readoldthings | Entries tagged with iolo morganwg

Our prayer continues:

And in Understanding, Knowledge,
And in Knowledge, Knowledge of Justice
And in the Knowledge of Justice, the Love of It

From Understanding immediately proceeds Knowledge. This is somewhat different from our usual way of using these words. Ordinarily they are either synonyms, or else understanding is a more complete form of knowledge. What's going on here?

The answer is that in our ordinary way of living, we ascend from knowledge to understanding. But in the Gorsedd prayer, we follow the emanations of divinity from the highest to the lowest. In the order of creation, Understanding gives rise to Knowledge.

By "Understanding" we particularly mean intellection or noesis-- the immediate knowledge of the noetic level of being, at which knower and object of knowledge are united. By Knowledge, we mean discursive reasoning or dianoia, which knows by applying the faculties of mind in sequence toward an object of knowledge. As separation has been introduced, we see that we have, again, made a descent in terms of the planes of being. Understanding is the activity of the highest part of the mind, called Intellect or Nous. Knowledge is its first-born, its image in the soul.

Now, we ask that we may direct our knowledge in a specific direction, toward Justice. Now, the very fact that we are directed toward "Justice" in particular rather than "Virtue" in general also indicates that we are moving further from the Divine Untiy, toward the realms of separation and generation.

Like Knowledge and Understanding, the term "Justice" is often misused (and mis-understood) in modern discourse. This is especially the case as it has become more common. And so it's worth taking a moment to remember that the ancient meaning of "Justice" is not "Governments take revenge against large segments of their own population for crimes they never committed." Justice means, very specifically, the right relationships between things. Aristotle defines it as rendering to each what is due to him. Plato tells us that it consists, internally, in the state in which each part of the soul performs its correct task, not seeking to usurp the role of others, and, externally, the same relation between the parts of the state.

It naturally follows that for Justice to be possible, there must be separation; only when there are parts is it possible for a relationship between parts to exist. Notice, too, that Justice is the only virtue given a name, but all of the virtues are present:

The Protection of God produces an abiding stability in the soul, which is the virtue of Temperance.

The Strength, given by God and unfolding from the Protection of God is the virtue of Courage.

The Understanding which arises from the Protection and Power of God, and the Knowledge which unfolds from Understanding, is the virtue of Wisdom.

From these Justice is unfolded, as a right application of power and knowledge toward the multitude which arise from the overflowing creative fire of the divine unity.

Finally, from the Knowledge of Justice is born Love. This is another simple statement which hides many layers of meaning.

We must always remember that, for the ancients, powers that move the human soul like "Love" are not simply choices or acts or events. They are gods or spirits. For Plato, Love (Eros) is divine: A daimon who causes us to desire unity with that which is beautiful, and, if we properly follow his teachings, will lead us to union with God. But Love is also an act of will, and the nature of that act for Plato as well as for Christ is "to will the good of another."

Justice, Courage, Wisdom, Temperance: We know all these things to the extent we know them only as we know their Paradigms, and these are living Ideas in the mind of the Father. All abide as great Powers in Gwynvydd, and when we act justly or temperately in Abred we unite ourselves to them. Here we invoke their son, Divine Love, and ask his aid in uniting ourselves to Them.

How exactly do we do this? We'll see tomorrow.

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:

Grant, O God, Thy protection;
And in protection, strength;

And in strength, understanding;

And in understanding, knowledge;

And in knowledge, the knowledge of justice;

And in the knowledge of justice, the love of it;

And in that love, the love of all existences;

And in the love of all existences, the love of God.

God and all goodness.

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:

Grant, Oh God, Thy Protection,
And in Protection, Strength,
And in Strength, Understanding.

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.

Another passage from Barddas, on the Circles of Existence:

The Circle of Abred, in which are all corporal and dead existences.

The Circle of Gwynvyd, in which are all animated and immortal beings.

The Circle of Ceugant, where there is only God. The wise men describe them thus, in three Circles.

As we have seen, the extremity of Abred is Annwn, the realm of the Dead; and this can also be seen as the meeting point of Abred and Cythraul, the Devil and Primordial Chaos.

I've said a great deal from within the Druid perspective on these ideas. I want to look a little more at Iolo's Druidry from a kind of "outside perspective," analyzing them, rather than understanding them. This mode of thinking, which is related to the sophistry employed by our university professors, is a lower mode to be sure, but it has its uses.

