Θεός, θεῖος, θεολόγια. God, the divine, account of God and the divine. Homer represents the gods, most of the time, as superhuman but anthropomorphic beings that have many human characteristics. Hesiod’s gods are more varied—some are anthropomorphic, some are conceptual, and many are hardly more than names handed down from one tradition or another. The philosophical tradition tends to be anti-anthropomorphic. Heraclitus   f. 32: “The Wise is one only. It is willing and unwilling to be called by the name of Zeus.” Xenophanes   is well known for critiquing anthropomorphic deities and positing one supreme God. “God is one, supreme among gods and men, and not like mortals in body or in mind.” Socrates   was charged with “not believing in the gods of the state but introducing new and different divinities.” It is remarkable that in his defense in Plato’s Apology he absolutely does not say “but of course I believe in Athena and Poseidon and all the other deities worshipped in Athens.”

Aristotle   sometimes characterizes the subject matter of his work that we know as the Metaphysics as theologia. For the most part, it would be difficult to think of that work as a discussion of deities in the ordinary sense, but it is clear that he thinks of the most fundamental realities as theia, divine, so that the study of “being qua being” (another characterization of the subject matter) is automatically and directly “theology.”

This way of seeing things is taken up both by the Stoics and by the Platonic tradition; neither makes much of a distinction between what we call “metaphysics” and what we call “theology.”

In the Roman period and late antiquity, the challenge of philosophy to the religious faith of Jews and Christians gave rise to the practice of religious leaders attempting to meet philosophers on their own ground, with more and more sophisticated theological systems. Philo   of Alexandria, Augustine  , and Pseudo-Dionysius   are just a few examples of theologians of this period. [HDAGP  ]

LÉXICO: divino; deísmo; deificação; deidade