Edward P. Butler (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
endymions_bower) wrote2017-03-05 04:12 pm
endymions_bower) wrote2017-03-05 04:12 pm
Polycentric Polytheism and Julian's Hymn to King Helios
(I wrote this at the request of a friend, and decided to post it here so that others can see it, since it doesn't quite rise to the level of a paper that I might use in a formal setting.)
Julian's hymn needs to be understood within the framework of polycentric polytheism. Julian is attempting to articulate the ways in which the deity to whom he is devoted, Helios, is ultimate, even though he’s doing it within a conceptual structure (Iamblichean Platonism) in which Helios is actually situated quite far down in the hierarchy that expresses the procession of Being. Assuming that the hypostatic hierarchy in Iamblichus is the same as that which we see expressed more fully in Proclus, Helios is active on the hypercosmic plane, just below the intellective plane where, e.g., Zeus and Hera have their primary activity. As such, Julian has to think about ways in which an intermediate status—or even one somewhat lower—can be understood to actually be supreme. Another part of his strategy is also to elevate Helios' position as much as possible by having Helios displace Zeus to some extent as primary demiurge of the cosmos and focal point of the intellective order of Gods, effectively promoting Helios from his hypercosmic position. Julian does this very intelligently, however, by arguing not for a different role for Helios, but rather that if we properly understand the role Helios is presently understood to have, we will see that it is really the crucial role.
In this, Julian follows in the footsteps of earlier polytheistic theologians in Egypt and in India, to name two especially notable examples, who use hymns to a given deity to demonstrate how that deity's functions can be understood as the ultimate ground of reality. Hence, in a hymn to Ptah, Ptah's special province, the function of speech, is seen as the nature of reality, and Ptah thus as the ultimate God, while in a hymn to Khnum, Khnum's primary field of action, corporeal form, is argued to be the essence of things, in particular, of the statues of all the other Gods, and Khnum therefore as the supreme God. The Rig Veda speaks of Agni as supreme in the sense that the sacrifices to all the other Gods pass through the fire, which is his, while treating Vac as supreme in the sense that the hymns to all the other Gods depend upon voice, which is hers. The Bhagavadgītā sees in the nature of Kṛṣṇa the nature of reality, while the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad sees reality in the nature of Śiva. The fact that such texts rarely affirm the reciprocal potential for affirming the ultimacy of the other Gods is a problem for modern polytheist polemics, but it was not a problem for ancient authors working within an environment in which this reciprocal polycentricity was natural and largely unthought.
(It should also be noted the degree to which this sort of effort of thinking about the ultimate nature of reality in diverse different ways fostered the development of philosophical thought in these cultures.)
The other major element that needs to be understood with respect to Julian’s work is his tendency, though not entirely consistently, to conflate the One with Being, which can make his thought appear somewhat more monotheistic to us than he, I think, intends. This may be due to shortcomings in Julian’s philosophical instruction, or because Platonic doctrine on the One was not so comprehensively articulated as it came to be in the subsequent generations, or Julian may have been attempting to make his pagan system look more like Christianity, or to streamline polytheism into a more top-down structure that could compete more effectively with Christianity on an institutional level.
I’ll proceed now to some comments on individual passages. (Translations by W.C. Wright.)
132d: "whether it is right to call him the supra-intelligible, or the Idea of Being … or the One, since the One seems somehow to be prior to all the rest"—we see here, as elsewhere in the piece, that Julian is uncertain of how to draw these philosophical distinctions, or finds them not too important.
135c: "the fact that he is established as king among the intellectual Gods, from his middle station among the planets"—here Julian seeks to use the centrality of the visible sun to argue for a higher position for Helios on the invisible plane of the higher principles than Helios has in the 'orthodox' Platonic system.
136a: Regarding the slogan Julian quotes about Zeus, Hades, Helios and Serapis, variations on this acclamation with one, two, and three members, or varying members, are well known and have been discussed especially by Versnel in Ter Unus. He argues that
"The essential meaning of the heis theos formula … is not a syncretistic confession of the unity or identity of the gods mentioned: on the contrary, it is an acclamation emphasizing the exceptional character and the greatness of the god or gods invoked. In other words, it represents the elative, not the unifying force of the word heis," (p. 235).
