(Roughly) Daily

Julius Caesar, who was deified by the Roman Senate this week in 42 BCE

At least, most of mankind. Anna Della Subin on men turned divine…

In the beginning, it was the serpent who first proposed that mankind might become divine. Ye shall be as gods, he advised, as the fruit waited…

The idea that a man might turn divine, even without intending or willing it, was to ancient Greece a natural and perfectly rational occurrence. Traffic flowed between earth and the dwelling place of the gods in the sky. In his Theogony, the poet Hesiod sang of the births of gods in a genealogy often crossed with that of humans. He told of mortals who became daemons, or deific spirits; of the half-gods, born of mixed parentage; of the man-gods, or heroes, venerated for their deeds. The theorist Euhemerus claimed he found, on a desert island, a golden pillar inscribed with the birth and death dates of the immortal Olympians. According to his hypothesis, all gods were originally men who had once lived on earth, yet their roots did not impinge upon their cosmic authority, nor make them any less divine. The ranks of the gods swelled with warriors and thinkers, from the Spartan general Lysander to the materialist philosopher Epicurus, deified after his death. In his Parallel Lives, the biographer Plutarch recorded that someone among the older, established gods was evidently displeased by the newcomer, Demetrius. A whirlwind tore apart Demetrius’s robe, severe frost disrupted his procession, and tendrils of hemlock, unusual in the region, sprouted up around the man’s altars, menacingly encircling them.

In ancient Rome, the borders between heaven and earth fell under Senate control, as deification by official decree became a way to legitimize political power. Building upon Greek traditions of apotheosis, the Romans added a new preoccupation with protocol, the rites and rituals that could effect a divine status change. For his conquests, Julius Caesar was divinized, while still alive, by a series of Senate measures that bestowed upon him rights as a living god, including a state temple and license to wear Jupiter’s purple cloak. Yet if it seemed like a gift of absolute power, it was also a way of checking it, as Caesar knew. One could constrain a powerful man by turning him into a god: in divinizing Julius, the Senate also laid down what the virtues and characteristics of a god should be…

The century that reset time began with a man perhaps inadvertently turned divine. It is hard to see him, for the earliest gospels were composed decades after his death at Golgotha, and the light only reaches so far into the dark tombs of the past. The scholars who search for the man-in-history find him embedded in the politics of his day: a Jewish dissident preacher who posed a radical challenge to the gods and governors of Rome. They find him by the banks of the Jordan with John the Baptist. He practices the rite of baptism as liberation, from sin and from the bondage of the empire that occupied Jerusalem…

In the decades after the crucifixion, just as the gospels were being composed and circulated, the apotheosis of Roman emperors had become so routine that Vespasian, as he lay on his deathbed in 79 CE, could quip, ‘Oh dear, I think I’m becoming a god.’…

In 325 CE, the emperor Constantine gathered together two thousand bishops at the Council of Nicaea to officially define the nature of Jesus’s divinity for the first time. Against those who maintained he had been created by God as a son, perfect but still to some extent human, the bishops pronounced Jesus as Word Incarnate on earth, equal to and made of the same substance as God the Father, whatever it may be. Other notions of Jesus’s essence were branded as heresies and suppressed, and gospels deemed unorthodox were destroyed. Through the mandates of the Nicene Creed, the idea of divinity itself became severed from its old proximities to ordinary mortal life. In the work of theologians such as Augustine, who shaped Christian orthodoxy for centuries to come, the chasm between humankind and divinity grew ever more impassable.

Though mystics might strive for union with the godhead, veiled in metaphors, the idea that a man could transform into an actual deity became absurd. God is absolutely different from us, the theologians maintained; the line between Creator and His creation clearly drawn.

Eminently worth reading in full: “First Rites,” a fascinating excerpt from Accidental Gods, by @annadella in @GrantaMag.

* Plotinus

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As we delve into the divine, we might recall that it was on this date in 1953 that Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered in Paris. The English-language version premiered in London in 1955. In a poll conducted by the British Royal National Theatre in 1998/99, it was voted the “most significant English-language play of the 20th century.”

Waiting for Godot, Theatre de Babylone–the first performance (source)