60 - Boethius and Neoplatonism

and I heartily welcome your company. Today we're going to continue this off season, at least for the public feed by doing some philosophy, as I give you a side lesson for my life, death and Meaning with Beowulf and Boethia's course that traces some major points in the development of Neoplatonic thought from the pre Socratics ancient Greece, through Plato, Aristotle, Platinus, and then its baptism into Christian thought by the likes of Saint Augustine and Boethius. And then we'll close with

a recommendation. Neoplatonism or new Platonism, which reaches height around the third fifth centuries or so, is largely an attempt of paganism to put forward a system that can stand against Christianity, but it actually ended up providing some tools that Christians like Augustine found to be effective for communicating Christian truth and recognizing that Augustine dominated medieval thought as well as reformational thought, and beyond. This makes it of

lasting significance and definitely worth our time to consider. And so now let's go ahead and jump into it. Hello and welcome, as we discussed some of the major philosophical influences on Boethius as seen in the Constellation of Philosophy. This lesson was originally made for My Life, Death and Meaning with Bewolf and Boethius course, but I'm also going

to make this one publicly available. If you'd like access to all of the material from this course, including on Boethius and Beowulf, and the side lessons which go into some element of myth or scholarship or philosophy, then you could head over to Andrew Snyder dot Patia dot com and you can likely find out link wherever you're watching this. All materials are you usually keeping once you enroll, and so you can go through it asynchronously at whatever time

man pays works for you. Now, if you've read any of the consolation at this point, you know that Boethius is pretty fast and loose with his references to classical pagan philosophy and poetry, which some find odd for a Christian theologian who has been stripped of nearly all earthly fortunes, and very well may be facing death, and history tells us that he absolutely was facing death as you would be executed. However, you have to keep in mind his position.

This is a Roman Catholic Trinitarian Christian under the heretical Aryan Ostrogothic king Theodoric, who took control of Italy after killing Odieser, who deposed the last Roman emperor, and so as a Catholic Trinitarian affirming Roman Christian, Boethius is very much an other relative to the Aryan Germanic king above him, and this difference was surely magnified when Boethius was stripped of his rank and goods through no apparent fault of

his own. And this gulf that he faced between his ultimate accuser that the king and his current position very likely caused him to appreciate vestiges of his rich pagan heritage alongside his theological convictions and intellectual framework. He was a Roman and a Christian, and both of those formed

an important part of his identity in the discarded image. C. S. Lewis says, like this quote, Catholic Christendom and that high pagan pass to which he felt so deep a loyalty, were united in his outlook by their common contrast to Theodoric and his huge, fair skinned beer drinking boasting things was there's no time for stressing whatever divided him from Virgil,

Seneca Plato in the Old Republican Heroes end quote. And so with that in mind, looking to some of the pagan traditions and philosophies that Boethius found particularly palatable will help us to get a better handle on what exactly he is doing in the consolation. In this lesson, we're going to be taking a high level look at the emergence of Neoplatonism from the pre Socratics up to its

baptism into early medieval Christian thought with the likes of Augustine. Neoplatonism, selfish to say, was an active force from about the third to six centuries or so, and of course it had significant influence beyond that time, even up to the

present day. According to Augustine, the Platonist by which he most directly meant, the group of thinkers we today would call the Neoplatonists provide the pagan school that comes closest to Christian thought, and it is actually most beneficial in helping Christians to systematically formulate what they believe about the

nature and working of the cosmos. Not so much that neoplatonism gives us new substance, but it does give us an intellectual framework for arranging the substance that we have through scripture and through at this point early Church tradition. And so Augustine and others thought that the Neoplatonists really helped them to formulate their understanding of the nature and the working of the cosmos. And Augustine, of course, was of monumental importance for setting many courses that would continue

through the Middle Ages and beyond. And Boethius, who was a couple generations after Augustine, definitely operates within this trajectory. And so I think that we're going to better see some of what's happening in the constellation if we have a better handle on this system of thought. Now. As a warning, especially if anyone is watching this who is already versed in this topic, this presentation is very much intended to be a summary of some of the major

elements at play here in the emergence of neoplatonism. This is nothing like an exhaustive study of Neoplatonism, or any of these connected ideas for some degree of scale. But I'm about to cover in about fifteen sl generally takes about three weeks at the beginning of my on campus medieval philosophy course, and it could easily make for an entire course in itself and beyond. And so with that being said, you can consider this to be a fairly

hefty introduction rather than a comprehensive study. And so note that we're not covering any of our sources exhaustibly, and we're also not including all the sources that could be brought into this. All right, with that in mind, let us go ahead and get started with the pre Socratics. Now, the history of Western philosophy typically begins with a group of philosophers in ancient Greece referred to as the pre Socratics,

because well, they came before Socrates. Now one hand, it's a little bit arbitrary to ever pick a beginning point of philosophy, because the truth is, to be human is to be a philosopher. To be human is to think about the way that the world is in our role within it, and how to move every closer to the path of wisdom. The path of achieving the goals of human nature, and so that's been happening for as long

as we've had consciousness. However, it is helpful to come up with a starting point, and going back to the Presocratics and specifically the Presocratic philosopher theies kind of makes sense because these are some of the early sources that we have that can go to through written records, where we see people intentionally asking questions through reason, like why is there a basic harmony in nature? What accounts for this?

