Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church by Elm Susanna

Author:Elm, Susanna
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520951655
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2011-07-25T16:00:00+00:00

Zeus-Helios the Mediator: Three in One

I flee innovation in all things, … and in particular in those that concern the gods. I think one must hold on to the laws that our parents have had since the beginning and that are manifestly a gift of the gods. They would not be as good if they were merely human works.94

—JULIAN, EPISTLE 89A.453B–C

Modern scholars accuse Julian, in his Hymn to King Helios, of muddled thinking or at least obtuse sentence structure, presumably caused by work habits that deprived him of sleep.95 Inscriptions demonstrate, however, that at least some local nobles grasped well the central message of the emperor’s hymn and indeed of his rule when they proclaimed, “One God wins. One Julian, the Augustus. Eternally, you, Augustus Julian”; “Julian, the eternal victor and triumphator, born to benefit the state”; “Soli invicto Aug(usto) sac(rum)”; ex philosophias basileuonta … hyph’ Hliou … Ioulianon … thetaton autokratora Augouston.96

How, then, did Julian conceive of Zeus-Helios and the manner in which all good, power, and knowledge emanated from him? What thoughts had he taken from Iamblichus, whom he cited again from memory, and what did he add to the philosopher’s thoughts about the origin, essence, and creative capacity of Helios, a subject that “Iamblichus, the beloved of the God,” had treated “more perfectly” than anyone (Hel. R. 157d)?97 To elaborate the philosophical foundation of his political thought, Julian proceeded via “two roads [to] discoverwhat [he sought], one by which we examine the actual essences … ; the other is an inquiry by means of the actions whereby we distinguish the essence on the basis of its product and completed works.” I quote Eunomius’s Apology 20.5–10, but both Eunomius and the emperor deduced by analogy knowledge of what Julian calls “What Is beyond All Thought” (or “the Supra-Intelligible,” to epekeina tou nou), “the Uncompounded Cause of the Whole” (h monoeids tn holn aitia), “the King of the Whole Universe,” “the One,” on the basis of what the One has produced, “by virtue of the primal creative substance [prtourgon ousian] that abides in it” (Hel. R. 132c–d). What interested Julian most was not the One but its product, through which by analogy deductions about the First Cause became possible. How did the First Cause, the incorporeal, transcendent One, interact with the layers or gradations below it, including the physical world, taking for granted the presence of the One in each of these gradations? The emperor, using Iamblichan structures, wished to delineate here how these lower layers proceeded from and would return to the One.98 Specifically, he defined and described the mediating function of Helios as “the Middle of the Middle” between the One, the intellectual gods, and the visible, sublunar, physical world. The sun’s light represented the continuity and hence mediation between the intelligible and intellectual realms and visible, physically manifest reality—between the divine and human.

Indeed, the question of the transcendental cause of everything forms the context for the passage from Plato (R. 508b–5 09b) that Julian cited in

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