What Is God?

One of the debates we might say between early Christianity and the late Roman Empire was whether or not an emperor could be God. Literally, right? To be deified, to be put in a temple. And you can see why that might happen because that's someone at the pinnacle of a very steep hierarchy who has a tremendous amount of power and influence.

But the Christian response to that was: never confuse the specific sovereign with the principle of sovereignty itself. It's brilliant! You see how difficult it is to come up with an idea like that. So that even the person who has the power is actually subordinate to something else, subordinate to, let's call it, a Divine principle for lack of a better word.

So that even the king himself is subordinate to the principle. And we still believe that because we believe that our president, our prime minister is subordinate to the damn law, whatever the body of law. Right? There's a principle inside that, that even the leader is subordinate to. And without that, you could argue you can't even have a civilized society because your leader immediately turns into something that's transcendent and all-powerful.

And I mean, that's certainly what happened in the Soviet Union and what happened in Maoist China and what happened in Nazi Germany, because there was nothing for the powerful to subordinate themselves to. You're supposed to be subordinate to God.

So what does that mean? Well, we're going to tear that idea apart. But partly what it means is that you're subordinate, even if you're sovereign, to the principle of sovereignty itself. And then the question is: what the hell is the principle of sovereignty?

I could say we have been working that out for a very long period of time. And so that's one of the things that we'll talk about because the ancient Mesopotamians and the ancient Egyptians had some very interesting dramatic ideas about that.

So just for example, very briefly, there was a deity known as Marduk. Marduk, he was a Mesopotamian deity. Imagine this: sort of what happened is that as an empire grew out of the post-Ice Age age, say 15,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, all these tribes came together.

These tribes each had their own deity, their own image of the ideal. But then they started to occupy the same territory, right? And so then one tribe had God A and one tribe had God B. And, you know, one could wipe the other one out. And then it would just be God A who wins.

But that's not so good because, well, maybe you want to trade with those people, or maybe you don't want to lose half your population in a war, something like that! So then you have to have an argument about whose God is going to take priority, which ideal is going to take priority.

What seems to happen is that's represented in mythology as a battle of the gods in sort of celestial space. But from a practical perspective, it's more like an ongoing dialogue: you believe this, I believe this. You believe that, I believe this. How are we going to meld that together?

So you take God A and you take God B, and maybe what you do is extract God C from them. And you say, well, God C now has the attributes of A and B. And then some other tribes come in, and then C takes them over too.

And so you get, like with Marduk for example, he has a multitude of names—50 different names. Well, those are names at least in part of the subordinate gods that represented the tribes that came together to make the civilization.

That's part of the process by which that abstracted ideal is abstracted. You think this is important, and it works because your tribe's alive, and you think this is important, and it works because your tribe is alive.

And so we'll take the best of both if we can manage it and extract out something that's even more abstract that covers both of us if we can do it. And one of the things that's really interesting about Marduk: I'll just give you a couple of his features, but he has eyes all the way around his head.

He's elected by all the other gods to be king God. So that's the first thing that's quite cool! And they elect him because they're facing a terrible threat, sort of like a flood and a monster combined, something like that.

Marduk basically says that if they elect him top God, then he'll go out and stop the flood monster—and they won't all get wiped out. It's a serious threat! It's chaos itself making its comeback.

And so all the gods agree, and Marduk is a new manifestation. He's got eyes all the way around his head, and he speaks magic words. And then he also goes out and, when he fights, he fights this deity called Tiamat.

And we need to know that because the word Tiamat is associated with the word tome, T-H-O-M, and T is the chaos that God makes order out of at the beginning of time in Genesis. So it's linked very tightly to this story.

Marduk, with his eyes and his capacity to speak magic words, goes out to confront Tiamat, who's like a watery Sea Dragon, something like that. It's a classic St. George story: go out and wreak havoc on the dragon.

And he cuts her into pieces, and he makes the world out of her pieces, and that's the world that human beings live in. And the Mesopotamian Emperor acted out Marduk. He was allowed to be emperor in so far as he was a good Marduk.

And so that meant that he had eyes all the way around his head and he could speak magic. He could speak properly. And so that we're starting to understand there at that point the essence of leadership, right?

Because what's leadership? It's the capacity to see what the hell's in front of your face and maybe in every direction. And then the capacity to use your language properly in a transformative manner and to transform chaos into order.

And God only knows how long it took the Mesopotamians to figure that out! And the best they could do is dramatize it. But it's staggeringly brilliant, you know? It's by no means obvious.

And this chaos, this chaos is a very strange thing. This is the chaos that God wrestled with at the beginning of time. Chaos is what? It's half psychological and half real. There's no other way to really describe it.

The chaos is what you encounter when you're thrown into deep confusion, right? When your world falls apart, when you encounter something that blows you into pieces, when your dreams die, when you're betrayed.

It's the chaos that emerges. And the chaos is everything at once, and it's too much for you, and that's for sure! And it pulls you down into the underworld, and all that's where the dragons are.

And all you've got at that point is your capacity to bloody well keep your eyes open and to speak as carefully and clearly as you can. And maybe, if you're lucky, you'll get through it that way and come out the other side.

And it's taken people a very long time to figure that out. And it looks to me like the idea is erected on the platform of our ancient ancestors, maybe tens of millions of years ago! Because we seem to represent that which disturbs us deeply using the same system that we use to represent, like serpents or other carnivorous predators.

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You know we're biological creatures, right? So when we've formulated our capacity to abstract—our strange capacity to abstract and use language—we still have all those underlying systems that were there when we were only animals.

And we have to use those systems; they're part of the emotional and motivational architecture of our thinking. And part of the reason we can demonize our enemies who upset our axioms is because we perceive them as if they're carnivorous predators.

We do it with the same system, and that's chaos itself—the thing that always threatens us, right? The snakes that came to the trees when we lived in them like 60 million years ago. It's the same damn systems!

So the Marduk story is partly the story of using attention and language to confront those things that most threaten us. Some of those things are real-world threats, but some of them are psychological threats, which are just as profound but far more abstract.

But we use the same systems to represent them. It's why you freeze if you're frightened, right? You're a prey animal—you're like a rabbit. You've seen something that's going to eat you. You freeze, and that way you're paralyzed—you're turned to stone—which is what you do when you see a Medusa with a head full of snakes.

Right? You're turned to stone, you're paralyzed. And the reason you do that is because you're using the predator detection system to protect yourself. Your heart rate goes way up, and you get ready to move.

Things that upset us rely on that system. And then the story, the Marduk story for example, is the idea that if there are things that upset you—chaotic, terrible, serpentine, monstrous underworld things that threaten you—the best thing to do is to open your eyes and get your speech organized and go out and confront the thing and make the world out of it.

And it's staggering! When I read that story and started to understand it, it just blew me away that it's such a profound idea. And we know it's true too because we know, in psychotherapy for example, that you're much better off to confront your fears head-on than you are to wait and let them find you.

And so partly what you do if you're a psychotherapist is help people break their fears into little pieces—the things that upset them—and then to encounter them one by one and master them.

And so you're teaching this process of eternal mastery over the strange and chaotic world. And all of that makes up some of the background. We haven't even got to the first sentence of the biblical stories yet, but all of that makes up the background.

So you have to think that we've extracted this story, this strange collection of stories with all its errors and its repetitions and its peculiarities, out of the entire, like, the entire history that we've been able to collect ideas.

And it's the best we've been able to do. And I know there are other religious traditions. I'm not concerned about that at the moment because we can use this as an example. But it's the best we've been able to do.

And what I'm hoping is that we can return to the stories in some sense with an open mind and see if there's something there that we actually need.