Given this, Wright's translation of "three gods in one godhead" is extremely misleading. At most, we could translate the slogan as "Sarapis is Zeus, Hades, and Helios in one," with no strong sense of identity at all, but the sense more that "Sarapis is as good as Zeus, Hades, and Helios put together." Julian uses the slogan for his own purposes, chief of which, again, is to elevate Helios however he can.
137a-c: Julian uses a subtle exegesis of the Odyssey and the Iliad to argue that Helios is not subordinate to Zeus or to Hera.
138d-139a: A lengthy discussion of "middleness", mesotês, in order to explain how a God who is "midway between the visible Gods who surround the universe and the immaterial and intelligible Gods who surround the Good" is nevertheless the supreme God. Again, at 141b, Helios is admitted to be "midway between the intelligible and the encosmic Gods," but this is, Julian has argued, actually the supreme position. At 156c, Helios is "midmost of the midmost intellectual Gods".
139c: Positing "a sort of binding force in the intelligible world of the Gods, which orders all things into one" permits Julian to see an analogy with what Helios does on the lower, cosmic plane, but also demonstrates that the unity of the intelligible Gods is not simply given for him.
141d: "King Helios is one and proceeds from one God, <that is,> from the intelligible cosmos, which is one"—Julian's awkward phrasing here seems like an attempt to convey that the unity of the Gods lies in their being all in each one; but all that matters for the purposes of this hymn, of course, is that they are all in Helios.
142c: "We must assume that what has just been said about his substance applies equally to his powers"—here and elsewhere in this piece (e.g., 145c) Julian seems to analyze a God into three phases of substance (ousia), power, and activity, unlike later Platonists like Proclus who speak instead of a God's existence (hyparxis), power, and activity, with ousia being on the level of the God's activity. This could help to explain Julian's tendency to conflate the One and Being, since ousia implies being. Julian never seems to use in this piece the terminology of supra-essentiality (hyperousiotês), which for Platonists like Proclus positions the Gods unambiguously prior to Being.
143b: Gods who are "akin to Helios" and "of like substance" serve to "sum up the … nature of this God," in whom "they are one"—this is the basic procedure of the polycentric hymn, i.e., since all the Gods are in each one, one may take all the other Gods as unfolding or articulating the chosen deity's nature, especially ones whose activity is related to hers narratively or that is similar to hers.
144a-b: Apollo "is the interpreter for us of the fairest purposes that are to be found with our God," articulating the nature of Helios just as Helios, in a hymn to Apollo, could be understood to articulate the nature of Apollo. Note also the argument here: "Helios, since he comprehends in himself all the principles of the fairest intellectual synthesis, is himself Apollo the leader of the Muses"—because Helios does what Apollo is said to do, Helios is Apollo. This kind of reasoning only applies where we are from treating the nature of all the other Gods purely as intelligible contents within our chosen deity. We see the same thing in Egyptian hymns, when the names of other Gods are taken semantically in order to treat them as "names" of the God being hymned at the moment, e.g., "You [God X] are hidden in this your name of 'Amun'," where the name of the God Amun is being used for its meaning, which is 'hidden'. The sentence thus reads, literally, "You are hidden in this your name of Hidden." This would be a meaningless tautology unless the independent identity of Amun is in fact taken as given. Julian takes this exact approach at 148d, where he speaks of "the other names of the Gods, which all belong to Helios".
144b: "though one should survey many other powers that belong to this god, never could one investigate them all"—compare Proclus' statement in his commentary on Plato's Cratylus, speaking of Apollo, that "the entire multitude of Apollo's powers is incomprehensible to us and indescribable. Indeed, how could human reason ever become able to grasp all the properties together, not only of Apollo, but of any God at all?" (In Crat. 97, trans. Duvick).
144b-c: Helios has "an equal and identical dominion" as Zeus, "shares … imperishableness and abiding sameness with Apollo," "shares … the dividing function … with Dionysus"—we see that despite the ability to think of Helios, for the purposes of the hymn, as expanding to encompass all the other Gods, Helios is also for Julian still situated in an environment in which the Gods are irreducibly many.
145b: Helios "bestows … on all the intellectual Gods the faculty of thought and of being comprehended by thought"—Julian often in this piece seems to draw particularly on account in the Republic of the analogy between the sun, the cause both of the being of mundane things and of their knowability, and the Idea of the Good, in order to promote Helios to a higher position in the intellective order of Gods than do other Platonists, who place more emphasis on the account of the demiurge in the Timaeus, traditionally identified with Zeus.
