(2 of 2)
Aphrodite as Playmate. Miller wants to do for religion what Hillman is doing for psychiatry by calling on the gods and goddesses who, Miller says, are the "potency in each of us." His notions are tantalizing but undeveloped, and in a particularly freewheeling last chapter, he admits that his "lines of thinking ... fly into many pieces. " Some of the pieces are nutshell comparisons that are certainly arcane if not goofy ("The military-industrial complex is Hera-Heracles-Hephaestus"). Miller contends that polytheism deepens human experience —and then equates Aphrodite with the Playmate of the Month.
Moreover, although he assails other people's rigidity, Miller severely circumscribes his polytheism by limiting it to the Greek pantheon "simply because," he explains, "willy-nilly, we are Occidental men and women." He fails to consider the psychological utility, for instance, of the richly nuanced popular theology of Roman Catholicism, beneath whose dogma, he concedes grudgingly, may lurk "all the gods and goddesses of the ancient world."* The basic problem of Miller's book is that he has tossed up as a clay pigeon a monotheism that is an arid and abstract doctrine rather than the complex and mysterious vision that it has been, and still is, for many believers.
*Some scholars contend, for example, that the Virgin Mary incorporates attributes of Athena, Artemis, Aphrodite and Persephone. Even more to the point, early Christians invented a St. Hermes.