Proclus on the names of the Gods

To the extent that he knows himself and all the other divine genera together, partakes of them all, and is distinguished according to existential peculiarity [kata tên idian huparxin], each of the Gods supplies subsistence [hupostasin] to the divine names, which are incomprehensible and ineffable to us, inasmuch as all of the intellectual and divine entities exist in us psychically. Yet, if intellections exist in the soul not in a mode corresponding to the intellect, but like an image and in subordination, the soul will become all the dizzier by thinking purely [eilikrinôs] about the Gods, but it is only imagistically [eikonikôs] that it can entertain conceptions about the essence and about the nomenclature of God. (Proclus, In Crat. 135, trans. Duvick, modified).

This quote establishes that the very names of the Gods are not mere cultural constructs, but are themselves rooted in the Gods' supra-essential existential individuality—all of the names in each God, no less, the same as how the Gods themselves subsist—and have themselves an intellective reality beyond the imagistic conception of them, that is, the names are not of the status of mere images, but are themselves a Reality apprehended through images.

The presence of the names of all the Gods in each God is presupposed by the presence of all the Gods Themselves in each God. So the significance of the quoted passage is not to establish the latter point, which is at the foundations of the entire system. Rather, the quote's significance is for what it says about the ontology of divine names.

All the names exist in each God; therefore there is an adequate divine cognition of every name, which our souls approximate through letters and sounds, as well as through our etymological inquiries, which also share this imagistic status relative to the divine cognition of the Gods' names. This is in sharp contrast to an approach that states that the names of the Gods are like matter relative to the divine forms of the Gods, and it sets clear limits to translation. This is all of a piece with the rejection of any intellectualistic reduction of the Gods to forms.