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

[sdi]

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."

Comments

[temporaryreality]

"The essences of the Gods never came into existence"

I find this particularly interesting in light of the Greek pantheon's "family tree" that shows successive generations of gods (and yes, I see that italicized word doing double duty). This ties in, in my reading of it, to the notion of"younger" gods being equated with "older" ones. I asked a question on Magic Monday once about the wording in the Orphic Hymn to Saturn and it was pointed out to me that Prometheus can also be understood as Saturn. So, this description of the gods as beings who never came into existence, when used as a lens to understand various gods' "birth stories," might open up a deeper reading of who earlier/later gods are relative to each other/themselves and the First Cause.

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I appreciate having the two translations (I have Taylor's) because the version you've posted here made this section much more comprehensible to me than Taylor's: "just as thoughts are not separate from mind nor acts of knowledge from the soul."

[boccaderlupo]

A huge question, and Edward Butler endymions_bower has done considerable work in trying to synthesize the more philosophic view with the genealogical relationships among the gods.

[temporaryreality]

I subscribe to endymions_bower but admit that I also have a hard time understanding what he writes about because (as per usual) I'm missing the deep-reading experience of other earlier texts. Is there a First Cause of texts? I probably oughta start there. :D

[sdi]

Alfred North Whitehead, at least, said that "the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." So maybe that's as close to a "First Cause of texts" as we get!

(But goodness, I can't conceive of having either the time or the mental energy to go all the way through Plato! I guess it's a project for the decades.)

[temporaryreality]

I'm only just able to work on Sallust - we'll see how far I get beyond that. Plato might be a ways out!

[boccaderlupo]

Ha ha, unfortunately, nope on the text question...here in the sublunar world, it's just wave after wave of information washing over each other...

Here is an interesting Twitter thread by Butler on the pantheon-relationships topic, specifically.

And here is yet another such discussion, referencing Proclus.

And one more, this one that goes pretty deep into Butler's view of polycentricity.

[temporaryreality]

Thank you! Those twitter comments are indeed helpful and will add to my baby-steps meditations.

This: the theoretical formulation from Plotinus that "each God is all the Gods coming together into one" (Enn. V.8.9.17)

[boccaderlupo]

Wanted to offer my thoughts on the point from temporaryreality about the Orphic hymns. You'll find a lot of references within the hymns (I use the Athanassakis translation) where the gods are seemingly conflated (Apollon is equated with both Bacchus and Pan, whereas Artemis is acclaimed as Titanic).

Alternately, you have Aphrodite depicted in some hymns as the daughter of Zeus and Dione, whereas alternately she emerges from the sea after the castration of Ouranos. So which is it?

Reading it with Neoplatonic ideas in mind, and considering that each god is, in effect, absolute unto itself, we can conjecture that: 1) each of the gods contains the cosmos, along with all other gods, in a sense, therefore we see "bleed over" of certain functions that are commonly ascribed to this or that god (to each god, then, the cosmos seems obviously a monotheism--some, as we know, take serious umbrage at this, whereas to others it is acceptable to fit into pantheons); 2) the gods have a plenitude of aspects, some of them apparently (and only apparently) contradictory, and different myths reveal different aspects of the gods.

Axé