Now, the great open question regarding Morganwg is precisely what were his sources, and, of course, the great question about our modern Druidry is what links it has to the Druidry of the ancient world. The old answer, which was untrue, was "It is the ancient Druidry, preserved down the ages." The current answer is, "It is not the ancient Druidry but a modern movement inspired in part, but only in part, by what we know of the ancients, intended to meet the spiritual needs of modern people."

To me, the second answer is more than sufficient-- but I wonder if it is not true either.

I've already discussed the great Ninth Century clergyman and philosopher of Ireland, John Scotus Eriugena. Eriugena's great work was entitled the Periphysion. I've only begun to explore Eriugena in detail, but from what I can tell, the essence of his metaphysics was a four-layered system of ontology, which exactly replicates the ancient Four Worlds of the Neoplatonists:

Nature includes both God and creation and has four divisions: nature which creates and is not created (God), nature which creates and is created (the Primordial Causes), nature which is created and does not create (the Created Temporal Effects), and nature which is neither created nor creates (Non-Being).

This division of things in a descending hierarchy from that which creates and is uncreated to that which neither creates nor is created is identical to the ontology of Proclus, who divides things into that which is immovable; that which moves itself and moves others; that which is only moved.

And so, again, we see a source for Iolo's thought in the mystical Christianity of the Celtic world, and particularly in Eriugena. Eriugena's source was Dionysius, and Dionysius was (probably) a student of Proclus.

So is modern Druidry simply Classical or Medieval, and Platonic, rather than ancient and Celtic?

Let us remember that Proclus didn't come out of nowhere. "Neoplatonism" is marked by scholars to begin with Plotinus, several centuries earlier, but "Neoplatonism" is a Neologism. Plotinus thought of himself as a follower of Plato, and it is only in very recent times that university professors, themselves blinded by the parochialism of their profession, have suggested that he was anything but. The ancients themselves saw the Philosophers of Greece as one example of a type, which included the Brahmins of India, the Magi of Persia, the sages of Chaldaea and Egypt-- and the Druids of the Celts. Pythagoras was said to have sojourned among the Druids. In all likelihood "Platonism" is only the specifically Greek expression of a Great Tradition common to the Indo-European peoples. If the specifically Celtic expressions were lost to time, it was natural enough to fill them in with their analogs from other, better-preserved sources, from Greece to India. This many modern Druids have done.

Finally, we need to take off our modern way of looking at these things. To the modern mind, a book is an object, an idea is a creation, and a truth is a discovery. But on the older way of looking at things, Truth is eternal, Ideas are living and more than living, and books very often have their own spirits, and to encounter them is to come under their power.

In Barddas we read:

Some have called God the Father HEN DDIHENYDD, because it is from His nature that all things are derived, and from Him is the beginning of every thing, and in Him is no beginning, for He can not but exist, and nothing can have a beginning without a beginner. And God the Son is called IAU, that is, God under a finite form and corporeity, for a finite being cannot otherwise know and perceive God. And when He became man in this world, He was called JESUS CHRIST, for He was not from everlasting under a finite form and body. And the man who believes in Him, and performs the seven works of mercy, shall be delivered from the pain of Abred, and blessed for ever be he who does so. Jesus Christ is also called GOD THE DOVYDD; and He has also other names, such as PERYDD, and GOD THE NER, and GOD THE NAV.

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 Father perfected all things, and delivered them over to the Second Mind, whom all Nations of Men call the First.

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:

Duw, Dofydd mawr, Ionawr, Iau.
Ener, Muner, Ner, Naf ydyw.

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:

Let the rule of the Oracles be here also prescribed for us, that we shall establish the truth of the things spoken concerning God, not in the persuasive words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit-moved power of the Theologians, by aid of which we are brought into contact with things unutterable and unknown, in a manner unutterable and unknown, in proportion to the superior union of the reasoning and intuitive faculty and operation within us. By no means then is it permitted to speak, or even to think, anything, concerning the superessential and hidden Deity, beyond those things divinely revealed to us in the sacred Oracles

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

Let us come to the appellation "Good," already mentioned in our discourse, which the Theologians ascribe pre-eminently and exclusively to the super-Divine Deity...