147d: With respect to Okeanos, Julian does the same thing we have seen him do earlier with other Gods, namely, use a definition of the God's principal activity as a middle term to identify them with Helios. Here, because Helios girdles the poles, he does what, on one definition, Okeanos does, and therefore Helios can also receive the attribute Homer accords to Okeanos of "father of all things", even though this attribute is actually only related to pole-girdling if we presuppose the individual integrity of the God Okeanos.
149b-d: Julian's doctrine with respect to Athena is interesting and quite technical. She comes forth "whole from the whole of him, being contained within him," but seems more distinct from Helios than Zeus, who Julian says he believes to be "in no wise different from Helios," or Apollo, who "differs in no way from Helios", because Athena must "bind together the Gods who are assembled about Helios and bring them without confusion into unity with Helios." Note that "without confusion" (dicha synchuseôs), literally, "without mixture", entails that even in union with Helios, the other Gods remain distinct. Proclus uses almost the same language to speak of the unity of the henads with one another, in which they are "unmixed" (amigês, asynchuta; In Parm. 1048), because all are in each, rather than all in one. Hence what is said by Julian of Helios here could be said of any other God, in principle. The special role of Athena in bringing the Gods in this fashion into unity with Helios points again to the irreducible role of other Gods for Julian even in the midst of his monolatrous meditation upon Helios.
150b: Aphrodite, like Helios himself, is "a synthesis [synkrasis] of the heavenly Gods", and like Athena, an irreducible "joint cause [synaitios] with him".
151a: "Helios holds sway among the intellectual Gods in that he unites into one, about his own undivided substance, a great multitude of the Gods"—Julian's claim for Helios here is a bit less sweeping than at some other points in the piece.
156d-157a: Helios "fills the whole heavens with the same number of Gods as he contains in himself in intellectual form"—that is, the presence of the other Gods in Helios enables him to bring them to visible form in their diverse ways, enabling him to express his own unique kind of ultimacy, which lies in the ubiquity of visible form through the solar agency.
158a: Julian explains here his task: "to compose a hymn to express my gratitude to the God … to tell, to the best of my power, of his essential nature [ousia]." The ousia or 'substance' of a God contains all things, and so what we can discern of that substance will encompass as many other Gods as the activities of whom we can grasp through that substance.
Julian's hymn needs to be understood within the framework of polycentric polytheism. Julian is attempting to articulate the ways in which the deity to whom he is devoted, Helios, is ultimate, even though he’s doing it within a conceptual structure (Iamblichean Platonism) in which Helios is actually situated quite far down in the hierarchy that expresses the procession of Being. Assuming that the hypostatic hierarchy in Iamblichus is the same as that which we see expressed more fully in Proclus, Helios is active on the hypercosmic plane, just below the intellective plane where, e.g., Zeus and Hera have their primary activity. As such, Julian has to think about ways in which an intermediate status—or even one somewhat lower—can be understood to actually be supreme. Another part of his strategy is also to elevate Helios' position as much as possible by having Helios displace Zeus to some extent as primary demiurge of the cosmos and focal point of the intellective order of Gods, effectively promoting Helios from his hypercosmic position. Julian does this very intelligently, however, by arguing not for a different role for Helios, but rather that if we properly understand the role Helios is presently understood to have, we will see that it is really the crucial role.
In this, Julian follows in the footsteps of earlier polytheistic theologians in Egypt and in India, to name two especially notable examples, who use hymns to a given deity to demonstrate how that deity's functions can be understood as the ultimate ground of reality. Hence, in a hymn to Ptah, Ptah's special province, the function of speech, is seen as the nature of reality, and Ptah thus as the ultimate God, while in a hymn to Khnum, Khnum's primary field of action, corporeal form, is argued to be the essence of things, in particular, of the statues of all the other Gods, and Khnum therefore as the supreme God. The Rig Veda speaks of Agni as supreme in the sense that the sacrifices to all the other Gods pass through the fire, which is his, while treating Vac as supreme in the sense that the hymns to all the other Gods depend upon voice, which is hers. The Bhagavadgītā sees in the nature of Kṛṣṇa the nature of reality, while the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad sees reality in the nature of Śiva. The fact that such texts rarely affirm the reciprocal potential for affirming the ultimacy of the other Gods is a problem for modern polytheist polemics, but it was not a problem for ancient authors working within an environment in which this reciprocal polycentricity was natural and largely unthought.
