The Greeks on One God

The poet Homer took the liberty poets take. He was competing with Orpheus’ original opinion about a plurality of gods, and so he does name a number of gods in the manner of myth — in case he should seem to be singing a different tune from the poem of Orpheus, a poem he so openly set out to rival that in his very first line he showed what his relation to it was. Orpheus had opened his poem, “Sing, goddess, the wrath of Demeter, who brings the good harvest”; Homer opened his, “Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.” He would rather break the meter of his opening line, it seems to me, than seem to have forgotten the names of the gods before anything else. [a]

But a little later he plainly and openly gives his own opinion, that there is only one God. In one place he has Phoenix say to Achilles, “Not even if God himself were to promise that he would strip off my old age and set me out in the flower of youth” — and there the pronoun marks the real and true God. In another place he has Odysseus address the whole Greek army: “The rule of many is no good thing; let there be one ruler.” And that the rule of many is not a good thing but, on the contrary, an evil, he set out to prove from the facts, recounting the wars that came about because there were many rulers, the fighting and the factions and the plots they laid against each other. Rule by one man is free from that strife. So much for the poet Homer.

And if we need to add testimony about one God from the writers of drama as well, listen to Sophocles: [e]

So much for Sophocles.

And Pythagoras, the son of Mnesarchus, who set out his own philosophy in a hidden way, by means of symbols — as those who have written his life show — seems himself to have held views about the oneness of God not unworthy of the time he spent living in Egypt. When he says that unity is the first principle of all things, and that it is the cause of everything good, he is teaching by an allegory that God is one, and alone. That this is what he means is clear from his saying that unity and one are two very different things: unity, he says, belongs to the class of things grasped by the mind, but one belongs to the numbers. And if you want a clearer proof of what Pythagoras thought about one God, hear his own opinion. He spoke as follows: [f]

“God is one. And he does not, as some suppose, exist outside the world, but in it, wholly present in the whole circle, and beholding all generations. He is the regulating element of all the ages, the administrator of his own powers and works, the first principle of all things, the light of heaven and Father of all, the intelligence and the animating soul of the universe, the movement of all the orbits.”

So much, then, for Pythagoras.

But Plato — who had, in all likelihood, accepted the teaching of Moses and the other prophets about one God only, which he learned while he was in Egypt — was afraid. Remembering what had happened to Socrates, he did not want to raise up some Anytus or Meletus of his own, who would accuse him before the Athenians and say, “Plato is doing harm and making a nuisance of himself, refusing to acknowledge the gods the state recognizes.” In dread of the hemlock cup, he worked out an elaborate and ambiguous way of talking about the gods, so that his treatise supplies gods to those who want them and none to those who are otherwise inclined. This is easy enough to see from his own statements. [h]

He lays it down that everything that is made is mortal, and then afterward says that the gods were made. Now if he would have God and matter be the origin of all things, then it is plainly unavoidable to say that the gods were made out of matter — and if out of matter, which is where he also said evil had its origin, he leaves anyone who thinks straight to work out what sort of beings gods produced out of matter must be. It was for this very reason that he said matter is eternal: so that he would not seem to be saying that God is the maker of evil. And about the gods that were made by God, there is no question that this is what he said: “Gods of gods, of whom I am the maker.”

And he plainly held the right opinion about the God who really exists. For having heard in Egypt that God had said to Moses, when he was about to send him to the Hebrews, “I am the One who is,” he understood that God had not told him a proper name of his own.

For God cannot be called by any proper name. Names are given to mark off and distinguish the things they belong to, because those things are many and various. But no one existed before God who could give him a name, and he did not think it right to name himself, since he is one and unique — as he himself also testifies through his own prophets, when he says, “I, God, am the first,” and after that, “And besides me there is no other God.” [l]

That is why, as I said before, when God sent Moses to the Hebrews he mentioned no name, but taught them by a participle, in a hidden way, that he is the one and only God. “For,” he says, “I am the One who is” — plainly setting himself, the One who is, over against those who are not, so that people who had been deceived until then might see that they had attached themselves not to beings but to things with no being at all.

