sdi | [Discussion] On the Gods and the World, Ch. I

Once upon a time, boccaderlupo recommended Sallustius' On the Gods and the World to me as a short introduction to Neoplatonism. But where he found it clear, I found it obscure! (I believe I described it to him as "a puzzle-box"—it seems to me that all the pieces fit together elegantly, but one needs to know the trick to open it up and get at the candy inside, and not knowing the trick all I could do was to play with it for a while before setting it down again.) Yesterday, I suggested perhaps starting up some discussion on the topic in the hopes that, with the help of other blind men, I might discover that this rope I'm touching is actually an elephant.

Therefore, I plan to post a chapter of the text each week (on Wednesday, in honor of the lord of dialogue), and perhaps we can unpack it together. I will only be posting the text in the subject post, and placing whatever thoughts and questions I may have down in the comments: after all, I am a student here rather than a lecturer, and anyway it might be helpful to break up discussion into parallel threads to keep things organized. Anyone is welcome to lurk, comment, ask their own questions, etc. I'll be transcribing from Gilbert Murray's 1925 translation, though I also have Thomas Taylor's 1793 translation handy and will call it out when there's something interesting. (Our good Br'er Wolf recommended Arthur Nock's 1926 translation, but I don't have a copy. It'll be in the public domain in a couple months, though, so perhaps we can revisit it then.)

Let's pick the puzzle-box up, shall we?

I. What the Disciple should be; and concerning Common Conceptions.
Those who wish to hear about the Gods should have been well guided from childhood, and not habituated to foolish beliefs. They should also be in disposition good and sensible, that they may properly attend to the teaching.
They ought also to know the Common Conceptions. Common Conceptions are those to which all men agree as soon as they are asked; for instance, that all God is good, free from passion,* free from change. For whatever suffers change does so for the worse or the better; if for the worse, it is made bad; if for the better, it must have been bad at first.

* Thomas Taylor's translation gives "without passivity." Arthur Darby Nock's gives "impassive."

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From:

sdi

Those who wish to hear about the Gods should have been well guided from childhood, and not habituated to foolish beliefs.

Oh. Guess I’m disqualified then. See you all next lifetime! 😜

From:

barefootwisdom

I think we can take this a little less literally. On the traditional Platonist ladder of virtues, all four of the cardinal virtues appear over and over again, at each of three (or 5, or 6, or 7) levels, each building on those that came before.

We start from the physical virtues (which are basically innate, but can be cultivated in some degree?), then the virtues of habit (this is the hook to "habituation" in the chapter here), and only then progressing to the virtues that are properly the provence of reasoning and philosophy.

So while it's certainly best if we've been building the proper habits from childhood, we're always either reinforcing old habits or inculcating new ones. So Sallustius' more general point—and that of the wider tradition—seems to be that good habits, and the character associated with them, set the stage for philosophical and theological reflection. The critical error, then, is to think that we can jump to theology without taking account of, and cultivating, that basic character.

("Habit" and "character" are, in Greek, both related to the ethos family of terms, from whence "ethics.")

From:

sdi

I think your interpretation of that paragraph makes sense.

You lost me with your argument though: I'm not familiar with any of the concepts you're using. "Cardinal virtues" was easy enough to search for—I knew I'd end up having to read The Republic eventually, but have honestly been dreading it!—but I wasn't able to find "ladder of virtues," and am not sure what you mean by the three/five/six/seven "levels", "physical virtues", "virtues of habit", etc.

From:

barefootwisdom

Yeah, sorry about that. I was shooting that comment off in a hurry, and didn't fully (or at all, really!) explain myself.

In a nutshell, this basic set of virtues (a.k.a. excellences) occur at a variety of levels: the virtues that come along with our individual material nature (which we only have "control" over in the sense that we chose this particular life when we were between incarnations, as Plato discusses in Republic book X), the virtues that we acquire through habit, various kinds of virtues that involve the intellect and rational choice, and finally the theurgic virtues that transcend the rational. At each of these levels, all four cardinal virtues of justice, temperance, courage, and wisdom reappear in a new guise.