(It should also be noted the degree to which this sort of effort of thinking about the ultimate nature of reality in diverse different ways fostered the development of philosophical thought in these cultures.)
The other major element that needs to be understood with respect to Julian’s work is his tendency, though not entirely consistently, to conflate the One with Being, which can make his thought appear somewhat more monotheistic to us than he, I think, intends. This may be due to shortcomings in Julian’s philosophical instruction, or because Platonic doctrine on the One was not so comprehensively articulated as it came to be in the subsequent generations, or Julian may have been attempting to make his pagan system look more like Christianity, or to streamline polytheism into a more top-down structure that could compete more effectively with Christianity on an institutional level.
I’ll proceed now to some comments on individual passages. (Translations by W.C. Wright.)
132d: "whether it is right to call him the supra-intelligible, or the Idea of Being … or the One, since the One seems somehow to be prior to all the rest"—we see here, as elsewhere in the piece, that Julian is uncertain of how to draw these philosophical distinctions, or finds them not too important.
135c: "the fact that he is established as king among the intellectual Gods, from his middle station among the planets"—here Julian seeks to use the centrality of the visible sun to argue for a higher position for Helios on the invisible plane of the higher principles than Helios has in the 'orthodox' Platonic system.
136a: Regarding the slogan Julian quotes about Zeus, Hades, Helios and Serapis, variations on this acclamation with one, two, and three members, or varying members, are well known and have been discussed especially by Versnel in Ter Unus. He argues that
"The essential meaning of the heis theos formula … is not a syncretistic confession of the unity or identity of the gods mentioned: on the contrary, it is an acclamation emphasizing the exceptional character and the greatness of the god or gods invoked. In other words, it represents the elative, not the unifying force of the word heis," (p. 235).
Given this, Wright's translation of "three gods in one godhead" is extremely misleading. At most, we could translate the slogan as "Sarapis is Zeus, Hades, and Helios in one," with no strong sense of identity at all, but the sense more that "Sarapis is as good as Zeus, Hades, and Helios put together." Julian uses the slogan for his own purposes, chief of which, again, is to elevate Helios however he can.
137a-c: Julian uses a subtle exegesis of the Odyssey and the Iliad to argue that Helios is not subordinate to Zeus or to Hera.
138d-139a: A lengthy discussion of "middleness", mesotês, in order to explain how a God who is "midway between the visible Gods who surround the universe and the immaterial and intelligible Gods who surround the Good" is nevertheless the supreme God. Again, at 141b, Helios is admitted to be "midway between the intelligible and the encosmic Gods," but this is, Julian has argued, actually the supreme position. At 156c, Helios is "midmost of the midmost intellectual Gods".
139c: Positing "a sort of binding force in the intelligible world of the Gods, which orders all things into one" permits Julian to see an analogy with what Helios does on the lower, cosmic plane, but also demonstrates that the unity of the intelligible Gods is not simply given for him.
141d: "King Helios is one and proceeds from one God, <that is,> from the intelligible cosmos, which is one"—Julian's awkward phrasing here seems like an attempt to convey that the unity of the Gods lies in their being all in each one; but all that matters for the purposes of this hymn, of course, is that they are all in Helios.
142c: "We must assume that what has just been said about his substance applies equally to his powers"—here and elsewhere in this piece (e.g., 145c) Julian seems to analyze a God into three phases of substance (ousia), power, and activity, unlike later Platonists like Proclus who speak instead of a God's existence (hyparxis), power, and activity, with ousia being on the level of the God's activity. This could help to explain Julian's tendency to conflate the One and Being, since ousia implies being. Julian never seems to use in this piece the terminology of supra-essentiality (hyperousiotês), which for Platonists like Proclus positions the Gods unambiguously prior to Being.
143b: Gods who are "akin to Helios" and "of like substance" serve to "sum up the … nature of this God," in whom "they are one"—this is the basic procedure of the polycentric hymn, i.e., since all the Gods are in each one, one may take all the other Gods as unfolding or articulating the chosen deity's nature, especially ones whose activity is related to hers narratively or that is similar to hers.
