I’ve been mulling for some time starting a Substack as a place for occasional, informal writing, and finally had the incentive when I saw this piece by my dear friend and colleague of many years, Antonio Vargas. Antonio’s Substack is superb, you really must subscribe:
Antonio’s remarks are in Portuguese, but the machine translation by YouTube is quite sufficient, I suppose especially if one is familiar with his work. Antonio is consistently one of the most insightful commentators on Platonic philosophy, displaying a depth of understanding far beyond so many who have received their laurels from the academy in the form of tenured posts, Festschrifts, and cadres of devoted students hanging on their every word. He is one of those for whom, like myself, the effort to think with, and not merely about the ancient philosophers is not so much a choice as an existential demand.
The question he addresses, moreover, is one which always comes up sooner or later in discussions of polytheism, namely that of the domains shared by multiple Gods, and the implications of this phenomenon. Since it seems one can never have said the last word on this topic, I decided to formulate a reply at length, instead of confining myself to a comment on Antonio’s page, or to a thread somewhere.
The ‘problem’ of many Gods sharing a single domain seems to trouble contemporary polytheists and commentators on polytheism rather more than it did the ancients. This is certainly, in part, because the many Gods were first and foremost a fact for the ancients, even if much was not understood about Them, whereas for moderns They are a dubious hypothesis, the understanding of which is accordingly demanded in advance (even if a similar demand is not made of the monotheist ‘God’). As a result, we may note that when the ancients did take up this issue, their solutions were not especially confident at first. As I discuss at length in my recent book, Polytheism in Greek Philosophy (nota bene, Amazon affiliate link) the earlier Greek philosophers are chiefly concerned, not with the nature of the Gods as such, but with expanding the scope of divine participation to include the grasp of principles or archai, things which are divine in a certain sense, but are not Gods.
For Plato and Aristotle, similarly to the Presocratics, there is much about the Gods which philosophers take as given in order to explore what mortals have a better shot at understanding. Among the things taken for granted in this fashion was the open-ended multiplicity of the Gods: “And as soul thus controls and indwells in all things everywhere that are moved, must we not necessarily affirm that it controls Heaven also? … One soul, is it, or several [pleious]? I will answer for you—several,” (Laws 896e, trans. Bury). With respect to the multiplicity of ‘pantheons’ of Gods (a term which did not yet exist), we note that Plato, unlike Herodotus, does not ‘translate’ the names of foreign Gods into Greek ones. (Herodotus himself had in any case been quite unclear and even contradictory on the subject.) The only case in Plato’s works where we find a foreign God identified with a Greek one, the case of Egyptian Neith and Greek Athena, is reported in the Timaeus as a matter of testimony by the Egyptians of Saïs, rather than as a matter of his own deduction or some kind of positing a priori. I have discussed at length elsewhere the importance Socrates attaches in the Philebus and the Cratylus to the names of the Gods, and the significance of this for how conceptualization is to approach Them.
The first thinkers to treat polytheism, and particularly the multiplicity of national pantheons, as a problem, in effect, during the Hellenistic and early Imperial period, had only simplistic solutions, based on the analogy of the translatability of different names assigned to the same mundane objects in different languages. This was the theoretical resource most ready to hand, but it was always, I would argue, implicitly understood to be less than satisfactory as an account of the Gods, who were not, by any means, mundane objects, nor mere ideas; and the difference between common nouns and proper names with respect to translatability was, as we can see from Socrates, already understood. I would argue that when Middle Platonists such as Plutarch, for whom the encounter with foreign religions has become a more pressing issue for thought, retreat from this discipline and embrace in principle the ‘translational’ paradigm, in which there are different names for the same God in different languages as there are different names for a hammer, they do so not without discomfort. Plutarch is quite aware of the difficulties that present themselves in such an account, so that while he states that the Gods of the nations are the same with different names, he nevertheless does not pursue an aggressive policy of such ‘translation’, but rather sticks most of the time to elucidating, e.g., Egyptian religion for his Greek readers without really attempting to reduce the vast difference between these cultures to a mere matter of reception. It would take further and harder thought by subsequent generations of philosophers to devise a theoretical structure truly adequate to this difference, which would come with the restoration of Platonism to a fundamentally henological, rather than eidetic account of multiplicity, in the new Plotinian synthesis. Plotinus’ student Porphyry was seemingly hesitant to pursue this synthesis in its full radicality, but it was embraced enthusiastically by Iamblichus and the subsequent Platonic successors, and resulted in the expansive doctrine of divine ‘henads’ for which this blog is named. When Porphyry, at once genuinely wondering, but also perhaps with a maieutic intention, explicitly poses the question of ‘translation’ in theurgic contexts to Iamblichus in book VII (4-5) of On the Mysteries, Iamblichus replies firmly and unequivocally that translation has its limits, as had been elevated to the status of a rule in the Chaldean Oracles: “Do not alter the foreign names” (frag. 150)—in other words, when in doubt, which can only be most of the time where Gods are involved, do not translate. This applies to proper names, as well as to common nouns depending on how close they are to the divine, and hence how much stands to be lost in translation. (This is what we typically do in any case, of course: we don’t translate proper names, and when a concept seems too semantically rich for straightforward translation, we tend to leave it untranslated as well, as we can see from the lists that circulate of ‘untranslatable’ words from diverse languages.)
