“Behold, a god!”: Realization as what it means to be divine
To be a God Part 2
In this journey where “[t]he focus is not on being exempt from moral error, but on being god” (Enn. 1.2.6.)[1], it is fair to ask what “being god” looks like. Plotinus elaborates on that in his “On Virtues’, but this can all be bewildering for a thoroughly modern person. On my end, ever since I first learned about Proclus’ description, I have always been fascinated by what it means and how I can understand such an idea. In the Elements, he says the following:
“PROP. 135. Every divine henad is participated without mediation by some one real-existent, and whatever is divinized is linked by an upward tension to one divine henad: thus the participant genera of existents are identical in number with the participated henads.”[2]
Vargas translates it thus:
“Every divine unity is incorporated immediately by a single being, and each divinized reality points to a single divine unity. And there are as many incorporating genera of being as there are incorporated unities.”[3]
Basically, the idea is that for any genera of being, there is an exemplar being that directly participates a God, or that incorporates a God. It is that exemplar being that makes that genera of being possible. Remember that, for Proclus (and I believe, for any pagan Neoplatonist), the Gods are “supraessential”, that is, “above Being” (Prop. 115). They are of the order of the first principle. Sallust says they are not separated from the first cause[4], which is in line with Proclus[5]. This means that apart from participating any prior beings, the exemplar being for a genera of being participates supraessential unity directly. This is how Proclus grounds the multiplicity of genera without reducing their individuation to material factors or to a “diminution” or “lessening” of goodness. Basically, Proclus denies that the procession of Being is due to a “loss” or a “fall”. A fascinating application of this principle is found in the angelic order of being:
“The most interesting thing Proclus has to say about angels, however, is about the special relationship of the whole class of angels as such to one particular God in the Hellenic pantheon, namely Hermes. Proclus states as a general principle that “the summit and the first genus of every order is … assimilated to the cause which is prior to it. As therefore, the first of intellectuals is intelligible, and the first of angels is a God, thus also the first of sensibles is perpetual and divine …” (In Tim. 3, 223). In a Hellenic context, the God who is also “the first of angels” is Hermes, as Proclus makes clear in the Cratylus commentary, when he explains that “as in Homer knowledge of the conversation between Zeus and Helios came down as far as Odysseus through the medium of both the archangel Hermes and Calypso (Odyssey 12.374-90), so also Helenus learned the will of Apollo and Athena not from the highest levels but from those proximate to him and daimonic (Iliad 7.44),” (37). Apparently the unusual term "archangel" is used here to distinguish Hermes, as the God of angels, so to speak, from mere angels, who are, unlike Hermes, beings”[6]
Angels reveal the Gods, they are “the interpreters of the Gods”[7], and yet their summit is a God. This is in line with the pattern in Proclus where Gods relate to each other in ways that beings incorporate. But what is interesting here is how the exemplar being itself is called the God while somewhere else said to participate the God. Which one is it? Does the being participate the God or is the being the God? The answer lies in how we understand participation here. When we participate humanity as a species, we incorporate that substance as a part of our identity. Similarly, when the exemplar being participates the God, they incorporate the God as their identity. Note that I didn’t say “part of identity”, but “as their identity”. The difference is crucial, because there is a sense in which beings participate prior beings, and this is accounted for, but for the uniqueness and individuation of this genera of being as something different from the other genera, it also needs to directly participate unity. To directly participate unity is quite simply to be self-unified, to “become” one’s self. Adam Labecki says it best when he says a being “belongs to being as a part while a one belongs to the one as itself”[8] (emphasis mine). The language is quite exact, and quite familiar, in the sense that it really does seem like what is happening here is that Gods qua being are realized beings, where “realization” here refers to “liberating knowledge of the true self.”[9] We can then make a bit more sense of how Vargas puts the difference between a “Henad” and a “God”:
“Proclus has already shown in prop. 114 that every god is a divine unity and in prop. 115 that every god is beyond being. The purpose of this proposition is to show that it is also a value beyond being, i.e., it is a Value, it is not a being that has value through a property or whose essence is valuable. Thus, for instance, a god of purity does not have purity as a virtue (even in a maximal way) nor is its essence somehow pure, rather it just is the standard “purity.” Of course, gods are usually more complex than this, so the values are not so much like “purity” and “protection” and the like but things such as “Apollonianess” and “Dionisiacality”. (I think the Nietzschean contrast is a good way of thinking about how gods can be values, its only problem is that it stops at two gods.)
