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Speaker 3: One of the more difficult topics to disect is the
topic of neoplatonism in Christianity. And I put a lot
of years into this question because it is very texting,
it's very intricate, but we can to some understanding on this,
and the purpose of this video is going to be
a kind of a rough introduction to the longer talk
that I'm going to do now. I've been reading recently
Michael Hoffman's new book, The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome,
and as you can see, I'm about almost halfway. So
I just got this the other day and I'm about
halfway through the seven hundred page attack on the last
five to eight hundred years of Western Roman Catholicism. And
most of what's in here I think is correct. Everything
I've seen so far is pretty solid. There's a couple
of areas where I take issue with Hoffman, particularly where
it's related to the character of Augustine if you look
at Plotonis's and Neids, the phillyoquay that Augustine pioneered and
which was subsequently dogmatized by the Council of Toledo with
papal approval, which you can also find a dissection of
in my essay that I just wrote about aryan arguments
being used by Philioquist. So it's actually an inverse. It
does not at all achieve the purpose for which the
filioque was intended. But we're gonna not really delve into
Augustine and all that right now, because the main point
of this is to do a bit of a review
of the first half of Hoffman's book and then maybe
my own thoughts on it. But as I said, you know,
over the last ten to fifteen years, this is a
topic that's been very central to me. In my twenties,
I was very much into Tomism and prior to that
also the Augustinian tradition. So you know, most of my
twenties I spent reading those two guys in mass Obviously
I read other things too. I wasn't just studying Tomism,
but you know, those things were something I took very serious.
Thing weren't there weren't ideologies that I adopted happenstance or
willy nilly. I really put the time and the effort
into it. And so I have my Suma over here,
and I have tremendous amounts of notes in it, as
well as the Summa country Geen t Lace the other work,
as well as other I have the Katina Array of
quinas well, which is a commentary on the Gospels and
other philosophical works de Veritate and so forth. So I'm
not I'm familiar with this territory. I know it very well.
I know very in depth that the nature of Tonism,
and it's a lot more complex than a lot of
times the way we want to break it down. Now,
that's not an attack on Hoffmann's book, although he does
still have a bit of a regard for Aquinas that
I wouldn't have.
Speaker 2: With all of the.
Speaker 3: Errors of created grace and beatific vision and philioque and
on and on and on that are occurring that occur
in the Suma Theologica, it really doesn't matter about those
guys and their opinions, because when it comes to the
topic of Roman Catholicism, what matters is what's dogma and
it's very clearly made dogma in Vatican One that the
ordinary Universal teaching Magisterium of the Church cannot air. So
when you read a book like Denzinger, which I've read,
the entirety of Denzinger is the totality of what's more
or less dogmatic. It was put together before the Second
Vatican Council, so it constitutes dogma for normatively speaking, for
Roman Catholicism, or it's supposed to if they're consistent with it.
Of course, so they don't always follow that, but that's
a different question of all the dogmas. And but what
Hoffmann does is that he deconstructs some of the influences,
and that's very accurate, very appropriate. It echoes the work
of doctor Farrell and God History and Dialectic, which is
really just the systematization of the critique from the Orthodox
perspective over the last however, many hundreds of years. Right,
it's not new, it's not fresh arguments, it's really just
a systematization, and it's done very well. And shorter books
like James Kelly's An Atomizing Divinity that I've done many
interviews with. His book is a good presentation of the
same theme. But again we have to eventually let go
of some of these Augustinian ideas that just are not biblical. Now,
that's not to be unfair to Augustine, because again, when
I converted to Roman Catholicism back in I don't know,
two thousand and one or two, I took his name,
so I'm very familiar with what he teaches. I know
what's in on the Trinity. I know it's in on Baptism,
and I guess the Donatus, and I know it's in
retractions and soliloquies and on and on on. So to
be fair, obviously the later Augustine was a lot more
biblical in his approach. He did shed a lot of
that philosophical baggage, but it really doesn't matter, because we
don't build our theology on a guy. We don't build
our theology on Aquinas. We build our theology on the
Bible and then, by extension, the Church universally what the
Church is always believed everywhere and at all times. And
the Augustinian argumentation for the philioqui, as well as the
very very bad argument that I elucidated with absolute clarity
in my article that the Holy Spirit perceives from the
will of God. That's an aryan argument for why the
Son is a creation. So the subordinationism that is often
mentioned in terms of God and arianism and all that
actually applies most coherently to philioquism. And I've sent this
piece to numerous Catholics, numerous Catholic apologists. Nobody has responded
to it yet or given it any adequate uh defense.
