Georgi Stankov
translated from the German book “Neoplatonismus und Christentum“, 176 pages, 2007, into English by the author
The Trinitarian Strife
The neoplatonic threefold division of 1) the Divine (Being, Nous, world soul), 2) the individual soul and 3) the lower world of becoming and physical forms was already taught by Ammonias Saccas and adopted by his disciples, Plotin and Origen. This gnostic categorical system goes back to Plato, which he discusses in his dialogues Timaeus and Phaedo.
This tripartite structure was not an apodictic proposition, but only a descriptive presentation of the phenomenology of the soul, as we have seen it in Plotin (51). Basically, it is a consequence from the concrete application of the number “3”, which, as stated above, is the universal number of space-time and without which no Gnosis can exist.
Analogous to this tripartite categorical system, the exegete Origen now developed a tripartite structure of the Christian God with the help of biblical allegories. Accordingly, God consists of three divine parts which are related to each other and form the wholeness of God. This relationship is called “homooúsios” in Greek, which means “of the same spiritual substance“. This term is genuinely neoplatonic and was also used by Origen only in this sense (see quotes above). The ancient Greeks understood “substance” as the “underlying energy” which forms the true Being and is therefore of spiritual nature. According to Plotin, Being (Nous) and Spirit are one and the same, as we have seen above. For this reason not only Origen, but also Paul before him, speak of the “spiritual” body.
In order to eliminate the fundamental misunderstanding of all previous interpretations of Neoplatonism and Christianity in advance, I must again point out at this place that the Greek concept of substance is not identical with the current concept of the same name in physics. Today, the term “substance” is understood in general terms, following atomism, as “matter” composed of elementary particles. This term does not include photon space-time, although according to Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonoga’s idea of quantum electrodynamics (QED), all electrons in the atoms of matter constantly emit virtual photons in order to maintain the stability of their orbits and thus of matter (52).
In the new Gnosis I speak of energy and prove that it is the Primary Term of human thinking, which should be an entirely axiomatic thinking. The Primary Term thus contains both the astral energies and space-time, which is a product of limited human perception; space-time is thus a U-subset of the Primary Term, of the astral energies, and contains the latter as an element. Precisely for this reason, any Gnosis must depart from the Primary Term in order to develop a true categorical system of the Divine, the Transcendental.
With this I prove in the Gnosis why all mystical teachings in the past failed in their representation of the Divine. The same objection is used by Plotin against the Christian Gnostics. This same objection applies unreservedly to the failure of modern empiric science, whose objective is to correctly assess the phenomena of the visible physical world. In this way I close the circle of all human knowledge once and for all.
Since the astral energies are highly organized – there is no chance or chaos in the universe, these are merely a product of misguided human thinking – the totality of the astral energies, the Whole, the Primary Term is also called Spirit, which implies intelligent energy (first axiom: principle of last equivalence). From the essence of energy, which can be grasped logically-axiomatically, one can now describe the entire phenomenology of the lower world of physical forms and their becoming as energy transformations from one form into another in a dynamic-dialectical manner, consistently and without any contradictions.
I repeat this fact, which I have explained in detail in the Tetralogy and in my philosophical books, for the third time in this treatise, because I have experienced that most people quickly forget it and fall back into their old categorical thought patterns, which consist of N-sets and exclude the Whole, the Divine, as an element. This is the foundation of any form of human agnosticism. This was also the crux of the early Christian exegetes, as I will now show and will thus prove why Christianity is as agnostic a teaching as any form of present-day atheism.
The new Axiomatics of the Universal Law eliminates in the first place all terms and concepts that are N-sets and exclude the Whole as a concept, as an element. I will prove that all Christian concepts of the Divine, which are firmly anchored in ecclesiastical dogmas, are N-sets and assess the Whole in a faulty manner. For this reason they must be erased once and for all from human thinking, which is also the purpose of this treatise.
