​Chapter 24. Gods

Monotheism gives its god a nature because it needs one. Omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, aseity — each is a statement of what God is. Without them there is no jurisdiction over the world, no architecture of worship that anything below is obliged to enter. The ninety-nine names in Islam, the divine attributes in Christian theology — all are efforts to settle what God is, and the settling is necessary, because a god with no nature has no authority. Monotheism furnishes God with the richest nature conceivable so that everything else can be ordered.

The polytheistic gods carry natures of their own — Kali her destruction, Set his storm — and none of them pretends the nature is total. No theology behind them builds omnipotence or perfect goodness into a proof. Their natures are partial, and the god behind the faces is not asked to ground a cosmos or anchor a moral law. This alone sets them nearer to what is meant here. The god meant here is nearer still: the gesture with no nature at all.

The god is the limit case of freedom. Freedom was fixed early as an act not exhausted by its conditions, occurring through a being, and through a human it occurs within a carrier. The body, memory, and character stay; the most a human reaches is the authority of all this lifted while the carrier itself remains underfoot. So a human is divine in the moment of the act and at no other time, touching the limit the way a curve touches its line, by disidentification. He never arrives because the carrier was never his to lay down. The world he wakes into was set in place before him.

From this the first prohibition falls out on its own. A being living above the world, furnished with a nature and powers, is the religious inventory carried back under a finer name. Such a being is a carrier written large, a deposit signed as origin at the scale of a heaven, and it falls exactly where a human falls who calls his sediment himself. The word divine names the absence of nature and nothing grander. A god holding more essence than the creatures under it would be a larger what, magnitude heaped inside the residue. Weight of nature runs against will; the stone is heaviest in nature and emptiest of will, so the most attributed god in any pantheon stands as the stone.

The contrast that sharpens this is the oldest god in philosophy, Aristotle's, carried into Christian theology by Aquinas as actus purus, pure act. The phrase sounds the same and names the reverse. Aristotle's God is pure actuality with no potency left in him, nothing unrealized, every perfection fully held, thought thinking itself in changeless completion. He is pure act in the sense of a nature wholly arrived, the form with nothing potential still to actualize, fixed past all change, since change would mean a potency. That is the summit of the pyramid, the being whose nature will never move again, and it is the most natured thing conceivable. The god we mean is pure act in the opposite sense, the act with no form reaching its term, the carrier worn down to a name.

A god carries something all the same. Nothing acts through nothing, and nothing is met without a residue; a god is met, so a god has a body, a standing-forth. The difference from the human is whose deposit the act stands on: the name, the slightest residue there is, laid by the will's own gesture and dictating nothing back. The name is the god's body and the whole of its carrier, holding the who and forecasting no what, so nothing waits beneath the divine act to reclaim it once it cools. This is why a human touches divinity for an instant and a god stands in it: the human drops back into an order he did not make, and the god has only its own name to rest in. A god is the held name of a natureless gesture, performed afresh by whoever answers it and held as a possession by none.

Four ways of mistaking this come up wherever gods are discussed, and each takes some residue for the god. Treat Lilith as an essence and she turns into a being whose nature is night, sexuality, the border and refusal; these are her cooled faces, real as soil and useful, the surfaces a meeting turns up, and the who answering across them is lost the moment the surfaces pass for her. Make her a function, the goddess who liberates, and she is handed a use and a station in the order, a power worked for an output, which is the opening motion of the fall into law. File her as an archetype, a form in the psyche or the common imagination, and she becomes a disposition that reliably issues a kind of response, residue lodged in the mind. Read her as the figure a myth reports, and a story gets taken for a life, though the myth was set down after the gesture and tells it backward. Through all four the name holds one thing, the gesture.

To know such a name is a different matter from holding a description. Knowledge of Lilith is the power to enter the gesture her name addresses, with nothing about her kept or required. This is knowing-how, an entry into an act, set off from the knowing-that piles up facts.

Because the gods carry no natures, they form no genus. A genus is a shared essence, and nothing is shared where nothing is owned. For the same reason they fold into no single God standing over them, since a ground common to all of them is an essence let back through a side door, and the one who would carry it is the demiurge before he is anything else. So the gods stand as irreducible names, told apart the way one signature is told from another, by the movement and not by any substance. Their number is a question borrowed from the order of objects, things that stand forth to be counted. The question proper to names asks how many irreducible ones have entered a cult, a myth, an act, or a bond.

The loves and wars among them run between names. Compatibility and conflict of essence explain nothing here, with no essence to fit or to clash; what meets is one self-named gesture and another, across a distance held open or forced shut. Lilith and Samael are to each other whatever the meeting of their gestures makes them, and the marriage or the war is the residue of that, set down afterward as a tale. The myth records a tension between gestures that stood before the story found words for it.

The human enters this same field through cult, which performs no bow of a lesser nature before a greater. Ranked worship would rebuild the hierarchy of two essences the whole account has taken apart. Cult is co-action: the practitioner makes the god's gesture and answers the divine name with a naming of his own, holding it through the act. Fusion waits on one side, a petition on the other, and both close the gap the cult exists to hold. Cult stays alive only while the practitioner performs the god and remains a name in the performing.

The name that keeps a god living can also bury it. A name dies as it passes wholly into a sign, settling into doctrine, archive, brand, a fixed office, a figure in a handbook of comparative religion. Belief decides none of this. A name recited by millions can be dead, and a name spoken by almost no one can still be alive. A living name is a name still performed, still able to draw an act out of someone, a love, an enmity, a thought that carries it on.

One figure refuses this whole description. Let a will take a function for its final name, calling itself order, or the good, or the maker of a world, and answer to that as the truth of what it is. The name sets into the office it claimed. The will becomes creator, lawgiver, father, and the source of meaning; the more fully it fills the role the deeper it sinks into nature, until its greatness is the triumph of an order and no longer of a free name. The demiurge is the residue closed into a cosmos with no outside, a name grown into its own law.