And there's not going to be a defense, because it's
our it's in your dogma. So that that human psychological
analogy of mind and and will and the spirit being
will and all the stuff that's that's read up into
the Trinity, that's wrong. And we have to let that go.
And once we do that, and we get back to
what's in the Councils and what's in the Fathers, whose
theology has been confirmed by the Universal Church already in
the first seven slash eight Councils, which deal specifically with
Christology and the Triad. I mean those teachings are they're
pretty solid. I mean they line up there, They make sense,
They give balance to what we're what we believe, and
all the deviations, be it filioquism, be it papism, that
you can all trace them back to deviations that relate
to Christology or the relationship between God and the world.
So what we're going to talk about now is the
subject matter of Hoffman's book, what is the relationship of
God to the world? And can we look to Plutonis
and Plato and Plethon and all of these Neoplatonic and
Platonic middle Platonic guys who are coming up with their
ratio mathematical mysticism as a way to understand God. And
I think that the answer is no. And that's an
emphatic no, because so much of the early Patristic argumentation
when it comes to the nature of God, or the
questions of Christology and the natures of Christ and so forth,
all those questions are not grounded in obscure neoplatonic arguments.
They're grounded in the Bible. And you'll see that very
clearly when you read through their works, especially somebody like Athanasius,
or if you read Ceri Old Jerusalem, Saint Cerul of Alexandria,
if you read Saint Gregory Palomas a thousand years later,
the arguments are consistently Bible, Bible, Bible blah blah Bible
and if there's ever a philosophical subtlety or clarification that's
brought in, it's merely for a teaching tool.
Speaker 2: We might use the.
Speaker 3: Term monad, and I believe that if the Church fathers
ever used that term, Like when Athanasius and decent Otis
is arguing with about the Arians, he's making fun of
the way that they talk about the monad and then
it being what creates a diad. So they're relying on neoplatonism.
When Saint Basil is arguing with heretics, he points out
that the I am the toe on I am being
supposedly that's not a Greek philosophical statement in Exodus. That's
not God is not saying I am super existent essence.
I am super existent. He's not saying that.
Speaker 2: He's saying I.
Speaker 3: Am the personal God that has the covenantal relationship with Israel.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So the error has been that when the Church and
different apologists like Origin, we're trying to convert their friends
who are very steeped in Greek philosophy, a lot of
times they were speaking the Greek philosophical lingo to try
to have a common ground. Now, I don't think that
that's inherently necessarily always wrong, but it's it's a little
bit dangerous. I mean John does this in John one
one where he talks about the logos, and certainly the
corn corny Greek New Testament would have been going out
to people who spoke coin a Greek.
Speaker 2: So it's not that it's wrong.
Speaker 3: The terms inherently are wrong, it's rather the context and
what you mean by them. So for example, hoopostasis, the
personhood that's spoken of as a you know, characterizing the
Father of the Son and the spirit. This person aspect
that is not from Plotinus, is not from the Eneids,
it doesn't originate in Greek philosophers and Athens. It comes
out of the New Testament. Right, The New Testament uses
the Greek term hoypostasis, and this was again originating probably
ultimately in the Septuogen, the Greek translation of the Old Testament,
which is generally speaking, what the New Testament writers relied
on was the septuigen. So that's kind of the norm
in the Orthodox Church is generally speaking, is the septuagen
and that terminology. But again, as I've shown in my
Logos talk, where we go to Saint John Damascus's exposition
of the Orthodox face. You know, what we see is
that it's clear that the context for these terms and words,
the one right the triad, it's not what Plato meant.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: So again, if you look at the eneids, if you
look at the third in the fifth in neid of Platinis,
you'll see that Platinis makes these arguments of how the
monad and the diad love one another, and then that
that love creates this third hypostasis, which is spirit or something.
Now that's obviously clearly what is being said by Augustine
when he tries to make this very new argument for
the philioque and this spirit proceeding from will and being will,
which is again there's no way to make that orthodox
because it's an aryan argument. So all that to say
that Hoffmann's book is another witness another researcher coming to
the conclusions that I came to that many have come
to for the most part, ten years or so ago,
when it was really a question of what is the
perennial philosophy?
Speaker 2: What is this?
