readoldthings

The Gorsedd Prayer is one of Iolo's most famous and enduring contributions, and forms a major part of the piety of many modern Druid organizations and individual Druids. In Barddas he gives several different forms, but that which is best known and used most often reads as follows:


Grand, Oh God, that we may unfold into light the knowledge contained in this prayer, for herein is the entirety of the Druid theology condensed.

Let's look at the beginning of the prayer, and what I think of as its first division:


We begin with an invocation of God.

Now, it is the nature of Druidry that no doctrine is given as an imperative, so that even a holy invocation may be modified according to the understanding of the individual Druid. Some pray, rather, "Grant, Oh Gods," or, "Holy Ones," "Goddess," or "Great Spirit." We will return to this point at the end. For now, let us consider the prayer as given: We begin by invoking God, with no specific denomination given. And so this is an invocation of God-as-such, or "Divinity Itself." This is identical with the First Principle, also called the Good or the One.

Now, the First Principle, being the Good Itself, wills by its very existence the good of all things; and being One, causes the unity of all things. To become unitedly that which we are is to become good, and this occurs only ever by participation in the First Principle.

Following the invocation of God, we first ask for three blessings: Protection, Strength, and Understanding. Each unfolds from the prior: From God, Protection; form Protection, Strength, from Strength, Understanding. We must therefore understand these three individually and as arising from each other.

"Protection" always means "to be preserved from harm." What is harm? Any deviation from the good-- and to be good, remember, is to be united, which is to say, is precisely to be. We first, then, ask for the preservation of our being and-- what is the same thing-- its union to God.

Being-Life-Intellect: We know these well as the three terms of the Intelligible Triad. Being is the first term, and the second, which unfolds from it, is power or life. Everything which is has a vitality to it: that which does not act at all is Dead and is very Death, which is Annwn and Cythraul. We therefore ask that, having been united to our true being, our true vitality may unfold. The third term of the triad is Intellect, which is the same as Understanding: This is true awareness, the capacity to, as it were, "turn around;" to look back upon our origin.

These terms, Being, Life, and Intellect-- or Being-Life-Intellect-- define the Divine Intellect, and they define every participant in the divine intellect. In Christian terms, they can be understood as the Father, the Holy Ghost, and the Son. In the thought of Proclus, they are the first Gods which proceed immediately from the One, and which unfold many succeeding triads which recapitulate the same basic scheme, until we arrive at those we know: Saturn holding the place of Being; Rhea, the place of Life; Jupiter, the Intellect. I have written elsewhere that in the terms of the Celtic theology we may understand the First as Hu the Mighty, the Second as Ced the Earth Mother, and the Third as Hesus, Chief of Tree Spirits, all of which unfold from and are supernally united to the OIW, the First Principle.

And so as we pray to God for Protection, Strength, and Understanding, we may be understood to say, "Grant that I may have my being perfected and united in thee."

At this point we are invoking the highest level of Being, the extremity of Gwynvydd at the unknowable boundary of Ceugant. As the prayer proceeds, we descend into the fullness of Gwynvydd, and then to Abred and Annwn, before returning again to our source, as we shall see.

The Moral Argument for Reincarnation

The Christian moral argument for the existence of reincarnation is very straightforward. It is as follows:

1. At least some babies will die before baptism. This has always been the case, and would even be every maternity ward had priests standing in every delivery room to baptize every baby upon emergence from the womb, because between 10 and 25% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage.

2. An infant in the womb, or in the first two or three (some say seven) years of life, is incapable of sin.

3. Therefore, there will always be some babies who die in a state of total innocence.

The next part of the argument:

1. Accoreding to the Christian account sinless baby, upon death, may go either to Heaven or to Hell. (There are two other options within Roman Catholicism, which we will come to in due time.)

2. If to Hell, God is a monstrosity, for he has deliberately formed certain lives for no purpose other than to torment them for all time. Such a being is not a "God" but a monstrous demon, and we should pray for its defeat and ultimate repentance.

3. If to Heaven, and if Hell is a possibility for human beings once they become capable of sin, then universal human infanticide becomes a moral imperative. The reason is that eternal Hell is the worst imaginable evil, while Heaven is the greatest possible good. Earthly life is a mixture of good and evil in which evil typically predominates. By universal abortion, we may spare all human beings both of the comparatively moderate evils of Earthly life and the possibility of the greatest possible evil in Hell, while guaranteeing the greatest possible good to all in Heaven.

4. If God has created a situation in which universal infanticide is a moral imperative, then God is not and cannot be good. Such a God is no "God" but a monstrous demon, and we should pray for its defeat and ultimate repentance.

The final part of the argument:

1. The most just solution to the foregoing is simply that infants who die in the womb or in the early years of life are given another chance.

2. God always does what is most just.

3. Therefore, reincarnation exists.

Possible Variations:

1. An unbaptized infant goes not to Hell, but to the Limbus Infantium, a place of maximum natural happiness but deprived of the supernatural happiness which is caused by the beatific vision, which is to say, the vision of God. If this is not as cruel as a Hell of conscious torment, it is still needlessly cruel, as God has necessarily created some human souls which could experience the beatific vision but deprived them of it through no fault of their own. On the other hand, as maximum natural good (Limbo) is still preferable to maximum supernatural evil (Hell), we would still be justified in arguing for universal infanticide. Therefore, this is false.

2. An unbaptized baby goes to Heaven, but only after a sojourn in Purgatory. This is not taught in the tradition as far as I know. This runs into two problems. First, the nature of Purgatory is a mixture of good and evil-- according to the tradition one suffers, but is comforted by the presence of the saints, including the Queen of Heaven herself, and one's own guardian angel, and one's suffering can also be alleviated by the prayers of those on Earth. We may therefore say that, like Earthly life, Purgatory is a mix of good and evil, but that there the good predominates, owing to the direct experience of the saints and angels and the guarantee of Heaven at the end of the line. This therefore also argues for universal infanticide, and is therefore false.

