Neoplatonism and the Transition to Christianity by Leonard Peikoff

let's then say a few words now about Plotinus PL o TI nu s Platina s-- the leading philosopher of the school called neoplatonist which was the main transmission belt between Plato and Christianity particularly st. Augustine whom we will look at next week Augustine was heavily influenced by penis and thereby all of Christianity in as much as Augustine was a vital to the shaping of Christian but sinuses dates are - or for - to 70 AD this is the first movement that we have in Congress that starts ad let's go straight to his metaphysics essentially of course as Neoplatonism the name would suggest to you he is a follower of Plato with a few twists of his own there is another superior dimension beyond the world in which we live actually as you'll see there are three of them why well it's all straight playtest in essence this is a world of change reality must as Plato and Parmenides argued to be unchanged this is a world of imperfection reality must as Plato argued be perfect this is a world of variety and multiplicity of the many but reality must be one you remember again Parmenides even called his reality the one that big physical sphere and Plato of course held at the universal in any category was the one in the many so reality for Platonists must be an absolutely perfect immutable completely unified existent which you can call God or the first or the absolute or the infinite or the good or the one the one for the obvious reason then it's one it is essentially plato's form with a good what is the one like according to platonist what is its nature what can patinas tell us about it nothing it is you say ineffable that is to say you cannot say a word about if you say anything at all about you would be making a distinction in the one you would be distinguishing its existence from its nature the fact that it is from what it is even if I say that one is exists I make a distinction between the one and the fact that it is in other words I make the one - and that of course is wrong you can out therefore say anything at all about the one not even that it exists you can't say that it's one or good or spiritual it is ineffable non conceptualize about non describable beyond anything man's mind can grasp incomprehensible to human reason all we can do is say that it transcends all human concepts we can say what it is not not what it is now this gave rise in later Christianity did the school known as negative theology which held that you cannot say what God is only what he isn't because they said very validly that if you give any characteristic to God you thereby limiting which is true if you say God is a by the very fact of saying he's a you have excluded him from being mommy and if he is there's something he isn't to that extent he is finite limited and therefore the school of negative theology which grew out of this said you cannot say God is good because what you mean he's limited he can't perform evil if he wants to you cannot say God is all-knowing you mean he couldn't attend a university class and absorb knowledge if he wanted to you can't say he's this because what about being not this - in other words they held the view to have an identity is to Sully God identity is incompatible with God which is certainly true and God therefore I must lack a humanly ascribable identity and this is Platonist viewport you see the kinship here with plato's ineffable form with a good now if the one is reality of course I'm not allowed to say that but Platanias wrote nine books on the ineffable if the one is reality our physical world must somehow have proceeded from it or some way be derived from however not directly there are simply two staggering a difference between the one with its absolute immutable unity and the many changing things making up this world we need some kind of mediating levels of reality specifically two of them between the one in the physical world so we're going to have a scale form going down from the one will get progressively less and less unified less and less changeless less and less perfect till we finally reached the last and least real least perfect level this physical world say well I have a characteristically playtest hierarchical metaphysics but I'm going to work from the top down instead it from the bottom up well the first thing to proceed from the one the second level of reality is of mind this platonist calls the divine mind now what has this mind have as its content Plato's world of forms play those universes Plato has shown that the universals must exist but they're not in the ineffable one so platanus scribes them to the next layer of the divine mind so we have a mind contemplating as its content all the Platonic forms and he also thought that this mind contained ideas not only of abstraction but of every particular instance of these forms now this divine mind is left unified than the one because now we can make some distinctions between the mind and its content although it's still very unified compared to our minds because it doesn't think in any step-by-step fashion it doesn't reason it surveys all of its content the whole world of forms in a one unmoving intuitive motionless insight now I'm not going to elaborate this or take any time on that essentially he is drawing a perfectly valid conclusion from Plato Aristotle had pointed out that abstractions only can exist in the mind Plato said abstractions are real apart from the particulars initial Platanias put the two together and says both are right therefore abstractions must exist in a supernatural mind which is the perfect blend of Platonism with the Aristotelian point and it's the inevitable tendency of Platonism therefore and that is why an hour later philosophy Plato's world of forms becomes thoughts in the mind of God in a divine mind and something you know personal simply becomes a thought of God instead of trying to study the anatomy of the divine mind which I don't think will be of great practical significance to you let us ask the