For, even as our Sun----not as calculating or choosing, but by its very being, enlightens all things able to partake of its light in their own degree----so too the Good----as superior to a sun, as the archetype par excellence, is above an obscure image----by Its very existence sends to all things that be, the rays of Its whole goodness, according to their capacity. By reason of these (rays) subsisted all the intelligible and intelligent essences and powers and energies.

Readers of this blog will, of course, have no trouble identifying the source of this particular idea of Dionysius's.

This tradition, of reciting, contemplating and meditating upon the revealed Divine Names is an ancient one. We may well believe that the Druids of old practiced it, and it is preserved, as we see, in Dionysius, the great disciple of Proclus (or the great companion of Saint Paul, or both). Many know that the system of transcendental meditation is based on the repitition of one of the Names of the Hindu pantheon. The tradition of Dhikr, the meditative recitation of all of God, is an Islamic version of the practice. Moreover, the Ismaili tradition within Islam explicitly understands the Names to refer to the second divinity, Divine Intellect, their understanding of which is drawn from the writings of Plotinus.

Morganwg-- perhaps we should call him Saint Iolo Morganwg, or Niomh Iolo Morganwg-- was a trickster, to be sure-- just as the mysterious author of the Dionysian letters was a trickster. If Dionysius merits the title "saint," "holy," then so in my view does Morganwg. Perhaps we might call him "Niomh* Iolo Morganwg." And, reading from the deep well of the Barddas, we might pray,

Niomh Iolo Morganwg, ora pro nobis!

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

The Unity of Philosophy

There are some who say that the study of philosophy had its beginning among the barbarians. They urge that the Persians have had their Magi, the Babylonians or Assyrians their Chaldaeans, and the Indians their Gymnosophists; and among the Celts and Gauls there are the people called Druids or Holy Ones, for which they cite as authorities the Magicus of Aristotle and Sotion in the twenty-third1 book of his Succession of Philosophers.

So we read in the History of the Lives of Eminent Philosophers, written by Diogenes Laertius around 150 B.C.

In Barddas we read:

Question. Why is the face turned towards the sun in every asseveration and Prayer?

Answer. Because God is in every light, and the chief of every light is the sun. It is through fire that God brings back to Himself all things that have emanated from Him; therefore it is not right to ally one's self to God, but in the light. There are three kinds of light, namely: that of the sun, and hence fire; that which is obtained in the sciences of teachers; and that which is possessed in the understanding of the head and heart, that is, in the soul. On that account, every vow is made in the face of the three lights, that is, in the light of the sun is seen the light of a teacher, or demonstration; and from both of these is the light of the intellect, or that of the soul.

And again:

Question. Why do we say, Heaven above, and Hell beneath, where there can be no highest in respect of any being, or lowest in respect of any existence? And why God in the highest, and Cythraul in the lowest?

Answer. Because the light is always highest, and above our heads, and it is in the light that God is found, and there can be no Heaven, except in the light; and God and Heaven always go together with light. And the darkness is always the lowest, and Cythraul and hell go together with it.

Book VII of Plato's Republic centers around the famous allegory of the cave. Imagine, Plato writes, that you have spent all your life as a prisoner in a cave, chained to the floor in such a way that you can move your head neither left nor right. Behind you is a fire, before you the cave wall. Between you and the fire men are moving puppets about, and all you can see and all you have ever seen are shadows cast by the puppets upon the cave wall.

But the day comes, and you escape. Making your way up to the surface, out of the darkness, you find a world of dazzling light in which you are totally blind. You come out at night, and look at things in the darkness-- at night the trees resemble the shadows which you had been used to, and the starlight is reminicent of the flickering of the fire.

Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is.

He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold.

Now this cave is our material world, and the fire our material sun. The master of puppets is the Sublunar Demiurge, who dazzles our eyes with unintelligible images. The true Sun is the Eternal Spiritual Sun, as he is named in the Druid tradition; the Idea of the Good, as Plato calls him. This is the image of the First Cause, the One Itself.

All things in our material world are the images of higher things, and it is through them that we make the ascent, out of the cave, into the light of the Real. And so we are enjoined to worship in the Sun and in the light of the Sun, that, uniting ourself to the material Sun, we may be drawn upward into the light of the Spirit.

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

There is nothing truly hidden but what is not conceivable;

There is nothing not conceivable but what is immeasurable;

There is nothing immeasurable but God;

There is no God but that which is not conceivable;

There is nothing not conceivable but that which is truly hidden;

There is nothing truly hidden but God.

