Theophany and Theodicy

A Euthyphrean Reconsideration

I

The popular Christian opinion of the Gods ascribes to them the role of “angels” or “demons”, or both depending on how you see the relationship between the two “classes”. This is mostly contrary to much of the way Gods are viewed in many places, most notably for my purposes here, the Pagan Platonists. To use an example in Aquinas, Wayne Hankey notes that “what “Plato” (Aquinas is actually looking at Proclus) called “gods” are only “separate intelligible form,” separated from knowing as well as from matter and motion. In his Exposition of the Liber de Causis, Thomas writes: the “order of gods, that is, of ideal forms has an order among itself corresponding to the order of the universality of forms.””[1]. Hankey correctly surmises that “This is at root a mistaken view”, for the Gods of the Platonists are not the forms. Instead “they [the Gods] are pure goodness, as they are pure unity”[2] and they “are in each other and are united with each other, and their unity is far greater than the community and sameness among beings... the individuality of each of them is a much more perfect thing than the otherness of the Forms”[3]. Considering the fact that the highest view of the angels we have in Christianity is as pure forms, the denial of this by Pagan Platonists entails the denial of every other solely ontological conception of the Gods, including Daimons. The Gods might have varieties of activity within Being that constitutes Being[4], including the possibility of manifesting as “daimonic Gods” and “material Gods” – as  distinct from material non-gods and ordinary daimons themselves, who might be “evil” – but they, their persons, are not reducible to beings, not even Being as such.

It is this understanding I have come to side with over the past few months. It conflicts, in appearance at least, with the popular Christian (and also “Gnostic”) belief that the Gods, the “lower Gods” especially, are evil, incompetent, or perhaps simply ontologically dependent and reducible, in the end, to this dependence. They do not legitimate worship in this view.

However wrong I believe this to be, this belief is borne out of the intuition of the “Problem of evil”. This does not change today, especially now that we know the history of the earth and the untold violence even “life” has to tolerate to survive as a whole. The stars are revealed to die, even if their reign is of an almost unfathomable range of years. That these stars were and are still in many places considered Gods might seem to vindicate the Christian view, not to mention Christ’s death, which is said to have come about by the hands of the world’s Gods as well as of its humans. One would wonder how a believer in the Gods as pure Goodnesses today might respond. I am in a weird position of siding with the Pagan Platonists on the question of Gods and remaining a Christian, at least for the meantime. How would I try to reframe this problem to my understanding? That is the purpose of this post. Gods help us in considering it.

II

Oṣun Statue

“Nor are the Gods the causes of evils, in the same manner as they are of goods; but evil originates from the imbecility of the recipients of good, and a subsistence in the last of things.” – Proclus

The idea of evil as “privatio boni”, a “negation” of the Good, is probably one of the best gifts to me when it comes to theodicy. It is also probably harder to understand than I used to think. When people hear “absence of good”, they often think of a vacuum, or vacuums in the structure of Being. But this is a mistake, there are no “gaps” in being. What would that mean? A “gap” in Being is not a physical vacuum, with its own energy and even existence, since it is still “something”, even if just “space”. A gap in Being would be non-existence, which is a contradictory thing if it is said to “exist” since it is non-existence. Note that the “Beyond Being” of the Platonists is not a “place” beyond existence that itself exists (merely having the property of “existence”). It is “existence” itself, which “privatio boni” is not. This leads to a conclusion. As I said in a previous post:

“An entailment of privatio boni is excessus boni. A privation of one good is always a relative "excess" of another. There are no true "gaps" in reality. This is also a way in which a God can be "evil", or more precisely, "wrathful": As an excess leading to "destructive" transformation. Material things are impermanent and fall to "privations" in the light of perpetual being and eternal being, which is always "excessive" in relation to them.”

This, unknown to me at the time I wrote this, is a possible interpretation of the Proclus quote that begins this section. The world’s beauty and wholeness are inextricably tied with its sheer “horror”. It is not really possible to separate them except abstractly. The world's beauty is a terrible and dangerous beauty. The beauty of the Sun is tied to the fact that it can so easily kill you. So also the beauty of the Ocean. But, if we read a lot of mythology, even Christian mythology, this is the nature of theophanies in general. The reason the Jewish temple is sealed up in layers is that it is dangerous. It is not a mistake that even HaShem has had the Sun as his symbol. This danger is not malice, but in fact, holiness, which is goodness.