And so they're asking these broad level philosophical questions. They're delving into the fundamental nature of reality, and we have a written pathway to at least approach understanding of what they were doing. And so this is not a bad place to begin the history of Western philosophy, which is

why it usually begins there. And so at this point with the Presocratics, we're mostly relying on fragments of writing and quotes provided by later philosophers, and so because we don't have a lot from these early thinkers directly, they usually just get luved together into this group of the

pre Socratics. Now, as I just mentioned, the first member of this group that the we usually go for the beginning of history of philosophy courses is a guy named Thales who recognized that there is harmony and order in the natural world, and so he wanted to get to the bottom of its cause. Well, he supposed that this harmony is owed to the fact that there must be some element that underlies everything. You break everything down into its most basic level, and you get one thing, and

this he theorized, was water. Now that might sound a little bit silly to us today, but it makes some sense that his stage of things, for example, plant and animal life requires water. Water is all around us, especially Phi Lippy in Greece. Water is generally moving, which accounts for change, and water can present itself in three states solid liquid, gas, and so it's not a bad early contender. Well, Thales was followed by others who proposed other elements you know,

such as earth, air, fire. But early philosophical critiques made it evident that no one physical element could account for everything because the elements supposed each other. Fire could not be water, air could not be earth, and so forth. And so Heraclitis takes the conversation in a new direction. Instead of looking to a physical element to describe all of reality. He said that everything is change or everything is changing, everything is moving, everything is in a process

of flux. Now, he did say that the cosmos is made of fire, but this was really just a poetic way of emphasizing the idea that, like fire, the elements are ever moving in and against each other, flaring up and diminishing from moment to moment. But he most famously said that you cannot step into the same river twice. As we get quoted from Plato, Heraclitis says somewhere that all things give way and nothing remains, and likening existing things to the flow of a river, he says that

you cannot step twice into the same river. And this is because you step into the river, you step into the water, you step out, you step back in, and now you're in new water. And he said, this is what all reality is like. It's ever moving, it's never the same, it's always in a state of process, it's always becoming, it is never being. Now, if this is all that he believed, then it would present some pretty

serious problems. For example, if everything is moving, then our knowledge is never accurate because the picture of the river that we have in our minds. It never corresponds to the way the river actually is in any given moment. It's always out of date. And so our minds are always separated from the state of things around us, because there is no state, there is only process. Also, this would create a crisis of identity, because it would mean

that there is no me that endures across time. On a physical level, we know that our cells are constantly being replaced, and maybe I might find recourse to an idea of the soul, but it's not even that continually undergoing change, adopting and pushing away desires, and just continually taking new forms as I undergo experience and as I direct the orientation of my soul. And so even the soul is constantly in a state of change. And so

who is the me that I suppose endoors across time. Well, if literally everything is moving, then there is no me. There's only a succession of becomings. Well, fortunately, heraclitis does give us some direction toward constancy, towards stability, somewhere where we might be able to find some rest. So, everything, or at least nearly everything, may be changing, but it

always changes in a consistent and orderly manner. The river may always be moving, but through reason I can reliably predict how and where it will move, and so change itself is constant. Now why is this well? Heraclite has found his answer in the lagos or the word, which is an idea that will become very important in the history of philosophy. And we even see some of this in the New Testament. While some biblical scholars may argue that Greek wisdom is not being referenced here, I've not

been completely convinced that it's not at play. When John begins his Gospel with NRK handhold logos in the beginning was the word, and then he proceeds to explain how the world was made through this word. For Heraclitis, the word is the one staple reality that holds together what would otherwise be the chaotic and the formless and the void. And me just think about what the word word means.

And imagine you have a bag of scrabble tiles and you pour them out, and odds are they're not going to go into the form of a word, just going to have a random cacophony of sounds represented by the letters that are formless and void of meaning. Well, the word is the form that it then imposes itself on the letters, arranging them in an orderly way, where now they contain and they express meaning. And so a word is what brings order and meaning out of what would

otherwise be chaotic and void. That's what a word does, and that is what the word does on a cosmic scale. As the apostle Paul says in Colossians, in him all things hold together because he is the word. He is the lagos. And for Heraclitis, this lagos does not only explain what we see in the natural world. Or better yet, he maintains that we are part of the natural world. Maybe that's a better way of saying that, and said, the lagos gives direction for how we live our lives.

