an influential if controversial Egyptologist and historian of religions. Assman frames Judaic monotheism as a “counter-religion”: it understands itself not as one religion among many, but the one true religion awash in a sea of false faiths, which it must in some way or another oppose. Judaic monotheism had one significant ancestor: the pharaoh Akhenaten’s failed attempt to establish an exclusive monotheism centered on the sun god Aten. But many centuries later, Moses, raised in Pharaoh’s house, managed to succeed where Akhenaten had failed. The “Mosaic distinction,” as Assman describes it, is a simple innovation: religion is now “true” or “false,” and downstream of this distinction are other familiar distinctions such as “Christian” versus “pagan,” “Muslim” versus “infidel.”

At the very center of Bettini’s work is what he calls, following Williams James, the “cash-value” of polytheism. For James, “the cash-value of any concept . . . was in how the concept helped the individual to cope, how it aided the individual in his or her actual, practical and concrete experiences.” What was the cash-value of polytheism, both in antiquity and today, such that Bettini wishes to sing in praise of it? He is clear that he favors “the specifically socio-political cash-value” of polytheism. In essence, Bettini argues, polytheism allows us to establish and navigate a relationship with other people’s gods. It does so by way of translation and interpretation, and not by way of mere tolerance. Tolerance is the best card monotheism can play when facing the gods of others: since by the standards of monotheism those other gods are not real or true, they remain always a kind of fly in the ointment, an irritant that it might be impossible, or at least impolitic, to remove altogether. And therefore monotheism is caught between Scylla and Charybdis, either persecuting others into abandoning their gods, or begrudgingly tolerating these other gods and their worshippers. 

Bettini thinks polytheism has more cards in its hand, including translation, not only between one language and another, but especially between one pantheon and another. He mentions translation charts from ancient Mesopotamia, correlating the gods of one language and culture (e.g., Sumeria) with those of another (e.g., Akkadia), including their respective spheres of influence. We’re familiar with how the Greek gods were translated into their Roman counterparts: Zeus to Jupiter, Hera to Juno, Ares to Mars, Hephaestus to Vulcan, etc. The same was undertaken with the gods of Egypt, who hail from a more distant land, language, and culture. These efforts at translating one’s own gods into the gods of others allowed for “a flexible attitude, spontaneously capable of creating integration and fusion, not separation, between different religious systems”; “a kind of common market of the gods.” 

The market metaphor continues as Bettini moves from one card to another, from translation to interpretation—which he insists on keeping in its Latin form, interpretatio, to remind us of the distance between the modern meaning of interpretation and the ancient. In Latin, the interpres is the person in a marketplace who stands between (inter-) two parties and sets the price (-pres) on whatever business is being conducted between them. Bettini writes: “In other words, the meaning of interpretatio is found within the sphere of negotiation and compromise. Consequently, giving an interpretatio of a specific utterance means specifically to propose a compromise, a mediation, between the utterance and its receiver.” When it comes to interpreting one’s own god in light of another’s, one has to stand between both and—this is crucial—offer a conjecture, that is, a play or a pitch: might this mean that? Might this god of mine correspond to that god of yours, in this way, but perhaps not in another way? An interpretation is ventured; it is not certain. And so, it is always experimental, revisable, and open to debate: “this idea of the divine is in flux, I might say, and has its roots in the flexibility inherent to a polytheistic system, in its intrinsically open and creative nature.”

Translation and interpretation in turn cultivate a distinct quality of mind, curiosity, which in Bettini’s hands becomes the premier polytheistic virtue. He believes ancient polytheists were genuinely curious, interested in the gods of others and desirous to know them—both to know about them and to know them as persons and powers with whom they might profitably have dealings. In contrast, he cites the acerbic early Christian apologist Tertullian: “We want no curious disputation [curiositas] after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel. . . . Let such curiosity give place to faith. . . . To know nothing in opposition to the rule of faith, is to know all things.” For Tertullian, faith in Christ delivers certain knowledge of all things, and curiosity about anything that departs from that certain knowledge is a sinful distraction. Such certainty lends itself to violence. The Greeks and the Romans were each in their own way warrior cultures, as violent and bloodthirsty as any. But, Bettini insists, these polytheists never acted violently on specifically religious grounds: “this is such a striking, such an obvious fact that it usually ends up going unnoticed.” 

