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Deity

The Orders of the Gods

the divine orders

theologyNeoplatonism

The Neoplatonic theology that ranks the gods between the One and the visible world.

As the Platonists came to defend the traditional gods philosophically, they developed an elaborate theology that set the many gods in ordered ranks descending from the first principle — a way of honoring the whole inherited pantheon while subordinating it all to the One.

From the One to the world

The gods, on this account, are the henads — the first multiplicity that proceeds from the One, supreme unities through which its goodness is distributed to all things. Below them the divine extends through descending orders: intelligible gods near to Being and Intellect, then hypercosmic gods, and finally the encosmic gods who govern the visible cosmos — the sun, moon, and stars, and the powers of nature. Beneath the gods proper come the lesser divine kinds: daimones, heroes, and (in some) angels and souls.

Sallustius, Iamblichus, Proclus

This theology was given handbook form in the little treatise On the Gods and the World by Sallustius, a friend of the emperor Julian; its ritual dimension was defended by Iamblichus, who explained the classes of superior beings and the theurgy that addresses them; and it received its most architectural form in the Proclus, whose Elements of Theology and Platonic Theology map the whole procession of the divine. In all of it the gods are not abolished but rank below, and flow from, the ineffable One.

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