In following the Lagos, the various competing elements of the human psyche and of human desire can find order and move in a unified direction. However, at least based on what we have, Heraclitis is only beginning to develop this logos doctrine, and so he is principally known as the philosopher of becoming or of change. On the other side of the spectrum of being becoming, we have Parmenides, the philosopher of being, who argues that movement is rationally impossible.

As he says in his poem on Nature, being is uncreated and imperishable, whole, unique, unwavering, and complete, meaning it has no potential. There's nowhere that it can go. The easiest way to understand his argument is to consider paradoxes that are provided by his student Zeno. Zeno has this. Imagine a race between the Greek hero Achilles and a tortoise. Now, obviously Achilles has the advantage, and so the tortoise gets ahead.

Start to keep the math easy, let's say the tortoise begins one hundred yards in front of the starting line where the Achilles begins. The race goes off, and then Achilles takes off. Now, before he can get to where the tortoise began at one hundred yards, he first has to cross half that distance. He has to go fifty yards. Well before he goes fifty yards, he has to go

twenty five. Well before he goes twenty five, he has to go twelve and a half, and so forth, and so forth, and so forth, and so rationally speaking, mathematically speaking, it turns out that there is an infinite amount of distance between any two points. Well, how long does it take to cross an infinite distance? Well, it takes an infinite amount of time, which is another way of saying

that movement is rationally impossible. Now, you may be tempted to say that this is absurd, because we experience an observed motion all the time. However, Parmenides believe that there's a conflict between our sense, experience and reason, and so we ought to choose reason right, because if we're not going to prioritize reason, then what business do we have

do in philosophy to begin with? With this move he really serves as an early modern, as Descartes, going to do the same thing right, He's going to isolate reason over again sense experience, and that's going to set the tone for a lot of what happens in modern and postmodern philosophy. And I would consider that modern turn, which very much is I believe in keeping with Parmenides, I

think that it leads to disastrous ends. But in any case, here we have our philosopher, a being who believes that reason leads us to a completely stable reality, the world of being. Well, in Plato, being and becoming will both find their place. Promenides and Heraclitis will be brought together. And I believe that the best introduction to Plato's thought is the one that is usually chosen for this purpose, and that is Plato's allegory the cave, which is found

in the Republic. In this section of the Republic, Soco has us imagine a cave. In this cave are prisoners who are shackled, and they've been in that position for their entire lives. All they can do is stare at the wall in front of them, and on this wall they see shadows of objects and animals and whatnot pass by. These shadows are the only reality they have ever known, the only thing they've ever perceived. Eventually, one of the prisoners is set free. And how this happens we're not told,

but it doesn't really matter for the allegory. And so he's set free. He turns around and he sees the fire that had been producing the cave's light, and he's initially pained greatly by looking at light directly for the first time, he sees these cutouts that have been passing back and forth in front of the fire to project the shadows and between the pain of his eyes and the confusion regarding what he's looking at, he's inclined to go back to watching the shadows because they seemed more

real to him. At this time. However, he is, apparently through no real design of his own, kind of almost dragged out. He's compelled out of the cave and up to the surface world, and now he's blinded by the light of the sun. But his eyes eventually adjust and he experiences the real things that were previously imaged on the cutouts, which he previously only saw through the images of the shadows, and so now he is in genuine reality,

illuminated by the genuine light of the sun. He eventually remembers the prisoners who are still in the cave, and he feels pity on them, and so he goes back to share this new revelation that he's had. Now at this point, he's a difficult time seeing in the darkness because he's used to the light, but he eventually finds his way down and he tells the prisoners of this

glorious reality that he has experienced. Well, they don't take too kindly to this, as they've developed a value system a hierarchy based on who is best at figuring out the shadow pattern and detecting what would come next. This new revelation shattered their shadow society, and so they initially thought him to be mad, and eventually they got ahold

of him, and they actually killed him. And of course, when Plato is telling us this story, he very much has in mind his teacher Socrates, who was executed by the city of Athens for practicing his philosophy. In addition to providing a general introduction of philosophy, this allegory gives us some images that are particularly helpful in understanding Plato's

system of thought. The shadow world or the shadowlands, which is a term that C. S. Lewis adopts, is the one that we all have access to by nature, kind of like by default. That's probably even a better word than saying by nature. That's more of a loaded term. And so by default, as material beings in a material world, we all have access to this shadowland, and this is the corruptible world of partial truths or of obscure truths.

