The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  “In the case of Platonism, it was a combination of humanistic linguistic skill and philosophical acumen, in the person of Marsilio Ficino, which proved fundamental to its revival in the Renaissance…His own philosophical inclination was towards Plato rather than Aristotle, primarily because, as a priest, he considered Platonism to be more compatible with Christianity. It was Ficino who put Platonism on the philosophical map of the Renaissance…which provided the intellectual framework for his Christianized interpretation of Plato…Much of the literary influence of Ficinian Platonism was channeled through the vernacular tradition…Take the case of Ficino’s Latin commentary on (Plato’s) Symposium (1469). He (Ficino) himself translated it into the vernacular, but it was also transformed by one of his followers, Girolamo Benivieni, into a densely allusive…Italian canzone.10…The central theme of the Symposium, Platonic love, as Christianized and purified by Ficino—Plato’s homosexual characters are converted into chaste male friends, united by their shared devotion to God…Platonism as a philosophical system, rather than a source of literary themes and motifs, was promoted in the midseventeenth century by a group of (Protestant) Cambridge clergymen and professors…(t)he Cambridge Platonists…” 11

  These Platonists in Protestant Britain were on the receiving end of Ficino’s two-hundred-year-old legacy.

  The “Cambridge Platonists” included Benjamin Whichcote (1609-1683); John Smith (1618-1652); Henry More (1614-1687) and Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688). These were Fr. Ficino’s spiritual and ideological heirs and the transmitters of his Catholic-Neoplatonic-Hermeticism to the Enlightenment, having realized its radical ends:

  “The acceptance by the Cambridge Platonists of Plato and his disciples under the leadership of Plotinus (204-270 A.D.)—’Divine Plotinus!’—went hand in hand with their bold rejection of the entire Western theological tradition from St. Augustine through the medieval schoolmen to the classic Protestantism of Luther, Calvin and their variegated followers in the seventeenth century…Luther and Calvin and the entire array of Protestant theologians were greeted with the worst possible disapprobation…

  “The return of the Cambridge Platonists to ‘the ancient and wisest philosophers…was a return to a tradition which included many more philosophers besides Plato, the Neoplatonists, the Greek fathers and the thinkers of fifteenth-century Florence. This tradition was rooted in ‘the primitive theology of the Gentiles’ 12 which, according to Ficino, had begun with Zoroaster…Hermes Trismegistus…passed thence to Orpheus and Pythagoras…a variant of it appears implicit in Cudworth’s True Intellectual System and it was once outlined by (Henry) More:

  “Plato’s school…well agrees with learned Pythagore,

  Egyptian Trismegist, and the antique roll

  Of Chaldee wisdom, all which time hath tore

  But Plato and deep Plotin do restore.” 13

  Father Ficino wrote, “Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes the thrice-greatest) was the first father of Theology, followed by Orpheus, who occupied the second place in the ancient theology. Aglaophemus was initiated into the sacred mysteries by Orpheus, to be succeeded in theology by Pythagoras, who in turn was followed by Philolaus, the teacher of our divine Plato.”14

  Plato was a forerunner of the Gnostics. For Plato the body was mainly the vessel that held the soul captive to materiality. At death, the soul was released from its bodily “prison.”

  “For Plato, the soul is the non-material aspect of a human being, and is the aspect that really matters. Bodily life is full of delusion and danger; the soul is to be cultivated in the present both for its own sake and because its future happiness will depend upon such cultivation. The soul, being immortal, existed before the body, and will continue to exist after the body is gone. Since for many Greeks ‘the immortals’ were the gods, there is always the suggestion, at least by implication, that human souls are in some way divine…Death is frequently defined precisely in terms of the separation of soul and body, seen as something to be desired.

  “Hades, in other words, is not a place of gloom, but (in principle at least) of delight. It is not terrifying, as so many ordinary people believe, but offers a range of pleasing activities—of which philosophical discourse may be among the chief, not surprisingly since attention to such matters is the best way, during the present time, of preparing the soul for its future. The reason people do not return from Hades is that life is so good there; they want to stay, rather than to return to the world of space, time and matter…What happens to souls in Hades — at least, to souls who go there to begin with…Judgment is passed according to the person’s previous behavior…Plato frequently hints at a future for souls after their immediate post-mortem existence; some will return into other bodies.