According to Origen, the Logos Christ is of the same nature as the Creator of the World and God Father, who already at that time was perceived extremely anthropocentric by all early Christians. However, the “Logos” is in the Greek philosophy both the Universal law of energy (Heraclitus) as well as the external manifestation of Spirit, Nous, which can only be grasped with the help of human logic. For this single, sufficient reason the ancient thinkers developed logic and made it the basis of their “love of wisdom” – Philosophy. This is also the basis of the new General Theory of Sciences, which is an all-encompassing teaching of the Logos – of the Universal Law. This is the whole semantic and epistemological background of the Logos, as I showed in my discussion on Neoplatonism; everything else is just senseless, confusing stuff.
Only 600 – 700 years later, after this term was already firmly anchored in Greek philosophy, came the Greek John the Evangelist, who had mystical visions, but in contrast to Plotin could only interpret them as apocalyptic horror visions, which could be a good stuff for any science fiction horror thriller from Hollywood, because of his pronounced fear structure. In order to make an impression on his philosophically savvy countrymen, he began his gospel with the boastful, simple proclamation “In the beginning was the Logos!” (check also here).
What John has to say about the Logos is so primitive according to today’s criteria, as it was then, that it is incomprehensible how such a childlike mind could exert such a great influence even among uneducated Christians: “and the Logos was with God, and God was with Logos. This was in the beginning with God” and blah-blah and blah-blah! That is all John has to say about the Logos – it is nothing more than what a two or three-year-old child would have said about the subject shortly after learning to speak.
What catches the eye, however, is the megalomaniac statement of John that he has been sent by God: “A man appeared, sent by God, his name was John“. This statement points to a deep psychiatric disorder, a paranoid split in the personality of this bizarre preacher (53).
If John had really been concerned with the Logos of Greek philosophy, then he would have dealt in detail with it in his Gospel, just as numerous Greek philosophers before and after him have done in a brilliant intellectual way. But since he had absolutely no idea of philosophy, he left it at this befuddled gibberish and left the Christian interpretation of the Logos to future exegetes like Origen, who promptly fell into the semantic trap set by John. Nothing has changed in this situation to this very day, especially not when Pope Ratzinger has started recently talking regularly about the Logos in his sermons, without even remotely understanding it – otherwise he would not have become a clergyman, but would have stayed a simple, honourable professor of theology.
Since John, who had the recklessness to introduce the concept of the Logos into his Gospel, all Christian scholars and exegetes felt compelled to incorporate the Logos into their Christian concept of the Divine. For Origen, the task was still relatively simple: the Logos was the Law of the Spiritual, Nous, and was embodied as a human being by Christ, who was a representative of the spiritual worlds of the souls. In this sense Logos and Christ are “homooúsios“, i.e. “of the same spiritual substance.” Since then one speaks in Christianity of “Logos Christ”.
In this way, the early Christians, these spiritual upstarts and notorious plagiarists around the turn of Christian time, downright usurped and distorted Heraclitus’ Logos to utter nonsense; what remained of Greek philosophy was abused for their lower purposes and needs.
But since the Logos was obviously more than Christ – the Neoplatonists had already provided for this insight in their discussions with the Christians at an early stage – the term was soon renamed “Holy Spirit” in Christianity. This was another neoplatonic tautology, for the Logos was already the Spiritual in Platonism. For Christians, however, the neoplatonic Spiritual was neither sublime, nor the epitome of bliss, and certainly not the unity of all souls (54), but merely “holy”.
The early Christian exegetes diligently overlooked thereby that the word “holy” was not a supreme category, “the most general genus” in the Aristotelian sense, as Porphyry writes in his introduction to the Aristotelian categories:
“Accordingly, the most general genus is defined as follows: What genus is, to be without species, and again: beyond that there can be no other, higher genus” (55),
but a subjective anthropocentric evaluation that has neither a philosophical nor a gnostic content.
