Polytheism’s local cults gave way to one personal God, uniting all deities’ powers

Evidence

Finally, ecclesiastical politics provides us with examples, and these have analogies even in purely religious developments. The polytheism of antiquity had many of the essential characteristics that I have subsumed here under the concept of “the narrower circle.” For the most part, the cults set themselves off from one another by sharp internal and local boundaries. The circles of believers were centripetal; often they were mutually indifferent to one another, often hostile. The gods themselves were often aristocratically ranked, with complicated relationships of superordination and subordination, and with segregated spheres of potency. At the outset of the Christian era in the domain of classical culture, this condition led to monotheism, to the enthronement of a single and personal God who united in himself all the powers of those discrete and segregated deities. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 676

Categorization

• XREF: Fits the broader Simmel thesis about narrower circles yielding to expanded groups — parallels the book’s core dialectic and could support Julius’s movement between intimate and anonymous urban life.