SOLAR THEOLOGY. – Solar theology is the final form assumed by the religious thought of Greco-Roman paganism before its definitive decline. In it converge the four fundamental lines of the religious landscape of the Empire: the imperial cult, the mysteries, the cults of the East, and the philosophical currents culminating in Neoplatonism.
Solar theology is the fruit 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 place, which is the middle position, among the seven concentric spheres of the planets: at the center of the entire system, immobile, is the earth. From the sun depends the harmonious reality of celestial movements; from it comes the rhythm of terrestrial life, thanks to its heat, which possesses both active and repulsive force, like the heart in the human organism; from it also depends the rhythm of human events, which it regulates indirectly through its planetary satellites. The sun is thus a “luminous intelligence” (φῶς νοσόν; memin mundi; Cicero, De rep., VI, 4), and as such it also governs the human microcosm. The soul of man is of solar nature, while the body depends on the moon. The irradiation of the sun imprisons within the body incandescent particles that animate II. At the moment of death, the sun’s heat reabsorbs the soul-reason, while the soul-breath or psyche goes to the moon. For this reason, its astronomical pantheism devotes itself to the world rather than to the creator of the world, as Philo of Alexandria observed.
The solar theology of the Chaldeans pleased the Stoics because it essentially corresponded to their hylozoism. Once it had entered the Western world and been elaborated by Hellenistic culture, it was destined to become the most valid exponent of the widespread syncretism of the time and to constitute the religious synthesis of paganism in the face of Christian thought.
All the Latin, Greek, and Eastern gods in vogue in the Greco-Roman world end up being considered as so many aspects of the same divinity, while maintaining the external variety of types that could not be suppressed because they were too closely tied to tradition. This supreme divinity, which the masses intuited as a force manifesting itself through various divine specifications, which educated minds felt as Intelligence, had to be concentrated in the sun, the most majestic manifestation of the cosmos, the highest symbol of the supreme Being in the various aspects of its divine attributes. The Neoplatonism of Julian the Apostate considers the material sun as an image of the intelligible sun (φῶς νοσόν), which in turn is a reflection of the ineffable One, the supreme and absolute Good. The intelligible sun thus has the office of mediation between the unattainable One and the sensible world. For this reason, by virtue of its role as mediator, the sun holds hegemony over all other gods, which are merely its aspects, whether they are called Jupiter, Pluto, Serapis, Mithras, Bacchus, or Apollo, who best expresses its essence.