God knew that the first human beings remembered the old delusion of their forefathers, by which the demon who hates mankind contrived to deceive them when he said to them, “If you obey me and break God’s command, you will be like gods” — calling things gods that had no being, so that men, supposing that other gods existed, might believe that they themselves could become gods. That is why he said to Moses, “I am the One who is”: so that by the participle “being” he might teach the difference between the God who is and the things that are not.

So human beings, tricked by the deceiving demon and daring to disobey God, were driven out of Paradise. They still remembered the name “gods,” but they were no longer being taught by God that there are no other gods. It was not right that people who had not kept the first command — an easy one to keep — should go on being taught; they should be driven to a just punishment instead. And so, banished from Paradise, thinking they had been thrown out for their disobedience alone and not knowing that it was also because they had believed in gods that did not exist, they gave the name of gods even to the men who were afterward born from them. This first false notion about gods, then, began with the father of lies.

God, then, knowing that the false opinion about many gods lay on the human soul like a disease, and wanting to take it away and root it out, appeared first to Moses and said to him, “I am the One who is.” It was necessary, I think, that the man who was to be the ruler and leader of the Hebrew people should first of all know the living God. So having appeared to him first — as far as it is possible for God to appear to a man — he said to him, “I am the One who is”; and then, when he was about to send him to the Hebrews, he further ordered him to say, “The One who is has sent me to you.”

So Plato, having learned this in Egypt and being greatly taken with what was said about one God, did indeed think it unsafe to mention the name of Moses, because of Moses’ teaching that there is only one God; he dreaded the Areopagus. But the passage he expresses so well in his careful treatise the Timaeus he has written in exact agreement with what Moses said about God — though not as if he had learned it from him, but as if he were stating his own opinion. He said: “In my opinion, then, we must first define what it is that always exists and has no coming-to-be, and what it is that is always coming to be but never really is.” [o]

Men of Greece, does this not seem, to anyone able to follow the matter, to be one and the same thing, apart from the difference in the article? Moses said, “He who is”; Plato, “That which is.” Either expression seems to apply to the ever-existing God, for he is the only one who exists eternally and has no coming-to-be.

Then what is that other thing, set against the ever-existing, of which he said, “and what it is that is always coming to be but never really is”? We must give it careful attention. We shall find him saying clearly and plainly that the one who is unbegotten is eternal, but that the things that are begotten and made come to be and perish — as he said of that same class, “gods of gods, of whom I am maker.” His words are these: “In my opinion, then, we must first define what it is that always exists and has no birth, and what it is that is always coming to be but never really is. The first is grasped by reflection together with reason, and always stays the same; the second is guessed at by opinion formed from sense-perception without reason, since it never really is, but is coming into being and perishing.” To anyone who can rightly understand them, these words announce the death and destruction of the gods that have been brought into being.

And I think it is worth attending to this too: Plato never calls him the creator of the gods, but the fashioner — and in Plato’s own view there is a considerable difference between the two. The creator makes the thing he makes by his own capacity and power, needing nothing else; the fashioner puts his product together only after he has received from matter the capacity for his work.

But perhaps some people, unwilling to give up the doctrine of many gods, will say that the maker spoke these words to the gods he had fashioned: [r]

“Since you have been produced, you are not immortal, nor imperishable at all; yet you will not perish, nor meet the fate of death, because you have obtained my will, which is a still greater and mightier bond.”

Here Plato, in fear of the people attached to many gods, brings in his “maker” saying words that contradict himself. Having stated earlier that everything produced is perishable, he now brings him in saying the exact opposite; and he does not see that this makes it altogether impossible for him to escape the charge of falsehood. Either he spoke falsely at first, when he said that everything produced is perishable, or he is speaking falsely now, when he puts forward the exact opposite of what he said before. If, by his own earlier definition, it is absolutely necessary that every created thing be perishable, how can he consistently make possible what is absolutely impossible?

