Neoplatonic Angelology
Dec. 10th, 2009 04:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
endymions_bowerI have found that many people are curious about the Platonic doctrine concerning angels (angeloi), doubtless because angels are so important in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. There is much less said about them in Platonism; but I thought that I might gather together in one place some of the noteworthy things I have encountered concerning angels in Proclus.
(On a separate issue, it is well-known that Christian angelology is heavily indebted to Platonic henadology. Some of the most interesting medieval reflections on individuation come about in the context of discussions on angelic individuality, since angels inherited the uniqueness Platonic Gods possess as henads. The angels of medieval philosophers, however, were conceptualized within the bowdlerized Aristotelianism of Christian scholasticism, so their uniqueness could only be conceived in terms of each angel being a species with just one member, a sort of flattened henadology lacking a real distinction between substance (ousia) and the huperousios, that which is beyond Being—and so it is a matter of divine fiat that there is not more than one angel of the same “species”, whereas for a henad to be duplicated is meaningless: they are unique by definition. Accordingly, real progress was not made on the problem of individuation until Leibniz took another great gulp of Platonic henadology to produce his monadology.)
Although angelos, “messenger” or “herald”, is already used by Homer to refer to the birds of augury (Iliad 24.292, 296), the term does not become popular in a theological context until much later, in the era of Hellenistic multiculturalism, and it was probably Iamblichus who first accorded these entities a systematic position in Platonism; e.g. De Mysteriis II. 6, where we even find “archangels”, a term not much used by subsequent Platonists (Proclus uses the term once, in his Cratylus commentary (37), in an unusual context I shall discuss below). Since Iamblichus was Syrian, it is possible that he adopted angeloi into his system at least in part to reflect the usage of Greek-speaking theorists of Semitic religious traditions who felt, for whatever reason, that certain of the semi-divine entities of those traditions were not accurately described as daimons, which was by far the more common term in Greek for an incorporeal entity with a mediate status between Gods and humans. I don’t know enough about those traditions to comment on what might have been the issue; perhaps the tendency to conceive daimons as being souls of some sort. At any rate, angels became a standard, if not much remarked upon, element of Platonic ontology after Iamblichus, the triad of “angels, daimons and heroes” becoming a familiar refrain in later Platonists to refer to the classes of beings immediately superior to mortals.
Basically, the Platonic concept is that each God has a personal entourage descending from Him/Her of angels, daimons, heroes and ordinary souls (I guess we could call those latter simply ‘fans’). Thus Proclus says in his Timaeus commentary (3, 262f):
For about every God there are more partial Gods [i.e., operations of that God on specific planes of Being, such as the intellective Zeus as distinct from the hypercosmic Zeus]; angelic orders unfolding divine light; daimons proceeding together with or being the guards or attendants of the God; and the elevated and magnificent army of heroes, repressing in advance all the disorder arising from matter, connecting the divine vehicles, purifying the partial vehicles which revolve about these, and assimilating the latter to the former. About every God likewise, there is a choir of undefiled souls resplendent with purity, as well as a multitude of other souls, at one time elevating the head of their charioteer to the intelligible and at another coordinating themselves with the mundane powers of the Gods. And of these, some are distributed about one and others about another power of their leading God … and others participate more nearly or more remotely of the same power. (trans. Thomas Taylor, slightly mod.)
As you can see, angels are the highest of the divine participants, that is, the closest mere beings to the Gods themselves. In each God’s procession, angels are analogous to Being, daimons to Life, and heroes to Intellect; with respect to their own substance or essence, however, angels are intellectual, and proceed according to the intellectual life of their God, because it is from the intellect of each God that Being Itself is produced. Thus “the angelic … which is first unfolded into light from the ineffable and hidden fountain of beings [i.e., the third intelligible triad, divine intellect] … unfolds the Gods themselves and announces that which is hidden in their essence,” (In Tim. 3, 165). Within a whole world-order, the angelic is thus closely affiliated with the demiurgic function, that is, the Intellective class of Gods: “the angelic indeed proceeds according to the intellectual life of the demiurge … and interprets and transmits a divine intellect to secondary natures,” (ibid.). As with all manifestations of “lower” (i.e., more specific) principles, angels have a narrower range of operation than Gods: whereas Gods act upon intellects, souls and bodies, angels operate on souls and bodies, and daimons upon bodies alone (In Tim. 3, 192).
