This was supposed to be a Facebook post, but it spiralled out of control. Because of this, the style might be a bit jarring. All errors are mine and I humbly ask that all holes in my very incomplete argument are treated with grace by the reader.
In one of the snippets from You are Gods, D.B. Hart says he sees the relationship between Nature and Supernature as that between matter and form, in the hylomorphic sense[1]. What this means is that manifest nature is always a limited manifestation of supernature, as “pure” nature would be equivalent to prime matter, formless and void. I chose those last two words specifically because there is a misunderstanding that DB Hart’s Platonism is somehow extrinsic to the Jewish context of the Christian message when this is exactly the opposite of what is the case.
One of the popular (mis)understandings of Platonism, especially Neoplatonism, is that the mythologies of Pagan and Christian alike are reduced to abstract ontological principles the understanding of which is not strictly necessary for philosophical theology. I think this is wrong. The context for Neoplatonism is simply the religious practice of the Neoplatonists, and they were not closet atheists. In the case of hylomorphism, it is not a dry abstract universal that is instantiated in an image. It is a God who instantiates a form. But the God that instantiates a form does not do so except “mythically”[2]. The form of man is only able to be instantiated because the exemplar is a God that instantiates the form, always in a context of narrativity that implicates other forms and other Gods who instantiate them. This is how we can read the Israelite myths with Neoplatonism in mind. The whole context of the temple rituals can be seen in a hylomorphic manner. There is the “centre of the cosmos” the demiurge, the “one like the Son of man” who hovers on his throne above the waters and constitutes the Cosmos from it by his words. The day of atonement ritual is the demiurge re-enacting creation. The agents of destruction are bound in his descent and ascent[3]. They are either redeemed and reinstalled in their rightful place or cast out into the “outer darkness”, that is, they are either incorporated into nature or cast out of nature, where “nature” is the whole “mythotopoi”[4], the “cosmos”, heaven and earth, where the demiurge qua demiurge controls and constitutes via mythic narratives (understand that mythology is an ontological category for many Neoplatonists.)
In a multicultural world of many “mythotopoi” and their Gods and demiurges, it is tempting to claim that one must be correct overall. Even if one does not want to use earthly violence to establish this, one can either resort to wishing for heavenly violence. This violence can be subtle, such as thinking that a universalism where all other religions find their fulfilment in “Christ”, narrowly defined by this particular mythology. But, with the hylomorphic logic that undoubtedly constitutes the “mythotopoi” of Christianity and all other traditions, such dreams of subsumption can only be so many errors in logic and metaphysics.
Hylomorphism implies that form can never fully manifest its fullness in any of these worlds. A mythical narrative can only ever manifest itself limitedly and manifest its forms limitedly[5]. This is why it is a duality. But, what else is “matter” but a reflected “unlimited potentiality” of all possible alternatives to a “regime of manifestation”?[6] The dream of unlimited domination of the Christian mythos (or any mythos) is a false dream that mixes up a limited and ever-changing regime of mythologically instituted manifestation of forms for the eternal stability of our God. Leaving aside my polytheism, even on monotheism, the unlimitedness of YHWH is beyond any mythological regime, even those we deem central to the Christian faith qua Christian. This idea is expressed in the “waters” which occasionally threaten to subsume the “land” in Israelite mythology. The land in Political terms is Israel, and the waters are the “nations”. Israel, in its formal particularity, cannot itself eliminate “the edge”. The attendant obligations and practices of that “mythotopoi” belong to them and them alone. Even in the early days of the Christian sect, Paul seems to understand something of this when he prohibits Gentile Christians from circumcision[7]. Circumcision would mean they placed themselves in the mythotopoi of Israel, within a limited “space” in this constellation of worlds. This is against the Christian claim, where one is freed from the domination of said mythotopoi. Paul’s vision of salvation, which is formed by the Jewish vision of the atonement, places at the centre the uniqueness of Christ over all “stoichiea”, in doing so, he somehow prefigures the emphasis on “positive individuality” expounded upon by Proclus and others centuries later. In Paul’s vision, through Christ’s fulfilment of Jewish rituals, he abolishes them in advance, such that although they may still be enacted in this age, they won’t be in the next age (the details of what Paul means by “age” is not exactly clear but there are clear parallels with and influences from Platonic ideas along with Jewish equivalents). Basically, for Paul, within the Christian community, to the extent that it is possible, all divisions appropriate to this or that mythotopoi are abolished.