3. Quem di dilligunt, adulescens moritur. This means "Whom the gods love, die young." This is the view that infants who die before baptism are conveyed directly to Heaven, but that the rest of us will also, universally, reach Heaven after a certain period of time which may well include a sojourn in Hell. On this perspective, the loss of a child, while a catastrophe from the perspective of the parent, is a blessing, indeed, a special grace, from the perspective of the child. Unlike the rest of us, who will have to wait an uncertain length of time before achieving Paradise, our lost children have been granted the grace of direct admission into the Kingdom of Heaven, without an earthly sojourn or the risk of temporary Hell. This only works if universal salvation is true, and could still be considered an argument for infanticide. Nevertheless, it is the best alternative.

What Which Cannot Be True

Some Christian saints have taught that "Even martyrdom is not enough to wash away the stain of heresy." That is to say, even if one loves Christ enough to die for Him, one will still be tormented in Hell for all of time if one happens to have gotten some of the details of his biography wrong. In many cases, the options on offer are equally plausible, and sometimes require specialized knowledge of ancient and medieval philosophy to even tell apart. Does homoiousios make more sense to you then homoousios? How about qui ex Patri filioque procedit? Into the fire with you! This bit of nonsense, unfortunately still preached by many, is contradicted by the following argument:


Therefore, one who accepts martyrdom out of love has fulfilled the first and great commandment. (He said nothing at all about prefering homoousia to homoiousia.)

In Barddas we read:


Now, "Hen Ddihenydd" means "ancient and unoriginated one"; apparently it is the Welsh translation of "Ancient of Days." "Iau" means "Younger," in that the Son is younger than and generated from the Father-- but it also means "Jupiter" and is, I believe, the modern Welsh name for Thursday (Dies Iovis, Jupiter's Day). Notice, too, that the word IAU is a cognate of IAO, which is an ancient Gnostic name for the Supreme Deity. The suggestion is that the God whom we can see and name as Supreme Being, IAO, Iuppiter or Jesus Christ, is himself an image of the Hidden One, the First Father. This idea is also found in the Oracles, where we read:


The titles given to Christ mean: Dovydd, the Tamer; Perydd, the Cause; Ner, the Mighty or Energy; Naf, the Shaper or Creator. And elsewhere in Barddas we encounter other Names of God, including a poem which reads:
Each of these represents one facet of the Second Mind, the Divine Intellect, who is God as He appears to human minds. As we have discussed before, since God is superessential, the names are inexhaustible, both in their particular meanings and in their variety. The particular Names are given to humanity through inspiration, as we read in Dionysius:


This is from the Areopagite's treatise on the Divine Names, which then proceeds to analyze many of the Names of God.

*(Yes, I did that on purpose, feel free to share if you get the joke.)

Continuing the discussion of God in the Barddas, we read the following, in a section entitled the Bard's Enigma:


This is then given in several different forms. The point in every case is that God is ultimately utterly unknowable. This is why the sphere of God is called Ceugant, the "empty sphere."

John Scotus Eriugena-- the name means "John the Scot, the Irishman," distinctions among the various species of Gael having been apparently less important at the time than now-- was a philosopher of the Ninth Century. Another way of saying it is that he was the philosopher of the Ninth Century. He seems to have been among the best-educated men in Western Europe and one of the few who could read Greek and thus access many of the Church Fathers in their original language.

Compare Morgwanwg's Bardic Enigma with these passages from Eriugena's homily on the prologue to the Gospel of John:


Later, comparing John with Peter, he tells us:


For Eriugena, then, "that which is not" is the whole realm of boundless possibility uncomprehended by human or even angelic minds, and it is beyond this that God himself abides. The way of contemplation signified by John is the way of immediate knowing. The word "contemplation" in modern language refers to thinking, and "meditation" to the emptying of the mind. This is one of these oddities that come up every now and then in the history of language, like the transformation of the French word blanc, meaning white, into the English black, meaning black. In former times "meditation" meant thought, while "contemplation," especially in a spiritual context, meant the immediate presence and knowing-ness that is beyond thought.

Eriugena's great source was Dionysius the Areopagite, that mysterious figure of the Sixth Century who wove together Procline Neoplatonism with Christian imagery. Dionysius's Mystical Theology begins with the following oration to Divine Darkness:

In the New Testament, Dionysius is the companion of St. Paul. His letters to Timothy were lost in ancient times, but coincidentally rediscovered two years after Justinian's banning of the teaching of pagan philosophy. They then formed a major part of the foundation of Christian theology, east and west, for a thousand years. After this time, someone got around to noticing that Dionysius's writings sounded a lot like the writings of Proclus, the last great pagan Neoplatonist. Here is a sample of Proclus's discussion of the First Cause in his Platonic Theology:




This, then, is the tradition in which Morganwg is ultiamtely working. It can be seen at once as pagan and Christian, Celtic or Druidic and Platonic. But these are only labels. The enigma remains, the task remains: to abandon multiform knowledge; to leave behind both sensible perceptions and intellectual efforts; to recline, as it were, against the very heart of the Christ who is the summit of all Intelligibles and, soaring as an eagle beyond all that is and all that is not; to encounter there the Great Mystery hidden in a stillness ineffable beyond all silence, a gloom darker than all darkness.

The Use of an Enemy

Some writers make a habit, others a whole career, of writing about things they disagree with. This sort of thing constitutes most "political writing" in the present time, which upon closer examination turns out to be largely the verbal equivalent of pointing and shrieking. That said, it can sometimes be useful to look at what you aren't, as a means of clarifying what it is that you are. And it is for that reason that I'm going to talk about the Roman Catholic Church.

Of course, anyone familiar with traditional Roman Catholic theology that the differences between my views and those of the Magisterium are considerable on a considerable number of matters. But today I just want to talk about two, and how these two stem from one common origin.

