Page 49 - Eclipse of God

22 Chapter 3

How the passage, “whoever he is,” is to be understood is shown
by a fragment from the same poet that expresses his feelings
in a paradox:

Zeus is all and what is more than all.

Here immanence is united with transcendence. But in con-
nection with the following passage, “If it pleases him so to be
called,” the scholiast rightly refers to the sentence in Plato’s
Cratylus: “We know neither the nature nor the true names of
the gods.” The next sentence explains that just for this reason
we address them in prayer by the names they like.
In the Trojan Women of Euripides, on the other hand, the
old queen calls upon Zeus in the following manner:

O Foundation of the earth and above it throned,
Whoever thou art, beyond our mind’s poor grasp,
Whether Zeus or Fate or spirit of men,
I implore thee.
Despite the resemblance of the beginning to the fragment of
Aeschylus, the religious situation is abolished by the total im-
manence which is considered in what follows as one of the
possibilities. As if one could pray to the “spirit of men”! Frag-
ments of another tragedy of Euripides show us further what is
meant. One of them says:

We are the slaves of gods, whatever gods may be.
and another reads:

Zeus, whoever Zeus indeed may be,—
Only through hearsay know I aught of him.

It is a decisively significant way which leads from the “whoever
he is” of Aeschylus to the seemingly similar “whoever Zeus in-
deed may be” of the last of the great tragedians. It is, of course,