Invoking the Gods

The appetite of the young for religious experience is leading along exotic paths these days--demons and gurus, mandalas and myths. Syracuse University Religion Professor David L. Miller encountered the phenomenon two years ago when he set out to teach a course on ancient Greek religion: his students asked him what application the Greek gods might have to their lives today. Miller mulled over the question while attending a scholarly symposium, where he heard Radical Theologian William Hamilton say that today's students' spiritual search "looks like polytheism," that the young want "total access to all the gods of men." Now Miller, 38, is himself advocating a return to the gods, but not merely for the young. In a sketchy, exasperating but provocative book, The New Polytheism (Harper & Row; $4.95), he recommends that Western civilization return to the polytheism that attended its birth.

The familiar Judaeo-Christian God, Miller asserts, is indeed dead. In Miller's view, he died much as Prometheus warned that Zeus would die: he usurped power over the other gods whose existence nourished his own. This happened, says Miller, because Christian theology, particularly after the Reformation, became dogmatic and narrow. Miller argues that Jesus himself was neither. He proclaimed that there were "many mansions" in his father's house, and in teaching he used a variety of parables. Complains Miller: "Christian theology has reduced those parables to a few creeds, all of which say the same thing." What is needed is an opening up of Christian thought, even to the extent of incorporating the Greek gods. Stories about the Greek deities, after all, parallel many Christian concepts, says Miller, citing as an example the ransom theory of the atonement as an analogue of Zeus' negotiations with Prometheus.

Why the need for polytheism? Because today many people are discovering "that a single story, a monovalent logic, a rigid theology are not adequate." Among the believers in other kinds of polysolutions are psychological theorists like Norman O. Brown and R.D. Laing, each of whom, says Miller, is a "Martin Luther in the face of psychological orthodoxy." Both Brown and Laing suggest that there can be a number of equally real but mutually exclusive aspects of the self. Healing does not necessarily mean "getting it all together." Indeed, "keeping it all apart" may be the better way. Miller cites at greatest length James Hillman, therapist and author of The Myth of Analysis, who began as a follower of Carl Jung, but goes far beyond him in the variety of archetypes he finds in people. "The"soul serves in its time many gods," Hillman says, and approvingly sees his patients playing out one by one the roles of Athena, Apollo, Asclepius, Eros and dozens of others.

Aphrodite as Playmate. Miller wants to do for religion what Hillman is doing for psychiatry by calling on the gods and goddesses who, Miller says, are the "potency in each of us." His notions are tantalizing but undeveloped, and in a particularly freewheeling last chapter, he admits that his "lines of thinking ... fly into many pieces. " Some of the pieces are nutshell comparisons that are certainly arcane if not goofy ("The military-industrial complex is Hera-Heracles-Hephaestus"). Miller contends that polytheism deepens human experience --and then equates Aphrodite with the Playmate of the Month.

Moreover, although he assails other people's rigidity, Miller severely circumscribes his polytheism by limiting it to the Greek pantheon "simply because," he explains, "willy-nilly, we are Occidental men and women." He fails to consider the psychological utility, for instance, of the richly nuanced popular theology of Roman Catholicism, beneath whose dogma, he concedes grudgingly, may lurk "all the gods and goddesses of the ancient world."* The basic problem of Miller's book is that he has tossed up as a clay pigeon a monotheism that is an arid and abstract doctrine rather than the complex and mysterious vision that it has been, and still is, for many believers.

*Some scholars contend, for example, that the Virgin Mary incorporates attributes of Athena, Artemis, Aphrodite and Persephone. Even more to the point, early Christians invented a St. Hermes.

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