The proverbial expression of the mills of God grinding slowly refers to the notion of slow but certain divine retribution.
The proverbial expression of the mills of God grinding slowly refers to the notion of slow but certain divine retribution.
Plutarch (1st century CE) alludes to the metaphor as a then-current adage in his Moralia (De sera numinis vindicta "On the Delay of Divine Vengeance"):
Plutarch no doubt here makes reference to a hexameter by an unknown poet, cited by sceptic philosopher Sextus Empiricus (2nd century) in his Adversus Grammaticos as a popular adage: [4]
The same expression was invoked by Celsus in his (lost) True Discourse . Defending the concept of ancestral fault, Celsus reportedly quoted "a priest of Apollo or of Zeus":
The Sibylline Oracles (c. 175) have Sed mola postremo pinset divina farinam ("but the divine mill will at last grind the flour"). [7]
The proverb was in frequent use in the Protestant Reformation, often in the Latin translation Sero molunt deorum molae due to Erasmus of Rotterdam ( Adagia , 1500), [8] but also in German translation. [9]
The expression was anthologised in English translation by George Herbert in his collection of proverbs entitled Jacula Prudentum (1652), as "God's mill grinds slow but sure" (no. 743). German epigrammatist Friedrich von Logau, in his Sinngedichte (c. 1654), composed an extended variant of the saying under the title "Göttliche Rache" (divine retribution), [10]
translated into English by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ("Retribution", Poetic Aphorisms, 1846): [11]
Arthur Conan Doyle alluded to the proverb in his very first Sherlock Holmes adventure, A Study in Scarlet . The allusion is found in the fourth chapter of the second part, in a scene in which the character John Ferrier is confronted by two of the Mormon characters:
Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1886) (emphasis added).
The proverb was used by Agatha Christie in her novel Hercule Poirot's Christmas , as a person quoted it when they saw the corpse of a man who had lived an evil life. It was also referred to by W. Somerset Maugham in the novel The Moon and Sixpence wherein it is used, somewhat piously, by a family member to imply a certain justice in the demise of the central character Charles Strickland,
Then I told them what I had learned about Charles Strickland in Tahiti. I thought it unnecessary to say anything of Ata and her boy, but for the rest I was as accurate as I could be. When I had narrated his lamentable death I ceased. For a minute or two we were all silent. Then Robert Strickland struck a match and lit a cigarette. "The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small," he said, somewhat impressively.
— W. Somerset Maugham, "The Moon and Sixpence" (1919)
During the Second World War, both Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt quoted Longfellow when promising retribution for the extermination of the Jews. [12]
Apollo is one of the Olympian deities in classical Greek and Roman religion and Greek and Roman mythology. Apollo has been recognized as a god of archery, music and dance, truth and prophecy, healing and diseases, the Sun and light, poetry, and more. One of the most important and complex of the Greek gods, he is the son of Zeus and Leto, and the twin brother of Artemis, goddess of the hunt. He is considered to be the most beautiful god and is represented as the ideal of the kouros. Apollo is known in Greek-influenced Etruscan mythology as Apulu.
Divinity or the divine are things that are either related to, devoted to, or proceeding from a deity. What is or is not divine may be loosely defined, as it is used by different belief systems. Under monotheism and polytheism this is clearly delineated. However, in pantheism and animism this becomes synonymous with concepts of sacredness and transcendence.
An oracle is a person or thing considered to provide insight, wise counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. If done through occultic means, it is a form of divination.
Plutarch was a Greek Middle Platonist philosopher, historian, biographer, essayist, and priest at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. He is known primarily for his Parallel Lives, a series of biographies of illustrious Greeks and Romans, and Moralia, a collection of essays and speeches. Upon becoming a Roman citizen, he was possibly named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus.
An augur was a priest and official in the classical Roman world. His main role was the practice of augury, the interpretation of the will of the gods by studying events he observed within a predetermined sacred space (templum). The templum corresponded to the heavenly space above. The augur's decisions were based on what he personally saw or heard from within the templum; they included thunder, lightning and any accidental signs such as falling objects, but in particular, birdsigns; whether the birds he saw flew in groups or alone, what noises they made as they flew, the direction of flight, what kind of birds they were, how many there were, or how they fed. This practice was known as "taking the auspices". As circumstance did not always favour the convenient appearance of wild birds or weather phenomena, domesticated chickens kept for the purpose were sometimes released into the templum, where their behaviour, particularly how they fed, could be studied by the augur.
Pythia was the name of the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. She specifically served as its oracle and was known as the Oracle of Delphi. Her title was also historically glossed in English as the Pythoness.
In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Pluto was the ruler of the Greek underworld. The earlier name for the god was Hades, which became more common as the name of the underworld itself. Pluto represents a more positive concept of the god who presides over the afterlife. Ploutōn was frequently conflated with Ploûtos, the Greek god of wealth, because mineral wealth was found underground, and because as a chthonic god Pluto ruled the deep earth that contained the seeds necessary for a bountiful harvest. The name Ploutōn came into widespread usage with the Eleusinian Mysteries, in which Pluto was venerated as both a stern ruler and a loving husband to Persephone. The couple received souls in the afterlife and are invoked together in religious inscriptions, being referred to as Plouton and as Kore respectively. Hades, by contrast, had few temples and religious practices associated with him, and he is portrayed as the dark and violent abductor of Persephone.