Two Stories

I have to drive a lot these days. This has its obvious down sides, but the upside is that I get to spend a great deal of time listening to talks and audiobooks. Occasionally I run out of things to listen to, or my phone dies, or I forget what I had planned, and I turn on the AM radio. In my area we have two Catholic stations, Relevant Radio and the Guadalupe Radio Network. Their perspectives are slightly different. Relevant Radio seems to cater to the sort of audience that thinks Catholic Answers is high theology. Guadalupe is more intersting; a priest on one of its shows made the only on-air reference to Plotinus that I've ever heard on any radio station-- and it's worth noting that he was citing Plotinus favorably and as an authority, in order to explain something about the nature of God. The same priest then, paradoxically but perfectly in keeping with Church tradition, went on to describe the "great disaster" of the "re-awakening of the old Celtic and Germanic Gods." That said, any God is better than no God, and so I'm grateful for these stations and the discussions they field. Frequently there are call-in shows, where a listener calls the station with a problem which the show host, often but not always a priest, tries to solve for them. And it's here that I'm reminded of exactly why I'm not and never again will be a member of the Roman Catholic Church.

Story 1. Yesterday, on one of the shows, a man called in to ask why he sometimes gets a strange sense about certain people, that they seem to have an evil "vibe" or aura about them. The host answered that many people have that feeling sometimes. He then went on to say that sometimes it's God intervening with a message directed at us that we should avoid a person or a situation, but that most of the time the other person is just having a bad day. And so his message wasn't precisely that we should ignore our instincts, but that we should certainly downplay them. And, critically, if we do have a sense or feeling about a situation that turns out to be accurate it isn't an accurate sensation on our part but rather a deliberate intervention, by God Himself, into the course of ordinary events.

Story 2. An Irish woman living in Baltimore called in to ask about a strange practice at a church she attended in her girlhood. It seems that, unlike most American churches, in this church the bread used for Communion was baked by one of the parishioners. And so instead of little round communion hosts, they had pieces of actual bread for communion. The woman, with great exasperation, described the constant presence of crumbs on the floor, and asked whether or not such practices are actually acceptable. The priest replied that while it is technically okay to have bread for communion baked locally, most churches prefer to order hosts specially made by companies set up for that purpose. It's much more expensive-- he went on-- but they're more convenient and you never have to deal with crumbs. The originally caller hung up the phone satisfied with her answer.

Connection and Disconnection

What unites these two stories on seemingly disparate topics is what I think of as a theology of disconnection. In the first story, anyone who has had any experience with these things can tell you that it is simply the case that we can learn to both perceive and to act on planes of reality other than the physical. This is what is meant by the various "planes of being" of Occult Philosophy and the worlds or levels of classical Platonism. The planes or worlds are not metaphorical; they are real levels of being, ontologically distinct from one another. To develop spiritually-- and mentally-- is to become able to function-- to act and to perceive-- on higher levels.

Many of Plato's works are structured precisely to produce this sort of spiritual-mental change in the reader. If one reads the Republic as a work of "political philosophy," as many modern people are trained to, one encounters it as a series of propositions which one can either accept or reject. What do you think of justice? Can it be best defined as a right relationship between the different parts of the soul or city? Would it really be a fine thing to be ruled by philosopher kings? (I answer: We've tried the alternative, and the idea looks increasingly appealing.)

But the text of the Republic makes it clear at the outset that the description of the ideal city is meant as an image of justice in the human soul. The work of constantly keeping the image of the soul and the city simultaneously present in the mind forces the reader to come to see the pattern which underlies both, and thereby to begin to function at the level of patterns.

According to this way of looking at things, if one has a "sense" about somebody, it isn't that it is necessarily correct. Often our psychic senses (the word "psychic" refers to "psyche," which means "soul") are clouded. It is, however, an indication that we have begun to function at a level higher than our individual mind, and this is something that we should pursue. The mainstream of the Catholic Church doesn't have room for this. Having been taught by Aristotle, rather than Plato, it sees minds as confined to brains just as do the materialists it opposes. It therefore requires regular "special interventions" by God in order to account for human psychic experiences.

There's nothing wrong with special interventions by God, of course; we should all be grateful for such things when they happen. The problem is precisely that this is a fragmented worldview, in which atomic individuals exist unconnected to one another and to the life of the spirit. The fragmentation is so complete that any exception to it requries a special intervention but nothing less than the Lord of the Universe Himself-- even great saints and archengels can't talk to you without God lending a hand. The alternative point of view is not a fragmented but a holistic worldview, in which each of us participates collectively in the many unfolding layers of reality.

The example of the communion hosts may seem rather removed from this, but it isn't really. In the case of the parishioner baking bread for communion, everyone knows what they are eating, what it is made out of, and who made it. The parishioner himself or herself is given a special role in parish life, and every member of the congregation can say to themselves, "This bread was baked by one of us." In the usual way of doing things, the hosts simply come from "somewhere"-- like most things in American life, they are made by some large corporation somewhere out there. In the example of the "locally made" hosts there is, in other words, an awareness of the whole which is also present in the layered ontology of the Platonic view, and absent in psychic Aristoteleanism.

The Reality of Connection

The truth is that we are always connected; there is in this Universe no fragmentation. God is absolute unity, and also absolute reality; it follows that the opposite of God is absolute dis-unity but also, therefore, absolute unreality. Therefore disconnection is always illusory, as the defining feature of the unreal is that it does not exist! The Devil Himself-- Cythraul, in the Druidic terms I've been using-- is precisely this, the tendency toward nonexistence.

We are always connected, via all of our actions, all of our words, and all of our thoughts. The question is-- To what are we connected? To a local baker and a local family? Or to a distant corporation-- however well-intentioned-- which we do not know and, critically, cannot love? To a short walk or drive across town with freshly-baked bread, or to an international transportation system and a system of industrial agriculture which requires massive inputs of petroleum and toxic fertilizers and pesticides? To the souls of our neighbors, or only to ourselves? This is our choice.

