readoldthings | Entries tagged with platonism

Creation

In Barddas, we read the following account of the Creation of the Universe, which is also an account of the creation of letters, and of music:

God, when there was in life and existence only Himself, proclaimed His Name, and co-instantaneously with the word all living and existing things burst wholly into a shout of joy; and that voice was the most melodious that ever was heard in music.

Parmenides

In the school of Iamblichus, one's education in the philosophy of Plato was crowned with two dialogues, the Timaeus and Parmenides. Timaeus, it was said, is concerned with physics, Parmenides with metaphysics. The bulk of Timaeus is occupied with a mythical account of the creation of the Universe by God-- what the eponymous character, a Pythagorean named Timaeus, calls "the likely story." The bulk of Parmenides, meanwhile, is occupied with a discussion of the nature of the One, or the First Principle of existence, by its own eponymous character, the Eleatic philosopher Parmenides.

The discourse of Parmenides on the One consists of eight hypotheses, each of which considers the implications either for the One or the Many (that is, the others, everything besides the First Principle) if the one either exists or does not exist. Here are the first three:

Hypothesis 1: If One. Yes, that sentence lacks a verb. The first hypothesis considers the One on its own. If anything at all can be said of the One, including its existence or nonexistence, then the One is no longer the One. This is because anything we might say about it adds something to it. Even if we say "The One exists," then we already have two terms: "The One" and "exists." Or, "Oneness and "Existence," or "One" and "Being." The One of the First Hypothesis is simply One. Thus we see that the First Principle is above even existence. That is why it is simply called "The One," and even to say this is to say immeasurably too much.

Hypothesis 2: If the One is. The moment the One exists, we have two terms, which we can call The One and Existence or Being. But we will see that if we look at each of these, they also contain two terms: The One which is has both oneness and being; the being of the One which is has both being and oneness; the oneness of the being of the One that is has both being and oneness; and so on, unto infinity. Thus the very moment the One comes into being, infinity also comes into being, and every possibility down to the last of things. To say it another way:

Hypothesis 3: Consequences for the Many if the One is. If the One is, then the Many will become One, both entirely and individually. That is: lacking oneness, the many have in no way any identity, because to be anything is to be one thing, and, in the absence of the One, there is no One Thing. If the One exists, however, each of the many is itself one, and also the Many as a whole are One, or One Whole.

Return to Barddas

The account of Creation in Barddas is given as a sentence, "God, when there was life and existence only in Himself, proclaimed His Name, and co-instantaneously with the word all living and existing things burst wholly into a shout of joy; and that voice was the most melodious that ever was heard in music." But this is actually an ordered series, in which the whole of theology is contained.

God : The One

When there was life and existence only in Himself : The One Being

Proclaimed his Name: For something to be named, it must be differentiated in some way from other things.

And co-instantaneously with the word all living and existing things burst wholly into a shout of joy : The moment the One Being exists, the Many exist as well, and each, containing all that is God within themselves, burst entirely into a shout of joy

And that voice was the most melodious that ever was heard in music : Music is harmony, and the "most melodious" is the "most harmonious." This is the ordered Whole which is brought forth into being by the creative power of the One.

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.

In the Phaedrus, Plato tells us:

All soul is immortal, for that which is ever in motion is immortal. But that which while imparting motion is itself moved by something else can cease to be in motion, and therefore can cease to live; it is only that which moves itself that never intermits its motion, inasmuch as it cannot abandon its own nature; moreover this self-mover is the source and first principle of motion for all other things that are moved.

Now, compare with the Fourteenth Proposition of Proclus's Elements of Theology:

Every being is either immovable or moved. And if moved, it is either moved by itself, or by another: and if it is moved by itself it is self-motive, but if by another it is alter-motive. Every nature, therefore, is either immovable, self-motive, or alter-motive.

For it is necessary, since there are alter-motive natures, that there also should be that which is immovable, and the self-motive nature, which is a medium between them. For if every alter-motive thing is moved because it is moved by another, motions will be either in a circle, or they will proceed to infinity. But neither will they be in a circle, nor proceed ad infinitum, since all beings are limited by the Principle of things, and that which moves is better than that which is moved. Hence there will be something immovable, which first moves. But if this be so, it is necessary that the self-motive exist. For if all things should stop, what will that be which is first moved? It cannot be the immovable, for this is not naturally adapted to be moved; nor the alter-motive, [14] for that is moved by another. It remains, therefore, that the self-motive nature is that which is primarily moved. It is this, too, which unites alter-motive natures to that which is immovable, being in a certain respect a medium, moving and at the same time being moved: for of these, the immovable moves only, but the alter-motive is moved only. Every thing, therefore, is either immovable, or self-motive, or alter-motive.

Corollary.— From the premises, therefore, it is evident, that of things which are moved, the self-motive nature is the first; but that of things which move other things the immovable is the first.

From this, we can derive the following doctrines:

1. All thought can be classed under movement, both becuase it is the form of movement appropriate to the Astral level of being, and because it is (usually) tied to physical movement in the human brain.

2. The ordinary course of thought is almost entirely automatic. Our thoughts are being moved, but we are not the cause. Though alive, we bear a resemblance to that which is dead or soulless, because soulless matter is always moved. Plato goes on to tell us: "Any body that has an external source of motion is soulless, but a body deriving its motion from a source within itself is animate or ensouled." Habitual, addictive, unchosen behvaior is seen as being caused by ghosts in the Chinese tradition, and people who give themselves over to such behavior become ghosts themselves. This is no mere metaphor. In modern America we refer to such people as "zombies," and too often we are all zombies.

3. Insofar as we gain control over the movement of our thoughts, we become self-motive, and take a step closer to the Divine. We cease to be dead and become alive.

This is what is meant by the following passages from the Barddas:

Question. In what place is Annwn?

Answer. Where there is the least possible of animation and life, and the greatest of death, without other condition.

...

Q. What wert thou before thou didst become a man in the circle of Abred?

A. I was in Annwn the least possible that was capable of life, and the nearest possible to absolute death, and I came in every form, and through every form capable of a body and life, to the state of man along the circle of Abred, where my condition was severe and grievous during the age of ages, ever since I was parted in Annwn from the dead, by the gift of God, and His great generosity, and His unlimited and endless love.

4. Prior to the self-motive is the immovable: That which, while imparting movement to others, remains entirely still in itself. This is what is meant by Intellect or Divine Mind. It is only from this place of stillness that we can truly choose, because only that which is in stillness can choose either to move or not to move.

It follows that our Great Pilgrimage is from Annwn, which is almost altogether alter-motive; through the circles of Abred, in which we attain to the self-motive; and to Gwynvyd, at which stillness becomes possible. We must then either divide Gwynvyd and say that its lower part is self-motive, its higher part immovable, or else we must say that it is the Self-Motive and, at its height, the Immovable, but that the Ultimate Immovable is beyond Gwynvyd. How can that be? The extremity of Gwynvyd borders Ceugant, and here is the closest to stillness and immovability that may be attained, but as all creatures have their origin and their being in the One, which is God, all creaturely stillness is surpassed by the eternal divine stillness. And so:

Ultimate Stillness is found only in the One, in Ceugant beyond all Gwynvyd.

Ultimate Death is found only in the Cythraul darkness below all Annwn.

It is better to be able to function on multiple levels of existence than one only. Therefore, our journey is not merely to enter into the final stillness, but to become able to move from stillness to self-motion, from self-motion to alter-motion, according as we choose. But we can only choose rightly if we are united to God.

This has further implications for the work of meditation. It seems to me that ordinary thinking is nearly always alter-motive. The work of discursive meditation is the work of becoming self-motive. The final work is to become immovable. But the immovable which never moves more closely resembles the Dead than the Living. The goal, rather, is to become immovable and yet able to impart motion. The immovable cannot be influenced; the self-motive is able to act. But the alter-motive too has its uses: the work of "creating good habits" is precisely the work of putting the power of alter-mobility to good use.

The Name of Nature

In the Oracles we are told:

Look not upon Nature, for her name is fatal.

We saw yesterday that mathematical principles are media which link the Sensible World of our experience to the Intelligible World of pure mind. The term that Plotinus uses for such principles is logoi, the plural of Logos. Now, like everything else, the logoi exist at a particular level of reality. They aren't sensible-- you cannot see or touch or hold the Pythagorean Theorem-- but they are directly involved in shaping matter. Their level of being is usually referred to simply as Nature, the generator of the physical world.

This is what the verse in the Oracles cited above is referring to. This is another area where we find difficulty in working with some of the ancient texts. To us, this sentence, "Look not upon Nature, for her name is fatal" means something like, "You're going to be killed if you go into the woods." We're left to assume that the Oracle is referring to Jason or some such thing.

Of course, this isn't the case at all. "Fatal," in this context, refers to "fate." In other words, Nature is deterministic. 1+1 always equals 2, whether in the case of two monkeys, two stars, or two atoms; there are no other possible outcomes. The logoi determine matter.

As we have seen, mathematical propositions are not the only types of logoi. Logical formula are another. If all p are q; And if s is p; Then s is also q. This is true for all objects p, q, and s. All men are mortal. Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. All crows are black. Jim is a crow, and therefore Jim is black. All coffee is healing to the soul, including the cup I am about to make. And so on.

The games of Eric Berne and the Drama Triangle of Stephen Karpman are also logoi, and also deterministic. When one is drawn into a dramatic triangle, one takes on the assigned role regardless of the other players. A Hero is a Hero whether their Villain is Zionism, Terrorism, Globalism, Fascism, Black Lives Matter or Ben Shapiro.

But learning these things has been greatly useful to us. We study mathematics in order to reason numerically, logic in order to learn to think clearly, transactional psychology in order to act deliberately. So what does the Oracle mean when it tells us not to look upon Nature?

One of the most important Occult maxims tells us, "What you contemplate you imitate." This was a truth well known to the ancients. The act of contemplation belongs to Intellect, and Intellect ultimately unites with whatever it looks upon. Spend too much time looking upon the deterministic logoi of Nature, not employing them properly, as a ladder to the superior realms, but simply as tools for the manipulation of matter, and you too will become deterministic.

This, of course, explains one of the oddest features of modern life-- why our best scientists are so unbearably stupid.

And of course, this has important implications for Druidry and similar traditions as forms of "Nature Spirituality." Nature in the sense used by the Oracles is everywhere, at all times. But right now I'm sitting at my desk, in my house, staring at a computer. After I press "Send" I'm going to go on a walk in the woods out back. Probably I'll bring that coffee I was just talking about with me, and give some as an offering to the genii loci. I'll find a place to meditate, maybe do some qigong, certainly pray to the spirit of the place. It's obvious to anyone that if I refer to "nature spirituality," I'm talking about the walk in the woods, not the time spent sitting at a computer. And so we see that by "Nature" we mean something a little different from Nature as a plane of being. No-- "Spirituality" as a class of activity must refer to anagoge or anagogy, that is, the elevation of the awareness to higher levels of being. This can be accomplished by various means, including art, physical movement, the reading of sacred scripture. When we say "Nature spirituality," in this case, we are using the word "Nature" in its more common form, meaning something like "The out of doors" or, better, "That which is not created by Man." Nature spirituality, then, is anagogy accomplished in the out of doors, by means of encountering the logoi of Nature in Nature.

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

All number has also an elevating effect; it raises the mind out of the foam and flux of generation to the contemplation of Being.

And:

Let our second branch of education be geometry... The use of geometry, to which I refer, is the assistance given by it in the contemplation of the Idea of Good, and the compelling the mind to look at true Being, and not at generation only.

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:

to our higher purpose no science [than arithmetic] can be better adapted; but it must be pursued in the spirit of a philosopher, not of a shopkeeper. It is concerned, not with visible objects, but with abstract truth

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

the present mode of pursuing these studies, as any one who is the least of a mathematician is aware, is mean and ridiculous; they are made to look downwards to the arts, and not upwards to eternal existence. The geometer is always talking of squaring, subtending, apposing, as if he had in view action; whereas knowledge is the real object of the study. It should elevate the soul, and create the mind of philosophy; it should raise up what has fallen down, not to speak of lesser uses in war and military tactics, and in the improvement of the faculties.

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.

Mathematical being necessarily belongs neither among the first nor among the last and least simple of the kinds of being, but occupies the middle ground between the indivisible realities and divisible things characterized by ever variety of composition and differentiation. The unchangeable, stable, and incontrovertible character of the propositions about it shows that it is superior to the kinds of things that move about in matter. But the discursiveness of mathematical procedure, its dealings with its subjects as extended, and its setting up of different prior principles for different objects--- these give to mathematical being a rank below that indivisible nature that is completely grounded in itself.

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.

Maybe I should have mentioned that we'd be closed for Columbus Day. But I suppose I'm a creature of an older world, one in which heroes were not despised as being subject to the same evils as the rest of us, but honored for achieving greatness despite being subject to the same evils as the rest of us.

In any case, what I want to talk about today is something quite different.

A few months ago I became aware of a scholar named Russel Gmirkin, and his theories on the origin of the Bible. These pertain directly to this blog and to what has become its main focus. In this post I want to briefly outline Gmirkin's ideas, my take on them, and why I felt it was important to open the discussion today. This post is necessarily going to skim the surface of some very deep waters. I'd ask readers familiar with these ideas to be patient, as I'll need to introduce them in a rather simplified form and it will take some time to fill them out.

Who Wrote the Pentateuch?

In the standard interpretation, the Pentateuch, or the first five books of the Bible, were written over several centuries, starting around 1000 B.C. and winding up no later than 450 B.C. This interpretation itself is revisionist. Traditionally, these books were believed to have been written by Moses himself sometime shortly after the exodus from Egypt. Some people still believe this. The sorts of circles that believe in "Biblical inerrancy," profession of Mosaic authorship is a kind of test of faith. I don't personally understand this form of Christianity, and every encounter I've ever had with it has left me shaking my head and wondering what the appeal could possibly be. And so I won't say much more of it. The 1000-500 B.C. interpretation was the one that I learned, and I was unaware until this past Summer that it had been challenged in a serious way. But challenged it has been.