said how did the divine mind come to be from the one the one sensible tarnis is inherently creative of course we can't say that but he said it and it in effect spills over or radiates out a process which Platonist calls emanation and man nation which is his term for the process by which one level of reality gives rise to the next what is the nature of emanation it can't be explained it says platonist literally all we can do is give you a metaphor think of the one as an analogy as a brilliant light for instance like the Sun of Plato you see how derivative all these philosophies think of the one is a brilliant light then light waves light rays stream forth from the Sun and at a certain distance you have an which is a little less bright than the Sun itself the Rays weaken it gets a little darker and therefore you have a region or dimension of reality which is less perfect less unified and so on than the light source of course you have to think of the Sun as possessing infinite energy it never gets depleted it always shines as brightly as ever and of course also the emanation process says platonist takes no time to occur so you have to imagine that light takes no time to travel from the Sun to the next region if the analogy is to be exact in other words for platonist the emanation process does not occur at some point in time there never was a beginning of the divine mind it had eternally emanated from the water and this you see is the last vestige of the Greek view that the universe is eternal as opposed to being created at some point in time well now let's go on the divine mind wants to imitate the worlds creativeness they're the ones creativeness so it emanates the next level the third dimension which latinas calls the world soul and that you see is the obvious stoic element which also I should say Plato in the dialogue the tiniest also subscribe to the idea of a world soul it's all of the whole world now it's not too important what he thought the world saw was in effect it also thinks but now it thinks more like us discursively step by step and therefore it's mental processes are infected with multiplicity with change it doesn't have the motionless contemplation of the divine mind and of course since soul for the whole Greek tradition is the principle of life and life is inherently bound up with changing motion the world soul is much less perfect unified or unchanging than the higher levels in terms of the metaphor we're getting farther from the Sun it's getting darker next stage the world soul emanates individual souls which emanate bodies and then inhabit them in other words the material world as we know it is emanated from the world soul the last level when we reach the material world we have the maximum of change multiplicity imperfection etc therefore the lowest in reality now you see here I can't resist adding the real primacy of consciousness minds and cells create matter create bodies by the time we reach Platina is this primacy of consciousness which I said was implicit in place has become deliberate and adopted as a matter of principle not only by platonist but by all a distinctive philosophies of the period including christiana they all objected to the Aristotelian idea that consciousness or as they would put it mind or soul was a metaphysically passive principle dependent on matter devoted only to discovering the facts of the material world this spiritually all insistent is about the material it has metaphysical primacy it has evaluative primacy it comes first in the order of being and matter is simply a derivative of a spiritual principle in a word consciousness is independent of matter it is a metaphysically productive principle whereas matter is the comparatively unreal the derivative simply the resultant of the operations of mind matter is a product of spirit this is the true primacy of consciousness now become explicit and it is the legacy of this mentality that you hear all around you on the street today asking where did the universe come from and you say it always existed and they say but it couldn't always have existed and you say why did I say well something must have created it some mind God etc and you say well but did God always exist and they say yes you say well then I your no farther head and they say well yes but even so I am farther ahead because God is a mind and I can take a mind as a primary but I can't take a physical reality as a primary now that is the mentality throughout this late Hellenistic period exemplified by Platonist although he himself as a Greek personally believed that matter had always existed had eternally been emanated from the world soul no note therefore that over and above the material world we have three non material principles which ultimately give rise to this world the one the divine mind the world soul or as I can say we have a trinity of divine non material principles over and against matter now this is very common in all the pagan philosophies of this period usually held that you need two intermediaries to bridge the gap between God in the physical world and consequently an otherworldly Trinity was very common it was of course taken over intact by Christianity as you know and became in the Christian version the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit which was conceived by Christian theology quite on the model of platonic and of course there was nothing distinctive in the Hellenistic worship of three the pythagoreans had got all excited about three back in their day excited about three in the 19th century so this seems to be a perennial disease of philosophy well now let's continue claipari has had to face a problem that was long faced by religious philosophers it was faced by Plato even though he's not fully a religion of course it was faced certainly by the Stoics it was faced by the Christians and it is the problem of evil what is this problem the problem was very sick evil things occur in the world earthquakes volcanoes which pour lava on peaceful virtuous little Italian communities at the foot