The Rational Animal



Let us recall that the root of the word "Man" is the same as the root of the word "Mind." Part of the definition of man is "a rational animal."

Morganwg's Christ



Let us also recall the progression of the soul in the thought of Iolo Morganwg. Every soul has its beginning in Gwynvyd, the luminous life, but descends to the depths of Annwn, the mineral creation and the very border of the Cythraul, the primordial chaos. Over the course of long ages, the soul rises from the cauldron of Annwn and works its way through the circles of incarnate life in Abred. Arriving at last at the level of humanity, the soul stands at at the border between Abred and Gwynfydd. The soul's work then is to release herself from the bonds of matter and restore herself to her proper divine place in Gwynfydd, which is the realm of Luminous Life.

The role of Jesus Christ in the soul's progression is described thusly in Barddas:


Elsewhere, we read the following account of the soul's progression:


Gwynvyd, Intellect, Christ

Let us, further, recall the three primary beings in the system of Plotinus. First there is the One, unknowable, ineffable, abiding beyond all things. After the one, produced from the one as heat is produced by a fire, is Intellect.

Intellect is the universal mind, but we must not think of it in the way that we ordinarily think about mind. There are two differences between Intellect as understood by Plotinus, and "mind" as we ordinarily talk about it.

First, Intellect is not the level of discursive thinking. The sort of thought that goes "I'm hungry-- I wonder what I have in the fridge?" is not Intellect. The sort of thought that goes, "I'm hungry, but I dont' know what's in the fridge. It seems to me that I have a pattern of waiting until my blood sugar crashes to find something to eat, and at that point my brain is too foggy to come up with anything and I end up eating a cookie. I should do something about that" is closer to Intellect, insofar as it is both deliberate and concerned with patterns. But neither of these are Intellect, because at the level of Intellect there is no difference between the knower and the object of knowledge.

Second, Intellect is Real Being. The phenomena of the sensory world are always passing into and out of existence, but the structures of Intellect, diverse and yet absolutely united, are eternal. Being eternal, they are real. Plotinus calls Intellect Itself "The One God who is all the Gods." Thomas Taylor explains that Intellect "is all Beings."

After Intellect is Soul Itself. Soul has a higher phase, which looks toward Intellect, and a lower phase which tends toward matter. But every being which is alive, is alive by virtue of having a soul, and every soul exists by virtue of Soul Itself.

It should be clear to anyone that there is an obvious parallel between the Three Primary Beings and the Christian Holy Trinity. The One identical to God the Father, Intellect to the Logos, his Son, and Soul to the Holy Spirit.

Throughout the ages, some Christians and members of related traditions have noticed this and embraced it. Others have denied it and condemned Plotinus. Others have embraced Plotinus but organized his system a bit differently, so that the One is identified with the entire Holy Trinity and the succeeding levels with subordinate beings.

In the third category are thinkers like Ficino, who identified Intellect with the realm of the angels and Soul with the World Soul. In the second are Christians in the tradition of Tertullian, who famously denounced Greek philosophy. In the first category are many Christian esotericists, including, from what I can tell, modern thinkers like C.W. Leadbeater, and also the whole of the Ismaili tradition within Islam.

But I believe that Iolo Morganwg is in the first category as well. Consider the rest of the exchange on the nature of Christ:


On this view, then, the Second Being is Intellect. Intellect can be understood as a Being who is All Beings, the One God who is all Gods, and as a level of existence, beyond the level of matter or ensouled matter. That is to say, the Intellect of Plotinus is the same as the Gwynvydd of Morganwg. Christ, then, is Gwynvyd.

Christ conducts the migration of all souls to Gwynvyd, and in order ot attain this level, the soul must "be all things, know all things, and suffer all things." What does this mean?

Mary's Room

In a series of papers published in 1982 and 1986 a philosopher of mind named Frank Jackson presented the following argument against Physicalism. Physicalism, recall, is the belief that only matter and energy exist.

Imagine a girl named Mary who lived in a black and white room and interacted with the world solely via a black and white TV. Perhaps her skin was painted black and she only wore white clothes, or her skin was painted white and she only wore black clothes. The point is that Mary had never seen color. And yet, over the course of her time in her black and white room Mary, via her black and white TV, learned everything that there is to know about color as a function of light waves. She knew, that is, exactly what happened when light bounced off an object at such and such a frequency to appear to the eye as red or blue or green, and she knew about the cones and rods in the human eye, and the different sets of cones and rods in other animal eyes. In fact Mary spent so much time studying color that she knew everything that could ever be learned about it in this way, even those details which have thus far eluded our own science of Optics.

And then, one day, when there was no more possible information to be learned, Mary stepped out of her room, and for the first time beheld the color red.

Now Jackson asks: Did Mary learn anything new?

Of course we must answer Yes. Now, instead of learning about red, she learned what it was like to see red.

Another way of saying this is to say that instead of learning about red discursively, she learned gnostically. No longer was there a separation between the knower and the object of knowledge.

Conclusion

If Christ is Intellect, and if Intellect contains all possible knowledge, and if Intellect truly is union with the object of knowledge, then Christ must know all things, do all things, and suffer all things. Otherwise his knowledge is limited in the same way that Mary's knowledge is limited before she emerges from her room; he has discursive knowledge only.

To say that Man is a rational being is to say that man begins to participate in Intellect. To say that his aim is to attain Gwynvydd is to say that his aim is to return to his existence in Intellect. To say that Christ conducts his migration is both to say that Christ is a man who has undergone the journey from Abred to Gwynvydd, and to say that Christ is all men as they rise from Abred to Gwynvydd. And to say that Christ is all men as they rise from Abred to Gwynvydd is also to affirm again that Christ is Intellect, Gwynvydd, itself.