One of the major themes, or perhaps the major theme, I've been developing on this blog has been the application of the ideas found in Plato and his successors to the spiritual traditions into which I've personally been initaited, be it Roman Catholicism or Revival Druidry. The ease with which this can be done shouldn't surprise us. The parallels between the ideas of Plato and those found in the Bible were obvious to the ancients. As the books of the Pentateuch were ascribed to Moses, who had lived a thousand years before Plato, it seemed obvious that Plato and other Greek philosophers had studied with Jewish teachers and been influenced by the Mosaic writings. This is discussed by various Church Fathers, including Origen, who mentions in his Contra Celsum that Pythagoras and Plato had both been influenced by Moses; Eusebius, who wrote, "What is Plato but Moses writing in Attic Greek?"; and others. It was this idea that allowed Philo of Alexandria to contribute to the development of Middle Platonism, despite being a Jew and not a pagan.

But what if the chain of influence actually went in the other direction? Apparently, no one thought of this until 1993, when a scholar named Niels Peter Lemche noted that external evidence for the existence of the Pentateuch only appears in the record after the Third Century B.C. Following Lemche, Gmirkin undertook to date the Pentateuch based on available evidence, and concluded that it was in fact written by Jewish scholars in Alexandria around the year 270 B.C.

Caveats

Now, "No one noticed it until smart people like us finally evolved 2,000 years later" is an enormous red flag, and it's the sort of thing that we find all over historical scholarship, archaeology, and, above all, anything having to do with the origins of Christianity. Gmirkin's works are only available at academic prices, and so in order to figure out what he has to say, it's necessary for most of us without access to university libraries to follow the old workaround of reading the introductions and summaries on Amazon and listening to as many podcast interviews with the author as we can. If you do this, you'll find that Gmirkin's interviewers regularly reveal themselves to be totally insincere, more interested in pushing "New Atheist" propaganda than seriously thinking about these issues. Podcasts like "MythVision" on YouTube combine occasionally interesting scholarship with an obvious agenda and a deeply unpleasant attitude. In many of these interviews, one is reminded very much of the work of Morton Smith, whose book Jesus the Magician combines a very interesting discussion of ancient magic with obvious anti-Christian bigotry and the constant oozings of Smith's own deeply unpleasant personality.

And so the first caveat in approaching Gmirkin's work is that he is working in a field with an agenda, and that it isn't too much to call that agenda is the "deconstruction" and destruction of traditional Western culture, and Christianity above all.

The second caveat is simply to always bear in mind the problem of fraud and dishonesty in the academy. It's simply the case that, at this moment in time, much of what comes out of the academy is nonsense and deliberate lies. I don't know Mr. Gmirkin and I won't libel him here. He seems sincere. But I simply don't trust professors on principle, and I don't recommend that you do either.

Back to Gmirkin

All that said, the evidence that Gmirkin has gathered is compelling. And to be quite honest with you, the most compelling evidence of all is simply to read Plato, already being acquainted with the Judeo-Christian tradition. It becomes clear that either Plato was indeed influenced by Moses, as both ancient authorities and modern scholars like Margaret Barker (a very interesting woman, deserving a post of her own at some point) believe, or that Gmirkin and his school is right.

Both the theological and moral innovations attributed to Christianity and Judaism are equally present in the works of Plato.

In Plato's Crito, Socrates, in prison awaiting execution, is given the chance to escape. His friends have bribed the guards; there is a ship waiting. Won't he come to safety? Socrates refuses, teaching that one must never return injustice for injustice. In this he anticipates both the moral core and the narrative climax of the New Testament.

In I Alcibiades, we learn that to follow the rule of the passions is to be identical with a slave. In Theaetetus, we learn that our goal should be to become like God. In the Republic, we are taught to see this world as a cave of shadows, and the real world as a spiritual reality brought into being by the Idea of the Good, which is an image or Son of the Good Itself. We are also taught that God can only be seen as good and unchangeable; an ideal society would abandon the teaching of Homer and Hesiod because they portray the gods and heroes as evil and given to change. In the Timaeus, we learn of the Demiurge, a good deity who created the universe and who gave the rule of the material world to his offspring, the secondary gods. In the Laws, we are given the constitution of an ideal society. This society venerates its traditional gods with temples and festivals, but looks to the One God above all. In Laws we are given a definition of love: "To will the good of another"; this is the definition preserved in the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church. We are given a law for marriage: A man should have one wife, and if he is caught with anyone else, including another man or a slave, he should be punished with a loss of citizenship. Again and again, the moral teachings of Christianity are anticipated by Plato.

Wild Speculations

For some time I've been wondering whether Christianity were not deliberately created by Platonist philosophers in late Antiquity, rather than evolving naturally out of Judaism as we've been told. I had been considering this, and whether I should talk about it, before I encountered Gmirkin. I was planning on writing a post entitled "Wild Speculations," which would go over the evidence, and conclude by saying, "I don't think that this is true. But I think that htere is a 10% chance it is true." Gmirkin's work would seem to bolster the case. And so I still don't know that I think it's true, but now I think that there is a 20% chance it is true.

But here is where Gmirkin's take and mine differ. In his iterviews, Gmirkin portrays Plato as a kind of great historical supervillain, a "dark genius" (actual quote) secretly manipulating us all from behind the scenes.

He never stops to ask what seems to be the obvious question:

What if Platonism is true?

It never seems to occur to him to notice that the world into which Plato was born was one in which people were regularly sacrificed to the gods, in which killing babies was perfectly normal, genocide was the standard way of war, and in which "goodness" and "brute, physical strength" were more or less identical. Into that world Plato introduced the idea that justice is not the same as taking what one wants, happiness is not identical with pleasure, and the sort of courage that leads to success in war is the least of the virtues. Plato's world was emphatically not ours.

And so my view is that, if this theory is correct, then we have Plato and his followers to thank for the fact that we live in a world in which most of us don't believe that we ought to regularly ought to barbecue human beings or leave babies to be devoured by wolves, and in which we have some knowledge, however partial, of the existence of the God of the Universe, and not merely the particular gods of the Earth. Raise a statue to the Divine Plato, pour out some beer in his name, because it may be ultimately due to him that you won't have to worry about being speared and hung from a tree in honor of Odin or eaten at a feast of Huitzilipochtli.

Something Is Moving

The reason that I felt compelled to post this today is that I logged onto JMG's blog this morning and saw that there was a lengthy discussion of Gmirkin and the possibilities he has raised there yesterday. These sorts of things happen very often-- I write something, or I come up with an idea, and then I find that other people with whom I share a connection are talking about the same thing at the same time or just before or just after, but unconnected with me. These sorts of synchronicities are the traces of forces moving in the higher worlds, like ripples in the water.

In the last few years, Plato has exploded; I see people talking about him everywhere, when I never used to. And now the conversation, guided by unseen hands, has moved in this direction. In the unseen world, something is moving, and it's telling me that we need to talk about this now. But why? That's what I want to explore this week.

The Journey Through Abred

In Barddas, we read the following dialogue:

Q. How often may one fall in Abred?

A. No one will fall once of necessity, after it has been once traversed, but through negligence, from cleaving to ungodliness, until it preponderates over godliness, a man will fall in Abred. He will then return to the state of man, through every form of existence that will be necessary for the removal of the evil, which was the cause of his fall in Abred. And he will fall only once in Abred on account of the same ungodliness, since it will be overcome by that fall; nevertheless, because of many other impieties he may fall in Abred, even numberless times, until every opposition and Cythraul, that is, all ungodliness, shall have been vanquished, when there will be an end to the Abred of necessity.

Q. How many have fallen in Abred? and for what cause have they fallen?

A. All living beings below the circle of Gwynvyd have fallen in Abred, and are now on their return to Gwynvyd. The migration of most of them will be long, owing to the frequent times they have fallen, from having attached themselves to evil and ungodliness; and the reason why they fell was, that they desired to traverse the circle of Ceugant, which God alone could endure and traverse. Hence, they fell even unto Annwn, and it was from pride, which would ally itself with. God, that they fell, and there is no necessary fall as far as Annwn, except from pride.

The One and the Many

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

Proposition 2. Every thing which partakes of The One is alike one and not one.

For though it is not The One itself — since it participates of The One and is therefore other than it is — it experiences [2] The One through participation, and is thus able to become one. If therefore it is nothing besides The One, it is one alone, and will not participate of The One but will be The One itself. But if it is something other than The One, which is not The One but a participant of it, it is alike one and non-one, — one being, indeed, since it partakes of oneness, but not oneness itself. This therefore is neither The One itself, nor that which The One is. But, since it is one and at the same time a participant of The One, and on this account not one per se, it is alike one and not one, because it is something other than The One. And so far as it is multiplied it is not one; and so far as it experiences a privation of number or multitude it is one. Every thing, therefore, which participates of The One is alike one and not one.

Proposition 3. Every thing which becomes one, becomes so by the participation of The One, and is one so far as it experiences the participation of The One.

For if the things which are not one become one, they doubtless become so by a harmonious alliance and association with each other, and experience the presence of The One, though they are not that which The One is. Hence they participate of The One, so far as they allow themselves to become one. But if they are already one, they will not become one: for that which is, does not become that which it already is. But if they become one from that which was previously not one, they will possess The One, since a certain one was ingenerated in their nature. [And this ingenerated one must be derived from The One itself. Everything, therefore, which becomes one, becomes so by the participation of The One, etc.]

Proposition 4. Every thing which is united is different from The One itself.

For if it is united it will participate in a certain respect of The One, so far as it is rightly said to be united. That, however, which is a participant of The One is both one and not one. But The One itself is not both one and not one: for if this was so, again the one which is in it would have both of these, and this would take place ad infinitum, if there was no One itself at which it is possible to stop; but every thing being one and not one, there will be something united, which is different from The One. For if The One is the same as the united, it will be infinite multitude. And in a similar manner each of the things of which the united consists will be infinite multitude. Every thing, therefore, which is united is different from The One itself.

Transmigration

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

Socrates: The soul which has been polluted, and is impure at the time of her departure, and is the companion and servant of the body always, and is in love with and fascinated by the body and by the desires and pleasures of the body, until she is led to believe that the truth only exists in a bodily form, which a man may touch and see and taste, and use for the purposes of his lusts,—the soul, I mean, accustomed to hate and fear and avoid the intellectual principle, which to the bodily eye is dark and invisible, and can be attained only by philosophy;—do you suppose that such a soul will depart pure and unalloyed?

Cebes: Impossible.

Socrates: She is held fast by the corporeal, which the continual association and constant care of the body have wrought into her nature.

Cebes: Very true.

Socrates: And this corporeal element, my friend, is heavy and weighty and earthy, and is that element of sight by which a soul is depressed and dragged down again into the visible world, because she is afraid of the invisible and of the world below—prowling about tombs and sepulchres, near which, as they tell us, are seen certain ghostly apparitions of souls which have not departed pure, but are cloyed with sight and therefore visible.

Cebes: That is very likely, Socrates.

Socrates: Yes, that is very likely, Cebes; and these must be the souls, not of the good, but of the evil, which are compelled to wander about such places in payment of the penalty of their former evil way of life; and they continue to wander until through the craving after the corporeal which never leaves them, they are imprisoned finally in another body. And they may be supposed to find their prisons in the same natures which they have had in their former lives.

Cebes: What natures do you mean, Socrates?

Socrates: What I mean is that men who have followed after gluttony, and wantonness, and drunkenness, and have had no thought of avoiding them, would pass into asses and animals of that sort. What do you think?

Cebes: I think such an opinion to be exceedingly probable.

Socrates: And those who have chosen the portion of injustice, and tyranny, and violence, will pass into wolves, or into hawks and kites;—whither else can we suppose them to go?

Cebes: Yes, said Cebes; with such natures, beyond question.

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.

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.

Over the course of this series, we've examined the transactional analysis model of social psychology created by Eric Berne. We've looked at the Drama Triangle of Stephen Karpman. We've discovered that much of our lives, and above all our relationships-- or what we consider to be relationships-- can be understood as destructive social games. These games play out unconsciously, without our control, all the time, and are responsible for a great deal of the misery that we experience.

Now it's time to talk about what we can do about it.

...And here, it feels necessary to hedge a little bit. The work of un-learning the sorts of behaviors that we're talking about is the work of a lifetime. In a real sense, it is the goal of all real spiritual practice, as it is identical with what Eliphas Levi called the Great Work: "The creation of a man by himself, especially the total conquest of his faculties and his future."

This is a tall order, and precisely how to do it is not going to fit into a short blog post. What I propose to do in this post is to provide a rough

Psychic Anatomy

I'm going to use Plato's tripartite model of the soul in this post. I've discussed this so many times that readers here are probably sick of hearing about it by now. In case anyone is tuning in for the first time, the soul can be divided into three parts:

Epithymia. This consists of all of our instincts and appetites; everything that we share with the lower animals. When you're hungry or tired or "in the mood," that's the Epithymia at work.

Thymos. This consists of the social emotions, including the desire for success and the instinct toward honorable conduct. C

Nous. This is the reasoning part of the soul. The nous itself is further divided into mere sense-knowledge ("I see a three-sided object"); opinion ("All three-sided shapes are triangles"), reason (Given the height of the triangle and the length of its base, its area is x); and intellection (knowledge of higher realities, inexpressible in language.)

Each of these has its proper role, both individually and in relation to one another. The state in which each part of the soul performs its correct function in relation to the other two is the definition of Justice give by Plato in the Republic; a Just man or woman is precisely that person whose soul is properly ordered. In the discussion to follow, I'm going to suggest specific practices aimed at the purification of each of the parts of the soul. Let's take these in order.

