How do we turn Neoplatonism into a popular contemporary religion?
Neoplatonism was somewhat of a semi-religion but the writings of Plotinus and Proclus take years to master and somewhat impenetrable to the common man.
Some suggestions:
1) Create somewhat of a church structure and hierarchy
2) Make a more user-friendly, exoteric version, while leaving the complicated stuff to philosophers and theologians
3) Anthropomorphize some more; the one, being, intellect, soul, it's all too abstract. Give them names like Zeus, Apollo, Diana, etc.
4) Appropriate Renaissance architecture and iconography such as pic related to make it more appealing to ex-Christians and Westerners in general
5) Create a reformed liturgy based on Iamblichus On the Mysteries with elements from Catholic and Orthodox liturgies
6) Incorporate some Renaissance and Modern occult stuff like Thelema
7) Compose a prayer book contaning classic poems.
8) Assemble a Neoplatonist "bible" with Hesiod and Homer as the Old Testament
The Catholic Church already has over a billion members.
>>992085
Lol. But they won't admit it though, that half their stuff is Pagan.
>>992088
Not my point. My point was that all that is good in Neo-Platonism has been preserved in the Church. I'm sorry you can't recognize the universality of Reason and instead only see paganism when it's acknowledged that wise men can live outside of the Church.
>>992098
Only one in a million Christians think like that. The vast majority think that le ebil bagans lived in ignorance and idolatry. And then even those who give Pagan philosophers their due do it in a condescending matter, Oh they had glimpses of the truth but the church, oh the church possesses the fullness of truth, as if Christian theology wasn't just Pagan metaphysics with angels. I can't stand this level of hypocrisy, hearing the student talk about the master, the miser about the rich man and the copy about the model as if the situation was the reverse, hence why Christian theology is repugnant to me.
>>992117
>as if Christian theology wasn't just Pagan metaphysics with angels
Is that true? I don't think it is.
Long live Zeus the thunderer, creator of the universe, universal intellect and identical with Aristotle's first unmoved mover, Anaxagoras' Nous, Heraclitus' Logos and Plato's demiurge.
>>992122
The word theology was actually first used by Plato. Aristotle called metaphysics the first philosophy or theology. It is the science concerned with the first causes and immaterial substances, which Aquinas explicitly calls angels. The rest and non-essential parts of Christian theology are based on the bible which is fiction anyways.
>>992078
explain to me the difference betveen neoplatonism and gnosticism
>>992137
>The rest and non-essential parts of Christian theology are based on the bible which is fiction anyways.
But the essence of Christianity is contained in the Gospel. You're just acting as if that were false.
>fiction
That's a strong word to be using in reference to works from Antiquity.
>>992142
>But the essence of Christianity is contained in the Gospel. You're just acting as if that were false.
The essence of Christianity yes, of theology no.
>That's a strong word to be using in reference to works from Antiquity.
Granted.
>>992128
that makes no conceptual sense whatsoever
>>992152
You're talking about Christian theology. This is an inherently Christian thing. I have never claimed, nor has anybody else, that there were no theologians prior to Aquinas.
>>992140
Some of the main points.
Gnosticism:
The demiurge is a malevolent and ignorant being;
The world is evil and ugly;
Planets and stars are demons;
There are three kinds of men, material, psychic and spiritual;
Spiritual men are better than their creator;
Neoplatonism:
The demiurge is a benevolent and wise being;
The world is good and beautiful;
Planets and stars are sensible "statues" of the gods;
All men possess body, a soul and a spirit vehicle;
Men indeed have a higher dignity than this material body, but they occupy a lower than their creator in the hierarchy of being;
There are a lot of similarities though.
>>992167
Theology is just metaphysics.
>>992183
What's your point, man? I don't see it.
>These are synonyms
So what?
Proselytizing is terrible.
>>992157
Of course it does. In Neoplatonism an harmonization between the systems of Plato and Aristotle is achieved, with the Prime Mover = Nous (that Aristotle got from Anaxagoras, he tells us so in the De Anima) occuping the place of the demiurge or universal intellect, primal being, unmoved mover and instrumental cause of the world.
>>992190
Theology is metaphysics.
Metaphysics is the science of first causes and immaterial substances.
Whatever does not concern these issues is a sensible and religious accretion and hence non-essential.
>>992199
Another way to put it.
Metaphysics is concerned with the study of pure being and first causes.
The business of religion is to provide sensible and dramatic supports for purely metaphysical concepts.
>>992199
=I don't understand your point. I see that you're denying that Christianity is true, but beyond that, I'm honestly not sure what you think you're arguing. It isn't being argued very well, either, since Christian theologians do in fact write about first causes and immaterial substances.