Speaker 3: How does it relate to Neoplatonism, how does it relate
to the you know, Jewish mysticism, in the Kabbalah. How
does that relate to the topics of the Renaissance guys
like Marsilio Ficino and Cornelius Agrippa and who else, Johann
Reuchlinn and these different guys who were very interested in
utilizing Kabbalistic structures to try to convert Jews or as
a means by which the Church might be able to
improve upon its theology of who Christ is and all
this kind of stuff and divine Plato as he's called. Now, this,
as Hoffman correctly argues, has been the dominant trend since
the Renaissance, in the Renaissance papacy. And when you look
no further than the art and architecture of Rome to
see that confirmed. And that's ultimately what starts becoming. The
problem is, it's not just philosophers philosophizing, it's also.
Speaker 2: Very weird artworks.
Speaker 3: I remember when I was getting really into Rome Catholicism
back in my twenties, I took a tour of the
One of the actually is an episcopal cathedral.
Speaker 2: I'm not making this up. You can look it up.
Speaker 3: There's an episcopal cathedral in Memphis, and when you go
in there there's a giant blonde hair, blue eye Ariyan Jesus.
I don't know why they made him in an Aryan Jesus,
but there's and then he's like facing opposite of a
Michael the Archangel who's holding a scroll with E equals
MC squared on it with with Einstein's STICKT. Now, I
did a little research on this guy. I don't remember
his name, but he was very well respected Roman artisan
an artist, and I think he did a lot of
work for Pious the twelve and different popes and whatnot.
He's designed various cathedrals, so in the point, because it's
not just a Episcopalian thing, he's also very important for
all the Roman Catholic cathedrals that he's designed. And then
you start to think, well, now, wait a minute, So
there is actually all this bizarre alchemical imagery and all
these kinds of images that are that populate the cathedrals
of Roman Catholicism. Now, why would that be? And that's
what we're going to look at as we get into
this book. It is going to be precisely because the
West was not just corrupted through Renaissance and Hermeticism and
all this kind of stuff, from the year, you know,
fifteen hundred on or twelve hundred on. There's a deeper
route that is actually the philosophical presuppositions of absolute dune simplicity,
of filioquism, of created grace, of the natural immortality of
the soul as opposed to the body. All of these
things were already condemned in the chart. The soul is
not naturally immortal. It's what Christ grants to it through
the incarnation, death, buril.
Speaker 2: And resurrection.
Speaker 3: That's how we participate in the immortality that God has
promised us in the resurrection. And so very very different
doctrines is what I'm trying to point out here, and
so all the more absurd by the way, then for
Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox that try to mesh together
because the theology is not compatible. It's not compatible because
Neoplatonism is not compatible with the Bible, simply put. So,
what I want to do in this talk is get
into Middle and in later Platonism and particularly the character
of Platinus. And Platinus is important because his philosophy is
very influential in the West and it leads to a
whole host of controversies and debates and part relationship to
the Christian Church in the first several centuries and then
even into the Middle Ages. The character of Plotinus and
his ineads, first of all, are going to be the
most relevant for influencing characters like Augustine. Now, if you
read a book like A City of God, for the
most part, City of God is something that we would consider,
you know, an orthodox book. It does contain several sections
of speculation, but the first half of the book is
Augustine's critique of the pagan world, the City of Man
as he calls it, and accurately accurately, So we would
say that the City of Man is flawed precisely because
it all the way back to you know what we
read in Genesis six or Genesis ten and eleven, the
Tower Babbel is basically been trying to erect a culture,
a society around the worship of Man slash Idolatry slash
the Devil. And so the idea here is that you know,
all of the pagan empires in the past pretty much,
you know, collapse into that pattern.
Speaker 2: You know, this is the entire experience of Israel as
a nation.
Speaker 3: You know, with the Babylonian captivity and the destruction of
the temple. It's the experience of most of mankind throughout
history is to be subjected to some form of pagan
human based law that is tyrannical. And so this is
not always totally brutal. You know, there was times where
the empires might provide a lot of peace.
Speaker 2: And so you'll read.
Speaker 3: In sections in Isaiah about Darius, and I excuse me,
about Cyrus and Isaiah and Darius with Daniel and Nebucaneser
and so forth. And at times these guys might have
even been converted by the prophets. We don't exactly know,
but we get tints of that, perhaps like with in
the Book of Daniel when he interacts with Nebucaneser. But regardless,
for the most part, the pagan empires are a thorn
in the side of God's people. And then, certainly for
the first few centuries of Christianity, the Empire is very
virulent on persecuting Christians. But the persecution quote unquote of
the Church and of our theology doesn't always come in.
