Divine Anonymity

David Sedley

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Chapter 1 Divine Anonymity

In: New Essays on the Platonic Tradition

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David Sedley

David Sedley
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 3–28

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004751149_002

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Abstract

As portrayed by Plato and Xenophon, Socrates habitually avoided referring to gods by their individual names, if not exactly to deny the gods of the city, as his accusers alleged, at any rate to discourage the impression that gods are unique individuals, potentially differing in moral character. All gods are essentially good, and good in the same way, much as good people, male and female alike, are good in the same way (Meno 72–73, cf. Aristotle, Pol. I.13). In recognising this strategy I follow Myles Burnyeat’s classic 1997 article ‘The impiety of Socrates’, adding confirmatory evidence from the Theaetetus.

I also compare an unrecognised alternative strategy employed by Socrates, his idiosyncratic private oath ‘by Hera’, which in Plato and Xenophon he uses even more frequently than the conventional ‘by Zeus’. I propose that by implying male-female parity even at the top of the Olympian hierarchy he was subtly pressing for a gender-blind ethics, as later fully articulated by Plato in Republic V.

In the remainder of the paper I argue that among philosophers the former strategy, leaving gods unnamed, was not distinctively Socratic, but shared by most major philosophers from Xenophanes to Aristotle, including Heraclitus, Parmenides and Plato. The theological motive was not the common ancient Greek wariness of invoking gods by name for fear of misnaming and thus offending them. Plato alludes to this superstition, but reinterprets it as embodying a philosophical thesis: not monotheism, but the homogeneity of the divine.

A revealing exception to this insistence on concord among the gods is Empedocles’ attribution of macrocosmic and microcosmic cycles of change to the perpetual conflict between two divine antagonists, creative Love and disruptive Strife, both of whom, accordingly, he freely and emphatically names. In Parmenides and Plato too there are illuminating exceptions. While the goddess who reveals to Parmenides the deep truth about Being remains unnamed, the avowedly deceptive cosmogonic narrative which followed named a heterogeneous array of divine individuals. This distinction in turn foreshadows a split-level theology in Plato’s Timaeus. The primary divinities of the cosmogony—the Demiurge, the world he creates, and within it innumerable celestial bodies—are gods that can be scientifically investigated, by a combination of mathematical sciences and rational likelihoods. Timaeus duly anonymises them, but does not hesitate to refer by name to the gods of the traditional theogonies, whose existence, despite their inaccessibility to scientific study, he piously (and non-ironically) accepts.

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New Essays on the Platonic Tradition

In Honour of Paul Kalligas

Series: Studies in Platonism, Neoplatonism, and the Platonic Tradition, Volume: 35

Cover New Essays on the Platonic Tradition

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004751149

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 26 Feb 2026

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- Philosophy

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Chapter 1 Divine Anonymity

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New Essays on the Platonic Tradition

In Honour of Paul Kalligas

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