of them diseases which run riots and attack the just as well as the unjust Slatter cetera now the problem of evil is simply if the universe is ruled by an all-powerful good power why does he permit evil now this has been a standard objection to religion ever since religion first appeared on the scene Epicurus of course it did not have to answer this problem being essentially atheistic put the problem to the Stoics as follows he said there are only four possibilities in theory either God wants to remove evil from the world but can't because he's not powerful which would show weakness on God's part which is contrary to God's nature as you described well God is able to remove evil from the world but he doesn't want which would show malignity which is equally contrary to God's nature God is neither able nor willing so he'd be both impotent and malignant well finally he's both willing and able which is a lot in concert with God as you describe him wait then comes evil why doesn't God remove it I was how Epicurus posed the problem and religions have attempted every imaginable and many unimaginable answers to this problem which usually boil down to what we call evil doesn't really exist it's only evil from a limited human perspective if you could only see the universe as a whole from God's point of view you'd see that everything has a place in his scheme and his plan and really therefore what we call evil is actually good if seen from God's viewpoint now the only trouble wrong with this answer is that the opponent the advocates of it go on to say of course as human beings we cannot see everything from God's viewpoint and therefore if you're a human being this answer is opaque and ungraspable if only you weren't human it amounts to you to know the answer now this is an errant appeal to mysticism but Platonists with his emanation scheme at least has a better answer to the problem of evil and because it was a somewhat better answer than the standard ones it was attached to by Augustine and by Christianity although of course it Christianity aiming for popular success kicked it all up with stories about Adam and Eve and so on but that is not the essential point so here's Platonists on the problem of evil evil first of all he says is associated with matter with the physical now in view of his platonic antimatter tendencies and the soul body conflict that was endemic to this whole period that shouldn't surprise so the problem of evil is really the problem of matter but now what is matter as platonist is it something positive if it is we could blame the one for emanating it we get all the one responsible for evil bad says proton is the actual fact is matter is simply the fourth and last level of the emanation process if we use the metaphor of the Sun that is to say s un it's been getting darker and darker as we leave the one well at some point it gets really dark there's no more like we get here darkest and that is matter the essential ingredient of our physical world so matter is not something positive it is merely that region of reality characterized by the absence of the energy the light the perfection of the one in itself matter is unreal an absence non-being and here again you see the enormous influence of Plato his idea that the distinctive constituent of the physical world is empty space the principle of non B matter for Platonists is in effect where the one's rays run out and as such you cannot blame the one for matter or therefore for evil because that's in hell in the process of emanation it can't emanate unless the thing is not it in terms of the metaphor it can't radiate light without the light being some distance from it and therefore it's darker and therefore less person in a word if the one is perfection anything emanating from it anything at a distance from it must in logic be less perfect must in logic have some metaphysical defect so it's not the one's fault the one is the source of light and thus is responsible for a light in other words for all the reality and perfection in the universe they're evil the physical is merely the darkness that the one didn't get to it's not something positively existing it's an absence now this principle was taken over by Christianity intact and used in the following form God is the good evil is the deficient the defective whatever is not God therefore evil is inherent in the world precisely because it's not God but since it is nothing positive God cannot be held responsible for you got it and therefore there is evil but God is not responsible that's the essential Christian solution to the problem of evil the most sophisticated one and it's pure Platonists as you see and ultimately it's played off now I should mention that the storix had a whole variety of less profound answers to the problem of evil quite different from this one and a lot of theirs are still kicking around today and you might hear it hear them if you're interested asking the question well I have one last word on Platonists how did he know all of this where our impact they claim to offer reasons honor of a plate in the sword as I tried to sketch in briefly however what about his views on the one in the emanation process how did he know if not by reason it is answer was to know the one you must undergo a special process which involves a long struggle a long period of asceticism a long period of self-discipline you have to in effect empty your mind at a certain point of all content all images all thoughts are sense experiences all emotions all reason you have to in effect jump outside your now self and the whole physical world and that's possible he claims and if successful if you do it successfully you will suddenly lose all sense of your own individuality and of your reason with all of its distinctions and multiplicity and logic and so on you will suddenly merge directly with the one and you will see what it is which of course you can communicate to anyone who hasn't had the experience now this state came to be called ecstasy from the Greek words meaning excellence