When polytheists use terms translatable as ‘God’, in whatever language they are speaking—speaking at the moment not with regard to the substance of such terms, but to their common designation of an object of the highest religious regard—and are not referring to some particular deity elsewhere identified by a proper name, they are not speaking of a singular ‘super-God’, but of the characteristics constitutive of ‘godhood’, of the nature of ‘the divine’ or ‘divinity’, if…

The myth of Pandora is a good one on which to demonstrate aspects of theological exegesis, being relatively self-contained, but also internally complex. The goal of theological exegesis, as explained previously, is to arrive at that reading of the myth which frees divine agency to operate in the widest scope. It does not supplant other modes of interpretation, such as those which focus on the myth’s historical and social conditions of emergence. In the case…

Thinking about a myth, we can choose to focus either on the Gods and other beings involved in the narrative sequence, or on the sequence itself, on the actions in it, and by this choice, make either the former, or the latter, primary. Concerning ourselves with the persons in the myth, we relate it to other myths involving those same persons, whereas concerning ourselves with the actions, we relate it to myths where the same…

Gods frequently thwart one another’s will in Hellenic theology, and in some cases even suffer violence from one another, perhaps most significantly near the very beginning of the theogony, when Ouranos is castrated. But no such incident in the Hellenic theology is perhaps of quite so much significance for the sort of beings that we are as that suffered by Persephone, except perhaps the dismemberment of Dionysos at the hands of the Titans, which is,…

Myths are a vital source of information for us about the attributes and activities of our Gods. We can hardly say that they are mere stories, even if we think that they have something less than the status accorded to the sacred texts of the Abrahamic traditions, for instance. But our traditions are very diverse indeed, and there are texts among some of our traditions that have a status scarcely less than this, at any…

In Plato’s Parmenides, the young Socrates meets the venerable Parmenides and his partner Zeno at the Panathenaia. There, the two great philosophers from Elea in southern Italy proceed to school Socrates in the art of dialectic, in the requisites for a theory of forms, and in the nature of the One-that-is-not-one. In my previous column, I spoke about the emergence of binary logic in Parmenides’ poem. In Plato’s Parmenides, we see this logic put to…