I could write a whole essay about this, but Michael Griffin has already done that, in his introduction to Olympiodorus' commentary on the Alcibiades; it's available free here: https://www.academia.edu/25871670/Olympiodorus_On_Plato_First_Alcibiades_10-28_Bloomsbury_Academic_2016_

I hope this helps at least a little bit!

From:

sdi

Thank you!

From:

sdi

They ought also to know the Common Conceptions. Common Conceptions are those to which all men agree as soon as they are asked;

Sallustius seems to me to be, here, talking about axioms. If we can’t agree upon our axioms, then how can we even converse? So we must necessarily have some axiomatic foundation upon which we may construct an edifice of conclusions reaching—hopefully, if the title of the work is to be believed!—up to the gods.

Logically, this is sound enough; but the notion that there are any things that everyone can agree upon strikes me as rather quaint! Was there ever such a time that such was the case? In the world I live in, people can’t event seem to agree to disagree!

What kinds of things did the philosophers, or indeed the mass of humanity, take in those days to be certainly true? Sallustius assumes a relatively nuanced notion about the gods to be common, and yet in our day we can’t even seem to agree on the existence of spiritual beings at all, let alone their nature...

Edited Date: 2021-11-03 04:59 pm (UTC)

From:

boccaderlupo

Another blind man checking in here, as well. These are very good questions.

No clue at what the "common conceptions" hold specifically, but circling back to the above (specifically, habituated to foolish beliefs), I have often wondered if this is not a slap against Christians. I believe it was Celsus who first identified the tendency for Christians to target children and so-called simple-minded folk. Sallustius was writing this, as I understand it, as a sort of "catechism" for pagans, as it were, in a time of increasing encroachment by Christianity. So Celsus's words are always in the back of my mind here.

Alternately, I assume he just means to have a grounding in philosophy, by which I further assume he means Platonic philosophy.

A final thought...perhaps he just means those conceptions which he lists in the subsequent sentences, regarding "The Good" and the unchanging nature of god, etc. An idea of what these might cover can be found in Proclus's Elements of Theology.

Just some random thoughts from another student.

Axé

From:

sdi

None of these occurred to me, so thank you for proposing them!

I hope [1] isn't the case, since I would hope philosophers are better than taking jabs at their ideological enemies, but it wouldn't be the first time! Ironic, I suppose, that my own education was explicitly Christian, and I consider it to have been a very poor foundation for both my mundane and spiritual lives. I suppose some things never change!

[2] aligns with

barefootwisdom's interpretation, above. Upon consideration, it strikes me as the most likely interpretation: you can't hope to set out on a journey if your house isn't in order first. (Bilbo Baggins notwithstanding.)

[3] implies that this sentence is merely an introduction to the rest of the work, and not, as I had understood it, as a "by the way, I'm covering material X, but I hope you all know that material Y is prerequisite, so I hope you studied it first."

From:

sdi

all God is good,

It seems to me that Sallustius is using "good" as a term of art, here, since he clearly can't be referring to the common meaning of "beneficial." By the short proof following this, I should suspect that by "good," Sallustius means "free of any defect?"

From:

boccaderlupo

This one hearkens to the association of The One with The Good, both concepts which are beyond our mortal understanding. Proclus deals with it in his Elements starting with Proposition 8, but the Stanford site has a good run down of it here.

Would not want to try to boil down something which surpasses all human conception into a single Web page, but I reckon we have to start someplace...

From:

sdi

Thanks for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy link: it's short and readable. Yes, it sounds like "good" is being used as a special principle and perhaps means "self-complete" or something close to that.

