contamination of mythic fancy. Radin opposed this sublime
figure to the figure of the transformer, a nonethical, material-
istic, and dynamically dramatic figure who fascinated the
more pragmatically inclined religious mind. Robert H.
Lowie, who examined supreme beings in his Primitive Reli-
gion (1924), was not so much concerned with the historical
origin of the idea of supreme being. Admitting its antiquity,
he insisted on the need to consider it as an idea on its own
merits, quite apart from notions of spirit, ghost, ancestor, or
mana.
Nathan Söderblom, a great specialist in Iranian reli-
gions, also abandoned the quest for the historical origins of
religion in favor of a threefold typology of religions distin-
guishing ethnic religion from mysticism of infinity and from
prophetic revelation. He denied any connection between
what he termed “primitive high gods” and the supreme be-
ings of monotheisms. Since the high gods remained remote
from their world and absent from cult, they appeared to him
to be abstract reflections upon the origin of creation. Far
from being true divinities, they were a rational construct of
an “originator” (Urheber). In Das Werden des Gottesglaubens:
Untersuchungen über die Anfänge der Religion (1926), he pos-
tulated a different origin in human experience for the idea
of a supreme being in the religions “of the Book.” In these
traditions, prophets interpreted their experience of a divine
will making itself felt in both the legal and political arenas
of daily life as an experience of the supreme (that is, most
powerful and authoritative) being. This contrasts with the
primitive notion of supreme being, which was, in his view,
developed in response to questions about the origins of
things.
Gerardus van der Leeuw employed several of Söder-
blom’s key concepts in his treatment of supreme beings in
“Die Struktur der Vorstellung des sogenannten Höchsten
Wesens” (1931). Later, in Phänomenologie der Religion
(1933), van der Leeuw extended the basic cognitive catego-
ries that Söderblom thought lay behind the concept of su-
preme being into a more refined Gestalt psychology of reli-
gion. The supreme beings outside monotheisms were an
outgrowth of the basic cognitive structure of origination.
Following Preuss, van der Leeuw also argued that these su-
preme beings, these high gods, preserved the world order by
serving as systematic expressions of the mystical unity on
which the conception of the world of everyday experience
was grounded.
Like Söderblom and Preuss, van der Leeuw considered
the question of the nature and structure of supreme beings
in isolation from the history of the idea and the historical sit-
uations of particular expressions of supreme beings. An in-
trinsic element of such supreme beings is their otiosity, their
remoteness. Whatever form a supreme being may take,
whether sky god, weather god, or animal in form, it is always
a form that remains in the background of the religious psy-
che. According to van der Leeuw, the supreme being created
the world but now remains uninvolved with it in any practi-
cal way. He is looked upon as a being who in the past accom-
plished something extraordinary but who will never act in
such a way again. Whereas Andrew Lang and Wilhelm
Schmidt believed that the supreme being suffered mythic
distortions accrued throughout history, van der Leeuw ar-
gued that the supreme being, as a structure of the religious
psyche, exists outside history.
Raffaele Pettazzoni. It was Raffaele Pettazzoni who
proposed that ambivalence is an essential component of the
structure of supreme beings. Reappropriating the historical
vision of Giovanni Battista Vico, who emphasized that every
religious phenomenon is also a “genomenon” (something
with a temporal history of development) and that the truths
of human history are especially accessible through ideas
forged in the symbolic terms of their time (“verum et factum
convertuntur”), Pettazzoni embarked on an enormous study
of the historical expressions and forms of supreme beings.
Nonetheless, he respected the efforts and contributions of
phenomenologists, who studied the forms of supreme beings
in their essential structures.
The essentially ambivalent structure of supreme beings
emerged from Pettazzoni’s study of their historical forms.
On the one hand, one finds relatively inactive creators who
have retired to inaccessible regions once their acts of creation
have been accomplished. On the other hand, one finds in
history testimonies to supreme beings who are extremely dy-
namic overseers of the moral order. These active and omni-
scient sky gods often intervene directly in the course of
human affairs by punishing transgressors of the statutes of
social order with the weapons of weather and flood so charac-
teristic of their own tempestuous natures.
Over the course of time, Pettazzoni argued, these histor-
ically separate features combined into a basic phenomenolog-
ical structure of a dualistic nature. Their common meeting
ground is the sky. Pettazzoni pointed out the primordial and
cosmic quality of the remote and inactive creator. In his
view, those features of a supreme being that emphasize his
transcendence of the world are best suited to express his con-
servation of the very conditions that guarantee its existence
and endurance. Once the world is fashioned, the function
of the creator can only be to prolong its duration and ensure
its stability. Further action would endanger it. Creativity and
passivity are thus indissolubly, if paradoxically, linked with
one another. In this way, Pettazzoni rejected the hypothesis
of Andrew Lang and Wilhelm Schmidt that the remoteness
of the creator is a historical development of mythic fantasy.
On the other hand, criticizing the view held by van der
Leeuw and Söderblom, which claimed that the dynamic fea-
tures of supreme beings are foreign to the otiose figure of a
primordial creator, Pettazzoni asserted that moral omni-
science is also fundamental to the structure of supreme
being. The capacity for moral supervision renders a supreme
being morally relevant to historical and social order. Arguing
that it is not only the God of historical monotheism who ac-
tively involves himself in the course of human events, Pettaz-8878 SUPREME BEINGS