Roswell Dialectic

Farrell nodal points:

Problem (ET1): The problem with any ET explanation of Roswell: “If, as is so often alleged, ET’s technology was so far superior to our own as to allow such interstellar reconnaissance, then why would they bother with such antiquated technologies as atom-bombs and rockets” (17)?

Problem (B1) with the balloon hypothesis: Are we to believe that the 509th’s base intelligence offer, Major Jesse Marcel, of the world’s only atomic bomb group could not tell the difference between a weather balloon and a flying saucer (26)?

Problem (ET2): by all accounts the strange writings on the “recovered debris” were recognized as numerals. Is it likely that aliens would have been using Roman or Arabic numerals (32)?

Problem (B3): What sort of experimental aircraft was being tested in New Mexico…at night…during a thunderstorm” (137)?

Problem (B4): “If the debris was from a crashed top secret balloon project, why draw the world’s attention to it with a crazy story about flying saucers” (171)?

Notable Figures

Wernher von Braun: Hitler’s rocket scientist who was brought to the US in Paperclip (237). Rosin Affidavit.

Hans Kohler: invented a little coil that contained nothing but magnets in a hexagonal pattern. It contained no power source but was able to produce an electrical current (246).

Willy Ley: member of Vrill Society. Investigated properties of space-time medium (248).

Allen Dulles: OSS station chief and later CIA director.

Reinhard Gehlen. Head of Nazi military intelligence within Eastern Europe. Commanded Fremde Heere Ost. Gehlen notes the following about his arrangement with the Allies (346-347):

Cosmic War Nodal Points

I’ve been reading, both appreciatively and critically, Joseph P. Farrell for the past fifteen years. The scope of his vision is breathtaking. He has suggested that one read his books in order, as they build upon each other. If you do that, you will notice recurring themes. I had the idea that it would be best to plot those themes and see what comes up.

Several themes:

1. Cosmic War
2. Roswell and the Reich
3. JFK
4. Nazi International
5. Topological Metaphor
6. Breakaway Civilizations
7. Transhumanism

Genes, Giants, Monsters, and Men (Farrell)

Farrell, Joseph P. Genes, Giants, Monsters, and Men.

Farrell, Joseph P.

The structure of Farrell’s argument is sound and impressive.  I have no real disagreement with him on that point.  His content, unfortunately, is often badly mistaken. He builds on his earlier Cosmic War thesis.  According to that thesis, if there were survivors to the cosmic war, then they would have found a way to pass on that knowledge.

So far, so good.  Unfortunately, his analysis of biblical scholarship is painfully inadequate. He is 150 years behind the times. He thinks the term “Yahweh” derives from a minor figure in the Babylonian pantheon. That is bad enough, but at other times, especially in his use of the O’Brien’s work, he comes close to suggesting Yahweh is actually a demigod or even Nephilim! 

When someone makes these claims, we must examine the scholarship.  Farrell starts well.  He debunks the Documentary Hypothesis and in doing so draws upon the excellent work of Gleason Archer. Towards the middle of the book, however, he utilizes no such scholarship, opting instead for the fringe, and quite frankly bizarre, research of the O’Briens. This is not the Farrell we know of Maximus, JFK, and Roswell fame.

The structure of the book is worth considering in detail.  In fact, a small outline of it will serve just as well as a review.

1. Elites did survive such a war and they are scattered in pockets over the globe.
2. These elites had certain agendas that included technological advances.  One should note, however, that Farrell does not subscribe to the ancient alien hypothesis.  These elites are human (or perhaps Fallen Watchers, though he does not entertain that idea).
   1. These agendas were both hidden and open.
3. If these elites have certain goals, then they must ensure these goals continue over time.  That means common networks, etc.
4. Farrell reads the Enuma Elish literally: a cosmic war between Marduk and Tiamat.  Marduk employed some form of torsion physics, a bending and pleating of space-time.
5. Both ancient and modern civilizations engaged in “genome” wars.
   1. Farrell notes similarities between the I Ching and DNA.
   2. He sees both having an analogical structure, information-creating systems, and a torsion moment of rotational characteristics.

