A Fractal Re-reading of Genesis 1
The Three Fathers
In my previous reading of Genesis 1, I more or less followed the seven days as six “generations”, or at least, as close to six “generations” as I could read it. This is still a valid reading, although it is incomplete, as all readings are. Interpretations always underdetermine the myth and the myth always underdetermines the Gods revealed in and by them. It came to mind recently that I could give a reading closer – but not identical to – the usual Christian or pre-Christian Jewish reading concerning the Logos and the Elohim, without denying the polytheism I see as present in the text. To be more specific, I have always known this reading is possible, but I just didn’t know exactly how to go about it with the tools I had. Now, I have something of an outline, even if – partly because I can’t read Hebrew, and partly because I may be too invested in other responsibilities – it might not be as detailed as some would like. This does not contradict my previous reading per say, I think it simply describes a different and more limited perspective of the activities described. My previous interpretation was written to match Proclus’s full formal (not theological) progression of being as closely as possible. This one is meant to match just the main Intellectual hypostases of his system and some of his cosmology, in formal outline, not theology, as stated earlier, since we should not confuse Gods and myths. For consistency’s sake, I am quoting from Edward Butler’s Microsoft Word version of his dissertation, which is where I can easily get quotes from. The page numbers do not match the copy of record.
For some background, in Proclus’ progression of Being prior to Soul, there is first the “Intelligible”, where “they [Each God] lend themselves simply as the individuals they are, befitting their primordial individuality, in which lies their supra-essential status” and in so doing “corresponds to and constitutes Being Itself, Being qua Being, expresses not a disposition of Gods relative to each other but the characteristics inherent in each and every God. Every God is, by default and even if manifesting him/herself at no subsequent level, an intelligible God.” (Pg 9). Next comes “the “intelligible-and-intellectual” Gods… Here for the first time Gods emerge together… the Gods emerging together at this level constitute a common field which is conceived in terms at once proto-spatial and mythical… as occupying a common mythical space.” (Pg 9-10)
Lastly, there are “the “intellectual” Gods… that a God is an “intellectual” God does not mean that s/he is actually at the level of the ontic hypostasis of Intellect, but that s/he is a supra-essential God whose activity is such as to constitute as its residue the ontic hypostasis in question… The new element present in the intellectual order of Gods is narrativity. The Gods of this order are not merely present together, they engage in activity together, which takes the form of mythological narrative. Narrative action implies fully reciprocal relations of the Gods to each other, and hence the hypostatization of relations themselves.” (Pg 10)
The beginning (pun intended) of this idea comes from what Butler says concerning myths and “proto-temporality”, which, I might say again, is formally indistinguishable from what certain Christians have called “supratemporality”:
This proto-temporal separation at once imparts temporality to the constitution of wholes and also corresponds to the mythical narrative, which emerges fully formed at the level of the intellectual Gods, in contrast to the iconicity of myth on the higher planes. Mythic narrative as narrative is always, we may say, an account of the structure and organization of the Intellect, a structure which in turn manifests itself in the soul… The distinction between intellectual father and paternal intellect which is applied to the first intellectual monad expresses the dual nature of the Gods of the intellectual order generally. S/he is the intellectual father of the Gods that proceed from him/her as expressing the relationship of father and son, which entails a proto-temporality newly emergent at the level of intellect… We should say that what is peculiarly novel in this order and constitutive of this relationship is the attribute of being a child of some other God, of being the younger. (Pg 339)
If one is perceptive, you can already see new ways of reading certain passages in Christian Scripture. But here is how it applies to my re-reading: Given the narrativity of the myth, especially as it references a temporal beginning, the nature of which is mythical, we can read this as referring to a deity in the first Intellectual mode of activity, the first Intellectual Father, from whom the “proto-temporality” (or “supratemporality”) of Being begins. As usual, we can read “beginning” to refer to “arche” or “principio”, usually interpreted as “Logos”. But here, it would refer to the first Intellectual Father as a “Paternal Intellect”. As each God is Beyond Being (Prop 115), this does not indicate the creation of the Gods as such, but their activity and manifestation, as Butler says:
The distinction between the powers and the hyparxeis [Hyparxis: a technical term in Athenian Neoplatonism referring to the existential dimension of the henads inasmuch as they are prior to Being Itself and to the opposition of Being and Non-Being] of the Gods serves a very practical purpose in Proclus, because it enables him to accept conflicting stories about the Gods. If according to Hesiod, Okeanos and Tethys are the siblings of Kronos and Rhea, while the Timaeus has it that Okeanos and Tethys are rather the parents of Kronos and Rhea, both can nevertheless be true, because what comes first is the individuality of Rhea, say, in whom – because all the other Gods are in her in some way – is a power of being-daughter-of-Tethys as well as a power of being-sister-to-Tethys, while in Tethys there is likewise a power of being-mother-of-Rhea and a power of being sister-to-Rhea. (Pg 47)
Putting all this together, I would read the first verse of Genesis 1 as referring to a God revealing Himself as the first Paternal Intellect, in whom all that pertains to everything subsequent to him is present. The “beginning” is this Intellect, and “Heaven and Earth” refer to the Intelligibles received from the previous hypostases that will manifest in Heaven and Earth. This position of having all things in itself – and by implication itself in all things – is quite in line with the fact that “The determinations of “in itself” and “in another” arise in the first intellectual monad” (Pg 350). So far so good.