  “…influences that steered Plato towards his view of the soul and life after death…(t)o begin with, it is a natural outworking of his larger ontology: according to the theory of Forms, the world of space, time and matter is of secondary ontological significance, and the unseen world of Forms, or Ideas, is primary.

  “…Already in Socrates’ time the (occult) mystery religions had begun to flourish, offering (so it seemed) a comparable benefit to philosophical wisdom…Beginning with the Orphic cult, but fanning out much more widely, these religions (if that is indeed the right term for them) offered the initiate access to a world of private spiritual experience in the present time which would continue into the world beyond death…

  “A further development, whose origins are obscure and controversial, was gnosticism. Many lines of Platonic thought led straight in this direction. The immortal (and perhaps even divine) soul is imprisoned in the unsuitable body, forgetting its origin in the process. During the present life those with this spark may have the fact revealed to them; as a result, they become possessed of a ‘knowledge’ (gnosis) which sets them apart from other mortals, and are assured of a continuing blissful existence thereafter…

  “Plato’s ideas on the soul (and much else besides) were, in addition, severely modified by his equally influential pupil Aristotle. He took the view that the soul was the subtance, or the species-form, of the living thing; this represents a turning away from the lively Platonic view of the soul as more or less independent, and superior, entity to the body.” 15

  Catholics and others conditioned by the Platonic and Neoplatonic Churchianity that passes for Christianity nowadays, may not find much fault with Plato’s soul doctrine. The fault is this: Plato has no place in his theology/philosophy for the dead person’s return to his or her body in the Resurrection. Of course, the Catholic Church does make ample room for this truth, and numerous councils and papal bulls can be cited which affirm it in no uncertain terms. But in the practice of the faith, the emphasis is decidedly not on our resurrected body, and our entirely new life after Jesus returns— the future reality which radically contradicts Platonic, Gnostic, Manichaean, Neoplatonic and Hermetic mystical occult fantasy.

  The Second Coming of Jesus will mark the beginning of a restoration that He will initiate when He returns. Again, this is a Biblical future reality that runs counter to the western occult mirage imprinted on our minds through the Neoplatonic and Hermetic infiltration of the Church. If we are honest with ourselves, many of us will admit that we are infected with this occult virus: we picture our after-life in heaven mainly as eternally experiencing the beatific vision. We have little or no sense of the actual future foretold by God’s Word.

  How was this ignorance inculcated in us? How have “devout Catholics” and their “learned priests,” and “conservative” Protestants and their “scholarly ministers,” failed to grasp what our future consists of, according to the Word of God? Is this desideratum the result of an accident, or a conspiracy? The greatest experience of our future existence has been rendered a footnote, when it is referred to at all: under Christ, we will administer God’s kingdom in our restored, resurrection bodies. This fact from the Book of Revelation undercuts all of the mystical mumbo-jumbo that emanates from the occult, which has migrated
into private revelations and apparitions that proliferate in the Church of Rome, aided by clerics and prelates in whose interest it is to furnish these soporifics to the people of God.

  What is at stake is the Christian’s correct knowledge of reality: that God’s Creation which we inhabit on earth, is basically good, in spite of the flaw which our first parent’s disobedience in the Garden brought into that Creation. Our life on God’s earth is precious and wonderful, and God is a God of the living. True Christians will live again in their renewed, physical bodies. Jesus will completely restore the Creation on His return, and we will be in our bodies as part of that restoration.

  These Biblical truths are heresy to the occult gnosis of the western secret societies, which finalized their usurpation of the hierarchy of the Church in the Renaissance. Much of Protestantism inherited some of Neoplatonic-Hermetic Rome’s errors, in spite of contending against other aspects of papal theology, while also adding new errors of their own invention.