Btw Metaphysics was the title of a book Aristotle's students compiled. It literally just means "the stuff that comes after the physics." This doesn't mean "The stuff that comes after Nature," since that's completely contradictory in Greek thought. It's the title of a book full of vaguely related arguments that didn't belong anywhere else in the Aristotelian corpus. It isn't a science.
>>992212
>It isn't a science
Confirmed for not having read it as Aristotle himself refers to it as "this science" all over it. Of course Greek episteme has a different meaning than modern science, but it is not incorrect to refer to it as science because it is a polysemous word and Aristotle's meaning was the original one.
With regards the name, I never said Aristotle used the word metaphysics. I said he called it first philosophy or theology.
Finally my point is clear from my previous posts, not requiring further elucidation.
>>992231
Is your argument that, because Christian practice has a material element, it's impossible for it to be truly theological?
>>992180
>The demiurge is a benevolent and wise being;
To the trash.
>>992180
sounds like neoplatonists just shill for the demiurge
>>992245
No. My point is that Christian theology has an essential and a non-essential part. The essential part is basically true and would be true for Muslims and Hindus and at all times, as truth has no religion, nationality and doesn't change. The non-essential part is whatever is based exclusively on the Gospel which is true only for Christians if at all.
>>992252
>>992255
1. We have seen elsewhere that the Good, the Principle, is simplex, and, correspondingly, primal — for the secondary can never be simplex — that it contains nothing: that it is an integral Unity.
Now the same Nature belongs to the Principle we know as The One. Just as the goodness of The Good is essential and not the outgrowth of some prior substance so the Unity of The One is its essential.
Therefore:
When we speak of The One and when we speak of The Good we must recognize an Identical Nature; we must affirm that they are the same — not, it is true, as venturing any predication with regard to that [unknowable] Hypostasis but simply as indicating it to ourselves in the best terms we find.
Even in calling it “The First” we mean no more than to express that it is the most absolutely simplex: it is the Self-Sufficing only in the sense that it is not of that compound nature which would make it dependent upon any constituent; it is “the Self-Contained” because everything contained in something alien must also exist by that alien.
Deriving, then, from nothing alien, entering into nothing alien, in no way a made-up thing, there can be nothing above it.
We need not, then, go seeking any other Principles; this — the One and the Good — is our First; next to it follows the Intellectual Principle, the Primal Thinker; and upon this follows Soul. Such is the order in nature. The Intellectual Realm allows no more than these and no fewer.
Those who hold to fewer Principles must hold the identity of either Intellectual-Principle and Soul or of Intellectual-Principle and The First; but we have abundantly shown that these are distinct.
It remains for us to consider whether there are more than these Three.
>>992259
> the Gospel which is true only for Christians if at all.
You started a Neoplatonism thread and now you're throwing out vague arguments about how truth is relative.
The Gospel is either true or false. It isn't true for some and not for others. Some believe it, some don't. Truth is necessarily true if it is true at all.
>>992263
Now what other [Divine] Kinds could there be? No Principles of the universe could be found at once simpler and more transcendent than this whose existence we have affirmed and described.
They will scarcely urge upon us the doubling of the Principle in Act by a Principle in Potentiality. It is absurd to seek such a plurality by distinguishing between potentiality and actuality in the case of immaterial beings whose existence is in Act — even in lower forms no such division can be made and we cannot conceive a duality in the Intellectual-Principle, one phase in some vague calm, another all astir. Under what form can we think of repose in the Intellectual Principle as contrasted with its movement or utterance? What would the quiescence of the one phase be as against the energy of the others?
No: the Intellectual-Principle is continuously itself, unchangeably constituted in stable Act. With movement — towards it or within it — we are in the realm of the Soul’s operation: such act is a Reason-Principle emanating from it and entering into Soul, thus made an Intellectual Soul, but in no sense creating an intermediate Principle to stand between the two.
Nor are we warranted in affirming a plurality of Intellectual Principles on the ground that there is one that knows and thinks and another knowing that it knows and thinks. For whatever distinction be possible in the Divine between its Intellectual Act and its Consciousness of that Act, still all must be one projection not unaware of its own operation: it would be absurd to imagine any such unconsciousness in the Authentic Intelligence; the knowing principle must be one and the selfsame with that which knows of the knowing.
The contrary supposition would give us two beings, one that merely knows, and another separate being that knows of the act of knowing.
>>992276
If we are answered that the distinction is merely a process of our thought, then, at once, the theory of a plurality in the Divine Hypostasis is abandoned: further, the question is opened whether our thought can entertain a knowing principle so narrowed to its knowing as not to know that it knows — a limitation which would be charged as imbecility even in ourselves, who if but of very ordinary moral force are always master of our emotions and mental processes.
No: The Divine Mind in its mentation thinks itself; the object of the thought is nothing external: Thinker and Thought are one; therefore in its thinking and knowing it possesses itself, observes itself and sees itself not as something unconscious but as knowing: in this Primal Knowing it must include, as one and the same Act, the knowledge of the knowing; and even the logical distinction mentioned above cannot be made in the case of the Divine; the very eternity of its self-thinking precludes any such separation between that intellective act and the consciousness of the act.