This opened the door wide to every obscure Christian interpretation of the Divine, for every believer understood “holy” to mean something else from now on.
When Porphyry wrote his introduction to the Aristotelian categories, the Trinitarian controversy had not yet erupted, so that all Bible exegetes after Origen had enough time to educate themselves about the semantic definitions of Aristotle of the first and highest categories of human thought. The Aristotle’s theory of categories was after all, for several centuries, the elementary basis of every educated Greek and Hellenistic citizen in the Old World. This fact vividly illustrates in what fundamental, even frightening ignorance about the fundamental questions of Greek philosophy the Christians assembled their doctrine in the time of the Synods.
In ignorance of the Aristotelian teaching of categories, on which also the principle of last equivalence of the new Axiomatics is based, the early Christians invented new theological expressions for the Primary Term, without recognizing their semantic equivalence. In reality they thus created new gnostic, cognitive problems, which they believed they could solve only at the cost of cruel, bellicose conflicts over several centuries, as also Carl Schneider excellently writes about Origen’s heritage in Christianity:
“In the closest following of Ammonius Saccas… Origen had taught with the help of biblical analogies a tripartite structure of God and had described the relationship of the three divine parts to each other as homooúsios… It was decisive, above all, that the Logos was Christ of the same faith with the world creator and Father-God… is. This was good Neoplatonic, but that it was Christian was denied since the last decades of the 3rd century by the exegetical school of Antiocheia founded by the text reviewer Lucian. But the public debate did not come to a head until about 320, when the presbyter and deacon Arius (56) , popular in Alexandria, appeared against the neoplatonic-origenistic Bishop Alexander of Alexandria and demonstrated in a popular manner on the basis of a pure synthesis of sober rational Antiochian exegesis and Aristotelian categories, Christ would not be equal to God because he was not eternal, but a creature, certainly the noblest of the highest God.
The always easily excitable masses of this city… now wandered through the streets singing to the melodies of the latest worldly hits: “There was a time when he (Christ) was not, and he was not, before he became,” and soon, alongside serious theological and philosophical discourses, there were fights and brawls. Not Alexander, but his deacon Athanasius was Arius equal… He defended Origenism without being fully equal to it. Above all, he did not understand it on one decisive point: he transformed the dialectical term “similar in nature” into the rational one: “equal in nature”. This forced the party that represented the homooúsios... to the extreme consequence to basically distinguish between God and the Logos no more at all. On the other hand, the radical Arians were urged to deny even the similarity of God and Christ. Both sides had saved monotheism in their own way despite bitter enmity, but both had abandoned Origen, Christian Platonism, and dialectical epistemology.
The decision was made by Emperor Constantine, who dictated a confession to the Imperial Synod of Nicaea, which had been appointed by him, which with slight changes had become the only “ecumenical” confession of Christianity (the “Apostolicum” is not recognized by the entire Eastern Church as a confession). The “Nicene Creed”, which became both imperial and church law (57) , contained the original formulas “begotten, not created, from the substance of the father, homooúsios the father”. Something unheard of and decisive for all time happened here: At the centre of the Christian confession was no longer a biblical sentence, but concepts of Greek philosophy which do not appear at all in the New Testament.
Although most of the assembled bishops obeyed the dictate of the emperor,… it still incited the opposition of the Arians as well as of the radical Athanasians and the naïve Biblicists, and opponents of philosophy. From 325 to 381 the passionate fight for homooúsius raged.” (58)
What an unedifying history of the Church from the very beginning, which believed that it should solve its intellectual inadequacy to justify a semantically correct concept of the Divine with bloody battles and countless martyrs. Nothing has changed in this primitive spiritual attitude of Christian believers in particular and of the people in general to this day, as the events in the Middle East prove. Even today, gnostic and religious differences are still rather settled with weapons than in scientific discourses.