Perhaps we can expect to see obscure particular images of justice, but we will never see the ideal pure justice in any particular historical instantiation. So too with love, and with the ideal of humanity, with loyalty, or even the ideal of a horse or whatever else. All of these ideas, the full actualizations of what things are, imperfectly in potential, reside above the material world, in what Plato would call

the world of the forms. And so by default we live in the shadowy world of becoming, but we can aspire to the illuminated world of being. After all, if you are to have a shadow, there must be a solid object in order to cast the shadow. Well, the solid objects that cast the shadows are the forms, such as the form of justice and whatnot. These are things that we can know through our minds, but it actually

takes more than that. To no justice, for example, is not just to be able to provide a definition, although such propositional knowledge is important, But to really no justice is to be just, to love justice and to instantiate justice in your life. Remember that philosophy in its truest sense is the love of wisdom, not just the knowledge of wisdom, but the love of wisdom. And so the forms of the highest level of reality that we can consciously we know, and as we better know such reality,

we gain stability in this world of change. Even when we experience in justice, we ourselves can still be rooted in the unending, eternal reality of justice itself. Well, remember that I said that the world of forms is an illuminated reality. Well, if it is illuminated, then it must be illuminated by something. And this something in the allegory is the Sun, which for Plato is the form of the good, or we would not even be far off to call this God, as Plato seems to do in

the timaeis Now. Admittedly, this is a place of some contention within Platonic scholarship, but for our purposes I don't believe that this complation is unfounded. And so God is the light that illuminates the world of the forms, which is the solid substance that cast shadows in the world of becoming. And just as you do not stare at the sun directly to understand its light, but you must instead look to what it illumines, you must look to the effects in order to understand the cause, so too

we own only understand God by understanding the forms. You look at the sun directly and you go blind. And this makes sense if we say that reason is good, then we mean that goodness is a higher reality than reason. Reason participates in the goodness that makes all good things good. And so what this means is that we can never, really never fully apprehend God directly by reason, because the good,

the good that makes reason good, stands above reason. And so we see this idea in the Medievals as well, that as we approach the heights that reason can assail, we have to engage at that point in a kind of mysticism that doesn't work against reason. Right, we're still making use of reason. We're not saying anything goes, but there is a kind of mysticism that we need to use to close the gap between reason and God. This gap must be traversed in love and in faith, in

a realm that goes beyond what reason can assail. And we see this idea in Scripture as well, as we're told that God's presence is engulfed in unassailable light or impenetrable darkness, which are two ways of saying the same thing. This is not a place in which we can see by ordinary means. So for Plato we have got at the top. Then we have forms in the knowable world of being, and then the shadows or particulars are in

the world of becoming. And let's flush us out a little bit more with his dialogue that gives us his creation account. That is, the tomaeis the Tomayos is a fascinating, albeit fairly difficult, platonic dialogue that became very influential in the history of pre modern thought. At a side note, this is also where we learn about Atlantis, and so that may be a hook for some of you to pick it up. But for now we're going to talk cosmology,

and so let's take a look at this. I'm going to read this fairly long passage and then we'll talk about it a little bit. In my opinion, we must certainly make this distinction. First, what is that which is always and has no becoming? And what is that which is becoming but never is? And so again we're dealing

with being and becoming. Now the former being, ever, the same is comprehended by the activity of news along with an account, the latter, by opinion, along with sense perception to void of an account, it comes into being and passes away and never actually is. Again, all that comes into being must come into being from some cause, for

it is impossible for anything to be generated without any cause. Now, whenever a craftsman looks always to the unchanging, referring to something like this as his model, he will produce its form and character, and all that he fashions in this way will necessarily be beautiful. But if he looks to something that has come to be and uses a generated model, the product will not be beautiful. And so in this passage Plato says that we initially have three things. We have

the craftsman, who we can shorthand ask God. He's going to refer to as the God. And so we have God. We have the forms, and we have undifferentiated becoming. We could even borrow the language of Genesis one two and call this last piece the formless and the void. In fact, calling it a formless is very much in tune with Plato, because you removed form, and all you have is the chaotic. You have the formless and the void, something very much

like nothingness. Well, the material world as we know it is the formless void, which has become something ordered and substantial, which for Plato is the same thing as saying that it has come to be. It has been made into something real, something knowable. Well, something is not made to be without something that makes it to be. In other words, a crafted work requires a craftsman who himself must not come to be. He cannot be part of the world

of change, and therefore he must be entirely stable. He must be eternal rather than temporal, and he must be the cause of all ordered temporal reality. Now, the design that the craftsmen used to order the otherwise formless and chaotic world of becoming is found in the eternal, unmoving world of the forms which are apprehended by noose or mind.

He goes on to say that it is surely obvious to everyone that the model was everlasting, since the universe is the most beautiful of created things, and the craftsmen is the most excellent of causes. So having come into being in this way, it has been made to resemble that which is comprehended by reason and intelligence, and remains

the same. And so, in other words, this intellectual blueprint that the craftsmen that God used in order to order the otherwise formless and void cost moose, is itself eternal, It is unmoving, It is in the world, It is in the realm of being, and don't worry. In just a moment, a couple of slides, I'm going to give you a visual aid for mapping this out. But first let's look at one more passage in the Timaeus, and I'm going to go ahead and read this, and then

again we'll talk about it. Well, let us state the reason why becoming and the universe were constructed by the artificer. He was good, and in the good, no envy ever arises about anything, and being devoid of envy, he desired that all things be as much like himself as possible. We would then be absolutely right to accept from men of understanding that this is the supreme source of becoming and of the cosmos. For the God desired that all be good, and as far as possible, nothing be imperfect.