Proclus also explains that as from one deity many angels are suspended, every angel rules over a multitude of daimons (In Tim. 1, 137). In the Cratylus commentary, he gives the example of how a God generates angelic and subsequent multiplicities by speaking of Apollo, from each of whose discrete powers a whole 'entourage' is suspended: “there are many classes of medical [i.e., ‘perfective’] angels, daimons, and heroes who are dependent upon Apollo, and many classes of different spirits of prophecy [‘revelation’], music [‘the property that binds the dispersed multitude’], and archery [‘the property that destroys the disordered nature’] who distribute the unitary powers of the God in a particular and discriminate mode,” (98). (Note that these are nowhere near all the powers of Apollo, "for the entire multitude of Apollo's powers is incomprehensible to us and indescribable. Indeed, how could human reason ever become able to grasp all the properties together, not only of Apollo, but of any God at all?" (In Crat. 97).)
As for the specific functions of angels, Proclus explains that both angels and daimons have been known to teach humans “names that are better fit to their objects than those which men generally put,” (In Crat. 20). Examples of these would be the alternate “divine” names Homer occasionally mentions for things, like Xanthus for Scamander, the river near Troy. I would say that the principle here is that of a name, invocation, or other formula customized, so to speak, for a particular intelligence or picking out something about the object that the more common name does not. This is not an office peculiar to angels; Proclus refers later (72) to “epiphanies of daimons” who “have revealed to the more fortunate of men names that have a natural relation to reality, names through which these daimons made the truth about beings more distinct.” That is, such a name is fashioned for direct phonetic effectiveness, and would be, I would imagine, opaque to etymological investigation. Proclus would doubtless say there is a difference between names delivered by angels and those delivered by daimons, but he doesn’t seem to state the difference clearly; when he goes on to classify names, the classes are merely (1) those established by the Gods themselves, (2) those established by daimons, (3) those established by humans “with the help of scientific knowledge,” and (4) those established by humans without the help of such knowledge. Later on, he merely says that “angels do not name both Gods and themselves as the inferior natures of daimons, heroes, or souls do, but they do it more majestically and more intellectually,” (79).
More colorful is the distinction Proclus draws (In Crat. 71f) between the different forms of “purification” exercised by angels and daimons, comparing these to the operations of priests and sophists, respectively:
Just as in the universe angels purify souls by excising their stains resulting from generation and by leading them up to the Gods, so too certain daimons connected with matter purify by torturing souls that look to matter … Thus the priests, acting like angels, remove all that obstructs us in our perception of higher reality, while the sophists, by exercising us in contradictory refutations, excise in the fashion of daimons the injury caused by the false conceit of knowledge.
He remarks later on that “Not all souls after release from the body are deemed worthy of association with Pluto, but only the zealous. For whoever is too attached to the body is released from evil only with effort and pain by certain daimons or purificatory angels,” (89).
The most interesting thing Proclus has to say about angels, however, is about the special relationship of the whole class of angels as such to one particular God in the Hellenic pantheon, namely Hermes. Proclus states as a general principle that “the summit and the first genus of every order is … assimilated to the cause which is prior to it. As therefore, the first of intellectuals is intelligible, and the first of angels is a God, thus also the first of sensibles is perpetual and divine …” (In Tim. 3, 223). In a Hellenic context, the God who is also “the first of angels” is Hermes, as Proclus makes clear in the Cratylus commentary, when he explains that “as in Homer knowledge of the conversation between Zeus and Helios came down as far as Odysseus through the medium of both the archangel Hermes and Calypso (Odyssey 12.374-90), so also Helenus learned the will of Apollo and Athena not from the highest levels but from those proximate to him and daimonic (Iliad 7.44),” (37). Apparently the unusual term "archangel" is used here to distinguish Hermes, as the God of angels, so to speak, from mere angels, who are, unlike Hermes, beings.
So it is presumably Hermes to whom Proclus refers when he says (In Tim. 1, 341) that
the divine causes of language unfold … the essences of the natures prior to them … In the Gods, therefore, the angel of Zeus, who has the relation of logos to the intellect of his father, announces [apangellei] the will of Zeus to secondary natures. But in essences [substances, ousiai = beings], soul, which is the logos of intelligibles, unfolds the unified cause of logoi which is in them, she receiving from them her hypostasis [= establishment in Being]. And in the genera superior to us, the angelic order has the relation of logos to the Gods.
