On Heartiste's Twitter feed, I noticed a link to this extremely verbose document. As an atheist attempting to understand the history and other material covered in the bible, I found this entire post striking. I've included key bolded parts in quotes below.
This time period is interesting because it's at the peak of Roman power, and thus at the beginning of its decline. Arguably, the West is in the same state or past it, or can at least be remarked to be in a similar situation and vulnerable to the same diseases of civilization.
http://orthosphere.org/2015/05/16/plotin...nosticism/
Key to the author's discussion is the statements that contemporaries of the Christian sect, the Gnostics, had to say about their attitudes. It's amazingly similar to modern attitudes that SJWs and others have towards society. I believe that Aurini remarked before on the idea that modern atheism or secularism is actually just a branch of Christianity, as it has preserved a lot of the culture within it. This follows in that same vein.
The Gnostics apparently:
Despised beauty for its own sake
![[Image: tumblr_lglaq4cvgA1qcvc7qo1_500.jpg]](https://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lglaq4cvgA1qcvc7qo1_500.jpg)
Did not believe in virtue
![[Image: shirtgate3-500x332.png]](http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/files/2014/11/shirtgate3-500x332.png)
Organized rallies against professors they determined their enemies
This was a very interesting read, and continues further, getting into Augustine and other discussion in the comments. This is not some big "oohh look, a conspiracy!" notion, it is only an observation that human behavior has not changed for 2000 years, and there is a distinct precedent for what we are observing and commenting on here.
This time period is interesting because it's at the peak of Roman power, and thus at the beginning of its decline. Arguably, the West is in the same state or past it, or can at least be remarked to be in a similar situation and vulnerable to the same diseases of civilization.
http://orthosphere.org/2015/05/16/plotin...nosticism/
Key to the author's discussion is the statements that contemporaries of the Christian sect, the Gnostics, had to say about their attitudes. It's amazingly similar to modern attitudes that SJWs and others have towards society. I believe that Aurini remarked before on the idea that modern atheism or secularism is actually just a branch of Christianity, as it has preserved a lot of the culture within it. This follows in that same vein.
The Gnostics apparently:
Despised beauty for its own sake
Did not believe in virtue
Organized rallies against professors they determined their enemies
Quote:Quote:
The illuminatus, in Plotinus’ words, “Carps at Providence and the Lord of Providence.” So too the illuminatus “scorns every law known to us,” while of “immemorial virtue and all restraint” he “makes… a laughing stock, lest any loveliness be seen on earth.” The doctrine of the illuminatus, making use of sarcasm and denunciation, “cuts at the root of all orderly living.” Or as Plotinus says of the illuminati, “They know nothing good here,” for to acknowledge goodness would be to disavow total moral superiority.
Plotinus notices that the Gnostics avoid giving definitions or explanations. Thus while the Gnostics claim moral superiority to other people, they disdain any discussion of virtue: “We are not told [by the illuminati] what virtue is or under what different kinds it appears; there is no word of all the numerous and noble reflections upon it that have come down to us from the ancients.” If anyone were to inquire directly of the Gnostics about these matters, the Gnostics would reply with their cryptic, “Look to God.” The Gnostic exclusion of the literary archive is particularly striking. In addition to being antinomian and anticosmic in their disposition, the Gnostics, as Plotinus describes them, are also anti-historical. The phrase, “Look to God,” irritates Plotinus because God, in his understanding, is rational and provides definitions and explanations, at least by indirection, through his works. Plato’s dialogues, which Plotinus has studied, are famous for Socrates’ insistence on defining terms precisely.
