Commentary XXI

Gaia-Chthonia, Aristotelian Gods, and Pointing at the Stars

I

Agamben has this interesting essay titled Gaia and Chthonia, where he lays out his interesting ontological interpretation of their complex joined nature and the political consequences therein. He says that:

“The fact is that chton and ge name two aspects of the earth that are, so to speak, geologically antithetical: chton is the external face of the underworld, the earth from the surface downwards, ge is the earth from the surface upwards, the face that the earth turns towards the sky.”

It is from Chthon that Hades emerges to steal Persephone away, and yet, as Agamben says, Persephone’s account says it is Gaia that opens the door. It is almost like Chthon, whose presence in Hesiod Agamben finds in Tartarus, and Gaia are the same God from two sides, almost like Janus. Perhaps we might say this is the “Janic” side of Gaia, although that would be an innovation on my part. In a relatively recent twitter (X) thread of mine, I thought a bit about what Gaia’s activity could be if Proclus places that phase of the God’s unfolding of Being in the “Intelligible-Intellective”, that “scene of intellection”[1] that establishes the ground within which a more familiar “chain of being” can emerge starting with (for Proclus’ Hellenic Theology) Kronos’ activity as Pure Intellect. I’ll reproduce it here, along with Butler’s response, as I think it helps give further context:

Oluwaseyi: “That it is with Kronos that intelligence in the sense denoted by his scheming with his mother Gaia, seems to me to indicate that Proclus’ interpretation of Ouranos’ activity as “Noesis” (also “Intelligence” or “intellection”) denotes something rather different. Perhaps this is where Eros comes in, given what Ouranos is doing? (Intercourse)

It seems Ouranos is the pure pleasure of manifestation to an other, given that the hypostasis of this activity is Zoe/Life. Ouranos is intelligibility without Limit, overwhelming intelligibility, the pure pleasure of the act of knowing. It is also interesting they remain in Gaia while Ouranos is whole and active this way.

Gaia being the “stability” of being at this point, their presence in her indicates the stability of the Gods’ being together due to her activity, while Ouranos enacts their co-inherence. Kronos’ “Hatred” of his “Father” (which ends up, due to this interpretation, referring to both the God Ouranos and his “Ouranic” phase in the Intelligible-Intellective) is thus is “desire” to proceed to intellective determination. That’s because, at this point, there isn’t exactly a cosmos yet. What there is, is a “scene” of intellection, where the intelligibles are known in and as the communion of “wholes in wholes”.

With the split of Heaven and Earth, Ouranos and Gaia, we have the split of intelligible procession and the stability of reversion. Where before they were “co-inherent” in the same hypostasis, they are now illuminating subsequent hypostases differently.

E.P. Butler: “It's appropriate to understand this moment through the union of Ouranos and Gaia, through the "multinaturalism" of thinking between Earth and Sky, a domain of forces essentially broader in scope than intellect. We do not know what a body can do, what is hidden in Gaia's womb. There is the intelligible object, and there is the intellective subject, and there is the link or bond between them, the intelligible-and-intellective. But there are profound consequences from making this connective tissue distinct in itself. In a sense, it blocks the perfect union of being and thinking which has been affirmed in the tradition since Parmenides, and which is strongly reaffirmed in Aristotle. The mediation now has its own telos.

This multiplicity is preserved in intellect, which aspires to a perfectly "translated" unity, through its acceptance that the closure in principle is never actually complete. But it also survives in its "wild" form, so to speak, in the ongoing coition of Earth and Sky. This is why the intelligible-intellective, the hypostasis of Life, also opens the system laterally, so to speak, to the multiplicity of topoi, of worlds. Aphrodite mediates between this manifold and the Olympian order, because it can only be grasped as force and desire. This is also why certain intellectual frameworks of the 20th century which ought, in a certain respect, to just have resulted in sterile reductionisms, have instead been fruitful, essentially because they were grounded in the ideas of love and power.”