Logos can mean simply ‘word’, but in Platonists has the more complex sense of a formula, i.e., an expression of the constituents of a compound. Logoi can also refer, in a usage borrowed from the Stoics, to the specific formative principles of the parts of a complex being that are subordinate to the overall functional telos, e.g., there is a logos for hair, but not a "form" (eidos), because it merely fulfills one of the requirements of the eidos of a given species of animal, or of Animal in general.
The soul is the logos of intelligibles because it exists to think them through, as it were, in space and time. And language in general is "angelic" relative to divine intelligences. Within many pantheons, moreover, we could perhaps expect to find deities in a relationship similar to that between Zeus and Hermes, that is, a demiurgic intellective God and a God specifically charged with translating that God’s formative will with respect to the cosmos into operative formulae; Re and Thoth, e.g., are in this sort of relationship in the Book of the Celestial Cow. An interesting question, which must remain open for now, is whether, applying here the structure of interpretation Proclus applied to the ‘lawgiver’ who fashions names in the Cratylus, we might thus regard Hermes as the ultimate ‘author’ of at least the divine core of the Greek language.
(On a separate issue, it is well-known that Christian angelology is heavily indebted to Platonic henadology. Some of the most interesting medieval reflections on individuation come about in the context of discussions on angelic individuality, since angels inherited the uniqueness Platonic Gods possess as henads. The angels of medieval philosophers, however, were conceptualized within the bowdlerized Aristotelianism of Christian scholasticism, so their uniqueness could only be conceived in terms of each angel being a species with just one member, a sort of flattened henadology lacking a real distinction between substance (ousia) and the huperousios, that which is beyond Being—and so it is a matter of divine fiat that there is not more than one angel of the same “species”, whereas for a henad to be duplicated is meaningless: they are unique by definition. Accordingly, real progress was not made on the problem of individuation until Leibniz took another great gulp of Platonic henadology to produce his monadology.)
Although angelos, “messenger” or “herald”, is already used by Homer to refer to the birds of augury (Iliad 24.292, 296), the term does not become popular in a theological context until much later, in the era of Hellenistic multiculturalism, and it was probably Iamblichus who first accorded these entities a systematic position in Platonism; e.g. De Mysteriis II. 6, where we even find “archangels”, a term not much used by subsequent Platonists (Proclus uses the term once, in his Cratylus commentary (37), in an unusual context I shall discuss below). Since Iamblichus was Syrian, it is possible that he adopted angeloi into his system at least in part to reflect the usage of Greek-speaking theorists of Semitic religious traditions who felt, for whatever reason, that certain of the semi-divine entities of those traditions were not accurately described as daimons, which was by far the more common term in Greek for an incorporeal entity with a mediate status between Gods and humans. I don’t know enough about those traditions to comment on what might have been the issue; perhaps the tendency to conceive daimons as being souls of some sort. At any rate, angels became a standard, if not much remarked upon, element of Platonic ontology after Iamblichus, the triad of “angels, daimons and heroes” becoming a familiar refrain in later Platonists to refer to the classes of beings immediately superior to mortals.
Basically, the Platonic concept is that each God has a personal entourage descending from Him/Her of angels, daimons, heroes and ordinary souls (I guess we could call those latter simply ‘fans’). Thus Proclus says in his Timaeus commentary (3, 262f):
For about every God there are more partial Gods [i.e., operations of that God on specific planes of Being, such as the intellective Zeus as distinct from the hypercosmic Zeus]; angelic orders unfolding divine light; daimons proceeding together with or being the guards or attendants of the God; and the elevated and magnificent army of heroes, repressing in advance all the disorder arising from matter, connecting the divine vehicles, purifying the partial vehicles which revolve about these, and assimilating the latter to the former. About every God likewise, there is a choir of undefiled souls resplendent with purity, as well as a multitude of other souls, at one time elevating the head of their charioteer to the intelligible and at another coordinating themselves with the mundane powers of the Gods. And of these, some are distributed about one and others about another power of their leading God … and others participate more nearly or more remotely of the same power. (trans. Thomas Taylor, slightly mod.)