It is truly impossible to imagine that the educated Neoplatonists could have also carried out their philosophical differences, of which there were plenty, with weapons. Rather, in the Hellenistic period there was a lively exchange of philosophical writings along the entire Mediterranean coast, where the many Neoplatonists and thinkers were scattered – from Syria and Asia Minor, through Greece and Alexandria, to Italy. With what joy and intellectual impatience they have waited for the latest writings of Plotin or another famous thinker of antiquity, who usually came by ship, to review them and put their own thoughts to paper, Porphyry reports in his preface to the Enneads.
*
The whole Synod period of the Church was accompanied by bitter, sometimes very cruel fights between Arians and representatives of the Trinity dogma. A series of councils (synods) were looking for a way to bridge these gnostic differences, though without achieving any notable success: Rome 340, Antiocheia 341, Serdika (Sofia, Bulgaria) 342, Antiocheia 344, Milan 345 and 347, Sirmium 351, Arles 352, Milan 355, Ankyra 358, Rimini and Seleukeia 359, Nike and Constantinople 360, Alexandria 362, Antiocheia 379, Constantinople 381, 382, 383.
The Christian exegetes tried different compromise formulas: “similar (homoios)”, “substance-like (homoioúsios) or with a naive-formal biblicism: “similar according to Scripture“. Since these compromise formulas had long since given up the claim to represent dialectical knowledge of the Divine and were becoming increasingly meaningless, their success among the faithful was more than modest.
The many intrigues among the bishops, who tried to bring about the decision in favour of one of the two parties by means of state power, also contributed to this deterioration of spirituality among the early Christians. Only when in 381 in Constantinople the formula of the three great Cappadocians and convinced Neoplatonists (see footnote 4) was agreed upon, could a certain peace be achieved on the Christian gnostic front.
The Cappadocian Trinity formula of Constantinople “one substance (ousia), three personal structures (hypostaseis)” meant the final victory of Christian Neoplatonism over the anti-dialectical, representational-naive view of the Divine of most early Christians. Both the term “substance” in the sense of spiritual energy, and the term hypostasis, last found in the writings of Proclus, were through and through neoplatonic concepts that can be searched in vain in the Bible.
This fact, of course, did not prevent Christianity from interpreting and applying the Cappadocian Trinity formula in the ensuing period in a crude non-dialectical, extremely anthropocentric manner: God became the heavenly patriarch, Jesus Christ was his son and the crucified martyr and the Logos became, as mentioned at the beginning, the Holy Spirit who, according to God’s whim, trickled down from heaven onto mankind. In this way, the transcendental concepts of Neoplatonism about the Spiritual, Nous, Being, the unity of all souls as world soul, the Logos as energy law and origin of cosmic logic, which, with the help of mathematics, is also accessible to the limited human mind, were completely abandoned by the Church.
Christianity voluntarily chose ignorance and intellectual hostility, culminating in medieval obscurantism and in the horrific persecutions of the inquisition, it abandoned science, and committed many other spiritual follies whose list might be so long that it might reach the extent of a stately encyclopedia of human aberrations.
As soon as the ink had dried under the Cappadocian formula, a new dispute broke out, the origin of which still lay in the inability of Christians to interpret the concepts of the Divine dialectically and to form a clear idea of Being.
The Nicene Creed and the hypostaseis formula gave the impression that they had satisfactorily resolved the relationship of God to Logos and Spirit. But how did the godlike Logos behave towards the man Jesus of the Gospels, in whom it was difficult to find all the divine attributes that were assigned to a divine being, if one only thinks of his raving madness during the cleansing of the temple?
The new dispute broke out between the Monophysites, the representatives of the “one nature” of Christ, and the Diaphysites, the representatives of the “two natures”. From a gnostic-semantic standpoint this dispute was merely a continuation of the dispute between Arians and representatives of the Trinity formula – thus a dispute on the ground of conceptual inadequacies, which can be solved immediately with the scientific-mathematical concept of the U-set.