The Purification of the Nous

Let us begin with the nous, as it is is the highest part of the soul.

Prayer and Ritual

We will find that we get nowhere without divine aid. This aid must be encountered in two ways: Prayer and Ritual.

By prayer I mean the direct invocation and communication with divine beings. Most of us know what prayer is, and so I don't know that I need to say a great deal about it. One thing that may be helpful to note: Many people from Protestant backgrounds have been raised to believe that prayer must be spontaneous, "from the heart." They make Jesus's condemnation of "vain repetitions" into a condemnation of all repetition, and therefore refuse to engage in formal or liturgical prayer. Often, cradle Protestants carry this attitude with them when they convert to other religions, or to liturgical forms of Christianity.

And then they sit down to pray find that they have no idea what to say.

If that's you-- whether your religious orientation is Christian or otherwise-- let me suggest another approach. Liturgical prayer is a technology; its intention is to invoke the presence of the Divine, in whatever form. Once invoked, the right thing to say is--

Nothing at all.

Remember that the highest part of the soul extends beyond the reasoning mind; it extends, therefore, beyond the sorts of thoughts that can be formed into words.

A simple but very effective form of prayer is to simply light a candle, say or sing a liturgical prayer out loud, and then be silent. Feel the presence of the god or power you have invoked. Don't feel the need to ask them anything; simply be aware of their presence. If you feel nothing, that's okay. Just be silent. Pay attention to whatever thoughts come into your mind. Remain in stillness for a few minutes, and then blow out your candle.

This is where prayer bleeds into the second of the two practices, ritual. Rituals are best when performed with two or more persons, but very often this isn't possible. If you happen to be a part of a large religious organization, then you're in luck, and all you need to do is to attend services regularly, but for many of us, ritual is something that we have to do by ourselves. In either case, though, the purpose of ritual was neatly expressed by Carl Jung as "the externalization of the archetypes of the Collective Unconscious." The archetypes, in Jung's theory, are those universal forces that lurk deep in the background of the human mind, and typically act through us without our knowledge or our consent. (If that sounds familiar, given our recent discussions, stay tuned; I hope to discuss Jung at length sometime in the near future.)

It is important not to treat prayer or ritual as a way of getting God or the gods to do something for you. God is not a genie, or a vending machine. The purpose of prayer is not to change God, to get Him to do what you want-- it's to change you, to make you more like him.

Study and Self-Examination

These work on the next two faculties of the nous, the dianoetic and doxastic powers-- that is, the reason and the opinion.

By Study, in this context, I especially mean studying those sorts of texts which help us to understand and unlock the hidden parts of the soul. Books like Berne's Games People Play, or books discussing Stephen Karpman's work (there are very many available these days) are one option. There are others, depending on the approach you prefer.

Develop the habit of reading slowly, and then setting aside time to carefully reflect upon what you have read. This can be blended into prayer through the practice of lectio divina (divine reading). Lectio divine is a traditional mode of meditation taught in the Roman Catholic Church, but it can be profitably employed by anyone; you can find simple instructions here. Some books, like modern fiction novels, can be read in the way that you watch a movie-- quickly, passively, and for entertainment. These sorts of books will not do the work of purifying your nous or changing your behavior, at least not in a way that you can choose consciously. The sorts of books I recommend here must be studied and considered carefully, and in so doing, they become initiations into higher modes of thinking. In this context I especially recommend Plato's Republic. Please, no abridgements or just extractions of the Allegory of the Cave-- read the entire thing cover to cover.

We must study the works of others in order to gain knowledge of how to work with the soul and a model for how to approach it. Whether you're reading Eric Berne or Plato or smething else, however, what you are reading is a map. One cannot become an explorer, much less a conqueror, by simply studying maps. We must venture into the territory. And the territory, of course, is your own soul, your psyche. Once we have a model of how the psyche works, we need to spend time in self-examination. Read Berne, and carefully go through his "Thesaurus of Games." Do any jump out at you? These are the ones that you're probably playing. Reflect on your own life, and see how the game is playing out, how it's doing its work. Then, learn to watch yourself play. This is the first step to quitting the game. Do the same with Stephen Karpman, Carl Jung, or Plato. If you are a Christian, there are countless books describing the process of "examination of conscience." If you aren't Christian, read them anyway; you still have a concience.

Next Time, On Life Without Games

The nous is the highest part of the soul, but it does not function in isolation. Alone, against the world of the animal instincts, it fails. It needs the aid of the thymos, and ultimately the appetites must be brought under its power. How do we do this? We'll discuss that tomorrow.

We've seen that the teachings of the Mysteries conceived of our material world in a real sense the world of the Dead, with the God of the Dead as its ruler. And we've seen that, as long as we abide here, under Death's dominion, we are, in a certain sense, ghosts or phantoms. It remains to discuss the matter of our escape.

But in order to do that, we need to look again at the reason for our descent.

Plotinus tells us that we begin our existence still in the presence of God. This is why he can ask, "What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and It?"

The Barddas of Iolo Morganwg also teaches this:

God made all living beings in the circle of Gwynvyd at one breath

So why is it that, having been created in the presence of God, who is all Life, we have fallen to this world of Death?

Plotinus gives the answer as "self-will." Now, the Greek word here is tolma, and it has a very particular meaning in this context. Its ordinary meaning is something like "audacity." In the philosophy of the Pythagoreans, this sort of audacity prompts the generation of the Dyad from the Monad, the Two from the One. Geometrically, the generation of the Two from the One is the generation of the Line from the Point.

This can be a difficult idea to grasp, because, to our our ordinary way of thinking, there's nothing especially wrong with drawing a line rather than a point. And yet, the Pythagoreans of Plotinus's day identified the Dyad and the generation of the Line with the departure from God and the very origin of Evil!

How can this be?

I believe the answer is simple: Tolma is the state of affairs in which the higher part of the soul, the nous, is enslaved to the lower parts, the desires and appetites. In this condition we are driven here and there by our desires, conscious after a certain fashion but never in control of ourselves. We are, in effect, akin to ghosts or phantoms, or the figures of a dream. And the world in which we find ourselves is itself a kind of dream-world, or ghost world, entirely illusionary.

More on the Mysteries

There were many mystery schools in the ancient world. The Eleusinian is well known, and so are the Bacchic, the Orphic, and the Mysteries of Ceres.

The Mysteries were universally schools of initiation, in which the aspirants went through a series of personal purifications over a length of time, tyupically including abstinence from food, wine, and sex, and then enaced a ritual drama over the course of one or more days. The ritual drama was based on a myth and consisted of the re-enactment of that myth, and the myth was typically concerned with the descent of a deity into the Underworld and his or her restoration to life.

In the work of the Mysteries, and also in the work of Philosophy, we discover the truth about our condition. We encounter the God of this World and we transcend him. And in so doing, we can cease to see him as an enemy, or as a jailer, and start to see him, and his world, as a teacher. In the work of discovering our condition and reversing it, we cease to be subjective beings or ghosts, lost in a Dream World. We wake up from the dream, we die to this world, and we learn to function as human beings.

In ancient times, one Mystery School began to eclipse the others, due at once to its effectiveness, the enthusiasm of its initiates, and the ruthlessness of some of its leaders. But that it was a Mystery School like the others we may learn from the words of one of its great initiates:

What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection: Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. For he that is dead is freed from sin.

Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him: Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him. For in that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God. Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The Christian Mysteries and Druidry

Iolo again:

...but they would be gods, and attempted to traverse the Ceugant. This, however, they could not do, wherefore they fell down to Annwn, which unites with death and the earth, where is the beginning of all living owners of terrestrial bodies.

In another section of the Barddas we read the following:

Teacher. Dost thou know what thou art?

Disciple. I am a man by the grace of God the Father.

T. Whence earnest thou?

D. From the extremities of the depth of Annwn, where is every beginning in the division of the fundamental light and darkness.

T. How earnest thou here from Annwn?

D. I came, having traversed about from state to state, as God brought me through dissolutions and deaths, until I was born a man by the gift of God and His goodness.

T. Who conducted that migration?

D. The Son of God, that is, the Son of man.

T. Who is He, and what is His name?

D. His name is Jesus Christ, and He is none other than God the Father incarnate in the form and species of man, and manifesting visible and apparent finiteness for the good and comprehension of man, since infinitude cannot be exhibited to the sight and hearing, nor can there, on that account, be any correct and just apprehension thereof. God the Father, of His great goodness, appeared in the form and substance of man, that He might be seen and comprehended by men.

Conclusion

Here is the picture that emerges from all of this.

We have, all of us, our origin in the Divine. But we-- beings like us-- begin our existence as phantoms or ghosts, driven about by the winds of desire. This drives us to descend into the limits of the universe, which is material incarnation. In the language of mythology, this is described variously as Adam (Nous) and Eve (Life) succumbing to the temptation of the serpent (Desire), eating from the Tree of Knowlege, and descending into the material world (Skins of Animals), ruled by Sin and Death (Sublunar Demiurge); the rape of Persephone (Soul) while gathering flowers (material desires) by Hades (the Sublunar Demiurge) and her descent into the Underworld (material incarnation); the descent of Pwyll (mind) into Annwn (world of the Dead) and his agreement with Arawn (Lord of the Realm of the Dead, Sublunar Demiurge).

Iolo describes Jesus Christ as he who "conducts our migration" through Abred, as he is "God in the form of a Man." Now this makes sense of the teaching of Christ as the "Second Adam"-- he is literally Adam himself, having descended utterly into matter and risen, by slow degrees, to be restored to the spiritual realm; he stands in for and is all mankind, but he is also eternally God and eternally beyond material existence. In the same way, Perseophone is the Soul Itself, who must be restored to her mother, Ceres, the higher part of the Soul. Pwyll is the mind descending into Annwn, and in his triumphant return to his seat of Dyfed he demonstrates the way of ascent from Annwn/Abred into the light of Gwynfydd. Each of these figures may "conduct our migration." Each demonstreats the principles, and we may follow them by initiation into their mysteries, by cultivating virtue, and by spiritual practice including meditation and prayer. But follow we must.

Arawn, Lord of Annwn

The above is a stylized image intended as a depiction of Arawn, Lord of Annwn. The source is a Google image search; the image is also used by a Druid order hitherto unknown to me, apparently based in Washington. Annwn is, as we have seen, the realm of the Dead, and according to the Mabinogion, Arawn is its ruler.

The First Branch of the Mabinogion concerns the adventures of Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed. At the beginning of the story, Pwyll finds that he has offended Arawn, and agrees to do whatever the latter asks in order to make amends. Arawn asks Pwyll to change places with him. For a year and a day, Pwyll will wear his semblance, rule his castle, and sleep in his bed. At the end of this time, he will meet with Arawn's enemy, who contends with him for rulership of Annwn. Pwyll must give him a single blow, but not more than this.

Now, the Mabinogion is a literary and very much a medieval work, not ancient mythology, but traditional Celtic lore is woven into it, sometimes in a garbled fashion, and there is much we can learn from this story.

Pwyll's name means mind, perception or wisdom. During his time in Annwn, he lives in Arawn's home and sleeps in Arawn's bed, wearing Arawn's form. And Arawn's wife is the most beautiful in the world. Despite having every opportunity to have access to the lady, Pwyll declines, and does not lay a hand on her at night. At the end of his time, he delivers a single blow to Hafgan, Arawn's opponent, but refrains from striking again. Hafgan is defeated, the kingdom of Annwn is united under Arawn, and when Pwyll returns to his own realm of Dyfed he finds that it has prospered in his absence.

The Prince of Dyfedd and the Descent of the Soul

Let's look at this story in terms of the ideas we've been exploring.

Pwyll's name means intelligence or mind; he thus symbolizes the incorporeal part of man. His name is significant in another way too, which we'll come to. By descending into Annwn, he descends into the World of the Dead. This world, as we have seen, is the world of Matter. Thus Pwyll's descent into Annwn is the soul's descent into the body.

But it doesn't end there.

By agreeing to Arawn's terms, Pwyll has accepted Justice. During his sojourn in Annwn, Pwyll demonstrates self-mastery or Temperance, especially in his refusal of intimacy with Arawn's wife. Facing Hafgan, he demonstrates Courage; administering but a single blow, he demonstrates Wisdom. Having done these things, he is able to return to his own realm, and to discover that it has been well-governed in his absence. He faces the temptations of both sex and violence, and responds with virtue. His soul is now rightly ordered, with strength acting in service to reason, and the desires no longer given free reign.

Now it is clear that Pwyll and Arawn are mirrors of one another, and their respective kingdoms are also themselves. Pwyll's government of Annwn is also his government of Dyfed, and his transcendence of the limitations of the material world is his government over himself. His descent into Annwn is his incarnation in a physical body. His refusal of the temptations of the flesh allows him to unite his body under himself as ruler, and to begin the process of ascent from incarnation. He has, we may suppose, have faced Arawn in the forest hundreds of times before this in prior incarnations. Was his name "Pwyll," intelligence, before?

The Lord of Annwn and the Father of Lies

The Sophist is a dialogue of Plato whose subject seems straightforward, but may not be so.

One of Plato's concerns in his dialogues is the distinction of the real from its imitations. In the Gorgias, for example, he suggests that there is an art of health and strength, but also an art which imitates this. The first is the art of the doctor and the physical trainer, but the second is the art of the fashion artist the aesthetician. The first produces healthy bodies, but the second only creates a semblance of it. Or to give another example, the baker produces sweet foods which we love to eat; the doctor produces medicines, which are often foul but produce health. (At that time a doctor's job was to produce health, as odd as it may seem to us). Most of us prefer the semblance to the real thing, and this is our problem, but it doesn't say anything about the reality of the situation. If you were to set a doctor and an ice cream man before a jury of children, they'll obviously prefer the latter. Our souls, in their unpurified state, are those children.

According to Plato, the Sophist imitates the Philosopher in just this same way.

