John M. Dillon writes of the post-first century hoaxer who posed as the Aeropagite who was the contemporary of St. Paul:
“At some time around the fifth century CE, an enterprising Christian controversialist…highly educated in the intricacies of contemporary Platonism…published a series of remarkable works, under the pseudonym of ‘Dionysius the Aeropagite’ 13 — thus seeking boldly to upstage the whole late Platonist system by implying that this first-century Athenian convert of St. Paul had anticipated every aspect of it. In a series of works of great theoretical and linguistic complexity…’Dionysius’ sets before us a conspectus of his (lightly) Christianized version of Procline Neoplatonism…The works of Dionysius first come to notice at a conference held in Constantinople in 532 between a group of Orthodox followers of the Council of Chalcedon, led by Bishop Hypatius of Ephesus, and a group of partisans of Severus (a Monophysite theologian and statesman), where the Severians adduce ‘Dionysius’ as an authority, and Hypatius expresses some skepticism as to the provenance of the works cited. However, Dionysius survived this first test, and a commentary composed on the corpus shortly afterwards by John of Scythopolis seems to have confirmed his credentials….
“…adaptation of a very distinctive Syrianic-Proclean system of triads occurs in Dionysius’ account of the structure of the angelic world in the Celestial Hierarchy. In that work… Dionysius sets out the succession, or hierarchia (a term which he seems to have invented), of the divine orders of beings in a series of triads, interestingly reminiscent of that proposed for the intelligible realm by Syrianus and faithfully adopted by Proclus. For Syrianus and Proclus, we may recall, the intelligible realm comes to be divided into a sequence of three levels: an intelligible triad of entities, an intelligibleintellective triad (each element of these subdivided into further triads), and an intellective hebdomad, consisting of two triads and a seventh entity, the so-called ‘membrane.’ However, what we basically have is a sequence of triads…Such a triadic system as this for the heavenly realm has really no warrant in Scripture, and it is remarkable that Dionysius should have felt moved to propound it.
“A salient feature of later Neoplatonism, from Iamblichus onwards, was the elevation of theurgy, the performance of rituals to attract the favor of the gods…With this theurgic tradition Dionysius appears to set off the divine activity from the human, and to denominate the former theourgia, thus subtly altering the connotation of the compound ‘god-work’ to cause it to mean ‘work of the gods’…The latter human component he renames hierourgia…for Dionysius the ‘hierurgic rites’ are the sacraments, but they fulfill the same role and possess the same rationale as the rights of the Iamblichean or Procline theurgist.” 14
It was Fr. Ficino who breathed an extended life into “Denys,” though here it must be conceded that prior to the time of the Florentine priest, even medieval Catholicism suffered to a degree from the influence of Platonism and Neoplatonism, and nowhere more so than in the development of a theology of the soul which exists in the Kabbalah but not the Bible.
The study of the theology of Plato and Neoplatonism has been subject to so much mystification that it has become a murky and baffling enterprise that has defied comprehension by the average Christian. The reason there can be no such thing as “Christian Platonism” or “Christian Neoplatonism” is the huge disconnect between the Platonic cosmology and the Biblical. There is no ecumenical bridge between the two and that fact violates a fundamental tenet of the syncretic occult religion, which insists on the supposed truth that all contemporary creeds have a common derivation. In order to put forward this fraud they must resort to their most common tactic, lying and deception.
According to Plato and Platonism, material creation is a prison from which “the soul” blessedly escapes at death. There is no resurrection of the body in Plato or Platonism, or the whole of pagan Greek thought, for that matter. Pagan Platonism posits a disembodied immortality which has been freed at last from sordid physical Creation. As far back as the first century A.D. and “the Jew, Philo of Alexandria,” this pagan belief that the body is the “prison house of the soul” began to circulate among Christians. Philo venerated Plato as “most holy Plato.” Eusebius (263-339), “the father of Church history” promoted the fable that Philo had met St. Peter in Rome. St. Jerome even includes Philo among the Church Fathers.
