God is the opposites — day and night, one fire many names
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θεὸς ἡμέρη εὐφρόνη, χειμὼν θέρος, πόλεμος εἰρήνη, κόρος λιμός. ἀλλοιοῦται δὲ ὅκωσπερ πῦρ, ὁπόταν συμμιγῇ θυώμασιν, ὀνομάζεται καθ᾽ ἡδονὴν ἑκάστου
God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger; but he alters the way fire does, which, whenever it is mingled with fragrant spices, is named according to the savour of each.
Preserved by Hippolytus (Refutation of All Heresies 9.10), who cites it to show Heraclitus making the divine the unity behind the warring opposites. The god is each pair at once, and 'alters' the way fire does when spices are cast on it — taking a new name from each.
Heraclitus's god is not one term of each pair but the pair itself held as a single thing. Day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, glut and hunger — the divine is what runs through all of them, the one reality the opposites are only phases of. This is the theology his physics has been driving toward: not an Olympian who takes sides, but the one that <em>is</em> both sides, the way the seasons are one year and the road up is the road down.
The simile is exact and a little mischievous. Fire is a single thing, but throw frankincense on it and it is 'frankincense,' throw myrrh and it is 'myrrh' — <em>onomazetai kath' hēdonēn hekastou</em>, 'it is named according to each one's savour.' The many names are ours, a projection of taste; the fire is indifferent to them. So the gods men pray to — Zeus, Dike, Dionysus — are local seasonings of one divine fire. Plato's <em>Cratylus</em> will worry whether names touch things at all; the Stoics will take this fire-god and make it providence. Here the point is quieter and sharper: what you call it says more about you than about it.
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