The title of the book suggests that the nephilim are involved. They are, but they are not as important as one may think. I think it is irrelevant whether we find Nephilim skeletons around the world. I think they exist, and I think it is funny when standard historical models are upset, but I do not have a lot riding on it.

Roswell and the Reich (Farrell)

Establishing the Problem

The Roswell investigation functions as a dialectic. Either the event is so extraordinary that it could only be from outer space, or it is so terrestrial, and hence ordinary, and so should be dismissed. Farrell attempts (successfully, I think) to break the dialectic by arguing “that the technology, while extraordinary, is within the possibilities of human achievement” and is tied to a wider international context (Farrell 328).

Saucer or Weather Balloon?

The First Articulation

The first news report explicitly stated that a disk, and not debris was recovered at the crash (Farrell 3). No mention of bodies.

The Second articulation

Even the later reports that mention bodies only mention one crash site, not two (13).

Problem (ET1): The problem with any ET explanation of Roswell: “If, as is so often alleged, ET’s technology was so far superior to our own as to allow such interstellar reconnaissance, then why would they bother with such antiquated technologies as atom-bombs and rockets” (17)?

Problem (B1) with the balloon hypothesis: Are we to believe that the 509th’s base intelligence offer, Major Jesse Marcel, of the world’s only atomic bomb group could not tell the difference between a weather balloon and a flying saucer (26)?

Problem (ET2): by all accounts the strange writings on the “recovered debris” were recognized as numerals. Is it likely that aliens would have been using Roman or Arabic numerals (32)?

Summary of Timeline: 56ff.

The Third Articulation

Problem (B2): How could a flimsy weather balloon’s crash have come to earth so violently and strewn debris over a quarter of a mile (60)?

Fourth Articulation

Problem (B3): What sort of experimental aircraft was being tested in New Mexico…at night…during a thunderstorm” (137)?

Those questions more or less destroy the original “It was a weather balloon” claim. I think the govt suspected that also, which is why they officially changed the story to a Mogul Balloon (an aircraft that was to track Soviet nuclear tests. The technology wasn’t all that impressive, yet it was top secret in that its mission was important). But it, too, is open to a damaging criticism:

Problem (B4): “If the debris was from a crashed top secret balloon project, why draw the world’s attention to it with a crazy story about flying saucers” (171)?

The Hot Air Force, The Balloon Hypothesis, and the Skeptics
The govt officially changed its story in June of 1997.

Majic-12 Documents

Short definition: simple photographs of a top secret meeting by the Truman administration for the incoming-Eisenhower. The “document outlines the crash and recovery of a flying saucer, its occupants, its technologhy” (254). This is the original set.

Another set of documents released were the “Cooper-Cantwheel” set.

Problem of Verification

All the documents came on film. No provenance to determine authenticity (258).
Only way to tell is from internal evidence (259). Several members of the Majic-12 group had Nazi/CIA connections, including one with the ability to read Japanese (which makes sense given some of the symbols on the recovered crash).

If it were Nazis….

There are three possible scenarios for what happened at Roswell:

Operation Paperclip (284-285). A research project by Nazi scientists in America after WWII. Everyone rejects this option. What crashed at Roswell was not German WWII technology.

Independent Nazi scenario (285-286). It was a continuation of Nazi technology, but not from America. This would explain how the US Army was caught flat-footed and issued the response it did. It would explain how it was able to penetrate US airspace. It also accounts for the extraordinary hieroglyphics found on the debris.

ET-Nazis. Suffers from other criticisms.

Recap: if the documents are genuine, then aliens exist. However, on even the most charitable reading, we have no way of verifying that. Further, there are aspects of the documents which make no sense on the alien hypothesis, but make perfect sense on the Nazi hypothesis.