After a long discussion of the sophist's nature and how, exactly, he may be defined, the two characters in teh dialogue-- Theaetetus and the Elean Guest-- tell us the following:

Guest: Then we may class him as a wizard and an imitator of some sort.

Theaetetus: Certainly.

Guest: Come then, it is now for us to see that we do not again relax the pursuit of our quarry. We may asay that we have him enveloped in such a net as argument provides for hunting of this sort. He cannot shuffle out of this.

Theaetetus: Out of what?

Guest: Out of being somewhere within the class of illusionists.

Theaetetus: So far I quite agree with you.

Guest: Agreed then that we should at once quarter the ground by dividing the art of image making...

And so the sophist is explicitly declared to a magician or wonder-worker. The guest then divides the art of image-making into two forms, which will be very familiar to those who know anythign about the iconographic tradition in the Orthodox Church. There are images which are intended to resemble forms; these are called "icons." And then there are illusionary images, which are called "phantasms."

The dialogue then makes a metaphysical point about the existence of non-being.

The truth is, my friend, that we are faced with an extremely difficult question. This "appearing" or "seeming" without really "being," and the saying of something which yet is not true-- all these expressions have always been and still are deeply involved in perpelexity. It is very hard, Theaetetus, to find correct terms in which one may say or think that falsehoods have real existence...

And so the sophist imitates the philosopher in the same way that the baker imitates the doctor or the aesthetician the physical trainer. Where the philosopher leads the mind to truth, the sophist produces lies. In this way he is a kind of magician or wonder-worker, seducing the minds of wealthy young men. But-- critically-- the images themselves have a kind of reality, a being of non-being.

The Sophist and the Sublunar Demiurge

The Sophist appears to discuss a particular class of people in Plato's day, viz. phony philosophers who sold their teachings to the parents of rich kids for money. According to Iamblichus, this is only a surface meaning. The Sophist is not a mere pedant for hire. Rather, he is an image of a particular feature of Iamblichus's cosmology, the Sublunar Demiurge.

Now the word "demiurge," you probably know, refers to the creator of the material world. The work of the Demiurge is discussed at length in Plato's Timaeus. But to the later Platonists, there were three demiurgi. The first is the Father of the Demirurgi. The Second is the Heavenly Demiurge. And the third is the Sublunar Demiurge.

Remember that, on the cosmology of both the ancient and the medieval worlds, our physical world begins at the Moon. Above the Moon there is order and stability. The super-lunar cosmos-- that is, the spheres of the planets, the Sun, and the visible stars-- is thus an image of eternity. Beyond this is the eternal Heaven of God. Below the changeable Moon, we have the realm of change, process, division, and decay. We thus have three realms, which we can call the Sublunar, the Astral, and the Celestial. Or in our terms, Abred, the depth of which is Annwn, which is the realm of change and death; Gwynfydd, the starry realm of luminous life; and the invisible Ceugant.

Now each of these three realms has its ruling Power, who is an image of the ruler of the next realm up. This is its creator or Demiurge.

Were Iamblichus and the later Platonists correct in their beliefs regarding the Sophist? Well, we don't "really" know, but it would make sense. We know that Plato's inner teachings were not written down, but were kept secret. We know that in one of his letters, he tells us the following:

I must expound it to you in a riddling way in order that, should the tablet come to any harm “in folds of ocean or of earth,” he that readeth may not understand.

The matter stands thus: Related to the King of All are all things, and for his sake they are, and of all things fair He is the cause. And related to the Second are the second things and related to the Third the third. About these, then, the human soul strives to learn, looking to the things that are akin to itself, whereof none is fully perfect.

And we know that the Sophist was the first in a trilogy of dialogues, of which the first concerns the Sophist, the second, the Statesman, and the third was to have concerned the Philosopher. This would seem like an image of the three kings, the three demiurgi. (The Philosopher was either never written, was lost, or was kept secret.)

In any case, we have the image of a creator-god of this material world. We have a material world which is a world of illusions, and also a world of death. And consider the following, from the Chaldaean Oracles:

Stoop not down unto the Darkly-Splendid World; wherein continually lieth a faithless Depth, and Hades wrapped in clouds, delighting in unintellible images, precipitous, winding, a black ever-rolling Abyss; ever espousing a Body unluminous, formless and void.

That passage was used by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn specifically as an invocation of the element of Earth.

To be continued...

Accounts of the Fall

What is it that binds us here, to this world of darkness and shadow? Or, to put it in the terms that we've been exploring with Iolo Morganwg, what is the cause of our origin in Annwn and our long sojourn through the realm of evil in Abred?

Plotinus asked the same question:

What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and It?

Here is a part of his answer:

The evil that has overtaken them has its source in self-will, in the entry into the sphere of process, and in the primal differentiation with the desire for self ownership. They conceived a pleasure in this freedom and largely indulged their own motion; thus they were hurried down the wrong path, and in the end, drifting further and further, they came to lose even the thought of their origin in the Divine. A child wrenched young from home and brought up during many years at a distance will fail in knowledge of its father and of itself: the souls, in the same way, no longer discern either the divinity or their own nature; ignorance of their rank brings self-depreciation; they misplace their respect, honouring everything more than themselves; all their awe and admiration is for the alien, and, clinging to this, they have broken apart, as far as a soul may, and they make light of what they have deserted; their regard for the mundane and their disregard of themselves bring about their utter ignoring of the divine.

Before we discusss this passage, let's look at another selection, from the Fourth Ennead. Here Plotinus gives us what is my personal favorite account of hte mystical experience of Divine Union in all of our literature:

Many times it has happened: Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the Supreme...

But the state of union is not to last:

...yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the soul ever enter into my body, the soul which, even within the body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be.

As an aside, notice that the first descent is "from intellection to reasoning." Intellection is the state of higher knowing in which there is no distinction between the knower and the object of knowledge. I've talked about this many times, but it bears repeating: This is a concept that we have lost in the modern world, and lost in the English language. The closest English word for this state is "intuition," which 1. we typically denigrate, 2. even if we don't, we see as a kind of helpful but fleeting faculty, something less real than reasoning, and 3. has a different meaning anyway. In the older way of thinking, Intellection comes first. After intellection comes reason, which is the sort of discursive thought that enables us to grasp concepts like "If All A are B, and All B are C, then all A are C." That sort of reasoning is called ratio in Latin, and is the root of our word "rationalism." Rationalism, therefore, is at once a kind of cosmic regicide and self-decapitation, in which the existence of the Highest is denied and a lower raised up in its place.

The Entombment

But let's return to Plotinus. Considering the discussion of previous philosophers on the subject, he writes:

Heraclitus, who urges the examination of this matter, tells of compulsory alternation from contrary to contrary, speaks of ascent and descent, says that "change reposes," and that "it is weariness to keep toiling at the same things and always beginning again"; but he seems to teach by metaphor, not concerning himself about making his doctrine clear to us, probably with the idea that it is for us to seek within ourselves as he sought for himself and found.

Empedocles says that it is law for faulty souls to descend to this sphere, and that he himself was here because he turned a deserter, wandered from God, in slavery to a raving discord- reveals neither more nor less than Pythagoras and his school seem to me to convey on this as on many other matters; but in his case, versification

We have to fall back on the Divine Plato, who uttered many noble sayings about the soul, and has in many places dwelt upon its entry into body so that we may well hope to get some light from him.

Everywhere he expresses contempt for all that is of sense, blames the commerce of the soul with body as an enchainment, an entombment, and upholds as a great truth the saying of the Mysteries that the soul is here a prisoner. In the Cavern of Plato and in the Cave of Empedocles, I discern this universe, where the breaking of the fetters and the ascent from the depths are figures of the wayfaring toward the Intellectual Realm.

In the Phaedrus he makes a failing of the wings the cause of the entry to this realm: and there are Periods which send back the soul after it has risen; there are judgements and lots and fates and necessities driving other souls down to this order.

In all these explanations, he finds guilt in the arrival of the soul at body...

Now, the "failing of the wings" is a reference to Plato's model of the soul in the Phaedrus. In this dialogue, he presents the soul as a winged chariot pulled by two horses. One of the horses represents desire for things of the flesh. When the charioteer loses control of it, it crashes the whole thing towards the Earth-- the wings fail-- and here we are.

And the discussion of the body-as-tomb takes place both in the Cratylus and the Gorgias. In the latter, Plato wrote, "Perhaps we are actually dead, for I once heard one of our wise men say that we are now dead, and that our body is a tomb, and that that part of the soul in which dwell the desires is of a nature to be swayed and to shift to and fro." The line about "being swayed to and fro" is almost certainlymeant to call to mind the ghosts of the Underworld, who are often portrayed as powerless and nearly mindless shades:

Then the ghosts of the dead swarmed out of Erebus – brides, and young men yet unwed, old men worn out with toil, girls once vibrant and still new to grief, and ranks of warriors slain in battle, showing their wounds from bronze-tipped spears, their armour stained with blood. Round the pit from every side the crowd thronged, with strange cries, and I turned pale with fear. Then I called to my comrades, and told them to flay and burn the sheep killed by the pitiless bronze, with prayers to the divinities, to mighty Hades and dread Persephone. I myself, drawing my sharp sword from its sheath, sat there preventing the powerless ghosts from drawing near to the blood, till I might question Teiresias.’

The preceding comes from the Odyssey. At the bidding of Circe, Odysseus has gone to the realm of Hades to speak with the ghost of Teiresius, the seer. Why Teiresias? As Circe tells him, "His mind is still unimpaired, for even in death Persephone grants him mental powers, so that he alone has wisdom, while the others flit like shadows.”

Abred is Annwn

What emerges from all of this is the secret teaching of the Mystery Schools, hinted at by Plotinus above. While we perceive Annwn, the World of the Dead, as the lowest part of Abred, the truth is rather worse than that. Abred is Annwn, and as long as we remain here, bound to our body, enchanted by its desires, we remain in the world of the Dead.

At the beginning of this post, I shared the image of the Devil from the Waite-Smith tarot deck. In a dark world, he keeps two souls enchained. This is precisely the image of bodily life that Plato wants to share. And this is our condition in Abred: We are slaves of the Devil, who is Hades, the Lord of the Dead.

But again, how did this happen?

Pride and the Fall

In Barddas, Iolo gives us the following account of the Fall:

God made all living beings in the circle of Gwynvyd at one breath; but they would be gods, 3 and attempted to traverse the Ceugant. This, however, they could not do, wherefore they fell down to Annwn, which unites with death and the earth, where is the beginning of all living owners of terrestrial bodies.

Question. Where is Annwn?

Answer. In the extreme limits of the circle of Gwynvyd. That is, living beings knew not how to distinguish evil from good, and therefore they fell into evil, and went into Abred, which they traversed until they came back into the circle of Gwynvyd.

Q. What ignorance did they commit?

A. They would venture on the circle of Ceugant, and hence became proud; but they could not traverse it, consequently they fell into the circle of Abred.

And this account, of course, reminds us and is meant to remind us both of the fall of Lucifer and his angels, and of the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. This seems somewhat different from the accounts of Plato and Plotinus. But is it? Or is there a way that the method of escape and ascent given by Plato and Plotinus, by Iolo and the Druidic tradition, and by Jesus Christ and his disciple Saint Paul, are one and the same?

These are the questions that I'm going to explore next time.

Rushing to work today to make an 11:30 appointment, I looked down at my phone to make sure I had the time correct and discovered that the appointment had been canceled sometime between the time I left the house and that moment. And, looking at my phone, I managed to miss my exit, and drove some 20 more minutes into the mountains of Western Virginia before realizing what I had done. I now find myself sitting at a coffeeshop in a place called Purcellville, with several hours to kill, or to use.

And so I'd like to take the opportunity to discuss something that's frequently on my mind, which is the question of how we ought to read Plato's political writings, and what relevance they have to our modern politics.

Plato and Politics

Modern treatments of Plato very often take him as some sort of weird old politician. In College I was forced to read the Crito in a Political Philosophy class, and told nothing of its author except that he was very old and very dead, but that we ought to know something about what he had thought on political topics merely as a way of saying "People have been talking about these matters for some time now."

Plato does indeed discuss politics-- or, rather, law-- in the Crito, but he treats of political matters much more fully in the Republic, the Statesman, and the Laws, three dialogues which come out to nearly 700 pages between them. As my own copy of the Complete Works of Plato comes out to around 1700 pages, these 3 dialogues between them make up some 40% of the entire body of Plato's work. Since Platonism has become so central to my thinking and to what I'm trying to do with this blog and my work in general, I thought it was worth spending some time on this issue.

In this post, I'd like to give an overview of Plato's political views, discuss how we ought to approach Plato's politics and what relevance they have to our approach to Platonism as a spiritual discipline, and, finally, to see whether Platonic politics has any relevance to our modern world.

Before we do that, though, it is critical that we understand what "politics" means in Plato's world.

The Polis

The word "politics," as you probably know, is derived from "polis," which is the ancient Greek word for a city. And, as you probably also know, the Greek world was composed of city-states, which were countries so small they were limited to a single city. This is what I was taught, at any rate, and if you know any better than this you're further along than I was just a short while ago.

It is true that the political unit Plato was discussing was the polis and it is true that the polis is a city and that the reach of a particular government in ancient Greece did not extend beyond the reach of a particular polis. But matters are not as simple as that. The polis, you see, is not simply a smaller version of one of our modern states, nor is the government of a polis the equivalent to the US Congress on a smaller scale, or to the government of the town in which you live. The polis is not merely a smaller thing than the things that we have, it is a different kind of thing altogether.

The best book on this subject is The Ancient City, by a Frenchman named Fustel Coulanges; you ought to read the whole thing when you have a moment. In The Ancient City, Coulanges shows that, in the "cities" of the ancient world, the categories of human life that we currently separate under the headings "family" "religion" and "government" were not separate, but were a single category of experience called "the city" or "politics."

