About the Project
Over the centuries, God and history have had a complicated relationship. Today, it is a truism that history is not just a sequence of events. Instead, an account of history always means that we impose a structure and a meaning on it. This sub-project is concerned with the lexical and semantic analysis of the terms for God and the divine in the biographies of Plutarch, the Platonic philosopher and priest of Apollo at Delphi, who was writing at the time of the creation of the New Testament. Indeed, as Swain (1989, 272) has pointed out, "The difficulty in estimating Plutarch's belief of providential interference in history lies principally in his terminology".
A philological, lexical and semantic analysis is therefore a useful starting point to approach this complex question. Therefore, the main questions that move me along this path are as follows: What words does Plutarch use to refer to the intervention of the divine? Where is such intervention understood as the work of an individual deity? Where does it appear as an expression of the divine nature at all? Can we discern a distinction between θεός and δαίμων (cf., e.g., Stoffel 2005, 306-309; on Plutarch's demonology, cf. Brenk 1977), and if so, what would be the specific contours of such a distinction? Which deities intervene in history and how are they profiled by Plutarch (cf. Valgiglio 1988)? In addition, there are more functional conceptions of the divine that occasionally draw on traditional personifications, such as Tύχη, the goddess of the vicissitudes of human life (cf. Swain 1989). Πρόνοια appears less as a personification than as God's providence for the world. The discussion of terminology is important for examining the interface between religious and philosophical (i.e. metaphysical) traditions in Plutarch's thought (cf. Boys-Stones 2016).
As recent research on Plutarch's Vitae has suggested (e.g., Pérez Jiménez 2010), the intervention of the divine is always to be reckoned with in the representation of human aspirations. Viten Grethlein (2013) concludes that there is "a strongly teleological design" in the Vitae by elaborating on how Plutarch presents the development of the individual lives of his characters. VitenOn this basis, the traditional and standard interpretation of Plutarch's biographies could be problematised by showing how and why Plutarch's conception of history is grounded in his philosophical and, above all, theological thought and reflected in his language.