Obviously, to the extent the expectations of the “second coming” prophecies were “literalist” in a particular sense, they have failed to materialize, and I, at least, cannot ignore the history between then and now, not least the Neoplatonism that developed afterwards in ways I think would benefit the Christian message in giving it philosophical rigour and theological merit. I can say here now that insofar our Christian “evangelism” is a cultural mission, whether to “civilize” or to “convert” to a particular way of thinking conditioned by the mythotopoi our Christian faith is based on, we are going against our very Gospel. Insofar the central aim in “making someone catholic” is to make them “Roman” – despite the fact that this will happen in some way insofar as they become catholic – then we have not spread the Gospel. To be even more scandalous, if our aim is to convert the whole world to the Christian faith as it is now, heavily tied to the various dominant cultures, as well as its western and Mediterranean imperial history, then I hope for our sake that we fail. This, perhaps, is one reason why DB Hart does not like the book of revelation. If by “there is no more sea” we mean we convert everyone in this life to this or that historically contingent brand of Christianity, then really, we have not spread the Gospel.
Forgive the long detour, this is the context of what leads me to this argument. In the Israelite mythotopoi, atonement is the God qua demiurge binding the fallen angels and either casting them out or reinstating them (after purification) in their proper place. The typical way of viewing this with respect to the religious traditions of other nations is that their gods are these morally ambiguous angels. We no longer live in a time where we can misconstrue this half-truth as full truth. In light of, for example, the subsequent Hellenistic pagan development of the doctrine of an absolute negative first principle and an indefinite plurality of Gods “beyond being, life and intelligence”, we have to take their own claims about themselves seriously, lest we forgo charity in our engagement with our past, and ultimately our present relationships with other non-hellenic and non “monotheist” traditions and the future of these engagements.
In the view of these hellenistic pagans as well, the nations are governed by daimones of morally ambiguous nature[8], just as one might say that the daimon of Israel, in charge of its stoichiea, is itself morally ambiguous in manifesting YHWH[9]. This concordance is where I want to make this proposal, a proposal I have already accepted, but will be simply a proposal for those reading:
In the "enclosure" of a particular mythotopoi, the presence of the activity of another God, such as a daimon, can be seen as disruptive to that mythotopoi. In that mythological "space", it is apparently "cut off" from its principle, and is thus "rogue". In such a setting, it must be "defeated", that is "chased out" of the mythotopoi, which from the perspective of those native to the space, "outer darkness". The only way to chase it out is to affirm the unity and wholeness of the space, which is Manifest in the name of the God. Thus a name that unites a mythotopoi is "more powerful" than an activity (or a being) apparently cut off from its own unitive name. It's "banishment" is its redemption. Outside of the foreign mythotopoi, it can reunite with its own.
What I am proposing here is a way to understand atonement as affirming religious diversity, a way to transcend mythotopoi by viewing through it the uniqueness of the God, in the same Spirit of St Paul, if not in his particular understanding of what this entails. If the purpose of “spreading the Gospel” is to declare salvation, and if salvation is from atonement, then here we have a way to spread the Gospel that does not entail conversion or subsumption. This is especially important in our context when we cannot claim that our traditions don't have their own mythotopoi that emerged in this two millennia interval, and where conversion most often entails converting to an established culture, with the attendant stoichiea, contra the Spirit of Paul. In affirming the unity and uniqueness of the emergent Christian space, we can help facilitate the affirmation and unity of non-Christian religious spaces, without assuming one must be antagonistic to another. The unity of the foreign space for itself without any necessary reference to ours is then its own “salvation”, since salvation is only beyond stoichiea through stoichiea to the unitive God beyond it. Again, apart from my Polytheist way of understanding this, a Christian can see this applied in the other Abrahamic faiths, where YHWH's uniqueness is asserted against any mythological regime he constitutes, and must therefore hold them all together in his person.