Here is how Plato described the purpose of mathematical studies in the Republic:


And:

Now, it was of course obvious to him that these studies had practical uses, and he especially singles out their uses to the general in war. Agamemnon, he notes, would have been a rather poor general if he'd been unable to count his feet, let along his soldiers; the uses of geometry in war are also obvious. 

Of course, Arithmetic is also very useful in the art of making money. Plato dismisses this: 


And has little patience for the use of geometry as simply a tool for art and construction:


This is one of the challenging things that modern people face when we begin to study the Platonic tradition. We are used to a kind of nested hierarchy of sciences in which Psychology can be reduced to Biology, Biology to Chemistry, Chemistry to Physics, and Physics to Mathematics. And we are used to both assuming this scientific hierarchy as an a priori, and to the belief that it somehow works as a proof of Materialism. Somehow proponents of this point of view never get around to asking what the height of the number 2 is, or its breadth, its mass, or its location in space, how long it has lasted and when it might be expected to conclude. 

The ancient view of Mathematics, passed on by Pythagoras to Plato and then forward through the whole tradition of ancient philosophy, is also the more realistic. Mathematical objects are not material objects. They have no dimensions, no location, and no duration. They have no existence in matter. And yet they constantly act upon the material world, defining and delimiting it. We are able to interact with them through the medium of the physical world-- by writing a problem on a chalkboard, or by practicing the classical art of the geometer with a stake in the ground. In this way, Mathematics serves as a bridge between the Sensible World-- that is, the world we grasp with our ordinary five senses-- and the Intelligible World, what we might ordinarily think of as the world of spirit, pure Mind. 

Proclus described it thusly, in his commentary on the Elements of Euclid. 

For the ancients, Mathematics had an anagogic function. That is, it elevated the soul, allowing it to function on higher levels of being. The objects of mathematics exist at a level between the perfectly simple Ideas and the material world. They are not the only such objects. Logical formulae also serve this purpose, and the syllogism functions as well as the geometrical theorem in elevating the mind. But love, too, has an anagogic power, and so does music, as Plato shows in the Symposium and Phaedrus.  

In the writings of Proclus, Plato is regularly given the epithet "Divine." "The Divine Plato" teaches this, "As the Divine Plato writes," and so on. Not only Plato is given this title. Plotinus, Iamblichus, and others are also Divine. "Divine" was rather like "Saint," a word which simply means "Holy." But when Proclus mentions Aristotle, he refers to him instead as Daemoniacal. Because I find Aristotle irritating, I like to pronounce this "demoniacal" and to treat it as its English homonym. But of course, that isn't what Proclus means. The daimones, as I've discussed many times here, are intermediaries between humans and the gods; in the Symposium. They elevate human souls to the divine, and distribute the energies of the divine into matter. 

Traditionally, one began the study of Aristotle with the Organon, a collection of logical treatises beginning with the Categories. In later centuries (that is, after about the year 200) one began first with the Isagoge or Introduction of Porphyry, which then became the standard introduction to logic during the Middle Ages. One then proceeded through Aristotle's physical, metaphysical, and ethical works, and only then began to study Plato. Aristotle's works functioned as a sort of Outer Initiation, preparing the mind for the Inner Initiation of Plato. 

The great philosopher of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages was Saint Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas was an Aristotelean. In his work he refers to Aristotle simply as "The Philosopher," and rarely disputes with him on anything. With Plato, on the other hand, he is constantly quarreling. This was a reversal of a longstanding tradition. Augustine, the Catholic Church's first great theologian, was a Platonist strongly influenced by Plotinus and Porphyry. Aquinas's great contemporary, Saint Bonaventure, was a Platonist, as Augustine had been, but in the end Aquinas ended up carrying the day. His Dominican Order's Thomistic theology provided the intellectual grounding for the Roman Church, with Bonaventure's Franciscans providing a kind of minority report. 

I'm wondering if this wasn't the great error of the Western world, and I wonder if it doesn't ultimately amount to prefering the Daemoniacal to the DIvine. 

Today's post is not fun, but it's something that I felt that I had to say. 



The Situation

Yet another war has broken out, as you're doubtless aware. As of this writing, it's unclear where it's going or when it will end. If we're very fortunate, it will be confined to Gaza, which will be horrible enough. If not, it will spill over into Lebanon and Syria at least, which runs the risk of drawing in the United States and Iran in turn. At that point the powers involved might just well decide that the Ukrainian war and this war are the same war after all, in the same way that everyone decided that the Sino-Japanese War and Anglo-German War were the same war after 1941 or so.

This is not a blog about current events and it's not a blog about politics. As originally conceived, it is a blog about books. And the reason I want to say something about current events is that I'm concerned that some of the books that we have on offer will make very bad guides for the present moment. To say it another way, I believe that we need better bards.

Let me be more specific. There are two stories which I love very much which I think are utterly useless for the present moment, and I worry that since many of my generation were raised on them, they will be floating around in our heads and, whether we realize it or not, guiding our actions. What stories are these?

One is The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien.

The second is not a book but a movie, though I often imagine that in a thousand years schoolchildren will be forced to read its screenplay the way that modern children read Shakespeare's plays. Of course, I'm talking about Star Wars.

And there is a third, hovering in the background of these and informing both, which we'll get to.

Good and Evil

Both of these are war stories, and that's helpful enough to have on hand in a time of war. The trouble is the way that they present war. In both of these stories, as you know, the war is between a Good Side and an Evil Side. The Good Side is all Good, and the Evil Side is all Evil. Moral ambiguity concists only in the possibilty that some characters may move between sides. Once they have done so, however, they then become entirely good or entirely evil as the case may be. Darth Vader, once redeemed, is good; Saruman, once fallen, is evil.

Since the outbreak of war on Saturday, I've seen many, many comments on the war between Hamas and Israel, and every last one of them has framed this conflict in these terms. One side must be good, and equivalent to Aragorn and Luke Skywalker, and the other side must be evil, and equivalent to Sauron and Darth Vader. There are no other possibilities. 