Philo personified the early Platonism that supported the emerging Gnostic view that matter itself is evil. For the true Christian however, “sin entered as an alien force into the universe” (Romans 5:12). The fact that creation was subjected to the bondage of corruption…implies that its original state was otherwise (Romans 8:20)…it is not intrinsic to the creation per se…For Philo, the ultimate goal is to escape and cast off the material: that takes the form of…an immortality of the soul after death. For (St.) Paul, the ultimate resolution comes through resurrection and new creation…Believers will receive glorified bodies like Christ’s…Likewise, all of creation will be set free from its bondage and participate in redemption (Romans 8:21). 15
Another aspect of Plato’s philosophy which is irreconcilable with the gospel of Jesus Christ is the Platonic demiurgic construct, which posits that one force created the universe, and another, the “Demiurge,” operates it (Timaeus, pt. II).
“…some thinkers have synthesized Christian theism with Plato’s god, the Demiurge. Certain points must be noted before an alleged correspondence can be confirmed…Taking Plato’s philosophy as a whole, I believe that all such demonstrations would be forced. One would have to isolate abstractly certain attributes or characteristics of Plato’s god, change their meaning as they appear in the holistic structure of Plato’s philosophy, then synthesize these attributes or characteristics with Christian theism. Not only does such a procedure destroy the distinctiveness of Christian theism…(s)uch an adventure is an injustice to Christian thought…We must underline, therefore, that Plato’s formulation of god is not a faithful response to the revelation of the Christian God, but rather a rejection of Him.” 16
It is this “injustice to Christian thought” which is the duplicitous objective of the syncretists, beginning with Philo and extending to the pontificates of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. It is not a “conspiracy theory” to perceive this unmistakable chain of transmission.
In traversing the numerous texts of “Christian” Neoplatonism, one will travel far before encountering an unambiguously egregious transgression of the First Commandment. Instead, in seemingly interminable books of this canon, one is met by a gradual conditioning process, in the form of a seemingly harmless metaphysic, which in reality takes us further away from the clarity and truth that comes with immersion in the Word of God as the highest and ultimate source of wisdom. In “Christian” Neoplatonism, the lucidity of the gospel of Jesus Christ is subsumed in a welter of mystical speculation—an extended make-believe excursion into the spirit realm, where phantasmagoric conjecture is presented as a higher reality. This was the peril of “Christian” Neoplatonism for the Church and the believer. The deeper the engagement with its conjectures, the deeper is the inculcation of extra-Biblical doctrines and notions which generate an enchanted pagan mentality in the mind of the Christian. Take for instance this seemingly innocuous excursus on the “geometrical images in Christian Neoplatonism”:
“Christian Neoplatonists are as readily prepared as their pagan predecessors to conceive the cyclic process of causation in terms of geometrical images, and much of the earlier doctrine is repeated without significant alteration…Christian writers are no longer concerned with a set of schemata which apply primarily to the sensible world and are transferred thence by analogy to the realm of intelligible essences, but with geometrical shapes which apply with varying degrees of precision to created things…The second geometrical illustration used by the pagan philosophers is much more common in Christian texts…In the first place it is applied to God through analogy to created things, and Ps.-Dionysius (Pseudo-Dionysius) ar
gues as follows:
“…it is possible to speak of him (God) in a manner fitting the divine. In this sense the rectilinear signifies the emanation of his potencies toward created things, the circular indicates his self-identity, and the spiral represents the combination of emanation and stability.’
“Secondly, it is applied to created things and especially the angelic and human intellects, in which case the pagan Neoplatonic theory that the three shapes relate to different faculties or modes of cognition is revived. This theory is applied by Maximus (the Confessor) in both a physical and epistemological context, for during his argument about the end of each creature’s motion which is God, he stresses that created things move either in a rectilinear, circular, or spiral manner, while elsewhere he equates the faculties of sense, intellect and discursive reason with these three types of motion.” 17
Another Platonic doctrine contrary to Scripture is a teaching about the soul utterly disconnected from the body. In the Nicene Creed, Christians recite the affirmation of the dogma that “we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” The Platonists and Neoplatonists cannot honestly subscribe to the Biblical belief that it is the body, not just the “soul,” or the nous (mind), that is the Lord’s Holy Temple. The concept of a soul completely divorced from the body is something we find in Plato, not the Bible.