  There is most certainly a disembodied state after death, while we await the Resurrection. But that state is not the final destiny of Christ’s Faithful, as so many have been led to believe through the influence of paganized agents of error. Our destiny is the “restoration of all things” (Acts 3:21)—the glorified Creation where Heaven will be a transformed earth, which we will experience in our glorified, regenerate, immortal bodies (Romans 8:11). The failure to consistently preach and propagate this wondrous future as the overarching reality of life after death, has misled, demoralized and alienated millions of people, causing them to reject a saving faith and hope in Jesus and His Gospel.

  The false picture inculcated in our minds of a shabby existence on a wretched planet earth that must be escaped, coupled with the vision of an eternal, disembodied post-mortem fate, is strong evidence of the extent to which Neoplatonism has replaced Christianity in churches where this delusion has been allowed to proliferate.

  “The influence of Platonism on the church father Origen (A.D. 185-254) was so thorough that the early Church theologian taught not only that the soul was the immortal part of human beings that preexisted eternally, but also that this soul was often reincarnated in different bodies. For Origen, Christ is primarily the soul’s educator, who, by his moral example and teaching, leads us from the transitory realm of material things to the invisible realm that is the soul’s true realm…” Origen taught that ‘Christ’s ascension was ‘more an ascent of mind than of body.” 16

  The disconnection between the soul and the body, transmitted by Catholic Neoplatonists to the Renaissance Church, penetrating its theology and positing a disconnection between the resurrection body and the soul, represents another grave peril for the Christian believer: it tills the soil for a theology which leads to the heresy of modernism, in which Christ’s resurrection is denied outright, or at the very least, obscured by cant language.

  “In The Education of the Human Race (1778), rationalist philosopher G.E. Lessing 17 (1729-1781)…said, regardless of whether Christ literally rose from the dead, such facts of contingent history are insufficient to ground or to challenge eternal principles of reason. On the basis of this Platonist prejudice, Lessing asserted that Christianity’s supernatural claims are indemonstrable.this trajectory leads to the theologian Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976), who said, ‘The Jesus of history is no concern to me…I am deliberately renouncing any form of encounter with a phenomenon of past history, including an encounter with the Christ after the flesh.” 18

  Platonized Catholicism (Neoplatonic occultism) combined Platonism and Gnosticism in propounding an ontological dualism of “realms of the forms” and “appearances.” In Neoplatonism the redemption Jesus gained for us in history, in the-here-and-now, is always sublimated to a putative secret gnosis behind that redemption, which is supposed to be an indispensable key to full enhancement of Christ’s salvation mission. In actuality, a false Christ is formulated, the Christ of the spirit as opposed to the true Christ who made possible our redemption. In the infernal marriage of Platonism and Manichaeism, the soul is trapped in the flesh. Redemption is found in escape from the body and the world in which the body has incarnated by the will of God, into the immortal spirit world. 19

  Contrasted with these delusions is the truth of the Biblical narrative of reality: a covenant between God and His people unfolding in the history of human life on earth. “In contrast to Plato, biblical religion looks for true knowledge of God in the realm of history, particulars, and flux, rather than in an ostensibly higher realm…transcending these factors.” (Michael Horton).

  Christ’s resurrection was spiritualized by the Vatican’s Renaissance Catholic occultists in secret, while outwardly the Church of Rome issued bold proclamations of Biblical truth concerning the imperative to believe in the efficacy of Christ’s physical resurrection from the dead. This masquerade was maintained in history for as long as it took for the zeitgeist to change. Then the time for public statements of the formerly hidden doctrines had arrived. Liberal and Conservative churchmen such as Pope Paul VI on the Left, and Pope Benedict XVI on the Right, undertook this unveiling.

  As Matthew Vogan observes, Benedict XVI (the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) “entered office with a formidable reputation as the Vatican’s arch-conservative ‘enforcer’ of doctrine…It is alarming to think of the extent of the heresies held by those who have authority within the bounds of Rome if Ratzinger is to be considered conservative.”