To illustrate how such a thing is possible, let's think about it in reverse. In our society, the life-categories "marriage" "child-rearing" and "residence" are combined under the single heading, "family." A "family" consists, ideally, of a married couple, sharing a home, and raising their children. To us, nothing in the world could be more natural; even where this system breaks down, it is still there in the background as something which is missed.

Imagine if we separated these things. Imagine a society in which husbands and wives don't live together-- the men live together with their friends and brothers in a dormitory or fraternity house, while the women have their own sorority, along with the youngest children. It's not that they don't get married-- they do. Husbands and wives go on dates and spend time together and sneak off into out of the way corners of town when they need some adult time. But they don't share a bed, and they don't share a house. And they don't raise children together-- the babies and young girls live with their mothers, yes, but men don't even raise their own sons. Instead, they raise their sisters' sons. When boys come of age, they are sent to live in their uncle's fraternity house, which is invariably in another city, since women move to a sorority house attached to their husband's fraternity, and it's considered somewhat incestuous to marry a girl from your home town. If a boy lacks an uncle, a suitable male relative is found for him, back in the mother's hometown-- but never his father.

Does that sound odd, or impossible? In fact, it's a very common social arrangement among certain tribes of the New Guinea highlands. So yes, it's very possible.

Now let us suppose that a similar living arrangement is found among our own descendants living right here in America sometime around the year 4500. Categories of life that seem to us to be obviously connected seem to them to be completely separate. Moreover, just as we pride ourselves on having separated the categories of "religion" and "government"-- and both from "family"-- much of their identity as a people and a culture revolves around their having had the wisdom to separate residence from marriage and marriage from child-rearing.

Given such a set of circumstances, what would our descendants make of a modern philosopher who wrote at length about spiritual issues, but regularly connected them with the family-- an institution which they either no longer had, or no longer had in the same form? If a modern philosopher-- I give no examples as I don't know that there is one-- wrote several books of detailed advice on household-management, describing the proper roles of father, mother, and children, but also filled them with detailed discussions and hints and allegories of a grand and universal spiritual system, what could these descendants of ours do with it? Dismiss it out of hand? If so they would lose an enormous contribution to human wisdom and human excellence, as well as (let us imagine) the root of many of their own ideas. But if they attempted to adopt our philosopher's recommendations as far as household management whole-cloth, they would need to burn their own civilization to the ground and start again from scratch. And even if they managed it-- as they probably wouldn't-- it would be at the cost of an enormous amount of suffering and death. And they probably wouldn't manage it; they'd probably just get a lot of people killed.

This, I argue, is precisely the position that we are in with regard to Plato's political writings. The polis that he wrote of does not exist, and the concepts that applied to it cannot be applied to our modern governments, as modern government-- this is critical-- is not the heir to the polis.

The Fire, the House, and the King

Let's go back and discuss ancient society, drawing, again, on Coulanges.

The basic unit of that society is the fireplace.

The fireplace? How is that possible?

In the ancient world the fire was-- as it still is today in India-- the living body of a god, or-- in the West-- a goddess, named Vesta at Rome and Hestia in Greece. Fire is a living being, and the fireplace-- the sacred hearth-- is a sacred altar. Every home has its fire, and lacking its fire, it is no home at all. The father, as head of the family, is also the high-priest of the religion of the hearth-fire. At the fire-- tended by his wife, the priestess-- the sacrifices are made every day to the spirits of the ancestors, the land on which the family lives, and the home in which they dwell. Sacrifices are made, too, to be sure, to the high gods and heroic ancestors that the family shares with its neighbors and its community as a whole, but at the microscopic level, each household is essentially a church and each family has its own, independent religion.

And each family is also a kind of political unit, with the father as its king.

In The Statesman, Plato discusses the nature of what he calls the True King, which is a leader who possesses the Science of Rulership. It's worth noting that, in the school of Iamblichus, The Statesman was read after The Sophist but before Philebus. In The Sophist, Plato discusses the nature of charlatan-philosophers called sophists, but the later Platonists understood him to also be discussing a being called the "Sublunar Demiurge," who is the trickster-god that creates the world that we experience with our senses, the exact equivalent of the Hindu Maya. The Philebus, meanwhile, is a discussion of the nature of the Good, which is the First God and Highest Principle. The Statesman must, therefore, also be understood as a dialogue about the nature of God Himself-- that is, the God that creates and governs the cosmos as a whole.

In the Statesman, Plato is explicit about the relationship between rulership of a city and rule of a household:

Stranger: Are we, then, to regard the statesman, the king, the slavemaster, and the master of a household as essentially one though we use all these names for them, or shall we say that four distinct sciences exist, each of them corresponding to one of the four titles?

....

Stranger: The science possessed by the True King is the Science of Kingship?

Socrates: Yes.

Stranger: The possessor of this science, then, whether he is in fact in power or has only the status of a private citizen, will properly be called a "statesman" since his knowledge of the art qualifies him for the title whatever his circumstances.

Socrates: Yes, he is undoubtedly entitled to that name.

Stranger: Then consider a further point. The slavemaster and the master of a household are identical.

Socrates: YEs.

Stranger: Furthermore is there much difference between a large household organization and a small-sized city, so far as the exercise of authority over it is concerned?

Socrates: None.

Stranger: Well, then, our point is clearly made. Once science covers all these several spheres and we will not quarrel with a man who prefers any one of the particular names for it; he can call it royal science, political science, or science of household management.

Layers of Meaning

All of Plato's dialogues were understood to have multiple layers of meaning. The Statesman is about the Science of political leadership, but it is also about how God rules the universe. The Republic, meanwhile, is supposedly a discussion of the ideal city, but Plato is explicit at the beginning of the dialogue that the city in quetsion is intended as an allegory of the soul:

Suppose [Here Socrates is speaking] that a short-sighted person had been asked by some one to read small letters from a distance; and it occurred to some one else that they might be found in another place which was larger and in which the letters were larger --if they were the same and he could read the larger letters first, and then proceed to the lesser --this would have been thought a rare piece of good fortune.

Very true, said Adeimantus; but how does the illustration apply to our enquiry?

I will tell you, I replied; justice, which is the subject of our enquiry, is, as you know, sometimes spoken of as the virtue of an individual, and sometimes as the virtue of a State.

True, he replied.

And is not a State larger than an individual?

It is.

Then in the larger the quantity of justice is likely to be larger and more easily discernible. I propose therefore that we enquire into the nature of justice and injustice, first as they appear in the State, and secondly in the individual, proceeding from the greater to the lesser and comparing them.

Summarizing

Let's summarize our argument before we proceed. Two major issues have emerged:

1. The polis of Plato is not a smaller form of a modern state. It is, rather, a different form of social organization, in which the categories of life that we currently separate under the headings "family," "religion," and "government" are combined. Plato's political arguments, therefore, cannot be applied to our current forms of government on a one to one basis.

2. Plato's political writings, like all of his writings, admit of more than one reading. What appears to be a discussion of an ideal ruler of a city can also be understood either as a description of God in his government of the universe, or as advice to the individual concerning the care of his own soul, which is regularly likened to a state with workers, soldiers, and leaders.

The Heir to the Polis

Let's consider the first issue.

Given the foregoing, the questions become: Do Plato's political theories have any applicability to our modern world as political theories? And, if so, can they be understood as applying to government, or are there other structures or organizations which might better be understood as heirs to the ancient polis?

Now, to a real extent, this is where we leave the domain of Truth and enter into the realm of Opinion. There are no fixed answers to these questions, and certainly Plato himself could not have anticipated them and gives no explicit guidance concerning them. So the following can only be my own view of hte topic.

That said, it's my view that Plato's writings on politics-- especially the three dialogues mentioned-- are very important, and very worth reading. But in a modern context, and perhaps especially in an American context, they have only minimal applicability to government as such. They work far better when applied to the lives of other heirs to the polis, including individuals and families, but also what are often called "civil society" organizations-- which can include anything from a church to a charity to a bowling league.

To illustrate what I mean, let's take another example from the Statesman, since it's currently open in front of me.

Toward the end of the dialogue, Plato describes the ways in which different virtues can be opposed to one another. Courage and Moderation, in particular, frequently come into conflict. Moreover, particular individuals often exhibit one personality type or the other, and these individuals then come into conflict. This leads to the ruin of hte state if individuals of either one type or hte other predominate. A state overrun by individuals of hte courageous type will be forever looking for conflicts with its neighbors, until it eventually antagonizes a larger power or a coalition of smaller powers and is overrun. A state dominated by the moderate type, meanwhile, will not fight even when it is necessary, and will soon find itself enslaved by its enemies. The wise statesman weaves together both types of individuals, so that they strengthen one another, allowing the state to fight or to make peace as necessary.

So far, this actually does seem like rather good advice as far as modern statecraft goes, even up to the level of global powers like the US and Russia.

But in the next part, Plato strays well beyond what is possible for any modern government. Having described the sort of education that unites the moderate and courageous types as the "divine link" between them, he now sets out to describe how to link them on the human level:

Socrates: But what are these links and how can they be forged?

Stranger: They are forged by establishing intermarriage between the two types so that the children of the mixed marriages are so to speak shared between them and by restricting private arrangements for marrying off daughters. Most men make unsuitable matches from the point of view of the betting of children of the best type of character.

...

Stranger: The moderate natures look for a partner like themselves, and so far as they can, they choose their wives from women of the quiet type. When they have daughters to bestow in marriage, once again they look for this type of character in the prospective husband. The courageous class does just the same thing and looks for others of the same type. All this goes on, though both types should be doing exactly the opposite.

Yes, he's arguing for exactly what we in the modern world call "eugenics," and which we know is a disaster in the hands of a government.

But does that mean that it's bad advice?

Consider that what Plato is saying here is "Marry someone whose strengths balance your weaknesses." The exact same idea is found in Carl Jung under the heading "Animus and Anima." And note that Plato very explicitly does not say something like "Men are aggressive and should therefore look for passive women to find balance," as one might expect from some of our modern "conservatives." No-- he says "Any person can be of the more active or more passive type, and both are necessary for a society. In a good marriage, an active woman is balanced by a passive man, or an active man by a passive woman." To my mind, that's exceedingly good advice-- to individuals. From a spiritual perspective, it can also be described as balancing fire and water or yin and yang energies.

As far as the Science of Kingship itself, this can be applied to any situation, from a political ruler to a church to a corporate boardroom. Anyone who has authority over any group of people, whether a nation or simply their own children, is a king, and can and should acquire and use the Science of Kingship.

Concluding: Who Is Above The Law?

After all this, I have to tell you that the best way to come to understand Plato's political writings is simply to read them. The Republic, Statesman and Laws are fun to read and, if you practice it, great sources of themes for discursive meditation. While you read them, ask yourself: How can I apply these ideas to my own life? Not to the ancient world which no longer exists, much less to (God help us) reforming society according to some ideal image, but to becoming a True King over yourself above all, and in all those situations which call for the exercise of leadership, wisdom, justice, courage and self-mastery.

Let me give one example before we go.

The Laws is-- you may have guessed this-- an entire book of laws for a hypothetical colony. Early on in the dialogue, Plato tells us that the very best society doesn't need laws-- its people hold all things in common-- including wives-- and live together as one. Is he arguing for Communism? No-- Such a society cannot be found on this earth, but is suitable only for gods or demigods (Compare Jesus: "In Heaven there is no marrying or giving in marriage.) On this Earth the best we can do is to imitate the ideal, the heavenly society; and so the laws he gives are only the second-best form of society. And then he tells us, "But you're probably only going to end up with the third best." He promises to tell us what the third best form of society might look like... and then never gets around to it.

Meanwhile, in the Statesman, Plato also discusses the nature of law. Here, he says that the worst sorts of societies are lawless. Does that mean that societies governed by law are best? No, not at all. Law is only an imitation of the statesmanship of the True King. In real life-- as you know and as I know-- the actual situations we encounter and the people we encounter in them are far too variable to be covered under any code of laws, no matter how extensive. The True King does not rule by laws, but by Science: That is, a True Knowledge of what is good and evil. Rather than legal codes of the "Thou shalt not" variety, he governs by applying unchanging, eternal principles, to everchanging, particular situations.

Now, is it possible for our nations to be governed in this way?

Of course not. Plato is literally saying that the True King is above the law, and he means it. When our leaders set themselves above the law, they merely cast themselves below it. At the political level, we must have laws and be governed by laws, and no one must be above them.

But what about the other levels? How do Plato's insights apply to those other inheritors of the fragments of the polis-- that is, the family, and the church?

Are we really to suppose, for example, that God Himself governs according to a mere petty legalist, checking our good and bad deeds and, above all, our opinions against a written set of rules that decide whether we get into Heaven or get tossed into the fire? Or do we suppose that he is a True King, applying eternal principles which He knows best of all to the everchanging situations of our material universe?

And, if we suppose that God is a True King-- as I believe He is-- how can we imitate him in our daily affairs, especially those under our own authority? Can we become better parents by rising above our own laws? Better managers? Better priests, teachers, ministers, spouses, friends?

I think so. What do you think?

I had intended to cover a number of subjects related to Platonic Christianity, but it turns out I have a great deal to say on that topic, and I'd rather not attempt to pack it all into one post. Instead, today we're going to discuss some of the possible ways of thinking about God that result when you combine the separate ideas of the Three Primary Hypostases in Plotinus with the Christian Holy Trinity, and then discuss how that then affects the role in the Divine economy of the greatest of Christian saints, the Virgin Mary.

Now, before we begin, I need to say that all of this is at the level of Wild Speculation. I intend nothing I say here as a statement of dogma and certainly not as an attempt to change anyone's views. I enjoy playing with ideas, combining important or powerful thoughts from different traditions, and seeing what results. If that sort of thing appeals to you, welcome aboard! If not, well-- you probably aren't reading this anyway.