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:

The voice of the spiritual eagle resounds in the ears of the Church. [The Eagle is the traditional symbol of St. John the Evangelist.] May our external senses grasp its fleeting sounds, and our interior mind penetrate its enduring meaning. This is the voice of the high-flying bird, not hte one that flies above the material air or ether or around the whole of the sensible world, but the bird which soars above all theory, on the swift wings of the most profound theology and with the insights of the clearest and most sublime contemplation, passing beyond all that is and all that is not.

By 'all that is,' I mean those things that do not entirely escape human or angelic knowledge... By 'all that is not,' I mean those things which transcend the powers of all understanding.

Later, comparing John with Peter, he tells us:

The one reclined on the breast of the Lord, which signifies contemplation, while the other hesitated, which signifies restless action. ... The power of contemplation, wholly purified, penetrates more keenly and swiftly the profound secrets of the divine letters than does action, which is in need of purification.

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:

TRIAD supernal, both super-God and super-good, Guardian of the Theosophy of Christian men, direct us aright to the super-unknown and super-brilliant and highest summit of the mystic Oracles, where the simple and absolute and changeless mysteries of theology lie hidden within the super-luminous gloom of the silence, revealing hidden things, which in its deepest darkness shines above the most super-brilliant, and in the altogether impalpable and invisible, fills to overflowing the eyeless minds with glories of surpassing beauty. This then be my prayer; but thou, O dear Timothy, by thy persistent commerce with the mystic visions, leave behind both sensible perceptions and intellectual efforts, and all objects of sense and intelligence, and all things not being and being, and be raised aloft unknowingly to the union, as far' as attainable, with Him Who is above every essence and knowledge. For by the resistless and absolute ecstasy in all purity, from thyself and all, thou wilt be carried on high, to the superessential ray of the Divine darkness, when thou hast cast away all, and become free from all.

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:

Let us now therefore, if ever, abandon multiform knowledge, exterminate from ourselvs all the variety of life, and in perfect quiet approach near to the cause of things. for this purpose, let not only opinion and phantasy be at rest, nor the passions alone which impede our anagogic impulse to the first, be at peace; but let the air be still, and the universe itself be still. And let all things extend us with a tranquil power to communion with the ineffeable. Let us also, standing there, having transcended the Intelligible (if we contain anything of this kind), and with nearly closed eyes adoring as it were the rising sun, since it is not lawful for any being whatever intently to behold him-- let us survey the Sun whence the light of the intelligible Gods proceeds, emerging, as the poets say, from teh bosom of the ocean; and again from this divine tranquility descending into intellect, and from intellect, employing the reasonings of the soul, let us relate to ourselves what the natures are from which, in this progression, we shall considder the First God as exempt. And let us as it were celebrate Him... as more ineffable than all silence, and more unknown than all essence, as holy among the holies, and concealed in the Intelligible Gods.

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.

I wanted to write at length about reincarnation today, but time's gotten away from me, so let's take a look at another one of the Theological Triads of Iolo Morganwg, this one concerning God:

God is three things, and cannot be otherwise: coeval with all time; co-entire with all essence; and co-local with all mental purpose. Could what is called God be otherwise, it would not be God, since it could be surpassed, and no one is God that can be surpassed. He is also co-sentient with all animation.

This is straightforward enough on the surface, but there is more lurking here than we might at first suspect. Let's look at the terms one at a time.

To be coeval with all time means that God is equally present in all times. There was never a moment where God was not, and never a moment when God will not be. Now, this also implies that God is changeless, because if God were to be one certain way at one time, and another way at another time, he would not be equally present to all time-- instead he would be present either partially or in a particular way in one time, and partially or in another particular way at another time.

To be co-entire with all essence means that every being which has existence, derives its existence from God. There is nothing which is outside of God, or which does not participate in God, because the very fact of nonparticipation in God is nonparticipation in reality.

And finally, to be co-local with all mental purpose is precisely to be in possession of all possible knowledge. The reason for that is that every possible mental experience attained by every possible living creature can be understood as a sort of knowledge or information. I may know, for example, what red looks like, but I don't know what it looks like through your eyes. Moreover, I know what it's like to look across the living room and see a red blanket on the couch, but I don't yet know what it will be like to look across the room and see the same red blanket on another part of the couch tomorrow evening. God either possesses that knowledge and every similar form of knowledge, or his knowledge is limited; if limited, he is not God; but if he does possess it, then-- as the argument showed the other day-- God is all beings. I take "co-sentient with all animation" to be another way of saying "co-local with all mental purpose."