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When Gnostics say, “Look to God,” they are invoking the knowledge-without-experience, the secret knowledge that the word Gnosis denotes. Such proprietary knowledge they specifically refuse to share with outsiders because possession of it – or the claim to possess it, for that is all that the outsider has on which to base his judgment concerning the claimant – is what differentiates the illuminati from the vulgate. Indeed, the secret knowledge cannot be shared, not even should someone in possession of it feel moved to share it. Thus by virtue (so to speak) of their secret knowledge, the Gnostics consider themselves elect; they are ontologically different from and elevated above ordinary people. Gnostics are thus an extreme in-group phenomenon. Under this conviction of supreme differentiation, they “proceed to assert that Providence cares for them alone.” When the Hidden God abolishes the corrupt world, only those whose being has been transfigured by secret knowledge will remain, and they, too, shall be as gods. Compared to those in whom the secret knowledge does not reside, and who are therefore not transfigured, the illuminati are already as gods. They may mock and revile their ontological inferiors – and invariably they do so.
We have remarked that Plotinus discerns in the Gnostic disposition several types of resentment: Envy of standing and wealth in the social order, with a concomitant and hypocritical advantage-seeking; jealously against the structure of existence, and disdain for the past and for its inheritance in the present. Correlated with “despising the world and all that is in it,” as Plotinus remarks, is the Gnostic orientation to a post-apocalyptic future in whose realization all attitudes contrary to the Gnostic attitude shall be humiliated and banished while the Gnostic antipathy to tradition will be justified in a triumph. Plotinus writes of the Gnostics that, “All they care for is something else [than the structure of existence in the present] to which they will at some future time apply themselves.”
It might surprise modern readers that Plotinus, a mystic of the Neo-Platonic school, should defend the goodness of the material world, but this surprise would stem from an unfortunate modern misconception about Plato and Platonism. For Plato, as for Plotinus, existence has distinguishable aspects – the sensible and the intelligible – but these aspects belong to a unitary whole. Platonism is not dualism, nor is it world-rejection, despite what Friedrich Nietzsche claims in The Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ.
Addressing the Gnostic loathing for physical reality, Plotinus poses rhetorically, “Who that truly perceives the harmony of the Intellectual Realm [the Ideas] could fail, if he has any bent towards music, to answer to the harmony in sensible sounds?” Likewise, Plotinus asks, “What geometrician or arithmetician could fail to take pleasure in the symmetries, correspondences, and principles of order observed in visible things?” Plotinus claims that the Gnostics harbor hatred even for the cosmetic beauty of comely individuals: “Now if the sight of beauty excellently reproduced upon a face hurries the mind to that other Sphere [the Intellectual Realm], surely no one seeing the loveliness lavish in the world of sense – this vast orderliness, the Form which the stars even in their remoteness display – no one could be so dull-witted, so immovable, as not to be carried by all this recollection, and gripped by reverent awe in the thought of all this, so great, sprung from that greatness.” To revile beauty, a proclivity which Plotinus ascribes to the Gnostics, would be consistent with their attitude of “censure.”
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A certain intellectual democracy is also implicit in the same words, for according to the gist of them non-philosophers, when they respond to cosmetic beauty or the sublimity of nature, respond indeed to the same supernal order as that studied in a more sophisticated way by the philosopher. The ground of philosophy consists in the average person’s openness to reality, his vulnerability to beauty: “The very experience out of which Love arises.” In spurning that experience, and that openness, the illuminati exhibit, as Plotinus puts it, “the perverse pride of despising what was once admired.”
According to Plotinus, Gnostics argue that, “They see no difference between beautiful and ugly forms of body.” It should strike no one, therefore, as unexpected that Gnostics also, in Plotinus’ words, “make no distinction between the ugly and the beautiful in conduct.” This remark communicates with the other, earlier remark in Plotinus’ treatise – the one concerning Gnostic evasiveness about defining virtue. To deny beauty in one aspect of existence, the corporeal, is, in principle, to deny it in all other aspects of existence, as for instance in the moral aspect. To equivocate about quality and degree is, moreover, to attack the connection between hierarchy and order, while at the same time establishing a new, crude hierarchy. In this reactionary conception of and response to hierarchy, one difference alone is paramount: The election of the elite minority, guaranteed by their secret knowledge, over against the damnation of the preterit majority. Plotinus need not be referring to the bearing of individuals, but merely to the doctrine in and of itself, when he invokes the word “arrogant” as a label appropriate to Gnosticism.