But Farrell takes it a step further. Roswell researchers make a good point: this isn’t a simple hoax, “for it contains too many details that only a very experienced forger would know” (287). This leads us to several possibilities:

a) It is a disinformation exercise to cover the tracks of an independent Nazi program.
b) it is calling attention to the Nazi program by leaving clues.

Kevin Randle’s argument:

The documents were on 8 ½ x 11 paper, whereas standard govt documents at the time were 8×10.

Notable Figures

Wernher von Braun: Hitler’s rocket scientist who was brought to the US in Paperclip (237). Rosin Affidavit.

Hans Kohler: invented a little coil that contained nothing but magnets in a hexagonal pattern. It contained no power source but was able to produce an electrical current (246).

Willy Ley: member of Vrill Society. Investigated properties of space-time medium (248).

Allen Dulles: OSS station chief and later CIA director.

Reinhard Gehlen. Head of Nazi military intelligence within Eastern Europe. Commanded Fremde Heere Ost. Gehlen notes the following about his arrangement with the Allies (346-347):

Clandestine German intelligence agency that would gather intel on the Soviets.

It worked “with,” not under the Americans.
It would operate exclusively under German leadership until a new govt was formed in Germany.
It would be financed by the Americans with funds that weren’t part of the occupation costs.

But here is the kicker: Gehlen made a separate peace with Dulles, resulting in the clean grafting of Nazi spy apparatus to the American clandestine sources. This was the birth of the CIA” (Jim Keith, quoted in Farrell 347-348).

Farrell explains: one member of the “American oligarchic elite–Allen Dulles–had negotiated a separate peace….with a member of the Nazi elite” (348).

General Gehlen also “traduced” (to use a theological term) a “vast network of emigre fronts,” whom Farrell will argue were influential in the Reagan and Bush administrations (348).

Arthur Rudolph. Principal designer of the Saturn V booster. Was noted as a “100% NAZI” and fled the US after the moon launch (352).

Ernst Steinhoff. Top rocket scientist of Von Braun’s Peenemunde rocket team (352).

LBJ and the Conspiracy to Kill Kennedy

Farrell, Joseph P. LBJ and the Conspiracy to Kill Kennedy.

Farrell argues there was a “coalescence of interests” in Kennedy’s murder.  There was no single group. This means that other Kennedy researchers are probably right but do not have the whole picture.  Kennedy analysis breaks down along the following lines:

Who wanted him dead?

How did they actually kill him (e.g., Spanky the Magic Bullet)?

Who actually had the means to pull it off?

Framing the questions this way lets Farrell show the conspiracy as layers within layers.  For example, the Mafia could easily be involved in wanting him dead, but they wouldn’t have had the long-term influence to cover it up.  The CIA, and LBJ, by contrast, could fit all three layers.

It is the genius of Farrell’s argument that he acknowledges the truth (and limitations) in each of the angles.  The trick is synthesizing them.  I think he comes close. What begins to emerge is a coalition–even very loosely formed–of anti-Castro Cubans, pro-Castro Cubans, the Mafia, the Deep State (think FBI, CIA, etc), and the Nazi International.

Towards the end of WWII Allen Dulles made a deal with Nazi general, Reinhard Gehlen. Gehlen would use his German intelligence network, Fremde Heer Ost, to spy on the Soviets in exchange, not only for immunity, but he would head the spy agency himself.  The OSS (later the CIA) got its intelligence from Nazis (56ff).

If Oswald was being run by the CIA, then Gehlen’s organization would be the natural point of contact in his getting out of Russia.  How else could a defector leave Russia with the daughter of a GRU colonel?

George De Mohrenschildt: he might be the key to the whole thing.  He had connections with the CIA, the Nazis, and probably NASA.

The difficulty is that no country was sure with whom he was working (154).  After the war he returned to America and got a master’s degree in petroleum engineering, later being hired by the ONI (155).

It is unlikely, though, that he worked for the CIA.  He spied on CIA assets in the Bay of Pigs fiasco (155).

