Occultation and Revelation
Idols, Eve and the Mother of God
Eidolons
It is hard for us to even grasp the concept of worshipping an idol, and easy to scoff at those who did because we don’t understand what is really meant by this.
Idol comes from the Greek “eidolon” which means a figure or representation. It derives from “eidos,” the word originally used to refer to Plato’s forms. The words “idol” and “idea” both derive from this.
Drawing a link to the term “model” might make the concept of the “idol” more intelligible. Model has the same definition: a representative instance. But it also has the advantage of being a term we use elsewhere.
The word “archetype,” a synonym of “prototype,” shares the same meaning. Both referred to primary instantiations of something which were then copied.
It is easy to imagine someone religiously exalting a role model, supermodel or scientific model. But this does not explain why you would worship a statue.
The veracity of the Old Testament accusation — that ancient pagans worshipped images — has been questioned as of late. The Greek deities were called the Olympians because they dwelt on Olympus which could only be true if they were not the effigies in the temples.
Many pagans appear to have had a quite sophisticated grasp of representation. They understood, at least in practice, that the god of the sun could be in the sky and his temple at the same time. Moreover, they must have known the same god could be instantiated in multiple temples simultaneously. Likewise, if one such image was destroyed, they did not suppose the god had been killed. It seems that Plato explicated a metaphysical system that was already understood implicitly, which is why the intellectual elite of that time were receptive to what he said.
So the question is: what’s the difference between a pagan idol and a Christian icon, assuming a meaningful difference even exists?
Ultimately, the accusation made in scripture is not that the pagans worshipped statues, it’s that they worshipped things of their own creation and that this is no different from worshipping the statues themselves. You can compact this for ease of understanding into “they worship statues” because this is spiritually true.
The fact that the pagans could use the metaphysics of representation does not necessarily mean they always understood it theoretically. The sense that storms, kings, bulls, eagles and the planet Jupiter are manifestations of the same principle is felt before it is understood.
That a pagan priestess can ritually become the person of Ishtar and a Christian priest, the person of Christ is an observed reality first and codified theology second. The question then is whether we are looking at consistencies in the theology of representation or in the phenomenology from which it is derived.
Put another way: did these pre-Christian cultures truly use representation, or did representation use them?
Sophia and Phantasia
The name, Sophia, is usually translated as “wisdom” as in philosophy (philo-sophia, love of wisdom) but it often means something more like technical/practical skill. Here is an ideal definition: the capacity to realize.
This captures its philosophical and practical aspects with a double meaning and brings the ancient word fully into the present.
The fall of Sophia is said to have occurred because Sophia either tried to create or contemplate God without her counterpart, the Logos, which results in the birth of the demiurge. This rhymes with the stories of both Eve and the Mother of God: Eve falls into error and her firstborn builds the first city. Mary does not fall into error and her firstborn, builds the New Jerusalem.
I spoke in a previous post about phantasia, the word often rendered as “imagination” in the writings of the church fathers. It has a meaning very similar to eidos.
The diagram below presents the relationship between the eidolon (middle) and the principle it instantiates (left).
The veil in the temple symbolizes the barrier between humanity and the divine and so it is traditionally said that Mary, who veiled God in the human form is the human embodiment of this veil. The symbolism of the grail and of Christ’s physical body as the temple is the same. Both are barriers around the divine presence. This is related to virginity as a symbol of both protection and wisdom, as it represents preserving the purity of something sacred.
It is through Mary that we see Christ and through the imagination that we “see” the word of God when we read scripture. This is why to “conceive” of something is to hold it in the imagination.
We may say then that Sophia is the imagination in general, whose fall and redemption are revealed in the persons of Eve and Mary respectively. Of course I do not mean to dissolve the distinction between these two, but rather to present them as models of the way the fall and redemption of the individual soul, Sophia, takes place.
Eve is related to phantasia; the image as itself and dissociated from its meaning. The Mother of God is related to revelation; the image as a representation of something greater than itself.
The Snake Gods
In Biblical Hebrew, the word Nahash in Genesis can be read several ways. It can mean “serpent,” but it can also mean “shining one” or “deceiving one” depending on how it is read as there was no notation system for vowels at the time.