From:

sdi

The notion that "the gods are unchanging" was a surprising one to me. If the gods do not change, they may never converse with us, for to converse with us would imply a change in state. Raised as I was in fundamentalist Christianity (which emphasizes the imminence of the Holy Spirit) and with Greek mythology (where every Odysseus has his Athena), and given that I regularly converse with such a god, when I first read Sallustius a year or so ago, I couldn’t conceive of how this could possibly be. Lately, I've read Apuleius, who says that what we usually think of as "gods" are technically "dæmons"—in his scheme, actually one of several kinds, a sort we would simply call "angels"—acting in the service of the gods, and these are the beings with which we humans interact and which are described in myth and folklore; the true gods are as far above dæmons as the dæmons are above us. So the "gods" Sallustius here refers to seem more like "foundational principles" than "beings" in the sense we usually think of "beings?"

From:

boccaderlupo

Yes, this is where things get interesting, for sure, and where you begin to see the "striations of divinity," as it were. There seem to clearly be gods that are immediately accessible personages, but these are iterations, as it were, of more remote versions that are less proximate (the latter of which are closer to "The One," the principle from which everything emerges and in which everything participates, but which remains otherwise unapproachable).

In terms of the "hierarchy," as it were, you have, per Iamblichus: gods, archangels, angels, daemons (more akin to spirits, not necessarily in the pejorative), heroes, archons, and us mortals.

Axé

From:

sdi

Ooh, this interests me greatly: my spiritual categorizations are not fine enough for my purposes. Does Iamblichus give definitions for how he discriminates between these various categories of beings?

From:

boccaderlupo

I don’t know about that, but he does point out at great length different attributes of each class—specifically in Book II of On the Mysteries.

Axé

From:

sdi

Thank you for the pointer! This is like Christmas for me.

From:

ehu

where is this work available?

..and many thanks to the host & commentariat of this worthy exploration!

From:

sdi

Thomas Taylor's translation is on Google Books.

Alexander Wilder's translation is at the Twilit Grotto.

Edited Date: 2021-11-04 03:58 pm (UTC)

From:

barefootwisdom

Taylor's translation (which

sdi links to below) is quite serviceable. There's also a more modern translation by Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell. If you just look past the 100 footnotes where they say over and over "He's talking about theurgy" (Gasp!), it's quite good.

From:

barefootwisdom

In part, this unchangingness follows from the claim that the Gods strictu sensu are perfect: literally, they are complete, lacking nothing that they could have or be. If they were to change, that would either be a change that made them better (in which case they were less than perfect to begin with) or a change which made them worse (and thereby compromised their perfection).

Our conversing with the Gods (or not) does imply a change in state, but it's a change in *our* state, not in theirs. Their providence is always present, but we can change to become more or less receptive.

From:

boccaderlupo

Spot on.

From:

sdi

I must misunderstand conversations, then! I would assume that in order for a conversation to occur, there must be a two-way exchange of information (however trivial that information may be, relatively speaking): if the information only goes in one direction, then it's more like a lecture than a conversation; and if there is no transfer of information at all, then I'm not even sure what it is. (A waste of time?)

But if a god is changeless, then they are unable to receive information of any kind (for the reason Sallustius and you describe), which means that we're not conversing. Perhaps they are speaking, but it would have to be a one-way transfer of information, right?

This implies to me that the gods are so far beyond comprehension (indeed, beyond comprehensibility) that I'm not even sure I can begin to make sense of them. (Though perhaps we'll see once we're a bit further into the text!) Certainly, the gods we're talking about don't fit my model for "gods" (which I suppose I have always assumed to be "vast people"). This harkens back to the conversation above, what are those Common Conceptions people had back in Sallustius' time? I assume this means they had a very different understanding of what the word "god" meant than I do?

In any case, I'm very thankful for the lower orders of beings who I can at least interact with! They may not be "gods" in Sallustius' sense, but I am not sure how I would be sustained without them!

Edited Date: 2021-11-04 12:42 am (UTC)

From:

boccaderlupo

One way perhaps of thinking about this may be: the gods represent more or less the highest ontological reality. Their shared reality, as it were, gives rise to everything else—so we don’t necessarily have discourse with them, as in a two-way conversation, but rather we participate in the cosmos that they give rise to.