Hovering in the background, of course, is that ur-story, the creation myth of the modern world:

The story of World War II.

This is our great modern epic, which has now so consumed the collective imagination that we cast every conflict past or present in its terms. Indeed, as the capacity for reason has diminished-- especially among public intellectuals-- it seems our moral compass consists entirely in determining, in any given situation, which side represents Hitler. New Hitlers are always turning up; in my life, Hitlers have included Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Slobodan Milosevic, George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein again, Barack Obama, Moammar Qadaffi, Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin. And, right on cue, today I saw a right-wing commenter on Twitter frame the new war in the Middle East in precisely these terms: "Ask yourself, which side would Hitler support?"

If you think that these sorts of stories are applicable either to the Russo-Ukrainian War, the war between Israel and Hammas, or any third and nightmarish war which may result from the combination of these two, let me make a suggestion. Find someone you know who supports the opposite side to the one you do, and ask them to make their case to you in detail. Don't say a word; just let them regail you with tales of the atrocities of the Palestinian terorists, the Israeli Defense Forces and settlers, the Russian Army, the Ukrainian Army, the Azov Batallion, on and on and on. I'm not going to do this for you, by the way. If you're a reader who supports the Palestinian Resistance and hates the Zionists, or who supports the state of Israel and hates anti-Semites, don't bother lecturing me in the comments; I'll just ban you. Do the work on your own. Talk to someone who disagrees with you, and ask them why. By the end, you will either understand that you are not the side of the good guys anymore than they are, or you will scream at them to shut up. I'm afraid the second choice is unfortunately common these days, and it's a choice I want to circumvent if I can.

There Is Another Way To Look At War

Humans think in stories as surely as we count with numbers. If we want a different way of thinking-- about any situation-- we need a different story to think with. And so in this case we'll need a war story. The good news is that, as Western people, we are heir to one of the greatest war stories of all time. It's a powerful, dark, difficult and thought provoking story. It's a story with heroes on both sides-- and the heroes are real heroes, the sons of gods. It's a story where men make bad decisions, and good ones, rise to the occasion or are brought low by their own pettiness. It's a story about a war in which the very gods themselves took part, siding with one force or the other as the occasion demanded.

I'm talking, of course, about Homer's Iliad.

You probably know the story; if not, you should. But let's take a moment anyway and review the facts.

The Iliad begins in the ninth year of the Trojan War. A great coalition of Greek city-states has united against the kingdom of Troy, in order to rescue Helen, the bride of the king of Sparta, taken captive by the Trojan Prince Paris. Over the course of nine years the Greeks have pushed their way through the Trojan lands, and now besiege the sacred city of Illion itself.**

(**You've probably heard that it was a ten year siege of a city called Troy, and that's how I learned it too. But the poem makes continuous references to the Greek armies having conquered many different cities of the Trojans, which implies that Troy was a kingdom or empire and Ilion its capital. Achilles himself tells us that "With my ships I have taken twelve cities, and eleven round about Troy have I stormed with my men by land." And yet everyone claims that the war was a ten year long siege, and that's what you'll see repeated by sources like Wikipedia. No, I don't know why.)

Over the course of the poem, the Greeks and the Trojans fight back and forth, and neither side is able to defeat the other. The gods themselves intervene. Poseidon and Hera and Athena fight alongside the Greeks; Zeus and Aphrodite and Ares stand with the Trojans. The heroes contest with one another. Aeneas, the Trojan son of Aphrodite, contends with Diomedes, and is only saved from death by the intervention of his mother and Apollo. Patroclus, companion of Achilles, kills Sarpedon the son of Zeus. Hector, great leader of the Trojans, kills Patroclus in his turn. 

Patroclus is the companion of Achilles, greatest of the Greek warriors, and up until now Achilles has behaved like a sulking child. At the beginning of the story his captive bride is taken away by Agamemnon, and Achilles withdraws from the fighting, refusing to intervene to save the Greeks from certain defeat. When he finally, grudgingly, allows his men to return to the fight he still refuses to go himself, and Patroclus is only killed because he was wearing Achilles' armor and mistaken for Achilles himself.  Now Achilles, filled with rage, sacrifices a number of Trojan soldiers on Patroclus's funeral pire and marches into battle, girt with new arms and armor made by Hephaestos. Armed by the gods, he kills Hector before the walls of the city.

Thorughout the story, as I've said, Achilles has behaved like a spoiled brat, while Hector has been brave and sympathetic, an honorable  leader of men. And now, not even Hector's death is enough to appease Achilles. He mutilates Hector's body and drags it behind his chariot around the walls of Troy. Oh, and he sacrifices a number of Trojan warriors on the funeral pire of Patroclus to boot. It's still not enough; like a child having a tantrum, he can't calm himself, and he falls to brooding, periodically taking a break to drag poor, dead Hector around some more. 

At the very last, Priam, Hector's aged father, comes to Achilles to beg for the body of his son to be returned to him. And now, after 24 books of sulking and murder, Achilles relents. He invites the old man to his tent, and together they drink, and eat, and tell stories. They weep for the dead on both sides. Achilles returns Hector's body with a promise that the Greeks will obey a truce for twelve days, so that Priam will have time to bury his son. 

Here is how the story ends: 


The End.

The Iliad is a very difficult book for modern readers. Its ending is not triumphant. The Death Star does not explode. The ring is not cast into the fire. Hitler does not shoot himself in a bunker. It ends in the funeral of a good man, with more war still to be fought. It is a hard story, a bitter and a sad story. And in that it is more thoughtful than every World War II remake that the past 80 years has given us-- very much including our fanciful and self-aggrandizing account of the war itself.