still to stand outside yourself stand outside is what ecstasy literally means so it does not mean in this technical usage simply strong pleasure but the state of literally jumping outside of the confines of yourself in the world and merging with deity in an in communicable trance and Platonists was the great champion of ecstasy and his biographers report that he experienced it four times in six years which I would imagine to create straight it's very similar as you see to Plato's view of how you get to know the form of a good today's Mystics I may say put forth to allegedly rational arguments in favor of Ecstasy and why that reveals truths on it unattainable by any other means if yours that in those modern attempts to justify ecstasy question period well I don't think I have to say more on Platonists you must have enough to get the message obvious just as it work it's just what you would imagine it to be by now you should be able to tell from the first three sentences of philosophers metaphysics what everything else is going to be because we passed the age of anybody original the ultimate goal of life is to escape this or it says Platonist to go back home in effect to the true reality to the spiritual world and to be slightly flippant about it there's two ways the short way home in the long way home the short way home is ecstasy which you could hope to do for a brief period here on earth a long way home is via the wheel of birth in other words Platina is accepted along with plate of the hall pythagorean reincarnation scheme with the ultimate hope of finally escaping the wheel of birth and staying at home permanently meanwhile on earth you should live aesthetically turn away from physical pleasures latinas was a staunch intense advocate of the mind-body opposition he was supposed to have been ashamed of the fact that he even possessed a body etc any word the standard playtest approach to ethics but now much more intense than in Plato though still Platonists is a pleasure seeker in relation to what is to come now you see to what depths and by what main steps Greek philosophy at every branch has degenerated it has become errant mysticism but pagan Neoplatonism was not the wave of the future not in the form I just presented it to platini's his philosophy which is typical of what ancient philosophers were saying at this period is to an ancient pagan philosophy is too abstract and remote to catch on with a man in the street in that for its essence of course caught on but in the form of a complex emanation scheme with the super divine mind and a world soul and all that it's too abstract now the man in the street during these centuries or at least great great numbers of them also wanted the same basic things he wanted another reality he also felt helpless on earth he also wanted escape and salvation having been shaped and molded for centuries by all these philosophies and these desires of the men on the street were are ministered to by the development during these centuries of a number of roll revel popular mystery cults usually imported from the Orient which grew steadily in the Roman Empire during these centuries now these cults were primitive religions something on the order of the Oryx that we looked at some weeks ago they all promised salvation to their followers there was the cult of Isis and Osiris the cult of the Great Mother the cult of Mithra Mithras etc many of them derived from primitive even savage fertility rites now they had a lot of features in common most of these cults usually they offered salvation to the believers they promised immortality they had a complex set of rituals to be practiced and dogmas to be accepted it was common to believe that the particular God they worshipped had died and then been resurrected this is a carryover of the ancient fertility ritual from which many of these cults grew you know that God dies in a winter and then in the spring when things are reborn that God comes back to life and that's the original source of the idea of a God dying and then being resurrected and there's a great similarity even down to tiny details for instance Mithra ism which was associated with sun worship held that December 25th was a major holiday because it was the day of the sons were both after the winter was over and Christianity many centuries later decided since they couldn't stamp out that pagan festival they would make it the day of Jesus's birth but by what we know he was born I think in June I'm not sure now one of these carts was of course that of a group of Jews that cult of Jesus starting off as an obscure reform movement within Judaism it was soon made into a distinct mystery cult a new religion primarily owing to the efforts of st. Paul in its essence that is its basic philosophic content and promises it was not very much different from all the others flourishing at the time nor was it immediately very popular it was an awful lot of competition for among these mystery cults for followers even in the 3rd century AD for instance such as hundreds of years after Jesus it was considered far less significant by the educated man of the time than many other cults it was written off in effect as an obscure and somewhat crackpot Jewish sect now I don't have to tell you in this room living in the 20th century who won in this competition the reason that one is essentially owing to tactical strategic propagandistic methods rather than to its distinctive ideological content now for details I have to ask you to see any good history but for instance typical mystery cult only catered to men following the ancient prejudice in favor of the superiority of men Christianity emphasized equally the soul of women and that gave them a big leg up on the other cults right off the bat and of course Christianity had an immense tactical advantage in the following fact there were a lot of people who wanted to play it safe and so they would join three or four different mystery cults figuring if this one doesn't have the key the other one will Christianity was one of the few