The absurdity becomes still more blatant if we introduce yet a further distinction — after that which affirms the knowledge of the knowing, a third distinction affirming the knowing of the knowledge of the knowing: yet there is no reason against carrying on the division for ever and ever.
To increase the Primals by making the Supreme Mind engender the Reason-Principle, and this again engender in the Soul a distinct power to act as mediator between Soul and the Supreme Mind, this is to deny intellection to the Soul, which would no longer derive its Reason from the Intellectual-Principle but from an intermediate: the Soul then would possess not the Reason-Principle but an image of it: the Soul could not know the Intellectual-Principle; it could have no intellection.
>>992278
2. Therefore we must affirm no more than these three Primals: we are not to introduce superfluous distinctions which their nature rejects. We are to proclaim one Intellectual-Principle unchangeably the same, in no way subject to decline, acting in imitation, as true as its nature allows, of the Father.
And as to our own Soul we are to hold that it stands, in part, always in the presence of The Divine Beings, while in part it is concerned with the things of this sphere and in part occupies a middle ground. It is one nature in graded powers; and sometimes the Soul in its entirety is borne along by the loftiest in itself and in the Authentic Existent; sometimes, the less noble part is dragged down and drags the mid-soul with it, though the law is that the Soul may never succumb entire.
The Soul’s disaster falls upon it when it ceases to dwell in the perfect Beauty — the appropriate dwelling-place of that Soul which is no part and of which we too are no part — thence to pour forth into the frame of the All whatsoever the All can hold of good and beauty. There that Soul rests, free from all solicitude, not ruling by plan or policy, not redressing, but establishing order by the marvellous efficacy of its contemplation of the things above it.
For the measure of its absorption in that vision is the measure of its grace and power, and what it draws from this contemplation it communicates to the lower sphere, illuminated and illuminating always.
>>992280
3. Ever illuminated, receiving light unfailing, the All-Soul imparts it to the entire series of later Being which by this light is sustained and fostered and endowed with the fullest measure of life that each can absorb. It may be compared with a central fire warming every receptive body within range.
Our fire, however, is a thing of limited scope: given powers that have no limitation and are never cut off from the Authentic Existences, how imagine anything existing and yet failing to receive from them?
It is of the essence of things that each gives of its being to another: without this communication, The Good would not be Good, nor the Intellectual-Principle an Intellective Principle, nor would Soul itself be what it is: the law is, “some life after the Primal Life, a second where there is a first; all linked in one unbroken chain; all eternal; divergent types being engendered only in the sense of being secondary.”
In other words, things commonly described as generated have never known a beginning: all has been and will be. Nor can anything disappear unless where a later form is possible: without such a future there can be no dissolution.
If we are told that there is always Matter as a possible term, we ask why then should not Matter itself come to nothingness. If we are told it may, then we ask why it should ever have been generated. If the answer comes that it had its necessary place as the ultimate of the series, we return that the necessity still holds.
With Matter left aside as wholly isolated, the Divine Beings are not everywhere but in some bounded place, walled off, so to speak; if that is not possible, Matter itself must receive the Divine light [and so cannot be annihilated].
>>992281
http://thriceholy.net/Texts/Plotinus5.html
Not gonna post the rest. Gnostics BTFO
>>992274
I didn't say that truth is relative. I meant in the sense that the Gospel is considered true only by Christians and cannot be demonstrated and accepted by all regardless of religion such as the truths of metaphysics.
>>992291
That seems irrelevant. Something has to be demonstrated to every person in order to be true? It's odd that you made a thread advocating the creation of a Neo-Platonist church in the modern world and then go on to say this sort of thing.
>>992259
The trinity and the god of Islam have are totally different though metaphysically. The Islamic God's oneness is one of his most essential qualities and Islamic philosophers studied the nature of his oneness or the implications of it. Christian theologians naturally elaborated the doctrine of the trinity. In other words there's no universal that connects the two. Your argument sounds like new age nonsense
>>992297
Oh God (or the demiurge) you're dense aren't you? I didn't say that something actually has to be demonstrated to every person in order to be true. What I mean is that metaphysics is demonstrable as opposed to revelation, which is not demonstrable and requires faith.
>>992278
>The Divine Mind in its mentation thinks itself; the object of the thought is nothing external: Thinker and Thought are one; therefore in its thinking and knowing it possesses itself, observes itself and sees itself not as something unconscious but as knowing: in this Primal Knowing it must include, as one and the same Act, the knowledge of the knowing; and even the logical distinction mentioned above cannot be made in the case of the Divine; the very eternity of its self-thinking precludes any such separation between that intellective act and the consciousness of the act.