(This also means that insofar as any being is in Hell, God is always with them; this is another proof of the ancient view that Hell is not everlasting.)

These three which cannot be otherwise also refer to the planes of existence.

God abides beyond all change. His creative power ever flows outward like heat from a fire, and immediately He produces the empty sphere of Ceugant, which is the source of all essence: this is his co-entirety with all essence.

From essence emanates intelligence, which is the luminous life of Gwynvyd, the source of all mind, the colocality of God with all mental purpose.

From Gwynvyd emanates Abred, which is the world of time, not indeed deprived of God as God is coeval with all time.

And note finally that the Monad presides over the Triad, which unfolds the Monad. This is the structure of all the Celtic triads, which are wisdom-sayings, and it is also part of the Deep Structure of reality itself.

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:

God made the world of three substances: Fire; Nature; and Finiteness.

Let's look at each of these terms, in reverse order.

First we have Finiteness. "Finitude" or even "Finity" are less awkward than "Finiteness." I don't speak Welsh, and it may be that the Welsh of the Barddas is very beautiful, but the English is quite often awkward, and this forms the major barrier to entry. Push past it, and there is something to learn here. Finitude or "finiteness" is the condition of every created being. Paradoxically, it is also the activity of God within each created being.

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:

All things are the progeny of One Fire.

God proceeds these three, brings them forth, and from their mixture brings all the worlds into being.

And again we read,

When, after all the phantoms are banished, thou shalt see the holy and the formless fire, the fire that darts and flashes through the hidden depths of the universe, hear thou the Voice of Fire.

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.

Proclus's Elements of Theology, Proposition 1

Every multitude partakes in some respect of The One.

For if it in no way or degree participates of The One, neither will the whole be one, nor each of the many things from which multitude arises, but each multitude will originate from certain or particular things, and this will continue ad infinitum. And of these infinites each will be again infinite multitude. For, if multitude partakes in no respect of any one, neither as a whole nor through any of its parts, it will be in every respect indeterminate. Each of the many, whichever you may assume, will be one or not one; and if not one will be either many or nothing. But if each of the many is nothing, that likewise which arises from these will be nothing. If each is many, each will consist of infinites without limit. But this is impossible. For there is no being constituted of infinites without limit, since there is nothing greater than the infinite itself; and that which consists of all is greater than each particular thing. Neither is any thing composed of nothing. Every multitude therefore partakes in some respect of The One.

The One is the First Principle, and that by virtue of which all other things have their existence. What Proclus is telling us here-- or reminding us-- is that unless anything has unity of some kind, it cannot exist at all. The alternatives are unity, multiplicity, or non-existence. Obviously the non-existent does not exist. But anything which has multiplicity but no unity will also not exist-- it will consist of fragments, and then fragments of fragments, endlessly divisible, with no part ever able to come together as a whole. No two parts will ever be able to interact with each other, because to do so, they would need to share some common property. But if they shared a property in common, that would be a form of unity, and, lacking one, there is no unity. No part will even be able to be "one part," because to be "one part" is to be one particular thing. Instead there willl only be parts of parts of parts of parts of parts of parts of parts, extending endlessly forever.

One easy way to understand this-- and a way that Plato himself would have approved-- is to consider mathematics. Every number, multiplied by 1, remains itself. What this means is that there is always a certain hidden 1 for every number. 2 x 1 = 2, 400 x 1 = 400, π x 1 = π.

The Identity of the Good and the One

Plato taught that the One is identical with the Good. In the Republic, discussing the establishment Justice in the Soul, he tells us that the just man is one who has become one out of many:

In reality Justice was such as we were describing, being concerned however, not with the outward man, but with the inward, which is the true self and concernment of man: for the just man does not permit the several elements within him to interfere with one another, or any of them to do the work of others,—he sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master and his own law, and at peace with himself; and when he has bound together the three principles within him, which may be compared to the higher, lower, and middle notes of the scale, and the intermediate intervals—when he has bound all these together, and is no longer many, but has become one entirely temperate and perfectly adjusted nature, then he proceeds to act, if he has to act, whether in a matter of property, or in the treatment of the body, or in some affair of politics or private business; always thinking and calling that which preserves and co-operates with this harmonious condition, just and good action, and the knowledge which presides over it, wisdom, and that which at any time impairs this condition, he will call unjust action, and the opinion which presides over it ignorance.