As you can see, angels are the highest of the divine participants, that is, the closest mere beings to the Gods themselves. In each God’s procession, angels are analogous to Being, daimons to Life, and heroes to Intellect; with respect to their own substance or essence, however, angels are intellectual, and proceed according to the intellectual life of their God, because it is from the intellect of each God that Being Itself is produced. Thus “the angelic … which is first unfolded into light from the ineffable and hidden fountain of beings [i.e., the third intelligible triad, divine intellect] … unfolds the Gods themselves and announces that which is hidden in their essence,” (In Tim. 3, 165). Within a whole world-order, the angelic is thus closely affiliated with the demiurgic function, that is, the Intellective class of Gods: “the angelic indeed proceeds according to the intellectual life of the demiurge … and interprets and transmits a divine intellect to secondary natures,” (ibid.). As with all manifestations of “lower” (i.e., more specific) principles, angels have a narrower range of operation than Gods: whereas Gods act upon intellects, souls and bodies, angels operate on souls and bodies, and daimons upon bodies alone (In Tim. 3, 192).
Proclus also explains that as from one deity many angels are suspended, every angel rules over a multitude of daimons (In Tim. 1, 137). In the Cratylus commentary, he gives the example of how a God generates angelic and subsequent multiplicities by speaking of Apollo, from each of whose discrete powers a whole 'entourage' is suspended: “there are many classes of medical [i.e., ‘perfective’] angels, daimons, and heroes who are dependent upon Apollo, and many classes of different spirits of prophecy [‘revelation’], music [‘the property that binds the dispersed multitude’], and archery [‘the property that destroys the disordered nature’] who distribute the unitary powers of the God in a particular and discriminate mode,” (98). (Note that these are nowhere near all the powers of Apollo, "for the entire multitude of Apollo's powers is incomprehensible to us and indescribable. Indeed, how could human reason ever become able to grasp all the properties together, not only of Apollo, but of any God at all?" (In Crat. 97).)
As for the specific functions of angels, Proclus explains that both angels and daimons have been known to teach humans “names that are better fit to their objects than those which men generally put,” (In Crat. 20). Examples of these would be the alternate “divine” names Homer occasionally mentions for things, like Xanthus for Scamander, the river near Troy. I would say that the principle here is that of a name, invocation, or other formula customized, so to speak, for a particular intelligence or picking out something about the object that the more common name does not. This is not an office peculiar to angels; Proclus refers later (72) to “epiphanies of daimons” who “have revealed to the more fortunate of men names that have a natural relation to reality, names through which these daimons made the truth about beings more distinct.” That is, such a name is fashioned for direct phonetic effectiveness, and would be, I would imagine, opaque to etymological investigation. Proclus would doubtless say there is a difference between names delivered by angels and those delivered by daimons, but he doesn’t seem to state the difference clearly; when he goes on to classify names, the classes are merely (1) those established by the Gods themselves, (2) those established by daimons, (3) those established by humans “with the help of scientific knowledge,” and (4) those established by humans without the help of such knowledge. Later on, he merely says that “angels do not name both Gods and themselves as the inferior natures of daimons, heroes, or souls do, but they do it more majestically and more intellectually,” (79).
More colorful is the distinction Proclus draws (In Crat. 71f) between the different forms of “purification” exercised by angels and daimons, comparing these to the operations of priests and sophists, respectively:
Just as in the universe angels purify souls by excising their stains resulting from generation and by leading them up to the Gods, so too certain daimons connected with matter purify by torturing souls that look to matter … Thus the priests, acting like angels, remove all that obstructs us in our perception of higher reality, while the sophists, by exercising us in contradictory refutations, excise in the fashion of daimons the injury caused by the false conceit of knowledge.
He remarks later on that “Not all souls after release from the body are deemed worthy of association with Pluto, but only the zealous. For whoever is too attached to the body is released from evil only with effort and pain by certain daimons or purificatory angels,” (89).
The most interesting thing Proclus has to say about angels, however, is about the special relationship of the whole class of angels as such to one particular God in the Hellenic pantheon, namely Hermes. Proclus states as a general principle that “the summit and the first genus of every order is … assimilated to the cause which is prior to it. As therefore, the first of intellectuals is intelligible, and the first of angels is a God, thus also the first of sensibles is perpetual and divine …” (In Tim. 3, 223). In a Hellenic context, the God who is also “the first of angels” is Hermes, as Proclus makes clear in the Cratylus commentary, when he explains that “as in Homer knowledge of the conversation between Zeus and Helios came down as far as Odysseus through the medium of both the archangel Hermes and Calypso (Odyssey 12.374-90), so also Helenus learned the will of Apollo and Athena not from the highest levels but from those proximate to him and daimonic (Iliad 7.44),” (37). Apparently the unusual term "archangel" is used here to distinguish Hermes, as the God of angels, so to speak, from mere angels, who are, unlike Hermes, beings.