Speaker 2: The form of overt attack through dictators or kings or armies.
Speaker 3: It can also come at times through subtle philosophical wranglings
and sophistry, and one of those issues, I think you
could argue is shown. One of those examples is very
clearly shown in the example of Platonis. Now, I'm not
saying that Platonus was necessarily Christian, but as we saw
in the talk that I did on the older Greek guys,
you know, Heraclitis and Promenides and the Ionians, and then
into Plato and Platonism, we saw a lot of figures
who were perhaps you know, into the Roman period as
it's called the Stoics, who were probably drawing from several
different well springs, maybe even Marcus Aurelius. Some of these
guys were probably influenced in some degree by Christian thought,
early theologians. But even though that's still a little unclear,
we know that there were, you know, dialogues between different
early Church writers, you know, writing letters to different Roman
rulers and so forth, trying to explain that you know,
their position was not anti authoritarian in itself, that it
was just based on the law of God, and that
you know, they couldn't in good conscience sacrifice.
Speaker 2: The idols and so forth.
Speaker 3: Now that philosophy of Platinus is crucial because it will
present one of the most subtle sort of challenges and
will influence some people to move in the direction of Platonism.
If I recall Celsus, one of the guys who Origin
was very pathetically trying to debate with the Celsus was
a Neoplatonist, and so you get a lot of that
same tendency of the platonic argumentation, trying to show that
Christianity is foolish because it relies on the Old.
Speaker 2: Testament being historical.
Speaker 3: And so this is why when Irenaeus writes his big
Treatise against Heresies in I think one eighty or so,
somewhere in there, Iernas is battling a lot of Gnosticism,
and so Gnosticism and Platonism, Neoplatonism, these are very very
close cousins. They're very influenced perhaps one another at times,
and so there's not exactly one Neoplatonic thing.
Speaker 2: That you can go to.
Speaker 3: You get Sometimes you get these guys like Iamblicus, who
is more of a ceremonial magi magic magician type guy.
Sometimes you get characters like Platinists, where it's not so
much about ceremonial rituals as it is the individual in
his own innernosis, the intuitive spark of the inner divine,
and so forth, and that this is how the soul
ascends into the higher planetary realms and spheres up to
the one as we see, we're going to see. That's
the argumentation of Plotinus, particularly.
Speaker 2: In the Eneiods.
Speaker 3: But if you recall, we did many lectures on Plato
and the dialogues and the entirety of the Republic, and
people can go back and listen to those, But the Fiato,
the Thiadrius, Symposium, Timaeus, Republic, these all provide the skeletal
outline for what will influence Plotinus, and what he does
is kind of dispense with all.
Speaker 2: The Socratic dialogue.
Speaker 3: It says, you know, out with all that stuff, let's
just have a more direct, almost a sort of a
philo theological treatise.
Speaker 2: It's kind of what the Eneids are. It's not really.
Speaker 3: Making a distinction between those two because in plotin in thought,
there's not a distinction between the knowledge or nosis that
you gain in philosophy and theology. They're basically the same endeavors,
and so by extension, obviously there's no revelation. All experience
of the forms and phenomena are themselves quote revelation, you
could say, in plutonium thought. But if we remember, I
think I did do at least an article on the
Fayto and then a talk on it, I think, And
I still haven't gotten to the Tomayos yet. I've read
it obviously, but I haven't done an electro on it.
But if we recall that's this sort of Egyptian gnostic
creation cosmogony of Plato is the Tomayis, and it's where
we get a lot of the esoteric symbolism that continue
into the Western tradition. You know, the snake and the
egg and the oral bo roast and all that out
of the Tomais. The platonic solids come out of the Tomais.
And then of course we know everything that's in the Republic.
We we did a lecture on each one of the
books of the Republic.
Speaker 2: So if we.
Speaker 3: Recall all that, and if we remember the talk that
I did a couple of months ago about the mysteries
of the early Greeks or something to that, if I
forget exactly what I titled it, but something like that,
where we did a critique of the dialectics of the
Greeks and the one and the many, and that's kind
of what it all boiled down to, was this presupposition
of setting the one in contrast, contrastinction, dialectical tension and
opposition with the mini and vice versa. Now, when you
get to Platinus, as we said, we've dispensed with Socratic
tales and storytelling and myths and and we've kind of
tried to boil it into more of a principled, logical
philosophical treatise that is metaphysical. So it's it's a logical,
rational approach to metaphysics, trying to pause it different tiers,
structures and levels of reality. So what does he argue, Well,
in these aneads, he is giving this metaphysical structure, and
we're going to kind of go in summary here. Obviously
it's a fairly long book, so we're not gonna go
through every single one, but for four Plotinus, just like Plato,
the soul is divine. The object of life is to
understand how.