The Hypostases, Horizontally and Vertically

As we’ve already seen, the Intelligible Triad of Being, Life, and Intellect (Nous) was borrowed by many of the Church Fathers in order to describe the relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. In the Christianized Triad, the Father is Being; the Son is Intellect; and the Holy Ghost is Life. Among the pagan Platonists, starting with Porphyry, each term in the Intelligible Triad is a hypostasis represented by a particular God, just as they are for Christians (the Christians also use the term “hypostasis,” though they’d say “three hypostases of One God” rather than “three hypostases, each of which is a God.” I’ll leave it to you to decide how important this difference is). Earlier on, this isn’t the case; Porphyry’s teacher, Plotinus, did not see them as hypostases, but as qualities possessed by the First Principle. For Plotinus, the three Primary Hypostases are Being Itself, Intellect (Nous) Itself, and Soul Itself.

I wonder if it isn’t possible to combine Porphyry’s view with Plotinus’s, and Christianize both. In this case, the First Principle, Being Itself, is the One, or God the Father. Within the One Itself are three terms, Being, Life, and Intellect. The Being of the Father is the Father, within the Father; the Life within the Father is the Holy Spirit, within the Father; the Intellect within the Father is the Son, within the Father.

It's worth noting, by the way, that at least some of the late Platonists wouldn't like that notion very much at all. For Proclus, the One must be preserved exempt from all qualities and all multitude; in the Second Book of his Platonic Theology he calls it "the cause of the Gods," and emphasizes that it is "not the leader of a Triad." Fortunately, we don't have to do what Proclus tells us!

The Second Hypostasis, Intellect Itself, is the Son. Please remember that “Intellect” is not thoughts, but the Ideas which make thought and existence possible; Intellect isn’t a particular Idea or even the sum total of Ideas, but that by virtue of which Ideas come to be. At every level, the First Triad is re-capitulated, so that the Father is the Being of the Son, the Holy Ghost is the Life of the Son, and the Son is the Intellect of the Son.

The Third Hypostasis, Soul Itself, is the Holy Ghost. Remember, here, that Soul Itself is not the same as the World Soul. The World Soul or Anima Mundi is a powerful being-- a God-- but it is still one soul, even if it is the one soul that contains all souls. Soul Itself is that by virtue of which there are any souls at all, including the World Soul. Within Soul Itself, the Holy Spirit, the Father is the Being of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is the Life of the Holy Spirit, and the Son is the Intellect of the Holy Spirit.

Mary and the Hypostases

Mary has a unique role to play in this formulation of the Trinity. She is a creature, but a creature which was able to contain the Second Hypostasis, and thus to contain the First Principle. She is thus the mediating principle between the Primary Hypostases and creatures. In traditional Theology, she is the Daughter of God the Father, the Mother of God the Son, and the Spouse of God the Holy Ghost. As such, she plays a different role with respect to each of the Primary Hypostases.

Here are some of the roles and titles Mary is given in traditional Christianity: 1. Queen of Heaven and Earth; 2. Exalted beyond compare above the Seraphim and Cherubim, the highest of the angels; 3. Mother of God; 4. Her womb contained the universe; 5. Mediatrix of All Graces; 6. Recipient of "hyperdulia," the highest veneration possible for a creature; 7. A creature, that is to say, a being with a definite beginning, and so not eternal; 8. Yet, somehow, able to contain the Eternal.

Picture the arrangement suggested above, in which the three persons of the Holy Trinity each occur at all three levels of being; in a sense the Triad becomes an Ennead.

On this arrangement, Mary would have a different relationship to each of the terms (or Persons) of the Ennead at each of the three different levels.

At the First Level, she is the Daughter of the Father; this means that she receives her Being from the Father (with the Son, his Intellect, and the Spirit, his Life). It might be that although, in Time, her birth comes rather late in human history, because there is no Time for God, the Idea of her, and thus the fundamental spark of her Being, always existed with him. In that case, as she will become the First of Beings, this was always the core of her being, and thus she was always the First; we can thus justifiably call her the First Creature, even if it doesn't appear so to us who live with Time and History. She is the Mother Secret and Hidden.

At the second level, she is the Mother of the Son; this means that, having received Being from the Father (which includes Life and Intellect), she acts as the Kora in Plato's Timaeus, the Formless-Form which brings forth all the Forms; thus she is Mother of the Word, who is the Logos, the Form of Forms. At this level, too, she is Queen of Angels, as these are the Ideas or Noetic Beings (gods, in an earlier way of thinking) that exist at this level.

At the Third Level, she is Spouse of God the Holy Ghost; this means that, in partnership with Soul Itself (the Holy Ghost), she becomes Mother to all particular souls. Would that make her the same as the Soul of the World (Anima Mundi), or would the Soul of the World be one of the particular souls to whom she is Mother? I don't know; what do you think?

The Holy Family and the Divinization of Matter

In the thought of Plotinus, Matter is not and can never be a Fourth Hypostasis; Matter is the source of evil and the prison from which we must escape.

I wonder if the logic of the Incarnation doesn’t change this perspective.

By her birth in time, Mary, the first Creature, becomes incarnate in matter. She then bears the Christ-child, who is the Second (or Third) Hypostasis, become incarnate in matter. The two are cared for by Saint Joseph, an ordinary man who rises to an extraordinary occasion. As a living human family, these three become a material model of the Trinity: Christ, the eternal spiritual power who descends into Matter; Joseph, the mortal man who rises to the occasion and thus rises above mere mortality; and Mary, who has elements of both, at once representing an immortal Idea incarnate in material form and also a perfectly ordinary woman who raises herself to universal heights by submitting absolutely to the Will of God: Be it done unto me according to Thy Word.

If all of this is the case, it suggests that part of the work of the Incarnation of Christ is the Divinization of Matter Itself, the creation, in effect of a Fourth Hypostasis-- an adopted Hypostasis, to be sure, but another One which will share in the Life of the Blessed Trinity. The Way is shown by the Holy Family. This is the true meaning of the Gnostic idea of the Fallen Sophia, for whose rescue Christ descends into matter.

But again, this is all speculation. What do you think?

I know I promised to continue the discussion of Christian Platonism this time, but the Muse speaks as she will, and just now she's led me to write a long discussion of Druidry and Platonism, while the next post on Christianity is only half finished. So we're going to shift gears a bit, and return to Christianity next time. It may be worth mentioning that this is the longest post by far that I have ever written for this blog.

Platonic Druidry, Druid Platonism

I should start by saying that to say “Druid Platonism” is a bit redundant. The modern Druid Revival-- which is the sort of Druidry I’ll be discussing here-- was heavily influenced by Platonism from the beginning, and for a very good reason. No one really knows what exactly the ancient Druids believed in. All we have are a few fragmentary records, largely written down by their enemies, and some hints in the archaeological record. When the Druid Revival began in the 18th Century in Wales and England, its proponents were forced to look around for sources to fill in the patchwork of legends with which they’d been left.

A century prior, an influential group of Anglican theologians and philosophers at Cambridge had drawn on Plato and Platonism to combat the rising tides of materialism and Calvinism in English academic circles and the English Church. The work of the Cambridge Platonists is almost certainly part of the hidden backdrop of the Druid Revival, though I’ve never heard anyone discuss it directly. Meanwhile, contemporary with the Druid Revival, there was a more direct revival of Platonic philosophy in the work and the person of Thomas Taylor.

Taylor-- pour out a glass of beer to his Genius-- is the first author to have translated the works of Plato into English, as well as those of Aristotle, Proclus, Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus. Taylor’s translations were read by William Blake, one of the founding fathers of the Romantic movement and-- critically-- one of the chiefs of the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids. They were also read by Ralph Waldo Emerson, G.R.S. Meade, and later by the founders of the Golden Dawn. Since then, even as his works have gone out of print, the fingerprints of Thomas Taylor are all over the alternative and nature-oriented spiritual traditions of Britain and North America.

But did I say alternative? Is it really so? Emerson is one of the founding fathers not only of American letters but of American culture. The movement that Blake inspired produced many of the greatest works of poetry in the English language. His influence, Taylor’s influence and, above all, the influence of Plato and the later philosophers in the Platonic tradition is all over American and English literature and art, and all of the best of it. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Emerson, Tennyson, Yeats-- we have them all thanks to Plato and the late Platonists, and we have the Platonists thanks to Taylor.

Well, that was a big digression to make a small point-- Platonism has been part of contemporary Druidry since it’s beginnings, and so it doesn’t require any sort of radical change to draw upon it. What I want to do here, though, is to go into detail about some of the ways that we can use Platonic ideas to think about the concepts, practices, and gods of the Druid Revival.

Not Dogma

Before we proceed, I want to emphasize that nothing that follows should be taken as a statement of doctrine or “belief.” I’m not trying to present a set of opinions that you have to “believe in” to be a Druid, or to present the One True Druidry, or anything similar.

Moving right along. Let’s ask the question: If Druidry is already Platonic, why call it Druidry at all? Why not just call it “Platonism” or “Celtic Platonism” and be done with it?

A Difference of Emphasis

Inscribed over the entrance to the Academy at Athens were the words “Let No One Enter Here Who Does Not Know Geometry.” Following his predecessors, the Pythagoreans-- you didn’t think Plato came out of nowhere, did you?-- Plato used mathematics as a bridge between the sensible and the Intelligible worlds.

We discussed how this works in the first post in this series. There, I gave the example of the Pythagorean Theorem: Though the perfect Right Triangle it describes exists nowhere in sensible reality, it shapes and determines hte geometries of all the imperfect triangles of our material world.

Numbers themselves function in the same way. Consider one. No, not The One-- not yet, at any rate. Just stick with 1 itself, the first number you learned when you first started to count. (My daughter learned it when she was only one years old; “One” was one of her first words.) One is a number, but it is more than that: It is the basis for all number. How many numbers 2 are there? Just one. How many 3s? Just one. And so on. Thus 1 provides being and unity to every number which follows it; the One Itself is the same principle applied to all things.

In the world of Druidry, all of the foregoing holds good. Indeed, many Druids are very familiar with number symbolism, sacred geometry, and so on-- and I encourage those that don’t know these things to get to know them!

But the focus of Druidry is not the world of Number, but the world of Nature. Numbers and mathematical formulae are examples of Ideas, the Intellectual Powers that shape the succeeding worlds of Psyche and Matter.

There are other Ideas. If A:B::C:D, then A:C::B:D. This is an example of a logical formula. It can be applied to mathematics in the form 2:4::6:12 therefore 2:6::4:12. But it can also be applied to human society in a form like If the King is to the City as the Nous is to the Soul, then the King is to the Nous as the People are to the Soul. This analogy, in fact, is one of those that undergird Plato’s political writings.

And Ideas can also be found in the world of Nature.

The most fundamental tenet of a Platonic Druidry, then, is the encounter with the Ideas as they manifest in the world of Nature.

The Idea in Nature

What does this look like in practice? Well, one of the really fun things about Druidry is that, while its roots are ancient, it’s a young tradition. And the sciences that strongly relate to it-- that would be ecology and systems theory-- are also very young. So there is a lot of work still to be done-- and we get to do it all!

But here is an example, drawn from my time spent working in the wilderness in Oregon. There lands west of the Cascade Mountains are covered by temperate rainforests, and the dominant trees in these forests are huge conifers-- Douglas Firs, Grand Firs, Western Red Cedar and Western Hemlock. The trees grow to enormous size, and provide a home in their massive canopies for countless birds, mammals and insects. But they also block the sun completely, so that only a few shade tolerant understory plants (mainly salal, swordfern, and Oregon graperoot) grow in the understory.

And then they die.

Now, when the old trees die, they die standing up. For months, years, or longer, a tree will rot from the inside out, becoming a gigantic snag standing in the middle of the forest. Eventually it falls. Sometimes it falls in the wind, but in this case, let’s say it’s something more violent. Let’s zoom in on one single tree-- an ancient, majestic Douglas Fir, grown brittle and dry with age.

And watch, as a blast of lightning pours down from Heaven and strikes the tree. There is a terrible roar as the trunk of the great tree is shattered by the strike. It crashes to the Earth and instantly great walls of flame pour forth in every direction.

A moment ago, there was a mature and beautiful but static and unchanging old forest. Now there is heat, fire, and chaos, and death and terror for the creatures who live in this place. Birds fly in every direction, deer and elk scramble to keep ahead of the blaze. Tree after tree is consumed with flames like a gigantic bonfire.

And when you come back, a few days or a week later, where there once was a forest, there is now a smoking ruin of ash and soot and blackened branches.

Sounds terrible, doesn’t it?

Keep watching.

The first plants to make their appearance are weeds. In this part of hte world, that often means hardy blackberry and Scotch broom; government scientists call them “invasive” because they grew somewhere else before Europeans arrived here (from somewhere else) and spend enormous amounts of money to try to remove them, but fail. To the plants it doesn’t matter. The lightning and the fire have released enormous amounts of organic fertilizer that had been locked up the giant trees, and now they’re growing like your lawn would if you covered it in fertilizer and ignored it for a month.

The weeds provide food for insects, which themselves feed birds and mammals. The thicker clumps of weeds provide homes for rodents, racoons, foxes and feral cats (some of these are government approved; others are not.) Shrubs appear, and provide nesting places for birds.

Year by year, the weeds die, and their bodies, mixed with the manure provided by the animals, becomes part of the soil, which is also enriched by the wood char lying everywhere. The soil thickens, and taller shrubs and small trees begin to grow. Ash and alder in low lying areas, oaks on open grounds and slopes. Where the fir trees had grown as nearly a monoculture, now many different types of plants and animals thrive here.

Over time, the landscape will stabilize into an oak woodland, with clusters of oak trees broken up by open areas, grazed by elk and black tail deer. Predators which are capable of hunting these will follow in due course.