What came as a result of this gnostic dispute can only be described as the “epoch of the great turmoil” of Christianity. In the end, the condemnation of Origenism was firmly established, which was pushed forward by the unspeakable church father and despicable person Hieronymus. Origen was condemned as a heretic and the break of the church with Neoplatonism, at least at the level of church politics, was finally completed. Neoplatonic thought lived from then on only in the minds of isolated Christian thinkers and had to wait almost a thousand years before it could experience its bloom again in the Italian Renaissance.
Conclusion
The representatives of every incarnation civilization in the Solar Universe are faced with two basic choices that reflect the two stages of development in their evolution:
1. Alternative
To continue lingering in a state of separation, fighting and killing each other until their technical ability to destroy the entire civilization has advanced enough as to face the fundamental alternative decision: to annihilate their civilization forever or to radically change the course of evolution. Humanity stands at this moment right in front of this alternative decision.
2. Alternative
To become fully aware of the deep, unbreakable unity and interconnectedness of all incarnated souls on the planet and to cease all struggles and wars among themselves forever. The prerequisite for this is to internalize the knowledge of the eternal existence of the soul and her repeated incarnation on the planet.
Only when all individuals of a civilization realize that they are immortal soul siblings, not in a symbolic sense, as sung in some odes to joy, but in a very concrete, energetic way, will the incarnation civilization enter its second stage of evolution.
Such an enlightened, evolved civilization will then face a single alternative, but with infinite possibilities for evolution: what creative path should it take to make the lives of its members ever more creative and blissful? Only when all individuals of a civilization realize that true creation is true bliss, and that every true creation is a comprehensive constructive interference of all the energies involved, which means that only a society that guarantees each individual the optimal conditions of creative expansion is an evolved one, only then will the path to total destruction be banished forever.
Today’s humanity is made up of “children-arsonists” – whether they are called Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin, Pol-Pot, Bush or Osama Bin Laden. But all children eventually grow beyond their childhood illnesses and become responsible members of an evolved society. During the long incarnation cycle, they have to work out the mental, spiritual, and philosophical prerequisites they need. The new scientific Theory and Gnosis of the Universal Law is a valuable introduction for all those who have embarked on the path of perfection and union with the Divine, however, this written knowledge is but one side of the coin.
The second, much more yielding one is to listen to the quiet voice of one’s own soul, which sometimes appears as fleeting emotions, sometimes as lightning intuitions, rarely as visions, but always acts as an inner impulse to which every human being should follow, as long as it is carried by the wings of Love.
The Divine can be experienced only as individual spirituality, because every individual, as Plotin teaches, is inseparably connected with All-That-Is through his soul. In this sense, love is a state of comprehensive constructive interference of all Existence and of all forms of Consciousness in general, which every human being can perceive in a subjective, sensual-emotional, but therefore no less valid way; only when one is able to comprehend this state of love comprehensively, will he endeavor to pass on that feeling unconditionally.
Only when love becomes the guideline of every interpersonal relationship can one also speak of an evolved society. And love does not need laws, punishment or coercion to express itself. It flows spontaneously out of every form of life, out of the energetic abundance of its creative urge, and transforms everything that it touches, even the darkest sides of the human psyche, into constructive interference – into divine light.
This was the basic understanding of Neoplatonism, which Christianity has so thoroughly misunderstood, and I very much hope that with the inevitable demise of all religions, humanity will soon experience a new Renaissance of the all-embracing, scientifically-founded Neoplatonism of the Universal Law, the Logos. It has lived for far too long in the spiritual dark night of its collective soul, it hurts to see in what limited mental and spiritual state most people still live on this earth.