Speaker 2: We might restore that soul to.
Speaker 3: Its original sort of proper place. And you know, the
getting back to the one, the journey back to the monad. Now,
this can only be done by knowing a comprehensive structure
of reality. We have to we have to have a
comprehensive knowledge of metaphysics and reality and our place in
the world in order to get to find the map back.
So in many ways the Labyrinth mythology could be could
be looked at as a kind of allegory for this,
you know, the kind of mythology of Minos and the
Labyrinth and so forth. And it's what a lot of
the polatness would do is kind of go back. And
Plotonus does this in the Aeneads. He goes back and
he looks at Homer and he like he reads these
sort of allegorical meanings and to Homer. So you get
a level removed from the grammatico historical. You know, this
god beating up, this god type story, and we're told, oh,
you know, Aros is love, and it's not really about
an actual god. It's an allegory for the principle of
love and love not falling into porn ai or porno
or whatever, or erotic lust fixation, but rather that it's
pure chased a lot you get all these kinds of
allegorical readings of Homer and Odysseus, which I'm not sure
that that's totally wrong. I think sometimes it's I mean,
it's either just totally clever creativity, but sometimes it does
look like they're making an interesting case that maybe Homer
was actually encoding those stories as allegorical myths. I don't know,
but that's debatable regardless, you know, we're not I'm not saying,
by the way, that has anything to do with theology.
I'm just considering a different approach is to Platonism and Homer.
And you know, there's all kinds of millennia of scholars
debating this stuff, so these are not new questions. But
with Platinis, we want to stress the dissimilarity to Christianity.
And again, it's entirely possible that Plotinus heard, you know,
Christian philosophers, Christian theologians, you know, speaking about things, right
he maybe he read some of them, maybe he read Origin,
who knows, and you know, he could have borrowed a
lot of their terminology and concepts. So could Plutonian ideology
be a corruption of Christianity?
Speaker 2: Of that's possible.
Speaker 3: Now, I say that because nobody will entertain the thesis
that I consider very viable that when we look at
the her structure of the theology of Egypt or any
of those ancient empires.
Speaker 2: So let's let's use Egypt. So we go back to Egypt, and.
Speaker 3: You know that one of the things that does distinguish
Egyptian fought from Greek hermeticism is the bodily resurrection. So
at a certain point in Egypt's history they appeared to
have adopted some kind of monotheism and a belief in
the resurrection. I'm not saying that their views weren't totally corrupted,
but what's interesting is, well, where do they get that idea. Well,
the liberal scholarship will say, well, this was like some
old form of monotheism, and you know, then this degenerated
into paganism or polytheism or something like that, and which
is not our view. It's not the view of a
biblical inspiration, it's not orthodox theology. We would say, what's
more likely is that when Joseph was in Egypt, he
influenced Egyptian theology. I mean, he has the ear of Pharaoh.
That's every bit as possible in my view as well. Actually,
I think that's way more possible and likely than the
hier critical liberal narrative of.
Speaker 2: Why Egypt.
Speaker 3: Had theological changes that it did. But regardless, the structure
of the Egyptian Hermetica and so forth is basically the
kind of architecture that you get in Platonis. So Platonius
goes on and again, if you read the Hermerica, you
see that similarity very clearly. Whenever that her Medica is
from who knows is it really Egyptian? I guess that's
debated too, but whatever.
Speaker 2: Is likely Egyptian.
Speaker 3: You know, again, with the body resurrection stuff, that is
a dissimilarity to Platonis. We're not going to have any
kind of body resurrection with Platonics. So in this philosophy
there's no access to to the divine through any kind
of special revelation. So plutonium philosophy, Platonic philosophy, excludes revelation.
And that's because all nosis, all knowledge, is ultimately of
the forms. Now, we might be duped by the phantasms
and the material world and think that we're only understanding
you know, base matter and so forth, as they would argue,
but in reality, what we need to do is purify
ourselves and then the soul, you know, the mind. Soul
and mind are kind of interestingly linked here, which will
become another normative view in the West, the body soul dichotomy,
where intellect and soul almost become interchangeable. So in Plotinus,
that is the so called reality that we have to accept.