And eventually, the oaks themselves will give way to the seedlings of fir trees and other conifers. They will grow tall, overshadow the oak, and, after a long time, the old forest will be restored. And the conifers will grow old, dry up, and die, and then with a new blast of fire from the heavens the cycle will start again.

The terms change, but the relations remain constant.

Imagine the forest. It grows old and brittle and unchanging. Fire comes and chaos and pain-- but out of chaos, new life. See this as a pattern, just like the Pythagorean Theorem or the logical formula given above. Have you ever seen it manifested in your own life? I know I have. What about the life of a people or a nation, or an entire civilization?

The One

As we’ve discussed, the First Term in Platonism is the One; it is from the One that everything which exists has its being. The One is also called the Good, because the highest term is identical to Goodness Itself.

In Druidry, we have an equivalent to the One in the term Awen, and the idea of the Three Rays of Light.

Awen is a Welsh word meaning “muse” or “inspiration;” a poet can be called “awenydd,” “one who has Awen.” In contemporary Druidic thought, Awen is the highest principle; we can thus understand it as another name for the One. Indeed, it is helpful to see that this highest term can be given different names in different traditions. In the Chinese philosophical tradition, “Tao” expresses the same idea. Neither One, nor Tao, nor Awen entirely characterizes the First Principle, as this is impossible for the human mind. Rather, each name we give to it allows us to understand it in a different way. In the poetic mode of thought common to all the Celtic peoples, Awen or inspiration is a perfect name for it. It teaches us to see, in the beauty of works of art and literature, something akin to the same power that produces the entire cosmos, that expresses itself in Nature, and that is also to be seen any time a human being lives according to his or her full potential.

Although we each have our own Awen, at the beginning of our lives it isn’t very clear; our souls are muddled and their parts disconnected, and we are weighed down with countless accretions from our culture or our personal karma, or elsewhere. The work of discovering and living one’s Awen is the work of encountering one’s true being and true purpose, and uniting ourselves to it. In just the same way, the task of the philosopher in the Platonic tradition is the gradual withdrawal from the world of sensibles, opinions and created things, to union with the Divine.

The Three Rays of Light

Awen is symbolized by the image of Three Rays of Light. These are named Gwron, Plenydd, and Alawn in Welsh, and their names are said to signify Knowledge, Power, and Peace. These three express the same idea as the Intelligible Triad that we discussed last time. Peace, Alawn, is Being Itself, the still and absolute center. Power, Plenydd, is Life, the activity of being. Knowledge, Gwron, is Nous, the awareness of being. These three together are Awen, which is also known by the name OIW, the highest expression of the Divine which can be understood by the human mind.

The third term in every Platonic Triad has two powers: It both returns to the first, and also recapitulates the first at a lower level. Thus from the third term in one triad, succeeding triads arise. From these triads are the unfolding of all the many Gods which bring the world of experience into being.

Succeeding Triads

Imagine the relationship of the Sun to the Earth. First there is the Sun, abiding in itself. Next, there is the light that shines forth from the Sun. Third, the light is received by the Earth. Now the process of creation begins, as the light is received by the Earth and turned into energy for living beings and the bodies of plants. From the interaction of Light and Earth, life emerges.

In Druidic terms, the Sun Itself is the OIW. The light which emerges is Hu the Mighty, the Great Druid God who drives forth darkness. The Earth is Ced the Earth Mother, who brings forth all living things.

These Three are another articulation of the Intelligible Triad. They also reveal another Platonic Triad, that of abiding, processing, and reversing. The Sun abides; the light goes forth; receiving the light, the Earth reflects it back to the Sun. If you were able to stand on the surface of the Sun, you could see the Earth, and what you were seeing would be the Sun’s light reflected back to you. In just the same way, our souls descend from the Eternal Unity of Spirit into material incarnation, and rise back up again to Spirit. (Is there a part of our soul which abides eternally, as the Sun stays where it is and shines its life forth? That’s a fine debate; Plotinus thought so, Iamblichus disagreed. What do you think?)

Here is another Triad, drawn from Plato’s Timaeus.

First there is the Form. The form is received by something which is at once form-like and yet altogether formless and without quality. The Formless provides the substance to the Form, and from these the Formed emerges. This triad of the Form, the Formless, and the Formed can also be called Father (Form), Mother (Formless), and Son (Formed). In Druidry, these are the Triad of Hu, the light; Ced, the substance, and their progeny, Hesus, Chief of Tree Spirits.

Hesus is an interesting figure. His name is a variation on the old Gaulish deity Esus, with the H added to emphasize the presence within his being of the power of Hu the Mighty, his progenitor. In the Druid traditions that I follow, he is the Power that dwells in the heart of the Sacred Oak, the guide of Druids, patron of healers, and teacher of wisdom. As the master of the trees, Hesus is the master of all forests and all plant-life. As the master of plant life, he is the master of the basis of Life Itself, as this is made possible only by the plants which absorb the light of the Sun and form it into food for succeeding orders of creatures. As we approach the forest, we can turn our minds toward Hesus and ask him to guide us to wisdom.

Ones and the One

Little is known of the ancient Celts and their religious practices, as I said above. We do know one very interesting thing about their religion, and that is their method of naming the Gods. Many divine names, it seems, were not so much names as titles. “Cernunnos,” for example, is one old Celtic God; his name means “he of the horns.” And, appropriately, Cernunnos was a Horned God. “Belenos” was another god; his name appears to have meant “the shining one” or the bright one”; in Roman Gaul he was seen as a form of Apollo. “Epona” is a goddess; her name means “she of the horses.”

Cernunnos

Belenos

Epona

And so here we have the convention: the suffix “unos” is added to a quality to give the name of a God; the suffix “ona” is added to give the name of a goddess. “Unos” and “ona,” meanwhile, are derived from the word for One.

In the thought of the late Platonic philosopher Proclus, the Gods are those beings which have their being in the One Itself. They can also be called “henads,” which means “unities;” the Gods particularize the One, bringing forth succeeding series of beings. A Goddess of Horses is absolute divinity manifesting as the power which brings into being horses and everything which relates to them. “Epona,” then, is a perfect name for this being “The One of the Horses.”

One of the issues that modern Druids who want a more polytheistic approach to their spirituality face is the paucity of available deities. Anyone who wants to work with the gods of Greece and Rome has an abundance of sources, the names and stories of hundreds of gods, spirits, and heroes. But those looking for a more Celtic “flavor” to their spiritual life are in a bind.

Knowledge of the old naming formula allows us to overcome this issue. Assume all the following to be true:

1. Awen is also called the One, and is the power which underlies all being.

2. Gods are beings which are most closely united to the One.

3. Everything in the world of our experience has its source in a God.

4. It’s much easier for a human mind to interact with a God if we have a name and a gender to assign to it.

We can use the old Celtic naming convention to designate Gods, which can then become the objects of prayer and contemplation.

How does this work? It’s simple. If you want to interact with a deity, and don’t have a name for it, look up the word for whatever it governs in Welsh or another Brythonic Celtic language. Then tack on “Unos” or “Ona.” Which one? That’s sort of up to you. The gods are designated masculine or feminine to show that, in addition to having unity, they have the power to generate: Generation is accomplished through gender. Masculinity can be defined as the sort of creativity which generates new forms by going outside of itself and mingling with other things. Femininity is the sort of creativity which generates new forms by drawing things into itself and mingling them with its own substance and power. If you’re want to bless your garden, and if gardens seem feminine to you, you might pray to “Garddona”-- that’s the Welsh word “gardd” for garden, with “ona” added on. If you’re out walking through the woods on a winter’s day and you find yourself moved by the beauty of the snow falling, you might give thanks to “Gwyntonos,” the “one of the snow.”

Now, it needs to be said that the words that will result from this process will almost always be complete nonsense. That’s okay. In fact, it’s important. By being unintelligible, the foreign word allows us to rise above the thinking mind. That’s also a reason to use words in a language you yourself don’t know, by the way-- saying “The One of the Snows” in English could work, but it doesn’t have the same power to kick your thinking above the level of dianoia. In magic, these sorts of half-comprehensible names for gods and spirits are called “the barbarous names of evocation,” and the old books include severe injunctions never to change them.

Since there are still people who speak the modern Welsh tongue-- and since getting offended about other people using languages is a popular past-time these days-- it would be even better to use an extinct language. A dictionary of Old Gaulish would be particularly useful, as there are no old Gauls around either to understand what you’re saying or get offended about your saying it. But, of course, you can always decide that you don’t care those sorts of things, and use whatever words you can come up with on Google Translate.

Beauty

Beauty is one of the most important parts of Platonic philosophy, and one about which we haven’t much to say. But Platonic philosophy isn’t all reading and math homework. Plato had a sense of humor, and also a sense of raunchiness, though both of these are often lost in the later commentators. Beauty and erotic love are central concerns for Plato.

Now Beauty, in this tradition, is not any kind of mere prettiness, and it isn’t a matter of “taste” or “in the eye of the beholder.” Beauty in an object is the living presence of Beauty Itself, which is the presence of the Divine. Oh, and Beauty isn’t just physical beauty. This is something that is often very hard for modern people to understand, but in the Platonic tradition, “beauty” can be found both in physical objects, like a beautiful forest or a beautiful face, and in beautiful actions. Beautiful actions, of course, are those which arise from the virtues.

Nor is the practice of Platonic philosophy all reading and thinking about stuff. Techniques both of contemplative meditation and ritual magic (theurgy) were taught in the Platonic schools. Different branches of the tradition emphasized one or the other-- Plotinus emphasized meditation, Iamblichus theurgy, and so on. But both are important. Just now, though, I’d like to talk about a particular technique of meditation which focuses on the contemplation of Beauty. This practice allows us to approach a particular object of beauty and to raise our consciousness by progressive degrees to the Divine.

Plato tells us how this works in the Symposium, a dialog which is especially concerned with the nature of Love, or Eros. In the dialog, Socrates relates how he was initiated into the nature of love by his teacher, a priestess named Diotima. Diotima teaches Socrates to move from the contemplation of a single beautiful image-- or person-- to beauty itself. “Starting with individual beauties, the quest for the universal beauty must find him ever mounting the heavenly ladder, stepping from rung to rung-- that is, from one to two, and from two to every lovely body, form bodily beauty to the beauty of institutions and laws, from institutions to learning, and from learning in general to the special lore that pertains to nothing but the beautiful itself-- until at last he comes to know what beauty is.”

Whoever has been initiated so far in the mysteries of Love and has viewed all these aspects of the beautiful in due succession, is at last drawing near the final revelation. ANd now, Socrates, there bursts upon him that wondrous vision which is the very soul of the beauty he has toiled so long for. It is an everlasting loveliness which neither comes nor goes, which neither flowers nor fades, for such beauty is the same on every hand, the same then as now, here as there, this way as that way, the same to every worshiper as it is to every other.

Nor will his vision of the beautiful take the form of a face, or of hands, or of anything that is of the flesh. It will be neither words, nor knowledge, nor a something that exists in something else, such as a living creature, or the Earth, or the Heavens, or anything that is-- but subsisting of itself and by itself in an Eternal Oneness, while every lovely thing partakes of it in such sort that, however much the parts may wax and wane, it will be neither more nor less, but still the same inviolable whole.

In the Symposium, Plato is talking about erotic love, and so the contemplation he discusses begins with the beauty of another person. Contemplating that person, the lover then considers what makes them beautiful, and then contemplates how that same beauty is manifest in others. In this way, he comes to realize how that beauty goes beyond any one individual. He then proceeds to contemplate what qualities that produce the sort of physical beauty he is contemplating are also manifest in human society at its best, in laws and the institutions of culture, in just actions and virtuous behavior. At this point, he attempts to realize a unified principle which underlies the beauty in question. Finally, he progresses, if he can, from a particular unifying principle, to unity itself, by seeing how the particular principle of beauty he has discovered is found in every form of beauty, and participates in what Diotima calls “the open sea of beauty.”

All this is very abstract, and we would do better to explain it by example. But now, as befits our purpose, let’s turn to the special emphasis of the Druid tradition: The Natural World.

A Druid Meditation on Natural Beauty

This practice takes the contemplation of beauty described in the Symposium and applies it to that most Druidly of actions: Taking a walk in the woods.

Step 1. Before you begin, either before you step out your door or before you step onto the path into the woods, say a prayer such as the following:

Oh Hesus, Chief of Tree Spirits, guide of Druids and teacher of wisdom, I pray that, as I venture into the Green World which is your kingdom, you will guide my soul to such wisdom as it is able to attain.

I like to then make a small offering at the beginning of any forest path before I enter. This can be as simple as pouring out a bit of water from your bottle. I say something like “In the name of Hesus, Chief of Tree Spirits, I pour out this water in offering to the spirits of this place. As you receive this offering, may I receive your wisdom.”

Step 2. Just walk. As you do, try to clear your mind of any stray thoughts, and focus your attention on the world around you. Keep an eye out for birds and animals, smell the air, touch the trees and the ground.

Step 3. Eventually, you will come across something particularly beautiful, on which you want to focus your attention and which you want to make the subject of your meditation. It may be the entire scene, or it may be some detail of it, like orange leaves in late Autumn or the scent of blackberries on the air in Summer, or it may be some particular object, like a bird’s nest in an ancient oak tree or a sunlight rippling on the surface of a stream.

Step 4. Focus your attention on the object of your contemplation. Experience it, enter into it, let yourself be totally enraptured with the beauty of it. Do this for as long as you like. You don’t have to be in any particular posture, by the way-- if it’s a static object, like a tree, you can stand or sit in a suitable meditation pose, but if it’s a larger scene, you can continue walking, slowly and reverently. Just make sure your body is poised but comfortable enough to not get in your way, and focus your attention on the object, filling your entire awareness in this way.

Ask yourself, what is it that makes this object beautiful?