He therefore toook everything that was visible, which was not at rest but moving discordantly and randomly, and he led it from disorder to order, regarding orders entirely superior to disorder. But it was not then, nor is it now lawful, for the supreme good to enact anything except the supremely beautiful.

So on reflection, he discovered that from whatever is visible by nature nothing that is made without noos is on the whole ever better than something which possesses nous, and furthermore, that news cannot be present in anything in the absence of soul. Based on this reflection, having placed noos in soul, in soul in body, he constructed the universe so that, once completed, it would naturally be as beautiful and excellent

a piece of work as was possible. Accordingly, based upon the likely account, we must state that this cosmos is a living creature with soul and news that has, in truth come into being through the providence of God. So we see at the beginning of this passage that God is good, and that he constructed the world to imitate his own goodness to the extent that contingent and moving things can approximate independent and eternal goodness. Now, in order for there to be rational order, there has to be

nous or mind. But minds do not exist by themselves, but are placed within souls, and so the eternal and unmoving realities are God and the forms. They both operate in this realm of being. But in order for the forms to be instantiated in the moving cosmos, they must

be apprehended by nous by mind. But in order for a nows to be instantiated, it must be placed in a soul, and so, according to Plato, the cosmos itself has a soul, a world soul that also contains news, which is directed towards the forms, which are something like the wisdom of God. A little bit later on in the history of thought this can turn into the mind of God, but for now the exact relationship between the forms and God is not clearly worked out. It's kind

of ambiguous in Plato. But as with the cosmos, each individual operates the kind of microcosm. As we have material bodies that are embedded in the changing material world, which is by nature given order to corruption and formlessness. But we also have souls which are capable of movement, and we have minds, which, rightly oriented by soul, can aim upward toward higher, unmoving reality. And ultimately, in doing so, we're moving in the direction of the God that we

cannot apprehend by mind. And so we use mind to move toward God, recognizing that God himself exists beyond the reaches of news, beyond the reaches of mind. I know what I'm saying, Mind singularly, because for Plato, it's not just that we have minds analogous to the divine mind. Our minds are actually kind of sharing. In the divine mind, there is news, not so much newses. And so in using mind appropriately, we're not just reaching toward God. We

are very much relying on God. We're following the divine light that comes directly from God, the divine light that we see when we are reasoning appropriately, that the goodness of God pervades all existent realities. And so in the upward path, you turn inward. You don't turn outward toward material things perceived by the senses. We turn inward toward the soul. You turn inward toward the mind. And as you turn inward, you are also moving upward. You're going

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order of priority, moving from substance to nothingness. We have God who uses the forms, which are something like the wisdom or mind of God, although again Plato himself is a little bit hazy about this exact connection, but in any case, God uses the eternal forms as blueprints for ordering of the material world, which is by nature formless and void. But the forms need to be apprehended by News, which needs to be placed within the soul, which mediates

between the news and the body. And on the other side of the ordered body or matter, we have nothingness, which can also be understood as evil because it is a movement away from the goodness of God. It's movement away from the good order that God imposes on the otherwise chaotic, and we on the path of wisdom, will use the agency of our souls to prioritize the life of the mind, which reaches to the forms and ultimately

in the direction of God. Alternatively, we also have the option of prioritizing material things and living as beasts, seeking nothing more than the fulfillment of carnal desires, and in so doing we become deformed. We move in the direction of nothingness, we become as ghosts or shades. It's also worth noting that in this dialogue Plato indicates that the planets or wanderers, which is what that word means, are associated with the gods, and they move in ordered, interlocking

spherical motion. In fact, I should say that the Tomayis seems to indicate that these heavenly gods are actually the true gods, as Plato demotes the Greek pantheon to the rank of damons, a secondary class of divine helpers, and so Plato himself is basically monotheistic. In fact, I would

say he is monotheistic. Now, these spherical movements of the planets are derivative of the spherical movement of the entire cosmos, because perfectly consistent spherical movement is as close as moving reality can get to imitating the perfect stability of God. In this understanding of the heavens is the beginning, or at least a significant leap in near the beginning, of an important cosmological development that will reach its height in the Middle Ages. And now we are going to jump

over to Aristotle, Plato's student. Aristotle deviates from his teacher in some rather important ways, but he also maintains some important points of continuity in his metaphysics. Aristotle gives us his famous cosmological argument for the existence of a prime mover or an uncaused cause. This is an important argument in the history of philosophy and was readily adopted by the likes of Thomas Aquinas as proof for the existence

of God. In this argument, Aristotle makes an argument regarding motion. To summarize, anything that begins to move is moved by something else. Follow the sequence of dominoes back far enough, and eventually you have to arrive at a starting place, or else you have an infinite regress. And without a real beginning, motion would be impossible. So the argument goes, well, motion is possible. Obviously things move, and so there must be a real beginning. There must be something that sets