Even stranger, his petroleum connection brought him in contact with oil magnates Clint Murchison and HL Hunt (157).  Hunt himself had right-wing connections with the Fremde Heere Ost and R. Gehlen.  This places De Mohrenschildt in vicinity of Permindex Corporation.

Permindex

Founded in 1958, it’s actual purpose was to fund and direct assassinations, etc (Torbitt document).  It used hotels and gambling casinos as fronts. Its donors included mafioso, NASA, fascists, and the like.  It is here that drug trafficking in South America takes off, and “these funds represented a virtually bottomless pit of money that could be kept off the books and used to fund their various black projects and covert operations” (167).\

Key argument: The goal of alchemy is to create, “via a magical operation, a transformation of consciousness in a group of individuals” (191).

Farrell draws heavily upon Michael Hoffman’s Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare.  There are at least three elements to this transformation of society’s consciousness:

The Creation and Destruction of Primordial Matter (the atom was split at Trinity Site, NM, which runs along the 33rd degree north latitude)

The Killing of the Divine King. (JFK was killed at the 33rd degree of north parallel latitude between the Trinity River and the Triple Underpass at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Dealey Plaza was the site of the first masonic temple in Dallas. This was also a televised slaughter in a sense).  

The Bringing of Prima Materia to Prima Terra (91).

The “Phoenix” lunar landing module, after its return to the orbiting mother ship piloted by Michael Collins, was jettisoned directly into the sun in fulfillment of one of the most persistent themes of alchemical lore and Rosicrucian poetry: the “sexual marriage” of the sun and the moon (98).

But if all this is a conspiracy, then why is it out in the open now?  It kind of works this way: if the elite (call them what you will) can reach the point where they tell you how they murdered JFK, and that they know you won’t do anything, then they completely own you.  

Ritual Symbolism

Dealey Plaza, dedicated to the first Masonic Grand Master of Texas (196).
When viewed from above, the Plaza forms a Trident (think Poseidon, olds gods).

Conclusions:

The assassination transfered power from the elected front-man to the unelected invisible college capable of terminating him with impunity (quoting Hoffman).

Concluding Observations

Nodal points.  These are the complexes of facts that place most (or all) of the main factions at one time in one place.  There are several nodal points: The Permindex Corporation, New Orleans bars, etc.

It’s not so important as to who killed Kennedy? (I think we can safely rule out Oswald).  Where Farrell succeeds is outlining the existence of a structured, multi-national group who had the means to cover-up, including eliminating loose-ends, a murder of this caliber

Anti-Federalist Papers

Collapsing into Dialectic

At this point I want to call attention to an argument Joseph Farrell made in God, History, and Dialectic.  Drawing upon an insight from St Gregory Nazianzus, Farrell asks, “what is the relation of origin, if any, between the people and the mutually opposed organs of federal government? If there be none, then those relationships reduce to merely dialectical oppositions (Farrell 617ff).  The Federalist Papers (no. 10) seek to balance the antagonizing forces by having these agons reduce to a chimerical term, “The People.”

And so Farrell concludes,

“The essence of the Anti-Federalist critique of the 1789 constitution then, was that it tended, if one may so put it, to collapse, through the multiplication of governmental agencies and the relations of oppositions that distinguish them, either into perpetual anarchy on the one hand, or into an eventual amalgamation of all powers of government into a new and superintending form of tyrannical simplicity” (618).

Throughout the Anti-Federalist Papers one notes the authors’ fear of the “instability” of the proposed Constitution.  In dialectical terms, this means the unstable government (or branches) must always reduce to the the more stable, albeit more totalizing branch.

Towards a National Anarchism

As Ketcham so nicely observes, “In a truly self-governing society, there would be such dialogue, empathy, and even intimacy that the very distinction between ruler and ruled would disappear” (Ketcham 19).  But this doesn’t mean a pure anarchism where anything goes. The anarchism in question is one where the bureaucratic apparatus of the state is negated, or at least marginalized. The formal structures of a nation remain: the leader (historically a distant monarch), the church, the village–all of these are social bonds that are not necessarily reduced to empirical quanta.  Or rather, they form bonds which themselves are not reducible.

