Anthropomorphism and Superstition

The Divine, the Daemonic, and Evil

It is a common enough mistake to reduce ancient people to gullibly intimidated by the monsters of their mythologies, including the bad behavior of their gods.¹ There are many reasons we likely ignore the more sophisticated critiques that ancient people had of the broad category of deisidaimonia or superstitio, excessive fear of divine malevolence in heaven and earth, as well as of the unreliability of myth. One reason might be that when we feel a sense of cultural inferiority, and dependence is a form of that feeling that can make us self-conscious about our stature in comparison to those we inherit from just as easily as it can make us unduly admire them. Another reason in a specifically Christian context might be that we look back on the Hellenistic and Roman worlds in particular as something that we (read: Christians) have conquered, and unlike the impetus that we have had to repent about this kind of rhetoric with Jews, who remain a living community, the living descendants of the Greeks and Romans are by and large Christians of Orthodox or Catholic persuasion, who are also happy to demonize their pagan past when the occasion calls for it. (There are, I will observe, Greek and Roman neopagans, but they are such a small, novel, and disorganized community globally speaking that I will not treat them here for expediency.) So I have heard homilies preached in all the major varieties of contemporary Christianity on how the gods of the Greeks were immoral and stupid, or how Greek mythology is illogical, and so, thank God, now we have true religion and ethics of the Judeo-Christian sort; or, if some allowance is made for Greek philosophy as having inched away from traditional religion towards the fuller truth eventually revealed to be Christianity, then nevertheless we have to do some kind of distancing act between the revelatory power of the latter over against the former.