Psyche represents the whole of that creature into which God breathed life; (in Hebrew, nishmath hayyim), thereby creating the living human being, nephesh hayyah. The body-soul Manichaean duality is a delusion of Platonism, not of the Scriptures or Christ’s true Church.
The pneuma is the divine force of YHVH that will give life to the glorified, immortal resurrection body. This is the Christian believer’s victory over death, not the state of disembodied immortality of the supersapientialis scientia platonica, which is mistaken for eternity by the minions of Churchianity. This latter belief is a Satanic lie of occult origin, advanced under Platonic and Neoplatonic auspices and infiltrated into the Church long before the Renaissance. The continuing dubiety surrounding the truth about the reality and nature of the afterlife is the contaminated legacy of the occult philosophy. As Neoplatonism spread through the Church prior even to the Middle Ages, its chief characteristic was the propagation of confusion through the dissemination of a multiplicity of allegorical and mystical traditions and cosmologies put forth as complimenting and enlarging Christianity, but in fact at radical variance with the Word of God.
No single person is more responsible for the advancement of Neoplatonism within the Catholic Church and Christendom at large than Rev. Fr. Marsilio Ficino, translator of the first complete Platonic oeuvre (Platonis Opera Omnia), which became a bestseller after Ficino’s death, having been reprinted in at least thirty separate editions in the sixteenth century alone. Ficino in his commentaries on Plato’s writings fitted them into a systematic theology of neo-Catholic syncretic origin, embellished with the addition of translations of Proclus, Plotinus and Iamblichus, and the teachings of Hermes, Zoroaster and Pseudo-Dionysius. This foul melting pot was perpetuated by the pope of Rome, who subsequently endowed university chairs in Platonic philosophy for occult heretics such as Francesco Piccolomini in Padua and Francesco Patrizi in the Vatican itself. They in turn imparted to the Church the idea that the ancient pagan sapience representative of Hermes Trismegistus and Plato, had heralded and prepared the way for Jesus Christ and His Church.
Reincarnation
Isaac Abarbanel was a prominent Spanish rabbi who emigrated to Italy in 1492, after the expulsion of the Judaics from Spain. Abarbanel authored his major theological treatise, Mif’a lot Elohim, on reincarnation (also called “metempsychosis” or the “transmigration of souls”), in Catholic Italy, circa 1500. Abarbanel drew on the Iberian Kabbalistic theology he inherited from the school of the medieval Spanish Rabbi Moses Nahmanides,18 as well as Catholic-Neoplatonism:
“…in regard to Abarbanel’s thought concerning the transmigration of souls…Abarbanel expresses an inclination toward a Neoplatonically ‘rationalized’ Kabbalah, characteristic of the Italian Renaissance milieu in which he wrote the bulk of his works on this topic, while maintaining a sense of esteem for and even deference to the more arcane Nahmanidean Kabbalah of his prior Iberian environs. Within this one illustrious thinker, the ‘exoteric’ and the ‘esoteric’ trends meet in a synthetic attempt to safeguard and to expound upon the kabbalistic notion of gilgul neshamot (the reincarnation of souls).19
“Though he exhibits an inclination toward philosophical speculation, as a proponent of the Kabbalah, Abarbanel takes strong issue with ‘Aristotle and the interpreters of his books… (who) sought ways to deny’ the real possibility of transmigration. According to Abarbanel, such attempts at denial are fundamentally mistaken. ‘Those who deny it,’ he writes, ‘they are the people who walk in darkness.’ Not only is the idea philosophically possible despite the false claims of Aristotle and his interpreters…among the Christians, as a received tradition 20 from the mouths of the prophets who saw the light of Torah, it is Truth and must be accepted. As a direct tenet of the Jewish kabbalistic tradition, Abarbanel has no need to be careful or to conceal his support for Transmigration, and can argue forcefully in its favor. This, in fact, is what he does, attempting to moor the doctrine as expressed within the writings of Plato and other ancient thinkers in his own understanding of the prisca theologia tradition as based upon the Jewish Kabbalah. Abarbanel’s longest and most definitive treatment of transmigration which specifically deals with the idea of human reincarnation, lies within his commentary on Deuteronomy 25:5-6. This is the commandment appertaining to the institution of levirate marriage, and there the Torah states (in Deuteronomy 25:5-6):
“When brothers dwell together and one of them dies and leaves no son, the wife of the deceased shall not be married to a stranger, outside the family. Her husband’s brother shall unite with her: take her as his wife and perform the levir’s duty. The first son that she bears shall be accounted to the dead brother, that his name may not be blotted out in Israel.” 21
In this misreading of the Torah we are offered a glimpse into Orthodox Judaism’s profound, intimate and irrefutable Kabbalah connection, which has been long denied by deceivers and apologists. As the revival of the superstition of ancient Egypt, Sumer and Babylon (Sumer was located in what would become Babylon), Orthodox Judaism is surfeited with occult practices and doctrines which for centuries were successfully hidden from public view, partly in order to encourage the rise of the hoax that rabbinic Judaism is a religion faithful to the Old Testament, which forms one-half of the synthesis popularly referred to as “the Judeo-Christian heritage.” Actually, every time this bastard hybrid is pronounced as a given fact it blasphemously yokes the Gospel of Jesus Christ with the squirming serpents of occult Egypt and Babylon, as represented by Judaism and its Babylonian Talmud and Kabbalah.