While I am not privy to the interactions you speak of and therefore cannot judge, I conjecture that you are interacting with the “intelligible” aspect of certain gods—the aspect that manifests in some way that can be apprehended by mortals. Proclus lays out in some detail the distinctions between intellective, intelligible-intellective, and intelligible gods, but this is where things get heavy and tricky for me, as the language becomes highly technical.

endymions_bower has significant writings on these topics, but the going gets challenging, for me, at least.

For my purposes, I would say the entities we feel familiar with are—barring us being hoodwinked by malign forces, gods forbid—the aspects of a god that they have chosen to unveil to us in some limited way.

Axé

From:

temporaryreality

I'm also interested in the fact that the two translations vary here. One says "Gods" the other, "God." Is the Greek not specific viz. singular/plural? Would Sallustius have been, by default, referring to "Gods" as a category rather than (as is common in Christian-derived thought) using the term "God" to indicate a specific deity?

From:

sdi

I'm not 100% sure of this—I couldn't find parallel Greek/English text!—but I think that "Gods" refers to the group composed of multiple individual deities, while "all God" refers to divinity in the general sense.

From:

boccaderlupo

Good question. I don't have the Greek text in front of me (nor the chops to translate it), but in general, being generally familiar with the Neoplatonic tradition, "God" in the singular can frequently be understand as the class of divine beings. The One is the unitary principle, and arrayed around it are all things that partake of its ultimate qualities (good, immutable, etc.), namely the henads or gods. Some refer to "The One" as the Godhead, but it would be a mistake, I think, to think of it as having any type of persona.

The Christians synthesized this idea with their conception of God, via Pseudo-Dionysius. Thus God the Father bears many of the attributes one would associate with "The One." Pagan Neoplatonists, on the other hands, would extend these qualities across the spectrum of divine beings, who abide at the pinnacle of the cosmos, ontologically speaking.

From:

temporaryreality

Thank you for giving some context (I'm quite unread in any of this, so tend to not know much).

From:

boccaderlupo

Surely!

When it comes to the gods, all of us can only know so much.

Axé

From:

barefootwisdom

Okay, I'm looking at Nock's edition of the Greek (and his translation) as I write this comment.

The first sentence has "the Gods" in the plural. That means exactly what we'd expect.

Later, in the bit about "common conceptions" (which Nock translates, perhaps more helpfully, as "universal opinions," in other words, beliefs shared by everyone), the Greek uses a grammatically singular construction, hoti pas theos agathos, hoti apathēs, hoti ametablētos. The key term here is pas. Taylor (as quoted in the post) renders pas as "all." Really, this term is a universal quantifier, so while "all" is fine, a more felicitous translation could be "every" or "any" in the sense of "any imaginable, any possible."

So the entire phrase means: "that every God is good, and impassive, and unchangeable." That preserves the grammatical singular of the Greek; we could just as well convey the same idea using the plural in English: "that all Gods are good, and impassive, and unchangeable."

Even in other contexts where the word "all/every" is not given, Sallustius and his fellow pagan Platonists would only use the singular form theos in one of two ways: (1) in a context where an individual God (perhaps Zeus or Dionysos) was already referred to by name, and they were just mentioning that same God again without repeating his name, or (2) as a generic singular to refer to the class, in just the way that someone might say "Man is the measure of all things" or "man is a rational animal," thereby referring to human beings universally or in general, without in any way implying that there's only one.

(In Greek, unlike in English, you use the definite article—"the" (ho)—in both those constructions (ho theos, ho anthrōpos) to refer to the class or the generic. It's a usage that, because of Christianity, is almost impossible to convey any more in English. Sigh.)

From:

temporaryreality

Thank you for taking the time to look at the Greek and explaining this. It does help clarify why the two translations differ in rendering "god" singular vs. plural.

From:

barefootwisdom

You're quite welcome! I'm glad it was helpful.