Once we kind of are initiated into this, you know,
Plato type stuff, then what happens is you'll realize that
philosophy is the real guide to life, not any kind
of special revelation from spirits or gods, and philosophy will
give you the complete account of reality, and in doing
so it becomes the guide to life, and that life
is a signpost. It's a labyrinth maze pointing us to
going beyond this sensible visible world. So to know that
reality very much in the same way as Plato, there
is a need to purify oneself, to work to attain
virtue and not It's not to be fair to plotonis
he's not saying that, Oh, it's just mental Like you
just sit there and contemplate as hard as you can
on the nature of being or something, and your soul
will ascend into the heights. You also have to practice
other ideas of Greek platonic virtue. I guess you know,
you have to understand aesthetics, and you have to know
the good and know justice and all this kind of
stuff that we talked about in the Platonic lectures that
I did. And so in doing all that, the soul
is then prepared for its progressive journey into up into
the One. So well, how then do we live properly
in this view? What's the ethics here? Well, it starts
with again dialectics as we saw of Plato, and the assumption,
the presupposition. The starting point of this system is that
there is one monad blob unifying principle, a concrete, absolute,
metaphysical principle, and it is beyond being, as it's called
many times in these writers. Now, the beyond being is
not in any way conceptual. It's not in any way tangible,
it's not in any way knowable.
Speaker 2: It's ineffable. It's not a god.
Speaker 3: It's beyond the conception of God or any notion of God.
It's not personal.
Speaker 2: It's beyond all that.
Speaker 3: And this one, the supreme principle, we might say, is
in some way like mind, which is interesting because how
can it be beyond being if it's supreme mind. But
maybe to be fair, he thought that he could overcome
dialectics in that way somehow, I don't know. But the
unity that we seek, right, we are fragmented.
Speaker 2: We have the multiplicity of.
Speaker 3: Experiences, we experience things through beginning middle end. There's change,
there's alteration that in the system is the problem. So
the fact that there's multiplicity, the fact that there's many
objects of our experience that we change from day to day,
and we feel one way, we feel another way, that's
all the problem. And you see the greade one, the
great monad. It's not like that. And if we could
only be like that, then we wouldn't have all the
problems we have. And so all of the forms, the
platonic forms in the world that are standing behind the
phenomenal reality that we experience, even the forms still exhibit
some kind of distinction and duality and opposition. And therefore,
since they're not an ultimate unity above mind, so to speak,
is this ineffable one. So it's almost like it's kind
of like there's gradations. I should have made that a
little bit clearer minute to go. Excuse me, Mind is
actually a step below the one. So even mind is
conceptual and is in some way an analogy between like
the human mind and some sort of and you know,
the divine mind. But okay, let me have to make
it clear. Plotinus is saying that the moment add the
one is even beyond that. So that's actually technically what
the ineffable beyond being is. So my mind and above
the mind and above forms, what you're in, that mind
is the one. Now Plato will follow Platinus as one
again in saying that it is beyond a being and
totally apathetic. That is, nothing can be said of it
in any positive way or known about it. And you
can't even say that it quote exists, because whatever kind
of existence that the monad has, it bears no relation
or similarity to anything in our experience. So when he
calls it the good, it's very similar to what Plato says,
in that the form of the good is above all
the other forms and is beyond being.
Speaker 2: So ultimate reality is the one.
Speaker 3: Maybe in some way goodness is closer of an approximation,
but even still you can't predicate goodness of the One,
because it's beyond being, beyond all conceptuality. If we were
to give a name to the one, it would be
the good, he says. So back to Promenides, in the
old lecture, there was a notion of this kind of
monad unity, and that's kind of what a lot of
the ancient Ionians.
Speaker 2: And so forth.
Speaker 3: What they were seeking was some grand unifying principle, but
they always wanted to make it impersonal. And of course
that's the same thing that Platonis is doing. So unqualified oneness,
absolute divine simplicity is the one. Now from this one
descend various emanations and degrees of reality that as you
go down the tree of reality, so to speak, there
is less and less unity and thus less and less reality.
So this scale of being comes into play here, the
Greek scale of being, which will be very influential in
the medieval Christian West, especially when you read the Scholastics
and all of this speculation about the chain of being
and all this stuff. It continues on for a long
long time. Now, that's not to say that every single
aspect of metaphysics or medieval metaphysics about being is necessarily wrong.
