Revision of the Doctrine of Guardian Angels

[sdi]

I was down the other day, and whenever I'm down I tend to think about angels, and that got me poking into the textual history of the Works and Days. It turns out that many variants of Hesiod were current even in antiquity, and that seems to be reflected in what we have access to, today.

The description of the daimons that I was familiar with is the scholarly accepted version of a century ago:

#	Greek	English
109 110 122 125	χρύσεον μὲν πρώτιστα γένος μερόπων ἀνθρώπων ἀθάνατοι ποίησαν Ὀλύμπια δώματ᾽ ἔχοντες. [...] τοὶ μὲν δαίμονες ἁγνοὶ ἐπιχθόνιοι καλέονται ἐσθλοί, ἀλεξίκακοι, φύλακες θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων, οἵ ῥα φυλάσσουσίν τε δίκας καὶ σχέτλια ἔργα ἠέρα ἑσσάμενοι πάντη φοιτῶντες ἐπ᾽ αἶαν, πλουτοδόται: καὶ τοῦτο γέρας βασιλήιον ἔσχον.	First of all, a golden race of humans with divided voice the deathless ones having homes on Olumpus made. [...] They are called holy, righteous daimons on the earth, warding off evil, guardians of mortal men, so they tirelessly police laws and works wearing air and going to and fro over all the land, and are givers of wealth (for they have this royal privilege also).

(The translation is my own, hopefully not too bad!)

As it turns out, lines 122–3 are those given by Platon in the Kratulos; the problem with this is that it disagrees with a different version given by Platon in the Republic, the version given by Ploutarkhos in his commentary on the poem, and the version given by Proklos in his commentary. (It seems that all of the manuscripts of the poem that we have adhere pretty closely to Proklos's version, so it was a wilful choice to favor Platon over it, and to favor the Kratulos over the Republic!) It seems Platon bowdlerized the lines in order to fit the purposes of his dialogues (both literary—these are lines recalled from memory by Socrates—and philosophical—as he uses the descriptions to argue for theological points).

On top of that, lines 124–5 are copied from elsewhere in the poem and appear to be either a gloss or an error in the mainline branch of the manuscripts, and are apparently not duplicated elsewhere (e.g. in Proklos); M. L. West notes that a "police force administering legal justice" is quite different from the Providential givers of all good things described by the rest of the lines; and the grammatical context changes from line to line, too, which seems suspicious (though maybe I'm just not familiar enough with Hesiod's Greek, which always feels rather crabbed to me, at least by comparison with Homer).

At any rate, the current scholarly text, by M. L. West, gives the same section as follows:

#	Greek	English
109 110 122 126	χρύσεον μὲν πρώτιστα γένος μερόπων ἀνθρώπων ἀθάνατοι ποίησαν Ὀλύμπια δώματ᾽ ἔχοντες. [...] τοὶ μὲν δαίμονες εἰσι Διὸς μεγάλου διὰ βουλάς ἐσθλοί, ἐπιχθόνιοι, φύλακες θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων, πλουτοδόται: καὶ τοῦτο γέρας βασιλήιον ἔσχον.	First of all, a golden race of humans with divided voice the deathless ones having homes on Olumpus made. [...] They are righteous daimons by the will of great Zeus, on the earth, guardians of mortal men, and givers of wealth (for they have this royal privilege also).

(Translation also my own.)

We see that the gist is the same, but the two differ in almost every detail. I did a pass previously over the doctrine of guardian angels, but noticing the differences in the modern accepted text, I thought I should do so again:

1. χρύσεον "golden:" incorruptible, hence never contaminated by material life. (This stands to reason; if material beings are granted guardians [#6, below] by Providence [#3, below] so that we have the potential for purification, then the guardians must themselves have never been material, since if they were, they would need their own guardians, who would need their own guardians, etc., which would be an infinite regress, which is absurd. So the guardians themselves must have never been material at any time.)

2. πρώτιστα "first of all:" that is, the race of not-gods that is closest to the gods.

3. τοὶ μὲν δαίμονες εἰσι Διὸς μεγάλου διὰ βουλάς "they are daimons by the will of great Zeus:" Providence, being good, always ensures that there is a pathway to good for all. Each soul's daimon (from δαίομαι "to distribute"), therefore, is the means by which Providence acts (e.g. is distributed to mortals).

4. ἐσθλοί "righteous:" morally good, virtuous, faithful; does not have the capacity for bad, because they act out the will of Zeus.

5. ἐπιχθόνιοι "on the earth:" as opposed to in heaven (where the gods live) or below the earth in Tartarus (where the dead live—that is, us), indicating their middle status.

6. φύλακες θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων "guardians of mortal men:" daimons protect mortals because mortals don't have the perceptive capacity or wisdom to protect themselves.

7. πλουτοδόται: καὶ τοῦτο γέρας βασιλήιον ἔσχον "givers of wealth (for they have this royal privilege also):" in archaic Greece, social status was not determined by how much you owned (as it is today), but how much and how freely you gave to others. Kings were kings because they had the greatest capacity to give. This same thread is taken up by Plotinos, who assigns higher position to those who are able give more freely of themselves (e.g. gods are gods because they can give without diminishment, and Zeus is king of the gods because Zeus is pre-eminent in doing so). Daimons are the agents by which the gods give: while the gods give universally, daimons give individually, mortals receive individually, once again demonstrating the middle rank of daimons.