gods absence · gods presence
The tension between divine presence and divine absence constitutes one of the most generative fault-lines in the depth-psychological corpus. The question is not merely theological but ontological and psychological: do the gods depart, or does human perception of them dissolve? Hillman, drawing on Heidegger’s dürftige Zeit, refuses the premise of genuine divine withdrawal, insisting that powers intrinsic to the world’s variety cannot logically vacate it — a position that reframes ‘absence’ as a failure of human attunement rather than cosmic abandonment. Jaynes locates the historical crisis of divine absence concretely: the breakdown of the bicameral mind produced a civilization-wide loss of the hallucinated god-voice, and the ziggurats, psalms, and theodicies of the first millennium BCE are monuments to that bereavement. Vernant illuminates the paradox from the Greek representational tradition — the very project of statuary is to ‘inscribe absence in presence,’ to make invisible powers visible in terrestrial form. Romanyshyn, via Heidegger and Jung, reads divine absence hermeneutically: the gods who have fled leave a ‘scent’ in the ordinary world, making absence itself a mode of haunting presence. Glaz, working empirically, demonstrates that both experiences — presence and absence of God — function as psychologically real poles of religious life, each with distinct affective and relational signatures. The corpus therefore holds these terms not as opposites but as a dialectical couplet, each defining and deepening the other.
Have the gods truly fled? Is this a dürftige Zeit (meager times)? … If they are the world as the powers within its variety, how can they be separated from it?
Hillman challenges the modern assumption that gods can genuinely absent themselves, arguing their immanence in the world’s variety makes departure logically incoherent, and that apparent absence reflects human construction rather than divine withdrawal.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
Why have the gods left us? And since they control everything, why did they shower misfortune upon us? … May the gods who have thrown me off give help, May the goddess who has abandoned me show mercy.
Jaynes identifies the anguished experience of divine abandonment — voiced in the Babylonian Theodicy and later in the Psalms — as the defining psychic consequence of the bicameral mind’s breakdown, inaugurating a new consciousness organized around the felt absence of divine guidance.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976thesis
this paradoxical aspiration exists in order to inscribe absence in presence, to insert the other, the elsewhere, into our familiar universe … evoking absence in presence, revealing the elsewhere in what is given to view.
Vernant argues that Greek statuary was structurally organized around the paradox of making divine absence visible, embedding the invisible other-world within tangible form — a representational task never fully resolved.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis
a sense of the sacred that lingers as an absent presence in the symbol … hermeneutics as a longing for the sacred is for the sake of healing.
Romanyshyn theorizes that hermeneutics is fundamentally driven by the wound of divine absence, the gods’ flight leaving traces — ‘absent presence’ — that the interpretive act pursues as an act of healing and reconnection.
, The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007thesis
many pious people have experienced the presence of God and the absence of God … During the experience of God’s presence, man is aware of His presence … Man who is convinced of God’s presence, can however experience His temporary absence.
Glaz establishes empirically that presence and absence of God constitute two distinct but interrelated poles of lived religious experience, each with characteristic affective signatures and developmental functions within a person’s spiritual life.
, Psychological Analysis of Religious Experience: The Construction of the Intensity of Religious Experience Scale (IRES), 2020thesis
Experiencing God’s absence is conducive to deepening my trust in Him … During the experience of God’s absence, I have the opportunity to better understand myself.
Glaz’s scale items reveal that the experience of divine absence, far from being purely privative, is understood by practitioners as psychologically generative — deepening trust, self-understanding, and openness to others.
, Psychological Analysis of Religious Experience: The Construction of the Intensity of Religious Experience Scale (IRES), 2020supporting
statistical relationship is recorded between the experience of God’s presence (PG) (r=.32, p<.01) and the experience of God’s absence (AG) (r=.18, p<.01) and the sense of meaning in life (PIL).
Empirical data demonstrate that both divine presence and divine absence correlate positively with meaning in life and multiple dimensions of religiosity, confirming their complementary rather than merely oppositional psychological roles.
