Agnosticism IS the most dishonest position

[Belacqua]

the beliefs we feel the surest about are certainly the ones that demand the most scrutiny.

Maybe it makes sense to look at a history of revelation. 

(And my classroom is shut today due to the coronavirus, so I'm free to annoy everyone with history.)

The ancient Greeks had no concept of the subconscious mind. For them, if a new idea popped into your head the only way to explain it was to say that it came in from outside. There were a number of entities which could give you an idea. The most common was the daemon. In those days daemons weren't necessarily evil, as English-language "demons" are. They were just intermediary messengers between us and the higher world. 

If your daemon gave you good ideas, you were lucky. Socrates' daemon, famously, warned him when he was about to do something stupid. The common Greek word for "happiness" is "eudaemonia," which just means "having a good daemon." 

Artists might also be given ideas by muses, and important people could hear straight from the gods.

The Latin translation of "daemon" is "genius." A genius used to be an intermediate spirit giving us ideas. This survives in the English usage "he has a genius for getting into trouble." 

As far as I can tell, the earliest conception of a subconscious mind comes in Plotinus. For him, it is possible for us to know things when we don't know that we know them. He arrives at this conclusion because he believes that the whole world is the One. The real world, the deepest (or highest) metaphysical level, is total unity. We don't see this clearly while we are in our material bodies, just because we have to divide things mentally to understand them. But the separations are imposed by our minds -- reality is one. 

This means that we don't need separate spirits to give us messages. We are integrated into the whole of reality, and the whole of knowledge, but don't currently see it because of our imposed limitations. The limitations are necessary to function in society, but not necessarily permanent or essential to our being. For Plotinus, revelation isn't a message received from "outside" but a sudden unexpected access to a truth we are already connected to. It's like waking up in the night and realizing something that had been staring you in the face all along. 

Plotinus' thought is incorporated into Christianity early on -- at least with Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. For theologians, God is also One, immanent in his entirety in every particle of the universe. (This is what Blake means when he writes about "the world in a grain of sand.") There is no "two" with God. So the image of God "out there" sending a messenger to little me over here is just an analogy. Revelation is an access to a truth which is already present.

Freud, of course, had a classical education and read the Greek texts in the original language. His system was more scientific than that of Plotinus, but the inspiration is clear. For Freud, the individual person is more than the conscious mind -- it is also the unconscious (which is in some way also the body), and all kinds of sense-impressions which haven't yet been incorporated into our conscious structures. But in Freud as in Plotinus, "revelation" could occur unexpectedly, by the sudden access of something which was there all along. 

So as usual there is a two-tier system in modern Christianity. For literalists and those who use myth as analogy, revelation is the angel Gabriel delivering messages. (The English word "angel" comes from the Greek word for "messenger.") More philosophical theologians, and educated poets like Blake and Coleridge, see God as in no way separate from people, and therefore not in need of envoys. Revelation, for them, is more like sudden insight for Freud. 

I enjoy this sort of history, so it's fun for me to type it out. I understand it's not everyone's idea of a good time......