Deity

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A deity is a god or divine being: a power held to stand above the human and the natural order, owed worship and capable of acting on the world. The word descends through Old French deité from Late Latin deitas, “godhood” or “divine nature” — a noun the Latin Fathers minted from deus, “god,” to render the Greek theotēs, and which Augustine pauses over in the City of God as a coinage forced on Latin by the need to name divinity in the abstract. Two senses are folded into the single English word from the start: deus, a god — a being one might address — and deitas, godhood itself, the quality that makes a being divine. The entry that follows holds both: the god, and the godhood.

The “Zeus of Otricoli,” a Roman marble bust after a 4th-century BC Greek original, Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican — a deity conceived as a being one might address. Photograph by Jastrow, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Behind deus lies a far older shape. Comparative philology traces it, and its cognates across the Indo-European languages, to a Proto-Indo-European root dyeu-, “to shine,” and so “the bright daytime sky.” That root threw off two distinct descendants, and the difference between them organizes much of what the concept later becomes. One is a proper name, Dyēus — the personified luminous sky, the “sky father,” surviving as Vedic Dyaus Pita, as Greek Zeus, and in the Latin Iuppiter (from Diēspiter, “sky-father”). The other is a derived adjective, deiwós, “celestial, heavenly one,” which became the ordinary word for a god: Latin deus and dīvus, Sanskrit devá (the deva class of Vedic and Hindu gods), Lithuanian dievas, Old Norse Týr — the last preserved in English in the day-name Tuesday. So Zeus and deva are not the same word reaching the same place; one is the name of a particular sky-god, the other the class-word for the heavenly ones as such. The etymology records what the concept never quite loses: the divine fixed to light, to height, to the heavens — the gods are, before anything else, the bright ones above.

Where the gods are many

What it means to call something a deity depends sharply on how many there are taken to be. In polytheist systems — Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Vedic, Norse, and the many living traditions of West Africa, of India, of the Pacific and the Americas — deities are numerous and distinct, each with a domain, a temperament, a story, a place: gods of storm and of grain, of the threshold and the forge, of love, of war, of the dead. They are greater than humans without being unlimited. They are born, they quarrel, they suffer and sometimes die; they have parents and consorts and rivals; they can be flattered, petitioned, and bargained with. The relation is one of exchange — the offering given so that the favor may be returned, faith kept with powers that are real, local, and many. A pantheon is less a list than an order: the gods are ranked, married, and federated, and the cosmos is the settlement among them.

Indra, king of the Vedic gods, mounted on his elephant Airavata; South Indian painting, early 19th century. In the Rig Veda sovereignty passes from one deva to the next as each is hymned in turn. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Even within polytheism the arithmetic is rarely flat. A tradition may exalt one god above the rest without denying the others — the worshipper turns to a single deity as supreme while the pantheon stands undiminished around. The philologist Max Müller, working on the Rig Veda, gave this its names: henotheism (1860), the devotion of one worshipper or one people to one god among many; and kathenotheism (1865), the Vedic habit by which each god in turn is hymned as if he were the highest, sovereignty passing from Agni to Indra to Varuna as the hymn requires. The single supreme and the many subordinate are not a contradiction inside such a system but its native grammar. The lines between a full god and a lesser divine power — a daimon, a hero, a deified ruler, an ancestor raised to a shrine — are drawn differently in every culture and are often deliberately permeable; the taxonomy of the lesser divine belongs to the entries on the angel and the demiurge, and the act of taking a mortal up into godhood to its own concept, apotheosis.

Where there is held to be one

The monotheist framing is different in kind, not only in number. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam the word names a single God held to be the source of everything else, without rival or equal, and the question shifts from which deity to address to what may truthfully be said of the one there is. This God is not the largest member of a class of gods but stands outside the class altogether: not a being among beings but the ground of being, on whom all else depends and who depends on nothing. The classical attributes follow from that single move. Such a God is held to possess aseity — existence from itself, uncaused, necessary by its own nature — together with simplicity, eternity, immutability, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. These are not separate powers added to a god but the consequences of refusing to let the divine be one item in the inventory of things.

The Tetragrammaton, the four-letter divine name YHWH, set within a Trinitarian diagram; 12th-century manuscript of Petrus Alfonsi’s Dialogi contra Iudaeos (c. 1109). In monotheist thought the one God is named only with difficulty. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Press the claim and language begins to fail. If God exceeds every category drawn from creatures, then the predicates that fit creatures — large, wise, present, good — fit God only by stretching past their ordinary sense, and the safest speech becomes negative: saying what God is not, stripping away every finite attribution until what remains is named only by what it surpasses. This is the via negativa, the apophatic turn, and serious monotheist theology keeps arriving at it — in Maimonides’ insistence that only negations may be predicated of God, in the Pseudo-Dionysian piling-up of denials, in the Islamic tanzīh that guards God from likeness. The grammar of unsaying is its own discipline and has its own concept, apophatic theology; the point here is only that the one-God framing presses toward it by structural necessity, where the many-gods framing does not. A god one can name and address need not be unsayable. The God who is the source of names is another matter.