Now, what’s particularly interesting for understanding the status of Proclus’ gods is the contrast he draws between considering the gods as things that have “gone forth” from the primary and considering them as gods. According to the former perspective the gods merely have the character of unity and value (they are ἑνοειδής and ἀγαθοειδὴς), whereas considering the gods “as gods” is to consider them as unities and values themselves (ἑνάδες καὶ ἀγαθότητες). This distinction is possible because “god” is not synonymous with “unity” in Proclus: a god is a self-complete unity together with the beings that incorporate (μετέχει) it. So it would be wrong to point to the sun and say “Look, a divine unity!”, but it is correct to point to it and say “Behold, a god!”. It makes sense, therefore, that the god qua god is a unity, since it is the divine unity that makes all that is incorporated divine, whereas what incorporates it merely has “the character of unity.””[10]
The being that realizes Zeus “becomes” Zeus and “is” Zeus. This is why there are so many different “Zeuses”, each being Zeus themself, different and contradictory from one another. The God qua being is a realized “sage”, but what distinguishes them from human sages? Or from angelic beings that are distinguished from their monad? I am not exactly sure about the answer to this, Iamblichus gives a phenomenological explanation of the differences between Gods, Angels, Daimons, etc. in his “On the Mysteries”[11], but it seems we have mentioned one of these criteria this earlier in the essay, in that these exemplar beings define a genera of being. It is a realization that is generative of taxeis, or novel classes of being. Another possible criterion is that they are also unoriginate in the sense that for most of these beings, it seems there was never a time when they were not realized. This criterion breaks down somewhat when we get to Gods who unify the many genera of embodied beings, but we can perhaps loosen it a bit. We can say that “for the Gods qua (realized) being, their existence as beings always coincides with them being realized”. So for eternal classes of Gods, beyond time (or having all that is proper to time in one unextended presence), realization is also eternal. For everlasting classes of Gods, who are in time but have no beginning or end, they have always been realized. For Gods whose unified class has a beginning and end in time, they are realized for the entire duration of their presence in time. So we can say that, from the first moment of its existence, the Sun has been realized, and it will be realized until its death. The Sun’s soul, on the other hand, is everlasting and always realized, and it is what guarantees that it is realized in its temporary embodiment. We can also say that its intellect is eternal and eternally realized. The Intellect (Nous) brings a particular problem concerning this criterion of realization, since all Intellects, whether they are Gods or not, are realized. It would seem that on the higher scales of Being, the criterion of novelty, the God’s inauguration of a taxis of being, matters more for discernment of Gods qua Being. We, on the other hand, seem to not be born realized, although perhaps there are exceptions. Those exceptions prove the rule.
This idea is not exactly new, and indeed I have been writing along these lines for a while now[12], but I realized I need to make it more explicit for the things that I will write later that will reference this idea as near foundational for its intelligibility. If the Gods qua being are those whose being coincides with their realization, and who inaugurate new taxeis of being, then we have another avenue towards solidarity with the traditions of the east, including Buddhism. We have a line to Islam, and even potentially Christianity (even if this is harder and requires development). Concerning the monotheisms, it is a way to discern divine activity from within, a way to find solidarity with those within it who are closest to our cause. There is also a line here to the Yoruba traditional religions, although one I will have to make more explicit later. The goal is, as we said earlier, “being god”. The Gods are in henosis with each other, and so our goal is henosis with one another, with our Gods and with the Gods of others.
[1] Lloyd P. Gerson et al., “Plotinus: The Enneads,” 2018.
[2] Proclus, The Elements of Theology, trans. E. R. Dodds (Oxford University Press, 1971).
[3] Antonio Vargas, “Proclus’ Elements of Metaphysics,” accessed November 23, 2022, https://www.academia.edu/44841806/Proclus_Elements_of_Metaphysics.
[4] Sallustius, “On the Gods and the World,” trans. Thomas Taylor (London: Edward Jeffery and Pall Mall, 1793). Chap. 2.
[5] “But the first number, and which is connascent with The One, is uniform, ineffable, superessential, and perfectly similar to its cause. For in the first causes, neither does difference intervening separate from the generator the things begotten, and transfer them into another order, nor does the motion of the cause effecting a remission of power, produce into dissimilitude and indefiniteness the generation of the whole of things, but the cause of all things being unically raised above all motion and division, has established about itself a divine number, and has united it to its own simplicity. The one therefore prior to beings has given subsistence to the unities of beings.” - Proclus, The Theology of Plato, trans. Thomas Taylor (Prometheus Trust, 1995). Book III, Chapter I. Pg 177
[6] “Endymions_bower | Neoplatonic Angelology,” accessed February 12, 2023, https://endymions-bower.dreamwidth.org/25169.html.
[7] Proclus, On the Existence of Evils, trans. Jan Opsomer and Carlos Steel, Ancient Commentators on Aristotle (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2014). p. 69.
[8] Adam Labecki, “The One and the Many: Part I: The One,” Dionysius 24 (2006): 75–98.
[9] “Self-Realization,” in Wikipedia, June 22, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Self-realization&oldid=1296764483. That such a beautiful definition is on Wikipedia is also interesting.
[10] Antonio Vargas, “An Henadological Find,” Substack newsletter, @philoantonio (blog), December 5, 2022, https://philoantonio.substack.com/p/an-henadological-find.
[11] Iamblichus, De mysteriis, trans. Emma C. Clarke, Writings from the Greco-Roman world 4 (Atlanta, Ga: Soc. of Biblical Literature, 2003). II. 3; p. 87.
[12] See for instance: Oluwaseyi Bello, “To Be a God,” Substack newsletter, A Play of Masks (blog), February 15, 2025, https://symmetria.substack.com/p/to-be-a-god; Oluwaseyi Bello, “Neoplatonic Tawhid,” Substack newsletter, A Play of Masks (blog), June 8, 2025, https://symmetria.substack.com/p/neoplatonic-tawhid.