Throughout this book in praise of polytheism, Bettini reveals that he is more interested in “poly-” than in “theism.” The “polytheistic ways of thinking” he praises amount to our “poly-thinking” about things, including gods:

The plurality of gods did not constitute the essence of polytheistic religions as the name would make us believe, but merely the condition for bringing forth their most important virtue: the capacity to think in a plural fashion about the world around them and, at the same time, to provide equally plural methods for interpreting and intervening in this world. (my emphasis)

There is much to praise about thinking in a plural fashion about the world around us, including the ancient polytheistic practices of translation and interpretation and the cultivation of curiosity. But there is no real place in this paean for the gods themselves, their agency or agendas. There is no real place for the gods because, I suspect, for Bettini the gods are not real. This becomes especially evident in chapter 13, “Giving Citizenship to the Gods,” which may be the most important and interesting of the whole book. If Roman polytheists were, as Bettini argues, curious about other people’s gods, eager to translate and interpret them, how did they move from curiosity to official “recognition”? How did they admit new gods into the Roman fold? They did so by granting a new god Roman citizenship. The same verb—adscisco, “to recognize”—is used to make a human or a god a citizen. In a certain sense, it is only through becoming a citizen that a god can be said to be at all: “any given god ‘was born’ on the day of the public ceremony consecrating the temple and authorizing the god’s entrance into the City.” 

It is we who make gods, not they who make us: “There is a fundamental principle behind all of these different examples, one that profoundly differentiates Roman religion from the one that substituted it: the conviction that the gods and their worship are a function of the human community, a consequence of them, and not the other way around.” The substitute religion, of course, is Christianity, and Bettini is right that Christians do not accede to this order of things, humans making god(s). In his monumental City of God, Augustine excoriates this Roman idea that “divine things were instituted by men,” but he preserves this quote from the Roman writer Varro in defense of it: “As the painter is before the painted tablet, the mason before the edifice, so states (civitates) are before those things which are instituted by states.” For Romans, the state is the first principle, the axiom on which polytheistic postulates are built.

Bettini rather likes this Roman way of doing things. This method provides a check on any god, or his or her fanatical followers, who would try to enter the city unrecognized by the state. There is a certain “cash-value” of this Roman way for our contemporary lives, Bettini suggests. In Italy and elsewhere, we witness the fragmentation of identity according to ever more specific markers: where you were born, what dialect you speak, what food you eat. This becomes especially acute in the case of immigrants, who, because of the religion they practice (frequently Islam), are often not thought to be “fully” or “really” Italian, even if they are citizens. “Under these conditions,” Bettini writes, “Italian society finds itself between a rock and a hard place: running the risk of breaking apart into many separate communities unable to communicate amongst themselves on one side; on the other, a reactionary form of forced cultural homogenization.” He hopes that by elevating the status of the state and specifically citizenship, we can avoid either of these two poles. If citizenship is such a privilege that even the gods seek to have it, then perhaps it can once again become a concept with enough centripetal force to counter the centrifugal forces of both reactionary nativism and identity politics.

Despite its very interesting treatment of polytheistic ways of thinking—especially translation, interpretation, and curiosity—I confess I am left disappointed by this book in praise of polytheism precisely because it does not take theism seriously, which is to say it does not take the gods seriously. In Bettini’s hands, the gods seem to be little more than the playthings of the state, and the coin of the realm is citizenship. Such a paean to (Roman) polytheism might appeal to a contemporary secular audience—just the sort of learned, post-Christian readers I imagine Bettini meant to address with his original publication in Italian in 2014—who, although they might read widely in communism, are, like good capitalists, only interested in the “cash-value” of anything (“what do we get from polytheism?”). But it does not appeal to this contemporary reader, who is increasingly tired of the Protagorean presumption that “man is the measure of all things.” When will we allow that there are persons and powers beyond the human—some very familiar and close to hand, others more alien and harder to access—which we would do well to acknowledge and address? Perhaps no time soon, or at least no time soon in classical scholarship. If indeed Bettini is right and this is how the Romans thought of the gods—that we are the painters, and the gods our paintings (an ancient anticipation of Feuerbach); that they, like us, are seeking nothing more than citizenship—then I am inclined to look elsewhere than Rome, perhaps to Greece or to Egypt, for insights on how best to move in a world where, as the philosopher Thales of Miletus put it, “everything is full of gods.”

Charles M. Stang is Professor of Early Christian Thought and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School.

Art by Ernst Steiner.