  During the pontificate of Francis, naive and self-deceived, Janus-minded “Conservatives” and “Traditionalists” in the wolf-pen of the post-Renaissance Church of Rome, bewailed the still-living Benedict XVI’s absence from the papacy like sheep bleating for Little Bo Peep. They were pining for the Hermetic heretic who wrote in his book Einführung in das Christentum (1968): 20

  “According to the Epistle in Ephesians, Christ’s work of salvation consisted precisely in bringing to their knees the forces and powers seen by Origen in his commentary on this passage as the collective powers which encircle man: the power of the milieu, of national tradition; the conventional ‘they’ or ‘one’ that oppresses and destroys man. Terms like original sin, resurrection of the flesh, last judgment, and so on, are only to be understood at all from this angle, for the seat of original sin is to be sought precisely in this collective net that precedes the individual existence as a sort of spiritual datum, not in any biological legacy passed on between otherwise separated individuals…Resurrection expresses the idea that the immortality of man can only exist and be thought of in fellowship of men, in man as the creature of fellowship…” 21

  The future Pope Benedict XVI—the Vatican II theological expert Rev. Fr. Joseph Ratzinger—was inextricably intertwined with the theology of his Renaissance-Catholic predecessors, upholding, in an unbroken chain of transmission, nearly six hundred years of Neoplatonic-Hermetic heterodoxy, when he wrote that the coming of Jesus Christ was prophesied “according to Plato,” in the latter’s blueprint for deceit and dictatorship, The Republic. The future pope wrote that Plato’s alleged prophecy “is always bound to move a Christian deeply.”22

  The future Pope Benedict XVI continues: “To our generation, whose critical faculty has been awoken by Bultmann, talk of the ascension, together with that of the descent into hell, conjures that picture of the three-story world which we call mythical…Indeed, since there is no absolute point of reference…basically one cannot any longer speak at all of ‘above’ and ‘below’—or even of ‘left’ and ‘right’; the cosmos no longer exhibits any firm directions. No one today (1968) will seriously contest these discoveries. There is no longer such a thing as a world arranged literally in three storys.” 23

  “In Introduction to Christianity, Ratzinger explicitly denies the resurrection of the body. ‘It now becomes clear that the real heart of faith in the resurrection does not consist at all in the idea of the restoration of bodies, to which we have reduced it in our thinking; such is the case even though this is the pictorial image
used throughout the Bible’…one thing at any rate may be fairly clear: both John (6:63) and Paul (1 Corinthians 15:50) state with all possible emphasis that the ‘resurrection of the flesh,’ the ‘resurrection of the body,’ is not a ‘resurrection of physical bodies.’

  “Ratzinger could not be more explicit about his interpretation of ‘the biblical pronouncements about the resurrection’. He says that their essential content is not the conception of a restoration of bodies to souls after a long interval; their aim is to tell men that they, they themselves, live on…because they are known and loved by God in a way that they can no longer perish…the essential part of man, the person, remains…it goes on existing because it lives in God’s memory.’

  “(In) Ratzinger’s theology of the resurrection of Christ…he dismisses an ‘earthly and material notion of resurrection’ and resists defining it as a real historical event. He says that it is ‘impossible for the Gospels to describe the encounter with the risen Christ; that is why “they can only stammer when they speak of these meetings and seem to provide contradictory descriptions of them.”

  “Ratzinger: ‘Christ is the one who died on the cross and to the eye of faith, rose again from the dead.’ How far this is from the biblical truth of passages such as John 20:27: ‘Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing’.

  “The Fourth Lateran Council has asserted — and Councils are regarded as infallible in Roman Catholic dogma—that all men ‘will rise again with their own bodies which they now bear about with them.’ Ratzinger was involved in producing the new Catechism of the Catholic Church, which was approved with ‘Apostolic Authority’ by the previous pope (“Saint” John Paul II) in 1992. This document states that ‘the resurrection of the flesh’ (the literal formulation of the Apostles’ Creed) means not only that the immortal soul will live on after death, but that even our ‘mortal body’ will come to life again’…While this could be more precise it appears reasonably categorical. How then may…Pope (Benedict) continue to deny such a statement of the Church’s official teaching? It can be done only by the Jesuitical distinction that he makes between his official and private views (despite the fact that his books are all marketed with ‘Pope Benedict XVI’ more prominently displayed than his real name).