The following verse about the blowing Spirit, in this interpretation, should refer to the second Intellectual Father. That this is fitting can be inferred from the fact that “The determinations of motion and rest correspond to the second intellectual monad” (Pg 352). The Spirit blow and rests in various places in Scripture. The Spirit in our tradition is often feminine, so it is a happy coincidence that the Second Intellectual Father for Proclus’ own tradition is the Goddess Rhea. This is possible because:
It should be noted that gender was already conceived in an ontologically fluid fashion by the ancient Platonists. Gender is certainly one of the most universal traits of deities, but it is not treated by the Platonists as a primary divine attribute. Gender among the divine is no more primordial for them than certain attributes that we tend to think of as being dependent upon gender, such as Fatherhood. Hence Rhea, for example, is treated by Proclus as belonging to a divine order of ‘Fathers’, despite being female. (Conclusion: On the Tetrad++ and the TransMythos)
Here, we definitely have a model for how the Holy Spirit can be “masculine” as well as “feminine”, although my current ways of seeing this grate against much of Christendom. Anyway, considering that the Second Intellectual Father is the “Vivific” part of this triadic progression, the Spirit appearing after the First Father is fitting, and so is the light that comes next. Margaret Barker has described the fiat lux as the “creation” of the intelligible world as well as the manifestation of the light of the Holy of Holies, the vision or form of the God’s Logos. This is more or less the position of the Gospel of John, for whom the “Logos” is “Light”. Here I read this as the constitution of the Third Intellectual Father, who is the Universal Demiurge and the main locus of formal teleology. That last point is important, and probably has implications that are probably uncomfortable for a certain type of “classical theist”, to wit: the highest direct referent of a formal teleological argument is also the highest being in a fully constituted onto-theology, that is, the universal demiurge. The determinations associated with Him is “identical with itself and different from itself, and different from other things and identical with other things” (Pg 354), each of which have different applications in the constitution of the Intellectual world and Soul. This is the first day, which, like any principle, encompasses everything posterior to it. Therefore, the rest of the days, apart from the seventh – which is simply the first day seen from the perspective of this explicated totality – reveal the things constituted by the “first day”. In addition to this, there are two more important things to note. The first is that the six days can be divided into two 3 day cycles, where one cycle concerns forming, and the second cycle concerns filling. I first encountered this in Michael Bull a long time ago, and I think it is a brilliant scheme for these kinds of narratives in scripture. The second thing to note is that the first day can be read as constituting the “intelligible” in general, that is, anything prior to bodies, as it is sometimes said that the fiat lux is where Angels come from. This is generally fitting since it is the demiurge that gives the intellectual roots of angelic activity. The “intelligible” here would thus refer to the Intellectual and hypercosmic psychic entities, who are Gods, and the Souls of the entities, Gods, angels, daimons, etc, that animate various bodies in the cosmos, including the God that is supposed to be the World Soul, at least in its hypercosmic aspect. I should state again concerning Gods that they are prior to any activity and co-operate in this constitution rather than being reduced to whatever roles they play.
The main reason for this overview was to give me a foothold in my understanding of the “mythical Trinity”, that is, the Trinity – or divine triad, if we want to be provocative – as it appears in Christian scripture. John 1 seems to be primarily dyadic, while the book of Genesis it draws on can be read as Triadic. As the Intellectual is where the particular mythical activities of the Gods of this or that religious cosmos are established, one can read the Christian myth of the constitution of the Cosmos here. I might in fact, upend (but not abolish) the idea that Genesis 1 refers to the intelligible constitution while Genesis 2 concerns fleshly constitution. This alternative interpretation might see Genesis 1 as giving an outline of a fully ontic constitution of a Cosmos from the first Intellectual Father to the limits of demiurgic activity (“matter” or the “waters”), while Genesis 2 and 3 would give the description of the constitution of Psychic hypostases in particular, something either omitted in Genesis 1 or implicit in the fiat lux as the constitution of the ontic intellectual and psychic hypostases in general prior to bodies. Thus it wouldn’t refer to the “terrestrial man” of Paul but the Psychic Gods who produce the world with the direction of the Universal demiurge. This is indeed what my previous interpretation of Genesis 2 & 3 is meant to be, and thus I do not want to give another interpretation for those two as it fits rather perfectly with this one. I pray I get to write a more comprehensive explication of this Trinity and the subsequent hypostases it spawns in a future post, or somewhere else. I think it is one of the more interesting things to cross my mind recently. The role of the Logos as Demiurge in Scripture is not something I see written or talked about often enough, probably due to gnostic associations with the word “Demiurge”. That’s a shame, because the concept and role of demiurge fit so much of the descriptions of the Logos, even if the Logos is not just a Demiurge. To ignore this aspect is not to realize that demiurgy is a role that is often shared or distributed, even if it has a primary referent. Moses is indeed a Demiurge insofar as he builds a tabernacle according to the model he saw in the heavens. Christ building his Church is very much the same kind of activity. That is what “Heaven on Earth” means. That is what it means to build Temples. The Christian that builds himself up in the image of the heavenly model is “Christ on Earth”.