that would not permit them Christianity said if you join any other you cannot join us and if you join us that's it and that was enormous ly impressive to people who thought they really must know what they're talking about if they are willing to stake everything on their review now its considerations of this sort that is essentially responsible for the success of Christianity in this competition of course it wasn't called Christianity in the early centuries but it came to be called Christianity as time went on what is the philosophy of Christianity that is the subject of the next lecture thank you very much at the end of the last lecture we reached the brink of the medieval abyss but we did not yet take the full plunge tonight we will we witnessed last time the protracted deterioration and final death of ancient pagan philosophy we saw the progressive flourishing of supernaturalism mysticism asceticism other worldliness the quest for a supernatural salvation the rise of the mystery cults and among them the development of the cult of Jesus at the beginning and our obscure reform movement within Judaism they a mystery cult of its own and finally a full-fledged philosophy with characteristic views in every branch and department and on every subject the philosophy that was of course destined to rule the West for well over a millennium our subject this evening is the philosophy of Christianity after it had finally developed in other words by about the fourth or fifth century AD so beginning with I want to say a very few words about some of the early figures in the rise of what later came to be called Christianity and I can hardly omit at least a sentence or two on Jesus himself whose dates are for bc2 29 ad Jesus was Jewish and believed in the god of Judaism Jehovah or Yahweh as this God is called Jesus was a deeply religious man preaching that God is the father of all men and that all men are brothers of you which in this respect is very similar to the stoic doctrine we looked at last time Jesus preached that the essence of morality is love first and foremost love of God thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all my heart and all my soul and all thy mind and secondarily and derivative ly love the neighbor thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself both of these love Commandments by the way have their source in Judaic tradition Jesus did not originate them but he gave them a stress and emphasis there to unprecedented as to the rest of his ethical teachings and his view of man's life on earth I presume that you are familiar with them and I won't pause to recapitulate them now the essence is of course in the Sermon on the Mount to some aspects of which I will refer briefly later I'll merely say that Jesus himself seems from the evidence we have to have been deeply convinced that Judgment Day was imminent and that in the face of this fact in the face of the imminent end of the world physical goods external comforts material affluence worldly success and so on we're simply foolish and unimportant give away your goods he preached turn the other cheek consider the lilies of the field they toil not neither do they spin in a word turn to God and prepare yourself to meet your maker now I trust you're familiar with this so I won't repeat it here in fundamentals Jesus's teachings were obviously congenial to the overall spirit of the age in which he lived and taught the metaphysics of supernaturalism that's obvious the ethics of asceticism and other worldliness that is obvious even in epistemology the age was right because of its authoritarianism just a word on this last as philosophy deteriorated by the time we reached the second first century BC and progressively thereafter it became common for thinkers to defend a viewpoint not by giving arguments but by citing authorities by saying that some great philosopher usually played or Pythagoras had endorsed this view so it must be true and as the age grew more religious the great thinkers of the past came to be viewed as inspired or illumined by God as the bearer is not a rational insight but of divine revelation it wasn't a word a period progressively right for a man to announce that he represented or was designated by God was the spokesman of God Jesus was not the only such spokesman of course there were others but the point is that in the spewing himself he was in harmony with the dominant epistemology of the Age now Jesus is early followers from what we can tell or at least many of them apparently conceived Jesus as a prospective founder of a Jewish state on earth in effect as a political liberator of the Jews they thought of him as the man designated by God to do God's work on earth that is specifically to liberate the Jews from purity so they called him jesus the anointed or Jesus that designated ie Jesus the Messiah which is what Messiah means and since the Greek for Messiah is Christos he was Jesus but Christ now I point out to you in passing Christ is not his last name he is not the child of mr. and mrs. Christ it is primarily not exclusively but primarily only into st. Paul who was born around the beginning of the Christian era that this Jesus movement was transformed into a distinct mystery religion it is thus Paul who was really responsible more than anyone else for the emergence of Christianity as a separate religion rather than being merely an obscure sect within Judaism where Jesus had talked of worshipping Jehovah Paul talked of worshipping Jesus he construed Jesus on the pattern of many of the extant mystery cults as a God a God who died and then was resurrected have not merely to see a divinely appointed political messenger or moral God Paul at the inception of what was to become Christianity laid great emphasis on several points he was not the only one to endorse these points by any means but their characteristic of him won the crucial importance of salvation to be achieved by ultimate mystic union with Jesus now that was by the loss of one's own identity and the ultimate merging with God