A quick detour. This might surprise some, but the Bible Project explanation of holiness as uniqueness is rather spot on and perfectly congruent with how Proclus understood Gods. For Proclus, the Gods are each unique, and this is a positive uniqueness, not negation like a particular of a universal, in which beings are divided from each other. As Unities, they each unite all things uniquely, and in doing so, give all things existence. In a phrase, their uniqueness is their unity and their goodness. They are not just something that is good. They are each Goodness as such. Each is the fullness of Goodness uniquely. This is a way to explain how Proclus can switch between “Unity as such” and a God as “a Unity” while calling also calling a God “pure unity”. Each God is “the God”, “the One”. However, what I am about to say holds whether or not you accept a “the One itself” beyond the Gods as Goodnesses.

Back to our journey, we can draw a line from Holiness to Uniqueness to Goodness. It is in fact Goodness that is dangerous in a temple. The glory is not dangerous because of malice, but because of Goodness, and it is dangerous precisely because we, in our frailness, are not sufficiently Good. As applied to HaShem, so we can apply to Gods in general. As Goodnesses, or each as Goodness, they are dangerous to us, for “one can’t expect Sophia simply to step out before your eyes naked, can you?... You’d be reduced to ashes, like Semele seeing the full glory of Zeus.”[5] This is why Proclus says that “evil originates from the imbecility of the recipients”, where “imbecility” here means “deficiency”. As mentioned earlier, this is the only way a God can be “wrathful” or “evil”, although the latter word is not really appropriate.

In the progression of Being, where Goodness manifests through Intelligible Being down to its limits, we are but temporary and limited sparks. We cannot exist without the greater powers, but we cannot have too much of them, it will kill us. This is so for even Time. We, in the flesh, cannot handle all of Time’s infinity. We die eventually. Even our imperishable souls have to handle it in limited, but endless, repetition of cycles, no matter how you conceive of these cycles, whether as reincarnation or the “circling the essence” we hear of the beatific vision. Even moral evil, as D.B. Hart says, is done in view of the Good which we confusedly see[6], but here I would add that we confusedly see because of the drunken partial blindness that results (at least partly) from the infinity of Goodness that breaks through the fullness of Being upon our frail psyches. But Goodness is not reducible to Being (or “essence”). Being’s power to destroy does not exhaust the Good, otherwise, particulars of essences would not exist. The Good is unity, unity as individuality[7], and it is this that secures the very possibility of our frail existences. In a sense, “evil” is the consequence of individuality – in the sense of self unity of the Good, for the Good is unity of each several thing (Prop 13)[8] – seeking to individuate. It reaches its “local limit” at the edge of this particular configuration of essential principles, where conflict between goods – that is, things that are good, not Goodnesses as such – predominate and where Being, by necessity, must “complete itself” qua Being. This priority of unity is what explains the possibility of beauty in the frail and the delicate, in the flower and in the image of a dead peasant on a cross[9]. This is also the “substantiality” of evil as Proclus explains it, the particular way it “participates of it [the Good] in a certain respect, by its very existence being detained by good”. The Good, which is here unity as person, whether as the Gods or us by derivation, must manifest as far as is possible, and so we and the Gods constitute worlds where these conflicts manifest, where, because this flesh and vegetative soul cannot exhaust our persons and the persons of the Gods, is never reconciled qua flesh, to this world. This is not a repudiation of the world “below the moon”, but a “putting in place” of its reality, and its transient nature, and in fact its very creation in a sense[10].

III

This is not to say I have “solved” the problem of evil for everyone. I cannot simply tell a grieving person that the person they lost died because the Gods are “too good”. Evil is a “surd”. In Schuon’s words, “we understand evil as such, but we do not understand such and such an evil.”[11] I have attempted to shed some light on the former. The latter is not fully “explainable” in the sense of the former, and to that extent, remains a “problem of evil”.

However, I do have here a way to the reconciliation of perspectives on another topic. Here, in these series of explanations, is a way to understand “wrath” in the Christian “substitutionary atonement”: wrath is goodness. In fact, we can bring elements of several substitution theories here, and glimpse a reconciliation of Christ and the Gods that would not demean either. It is the Gods, including HaShem as the central God in the myth, that pour their wrath on Christ, but in doing so, HaShem is vindicated in his son’s resurrection. His resurrection is the vindication of the particular and unique individual person over the dominion of universal essences [12]. This is also a generic description of the Neoplatonic understandings of Salvation[13]. But it is not the Gods as such that are rebuked, but the Gods qua “universals”, as manifest in these principles. But this is not a stain on the Gods, for this is a myth, and in the Platonic vision, particularly the Proclean, even this is according to their will, which is supraessential with their persons and beyond whatever universals they instantiate. The Gods, in the particular Christian Cosmos, “accept rebuke” for our sake, in order that we might be “raised”, and this is a dimension of their activity in constructing the world in question. The Gods remain Gods. Each of them, including HaShem, remains unique.