Patrick Henry hints at this real, yet intangible bond, in response to the question of whether a confederation can withstand attack: “I would recur to the American spirit to defend us” (Henry 203). This isn’t bluster.  Such a “spirit” defeated the most powerful army on earth. Indeed, it “secured a territory greater than any European monarch” (201).

Towards a Review

The Structure of the Book Itself

Overall it is hit and miss. Ketcham gives a VERY detailed review of the Constitutional Convention (180 pages).  If you have read The Federalist Papers then you can probably skip it.  He does provide a fine annotated bibliography at the end (this is one of those things that separates good books from great ones).

Summarizing the Anti-Federalist Position

(1) It is agreed that the Articles were defective, but that does not logically prove that the new Constitution is good (Melancton Smith).

(2) The problem of representation:  In any representative government, there must be a proportion between the size of the population and the ones representing that population.  So far, that’s common sense. But when you have a large population, you must either have [1] a small representation, or [2] an extremely large representation.  If [1], then you have oligarchy and tyranny. If [2], you have chaos. Therefore a third position is needed: [3] new republics. Republican government by necessity MUST remain small(ish).

(3)  The problems in the country aren’t so much the fault of the confederation itself, but simply that the people haven’t yet fully recovered from the war (“Federal Farmer” 258).

(4) Further complicating the problem was that paper currency (and all its instabilities) was introduced during the war and the people were only now overcoming that debt system. And it bears noting that the Anti-Federalists were militantly anti-usury (Dewitt 191)..

(5) The constitutional convention was called in secrecy (238).

(6) A very extensive territory cannot be governed on the principles of freedom, otherwise than by a confederation of Republics (242).

(7) Intermediating structures have been negated.  Congress has direct power over the purse to tax. Previously in agricultural and quasi-anarchist societies, the commune or district mediated the tax burden between the man and government.

(8) Since the number of representatives is so small, the ones who represent will always be part of the monied elite (e.g., Goldman Sachs, Koch brothers, etc).

(9) Interestingly enough, the anti-Federalists appear to reject the idea, quite republican in itself, of the Senate electing the president (252).  They saw the president as always being buddies with the Senators.

(10) The power to tax directly is inversely proportionate to liberty.  The anti-federalists predicted the rise of the IRS.

Conclusions and impressions:

The Federalist ideas aren’t wrong as long as you have a unified people sharing a common bond of love (cf Augustine, City of God, Bk. 19.24).  And if it is a small area, then it should work.  But since self-government is strained (if not impossible) over larger areas, then The Federalist becomes a manifesto for Empire.

As it stood the Anti-Federalist program, while godly and ensuring liberty, was inadequate.  There really wasn’t a way to withstand a foreign invader (though to be fair, invading a forested, hill-country like America, protected by 2,000 miles of ocean, isn’t easy). 

 

Financial Vipers of Venice

The first part of this review covers previous material.  The second part is the rest of Farrell’s book. This is sort of a sequel to Babylon’s Banksters. It’s mostly excellent, though he does get into his anti-Yahweh speculation at times. I don’t think that is necessary to his thesis and it somewhat detracts from the book. On the other hand, his comments on the nature of mind, soul, and the Topological Metaphor are outstanding.

His thesis starts out that Giordano Bruno discovered the Topological Metaphor, which functioned as an information-creating medium. Applied to finance, this meant an open-ended system which had no need of debt or usury, and so he was killed. I actually think he was killed because he was a heretic, but I think the medium is basically correct.

1 = 3

Imagine an undifferentiated “No-Thing.” This isn’t “nothing” in the sense of non-existence. It’s rather like an empty hyper-set. Designate it with Φ. Imagine an empty rectangle. Now, we cleave this space. So now we have two spaces, “all that inside the circle, and all outside it” (Farrell 126). All of the space outside the circle will be the interior of space 1, designated as a topological “o” superscript above the Φ.