Footnotes:
51. Enneads: 10, 11 and 12.
52. See Bohr’s model in Volume 1 and 2.
53. Christianity and the bible are so fraught with fraud, lies and deceptions that one does not know where to begin to unravel the truth. Although the Church claims that John the Evangelist and John the Revelator are one and the same person it has not provided a single proof until today. Already at the time of Plotin and Origen bible interpreters and Christians have proved in many different ways that the two texts cannot have been written by the same person. Since then there have been innumerous historians, theologians and bible experts who have pointed out that John’s gospel and the book of Revelation (Apocalypse) must have different authors. Besides, there are many experts who believe that the four gospels were written by the Roman family Piso (by the father, three sons and a grand-daughter) for political reasons, in order to harm the Jews and the facts and arguments put forward for this thesis are much more credible than the official explanation of the Church.
In a remarkable and highly authentic message that was channeled on May 2oth, 1881, and recorded by Mr. Jonathan Roberts, grand-grand father of Jon Roberts, a member of the PAT, we learn that Apollonius of Tyana, alias Jesus Christ, was the author of Paul’s epistles and John’s Revelation. Actually he brought these epistles from India. Apollonius assessment of his Revelation as a spirit is also rather sober and critical as it should be in a state of expanded consciousness and this is for me another powerful confirmation that the message is credible and reliable. Further on, the spirit of Apollonius claims that all the gospels were stolen and plagiarized from gnostic texts he brought from India during his visit there. As he was a renowned teacher in the entire Roman empire and also an adviser to some Roman emperors, there is no doubt that these texts were well known and popular among educated Romans at that time and could have served as a template to forge the four gospels by malicious people later on. I would recommend my readers to read this article very carefully one more time in order to put the pieces together.
With regard to John the Evangelist as a writer and a person: For someone like me, who has lived long enough in the Balkans and has had many experiences with the spiritual aberrations of the people in this corner of the Old continent, John’s confused, disturbed personality is anything but unusual. Such figures can still be seen in abundance there today. I personally knew some priests and monks in Bulgaria and on Mount Athos who were a decal of John.
54. The neoplatonic idea of the unity of all souls in the Divine, in the Spiritual, is in the meantime not only completely unknown to the Church, but its doctrine is also profoundly contrary to it, for in this case the Church must completely renounce its conception of hell and purgatory, as well as to shelve her entire hierarchies of angels, and certainly all its saints “on the right side of God”. But without this mystical hodgepodge very little would remain of Christianity – as a doctrine and as well as mural paintings (frescos) and mosaics in the churches.
55. Porphyry, Einleitung in die Kategorien Aristoteles (Introduction to the Categories of Aristotle), Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, 1958, p. 16.
56. For several centuries before and after Emperor Constantine, when the division of the Roman Empire was completed, Arianism was the dominant Christian doctrine not only in the Old World but also in many parts of Europe. Almost all Roman soldiers along the Limes were Arians between the 4th and 6th centuries. The Goths, who had become Arians after their conquests in the Eastern Roman Empire, later brought Arianism to Central and Western Europe. Especially in the former Danube provinces, Moesia, Illyricum, Pannonia, Noricum and Raetia (Bavaria, Austria, eastern parts of Switzerland and part of Schwaben, the approximate location of the city of light New Raetia in Central Europe which we have built), the Arians were very numerous. When the area around Freising, where I currently live, was allegedly christianized by the travelling bishop Corbinian (patron of the archdiocese of Munich and Freising) in the 8th century, more precisely converted by force, it had already been Arian for several centuries. This is by the way another lie of Pope Ratzinger who was the bishop-cardinal of this diocese before becoming the head of the Vatican Inquisition and who praises this warlord Corbinian in his vita and on his crest sign (as Corbinian grizzly-bear (?).
57. This is the state doctrine of Caesaropapism, which, starting from Byzantium, became the basis of all Western monarchies, including the last absolute monarchy – the Catholic Church. In this way the Christian interpretation of the divine law, the Logos, became an earthly jurisdiction. In the Justinian codification of Roman law in the 6th century, also known as Corpus Juris Civilis, these Christian ideas found their binding legal framework – until today.
58. Carl Schneider “Christianity” in Propyläen World History, vol. 4, 467-468, 1991.
