I’m trying to read Iamblichus’ Mysteries of Egypt, a Neo-Platonic philosophical treatise masquerading as a letter from an Egyptian priest. It’s slow going, not least because Iamblichus shares with many of his contemporaries a tendency not to tell you what the point or the payoff of an argument is until he’s finished making it.
So you don’t really know, for instance, why you’re supposed to care – and why Iamblichus’ authorial persona cares so much – about the thewn idiotetes, the distinguishing characteristics of the gods. Iamblichus’ point seems to be that the gods don’t have idiotes in the same way that we do, since that would imply limitation. The gods are everything at once, actually – as, in some sense, is everything except the somatic matter that sits at the bottom of Iamblichus’ hierarchy of being.
Well, the payoff of all that is this. Iamblichus’ rival, Porphyry, defines gods, demons, heroes, etc. by their place in the cosmos, by the elements with which they associate: ether for gods, air for demons, etc.. That’s their idiotes. Iamblichus argues that that’s putting an inappropriate limit on the infinite nature of the divine, and, what’s worse, making it impossible for humans to influence or commune with the gods. Iamblichus clearly thinks this relationship, which the rest of Mysteries teaches us how to manage, should be personal or at least manipulable.
You can’t talk to a deus absconditus, let alone subject him to your will using magical statues. Iamblichus needs his gods to be right here, not removed to the outer reaches of the universe. This means deterritorializing them: they can be right here, with us, because in some sense they’re nowhere. They don’t have a local habitation, just a name.
The way this works, or at least the way that Iamblichus wants us to conceptualize it, is on analogy with the sun: it’s somewhere – that is, out in space – but at the same time everywhere, since its light penetrates the whole cosmos. Since Iamblichus thinks of that light as a kind of instant emanation, we’re licensed to see it as the sun’s way of being as it were outside of itself. Like the sun, Iamblichus’ gods don’t keep their being to themselves (idios). They’re not abstract or nebulous, nor are they Morton-style hyperobjects that saturate the world. They’re radiant, at once near and far.
There are other things it might be useful to think about this way. Most websites are radiant, showering us with their being from a distance. This is extra true of social media sites that, like Iamblichus’ gods, at least give the appearance of obeying our commands. By way of that mediation, individuals are radiant now. So are countries. We could for instance think of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election as radioactivity, an unwanted radiance with unvelcome consequences.
Actually, so much of what makes it annoying to be alive right now is that kind of radiation. Distance used to be a pretty reliable buffer against people we can’t stand, but it’s hard to be indifferent to assholes when they’re constantly glowing at us. If you try to protect yourself by unhooking from twitter or nytimes.com or whatever, the people around you are still getting dosed. You can be a sane man in a society of mutants, which sounds even worse than getting blinded by the light.