SOLAR THEOLOGY. — Solar theology is the final form assumed by the religious thought of Greco-Roman paganism before its definitive decline. The four fundamental lines of the religious landscape of the Empire converge in it: the imperial cult, the mystery religions, the cults of the East, and the philosophical currents culminating in Neoplatonism.
Solar theology is the product of the astronomical science of the Chaldeans, which reached the West through the filter of Stoic thought. According to Babylonian astronomy, the sphere of the sun occupies the fourth position, the middle place, among the seven concentric spheres of the planets: at the center of the entire system lies the earth, motionless. The harmonious reality of celestial movements depends on the sun; from it comes the rhythm of terrestrial life, thanks to its heat, which possesses an active and a repulsive force, like the heart in the human organism; on it also depends the rhythm of human affairs, which it regulates indirectly through its satellite planets. It is therefore an “intelligent light” (ὅς νυχόν; mens mundi; Cicero, De rep., VI, 4), and as such it also directs the human microcosm. The soul of man is of a solar nature, whereas the body depends on the moon. The sun’s irradiation imprisons incandescent particles within the body, animating II. At the moment of death, the sun’s heat reabsorbs the rational soul, while the breath-soul, or psyche, goes to the moon. Because of this astronomical pantheism, which deifies the world rather than the creator of the world, as Philo of Alexandria observed, the solar theology of the Chaldeans appealed to the Stoics, since it corresponded essentially to their own physicalism. Once it had entered the Western world and been elaborated by Hellenistic culture, it was to become the most effective expression of the widespread syncretism of the age and constitute paganism’s religious synthesis in opposition to Christian thought.
All the Latin, Greek, and Eastern gods in vogue in the Greco-Roman world eventually came to be regarded as so many aspects of the same divinity, while retaining the external variety of forms that could not be suppressed because they were too closely bound to tradition. This supreme divinity, which the masses intuited as a force manifesting itself through the various divine specifications, and which cultivated minds perceived as Intelligence, was to be concentrated in the sun, the most majestic manifestation of the cosmos and the highest symbol of the Supreme Being in the various aspects of its divine attributes. The Neoplatonism of Julian the Apostate regards the imperial sun as an image of the intelligent sun (ὅς νυχόν), itself a reflection of the ineffable One, the supreme and absolute Good. The intelligent sun therefore has the office of intermediary between the unreachable One and the sensible world. Because of this mediating office, the sun is entitled to hegemony over all the other gods, who are merely its aspects, whether they are called Jupiter, Pluto, Serapis, Mithra, Bacchus, or Apollo, the god who best expresses its essence.