Where the question of divine multiplicity seems especially troubling to moderns, however, and probably distinctly more so than it was for the ancients, is with respect to the relationship of the Gods to things most tangible in their singularity, such as the sun and other heavenly bodies, or to natural forces, things that are typically reckoned to have a certain close relationship to the divine, but which, on the other hand, also share a concreteness with mundane objects referred to by common nouns, the translation of which is regarded as unproblematic. The tangibility of such objects has additional weight for us today because of our default materialism, which is not to say that there were not materialists in antiquity as well. The materialism of antiquity was not the same as ours, however. And there was also a longstanding tradition of interrogating the materialist position that we have allowed to lapse, having elevated our own brand of materialism to a status of not merely epistemic, but moral authority. For us, this is what it means to be a sober, responsible and trustworthy thinker. For ancient philosophers, but even, I think, for ordinary people, things were rather different. Far from being the ultimate adjudicator of any conflicting claims, even when perceptions of physical objects were granted epistemic authority, they lacked the ability to resolve conflicts concerning the status of those objects, because their reception came necessarily through human bodies inscrutable in their own complexity, and in a flow of time that introduced further unresolvable complications. So the singularity of physical objects was no kind of foundation. Here, it is ourselves who can be charged with a naïve ‘faith’ that the problematic status of certain objects is resolvable in principle. (Merleau-Ponty spoke aptly of ‘perceptual faith’ as an element to be reckoned with in any phenomenology.)
How is the unity of something like our Sun secured? We all see the Sun, it shines on one and all. It may be regarded as a visible animal upon which many perspectives are available without its unity being destroyed as a result. The unity of an animal is in general supplied by its soul, which makes it not only an object, but also a subject; not only the focal point of my perspective on it but the source of its own, so that the Sun looks at me, too. If the Sun is an animal, it ought, indeed, have a name; and it could have many names, since it has the freedom that any physical object has with respect to names. For in virtue of its very physicality, no physical object is inseparable from its name.
This is the converse of the epistemic authority we grant to such objects to have a say, so to speak, beyond any intellectual determinations. This is what the ‘Giants’ of whom the Eleatic Stranger speaks in the Sophist are appealing to when they lay their hands on something and say, emphatically, ‘This’. It is a security that both grounds, and also ungrounds, and this is not a bug, but a feature, for it allows perception its critical weight relative to conceptions.
This grants to an animal such as the Sun an inherent anonymity—this is, I think, what Antonio means in speaking of ‘nameless Gods’. So when I address the Sun as Re, and another addresses Them as Helios, what exactly is the issue? Ostensibly, it is because there is so much that is true of Re that is not true of Helios and vice versa. Nor, we must remember, is this solely an issue between pantheons, but also within them, because there are diverse ways in which Egyptians and Greeks, even among themselves, can address the Sun. Helios and Apollo are the Sun in different respects, as is Re and any of the many Goddesses referred to as the ‘Eye of Re’. Egyptians even refer to the visible disc of the Sun as distinct from any divinity. (This is that ‘Aten’ that Akhenaten made his sole divinity, and tried to impose on others.) And so internal to these very world-orders or kosmoi, there is a lack of closure between an object of perception, even one so omnipresent, and any names or properties we might attribute to it, and the diverse webs of association in which it features through them. In fact, far from introducing confusion into the supposedly unproblematic singularity of the perceptual object, these webs or nets are what specify these objects, what allow us any purchase on them in the flux of time and reception. And so it is not the case that the Sun is one, and we have made Them many by calling Them ‘Re’ and ‘Helios’ and other things, but rather that each of these is a path along which the inherent multiplicity of the Sun is resolved.
The conception of the Sun that we consider to be normative is impoverished, and was arrived at through a process of winnowing down the rich conception from which we began. Hence when Heraclitus states that the Sun is the width of a human foot, he is not expressing some original, naïve perception, but proposing a new, artificial one—he is producing the field of ‘raw’ perceptual data, which never existed on its own, for there is no creature who is not already in a relationship with the Sun far more complex than this. What we think of as the ‘natural’ Sun beyond all merely ‘cultural’ ties is the Sun which is the width of a human foot. This is why the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro believed it indispensible to invert this relationship of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, and speak of a ‘multinaturalism’ rather than ‘multiculturalism’, in order to do justice to the real plurality of ontologies that precede—not only historically, but metaphysically—the formation of this denuded ‘nature’ with its one-foot-wide Sun.
Perhaps it was this vivid sense of just how problematic any supposedly unproblematic being turns out to be when examined that led Plato’s Academy, at a certain point, to adopt Skepticism, in the Hippocratic spirit of ‘doing no harm’. Clearly it was preferable for them that our lights carve out illumination in piecemeal fashion than that everything be flooded in a distorting light from concepts that fail to recognize their limitations.