barefootwisdom ([personal profile] barefootwisdom) wrote in [personal profile] sdi 2022-03-02 04:30 pm (UTC)

I'm not sure I'd want to put it so much as "Divinity will respond...", as in terms of our own continued choosing. (Though each may be illuminating in its own, distinct way.)

I'm more inclined to think of this in terms of the choice of life each of us will make in the Meadow, as Plato describes in book X of the Republic. The habits we develop in this life will carry over beyond the death of our present physical body, including the time when we choose our next incarnation. So if we're habituated to carefully attuning ourselves to the Gods, we'll do that same careful attuning (and careful choosing!) in the Meadow as well, and find ourselves in a subsequent incarnation that is well-attuned. Likewise, those who are currently habituated to pushing themselves violently away from the Gods, to rejecting them utterly, will by the force of those very same habits be inclined, when they get to the Meadow, to choose a life that is distant from the Gods.

In all cases, the choice, and the responsibility, lies with us. As the prophet puts it in Republic X (617e), as he introduces the moment of choice: "The [guardian] daemon [of your incarnation] shall not receive you as his lot, but you shall choose the daemon: He who draws the first, let him first make choice of a life, to which he must of necessity adhere: Virtue is independent, which every one shall partake of, more or less, according as he honours or dishonours her: the cause is in him who makes the choice, and God is blameless."

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