From:

sdi

I found a helpful footnote regarding this by Thomas Taylor while reading through his translation of Maximus Tyrius: "The intellectual philosophers of antiquity by the word θεός, God, either denoted the highest god, or all the gods; because, according to the ancient theology, all the divine powers which proceeded from the first God are concentrated and rooted in him, so as to form as it were one divine orb in which the union of these divinities with each other and their ineffable principle is most transcendent, and at the same time their separation from each other surpasses every conceivable mode of distinct subsistence. Let it be observed, however, that Jupiter is properly the fabricator and father of all things; and that, according to Plato, the highest god is superior to a fabricative energy."

From:

temporaryreality

Thanks for following up and coming back to this.

I'm still pretty much in the dark, but it's interesting to hear what those more in the know have to say about the gods.

From:

temporaryreality

From Taylor (put here so I can look at it while I think out loud),

The knowledge likewise of common conceptions is necessary; but common conceptions are such things as all men, when interrogated, acknowledge to be indubitably certain; such as, that every god is good, without passivity, and free from all mutation; for every thing which is changed, is either changed into something better or into something worse: and if into something worse, it will become depraved, but if into something better, it must have been evil in the beginning.

This section is where my attention falls most squarely each time I read this chapter. First, I read the proposition about gods in two directions.
1. The gods are ___. A simple description of the characteristics of the divine beings we call gods.
2. That which is ___, ___, and ___ can be categorized as gods.

I know that this is not exactly what Sallustius is saying, but it's an interesting conceptual exercise to think of it via mode 2: that which we recognize as good, active, and unchanging(ly so) can be conceived of as a god. I think this supports Sallustius's later assertion (Ch. 4) that myths/fables work on different levels and that the gods and their actions can be understood differently via those levels.

Second, I've tried to accept S.'s limited notion of change, but my contrary-mary-mind insists on chiming in. I don't think change must be forced onto an axis of better-worse. Acorn - oak, child - adult, summer - autumn, even living - dead... Perhaps it's helpful to consider that there are non-polarized types of changes that do not change the "essential nature" of a thing (I feel like I'm walking among landmines by using that phrasing, but I don't know what else to say). So, a being may arise, grow, develop, mature, decline - but its essential nature is unchanging? I may be over-expanding the concept of change here since I'm not just talking about gods... but perhaps you see the dilemma. I don't see change as indicative of a flaw. Gods may not appear to us to change, but who's to say that they don't change on some cosmic level. Their stories change - does that mean it's only the humans who've changed their conceptions?

I'm also seeing if I can reconcile JMG's notion that gods may in fact be part of an "ecosystem" and may have periods of increasing/decreasing influence. If they don't change, then nope. If, though, they change but without modification of their essential natures as divine beings, then maybe?

I admit, I don't have a clue. But those are questions that occur to me.

From:

sdi

You know, now that you mention it, it occurs to me that the Moon is god(dess) that governs change (and frequently changes, Herself), is she not?

I suspect that Sallustius is even using "god" as a term of art, here. Apuleius seems to clearly treat "the Moon is a god" as a "Common Conception:"

[...] there is not any Greek, or any barbarian, who will not easily conjecture that the Sun and Moon are Gods;

But I suspect what Apuleius means by "god" is not what Sallustius means by "god." (It's also worth noting that Apuleius predates Sallustius by a couple hundred years; indeed he predates Neoplatonism. So I suspect we're dealing with a special set of notions peculiar to Neoplatonism, which are not quite clear to me.)

Edited (HTML formatting) Date: 2021-11-04 09:00 pm (UTC)

From:

temporaryreality

Can you explain what "a term of art" means? (Is it something I should understand? or should put through a search engine? -- among other things, I've never studied logic, so it's unfamiliar to me)

From:

sdi

It just means "term specific to some particular field of endeavor." You know, a "technical term," "jargon," etc.

From:

temporaryreality

I see!

gee, how do we a) figure out what they each mean by "god" and b) figure out what we mean by it?! :D

Maybe be reverting back to my reversed reading mentioned above?: that which is good, active, and unchanging...

hmmm....

also, good point about Moon as god/dess of change. More hmmm...

