sdi

You're completely correct, of course: given that our logic works here, but is certainly broken by the time we get to the One, there must therefore be some level between them at which it breaks. The Gods we're talking about are pretty high up the chain, and therefore our a priori belief about whether our logic applies to them must be correspondingly low! Thomas Taylor says somewhere (I can't now find the reference—he wrote a lot of footnotes!) that the Gods exist in some kind of mystic union through their connection to the One. If so, then the belief that the Gods are not Caused is itself a paradox.

For my own part, even if it doesn't apply to the highest levels of Gods, it certainly applies at the more proximate level of beings that give rise to our own world and the conflicts we see within it! (Apuleius, for example, would treat the Zeus we can comprehend as a dæmon, separate from—though in service of!—the true Zeus. Maybe this logic doesn't apply to the true Zeus, but does it matter? We can't even comprehend Him anyway! We might as well deal with the beings we can experience.)

So in order to align our experiences, I'll need to use a more nuanced argument applying recursively to individual "levels" of the cosmos. I'll consider putting it together, it'd be instructive for me...