This interpretation follows the way myth is read “theologically”[14] in much of Pagan Neoplatonism. It is very similar to the Christian “spiritual interpretation”, which is typically only applied to HaShem and perhaps those closely allied, in order to understand passages where HaShem Himself is described in what would be morally reprehensible on a plain reading. Here, we have a possible reconciliation of perspectives without the dissolution of the uniqueness of traditions and religions. We have here a playing out of myth in linear history, which is raised upwards for all those who will “drawn” to the God, the Icon of the God that is the God, thereby revealed and centralized. Christos Resurrexit! And because of this, reverence to all Gods.

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[1] Wayne J. Hankey. “God’s Care for Human Individuals: What Neoplatonism Gives to a Christian Doctrine of Providence.” Quaestiones Disputatae 2, no. 1 (2011): 4–36. https://doi.org/10.5840/qd201121/21

[2] Proclus, and E. R. Dodds. The Elements of Theology. Second Edition. Oxford University Press, 1971.

[3] Proclus, Glenn R. Morrow, and John M. Dillon. Proclus’ Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987.

[4] Butler, Edward P. “The Gods and Being in Proclus.” Vol. XXVI, 2008.

[5] Hart, David Bentley. Roland in Moonlight. Angelico Press, 2021.

[6] Hart, David Bentley. That All Shall Be Saved. Yale University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvnwbzd4

[7] Both Labecki and Butler, building on prior scholars and Neoplatonic texts, infer that "the One" is the principle of individuation. Labecki, Adam. “The One and the Many: Part I: The One.” Dionysius 24 (2006): 75–98. file:///PDF/Labecki - One and Many I-3377340160/Labecki - One and Many I.pdf; Butler, Edward P. “Polytheism and Individuality in the Henadic Manifold.” Dionysius 23 (2005): 83–104.

[8] Proclus and Dodds, The Elements of Theology.

[9] Hart, David Bentley. Theological Territories: A David Bentley Hart Digest. University of Notre Dame Press, 2020.

[10] Shaw, Gregory. “Taking the Shape of the Gods: A Theurgic Reading of Hermetic Rebirth.” Aries 15, no. 1 (2015): 136–69. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700593-01501009.

[11] Schuon, Frithjof, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. The Essential Frithjof Schuon. The Library of Perennial Philosophy, 2005. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0513/2005014071.html.

[12] “Christ is condemned to death by the duly appointed authorities of his age, whose verdicts are no more than proper exercises of political prudence and responsible governance. And the crucifixion is an expression of a particular sort of “sacrificial justice,” which is always willing to destroy the individual for the sake of social equilibrium; it is a perfect epitome of the legal, religious, and political rationality by which human society sustains and justifies itself. Yet God’s verdict entirely reverses that of Christ’s judges. Rather than confirm us in our devotion to the economy of social order, and our obedience to certain “tragic necessities,” Easter reveals that divine justice is on the side of the particular, the rejected, the victim we are willing to offer up to the greater good.” Hart, David Bentley. The Hidden and the Manifest Essays in Theology and Metaphysics. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2017.

[13] “To be sacrificed, in the genuine sense, is to be withdrawn from the economy of being another goat, another human, another instance of any universal, and to become the unique individual that is. At this point the theology of sacrifice and that of salvation become indistinguishable. The sacrifice, when not understood in its proper logic, is not a genuine sacrifice, but merely a moment in the lower daimonic economy; and once understood properly, that violent supplement can add nothing to the soteriological structure nor, of course, to the natural processes of change and mortality operating on all corporeal beings in any case. It is impossible to identify any particular temporal process as releasing a being into individuality; one can only state that whenever this occurs, the mystic fire is present.” - Butler, Edward P. “Gods and Daimons in the Platonic Economy of Sacrifice,” 2014

[14] Butler, Edward P. “The Book of the Celestial Cow : A Theological Interpretation.” Teologi, 2009, 27–41.