the dominoes in motion. There must be something that moves but is not itself moved. This something is the prime mover, which Aristotle also refers to as God. This God is eternal and fully actualized, meaning it has no potential. There's nothing that it can do, because it's already the best it could possibly be. It is eternal and unchanging goodness, eternally contemplating its own goodness, because well, what else is

there for fully actualized goodness to do? If God is fully good, Aristotle proposes, then God will be eternally focused on that which is most good, which is himself. And so this God does not intentionally do anything to set the cosmos in motion. It instead moves the cosmos as a beloved does its lover by producing desire. This begins with the outermost edge of the cosmos, fe of the

primum mobile or the first movable sphere. This outermost level of the cosmos moves in a perfect spherical dance and imitation of its beloved, the perfectly stable, unmoving God, who is fully actualized goodness. This great cosmic dance then moves through the firmament or the stellatom, the realm of the fixed stars, then to the planetary spheres of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, the Moon, and finally the Earth, which is stable, almost as a kind of mockery of

the stability of God. And we see this idea really play out in Dante, where you go to the center of the Earth and that's where you find Hell. Go to the center of Hell and you find that it is frozen over. And so Satan is perfectly stable, just as God is perfectly stable. But for very different reason. And so the closer you get to absolute evil, and

notice I said, the closest you get. And so in this kind of model we're working with, there is no such thing really as absolute evil, because so the evil would be nothingness. And so even Satan is at least as close to nothingness as you can get. And so as he is on this other side of being, the other side of the spectrum from God, who fully is, Satan also is stable, but very different reality. He is frozen over. Satan is stable because he lacks actuality, whereas

God is stable because he lacks potential. And so is a kind of inversion, a kind of mockery of the good. So too, Earth, which is the furthest away from the reality of the prime mover is, it is stable for somewhat similar reasons. And so the heavens move in perfect order. But then once you get below the moon, once you get to Earth, we are now at the furthest point away from the initiation of the great dance. We've lost the same sense of desire that we see in the heavens.

And so the perfectly ordered movement starts to move into chaos, that starts to move into corruption. Once we get down

to earth, this is where things are the most chaotic. Well, now let's jump ahead to Platinus, who is likely the most important foundational figure for the Platonic tradition that would become known as Neoplatonism, which will be essentially Platonic, but with borrowed elements from Aristotle, the Stoics, and others, as well as some innovations, aim to counteract the emerging critiques

of Christianity. Of course, the irony is that, at least according to Augustine and those who would sympathize with him, that the Neoplatonists attempted to respond to Christianity, but in so doing they actually have created some useful tools for communicating Christian truth. In any case, let's take a look

at a couple of quotes from Platinus concerning good and evil. So, for the good, he says that the good is that on which all else depends, toward which all existences aspire as to their source and their need, while itself is without need, sufficient to itself, aspiring to no other, the measure and term of all, giving out from itself the intellec actual principle and existence and soul in life and

all intellective act, and then of evil. If the solution is that the one act of knowing covers contraries, and that as evil is the contrary to good, the one act would grasp good and evil together, then to no evil there must be first a clear perception and understanding of good. Since the nobler existences precede the baser in our ideal forms, while the less good hold no such standing, are near to non being. Okay, so I know that for many of you you probably didn't follow that, and

that's honestly to be expected at this point. But Platinus affirms with Plato that the good is the ultimate and independent reality on which everything else depends. Because this ultimate good is the one place of absolute order, of absolute unity, Platinus and the new Platonists will often refer to him to this Good or this God as the one. This is the place of absolute order, where there is no differentiation,

there's no distinction. As with Aristotle's primever, this God is eternally focused on its own goodness, and so it's not intentionally related to any external realities beyond itself. However, as it eternally turns in on itself, it also eternally emanates out contingent reality. Think of this like ripples in a pond, or perhaps as a tiered fountain in which water gushes up from the top tier and then trickles down to

the other tiers. Or maybe better yet, think of the one as the Sun, which cast out as rays, not because it chooses to, but because that is its nature, is simply what it does. And objects closer to the Sun will receive its light and its heat more fully, but the slightness heat will diminish the further away you move.

And so emanations closest to the one closest to God are good in proportion to said nearness, and more distant emanations are less good, until finally we drop off from existence altogether, just as the rays of the Sun eventually dwindle into nothingness. This nothingness, or rather this presence of lack, if we want to put it that way, is what evil is. It is lack. It is a privation of being.

It is a movement into formlessness. Now, these quotes here are fairly abstract, and you can spend some time bowling over them if you so desire, But I don't want to get overly bogged down in Platinus at the moment. If this were a course in ancient or early medieval philosophy,

we would spend some more time here. But for our current purposes it is sufficient to say that the Good or a God or the One is the only fully actualized reality, and that we are good in as much as we approximate this ultimate reality, and that we are evil, and as much as we turn from this God toward lesser things, because turning to lesser things, such as through our carnal desires for material goods, orients us in the direction of the formless and the void, which is evil.

