About the Gods of the Cynics

For Anna Kalis

In the beginning there was sex. Then came madness. The madness spoke: Let there be light. And behold, it was his boy. And he had become a stranger to him.

Animismus and Monotheismus

Cynics are dialecticians. The world is, thank God, in an ongoing war. For war is father of all things. The primordial substance for Heraclitus, the first dialectician, the first cynic and, many says, the first philosopher, is fire, symbol of constant war. Or of the constant flowing, becoming, the river in which one cannot rise twice.

If this war ends, time ends. We are transients. The war of all things means: all things are ensouled. They are animated with the will to might. Nietzsche, at the end of his active life, doubts that there is such a thing as non-living things at all.

To be matter is to be appearance. At the same time, however, it emerges that natural science is only after appearance, which it treats most seriously as reality.
[Nietzsche, NF-1870,6[4]]

There are no things in themselves. Everything flows. Everything is animated. Everything is: One God!

Monotheism is just another perspective of animism. Animism only another conception of monotheism.

From idolizing

We need representatives of the One God. Without an image, we cannot see God, we cannot love God. Polytheism is the representation of different attributes of the One God. We need to romanticize the world, say the early Romantics. They were, not only in content, but also explicitly cynics. Romanticizing the world means invoking again the God killed with the Enlightenment. To love everything beautiful, to adore everything, to serve everything, to be able to kneel down before everything that we love.

If God could become man, He can also become stone, plant, animal, and element.
[Novalis]

Romanticizing the world, then, means kneeling before a beautiful plant; a beautiful woman¹Of course, I write as a man and make no secret of it. I don’t even try to speak for women, they can do that themselves. And I am not gender-neutral.to idolize her, to swear eternal allegiance to her as a goddess and to keep this oath. Because, free²free after Jesus means here that the author of the so-called John letters is unknown, at least not Jesus himself. But we know that from the gospels also not more surely what comes from Jesus himself or only corresponds to his thinking / acting. And if at all. On the latter it depends only. according to the Cynic Jesus:

Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.
[1 John 4.20]

So we can love God only if we idolize appearances in the — divine — nature. The dialectic of the Cynics and also Stoics is here, that e.g. also the deified woman, for whom her Freier³Unfortunately I don’t know a suitable translation for the old German word „Freier”. It means the lover, freedom here understood as belonging to the loved ones, so the old meaning of freedom is ready to die, is not the One single woman, but despite total devotion always remains only one woman. It is not his child that the Stoic should love, but always realize that she is only one child, only one woman, only ohne blue flower. Nevertheless, the Stoic can give himself to her with full love, ready to die for her. This is the dynamic, the contradictoriness of the dialectic, as the Cynics took it from Heraclitus, the Romantics from the Cynics, Hegel from the Romantics, and Marx from Hegel. Whereby Marx finally robbed the dialectic of its deep truth, with which, of course, Hegel had already begun.

Allahu akbar – God is greater

It is important to correctly translate the famous exclamation in Islam as God is greater. This means he is greater than we can imagine. He is so big that he can also be extremely small. He is closer to us than our own jugular vein, according to the Koran.

Novalis and the other early Romantics suggest not to explore God and the world with spaceships, since the whole infinity of the universe is contained within us.
And Holy Scriptures, say the cynical romantics, are certainly worth reading. But we must also compose our own holy writings, try to put our own God poetically into words.

.Which brings us back to the virtue of the Cynics: Parrhesia: to speak and live the truth about oneself. And that means: to understand life as a way to become God oneself.

So are cynics monotheists? Sure we are.

The Invisible Hand (of God)

Ancient cynism is the mother of anarchy. It initially had a strong influence in Europe for almost 1000 years. Then it was pushed back by Pauline Christianity and with it the increasing belief in the state. With Erasmus of Rotterdam as Luther’s opponent, then with…

• 1
  Of course, I write as a man and make no secret of it. I don’t even try to speak for women, they can do that themselves. And I am not gender-neutral.
• 2
  free after Jesus means here that the author of the so-called John letters is unknown, at least not Jesus himself. But we know that from the gospels also not more surely what comes from Jesus himself or only corresponds to his thinking / acting. And if at all. On the latter it depends only.
• 3
  Unfortunately I don’t know a suitable translation for the old German word „Freier”. It means the lover, freedom here understood as belonging to the loved ones, so the old meaning of freedom