The details, as usual for a non-systematic blog post, are impossible to articulate here, at least right now. I already wrote an argument of this kind from another perspective. All I am doing here is showing how taking, for example, antique Hellenistic pagans, on their own terms can help us be better Christians without betraying the context from which our tradition springs, and also to learn from our mistakes.
[1] The snippet was posted by Jesse Hake on the DB Hart reading group, the statement in question is “Nature stands in relation to supernature as (in Aristotelian terms) prime matter to form. Nature in itself has no real existence and can have none; it is entirely an ontological patiency before the formal causality of supernature, and only as grace can nature possess any actuality at all.”.
[2] Edward Butler, ‘The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus’ (New School University, 2003) <https://henadology.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/dissertation-copy.pdf>.
[3] Margaret Barker, The Revelation of Jesus Christ: Which God Gave to Him to Show to His Servants What Must Soon Take Place (Revelation 1.1) (T&T Clark, 2000).
[4] David Bentley Hart, Roland in Moonlight (Angelico Press, 2021). “I think of religious symbolic economies as specific congelations and contractions of consciousness, local dreamscapes or… oh, I don’t know… ‘mythotopoi,’ I suppose I might say, where the mystery truly shows itself.”
[5] Edward Butler. “The other Gods, in their absolute refusal of relation to the demiurge, represent the surplus of productivity in the First Principle over any regime of forms.”
[6] Edward Butler, "The demiurge engages with the “disorderly” motion that represents the remainder of co-emergence, the “traces” of forms which are none other than the possibility of different regimes of form… This means that any regime of forms, despite its divine pedigree, is subject to the eruption of a foreign element inconceivable within the confines of the cosmos it fashions. The further this formative activity proceeds, the more focused is this resistance. Thus, for the demiurge, this resistance crystallizes into matter itself, the pseudo-hypostasis or parhupostasis, the manifestation of “necessity.” Matter, we read in the essay on evil, is “neither good nor evil” but necessary (DMS 75). “That which is necessary is all that is for the sake of good, has a reference to it, and whatever has a generation subsists on account of it,” and matter, specifically, is “produced by divinity as necessary to forms, which are incapable of being established in themselves” (76). Forms can never possess the integrity of the supra-essential individual; hence the further a given deity seeks to extend their formal hegemony through cognizing the other deities – that is to say, lending more and more of their own nature to the activity of illumination – the more focused the resistance, the sharper the alterity that must finally emerge."
[7] Paula Fredriksen, ‘Mandatory Retirement: Ideas in the Study of Christian Origins Whose Time Has Come to Go’, Studies in Religion, 2006, 231–46 <https://doi.org/10.1177/000842980603500203>. She argues that Gentile Christians are not to be considered “converts” to a new religion, which would entail adopting the “stoichiea” (my words not hers) of said religion.
[8] Edward P Butler, ‘Gods and Daimons in the Platonic Economy of Sacrifice’. “In the lower reaches of divine activity, however, the principle of objectification immanent to each deity leading to increasing internal multiplicity, particularly through the hypostasis of Soul, an indeterminate multiplicity of beings generically termed daimons are generated in the divine series… In the state of emptiness or aporia the soul of whatever kind is present to everything in its environment passively, and can thus only reflect the balance of cosmic and historical forces at a given place and time. This is the condition of Porphyry’s “maleficent” daimons, who are “complex” and nourished from complexity, inconsistency and incompatibility, not only complex foods but also complicated traditions built up over time and hence difficult to critique.”
[9] David Bentley Hart, ‘Everything You Know about the Gospel of Paul Is Likely Wrong’, Aeon, 2018 <https://aeon.co/ideas/the-gospels-of-paul-dont-say-what-you-think-they-say> [accessed 21 July 2020]. “These angelic beings, these Archons, whom Paul calls Thrones and Powers and Dominations and Spiritual Forces of Evil in the High Places, are the gods of the nations. In the Letter to the Galatians, he even hints that the angel of the Lord who rules over Israel might be one of their number.”