Although Plotinus never directly remarks the aggressiveness of the illuminati, the existence of his treatise implies it. Plotinus ran a type of school or college, in whose precincts he lectured on the Platonic philosophy. In the Third Century, Platonism functioned in many ways like a religion or as a coherent ethical system, as did also Stoicism and (increasingly) Christianity. In Against the Gnostics, Plotinus is apparently responding formally to disputatious Gnostic infiltration of his lectures, with disruptive objections and derailing pseudo-inquiries during the question-and-answer.
We can understand such aggression as belonging to the inherent intolerance of Gnostic believers for any interpretation of reality other than their own, an intolerance made worse by the lack of originality in Gnostic doctrine, which appropriates elements of established doctrine and crudely reverses them. By obliterating the model, the sectarian may better advertise his derivative as original. This obliteration of the original is, by the way, the modus operandi of Islam, which, fiercely anti-historical, attempts always and everywhere to destroy any and every vestige of the non-Islamic past. It is entirely possible that Islam is a surviving offspring of Late-Antique Gnosticism. Islam has roots in two Christian heresies that exhibited Gnostic tendencies – Sabellianism and Monophysitism. The Islamic scriptural convention of abrogation, whereby a later Koranic verse abolishes an earlier one, is paradigmatically Gnostic.
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Plotinus employs an elaborate metaphor to sum up the hypocrisy, as he sees it, of Gnostic anticosmic complaint. It is as though, he writes, “two people inhabit one stately house,” the house, of course, being the cosmos itself. One of these inhabitants, grumbling about the house, “declaims against its plan and against its Architect, but none the less retains his residence in it.” In doing so, “the malcontent imagines himself to be wiser” than his co-dweller; and he thinks of his inability “to bear with necessity” as a higher wisdom. Plotinus’ word, “necessity,” means the structure of existence, as it is given. The grumbler execrates “the soulless stone and timber” out of which the house is constructed. As for the co-dweller, he “makes no complaint,” but rather he “asserts the competency of the Architect.” Plotinus attributes to the disgruntled inhabitant a type of dissimulated envy, “a secret admiration for the beauty of those same ‘stones,’” whose supposed soullessness and degraded materiality he so volubly and inveterately deplores.
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Plotinus discerned in the Valentinian Gnostics and their writings the traits of an anticosmic attitude as well as of an obsessive antinomianism; he also grasped that Gnosticism was unoriginal, borrowing from established schools while simultaneously denouncing the sources from which it borrowed. Augustine makes similar observations, using a rhetorical structure resembling Plotinus’ parable of the house with two dwellers. Augustine notes that the Manichaeans constantly addressed the Old Testament, not in admiration, but for the sake of condemning the Patriarchs. If a Patriarch had many wives, then the Manichaeans, who abhor procreation, would revile him; if another Patriarch were at first willing to offer human sacrifice, then the Manichaeans would revile him, even though he relented, as God commanded, and afterwards foreswore the practice. For the Manichaeans any goodness save their own is intolerable. Only the revelation of the final prophet can constitute a precedent, as absurd as that proposition sounds.
Augustine writes: “It is as if a man in an armory, not knowing what piece goes on what part of the body, should put a grieve on his head and a helmet on his shin and complain because they did not fit. Or again, as if, in a house, he sees a servant handle something that the butler is not permitted to touch, or when something is done behind the stable that would be prohibited in a dining room, and then a person should be indignant that in one house and one family the same things are not allowed to every member of the household.” This passage captures by metaphor the essentially plundering and resentful character of Gnosticism, which finds every inherited injunction intolerable. Tearing down the institutions, the Gnostic then tries to build new institutions, suiting his own whims, by reassembling the pieces. The result is like a modern sculpture put together according to the aesthetic of “found objects” or asserting the supremacy of a political notion. It is merely an obscene joke.
This was a very interesting read, and continues further, getting into Augustine and other discussion in the comments. This is not some big "oohh look, a conspiracy!" notion, it is only an observation that human behavior has not changed for 2000 years, and there is a distinct precedent for what we are observing and commenting on here.