this is a state very similar to Plato's view of the ultimate merging with the form of the good or with platonist as ecstasy which was of course not to be formulated till some centuries after paul ii i'm giving you these in no particular order paul stressed man's utter helplessness and dependence on god's grace on God's free gift of salvation to man if man is to be saved on his own said Paul man cannot earn or achieve or deserve salvation because man is evil corrupt stained by sin the original sin of Adam transmitted thereafter to all of Adam's posterity therefore man needs grace grace is a key term in Christian philosophy and the best definition of it is it is the unearned offering of values by God to men now a word here on the term seen in the phrase original sin the term sin has to be sharply contrasted with the Euler term vice or wrongdoing or its equivalents when the Greek said that something was wrong or vicious they meant that it was contrary to the nature of man contrary to the dictates of reason that had harmed the individual and violated reason wrongdoing for them following the Socratic method or position was essentially self-destruction thin however is a religious term it means disobedience to the will of God it is therefore not so much what you do in actual content as the fact that you do it on your own by your own decision rather than submit to the will of God sin means religious disobedience alienation from God's will as against the Greek view of evil as transgression against man's nature so Adam's sin for instance was not in the content of his act not in the simple eating of the Apple but in doing it after God had forbidden err but Paul goes on just as Adam corrupted all of his posterity by his sin so Jesus will save and redeem them by his sacrifice on the cross if you believe in you if you have faith and thus point 3 of Paul that I'm going to mention the crucial importance of faith of acceptance in the absence of argument of mystic acceptance in the teachings and divinity of Jesus and for the crucial importance of leading an ascetic life of turning away from worldly pleasures above all de-emphasizing sex and turning instead to God as the almost exclusive focus and center of one's concern and I might mention simply a fifth point under Paul before we leave him and that is that it's primarily owing to Paul's efforts that this mystery cult became a universal religion as we say it became Catholic Catholic means simply universal we still have that usage today when we say that somebody has Catholic tastes with a small C in other words the Jesus Movement after Paul was not restricted to Jews it was applicable to all men Greek or Jew free man or slave male or female whoever unites with Jesus will be saved now so much for a thumbnail sketch of Paul now I have no time even to do this short of job on the great many other figures who comprise these early centuries of Christian development I cannot begin to recite their several contributions to the emerging Christianity to make a long story short let us summarize by saying that there are three main elements contributing to what emerged ultimately as Christianity 1 Jesus himself was Jewish and there is therefore a large influence of Judaism on Christianity then as Christianity as the Jesus Movement became a separate mystery cult taking Jesus as its God it acquired further mystery cult trappings and dogmas that were not possessed by Judaism and then as its spokesman tried to make it intellectually respectable they tried to express Christian views in terms of concepts that they borrowed from Greek philosophy they tried to answer the taunts of the pagans by working out a philosophy rather than just a cult of their own and in so doing they bored profoundly from Plato and above all Platonist now this amalgam of varying sources and ideas led to many sects within the early Christians and for the sake of retaining unity the church had to keep meeting in appropriate councils of bishops to take formal stands declare opposing positions on a given issue heretical and carve out the orthodoxy slowly across centuries now once the church spoke that was it one thing they decided to quite early was the need for a sacred text and of course the reason is obvious there was a wealth and abundance of revelations coming in at a rate you couldn't imagine there was every conceivable kind of religious sect and sub-sect splitting off on the basis of their particular revelations including K Knights who worshiped Cain you know the one that killed Abel and all fights who worship the serpent who had tempted Adam and the problem you see was intrinsic in the nature of hounding and organized religion you could no longer use logic as the standard but you needed some standard to distinguish that true from the false in this case the true Word of God from the false and if you're going to have an organized religion with some stability the only solution is to decree an orthodoxy and prescribe all debate thereafter to stand certain texts as the definitive revelation and thereafter that is the dogma and the doors are closed and new ones and this is the process which gave rise to the new testament and also to the absorption of the old testament by Cristiano now there's whole period of settling basic doctrinal points declaring what would and wouldn't count as an authentic revolution excuse me revelation organizing the administrative setup of the church and acquiring a philosophy to unify the whole thing this as I say lasted hundreds of years roughly from the time of Jesus till about the sixth century AD and this period these six centuries are called the patristic period in other words the period of the Fathers of the Church does Platanias theory of the world still bear any relation to Heinkels theory of the world spirit I suppose it does in certain ways and there is a definite influence of Platonists on Hegel I would just assume however past that by because to explain would take some time and would be beyond anybody who doesn't know Hegel and you cannot send upsize