A Reaction to Kirsch's God Against the Gods

If you like reading about Emperor Julian, you might like this book.

I began to read God Against the Gods in the basement of the Smith College library during thirty-minute breaks between classes as a reward for making progress on some of my papers, and I consumed much of it in the B-level room with the snack machines and whirring heating systems as people walked in and out for their paper-writing fuel. I read a chapter at a time, never checking it out because I needed to barricade my room against distractions, haunting the BL 200 section. The copy I secured afterward came from an Amazon.com used books associate; it contains a lot of notes for the first two chapters before the original reader fell silent or stopped reading. This is a sampling of what the previous reader underlined:

• “[M]onotheism insists that the other gods to whom worship is offered are not merely inferior in power or stature ... they are false ... even demonic .... there is but one God” (10).
• “To worship the wrong god ... is punishable by death” (10).

They underlined only the portions that describe the Christian world view, a summary of everything many polytheists find objectionable or even downright rude about intolerant monotheism. The original reader elaborated on his or her writings in the margins: “monotheistic approach to faith is cruel,” s/he says and—one of the most perplexing statements I think I have found in a used book—“This snobbism, this SUPERIORITY ATTITUDE → Repulsive!” Perhaps a fellow polytheist decided to vent at the naked portrayal of monotheism's flaws, but the individual could have been an irate monotheist. Some Internet reactions state that Jonathan Kirsch's arguments in God Against the Gods are anti-Christian; perhaps this reader, too, expected something that glorified monotheism at the expense of what came before.

“Anti-Christian” can sometimes be a synonym for “balanced and BS-free”; the arguments and ratings given by those inflamed people do not provide effective arguments against the book. In fact, any argument criticizing the book for sympathizing with polytheism makes it more valuable to me, and I agree with one of the book's goals: to highlight the struggles of the past with an aim to speak out against present-day extremist monotheism. “[T]he roots of religious terrorism are not found originally or exclusively in Islamic tradition,” Kirsch writes. “Quite the contrary, it begins in the pages of the Bible, and the very first examples of holy war and martyrdom are found in Jewish and Christian history” (3). As Kirsch develops his argument, he pits the intolerant monotheism against an open, tolerant polytheism, reflecting many opinions Pagan bloggers have made this month about the value of spiritual inclusiveness in our various pagan and polytheistic faiths. One-True-God exclusivity has no place in polytheism, even for mystery sects such as the Orphics, because all gods deserve some consideration.

The section of this book I found most enjoyable was Chapter Two: What Did Pagans Do? In fact, I recommend any individuals interested in understanding the polytheistic world view to check out these pages. Kirsch argues that most arguments about classical paganism are wrong. “The awkward and ironic truth is that the rituals against which the biblical authors rant and rave bear a striking resemblance to some of the approved beliefs and practices of monotheism as they are depicted in the Bible. What pagans did, as it turns out, was not so very different from what the pious worshippers of the Only True God did” (59). The assessments he makes—while some who believe that every folk magician is a Medea waiting to happen may disagree—are generally well-founded and illuminating.

And then the rest of the book happens. Reading it made me feel anger sometimes, but also horror and resentment. Towards the end, I felt despair at the death of Julian and anger at the person who killed him—most acutely at the Church, which flaunts his death, and the people who consider him a depraved person instead of the brilliant philosopher and defender of the old religion he was. The rise of monotheism seems so improbable and against reason, yet here we are today living in a world where people murder one another for believing in the wrong god and children learn intolerance from an early age. Monotheists, too, must feel uneasy and even angry when they read this because Kirsch does not give them the glory they found in the state-mandated history texts and Sunday sermons.

Layout - 4/5
Editing (Grammar, spelling, formatting) - 4.5/5
Content - 3.5/5
Readability - 4.5/5
Overall - 4/5