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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.
With all of the.
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.
We might use the.
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.
He's saying I.
Am the personal God that has the covenantal relationship with Israel.
Right.
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.
So it's not that it's wrong.
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.
Okay.
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?
What is this?
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.
Very weird artworks.
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.
I'm not making this up. You can look it up.
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.
And resurrection.
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.
You know, this is the entire experience of Israel as a nation.
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.
And so you'll read.
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.
The form of overt attack through dictators or kings or armies.
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.
The idols and so forth.
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.
Testament being historical.
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.
That you can go to.
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.
In the Eneiods.
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.
The Socratic dialogue.
It says, you know, out with all that stuff, let's just have a more direct, almost a sort of a philo theological treatise.
It's kind of what the Eneids are. It's not really.
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.
So if we.
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.
We might restore that soul to.
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?
Of that's possible.
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.
So let's let's use Egypt. So we go back to Egypt, and.
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.
Why Egypt.
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.
Is likely Egyptian.
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.
It's ineffable. It's not a god.
It's beyond the conception of God or any notion of God. It's not personal.
It's beyond all that.
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.
We have the multiplicity of.
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.
So ultimate reality is the one.
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.
And so forth.
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.
Gets further or something like that.
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.
It's full of life.
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.
In Aristotle talks about the celestial.
Spheres and how all the spheres move in a circle around the monad.
And so.
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.
And stasis. There's no change, no alteration, no movement.
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.
So epistasis was used.
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.
And then.
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.
So again it's.
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.
With the Aryans.
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.
So you know, kind of.
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.
Way be natural. It has to be or what's the word I'm looking for.
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.
So the life of mind itself is pure stasis. And arrest the soul.
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.
So this is a.
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 you can subscribe at Jay's Analysis for four ninety five
a month or for sixty dollars a year. Thank you for listening.