Edited Date: 2021-11-04 09:18 pm (UTC)

From:

boccaderlupo

RE: Apuleius, a really interesting find...I only really associated him with "The Golden Ass," so the work you linked to was a delight. I think the timeline you noted suggests that these ideas had been floating around for a considerable time (indeed, back to Plato, at least...)

From:

barefootwisdom

I think the bit about the Gods being "impassive" is doing quite a lot of work here.

Let's remember that "passive" is the antonym of "active." The critical claim is that the Gods are always agents or actors—those who initiate activity—and they are never "patients" in the sense of having anything done *to* them.

This means that the only relevant causal factor (using that term somewhat loosely) that accounts for why a God is the way he is, is the God himself. There is not, nor could there ever be, any appeal to any causes apart from the God to explain the God.

Everything that a God is, he always is, because of his own nature and his own eternal activity. Because the God is entirely active, never passive, and the God is always present to himself, then all the causes that would explain the God's being a certain way always and eternally present: the God himself is the one and only such cause. And so every way that a God can be, he will always be, since there is no change in causes that would give rise to different effects/results.

Therefore, because every God is both good and impassive, there's nothing that a particular God could be that he isn't already.

From:

boccaderlupo

Yes, and this understanding presents new puzzles when it comes to how things like divination and sacrifices work, which Iamblichus deals with extensively in "On the Mysteries." Ex. Does the performance of sacred rites, for example, here in good ol' spacetime influence the gods in some way? (Section 1, Chapters X-XI in the Taylor translation, I believe.)

From:

sdi

Thank you, I think this clarifies things immensely. The Neoplatonic definition of "Gods" is therefore something which is acted upon only by itself: something of a causal fixed-point.

In the case of my above example of the Moon, She is not definitionally a God, since She is acted upon (by the actions of light, gravity, mechanical action, and who-knows-what else) by the Sun, Jupiter, Venus, the great Gods above, the engineers of the Apollo program, and even—in a minuscule way!—by little old me.

Edited (capitalization and grammar) Date: 2021-11-07 05:15 pm (UTC)

From:

sdi

Incidentally, every time I write "Neoplatonic", I think "Neapolitanic," and then I dream of not being allergic to ice cream...

From:

boccaderlupo

I now fear "Neapolitanic" will wind its way into the astral currents... :)

Note that later in this same tract, Sallustius will emphasize that (in his view) the celestial bodies are not themselves gods per se, but rather, if I remember right, vehicles for the gods' activities. He contrasts this with, if memory serves, the Egyptian view, in which (according to him) the "planets" are equated with the gods themselves.

For myself, I tend to regard the heavenly bodies as massive sunthemata (tokens) that serve as the most potent and visible conduits for the gods' expression, thus their outsized (literally and figuratively) impact on the events here in the sublunar world. This is just my person opinion, however.

On how divination and various rites impact (or rather, fail to impact) the gods, who are immutable, I would consult Iamblichus, though I think Sallustius touches on it briefly, as well.

Axé

From:

sdi

I'm not sure where I sit on that one! On the one hand, I've spoken with most of the planets (and this is the source of some of my relatively unorthodox planetary assignments), so I tend to regard them as people; but on the other hand, they have effects so constant as to be un-people-ish. Perhaps this is why I tend to like Apuleius' middle-of-the-road explanation...

From:

temporaryreality

I missed the conversation between you two, so this post came as a pleasant surprise! I feel so lucky!

Generally, I just been reading the text, then I go back and reread, then I go back again. I figure maybe a little more will trickle in through the cracks that way. Not sure if it does, particularly when I'm unsure what's being implied with some of the terms. So yes, the puzzle-box metaphor is quite apt.

I'll be back later to chime in on the text itself.

From:

barefootwisdom

And thank you for starting this series of posts. I think this will be a delightful (and edifying!) ongoing conversation.

From:

sdi

You're welcome! I hope so, too!

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[Discussion] On the Gods and the World, Ch. I

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