Based Plotinus. Aquinas (and surely not Bonaventure) wouldn't object to this.
>>992275
dont think they saw humans as 'good'
human beings can achieve spiritual transormation/liberation, but they arent good, the human as a organism is just another perverted concoction of the demiurge
its hard to argue with gnostic logic, except by rising above it, defining the demiurge as incapable of being different, hence conditioned and contingent, hence not technicaly 'evil', just lacking, or to depersonalise it, and say the 'demiurge' is just a simbolic personification, or just put it all down to a broken phone kind of thing, where information is just corrupt each iteration and so abberations accumulate, one way or another theres no one to be angry at, no one is being purpusefully mean, things are just shit depending on perspective
i mean you cant realy claim a demiurge could in any way be truly good, hes too close to the guts and shit of creation, as in the actual act and process of it, you can assume a demiurge would be divine and allpowerful in human terms, but good just does not apply as a notion
now the gnostic atitude could be attacked for being neurotic in a sense, as in that ones entire existance as a living being is seen as a afront and a insult and even a injury, which is kind of a cry-baby perspective of self pitty and rejection of life, but even if this is overcome and a human accepts and deals with life, even percieving beauty and feeling joy, you still cant justify or explain away the absurdity of it all, only refrain from value judgment and good-evil dichotomy, and just deal
at no point can you claim a creator is good, thats just as streched as saying its evil
>>992320
Except that Christian theologians themselves say that the dogma of the trinity is not deducible by metaphysics alone, but only obtained through revelation, and even then not explainable and considered a mystery. Hence it is a religious and non-essential accretion.
>>992323
>metaphysics is demonstrable
Lol
That's funny
The real religion the west needs is something intensely violent, expansive and imperialistic with an aspiration to truth and knowledge. I don't think this neoplatonist stuff fits.
Think fundamentalist islam plus new atheism's rationality worship plus some bullshit stories and morals to keep plebs in check.
>>992350
Read Proclus' Elements of Theology.
>>992366
I have.
I don't think it demonstrates much. Mostly because metaphysics is indemonstrable.
>>992363
Been done:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity_(religion)
Ultimately purely material pursuits such as eugenics are not inspiring enough. People strive for particular goods and then the supreme good which is beyond this sensible world and the cause of conversion to our paternal cause and true origin.
>>992383
Namely the Good or the One, which is above even the demiurge.
>>992343
Very thoughtful post.
>>992345
But Islamic theologians don't claim that the Quran can be deduced through the use of pure reason
>>992363
no no no, we need a religion of personal betterment and spiritual transformation and collective solidarity and mutual cooperation and acceptance of all aspects of humanity and striving for individual and group transcendence and reaching fundamental realities and love and joy, that starts up mass systemic homicidal shit on continental scales only incidentaly, only when no other mutualy satisfying option remains, not as a result of actual religious purpose or intention, just... for practical reasons
>were all human after all
>>992403
I honestly don't know what they claim and I am not shilling for Islam. Whatever is not deducible by pure reason belongs to the realm of religious revelation and not pure metaphysics. Let their apologists contend with each other.
I would add that the difference between dogmatic religions and Neoplatonism is this. The Neoplatonists were straightforward that the myths of Homer and Plato were made up. Their function being merely to provide sensible images for metaphysical concepts, because most people need that. Whereas most dogmatic religions will have you believe their flawed mythologies and cosmologies as fact.
>>992439
Tbh you sound more like a Kantian than a Platonist.
Ok I gotta go now. Zeus bless.
Zeus is the first. Zeus the thunderer, is the last.
Zeus is the head. Zeus is the middle, and by Zeus all things were fabricated.
Zeus is male, Immortal Zeus is female.
Zeus is the foundation of the earth and of the starry heaven.
Zeus is the breath of all things. Zeus is the rushing of indefatigable fire.
Zeus is the root of the sea: He is the Sun and Moon.
Zeus is the king; He is the author of universal life;
One Power, one Dæmon, the mighty prince of all things:
One kingly frame, in which this universe revolves,
Fire and water, earth and ether, night and day,
And Metis (Counsel) the primeval father, and all-delightful Eros (Love).
All these things are United in the vast body of Zeus.
Would you behold his head and his fair face,
It is the resplendent heaven, round which his golden locks
Of glittering stars are beautifully exalted in the air.
On each side are the two golden taurine horns,
The risings and settings, the tracks of the celestial gods;
His eyes the sun and the Opposing moon;
His unfallacious Mind the royal incorruptible Ether.
Eus. Pr. Ev. III.—Proc. Tim.—Aristot. de Mund.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/af/af10.htm
>>992180
>The demiurge is a benevolent and wise being
you're thinking of regular platonism. neo-platonism varied from the demiurge being incompetent to malevolent
>>992528
[Citation Needed]
