readoldthings

Socrates: Of all that now exists in the universe, let us make a twofold division, or rather, if you don't mind, a threefold.

Protarchus: On what principle, may I ask?

Socrates: We might apply part of what we were saying a while ago.

Protarchus: What part?

Socrates: We said, I fancy, that God had revealed two constituents of things, the Unlimited and the Limit.

Protarchus: Certainly. 

Socrates: Then let us take these as two of our class, and, as the third, something arising out of the mixture of them both.
 

Plato, Philebus, 23.c
 

 

For law is order, and good law is good order; but a very great multitude cannot be orderly: to introduce order into the unlimited is the work of a divine power-- of such a power as holds together the universe.

Aristotle, Politics VII.4.1326.a.30

 

According to Plato, then, God has established three powers or forces, which can be found in all things. The first is the Limit, the second, the Unlimited, and the third, the Mixture of the two. Everything in the universe is brought into being by these three forces.

This is difficult to understand, because it is very different from modern ways of thinking. Let's try to illustrate it by way of an example.

 

In Geometry, Limit is equivalent to the geometric point. The Unlimited, then, is the line, which extends to infinity in either direction. The point is fixed; it has no dimensions, it goes nowhere. It is all boundary. The line is unlimited. It extends to Infinity.

On their own, neither the single point nor the infinite line is of very much use, and if that were the end of geometry, we wouldn't have much of a universe. 

 

Now, imagine a power prior to both the point and the line producing both, and then deliberately combining them. How? By taking the line and bending it back upon itself, to produce the first shape, the circle. The circle, like the point, has a fixed location and is circumscribed. The point is nearly infinitely small; in a sense, there is nowhere that it actually is. Bringing in the line's power of extension allows the circle to have a location-- somewhere that it is. But bringing in the point's power of limitation allows the circle to function in the universe, because it now has somewhere-- or, rather, an infinite somewhere-- that it is not. The latter is just as important as the former-- a line extending to infinity is incapable of accomplishing anything. The only way to be anything in particular is to also not be anything else. 
 

This is the beginning of geometry. Starting with the circle, the process then begins again. From the circle, a series of succeeding shapes can be derived, by the addition of still more circles. The triangle, the square, the pentagon, and so on. These then generate their own successions of shapes-- the equilateral triangle, the right triangle, the rectangle, the parallelogram, and so on.

 

The same process works again with human speech. For the point, there is the sound uttered for the briefest moment. For the line, the unending noise. The combination of the two produces the word, or, rather the letter or syllable- A, B, C and so on-- which then combined to produce the word, and then the sentence, and so on for the whole sequence of human communication.

Culture and the Unlimited
 

The same process is at work in human culture.

 

Like the line of infinite extension, the number of possible arrangements of human society is basically infinite. We know this from the anthropological record. Is farming best done by men or by women? Should hunting territories be owned by individuals, by fathers and sons, by clans, by secret societies, by tribes, by hereditary nobility, or by the Bureau of Land Management? Should marriage take place between one man, and one woman, for life? One man and one woman at a time, with the possibility of additional marriages for either once the first is dissolved? Between one man and a number of women? Between one woman and a number of men? Between any number of persons? Between two men, or two women?

All these questions and countless others have been given different answers by different societies across the world and throughout time. A set of answers to the full range of questions about how human life is to be lived which is shared among a discrete community and transmitted to its children is called a culture. 

 

Plato writes, as I said, that God has established the first two powers and caused their mixture. God, the cause of the mixture, is the fourth power to which Socrates alludes-- really the First, which is prior to the three.

Now God, in this context, was understood by the Neoplatonists to refer to the One. This, says Proclus, is why Plato simply says "God," rather than "Zeus" or some other particular God-- the One is beyond all description, and can simply be referred to as "God" or "the First God." In a Christian context, God would refer to the Holy Trinity, all three Persons of which are understood to be, somehow, prior to existence as the One is for Proclus or Plotinus. For our purposes here it doesn't matter-- use the framework that works best for you. 