, Psychological Analysis of Religious Experience: The Construction of the Intensity of Religious Experience Scale (IRES), 2020supporting
The absence of Orpheus belongs to the symptoms of the Weltbild that Western Christian society continues to export … Absent, but present too.
Hillman reads the cultural absence of Orpheus — and by extension polytheistic nature gods — as symptomatic of a Western Weltbild, while insisting that the absent god manifests obliquely through symptomatic behaviors such as animal rights activism.
, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting
huge pedestals for the return of the gods from heaven and not houses for earthly gods as before … a long spiral ramp winding around the core of the tower down which Ashur could walk, when or if he ever landed.
Jaynes reads Assyrian ziggurats as architectural monuments to divine absence — no longer divine residences but landing platforms built in desperate anticipation of gods who have withdrawn to the celestial realm and may never return.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting
It would be downright absurd to maintain that one does not ‘believe’ in Aphrodite, the goddess of love. It is possible to neglect her … but Aphrodite is present, and active, none the less.
Snell argues that for the Greeks, divine presence was self-evident in the fabric of reality — the gods were not objects of belief but of recognition, making their ‘absence’ a form of neglect rather than ontological withdrawal.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
After the Holocaust these gods could not be believed in and so the gods died. More: Belief itself died, leaving open other modes of being with the gods.
Hillman locates a historically specific moment of divine death — post-Holocaust — in which not just particular gods but the structure of Belief itself collapsed, opening a post-credal mode of encounter with the divine.
, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting
The IRES measures a sense of influence of God’s presence or absence on one’s life … correlation coefficients for the experience of God’s presence range from .55 to .64, and for the experience of God’s absence from .17 to .31.
Psychometric analysis confirms that divine presence exerts a stronger empirical correlation with religious life dimensions than divine absence, but both retain statistically significant influence, supporting a bipolar model of the divine-human encounter.
, Psychological Analysis of Religious Experience: The Construction of the Intensity of Religious Experience Scale (IRES), 2020supporting
Jung’s ‘Answer to Job’ exposes a divine deficit: Yahweh ‘lacks a relationship to values.’ … The Homeric text systematically excludes divine subjects from the vocabulary of mortal suffering, marking an ontological boundary in the grammar of value-creation.
Peterson frames divine absence as an ontological deficit — Yahweh’s lack of relationship to values — and reads the Homeric exclusion of gods from mortal suffering grammar as a structural marker of the boundary between divine and human modes of being.
, The Iron Thūmos and the Empty Vessel: The Homeric Response to ‘Answer to Job’, 2025supporting
only among the distant Ethiopians do gods feast with men … it is only the outcome, the turn of events, which gives earnest of the fact that a Stronger One was at work here.
Burkert documents how Greek religion managed divine presence through indirection — gods reveal themselves through effects and brief theophanies rather than sustained co-presence, institutionalizing a structured alternation of divine presence and withdrawal.
, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977supporting
Although she is invisible, like all the gods, Artemis is present at Hippolytus’s side: he hears her voice, he speaks to her, and she r[esponds].
Vernant illustrates through the Hippolytus–Artemis relationship that divine presence in Greek religion is characteristically invisible yet intimately felt — a paradoxical mode that anticipates later depth-psychological formulations of the numinous.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
Two poles: (a) The Presence of the absolute Mystery (Ḥaḍrat al-ghayb al-Muṭlaq; (b) the Presence of the absolute M[anifestation].
Corbin maps Ibn Arabi’s metaphysical architecture as a polarity between absolute Mystery and absolute Manifestation — a framework in which divine presence and absence are not opposed states but complementary ontological poles structuring the five universal Presences.
, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969aside
no divine power be found all this while, that could rectify the things of the world? Or is the world, to incessant woes and miseries, for ever condemned?
Marcus Aurelius voices the experience of divine absence as a practical philosophical question — whether providential power is operative in the world — situating the problem within Stoic cosmological anxiety rather than personal mystical experience.
, Meditations, 180aside