The Orthodox Judaism of which the Renaissance popes and their successors were smitten, teaches multiple levels of secret Biblical meanings (sod)—meanings which were unseen by Jesus Christ or his apostles—and which are brought to the surface (rasu lemor) by the mediation of rabbinic “sages.” For the rabbis, the esoteric decoding of the Bible’s concept of Levirate marriage is contained within sod ha-’ibbur, the secret of impregnation, which they link to gilgul, metempsychosis, i.e. reincarnation. In Deuteronomy, when there are two brothers and one dies without having produced a child, it is the duty of the living brother to have sexual congress with the wife of the deceased brother and to have children with her, out of respect for the deceased brother. Orthodox Judaism adds to Deuteronomy the man-made teaching that the newborn infant produced by the union of the surviving brother and his brother’s widow, is the reincarnation of the soul of the dead brother.
This belief of Orthodox Judaism is evidence of the degree to which Kabbalistic occult fantasy has been embraced by the rabbis. Here hangs our indictment of Moses Nahmanides, the “Ramban,” portrayed as the “a
nti-idolatry rabbinic paradigm of Biblical probity,” who, it is supposed, defeated the Dominican “Friar Paul,” a Judaic convert to Catholicism, in the “Barcelona Disputation” of 1262, arranged by King James I of Aragon, wherein the Ramban is reputed by the Judaics to have succeeded in refuting the friar’s charges and presenting himself as an opponent of occult superstition. 22 The record shows however, that Nahmanides did indubitably traffic in Kabbalistic dogma. Like Rabbi Ezekiel Landau, another halakhic authority promoted as being renowned for his opposition to pagan mysticism, Rabbi Nahmanides’ sterling reputation in this regard is a hoax. The black magic mendacity of Nahmanides (“Ramban”) was permitted publication in Catholic Venice by Pope Leo X in 1517:
“To unlock the ultimate secret of Job, not unlike his method throughout his commentary to the Torah, Ramban tells us he relies on his own insights and what God reveals to him. He will meditate upon the Scriptures to unlock the mystery of Job. Yet, he cannot allow himself to reveal the secret of the climax explicitly to us. The Kabbalistic secret in a word is ‘reincarnation.’ Kabbalistic traditions, he stresses, are part of an oral tradition passed down from Moses to Prophets to Sages…Ramban dwells on the secret of Job in ch. 33 of his commentary to Job…Ramban’s Commentary on the Book of Job appeared only in the first Mikra’ot Gedolot edition in Venice in 1517…Kabbalists explain God was kind enough to allow redemption for past sins in a past life…Ramban’s key to Job, viz reincarnation, was adopted by all subsequent Kabbalists.
“…Shalshelet haKabballah 13a claims that Uts died without children and Buz, his brother (Genesis 22:21) married Uts’ wife. Job came from this levirate union. Ramban alludes to transmigration of souls in regards to the law of levirate marriage in his comments on Genesis 38:8.” 23
The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome Page 19
