Jean-Luc Marion makes a helpful distinction between icons and idols. An icon is that which catches our gaze and directs us further to God; an idol is that which catches our gaze and keeps it. The command against making false Gods is essentially a command against elevating any phenomenon (that is, something created and not Creator) above the one and only Creator, Who is at once God and Goodness itself. The point is not to make an idol of anything, even (and especially) our own ideas. This is why it was so important for Christians to formulate a Trinitarian doctrine that did not devolve into tritheism. (From many Christian perspectives, then, Christ is not one mode of the same truth that Hermes is a mode of, assuming, of course, that you haven't simply given the name "Hermes" to the true and living God, etc)
I make this point because I think it might be helpful in thinking about our relationship with any gods at all. If your polytheistic worship is one based on a fundamental plurality to the nature of the universe — that, in other words, there isn't simply One Truth-Goodness-Virtue-Love-Being-………… but many — then your loyalty to this or that god needs to be framed in a different way. For instance, it may be that each god is a foundational being for the nature of some good. So Hermes is the god of boundaries and the travelers who cross them, say, meaning that the nature of that "good" — the good of boundaries — depends on Hermes for its existence. Hermes is the creator of those boundaries. But then Athena is the goddess of the good of wisdom, and these are essentially incommensurable goods. It could be that the kind of wisdom Athena provides can somehow direct us away from crossing a boundary that Hermes would tell us to take, and that there simply isn't any way of standing back, objectively, and weighing the two against each other. So the question of whether it would be wrong to worship both Hermes and Athena is really a matter of choice.
In speaking of the gods as gods, I don't mean to reduce them to the ideal of which they are gods. That is, I don't mean to suggest that Athena is simply the personification of wisdom; I would suspect (maybe foolishly) that one who really worships Athena would do so because xe thinks Athena is the very source of wisdom rather than just a means to wisdom. It doesn't really seem like worship to me if you're just using the god as a tool to something better.
When talking about Hermes and Christ, though, the question is whether you really believe that Christ is the second person of a real Trinity, Who creates all things or whether you think Christ is one phenomenon among many or whether you believe that Christ is one creator among many. If you believe the first, then I'd say you probably are a Christian and had best try to see God through Hermes and never worship Hermes unto himself. If you believe the third, then, as with Athena and Hermes, its kind of your choice (maybe theirs, too). If you believe the second, though, then you probably ought not to worship Christ at all.
But maybe your relationship with a god is analagous to a relationship with a lover; one cannot simultaneously devote oneself to two gods at once, perhaps. There's probably some truth to this, but I'm guessing it's a human condition more than a godly condition. Any god that actually gets jealous in the same way we do is probably not worth the time of day. |