Now Here we have our cosmological model that looks similar to the diagram that I gave you for Plato. At the top we have the One or God. The first emanation from God is platos Nus. Although at this point we have some clarification regarding the location of the forms, they exist within the News, which is now explicitly identified as the mind of God, and so the forms the ordering principles for creation. This intellectual blueprint is found within

the mind of God. Now note that this mind is an emanation, yet it is very closely associated with God himself, and so this almost sounds Aryan, which saw the Lagoss as the best of God's creation and of similar substance to God, that Greek word being homoeusius, but not exactly God,

of similar substance but not exactly the same. Oh and by the way, in this presentation I did not include Philo of Alexandria, who is a Jewish Platonist in the first centuries b c. And AD, and he belonged to a period of Platonic thought that we now call Middle Platonism, which stands between Platonism proper and Neoplatonism. Well, Filo referred to the mind of God as the Logoss, which he

also refers to as God's Son, And isn't that interesting? Well, in any case, we have God, and then we have the mind of God, which is the first emanation and sometimes difficult to fully differentiate from God, but is nonetheless different. The next emanation is soul, in keeping with Plato, and then the material world, and then nothingness on the other

side of things. Now, by default we are born into the material world, the world of shadows, but we are capable of transcending to soul and the mind in the direction of God. Now in order to go further up in this cosmic hierarchy, you must go within again, not because you are anything special in yourself, but because the immaterial aspects of human existence, namely the soul and the mind, participate in the world soul and the divine mind, and

ultimately in God himself or itself. In each soul we have access to the utmost foundation of reality, because everything that exists is an overflow of God. And so in each one of us we can find the divine light of God that illuminates all reality for those who have the eyes to see. And so when we contemplate inwardly in this fashion, we are not really seeing ourselves at all, but we are seeing the light of God, which draws

us further up and further in. If you'll remember those words from C. S. Lewis's The Last Battle, well you may now have a better image as to what he is talking about, that reality goes further up and further in. And of course Lewis did not hide his appreciation for the Platonic tradition. The further up we go, the further in we go, and the further in we go, the further up we go. This is how you have worlds nested within worlds, and at his root we ultimately find

the world of God. Now let's take a look at Augustine, who is likely the most important figure in baptizing the Neoplatonic model, as he took what he saw as God's truth held unjustly by the Neoplatonists and brought it back into its proper context, while leaving out what he saw as irredeemable error. Now, Augustine, like Lewis, also did not hide his appreciation for the Platonists, as he says in

the City of God. If then Plato defined the wise man as the one who imitates, knows, loves this God, and who is rendered blessed through fellowship with him in his own blessedness, why discuss with the other philosophers. It is evident that none come nearer to us than the Platonists.

So pretty clear claim there. And we see this thought carried out further in this passage of the Confessions, as Augustine says, what I found in reading the Platonists, not precisely in these words, but saying the same thing in varied in very convincing ways, was this At the origin was the word, and the word was in God's presence, and the Word was God. This was at the origin with God, and all things were made through it, and nothing was made without it. In it life was made,

and a life was men's light. And the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness cannot control it. Further that the human soul, however it may bear testimony to the light, is not itself the light. God's Word is the true light that gives light to every man who arrives in this world. Further that he was in this world, and the world was made by him, and the world did not recognize him. But this I did not read. There he came among his own, and his own did

not accept him. But to all who accepted him, who believed in his title, he gave the right to become God's sons. And so, as far as a system of philosophy goes as a structure for understanding what reality is, he believes that the Platonists do a remarkable job of providing a structure that is well suited for articulating Christian truths. However, what he does not find in the Platonists is a real redemption. He does not see the Gospel in the Platonists.

He sees a God who supplies the cosmos and man with existence, but not much else regarding redemption, regarding participation in wisdom, there's no personal connection here. The platonic God never looks on man with grace, never has any initiative

toward man. There's no rescue mission, and in fact, a rescue mission such as we have in Christ would be unthinkable because it would be philosophical sacrilege to suggest that the immaterial, eternal, immutable God would take on a material body, for matter was seen as intrinsically evil, approaching nothingness on the grand hierarchy. And so a Platonist regarding John's Gospel would likely be on board with John's teaching on creation that God made all things through his logoss until they

get to the logos becoming flesh. And so to be very clear about this, because sometimes some charges are brought against Augustine that he was overly Platonic. Augustine is not a wholehearted Platonist. He believes that the Platonists are of great value, but that even the best that Paganism has to offer lacks the Gospel. Augustine is first and foremost a Christian and that is how he approaches the Platonic tradition.