If you’re focusing on a bird’s nest in a tree, it may be that you found yourself moved by the way that something as ancient as a centuries-old tree provides a home for the newborn life of the baby birds. It may be the interplay of solidity, represented by the tree, and fluidity, represented by the nest and its inhabitants; or it may be the interplay of the straight lines of hte branches with the circular lines of the nest. Any answer is correct.

Step 5. Consider where else in the natural world the same sort of beauty can be found. It might be that, in the same way that an ancient tree provides shelter for birds, a different and far more fleeting form of life, a tidal pool provides a home for molluscs and crustaceans, and your own gut is home to countless micro-organisms which aid you in the work of digestion. Or it could be that the interplay of solidity and stability seen in the birds and their tree can also be seen in a stream making its way through a stone channel or in fish spanning underneath a fallen log in a pool. Or it could be that the same relationship of straight and circular is also found in a lake overflowing into a stream or winds gathering into a vortex.

Step 6. From this contemplation, see if you can derive a general principle. “The ancient, abiding life which creates the home for the new and transient life.” “The creative power of the union of stability and change.” “The spiral as union of the circular and the straight.”

Step 7. Move in your mind from the realm of nature to the realm of human society and culture. Where can the same principles be found in humanity at its best? Perhaps the same care of the ancient and abiding for the young, different and fleeting can be seen in the way that the best constitutions are framed with the care of many generations in mind, far past those the framers themselves will ever see. And this same principle can be seen in wise parents that lay up savings for their children, their grandchildren, and beyond-- or in family stories and traditions, passed down from generation to generation. The interplay of stability and change can be seen in this way also, as laws that permit change but limit its pace and its direction, and the same laws as household rules laid down by parents for their children. The union of line and circle can be seen in a well-designed farmer’s market, which leads you on a straight path to circle through the stalls of the many vendors, or in the best forms of cultural practice, which allow periods of movement and change to alternate with periods of circling back toward old ways.

Step 8. Consider the foregoing, and add in a contemplation of how you can best make use of the same principle in your individual life. Maybe you could do some work toward making your own lawn or garden more like the tree, providing a stable home for those fleeting forms of life, butterflies and pollinators. Or maybe you could do a better job of providing a stable example for the young and changeable people you know. Or maybe it’s time to circle back to something you once knew and did well-- or to move forward in a line toward the next circle.

Step 9. Let us suppose that all of the ideas which you have experienced so far emanate from a single principle. We can give it a name, and here we can draw on the Celtic Naming Conventions given previously. “Hengoedenona” would mean something like “The One of the Old Tree” or, more poeticly, the Old Lady of the Trees. Solethylifunos is a combination of the words that (according to Google Translate) mean “Solid” and “Fluid” with the -unos suffix; it could be said to mean “The One Who Moves and Abides.” “Cylchalinnelona” is the Lady of Line and Circle.

Address yourself to this power and thank it, in your own words, for its wisdom. Try to reach out with your mind, letting go of all the details and particularities previously encountered, and stand only in the presence of this power, which is a God. Ask that you may manifest its light and its wisdom in your own life and bring its blessings with you back to the world of experience. If you want, you can create an image of the God in your mind; whatever seems appropriate, let it be filled and overflowing with light. As you speak to it, slowly allow everything but the Light to melt away, and imagine that Light spilling over from the ineffable One, through teh God that bears it, to you and to the entire world.

Step 10. Close with a suitable prayer. The Gorsedd or Universal Druid’s Prayer may be particularly appropriate:

Grant, oh God (Goddess, Gods, etc),

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 the Love of Justice, the Love of All Existences,

And in the Love of All Existences, love of hte Gods, and the Earth, and all Goodness.

AWEN.

You may find it helpful, when you return to your home or your car or wherever you started, to write down any insights that came to you during this practice.

Platonism and Early Christianity

The influence of late Platonic thought on early Christianity is very strong. Some contemporary thinkers-- almost always Anglophone converts to Eastern Orthodoxy-- try to deny this, but in doing so they make fools of themselves; the ideas of Plato and his successors are all over the early Church. The idea of the Intelligible Triad, in particular, was borrowed by the Church Fathers, in order to explain the relationship between the three members of the Holy Trinity.

Let's take a minute to recall what we said last time. The "Intelligible Triad" refers to three qualities which characterize beings, and which particularly apply to the Primary Hypostases. These qualities are: Being; Life; and Intelligence. We could also call these the capacity to Be, the capacity to Act, and the capacity to Know. (If this reminds you of someone, you're not far off.)

The Three Primary Hypostases, meanwhile, are the One, Intellect, and Soul. These are the three primary Beings, which bring all other beings into existence. The One is first; Intellect proceeds from the One; Soul, from Intellect (and the One). Now, the terms of the Intelligible Triad, as we said, are different from the Three Primary Hypostases. The terms of the Intelligible Triad are arranged horizontally, not vertically.

Now, one of the things that makes later Platonic philosophy difficult to access is that the ideas are not static; the doctrines evolved with time, and the thinkers involved often disagreed among themselves. For Plotinus, the terms of the Intelligible Triad are qualities possessed by the One, or by the One as it emanates into Intellect and returns to Itself. But Plotinus's student Porphyry turned the terms of the triad into hypostases themselves, calling them "three Gods." This was-- probably-- part of the process of transforming the pagan Chaldaean Oracles into sacred texts which could form the basis for a Platonic pagan theology; in the Oracles, the primary Gods are referred to as "Father -- Power -- Intellect."

It isn't certain, because many of Porphyry's writings are lost, but it's likely that he actually spoke of three Triads emanating one from the next, to form an Enneagram of deities.

The Triad Christianized

Remember the terms of our Triad-- Being, Life, and Intellect. And remember that the Three Primary Hypostases, for Plotinus, are the One, Intellect, and Soul-- in that order. Now, let's turn to Saint Augustine, the most important of the Western fathers of the Christian Church:

Porphyry... speaks of God the Father and God the Son, whom he calls (writing in Greek) the Intellect or mind of the Father; but of the Holy Spirit he says either nothing, or nothing plainly, for I do not understand what other he speaks of as holding the middle place between these two. For if, like Plotinus in his discussion regarding the three principal substances, he wished us to understand by this third the soul of nature, he would certainly not have given it the middle place between these two, that is, between the Father and the Son. For Plotinus places the soul of nature after the intellect of the Father, while Porphyry, making it the mean, does not place it after, but between the others.

That is all to say: For Augustine, Porphyry's Triad is the Christian Holy Trinity.

Being is the Father.

Life is the Holy Spirit.

Intellect is the Son.

It's worth noting that Augustine isn't quite right about Plotinus (as far as I know). Soul Itself is not the same as the "soul of nature" or the World Soul. The latter, while immensely greater than any human being and properly honored as a god, is still one soul among many, and so not the same as the hypostasis Soul Itself.

Augustine was not alone among Church Fathers in his use of the Intelligible Triad. The anonymous author who wrote under the name "Dionysius the Areopagite" used it explicitly:

The divine name of Good revealing all the processions of the universal Cause, extends both to the things which exist, and to the things which do not exist, and is beyond both existent and non-existent things. And the title of Existent extends to all existent things and is beyond them. And the title Life extends to all living things and is beyond them. And the title of Wisdom extends to all intellectual and rational and sensible things and is beyond them all.

Notice that in Dionysius, the terms of the Triad are not hypostasized, unlike in Porphyry or Augustine. Saint Maximus the Confessor also used the Intelligible Triad as a description of the Trinity:

Furthermore, having noticed that through sophisticated investigation connected with reasoning, the Cause could be variously contemplated in its effects, they [that is, saints of prior generations] piously under-stood that it exists, and is wise, and is living . And from this they have learned divine and salutary doctrine about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, so that they both have been mysteriously enlightened about the principle of being of the Cause and have been initiated into the mode of its existence

Christian Platonisms

A straightforward, more or less Orthodox and in fact quite traditional Christian Platonic theology, then, simply borrows the terms of the Intelligible Triad and applies them to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The One Itself, which stands above Being, Life, and Thought, can be understood as the Godhead which all three share, as in the diagram that heads this page. The realm of Intellect is the proper habitation of the Angels, and Intellect is, as I wrote before, called Angelic Mind in the work of Marsilio Ficino. Soul comes next, just as in the pagan Platonic thinkers, and imparts the capacity for life and motion to beings. In this way of looking at things, Plotinus's First Hypostasis, the One, becomes the Three Hypostases of the Holy Trinity. His second two hypostases are levels of being, but are no longer hypostases in the same sense.

Ficino describes the levels of reality this way: Above mobile soul is motionless Angel. Above Angel is God; for just as Soul is mobile plurality and Angel motionless plurality, so God is motionless Unity." For Ficino, as for Plotinus, the World Soul exists and is also one soul among many. Stars, planets, and elements are ensouled-- as they were for many medieval and early Renaissance thinkers. For readers who are interested, Ficino wrote a six volume treatise of Platonic Christian Theology, and if the Catholic Church had preferred it to Aquinas's Summa Theologica we would all be much better off.

Ficino represents one possibility for Christian Platonism. I would like to suggest another, which draws upon him and other thinkers, including Dionysius and Iamblichus, but goes further than they did. But that will have to wait for next time!

The One

In Platonic thought, the First Principle is called the One; it is also known as the Good. The One is not one being among many; the One, rather is Being Itself, or that by virtue of which everything anything has existence. In one sense, the One does not even exist-- not because it is nothing, but because it precedes existence and allows for the possibility of existence. In another sense, the One is everything that exists.

Intellect

The Second Principle is Intellect, or, in Greek, "Nous." It is sometimes named "Divine Mind" in English translations of Platonic writing, or "Angelic Mind" in the work of Christian Platonists like Ficino. It is better not to think of it as mind in the ordinary sense. Intellect consists, not of ordinary thoughts, but of Ideas. Note the capital I-- the word in Greek means something like "showings." In the 19th century, it was translated into English as "Form," and that is the word under which most people know it. Intellect consists of the Ideas or Forms, the fundamental patterns which create, shape, and sustain existence at lower levels of reality. It is important to note that Intellect isn't static; the Ideas aren't like blueprints sitting on a table somewhere. They are alive, constantly shaping our experience of reality.

The easiest way to understand the Ideas is to consider mathematical formulae, and, of these, the most traditional is the Pythagorean Theorem:

a²+b²=c²

The Pythagorean Theorem describes the geometry of a perfect right triangle. The trouble is, no perfect right triangle exists in the material world-- every physical triangle is off by at least some tiny fraction of a percent. The perfect right triangle of the Pythagorean Theorem, then, does not have material existence-- but it has a higher existence, which shapes and determines conditions in the material world. And notice: We can understand the perfect right triangle with our minds, even though we can never encounter it with our senses.

Now imagine the Pythagorean Theorem is alive. That's an Idea.

Intellect is not one idea among many, just as the One isn't one being among many; it is Idea Itself, as the One is Being Itself.

Soul

The Third Principle is Soul. In the same way that Intellect isn't what we commonly think of as the thinking mind, the word "soul" also means something a little different from its common English usage. Specifically, it isn't something that you "believe in," and it isn't some kind of weird, invisible bag of gas (perhaps weighing 27 grams?) which floats away from the body at the time of death in order to go live up in space or something. It's easier to understand what it is if you consider that the Greek word for soul is psyche; the definition is roughly the same as psyche. Soul includes all of our thoughts and emotions, our energy, desires, and sense-impressions.

Soul Itself-- you already saw this coming-- is not one individual Soul among many, but that by virtue of which everything which is ensouled has soul.

These three-- the One, Intellect, and Soul are called the Three Primary Hypostases. Hypostasis means a kind of Being or Substance, and so the Three Hypostases are also called the Three Primary Beings.

The Intelligible Triad

Everything which exists can be understood as possessing three basic properties: Existence, Life, and Thought (In Greek: On, Zoe, Nous.) Being is mere existence; Life is activity; Intellect is the capacity for awareness. It's very important to note that the Intelligible Triad is not the same as the Three Primary Hypostases-- rather, each hypostasis possesses Being and Life and Intellect. And so do you!

Also note that Intellect or Nous, in reference to the Intelligible Triad, is not the same as Intellect or Nous, the hypostasis-- though they mean something similar.

The Three Primary Hypostases, the worlds which they produce, and the lower world of Matter are all arranged hierarchically to one another. The One comes first, and with it, those Beings which are eternally united to the One-- yes, those would be the Gods. Intellect comes next, with its inhabitants, the Ideas. Soul is next, and with it the souls. Matter comes last, and material objects with it; matter is not a Fourth Hypostasis, as it has no causal power. But the terms of the Intelligible Triad are arranged horizontally to one another-- they occur on the same plane, at every level.

Pagan Platonism, Christian Platonism, Platonic Druidry

In the thought of late antiquity, the identities Primary Hypostases were assigned to the classical gods. There are various ways of doing this, depending on who you are reading, and sometimes individual thinkers contradict themselves-- Plotinus usually identifies Intellect as Saturn, but sometimes Intellect is Juno, who he also identifies with Aphrodite. Aphrodite, meanwhile, he elsewhere identifies with Soul! One older translator wrote that, in Plotinus's thought, the classical gods are basically vestigial. I think that's too much of a stretch-- Plotinus wrote at length of the importance of honoring the Gods, but he also made it clear that, in his view, they are subordinate to the One Itself, which he also refers to as God or the First God.

Proclus, on the other hand, was far more concerned with finding the old gods their proper places in the hierarchy of being-- so much so that he stretches the basic system I've described here nearly to its breaking point. Proclus divides Intellect into two levels, connected by various overlapping Triads and Heptads. His whole system is complex, baroque, fascinating and sometimes a bit ridiculous. It would require turning this blog post into a book to really get into the details of Proclus's thought here.

In the next post, I want to discuss another possible Platonic theology, based on traditional Christianity. After that, I want to look at a third possibility, based on the Druid Revival. Finally, I'll close this series with some thoughts on an ecumenical Platonism through which any spiritual tradition can be understood.