In the Iliad, there isn't a right side and a wrong side. The war began long before the text itself, with Paris, prince of Troy, carrying off Helen, wife of the Spartan King Menelaus. But Paris was promised Helen by Aphrodite, a goddess, and some sources claim she went willingly; in any case Paris himself is no mere robber. He is also known as Alexandros, "defender of men," a name that he was given for heroic deeds in his childhood. And the Greeks are not the Star Wars rebels or Tolkien's elves. Agamemnon, their supreme commander, sacrificed his own daughter to Artemis to ensure victory. And victory he was given, but for his deeds the gods allowed him to be murdered by his own wife upon his return to Argos. There are heroes on both sides, villains on both sides, gods on both sides.

It is a story for our time, and it is the story of our wars.

An Hour For Men

Let me tell you a hard truth. And for this I'm going to have to ask that the children and the faint of heart leave the room; this isn't for you.

Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings are stories for children. Moreover, the story on which they are based, the tale of our heroic struggle against evil in World War II, is a lie. The Second World War was a war like other wars. The Nazis were guilty of monstrous war crimes. And so was our great ally, the Soviet Union, a monstrous prison-state which would have been destroyed if not for American aid. And so were we. At Dresden and Hamburg, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki we murdered hundreds of thousands of people, most of them civilians. World War II was a war like other wars; we celebrate it because our side happened to win. 

Now, there is an easy way to misunderstand what I'm saying, and so I'm going to address it now. My point is not that America should not have been involved World War II, or that we were "just as bad" as the Nazis. My point is that there were evil deeds on both sides, and there were good men on both sides. Again, we like to use the word "Nazi" as a stand-in for "evil," but it's easy to see that this isn't so. Imagine that you are a German of military age. The year is 1944. To the east, the Red Army is rolling through Poland, bringing murder, rape, and mass enslavement. To the West, the Americans and their British allies are advancing through France, and the New York Times has just published the Morgenthau Plan to reduce Germany to an agrarian society after the war. For years British and American planes have been raiding German cities, killing indiscriminately. You loathe Hitler, and you believe the rumors you've heard about the camps at Dachau, Auschwitz and elsewhere. But everyone knows what the Soviets have done at places like Katyn Forest, and your cousin who survived Dresden has told you what the Americans are capable of. What do you do? 

In real life, evil doesn't dress up in a black helmet, and good doesn't wear white wizard robes. There are no good or evil people. There are only good or evil actions.

And--

This is the really hard part--

In real life, unlike in fantasy stories, two people can both choose good, and still end up on opposite sides of a conflict. They can even end up killing each other. This is what it means to say that "The gods fought on both sides" of a war. This, actually, is why polytheism is more realistic than monotheism, especially as regards life on Earth.

A Thought Experiment



Let's illustrate the point.

Suppose a family member, a member of your household, got into a conflict with a neighbor. How it began doesn't matter. Let's just say that it became, over the course of months, one of those intractible human conflicts marked by tit for tat retaliations, with each side blaming the other. Let's say that when you tried to talk to your family member-- let's say it's your son-- about the matter, it was clear that both sides were at fault, and had done terrible things, but that he had started it. Maybe the neighbor was another boy, and your son called called him a name, and the other boy hit him, and your boy retaliated by getting his friends together to beat up the other boy. On and on and on.

It's a terrible situation, right? And a situation all too common among human beings. The right thing to do is to have both sides sit down, admit their own part in the conflict, apologize for their misdeeds and forgive the other's. That's what should happen.

But-- Uh oh.

It looks like the neighbor kid's snapped. The beating he took from your son and his friends was the last straw. Now he's coming over to your house with a knife.

Your son is in the back yard. You yell, but he doesn't hear you. There's the neighbor kid. He runs into the backyard and knocks your son down. There he is, holding the knife, about to kill your son. But now, as luck has it, you have a gun in your hand, and a clear shot.

What do you do?

There's no good side in the conflict, and your son started it in any case. You can imagine what drove the neighbor kid to react this way-- imagine his fear and humiliation as your son and his friends beat him into the ground behind the school. Now you have a chance to shoot and kill him on top of it, and become a murderer. Would you do it anyway?

I would, and I'll bet you would too.

Why? Because the other kid is evil? Because he's no better than a nasty orc or a Stormtrooper or-- worst of all-- A Nazi?

Grow up.

I'd shoot him and you'd shoot him because it would be the right thing to do. It would be the right thing to do not because he is evil, but in spite of the fact that he is not evil. In the final analysis, it would be the right thing because duty to family is a part of the virtue of piety, and piety is a part of Justice. 

It's a horrible thing to think about. No one wants to face a situation like that. But in this real world, situations like this are far more common than fights with orcs or goblins or stormtroopers or "Nazis."

Why Talk About This

If we are fortunate, and pray to God that we will be, the latest conflict in the Middle East will be resolved quickly. But there's a chance that it won't be. If so, many of us are going to have to make choices. They are going to be hard choices.

What I want is for us all to make them with our eyes open, like men. If we have to choose sides, let us each choose the right side. 

The right side is not the side of the elves, or the angels. The right side is not the side of whoever is fighting "Nazis." There are no Nazis. There never really were, in the mythical sense. There are only other human beings, all a mix of good and evil, some more good on the balance, some more evil. 

The right side is the one which Justice demands you support. Not me, not your cousin, not your favorite YouTuber: You. Justice is a virtue, and it has a clear definition: It consists entirely in right relationships. Now loyalty or Fidelity is a component of Justice, and each of us has groups which rightly demand our loyalty. In order to act justly, we must decide which groups those are, and act accordingly.  

In the Iliad, the Greek kings join Menelaeus and Agamemnon because that is what Justice demands of them. The Trojans also had allies; the Amazons fought alongside them, and so (after the events of the Iliad) did the Aethiopians. When Memnon, king of the Aethiopians, obeyed the summons to war, he obeyed the command of Justice; when Achilles slew Memnon as he had slain Hector, he too obeyed the commands of Justice. It's not cinematic, it's not satisfying, it doesn't make us feel better about ourselves. But it's real.