And I should also specify that when Augustine refers to the Platonist he is more likely or at least more often and more directly referring to the group that we now call Neoplatonists, he referring to the Platonic tradition in general. Now, in this same section of the Confessions, Augustine mentioned some of what the Platonists did for him. He says that the books of the Platonists did provoke in me and returned into myself, you guiding me, I entered my own recesses,

though you helping me made that possible. Entered there I could see, so far as I could see anything with my poor soul's vision, something beyond my soul's vision and beyond my mind, in always unfailing light, not the light common to all our physical vision, nor simply like that, but on a grand scale, as if it had just got brighter and brighter till nothing else could be seen. Nothing of that sort was it, No of some other,

some far different sort. It was not a thing layered above my mind, as oil floats above water, or heaven above earth, but something higher than I am, because it made me who am lower, because made by it. To know truth is to know this light, and to know this light is to know eternity. It is the light Love knows. And so there we have it. Augustine looked

within and he saw the light of God. And this is very common Augustinian language, which definitely mirrors the Neoplatonic image of seeing the light of God within your soul. If you read the Confessions, you'll find that Augustine regularly talks about how he foolishly sought God or satisfaction beyond himself in the things that are seen, rather than within. This is the kind of thing that can be very easily misunderstood due to the influence of pantheistic New Ageism

and whatnot today. But when Augustine talks about searching within, he is looking for God's divine light, the true light that enlightens all rational souls, as the Apostle John tells us. And he's not looking for himself as God or anything like that. And so this light which is above him, this light that created him, allows him to see reality within the right context. To know truth is to know this light, and to know this light is to know eternity.

It is the light love knows, and this concept and this kind of light imagery leads us right up to Boethius, so sinks the mind in deep despair, and sight grows dim. When the storms of life inflate the weight of earthly care, the mind forgets its inward light and turns in trust to the dark without again. When Boethius talks about the inward light, he means the same thing as Augustine, who himself is using a modified version of the neoplatonic structure

of reality. When we set our gaze on material things, we are looking to external things, things that are not by nature part of us, and are nearly nothing. As Boethia says in the Constellation, you can never make what is by nature external to you and internal good. That's not the way that it works. We need to look toward that which we are, and in looking toward that

which we are, we find the God who is. Why would you put your hope in the volatile world of becoming that teeters on the edge of the formless and the void when you have recourse within to access the stable light of divinity that illuminates the rightly ordered and

rational soul. This obsession, and I don't mean that negatively, this obsession with light, would permeate these so called dark ages, as the great Medievals saw all of reality, which is necessarily upheld by God, as bursting forth the light associated with God's presence. And this is such an ennobling, encouraging, and beautiful way of looking at the world. It does not matter how fortune spends her wheel, It does not matter how changing circumstance may appear at any given moment.

The changing world will do what it always does, it will change. And so if you set your gaze in this direction, you will become lost in the maelstrom as you approach nothingness. If, however, you cling to the light of God that is present in all of existent reality, as seen through the light of Reason that is embedded in your soul, that you will find stability in the

God who is. As you strive to think in accordance with the mind of God and to love in accordance with the goodness of God, you move within the great and cosmic dance that moves in response to the goodness

of God. And now I will conclude today with the words of the apostle Paul as he speaks to the Athenian philosophers of Mars Hill, the God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since He himself gives to all mankind life and breath in everything, and he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth,

having determined allotted periods in the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet He is not actually far from each of us, for in him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own poets have said, for we are indeed His offspring. With this we see that even Paul himself engages in such baptism of pagan wisdom, as the Greek poet says, in him we live and move and have our being

until next time, God's being. I hope that you enjoyed that, as I know that I enjoyed putting it together. It's also available on YouTube, by the way, and I'll provide that link in the show notes. It's been a little while since I made fresh content about philosophy proper, but I'd like to get back to my roots in that regard, and so we'll see what happens once I finished the current Patron exclusive series on the poetic dam maybe we'll go through some Plato or maybe Augustine, but I haven't

quite decided yet. But for now, I would like to recommend to you tolstoy short story, The Death of the yvon Iliach. It's possible that I've already recommended it at some point, but it's worth the double recommendation if so. This short story is a haunting tale of a man's confrontation with his mortality, and by extension, every man's confrontation

with mortality, as we're all mortals doomed to die. Yet despite this somber tone that tends to typify Russian literature, there is great hope and there's some important sign posts pointing us toward what it means to live and to die well. And I intend to do a video on evon Iliott soon and you can subscribe to my YouTube channel to make sure that you don't miss it. And now, before we go, I want to thank all of my

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officially on a Patreon exclusive season right now. I would love to get to a point where I can simultaneously run a public and Patron season, but I'm just not there quite yet. But that's it for now and until next time, godspeed. You may have noticed that there were no annoying auto populated ads the beginning or throwing into the middle of the show, and that's thanks to our current sponsor, middle Born Arms. I previously relied on those autopopulated ads, but to be honest, I know that they're

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