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[Discussion] On the Gods and the World, Ch. II
My gratitude to those who participated in last week's discussion of Sallustius' On the Gods and the World—I am learning much, and we've hardly begun! So let's pick the puzzle-box back up, shall we?
II. That God is unchanging, unbegotten, eternal, incorporeal, and not in space.
Let the disciple be thus. Let the teachings be of the following sort. The essences of the Gods never came into existence (for that which always is never comes into existence; and that exists for ever which possesses primary force and by nature suffers nothing): neither do they consist of bodies; for even in bodies the powers are incorporeal. Neither are they contained by space; for that is a property of bodies. Neither are they separate from the First Cause nor from one another,* just as thoughts are not separate from mind nor acts of knowledge from the soul.
* Thomas Taylor notes, "The reader must not suppose from this, that the gods are nothing more than so many attributes of the first cause; for if this were the case, the first god would be multitude, but the one must always be prior to the many. But the gods, though they are profoundly united with their ineffable cause, are at the same time self-perfect essences; for the first cause is prior to self-perfection. Hence as the first cause is superessential, all the gods, from their union through the summits or blossoms of their natures with this incomprehensible god, will be likewise superessential; in the same manner as trees from being rooted in the earth are all of them earthly in an eminent degree. And as in this instance the earth itself is essentially distinct from the trees which it contains, so the highest god is transcendently distinct from the multitude of gods which he ineffably comprehends."
no subject
"Superessential" in this context simply seems to mean "above existence."
Sallustius specifically treats "existence" as a property of the gods. (In fact, he makes a stronger statement, that the gods exist eternally, and thus have no beginning and no end.) This would seem to imply that the gods are "essential" rather than "superessential."
If I'm reading Taylor right, he's saying that the One is superessential, but that the gods are "superessential" in the same way that trees are "earthy"—they're not literally like the earth, but if you're looking at a tree, it's definitely got something to do with the earth (rather than, say, some asteroid or something). I would take this to mean that the gods aren't truly above existence, but they can reasonably be said to be above existence since they're above all the other things that exist and give rise to them, which I think is what
(As far as the One goes, I'm not sure what it can possibly mean to "be superessential", which strikes me as self-contradictory. I wonder if the One is merely some kind of (literally) glorified reductio ad absurdum used to prove logical statements about what the gods must be. I guess we'll see as we proceed?)