Hegel briefly on the hill however it has been often said that certain followers of platini's anticipated Hegel but actually anything in the ancient world is very far removed from anything in modern romanticist philosophy certainly Hegel there is a similarity that there was even an anticipation of the dialectic process Hegel's dialectic 3-fold process in who was it I think it's yam Lukas who is one of the followers of Platanos if evil is not godness that's plutinos doesn't this still imply non omnipotence on the part of God well you mean there's something he can't do yes in a certain way it does because it's still restricting God by logic the argument is well after all you can't expect God to create without his creation being something other than him that's inherent and the very meaning of creation or emanation and therefore it would be a contradiction if God were to create something which wasn't not him and therefore the laws of logic themselves prohibit God's doing it now whether this is a limitation on God's all powerfulness depends upon whether or not you regard adherence to the laws of logic as a limitation on God's power now the typical Christian would say that is not a limitation on God's power they would say God has to adhere to the laws of logic but after all what a contradiction is not even conceivable and consequently when you say God can't perform contradictions you are not saying there is inconceivable to man which God can't do contradiction is actually meaningless and therefore they would say God's inability to create contradictions is not a limitation on his power because a contradiction is simply outside the problems of the mind to grasp that's what the Aristotelian Christians tried to say to get around this point they're real religious Christians took the bull by the horns and they said to hell with logic God is so powerful he could violate the laws of logic them sin themselves if he wanted to and in fact does so all the time there was one of them for instance Damiani was his name beloved of existentialist a Christian mystic who said that God is so powerful that once the past has taken place God could retro actively abolished now that's what you call our powers the only other people claiming that power of the Soviet officials what are the two allegedly rational arguments for ecstasy put forward by modern mystics that you mentioned last time I'm glad to answer that because I thought no one would ask me that and no one did ask me last time I'll recite them very rapidly I argued one from The Sixth Sense and that argument goes as follows if a blind man saw or clink came up to a man with normal vision and said to him I don't see what you see therefore you must be crazy you would say what business do you have to criticize somebody who has a faculty you don't if you don't have it keep quiet by the same reason we claim the Mystics say a sixth sense which gives us insight into a true dimension of reality radically opposite to this world a reality where everything is the one where all distinctions are unreal etc and so on now by what reasoning can you if you only have five senses say we don't see it if you don't have any such sense then just like the blind man you should keep quiet you're in no position to criticize that's argument one what is the answer well go on indefinitely but it isn't worth it there is no identifying physical basis of the sixth sense although Duke University claims to be working on second it's a funny thing that blind people have no controversies as to whether there are sighted individuals how come obviously because blind people are capable of having proved to them objectively in terms of their own senses that they lack a certain Faculty human beings normal sighted people can make predictions of what will happen that they judge by their sight and the blind person can verify that he could not have made those predictions and yet he can verify them by his other senses consequently there's no debate on the question of the Mystics however the exact opposite is true it's not that the Mystics are able to demonstrate a form of knowledge which we can validate or verify by our five senses on the contrary that claim a form of knowledge which blatantly contradicts everything given by the five senses now the parallel would be if you told a blind person with just eight cherry pie there is nothing round or sweet in the universe and I know this from my fifth sense now a blind person would have a proving right to say I may be blind but I'm not crazy oh the second argument is the argument from unanimity the argument unanimity goes mystics through the ages east west north south ancient medieval wanna have had this same mystic experience now doesn't that prove that it can't be just a subjective aberration or a diseased consciousness but there must be something objective and real to it the answer that one is yes there's something objective to it they all have the same sickness schizophrenia whatever it happens to be the symptoms remain constant it's a syndrome I mean you prove nothing by showing that something happens repeatedly more than that how would you ever know that they have the same experience since the central characteristic of the experiences you can't say anything about it now if you judge by their hundreds of religions which exists and which all appeal to it in which all conflict with each other on details they must have some differences however that is too stupid to discuss further

Channel: Ayn Rand Institute

Views: 1,473

Rating: 4.8400002 out of 5

Keywords: history of philosophy, history, philosophy, history of western philosophy, western philosophy, leonard peikoff, ayn rand, ayn rand institute, objectivism, objectivist, political theory, modern philosophy, ancient philosophy, school of life, crash course, lecture, educational video, secular humanism, neoplatonism, Neoplatonism of Plotinus, pagan mystery religions, pagan religion, christianity

Id: TWy0DsIHnWI

Length: 51min 25sec (3085 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2020