Cleanthes, of Assos, was a Greek Stoic philosopher and boxer who was the successor to Zeno of Citium as the second head (scholarch) of the Stoic school in Athens. Originally a boxer, he came to Athens where he took up philosophy, listening to Zeno's lectures. He supported himself by working as a water-carrier at night. After the death of Zeno, c. 262 BC, he became the head of the school, a post he held for the next 32 years. Cleanthes successfully preserved and developed Zeno's doctrines. He originated new ideas in Stoic physics, and developed Stoicism in accordance with the principles of materialism and pantheism. Among the fragments of Cleanthes' writings which have come down to us, the largest is a Hymn to Zeus. His pupil was Chrysippus who became one of the most important Stoic thinkers.
Xenocrates of Chalcedon was a Greek philosopher, mathematician, and leader (scholarch) of the Platonic Academy from 339/8 to 314/3 BC. His teachings followed those of Plato, which he attempted to define more closely, often with mathematical elements. He distinguished three forms of being: the sensible, the intelligible, and a third compounded of the two, to which correspond respectively, sense, intellect and opinion. He considered unity and duality to be gods which rule the universe, and the soul a self-moving number. God pervades all things, and there are daemonical powers, intermediate between the divine and the mortal, which consist in conditions of the soul. He held that mathematical objects and the Platonic Ideas are identical, unlike Plato who distinguished them. In ethics, he taught that virtue produces happiness, but external goods can minister to it and enable it to effect its purpose.
The Sibylline Oracles are a collection of oracular utterances written in Greek hexameters ascribed to the Sibyls, prophetesses who uttered divine revelations in a frenzied state. Fourteen books and eight fragments of Sibylline Oracles survive, in an edition of the 6th or 7th century AD. They are not to be confused with the original Sibylline Books of the ancient Etruscans and Romans which were burned by order of the Roman general Flavius Stilicho in the 4th century AD. Instead, the text is an "odd pastiche" of Hellenistic and Roman mythology interspersed with Jewish, Gnostic and early Christian legend.
Divine retribution is supernatural punishment of a person, a group of people, or everyone by a deity in response to some action. Many cultures have a story about how a deity exacted punishment upon previous inhabitants of their land, causing their doom.
The Apocalypse of Peter, also called the Revelation of Peter, is an early Christian text of the 2nd century and an example of apocalyptic literature with Hellenistic overtones. It is not included in the standard canon of the New Testament, but is mentioned in the Muratorian fragment, the oldest surviving list of New Testament books, which also states that some authorities would not have it read in church. The text is extant in two incomplete versions of a lost Greek original, a later Greek version and an Ethiopic version, which diverge considerably. The work is classed as part of New Testament apocrypha.
Celsus was a 2nd-century Greek philosopher and opponent of early Christianity. His literary work, The True Word, survives exclusively in quotations from it in Contra Celsum, a refutation written in 248 by Origen of Alexandria. The True Word is the earliest known comprehensive criticism of Christianity.
Julia was the daughter of Roman dictator Julius Caesar and his first or second wife Cornelia, and his only child from his marriages. Julia became the fourth wife of Pompey the Great and was renowned for her beauty and virtue.
The saying Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad, sometimes given in Latin as Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat or Quem Iuppiter vult perdere, dementat prius has been used in English literature since at least the 17th century. Although sometimes falsely attributed to Euripides, the phrase does have classical Greek antecedents.
Ancestral sin, generational sin, or ancestral fault, is the doctrine that individuals inherit the judgement for the sin of their ancestors. It exists primarily as a concept in Mediterranean religions ; generational sin is referenced in the Bible in Exodus 20:5.
Theodorus the Atheist, of Cyrene, was a Greek philosopher of the Cyrenaic school. He lived in both Greece and Alexandria, before ending his days in his native city of Cyrene. As a Cyrenaic philosopher, he taught that the goal of life was to obtain joy and avoid grief, and that the former resulted from knowledge, and the latter from ignorance. However, his principal claim to fame was his alleged atheism. He was usually designated by ancient writers ho atheos, "the atheist."
The Crow or Raven and the Snake or Serpent is one of Aesop's Fables and numbered 128 in the Perry Index. Alternative Greek versions exist and two of these were adopted during the European Renaissance. The fable is not to be confused with the story of this title in the Panchatantra, which is completely different.
Greek divination is the divination practiced by ancient Greek culture as it is known from ancient Greek literature, supplemented by epigraphic and pictorial evidence. Divination is a traditional set of methods of consulting divinity to obtain prophecies (theopropia) about specific circumstances defined beforehand. As it is a form of compelling divinity to reveal its will by the application of method, it is, and has been since classical times, considered a type of magic. Cicero condemns it as superstition. It depends on a presumed "sympathy" between the mantic event and the real circumstance, which he denies as contrary to the laws of nature. If there were any sympathy, and the diviner could discover it, then "men may approach very near to the power of gods."
Deorum injuriae diis curae is a Latin maxim. It is often invoked in relation to questions of blasphemy, libel and free speech, positing that any insult to the divine should be left to divine vengeance rather than state punishment.