This pre-intellectual “manifestation of presence” has in Gaia its stability, but also its depth, the ability to “contain” more than the surface presents. Indeed, it is possible to interpret in Agamben’s conclusion of Gaia as the surface “turned towards the sky” the reversion of entities towards their causes, and see Chthon as the affirmation of their self-establishment, their “rootedness” in themselves. Perhaps it is not by mistake that Proclus describes the Henads as “rooted in the One; for even as trees by their ‘topmost’ parts are fixed in the earth and are earthy by virtue of that…”[2] Further justification can perhaps be found in the idea that “the underworld is the hidden sky,” a paraphrase the exact quote and source of which I can’t seem to remember, but one that finds corroboration in certain philosophers, including Proclus when he sees Hades as a “hypercosmic God”, a God whose psychic activity (or whose Soul’s substance) transcends embodiment and the cosmos of embodiment. A consistent part of ontological interpretations of myths is the constant inversion of direction. Hades steals Persephone “downward”, and this is the paradigm for embodiment of all souls, and yet Hades and his “realm” transcend embodiment and the cosmos as such, or rather (as all transcendent realms do) it encompass the embodied cosmos from beyond its ontological limits. This is because “downward” here is also inward, and inward is also “upward” from another perspective, the perspective that transcends the “upward” of the immediate intellective context.

I will explain.

Recall the “intelligible-intellective”. It is supposed to be prior to the more proper “chain of being” in the sense of a chain of monads that define and shape the world from ideality qua itself (Kronos) to pure matter, “prime matter”. The “Intelligible-Intellective” is a “scene” according to Butler, but I have always wondered in what other ways we might understand its priority that might free us from the traps inherent in hierarchical representation. Chthonos offers us the possibility of seeing it as a “depth” to things, that “internal space” in which things know themselves. The “scene of intellection” is the space of self-knowledge. This is not antithetical to the idea of Gaia as the surface turned to the sky. Gaia, in this sense, is already separate from Ouranos. The Gaia in which Persephone – and by implication, all our souls – inhabits is the aspect of our stability that distinguishes between the self and other, the space where there is an orientation towards higher principles, the space of a “chain of being”. It is the space that Kronos makes possible with his castration of Ouranos. But myths are always now, and the “Ouranian” sovereignty is still present here in the presence of an orientation to the “above”, the “beyond” of the higher principles. Even more importantly, the original mode of “Ouranian” sovereignty is still accessible, if one is willing to accept the activity of Hades, the “Lord of many guests,” the one who by using images – he is the demiurge of images[3] – lures us deeper into ourselves and away from the limited and insufficient intellection of this or that order of being. Indeed, it cannot be any other way. It is constitutive of our being that this interiority be discovered. The resulting conflict, as the price of this salvation, between this “interiority”, this “excess” of our inside, and the order of being we have fastened ourselves to, is what we discover as the visceral experience of embodiment.

II

It is common to identify Nous as “Mind” and the forms as its “thoughts”, but as Vargas recently said[4], the identification doesn’t take seriously the fact that the forms are themselves each a Nous, at least in the Neoplatonists. This does not take away the idea that forms are in some sense “parts” of a whole Nous, but it does help us reconsider what this means. We have to remember Aristotle here, that the first principle is often translated as “thought thinking itself”, which perhaps describes Nous quite well. This means that at some level, each form is self-determining, which means it is “necessary”, at least modally. More importantly, it means there is a necessary first-person component to “thought thinking itself” that makes any “thought” (the form, as itself a thinker) not completely reducible to the whole Nous, which is its context. Moving away from forms, perhaps this is why Aristotle can have a Pros hen structure to the universe without needing to be a monotheist[5]. The Gods are themselves not forms, and thus not parts. But if forms as parts are not completely reducible to Nous as thought to thinker, how much more the Aristotelian Gods. If these Gods are each a whole Nous, then perhaps they co-inhere according to the principle of “all things in all things, but in each appropriately”, without needing to dissolve into one God. They are the “top” of the pros hen structure, one substance, and yet they are many Gods. The disagreement with the more traditional Platonists would then be the question of whether Nous or Unity explains this first-person irreducibility in the first place. This is not supposed to be a definitive reading, but a potential frame from which to begin my readings of Aristotle himself when I am ready to.

