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

[sdi]

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."

Comments

Re: perfect, therefore unchanging

[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