The identity of the Good and the One was the theme of Plato's only public lecture, the text of which is lost to us, but which was described by some of his contemporaries-- including Aristotle, who claimed not to understand it. (The failure to privilege Plato over Aristotle is the great mistake of Western civilization-- but that's a story for another time.)

The One is Superessential

Following Plato, Proclus will also tell us that the One is "Superessential." This is a word which has no English meaning, and the eye trained in American English tends to pass over it. In every day use, "essential" means "really important" and "super" means "really really," so at best, we get the idea that "The One is superessential" means "The One is a very big deal."

Now the word "essential" is rooted in "essence," and thus shares the same root as the Latin word "esse," which means "to be." Knowing this, we can take a step further, and say that "The One is superessential" means "The One is beyond being." This is closer to the point, but we're still missing the target. The trouble is that this gives us the impression that the One does not exist, or that the entire thing is a sort of paradox.

The Greek word which is translated as essentia in Latin or essence in English is ousia, and "superessential" is hyperousia. Ousia does not mean "being," or at least, not in the same way that we mean it in English. Originally it actually refers to the boundaries which mark a property line-- and, as an aside, it's worth remembering that "property" was not a secular concepts with the ancients as it is with us; rather, the boundary line between properties was a sacred thing, presided over by a God. That said, knowing this will help us get to the real meaning of the term. Ousia denotes a kind of particularity-- to be ousia is to be one thing above many. But the One cannot be one thing out of many, because then there will be things which do not participate in the One-- and here we're back to the problem of the parts of parts of parts of parts described above. Rather the One, the Good, is above particularity, not one thing in a set of things, but simultaneously present to but beyond all particular things.

Neoplatonisms

Proclus was a pagan, and, indeed, one of the last great philosophers of the Pagan world. His six-volume Theology of plato is deeply concerned with applying the dieas that he learned in the work of Plato to the particular gods of the ancient Greek world. And so the Demiurge or Creator-God of the Timaeus, left unnamed by Plato, is identified with Zeus, the paradigm, or model on which he creates the world, with Ouranos, and so on through a cascading series of triads. The One, for Proclus, is called God or the First God, but is otherwise left unnamed. The One is without qualities, and so cannot be part of a triad, as are the gods that follow from him. But also for Proclus, all of the Gods are super-essential-- above particularity-- not just the One.

Before Proclus, Plotinus's system was much simpler. For Plotinus there are three primary hypostases-- the One, Divine Intellect, and the Universal Soul. These can be identified with Ouranos, Cronos, and Zeus, with Zeus again as Creator, looking to Cronos as his paradigm. Myth plays a minimal part in Plotinus's system, and ritual no part at all; Plotinus famously refused to attend sacrifices, stating "It is for the Gods to come to me, not me to go to them."

Sometime after Proclus, a writer who went by the pen-name of Dionysius the Areopagite assigned the entire Christian Holy Trinity to the place of the One. For Dionysius, the One is triadic, or, rather trinitarian. In place of the layered triads of Gods in Proclus's work, Dionysius has choirs of angels-- 9 in all, 3 groups of 3. But For Dionysius, only the Holy Trinity is superessential. The angels are not.

After Dionysius, the Ismaili tradition within Islam preserves the One as completely unitary, with no triads or trinities, as in Proclus. But here the One is God, or Allah. Intellect and Soul are secondary entities, exalted indeed, but not the First. In this tradition, Mohammed is sometimes said to shine with "the Light of Intellect," and Ali with "the Light of Soul." Allah remains forever beyond knowing.

Of course, many years even before Plotinus, Philo of Alexandria had applied Platonic principles to his native Jewish religion, reasoning that Plato must have studied the books of Moses.

The Names of God

In the Barddas of Iolo Morganwg, we read the following:

Einigan the Giant beheld three pillars of light, having in them all demonstrable sciences that ever were, or ever will be. And he took three rods of the quicken tree, and placed on them the forms and signs of all sciences, so as to be remembered; and exhibited them. But those who saw them misunderstood, and falsely apprehended them, and taught illusive sciences, regarding the rods as a God, whereas they only bore His Name. When Einigan saw this, he was greatly annoyed, and in the intensity of his grief he broke the three rods, nor were others found that contained accurate sciences. He was so distressed on that account that from the intensity he burst asunder

And elsewhere:

Why is it not right that a man should commit the Name of God to vocalization, and the sound of language and tongue?