III

In recent weeks, I have had real-life conversations with friends about my philosophical project and framework and the character of its language on unity and multiplicity. I have to admit I am rather bad at explaining myself verbally. I am much more comfortable with the typed (not written!) word. However, these conversations have been exhilarating, to say the least, and engendered deep thoughts and feelings about what I am trying to do with these ideas. One thing I remembered (or was reminded of) during these few weeks is the Schuonian origins of some of my thoughts, particularly how Schuon deals with arguments:

“The classic error rationalists make with respect to metaphysical demonstrations is to believe that a metaphysician assumes his thesis as a result of the arguments he propounds, and that this thesis is therefore no more than a mere conclusion, and that it falls apart as soon as one denounces the weak points that some excel in discovering—which is not difficult to do since the facts of the demonstration elude ordinary experience; in reality, as we have said more than once, metaphysical arguments are not the causes of certitude, but its effects; in other words, the certitude at issue, while being a subjective phenomenon, is made of objectivity since it pertains entirely to a Reality that is independent of our mind.”[6]

It’s because of passages like these that I fell in love with Schuon’s writing in the first place. I have to say, I had forgotten how liberating it feels not to rest the weight of your world on getting the exact right words to express what is in the end, inexpressible. To co-opt the words of my dear Buddhist friend, we write to point at the moon, not to point at our fingers and ourselves.

Given that, I’d like to state the virtues of the language of “many” or “multiplicity” when referring to “Ultimate Reality.” A significant part of the arguments I was having was concerning the reason I insist on the language of “multiplicity” for reality beyond identity and difference, and “beyond being”. Why not “neither One nor Many” or “both One and Many”? I admit I could not think up appropriate reasons on the spot, but I have thought about it quite a bit since then. Although the language of “neither one nor many” is appropriate on some level, the reason I think the language of “many” is meaningful is that to say “many” takes seriously the uniqueness of the various Gods in question, such that we are less likely to be tempted to mix them up as simply interchangeable. If we are to take this philosophy seriously, if we are to take Proclus seriously, I don’t think the Gods are reducible to their functions or aspects. There is something to Zeus that makes him in principle at home in and as any monad or hypostasis in any ontology, ditto for any other God. Yet, to affirm this does not mean that Zeus collapses into every other God. Who you worship matters, the Gods you know and interact with matters, and this is beyond their functions. This primacy of who as an ineffable category only fully known in relationship with the Gods in question is a key part of this philosophy, and to meet the who in their fullness is to encounter the all, to be liberated into unity. The Gods qua unity are not “separate,” but they aren’t “one” either, not confused, not mixed together, and as they transcend identity and difference, they are not identical with one another or different from each other. Those determinations do not arise in the highest form of polycentricity we see qua unity, and yet, it is significant we meet the all, the multiplicity of Gods as such, and not qua this or that attribute or name, in each one. The “multiplicity” of Gods then, acts for this philosophy as the most adequate expression of Non-dualism. Put in more explicit words, in this philosophy, Polytheism is Non-dualism. Here, we are not just pointing at the moon, we are pointing at the Einsteinian heavens in all its multitudinous and acentric (or rather, polycentric) glory. This is why I originally considered my leap into this system the continuation of my Schuonian project of pluralist religious philosophy. Here still, words fail me, but at the very least, they can point to something. It is through the all in each that I now continue my originally perennialist project.

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[1] Edward Butler, “The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus” (New School University, 2003), https://henadology.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/edward-butler-the-metaphysics-of-polytheism-phd-thesis.pdf.

[2] Proclus, Proclus’ Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, trans. Glenn R. Morrow and John M. Dillon (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987). p. 408-09

[3] “Endymions_bower | More on Dionysos,” accessed January 22, 2023, https://endymions-bower.dreamwidth.org/21514.html.

[4] Antonio Vargas 🏳️‍🌈 [@philoantonio], “Thinking about What Bothers Me about the ‘Nous as Divine Mind, Forms as Divine Thoughts’ Is That Apart from Being Too Subjectivistic, It Ignores That Every Form Is Itself a Nous of Its Own in Some Sense.,” Tweet, Twitter, June 14, 2025, https://x.com/philoantonio/status/1934005796594933936.

[5] Richard Bodéüs, Aristotle and the Theology of the Living Immortals, SUNY Series in Ancient Greek Philosophy (New York: State University of New York Press, 2000).

[6] Frithjof Schuon, “The Question of Theodicies,” World Wisdom Online Library, n.d.