Obedite mandata Iusticiae-- "Obey the commands of Justice." Let this be our slogan, and not "Kill the Nazis." We'll likely feel worse about ourselves, and worse about whatever killing we do or our side does. And I'd suggest that that's a very good thing. 

I'm unusually busy this week, and so for today's post I need to choose between writing something short but clear or long but messy. Yesterday I chose "long but messy," so let's reverse course today, and resume looking at the Triads of Iolo Morganwg. The work that we have as "Barddas" was compiled after Morganwg's death by John Williams ab Ithel, and as such it contains a number of different documents, some overlapping, some rather different from one another. A brief but fascinating chapter in the "Theology" section is entitle Triads of Bardism. These are seven short triads which form a coherent whole. I want to look at each of them one at a time, and then see what picture emerges when all are taken together.

Here is the first of the Triads of Bardism:


Everything in our World Below, being one thing, is thereby rendered not another thing. As we have discussed elsewhere, Greek word ousia is often translated "being," but it especially means "particularity" or "particular being." In the physical world, ousia is primarily particular things as particular things-- and not members of a genus or species. "Hopper the Cat" is ousia primarily, "cat" secondarily, "animal," um, "tertiarily." and in the physical world, ousia is especially not-something-elseness. God, on the other hand, being one thing is also everything.

Nature, in common usage, means something like "woods" or "the out of doors." But it can be better understood by considering how we use it when we describe "the nature of" something. Why is my cat sitting on my keyboard? Why is she trying to catch the words I'm typing on the screen with her paws? That's just her nature. Why do I want another cup of coffee? That's my nature. From what are these particular natures derived? From Nature itself of course, which must mean something like "that which provides the particularity of things." But this Nature Itself will not be any one particularity, because then it would have a nature, rather than being Nature. It is a unity, then, and superessential-- above ousia-- but it isn't Unity Itself, because it is still involved in particularity. It can best, then, be seen as a medium between Finitude and our First Substance, which is Fire.

Fire unites all things to itself; to enter into fire is to become fire. And it is by fire that all things are rendered visible, and by fire, or its progeny, heat, that anything is able to move or act. Unity, Intelligibility, Act or Power are the three primary terms, the Triadic Unity which follows immediately from the First or Simple Unity. In the Oracles we read:
God proceeds these three, brings them forth, and from their mixture brings all the worlds into being.

And again we read,


And so we may see all these three, Finitude, Nature, Fire as proceeding from One Power, which is God. And that implies, too, that we can follow them in reverse order. From particular natures, we can ascend to Nature, from the contemplation of Nature to the contemplation of the Holy and Formless Fire which preceedes it; from the Fire which is all things united to that fundamental unity which is prior to all things, and calls them into being. 

 

The One and the Many

Here are the second, third, and fourth propositions from Proclus's Elements of Theology:



Transmigration

Finally, here is a selection from Plato's Phaedo on the fate of the unjust soul after death:



Gathered Thoughts




A major focus of my work here is to take disparate elements of the world's spiritual traditions-- the fragmented Western tradition above all, but helped along by Eastern ideas from time to time-- and to set them alongside one another, and see what emerges.

Morganwg gives us an image of the soul attempting to rise to the Circle of Ceugant, which is the empty sphere traversed by God alone. We saw yesterday that God, or the One, is superessential, above all particularity.

Now the One must be one alone, and this is proved in the following way. Everything which exists that depends upon something else for its existence is called contingent. But if all beings were contingent, there could be no particular beings, because every thing, depending on something else for its existence, would never be able to come into existence. Therefore there must be something which is noncontingent, and by virtue of which all contingent beings have their existence. This something must be radically simple, and without qualities, otherwise it would be a compound, and the members of the compound would depend on a third thing for their existence. Even if that third thing was simply their shared unity, that unity would itself be the only noncontingent being. Therefore there is only one noncontingent being, and this being we call the One or God.

Because God is both radically simple and superessential, He (say She or It, none is actually accurate) remains forever out of reach. Ceugant is the empty sphere.

Now to become good means to become like God, because God is the Good and there is nothing Good which is not made Good by the participation in God. This is another way of saying, as Proclus above, nothing becomes One except by participation in the One. But, again, God is superessential and radically, permanently distinct from every form of ousia, even the most exalted.

It therefore follows that the journey of creatures to God is unending.

This, in turn, is the basis for two doctrines.

First, the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. If it is the case that God wills by his nature that every thing should become like him, which is to say, to become Good as He is Good; and if it is also the case that some beings are capable of a greater degree of participation in God than others; then it is necessarily the case that beings must evolve. Hence an animal, which is capable of limited forms of virtue trained by habit, may become a human, who is capable of higher forms of virtue, and a human a hero or saint, who is capable of transcending death and materiality. Evolution implies devolution-- given that it is possible to choose the Good, it is also possible to fail to choose it, or to choose Evil, which to say, nothingness and dissolution; this would then entail a descent into a lower state of being.

Second, the doctrine of permanent evolution. That is to say, it is not the case that, after death, our capacity to change or develop ceases, as is held by the Roman Catholic Church. This is the basis for their doctrine of eternal damnation-- Unrepented sin requires punishment; following death, change is impossible; repentance is a form of change; therefore, following death, unrepented sins must be punished and that punishment is incapable of ending, as the sin can no longer be expiated nor the punishment transformed into mercy. It is also the basis of the doctrine of eternal Paradise-- any pleasant state in the Afterlife, in Christian teaching, may be expected to endure forever; moreover, one's particular station in the hierarchy of Heaven is one's station for good. But the doctrine of the superessential nature of God suggests that even beings which have transcended the physical world and ascended to a better state still have an unending journey ahead of them, and may continue to unfold and to grow in wisdom, power and bliss, forever.