XX. ‘But the God IS, we are bound to assert; he is, with reference to no time but to that age wherein is no movement, or time, or duration; to which nothing is prior or subsequent; no future, no past, no elder, no younger, which by one long “now” has made the “always” perfect. Only with reference to this that which really is, is; it has not come into being, it is |B| not yet to be, it did not begin, it will not cease. Thus then we ought to hail him in worship, and thus to address him as “Thou Art”, aye, or in the very words of some of the old people, “Ei Hen”, “Thou art one thing”.[[75]] For the Divine is not many things, in the sense in which each one of us is made up of ten thousand different and successive states, a scrap-heap of units, a mob of individuals. No, that which is must be one, as that which is one is. Variety, any difference in being, passes to one side to produce that which is not. Therefore the first |C| of the names of the God is right, and the second, and the third. “Apollo” (Not-many) denies plurality and excludes multitude. Ieïus means one and one only; Phoebus, we know, is a word by which the ancients expressed that which is clean and pure, even as to this day the Thessalians, when their priests pass their solemn days in strict seclusion outside the temple, apply to them a verb formed from Phoebus. Now The One is transparent and pure, pollution comes by commixture of this with that, just as Homer,[[76]] you remember, says of ivory dyed red that it is stained, and dyers say of mingled pigments that they are |D| destroyed, and call the process “destruction”. Therefore it is the property of that which is indestructible and pure to be one and without admixture.
XXI. ‘There are those who think that Apollo and the sun are the same; we hail them and love them for the fair name they give, and it is fitting to do so; for they associate their idea of the God with that which they honour and desire more than all other things which they know. But now that we see them dreaming of the God in the fairest of nightly visions, let us rise and encourage them to mount yet higher, to contemplate him in a dream of the day, and to see his own being. Let them pay honour also to the image of him and worship the principle of increase which is about it; so far as what is of sense can lead to what is of mind, a moving body to that which abides, it allows presentments and appearances of his kind and blessed |E| self to shine through after a fashion. But as to transitions and changes in himself, that he now discharges fire, and so is drawn up, as they put it, or again presses down and strains himself into earth and sea, winds and animals, and all the strange passages into animals and also plants, piety forbids us so much as to hear them. Otherwise the God will be a greater trifler than the boy in Homer,[[77]] for ever playing with the universe the game which the boy plays with a pile of sand, which is heaped together and sucked away under his hand; moulding the universe when there is none, and again destroying it when it has come into being. The opposite principle which we find in the |F| universe, whatever its origin, is that which binds being together and prevails over the corporeal weakness tending to destruction. To my thinking the word “EI” is confronted with this false view, and testifies to the God that THOU ART, meaning that no shift or change has place in him, but that such things belong |394| to some other God, or rather to some Spirit set over Nature in its perishing and becoming, whether to effect either process or to undergo it. This appears from the names, in themselves opposite and contradictory. He is called Apollo, another is called Pluto; he is Delius, the other Aidoneus; he is Phoebus, the other “Skotios”; by his side are the Muses, and Memory, with the other are Oblivion and Silence; he is Theorius and Phanaeus, the other is “King of dim Night and ineffectual Sleep”.[[78]] The other is |B|
Of all the Gods to men the direst foe.[[79]]
Whereas of him Pindar[[80]] has pleasantly said:
Well tried and mildest found, to men who live and die.
so Euripides[[81]] was right:
Draughts to the dead out-poured,
Songs which our bright-haired lord
Apollo hath abhorred.
And still earlier Stesichorus:[[82]]