144a-b: Apollo "is the interpreter for us of the fairest purposes that are to be found with our God," articulating the nature of Helios just as Helios, in a hymn to Apollo, could be understood to articulate the nature of Apollo. Note also the argument here: "Helios, since he comprehends in himself all the principles of the fairest intellectual synthesis, is himself Apollo the leader of the Muses"—because Helios does what Apollo is said to do, Helios is Apollo. This kind of reasoning only applies where we are from treating the nature of all the other Gods purely as intelligible contents within our chosen deity. We see the same thing in Egyptian hymns, when the names of other Gods are taken semantically in order to treat them as "names" of the God being hymned at the moment, e.g., "You [God X] are hidden in this your name of 'Amun'," where the name of the God Amun is being used for its meaning, which is 'hidden'. The sentence thus reads, literally, "You are hidden in this your name of Hidden." This would be a meaningless tautology unless the independent identity of Amun is in fact taken as given. Julian takes this exact approach at 148d, where he speaks of "the other names of the Gods, which all belong to Helios".
144b: "though one should survey many other powers that belong to this god, never could one investigate them all"—compare Proclus' statement in his commentary on Plato's Cratylus, speaking of Apollo, that "the entire multitude of Apollo's powers is incomprehensible to us and indescribable. Indeed, how could human reason ever become able to grasp all the properties together, not only of Apollo, but of any God at all?" (In Crat. 97, trans. Duvick).
144b-c: Helios has "an equal and identical dominion" as Zeus, "shares … imperishableness and abiding sameness with Apollo," "shares … the dividing function … with Dionysus"—we see that despite the ability to think of Helios, for the purposes of the hymn, as expanding to encompass all the other Gods, Helios is also for Julian still situated in an environment in which the Gods are irreducibly many.
145b: Helios "bestows … on all the intellectual Gods the faculty of thought and of being comprehended by thought"—Julian often in this piece seems to draw particularly on account in the Republic of the analogy between the sun, the cause both of the being of mundane things and of their knowability, and the Idea of the Good, in order to promote Helios to a higher position in the intellective order of Gods than do other Platonists, who place more emphasis on the account of the demiurge in the Timaeus, traditionally identified with Zeus.
147d: With respect to Okeanos, Julian does the same thing we have seen him do earlier with other Gods, namely, use a definition of the God's principal activity as a middle term to identify them with Helios. Here, because Helios girdles the poles, he does what, on one definition, Okeanos does, and therefore Helios can also receive the attribute Homer accords to Okeanos of "father of all things", even though this attribute is actually only related to pole-girdling if we presuppose the individual integrity of the God Okeanos.
149b-d: Julian's doctrine with respect to Athena is interesting and quite technical. She comes forth "whole from the whole of him, being contained within him," but seems more distinct from Helios than Zeus, who Julian says he believes to be "in no wise different from Helios," or Apollo, who "differs in no way from Helios", because Athena must "bind together the Gods who are assembled about Helios and bring them without confusion into unity with Helios." Note that "without confusion" (dicha synchuseôs), literally, "without mixture", entails that even in union with Helios, the other Gods remain distinct. Proclus uses almost the same language to speak of the unity of the henads with one another, in which they are "unmixed" (amigês, asynchuta; In Parm. 1048), because all are in each, rather than all in one. Hence what is said by Julian of Helios here could be said of any other God, in principle. The special role of Athena in bringing the Gods in this fashion into unity with Helios points again to the irreducible role of other Gods for Julian even in the midst of his monolatrous meditation upon Helios.
150b: Aphrodite, like Helios himself, is "a synthesis [synkrasis] of the heavenly Gods", and like Athena, an irreducible "joint cause [synaitios] with him".
151a: "Helios holds sway among the intellectual Gods in that he unites into one, about his own undivided substance, a great multitude of the Gods"—Julian's claim for Helios here is a bit less sweeping than at some other points in the piece.
156d-157a: Helios "fills the whole heavens with the same number of Gods as he contains in himself in intellectual form"—that is, the presence of the other Gods in Helios enables him to bring them to visible form in their diverse ways, enabling him to express his own unique kind of ultimacy, which lies in the ubiquity of visible form through the solar agency.
158a: Julian explains here his task: "to compose a hymn to express my gratitude to the God … to tell, to the best of my power, of his essential nature [ousia]." The ousia or 'substance' of a God contains all things, and so what we can discern of that substance will encompass as many other Gods as the activities of whom we can grasp through that substance.