Because it cannot be done without misnaming God, for no man ever heard the vocalization of His Name, and no one knows how to pronounce it; but it is represented by letters, that it may be known what is meant, and for Whom it stands.

But what does it mean that men worshipped the name of God, and not God himself? Why is it that the name of God cannot be pronounced?

Imagine a name. Don't pick a personal name-- just pick a noun, the first thing in your field of vision. Around me I see "computer," "coffee cup," "keyboard," and "cat." (Notice the hard-c sounds.) Each one of these words contains information. I hear the word "cat." Immediately, I am given access to certain information: Cats are four-footed predatory animals, companions of humans, smaller than dogs but larger than mice, given to sleeping, sulking and skulking. All this emerges from the word "Cat." On its own, however, "cat," k-a-t, is a mere syllable. To a Spaniard or a Chinaman, ignorant of English, it means nothing at all. On the other hand, let either hear the word "gato" or "mao," and they will gain access to the same information that I do when I hear "kat."

The particular cat sitting next to me right now is named Hopper. When I hear that name, "Hopper," and associate it with a cat, I gain a great deal more information. Hopper is orange in color, nervous around unfamiliar humans, frightened of dogs, affectionate with familiar humans and with other cats; he was found in a box and brought to a cat shelter in Santa Barbara, where he was adopted by a family for their son's 8th birthday. He is four years old, and I could go into detail about his biography, but I won't.

Notice, though, that the name suggests a story. The name is not the cat. The story is also not the cat. A neighbor might have a different name for Hoppper, referring to him as "that orange cat," and might have a different story, like, "We see him skulking around here sometimes."

Now a cat is relatively simple being-- though I suppose you shouldn't tell the cats I said that. But it's not just that "cat," "gato," "mao," "felis," and so on all point to the same thing. Imagine something greater than a cat, like the Earth. Imagine our American, our Chinaman, and our Spaniard-- and set the clock back far enough in history that they are ignorant of one another and unable to share information via the internet. One calls the planet we live on Earth, the other calls it Tierra, the third calls it Tiqiu. They mean the same, but both their name and the story which accompaines the name will be radically different. Moreover, and critically, it is impossible to really have the same experience of Earth and Tiqiu and Tierra.

Now, cats, Hopper the Cat, and the planet Earth are all examples of particular ousias, as we used that term earlier. For Aristotle, both Hopper the Cat and the planet Earth are truly ousia, while a category like "cat" or "planet" is ousia secondarily. But all are ousia-- named, particular substances, things which are "this" but not "that." This is a useful way of thinking about things, which is why Aristotle's works were picked up and re-purposed by the later Platonic commentators, starting with Porphyry.

But God, as we have seen, is beyond ousia-- or, in English, superessential.

And please note well: While debates exist about the role of Platonic philosophy within the Christian churches, the superessential nature of God is accepted by anyone. God as superessential and radically simple is Catholic doctrine. Dionysius the Areopagite is still venerated as a saint by the Orthodox, who are smart enough to not let historians dictate their religion to them.

Names are assigned to ousias, and stories follow from names. Names and stories are not meaningless. They have immediate power. Hopper is a very entertaining cat, I hear his name and I smile and feel like laughing. Other names provoke me to wrath, or sorrow, or delight, or wonder. Many of these names will be meaningless to you, because you haven't learned the stories. The name is the title, the story is the book.

God; The One, the Good; Ouranous; Allah; God the Father; Holy Trinity; YHVH; IAO; OIW. These are Names of God. Appended to each name is a story. God is bigger than a cat, and God is bigger than the Earth. A story about Hopper can be learned, in its basics, in an hour. That story will be limited, though, because he's a four year old cat; I can tell you all about him, but if you haven't lived all four years of his life with him, you won't know the details of the story as I do. But I also don't know the story the same way as the other members of my household, or the other cats, or the neighbors, or the birds that he likes to argue with. If a story about a cat can take four years to learn and still not be complete, what can we say about a story about God? Surely it takes a lifetime to learn. And even then it still falls short. And not partially short, as in the case of the cat. Infinitely short. What this means is that an infinite number of names, and an infinite number of stories, would never be enough to describe or contain God. And that, furthermore, means that we must allow many names, and many stories, if we want to know God at all.