 

The triad of the Limit, the Unlimited, and the Mixed, is also the Intelligible Triad of Being, Life, and Intellect, which we've discussed at length elsewhere. As we've seen, the cycle of creation is recursive. The third term of the triad, the mixed, also called Intellect, begins a new cycle of creation and acts as the First for the beings that follow it. Thus the circle in my example, which is the third term in the tirad of Point, Line, Shape, produces additional shapes, and the word produces additional words.

Now, notice that  the circle, the first shape, produces additional shapes, rather than colors, or notes, or catfish. In just the same way, in the First Creation of Things, the beings produced by God immediately are themselves Gods, immense Divine powers which shape life on Earth. The First God is universal; the second Gods, very nearly universal, but with elements of particularity. The more remote you get from the First God, the more particular the Gods become. The second term in the Intelligible Triad is life, the Unlimited, and she-- even numbers are feminine-- is all life, everywhere. Much closer to the world that we know, Ceres governs the outpouring of Life onto the Earth by the creator. Interestingly, the 3 sons of Cronus, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, also form the same type of triad. Here Poseidon is the second term, and his job is to conduct life into the world of generation.

Back to Culture



 

Let's return to the subject of culture, and let's introduce two more concepts from Proclus that will help us.

 

Every unity participates of the One. This means that everything which is united, whether the circle, or the musical note, or the human culture, is united by virtue of the One. As the One can be denominated as simply God, the unifying power which governs, say, a human culture, can be understood as a God.

 

Now the Divine is always good, and never evil. The Divine is always perfect and never incomplete. But the perfect and the good do not exist as such in the material world. The perfect circle exists in the mind; it cannot be found in nature. It is the ideal form which determines the geometries of the material world, which are always slightly off from absolutely perfect. In a similar manner, then, it must be the case, that every human culture is to a perfect version of itself as a circle in the material world is to a perfect circle. It is possible for a circle drawn by a human hand to come closer and closer to the absolute ideal, but it won't reach it in the material world. On the other hand, it is possible for material circles to be extremely sloppy. In the same way, the perfect culture does not exist. But the perfect version of every particular culture can be approximated, or we can be very far away from it.

 

Now, among shapes, which is different in each has its use. The unity of a triangle is the oneness of the triangle, or, even, the Divinity of the triangle. the triangle does not become a better triangle by trying to become more like a square. This is impossible it becomes a better triangle by becoming a more perfect reflection of the ideal form of the triangle.

 

Applying the same principle to human culture, there is not a single ideal human culture, because culture is a concept like shape. It is a genus, not a species. A given culture comes closer to the divine, the One, God, by expressing in the best form possible the ideal which itself is striving, not an abstract ideal toward which all of human culture is striving. If you were to try to create a perfect shape which consisted of it at once a triangle, a rhombus, and a pentagram, you would just draw a mess on a paper. It is its separation, paradoxically, it's unique identity as a triangle, which allows a triangle to express the unity of the one.

 

That being the case, the same must be true of human culture. To simply mash cultures together or to try to force them to become one another, does not actually produce unity between them. It destroys the possibility that they individually have for reaching unity by expressing in a clear and united way the Divine ideal which is their own origin and unattainable endpoint.

 

Now the isolated individual is not a culture, and neither is the isolated family. Moreover, the collection of isolated families, each with radically different modes of life is not a culture-- it is a return to the principle of the Unlimited. At this point, it feels very apropos to point out that the Unlimited is the principle of Evil. The Unlimited is the primordial chaos, the great void out of which being arises.

American Nations, American Gods



 

I've said before that there are four books that are necessary to understanding American culture. The first three are Albion's Seed, the Nine Nations of North America, and American Nations. The first is the most detailed. Each is a study of the ways in which the apparent unity of American, or North American, culture is illusory. There are between seven and eleven-- depending on the author-- major cultures, and dozens of minor ones, hidden under that unity. The fourth book is a good atlas of American Indian culture regions, which will demonstrate that the American cultural regions we have today aligns very closely with cultural regions that existed long before Columbus. 


It is my view that the persistent issues facing the United States arise from this fact. Left to its own devices, each culture has its own particular virtues, and also its own particular vices. United under a too-strong federal government, the pathologies of each manifest on a continent-wide scale, while the virtues are lost in the chaos. Next time I want to talk about the particular American regional cultures, the gods that govern them, and the demons that come with them.