So it is presumably Hermes to whom Proclus refers when he says (In Tim. 1, 341) that
the divine causes of language unfold … the essences of the natures prior to them … In the Gods, therefore, the angel of Zeus, who has the relation of logos to the intellect of his father, announces [apangellei] the will of Zeus to secondary natures. But in essences [substances, ousiai = beings], soul, which is the logos of intelligibles, unfolds the unified cause of logoi which is in them, she receiving from them her hypostasis [= establishment in Being]. And in the genera superior to us, the angelic order has the relation of logos to the Gods.
Logos can mean simply ‘word’, but in Platonists has the more complex sense of a formula, i.e., an expression of the constituents of a compound. Logoi can also refer, in a usage borrowed from the Stoics, to the specific formative principles of the parts of a complex being that are subordinate to the overall functional telos, e.g., there is a logos for hair, but not a "form" (eidos), because it merely fulfills one of the requirements of the eidos of a given species of animal, or of Animal in general.
The soul is the logos of intelligibles because it exists to think them through, as it were, in space and time. And language in general is "angelic" relative to divine intelligences. Within many pantheons, moreover, we could perhaps expect to find deities in a relationship similar to that between Zeus and Hermes, that is, a demiurgic intellective God and a God specifically charged with translating that God’s formative will with respect to the cosmos into operative formulae; Re and Thoth, e.g., are in this sort of relationship in the Book of the Celestial Cow. An interesting question, which must remain open for now, is whether, applying here the structure of interpretation Proclus applied to the ‘lawgiver’ who fashions names in the Cratylus, we might thus regard Hermes as the ultimate ‘author’ of at least the divine core of the Greek language.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-12-11 02:17 am (UTC)Actually, I am wholly unaware of the angel cults you refer to. I'm really very deficient in any of the historical background that would explain why Hellenic theologians felt it necessary to incorporate angels into their systematizing. Obviously angelos struck the authors of the Septuagint as a good translation for Hebrew malach, since they both mean "messenger"; although theologically, one might as well have simply called these entities daimons. So what's the score?
no subject
Date: 2009-12-11 06:22 pm (UTC)It seems as though the crystallization of "angels" as a distinct, specialized class of semi-divine beings was from the beginning a syncretistic phenomenon, since the Torah seems to use malach indiscriminately for human and divine "messengers". It's in the Apocrypha, which are already being written in a bilingual environment, that "angels" really come into their own. And then Platonists decided to try and take back the term, based largely on its Homeric usages, as though it had been theirs all along, in effect.
Interesting goings-on in Phrygia, as ever. Always a crazy, syncretic place. You'd hardly think so, given its rather out-of-the-way location, but it just seems as though everyone passed through there at one time or another. Note that it's just to the north of Pamphylia ("all-tribes-land")!
Hosios kai Dikaios seems like a good example of the "angelizing" of discrete potencies of a God that Proclus speaks of in the example of Apollo. It was probably an appealing way to express a Graeco-Jewish syncretism, since hosios and dikaios could be looked at from one side as mere personified potencies of a henotheistic Zeus-YHWH, from the other side as Zeus together with traditional companions such as Hermes and Dikê. Especially interesting is the occurrence of a Hermes-like figure on the inscriptions. Again, Hermes here is the angel par excellence. So the Homeric usage of angelos in relation to the angeloi of the Septuagint was obviously already on people's minds in the 2d-3d c. CE.
I'll be interested to hear your thoughts on the Ptolemies as a divine series. I take it from your remarks that they would not be heroes in the series of Dionysos and certain other deities, but rather a mix of full deities in transitory human form (à la Vishnu and his avatars), heroes, and divinized souls.
In any case, I have certainly found the hierarchical method on display in that quote to be extremely helpful in harmonizing different aspects of a deity. It's especially useful when one has inconsistent myths concerning a deity, not simply because one locates the different myths on different planes and thus avoids open contradiction, but also because it helps one to understand why it makes sense to have these different narratives all in play.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-12 02:25 am (UTC)What is that business about the Ptolemies?
no subject
Date: 2009-12-12 02:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-12 05:18 am (UTC)Neoplatonism is a philosophy, not a religion, as far as I am concerned; hence I would not say that I have "Neoplatonic beliefs". I am a scholar of Neoplatonic philosophy who also happens to be neo-pagan.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-15 05:10 pm (UTC)(This could tend to be obscured by the fact that I happen to have a personal religiosity resembling the historical religiosity of the philosophers from whom I supply much of the conceptual framework for my work. But I do try to convey this somewhat by the different "core statements" for Philosophy and Theology on the henadology site, albeit these formulations are works-in-progress.)
no subject
Date: 2009-12-15 05:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-15 04:47 pm (UTC)This is the first time I've specifically looked at Neoplatonic angelology. It just seemed like every time I mentioned angels in a pagan Platonic context, people were extremely curious, and so I wanted to see if I could flesh it out a bit beyond merely talking about the position of angels in the hierarchy.