So Plato seems to be handing his “maker” an empty and impossible privilege, when he proposes that things once perishable, because they were made out of matter, should become imperishable and lasting again by the maker’s own intervention. It is only natural that the power of matter — which in Plato’s view is uncreated, as old as the maker and existing right alongside him — should resist his will. A man who has not created a thing has no power over it while it remains uncreated, so it is not possible for matter, being free, to be controlled by any necessity from outside. That is why Plato himself, taking this into account, wrote: “We must say that God cannot be forced.”

How, then, does Plato banish Homer from his republic? In the embassy to Achilles he has Phoenix say, “Even the gods themselves can be swayed” — though Homer said this not of the king and Platonic maker of the gods, but of some of the crowd the Greeks reckon as gods, as one can gather from Plato’s phrase, “gods of gods.” For by that golden chain Homer traces all power and might back to the one highest God. The rest of the gods, he said, were so far from that divinity that he thought it fitting to name them alongside men. At any rate, he brings in Odysseus saying to Achilles about Hector, “He is raging terribly, trusting in Zeus, and he values neither men nor gods.” [t]

In this passage Homer seems to me beyond doubt to have learned in Egypt, as Plato did, about the one God, and to declare it plainly and openly: the man who trusts in the God who really exists takes no account of those that do not exist. For in another passage the poet, using a different but equivalent word — a pronoun — made use of the same participle Plato used to designate the God who really exists, about whom Plato said, “what it is that always exists and has no birth.” There is more than one sense in this line of Phoenix: “Not even if God himself were to promise me that he would strip off my old age and set me out in the flower of youth.” For the pronoun “himself” means the God who really exists.

The oracle given to you about the Chaldeans and the Hebrews means the same. For when someone asked what men had ever lived godly lives, you say the answer was:

How, then, does Plato blame Homer for saying that the gods can be swayed, when it is obvious from the words used that Homer said it for a useful purpose? For it belongs to people who expect to obtain mercy by prayer and sacrifice that they should stop sinning and repent of their sins. People who think the divine cannot be swayed are not stirred at all to leave their sins, since they suppose they will get no benefit from repentance. [x]

How, then, does Plato the philosopher condemn Homer the poet for saying, “Even the gods themselves can be swayed,” and then himself present the maker of the gods as so easily turned that he sometimes declares the gods to be mortal and at other times declares the same gods immortal? And not only about them, but about matter as well — out of which, as he says, the created gods must have been produced — he sometimes says it is uncreated and at other times that it is created. And he does not see that when he says the maker of the gods is so easily turned, he stands convicted of the very errors he blames Homer for, though Homer said the exact opposite about the maker of the gods. For Homer had him speak this way of himself:

But Plato, it seems, entered on these strange discussions about the gods unwillingly, for he was afraid of the people attached to many gods. And whatever he thought fit to tell of all that he had learned from Moses and the prophets about one God, he chose to deliver in a hidden style, so that those who wanted to be worshippers of God might get an inkling of what he himself thought. For he was charmed by that saying of God to Moses, “I am the One who really is,” and after a great deal of thought about that short participial phrase, he understood that God meant to show Moses his eternity, and that this is why he said, “I am the One who really is.” For this word “is” expresses not one time only, but all three — the past, the present, and the future. And when Plato says “and which never really is,” he uses the verb “is” of time without limit; for the word “never” is not spoken, as some suppose, of the past, but of the time to come. And this has been accurately understood even by writers outside our own books.

And so, when Plato wanted to interpret to the uninitiated what had been expressed in a hidden way by that participle about the eternity of God, he used this language: “God, as the old story has it, holds the beginning and the end and the middle of all things.” In that sentence he plainly and obviously calls the law of Moses “the old story,” because in dread of the hemlock cup he was afraid to mention the name of Moses; he knew that the man’s teaching was hated among the Greeks, and he points clearly enough to Moses by the antiquity of the story. And we have proved sufficiently, from Diodorus and the rest of the historians, in the chapters above, that the law of Moses is not only old but the very first. For Diodorus says that Moses was the first of all lawgivers, and that the letters that belong to the Greeks, the ones they used in writing their histories, had not yet been discovered.