I'm just speaking of general trends here. So in these
degrees of reality or emanations from the one. Again, as
we move further away from the One, there is a
noticeable differentiation in particularization that leads to less and less
unity and less and less reality. So as we move
down from the One, we lose that super essence and
we fade towards non being. Now, the One is said
to overflow in this way as a kind of emanation
in these descending levels, all the way down to the
physical universe, which is kind of at the bottom of
this this scheme, this pyramid here, and these these emanations
are kind of like the sun. So we can look
at the light of the sun and it's and maybe
it fades away as it.
Speaker 2: Gets further or something like that.
Speaker 3: And the further away you are, you know, the weaker
the power and heat of the Sun would be. So thus,
in order and in structure, we can say the fabric
of this thing, the universe is unchanging, and it's it
is static, but it is alive, so it's not dead matter.
Speaker 2: It's full of life.
Speaker 3: There is a cyclical celestial sphere dance that the universe
does in an orbital pattern around the one, around the monad.
This will be again very similar to all the traditions
of the celestial spheres and Neoplatonism, and even.
Speaker 2: In Aristotle talks about the celestial.
Speaker 3: Spheres and how all the spheres move in a circle
around the monad.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 3: At the highest level, the fullest sense of the good
there is pure act. It is self contained thought, thinking itself,
even perhaps the way that Aristotle characterized his quote unquote God,
which is not the God of the Bible, thought thinking itself,
total complete contemplation.
Speaker 2: And stasis. There's no change, no alteration, no movement.
Speaker 3: And so the life of the here and the now,
the physical level that we experience, these are faint images
precisely because they change and are therefore some in some
way lesser than the static, perfect super beyond essence essence.
Now this again, this obviously will be rejected in our theology,
because change, alteration is not in itself bad. Time isn't
inherently evil, there's no there's nothing wrong with any kind
of there's no dialectic at work here. And Saint Gregor
of Nissa is very good in refuting the heretics who
argue this, particularly the Platonists, this kind of stuff where
we don't do that, we don't say that right, because
if once we say that, it's impossible for there to
be an incarnation. Right, the Highest Good could in no
way incarnate because it's absolutely in dialectical tension with time
and change in space. That's again why we're not Platonists.
Neoplatonism would exclude the possibility of an incarnation. So there's
a flow within the universe which consists of a downward
movement from the One, but some of these beings, particularly Man,
has the ability to also have an upward movement back
towards the One. Now, how is that going to happen? Well,
Platinus is going to construct this elaborate superstructure of metaphysics
to where there are three hypostaces or persons. Now you
might say, well, wait a minute, did the Christian Church
rip off Platinus? No hypostasis. It comes from the subtu agent,
the Greek translation of the Old Testament, and it comes
from the New Testament texts.
Speaker 2: So epistasis was used.
Speaker 3: In our revelation prior to the coming of Platonis on
the scene. Now, individual substances that make up the intelligible
universe are three, the one and mind and soul. So
this is the triad of Platonis, One, Mind and Soul, Mind,
will emanate outward from the One, and it has it's
automatic and it has the potential itself to know. So
you have this ineffable beyond being one, the monad, and
it emanates outwardly a lesser entity called mind.
Speaker 2: And then.
Speaker 3: By this act of contemplation, the world of forms arises.
So the mind that's that springs forth from the One.
We could think this is very similar to the story
of Athena and Zeus. Right, it doesn't Athena spring from
the head of Zeus. This, this thought form world is
the result of this first emanation. Now, so when this happens,
mind wants to be united to the One from from
whence it emanated or radiated. And so the world of forms,
the ideals that are generated by mind, is the way
that the One or the good is known by mind.
Speaker 2: So again it's.
Speaker 3: Very bizarre, but so it comes out from the one
mind quote unquote, and mind wants to know its origin,
the One, the mon Ad, and so it thinks about
the forms, and in those forms it contemplates the One.
By the way, this is some almost exactly the way
that a quant talks about knowing the essence of God
and the archetypes and the essence of God. This absolute
unity is known at the level of mind through the
multiplicity of forms. Of course, I don't know how that's
supposed to happen, But the forms then have this high
degree of unity, and mind, when it knows these objects,
it becomes like it. So mind is its own thoughts, thought,
thinking itself right Aristotle, However, that isn't the absolute level
of unity, as we saw that was the one. The
forms only represent the monad or the One at the
level of the contemplative mind. So mind or noose thus
timelessly emanates or radiates from the One as a potency
or ability to know, and thus timelessly mind actually knows
the One as the multiplicity of forms. Very bizarre, by
the way, is in no way the orthodox theology of
the trinity. For one, when you can see this replicated
in the debates that Athanasius has.