(1) Φ⁰

The space inside the circle is another interior, (2) Φ⁰.

And the common surface between the two, designated with an alpha

ɑΦ₁₂

Now let’s look at what just happened. Remember we still have our empty hyperset (Φ). We now have three derivatives: the space outside the circle, the space inside the circle, and the common surface between the two. Thus,

Φ = (1) Φ⁰, (2) Φ⁰, and ɑΦ₁₂

Therefore, 1 = 3. I’m going to take this model in a radically different direction than does Farrell. He thinks this model represents an earlier way of thinking about the cosmos that predated Yahwist traditions. I’m skeptical of that claim, as some of Farrell’s positions have come under attack.

But the model itself is quite powerful, and it explains a way of looking at some difficult sayings by St Maximus the Confessor.

But back to Farrell’s argument. Because the above model is written in quasi-mathematical terms, and because it couldn’t exist without a conscious observer (or Mind), this means we have an information-creating system. This is a system that doesn’t reduce to a closed cosmos (and thus Aristotle is false).

Farrell says the hermetic occultist Giordano Bruno was advocating something like that. Maybe. The problem is that Bruno couched all of it in what we call New Age terminology, and that’s partly why he got burned at the stake. There might have been another reason why he got burned: he advocated a way of approaching the world, and particularly finance, that attacked the Aristotelian and (ironically) usurious system of the Venetians. Bruno thought he could tap into the primordial medium.

Farrell begins his alternative history of Venice. Earlier Roman authors like Juvenal suggested that there was a strong Babylonian influx in the Roman genetic makeup. Farrell suggests this Babylonian streak later went to Venice.

His reconstruction of Venetian history is interesting and probably accurate. Relevant to our purposes is the relation of “money” to the Medium. Farrell says that concepts like “debt” and “sacrifice” were illegitimate applications of the Medium/Metaphor (124).

Some societies were able to get around the debt-money concept by issuing Jubilees and promissory notes backed, not by bullion, but by labor and production (132).

Coinage introduced something new: it gave “order and rationality to multiplicity” (136). Bullion, especially when stamped, represents the unchanging, underlying substrate. It makes the users equal, and hence derivations of the metaphor. Person = some aspect of nature (137). Since this metaphor can differentiate without limit, there is no notion of debt (at least at this time).

The Fiction of the Corporate Person

The doctrine of original sin is related to the notion of infinite debt (146).

Eph ho pantes hemarton

KJV: for that all sinned

What is the antecedent of ho? Is it ho anthropos or ho thanatos? If we take the former, then we have a grammatical problem: reflexive pronouns refer to the nearest antecedent, not the farthest:

“Wherefore, as by one man sin entered the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, because of the one man all sinned.”

The more literal translation:

“Wherefore as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, because of death all have sinned.”

Death is passed to all men, not moral culpability (148). The Western doctrine of inherited guilt is based upon the doctrine of Corporate Personhood.

Latin Vulgate: en quo omnes peccaverunt.

Notes on Person and Nature:

I am a person. I have a soul. Therefore, we cannot reduce the person to the soul’s natural functions (reason, will, etc). Yet on the Vulgate’s translation, we have the following (151ff):

1. The Person of Adam (one man) sins.
2. Sin is a personal use of the natural operation of the will, common to all humanity.
3. The moral culpability of Adam’s willing passes to all humanity.
4. Therefore, the person is now connected both with the natural operation of the will and the common nature on the basis of one. One person (Adam) is now a group of people (humanity).

There is a superficial similarity to the Venetian supercompanies (153).

Is There an English Connection?

Maybe. Venetian bankers made a number of loans to Edward III (166ff). The rest of the book surveys numerous, often brilliant, strategies by Venetian clans concerning bullion. The connection is stronger than that. After the War of the Cambrai, Venice knew its days were numbered. Geographically, it was in a backwater and had no access to the newly-discovered New World (or India). Farrell traces the intermarrying into the Guelphs, who would later become the Hanoverian monarchs.