The distinction is not simply transcendence against immanence. Monotheisms hold their one God to be both utterly beyond the world and intimately within it — nearer, the Quran says, than the jugular vein. The contrast with polytheism is rather that the one God’s transcendence is absolute and its immanence total at once, so that the same being is wholly other and wholly present, while a polytheist god is local in both directions: present here, absent there; mighty in its domain, powerless outside it. Where the divine is identified with the whole of what is, the framing slides toward pantheism; where it is held both to contain the world and to exceed it, toward the position later called panentheism — and the boundary between a transcendent creator, an immanent indwelling, and an outright identification of God with the cosmos is one the traditions police with care.

The Hermetic seam

The Hermetic writings sit exactly on the seam between these two worlds.

Hermes Trismegistus, marble floor inlay by Giovanni di Stefano (c. 1488), Siena Cathedral. The Hermetic God is held to be “beyond all name” yet present in everything that is. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Hermes Trismegistus, addressing his son Tat in the treatise Mead titled Though Unmanifest God is Most Manifest, holds together what the two framings keep apart. The God of the Corpus Hermeticum is “the God beyond all name” and yet the one who “manifests through all things and in all”; were he manifest, the text reasons, he would not be, for whatever is made manifest has come to be, while the Unmanifest forever simply is and makes all else manifest. He is at once “the one of no body, the one of many bodies, nay, rather He of every body,” so that “there is naught in all the world that is not He.” And because he is the father of all names, he himself has none — every name is his, therefore no name is his.

This is neither the bargained-with god of the pantheon nor merely the unsayable God of strict negation. It is a divinity that is most present precisely in being most hidden, known by mind alone yet legible in the order of the stars, in the courses of sun and moon, in the fashioning of a child in the womb — the treatise reads the body’s intricate workmanship as proof of an unseen Worker, refusing to “deprive works of Worker.” In the wider Hermetic frame the divine is reached through the nous, the mind that is itself a spark of God and so the only faculty that can “see” the unmanifest, “in that it is itself unmanifest.” Here the one and the many are not rivals: the supreme is the source from which all proceeds by a kind of overflow, a pattern the later Neoplatonists would systematize as emanation from the One, and which lets a single divine principle stand above many gods without abolishing them. The Hermetic God is one and all-pervading — beyond name yet present in everything that is.

Deity as a comparative category

Set beside one another, these framings show “deity” to be less a single idea than a comparative category — a tool of the study of religion rather than a claim within any one faith. Ninian Smart, mapping the dimensions of the sacred across traditions, treated the tendency to recognize and worship the divine as a recurring feature of human culture without supposing that the divine means one thing wherever it appears. The category is useful, and it has sharp edges. The line between a god and a lesser divine being is drawn differently in each setting; the worship owed to deity — and the careful gradations within it, the adoration reserved for God alone marked off from the veneration of lesser holy figures — is itself a doctrinal matter, treated under latria; and the cultic forms through which gods are served belong to the concept of cult.

Above all the convenient sorting of traditions into “polytheist” and “monotheist” flattens systems that fit neither slot cleanly. It collapses the one-supreme-principle-above-many of Neoplatonism, of Vedic henotheism, of the Hermetic nous, into the same bin as a flat pantheon; and it collapses the one-God-known-under-many-names of Brahman glimpsed through its countless aspects, or of a single deity worn by many cultic masks, into a confused plurality. Between strict polytheism and strict monotheism lie the henotheist, the kathenotheist, the emanationist, the pantheist, and the panentheist — gradations the binary cannot register. The figure of the divine, set against the human, is among the most widely shared features of religion; what is meant by it is not one thing but a family of answers, each precise in its own setting.

Sources and scholarship

The reconstruction of the Indo-European divine vocabulary — the root dyeu-, the sky-father Dyēus, and the derived deiwós that becomes the common word for a god — is set out in J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (Oxford, 2006), which distinguishes the proper name from the appellative and traces both across the family. For the comparative category itself, Ninian Smart’s Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs (HarperCollins and University of California Press, 1996) anatomizes the divine across traditions through his seven dimensions. The philosophical analysis of what qualifies a being as God — the contrast of theistic and non-theistic concepts, and of the personal-omnipotent God of classical theism against impersonal absolutes — is surveyed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Concepts of God, where the personal, omnipotent, omniscient God of classical theism is set against the impersonal absolutes of other systems; the distinctive negative turn of monotheist theology is developed under apophatic theology. Max Müller’s coinages henotheism and kathenotheism arose from his work on the Rig Veda in the 1860s and entered comparative religion as the standard names for worship that exalts one god without denying the rest. The primary Hermetic statement of the unmanifest-yet-most-manifest God is hosted in G. R. S. Mead’s 1906 translation, Though Unmanifest God is Most Manifest.

→ In the library: The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — V. Though Unmanifest God is Most Manifest

→ Related: Apophatic Theology · The One · Nous · Hermes Trismegistus · Emanation · Zeus · Deva · Corpus Hermeticum · Neoplatonism · Immanence · Pantheism · Brahman · Latria · Religion · Cult