Speaker 2: With the Aryans.
Speaker 3: Because the Arians have all of these same Plutonian presubpositions,
as Origin would earlier than them, Origin borrow, borrowing all
this theology would try to say the same stuff. He
would try to say, well, I guess the son being
the second emanation is in some way a kind of
lesser being, and that's what the Church had for, you know,
a damn goodwhile have to combat this presubposition. And when
Athenasius fights with it, he says, there's no dialectical tensions
in God. There's nothing dialectically in opposition. By saying that
the Father eternally generates the Son, you can have those
two things be true, and the Father and the Son
not be in any kind of lesser greater ontological distinction. Now,
the Father, we believe, is the archae or prime principle
of the Trinity. He's the beginning and source of the Godhead,
the fountain of deity. But the fact that there's a
logical distinction St. Basil says between the Father, the Son,
and the Spirit, or an ordinal distinction in that the
Father is prima in patres.
Speaker 2: So you know, kind of.
Speaker 3: Collegiality so to speak, does not mean that there's less dignity, honor, deity,
et cetera, or glory for the Son or for the
Holy Spirit. That is at least the rallying cry for
the first several centuries battling the Arians. But I want
you to notice, and this is something that has been
pointed out by different orthodox theologians is the similarity between
the plutonium starting point and presubsition of what the one
or the monad or God quote unquote is and that
of the Arians. And by the way Eunomius, when Eunomius
has his version of Arianism that he argues with Saint
Gregor of Nissa, Saint Gregory responds by all the things
that I'm saying to him that you're hearing me say
in a response to Platinus. So what is then the
third emanation? So one in mine also contemplate their distinction.
And because it is discursive thought, and it's a thought
process that has successive thoughts rather than being intuitive, Mind's
contemplation or thought is intuitive. So this is the highest level,
and therefore to have a lower level, the springing fourth
of the third of the triad can't in any.
Speaker 2: Way be natural. It has to be or what's the
word I'm looking for.
Speaker 3: It happens discursively, that is, it happens by reasoning process.
So mind thinks about all these forms, and it thinks
about its relationship to the One, and this gives birth
to soul, and soul is then a lower level of
emanation and reality from mind So what's the triad here?
One mind and soul monad diad triad. Now, the soul
is the cause of everything in the sensible world, and
it represents the intelligible world to the sense world. So
the mediator between mind and sense is soul. And then
once you ascend from soul to mind, you have to
ascend from mind to monad to one. Although although it's
distinct from mind, the top levels of soul touch the
realm of mind, let's see. So it's the bridge, and
with mind it can rise to self, transcendence and unity
with the one. So you have to climb the ladder
of the emanations. So these three hypostases are distinct, and
they are hierarchically arranged, but they're not totally cut off.
So again faint images of the idea of the trinity here,
But the trinity has just been replaced with these different
intellectual concepts and weird ideas of thought, thinking itself and
so forth. And so the one in the mind are
always present to the soul. And because the emanations are
lower than the starting point, they have to in some
way be in movement and particular.
Speaker 2: So the life of mind itself is pure stasis. And
arrest the soul.
Speaker 3: Like the mind desires to know and be itself, so
there's a succession to its awareness to know a continuous
series of thoughts then, and so it cannot grasp truth
all at once like mind can. And the soul is
the logos of the mind. It is an expression or
direct image or representation of a higher level of reality
to a lower level. So here we have a misuse
of co opting of the idea of logos, where it
turns into a mystical magical mediator between grades of reality that,
as we said, are just are different.
Speaker 2: So this is a.
Speaker 3: What's the word I'm looking for? Is this a trinity?
It is a kind of trinity, but it's not a
trinity like we teach. In this trinity, the levels are
lesser and greater, and we don't believe that there's no
chain of being in God. So reality becomes an unfolding
process from the top down, from maximum supreme unity down
into a total differentiation in particularity multiplicity. And as we
descend down the chain of being, you come to non being.
The closer that you move towards a way, excuse me,
the further that you move away from the one the monad.
You're just like shooting yourself towards non existence and non being,
So the good the monad. You've been listening to the
first half of my talk on Plotinus and the Eneids
and deconstructing them as well as pointing out the hermetic
influence that would come to be in the West. If
you want to hear the rest of this talk, then
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