Edward
BUTLER The Ethical Relationship to the Gods in
the Encheiridion Commentary of Simplicius
This paper concerns the proper spirit in which to make
offerings to the Gods. Simplicius writes at a time when
most pagan temples had been closed and the responsibility
for making offerings to the Gods had therefore fallen
exclusively upon the individual worshiper or upon small
private circles of worshipers instead of a dedicated
priestly establishment. As such, there was a new
dimension to the making of offerings which Simplicius
subtly articulates in a novel contribution to late pagan
thought. The paper focuses particularly on the ontic
duality of the offering, which is at once an instance of
a species and also an absolutely unique individual. By
virtue of this duality, the offering expresses the
duality of the Gods &endash; who are at once prior to
Being and implicated within Being, unique individuals
with proper names as well as representative of the
generically divine &endash; and the duality of the human
worshiper, at once an irreducibly unique individual and
an instantiation of the human species. Human
individuality falls beneath the level of Being qua
Form, as embodied in the infima species, and
yet in the act of making offerings the human individual
establishes his/her correspondence with the uniquely
individual deity who receives the offering, forging a
vitalizing connection between the domain of individuals
superior to Being (the Gods) and that of
individuals inferior to Being (factical beings).
The Simplician vision also incorporates two Aristotelian
echoes. Simplicius stresses the importance of a
universal, "scientific" understanding of the Gods which,
by abstracting from the particularity of one's position
and achieving the viewpoint of Aristotelian
epistêmê, which is always of the
universal, purges the action of making offerings from
misconceptions that would dispose the worshiper
unethically in relation to the Gods. The essential
particularity of the domain of the ethical in Aristotle's
thought is, however, also embodied in the act of making
the offering, in which a particular human offers a
particular item to a particular deity. A merely
"scientific" or universalizing viewpoint on the Gods is
not sufficient: the practical dimension which involves
the actual cult of particular deities is its necessary
complement. Simplicius thus contributes to the project of
late pagan Platonism of arguing for the inseparability of
philosophy from pagan religiosity. The affirmation of the
unique individual which takes place in the scene of the
offering completes the cosmogonic opus of the Gods by
fulfilling the potentiality embodied in the corresponding
positions of the Gods prior to Form and the humans and
other entities posterior to Form.
Abstracts
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