This kind of thing is more suitable for a series of tweets or threads, along with the corresponding dopamine rush, but perhaps I shouldn’t rely too much on that to note things down. I’m sorry if this does get too obscure, this is more for me. They are thoughts I don’t want to lose and may expand on in future posts and essays. I will link some of the necessary material for those who do want to read more.
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The way I have understood Christianity in Proclean terms is as its own “mythological regime”; that is, a state of affairs, a world projected by a demiurge in a finally constituted intellect. Prior to this (Eternally, not temporally) is simply the realm of Gods in common and all possibilities of their organization existing at once. Prior to this still, is the realm of the Gods in singularity, “all in each” as it manifests in Being and the Intelligible Triads. Because of this, it would be a mistake, for example, to see the divine hierarchies of angels in Christendom as extending beyond the Demiurge. All the myths and philosophical explanations do not lend themselves to anything beyond the Demiurge. Angeloi are prefigured in the “guardian deities” with the intellectual Father and properly appear first in the highest reaches of Soul. This insight entails a perennialism with respect to the God that this demiurge is a manifestation of. As Butler in his dissertation says, the Gods, even the demiurge, cannot be reduced to their activities and roles, and “matter” is the reflection of the One in the inability of any formal mythological regime to exhaust even its demiurgic deity. Thus, a perennialism pertaining to the God in question follows. In the Christian case, it is perfectly rational to affirm the same God for the Abrahamic religions. In the case of other traditions, polytheism is required, as they have different Gods.
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In his dissertation, Butler gives an interesting explanation as to what constitutes the “historical limit” of demiurgic manifestation (Emphasis Mine):
“The demiurge must not only subordinate the deities co-emergent with him – a process which would have its historical limit in the reduction of originally independent deities to the status of created beings in the service of the demiurge (a process in itself never fully completed and rife with possibilities for the reconstitution of incommensurable differences within the momentarily unified field)…” (Pg 327, revised copy)
This, I believe, perfectly describes what many take to be the “story” of monotheism. The hyparxes of the Gods are forgotten and their activities (and therefore their origin) are rooted solely in the demiurge, who is himself subordinated to a prior ineffable principle, beyond ontology, but still thought of in ontological terms. This entails a privileging of ontology over henology (and henadology). My quoting Butler here is as a way to understand in what way we might take Christianity as a Polytheism, rather than an ultimate henotheism. We could take the “Elohim” of Genesis 1, not as simply a cipher for the unboundedness of one ineffable God – or one ineffable God and his angels or even the Trinity – and read it instead as concerning “the Gods” in the Proclean sense, Henads, in the Polycentric sense. This would then see the various “acts” of Elohim as the acts of Gods in general. It would see, for example, Elohim calling the Stars into existence as the Gods themselves manifesting as Stars. It would also explain to whom Adonai is speaking to in Genesis 3 when he reports the transgression of the primordial couple. In the distant future, perhaps there could be a return of a Christian Polytheism, since the Gods cannot be exhausted by form. In any case, it is an interesting path to follow. My hunch is that we begin with the Theokotos, and the various apparitions of “Our Lady”.
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A delight of mine over the past few months has been to put DB Hart’s metaphysics in Proclean terms. I will perhaps write an article that explains the man as I see him, but for now, I really enjoy putting him in other terms that would be probably unfamiliar to Him, mostly because through it I discover elements of a framework for doing the same for Christian theology in general. For example, his arguments from consciousness to the divine strike me as most applicable to the Proclean demiurge, since ontological logic of whole and part most properly start and end there, and all partial intellects and ultimately consciousness gain independence through the demiurge’s manifestation of a cosmos. All other previous orders of being pour into and are viewed through the Demiurge’s singularity. It is also through Hart that I learned that Christianity’s first principle does not distinguish between a principle of unity and a principle of intelligibility. Both are one principle in the Christian estimation. However, as this is a Trinitarian reconfiguration of the First Principle, it is possible to see these two principles divided between The Father (Unity) and Son (Intelligibility), their “consubstantiality” explained by the logic of the Proper Name with respect to the ineffable Gods. This merger also explains why Proclus is so elaborate with the intelligible realms compared to Christianity. Christian angelology at best corresponds to orders of beings posterior to and emergent from the demiurge. The roles of entities prior to the Demiurge are often merged into the first principle along with the principle of intelligibility. This is seen in which “Truth” as a principle, the paradigmatic role of Animal itself in relation to the world, the role of “life”, the origin of “distance”, “space”, “time”, and so on are usually pushed up into the Trinity without intermediary. As a detour, it may also explain why, even in the ways certain monotheists paralleled Proclean thought – such as when certain Islamic metaphysicians did distinguish between the principle of unity and that of intelligibility – they did not have a proper equivalent of the intelligible-intellective, except in the slimmest of ways.