Why does Plethon's book of laws describe Zeus as an actual Supreme being if he wanted to revive paganism? He basically made a pagan god into a Monotheistic God
>>18484336People (including you) often assume that Greco-Roman pagans in the 1st century AD held the same Homeric, literalist beliefs as their forefathers in the 6th century BC, but this isn’t true. By the Hellenistic and Roman period, educated pagans had begun to reinterpret myths as allegories and the gods not as anthropomorphic beings, but rather as the fundamental pillars of the universe. The final form of this pagan philosophy was Neoplatonism, which prior to the Christianization of Rome was the standard view amongst educated pagans.To summarize the philosophical paganism of antiquity, they believed that traditional myths were divinely-inspired allegories rather than literal historical events. They still believed in the gods, but they viewed them in more complex terms and considered them to be metaphysical spirits rather than anthropomorphic beings. They viewed the traditional anthropomorphic depiction of the gods to be more symbolic than literal and believed the gods to all be aspects or emanations of a single divine principle that all reality emanates from called the Monad (μονάς) or “the One” (τὸ Ἕν), which in my opinion is similar to the Hindu concept of Brahman and the Chinese concept of Dao. Despite popular misconception, this belief wasn’t a form of “proto-monotheism” but rather monism which isn’t even incompatible with polytheism—monotheism explicitly rejects other gods while monism allows the existence of multiple gods, viewing them all as aspects or faces of a singular divine principle. I should also mention that pagan philosophers still defended traditional religious practices and believed them to be valid ways for the masses to access the divine.In this sense, Zeus isn’t literally an old man sitting atop Mount Olympus hurling thunderbolts like javelins but rather a more distant, fatherly creator. In Stoic terms he is the Logos, the divine rational principle that orders the cosmos.
>>18484342Oh and in case you're wondering why some of this sounds so similar to Abrahamic theology (particularly the part about Zeus being a distant, fatherly creator), that’s because Jews and Christians in late antiquity heavily borrowed from Greco-Roman philosophy and reinterpreted the Hebrew Bible through this lens. They tried to justify it by claiming classical Greek philosophers were “proto-monotheists” which of course is complete nonsense that is unfortunately still widely repeated by Christian apologetics. I don’t have a problem with them adopting Greco-Roman philosophy, but I do have a problem with them claiming credit for it.
>checks timestampssage
because there's only one God, literally 0 usecases for more
>>18484747Monday, Lagos Brahman or are you a retarded abarahamic?
>>18484344>Jews and Christians in late antiquity heavily borrowed from Greco-Roman philosophy and reinterpreted the Hebrew Bible through this lens.I believe specifically Plato. The past 2000 years of Western and Islamic theology is born of Plato.