On the latter, however, and since you have a high tolerance for high metaphysics, there is one passage that I didn’t mention here, namely the occurrence of the anglic order in the schematic analysis of the constitution of intelligible multiplicity at PT III 27. 98f from the One-that-is and Being-which-is-one. (I discussed this passage briefly in my dissertation, and also in an article on the second intelligible triad and the intelligible-intellective Gods, the follow-up to the article in Méthexis on the first intelligible triad and the intelligible Gods; it’s under review right now at Méthexis.)
The passage explains that by taking the relationship between the One and Being in four different ways, we get Gods, angels, daimons and mortal animals, formed respectively by:
(1) the One-that-is, in relation to the One-that-is;
(2) the One-that-is, in relation to Being-that-is-one;
(3) Being-that-is-one, in relation to the One-that-is; and
(4) Being-that-is-one, in relation to Being-that-is-one.
The product of this conjugation is the chain connecting each God to the lowest Beings, beginning with the direct illumination by that God of whatever particular planes of Being, and then come angels, daimons and mortal beings depending from that God. I think that one could profitably extrapolate this into four different ontologies.
On theurgy, by the way, you might check out my article for Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, available on the henadology site.
I know only a little about Pico--I'm more of a Bruno man when it comes to the Renaissance--but I did try a rather speculative Deleuzean appropriation of Pico's notion of the "indeterminate essence" of the human in my "Hercules of the Surface" article.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-15 09:15 pm (UTC)I still need to look at the Deleuze article but I'll try to have something to say about it
I'm a big Bruno fan too but I don't understand him very well yet (I was first inspired to get into "high" neoplatonism by Stephen Clucas' article on Bruno and Plotinus, and the Farinella article on Bruno and Proclus)
Your article for Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft was also very helpful to me. I definitely appreciate your take on Proclus and defense of his metaphysics vs. the Christians who would flatten his ontology. I want to argue that Pico is trying to get back to a more Proclan-Dionysian poetic theology but he's still stuck with the Thomistic "solution" to the problems, being a Christian.
anyway, very pleased to make your acquaintance and looking forward to more talk of heady metaphysics in the future
no subject
Date: 2009-12-15 09:19 pm (UTC)http://magictraditions.livejournal.com/
http://community.livejournal.com/alchemy_class/
(mostly links but I try to get discussion going)
no subject
Date: 2009-12-15 09:36 pm (UTC)That's so funny! I added it to my FL after it came up on a Google search about something to do with Bruno, as I recall, because I was thinking about dusting off this essay I have on Bruno's monadology and seeing if I might publish it somewhere. And then when I wrote up the angelology material, I thought to myself, that gdorn fellow might find something interesting here...
no subject
Date: 2009-12-15 10:04 pm (UTC)is that Bruno essay something you're willing to share? I'd love to have a look. I have a long-neglected essay on Bruno and Plotinus' countermagic that has been unfinished collecting dust, which I plan to finish one fine day...
no subject
Date: 2009-12-16 03:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-16 10:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-17 12:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-18 01:34 am (UTC)What one has in Christian Platonism generally, it seems to me, is something akin to the fundamental formula of Islam, as exhibited in the profession of faith: there is no God but God, in which the first 'God' functions as a class term, and the second as, in effect, a proper name. The formula asserts the existence of a privileged unit in which the particular and the universal are identical.
The fundamental henological formula, on my reading, is, by contrast, that the One is not one, that is, that the principle of individuation is not other than each individual. This formula immediately transforms henology into henadology, inasmuch as it throws the inquiry back upon the way in which different individuals individuate themselves.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-18 02:10 am (UTC)http://cla.umn.edu/sites/jhopkins/NA12-2000.pdf
no subject
Date: 2009-12-18 02:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-18 04:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-18 06:57 pm (UTC)I didn't really answer this earlier. My guess would be that, having accepted the fundamental Platonic principle of the continuity of procession, and wanting to make the system work, but not to treat his God as a henad, but as the One Itself, he had to treat the angels as henads, instead of as Platonic angels.