But Venice didn’t go straight to England. It stopped first in Amsterdam.

While shorter than his other books, this is somewhat slow-going. It is heavier on the history aspect His thesis seems relatively sound, and his musings on metaphysics and theology are top-notch.

Vipers of Venice: The Topological Metaphor

This is sort of a sequel to Babylon’s Banksters.  It’s mostly excellent, though he does get into his anti-Yahweh speculation at times.  I don’t think that is necessary to his thesis and it somewhat detracts from the book. On the other hand, his comments on the nature of mind, soul, and the Topological Metaphor are outstanding.

1 = 3

Imagine an undifferentiated “No-Thing.”  This isn’t “nothing” in the sense of non-existence.  It’s rather like an empty hyper-set. Designate it with Φ.   Imagine an empty rectangle:

Strictly speaking, this rectangle, or empty set, doesn’t have any edges.  It is an infinitely extended no-thing. Now, we cleave this space:

So now we have two spaces, “all that inside the circle, and all outside it” (Farrell 126). All of the space outside the circle will be the interior of space 1, designated as a topological “o” superscript above the Φ.  But since the rectangle goes on forever, what we really have is this:

(1) Φ⁰

The space inside the circle is another interior, (2) Φ⁰.

And the common surface between the two, designated with an alpha

ɑΦ₁₂

Now let’s look at what just happened.  Remember we still have our empty hyperset (Φ).  We now have three derivatives: the space outside the circle, the space inside the circle, and the common surface between the two.  Thus,

Φ = (1) Φ⁰, (2) Φ⁰, and ɑΦ₁₂

Therefore, 1 = 3.  I’m going to take this model in a radically different direction than does Farrell. He thinks this model represents an earlier way of thinking about the cosmos that predated Yahwist traditions. I’m skeptical of that claim, as some of Farrell’s positions have come under attack.

But the model itself is quite powerful, and it explains a way of looking at some difficult sayings by St Maximus the Confessor.

“According to St. Maximus, God is “identically a monad and a triad.” Capita theologica et oeconomica2, 13; P.G. 90, col. 1125A.He is not merely one and three; he is 1=3 and 3=1. That is to say, here we are not concerned with number as signifying quantity: absolute diversities cannot be made the subjects of sums of addition; they have not even opposition in common. If, as we have said, a personal God cannot be a monad — if he must be more than a single person — neither can he be a dyad. The dyad is always an opposition of two terms, and, in that sense, it cannot signify an absolute diversity. When we say that God is Trinity we are emerging from the series of countable or calculable numbers. St. Basil appears to express this idea well: “For we do not count by way of addition, gradually making increase from unity to plurality, saying ‘one, two, three’ or ‘first, second, third.’ ‘I am the first and I am the last,’ says God (Isaiah 44:6). And we have never, even unto our own days, heard of a second God. For in worshipping ‘God of God’ we both confess the distinction of persons and abide by the Monarchy.” De spiritu sancto18; P.G. 32, col. 149B. The procession of the Holy Spirit is an infinite passage beyond the dyad, which consecrates the absolute (as opposed to relative) diversity of the persons. This passage beyond the dyad is not an infinite series of persons but the infinity of the procession of the Third Person: the Triad suffices to denote the Living God of revelation. St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 23 (De pace 3), 10; P.G. 35, col. 1161. Or. 45 (In sanctum pascha); P.G. 36, col. 628C.If God is a monad equal to a triad, there is no place in him for a dyad. Thus the seemingly necessary opposition between the Father and the Son, which gives rise to a dyad, is purely artificial, the result of an illicit abstraction. Where the Trinity is concerned, we are in the presence of the One or of the Three, but never of two.

When we speak of the Personal God, who cannot be a monad, and when, bearing in mind the celebrated Plotinian passage in the works of St. Gregory of Nazianzus, we say that the Trinity is a passage beyond the dyad and beyond its pair of opposed terms, “The monad is set in motion on account of its richness; the dyad is surpassed, because Divinity is beyond matter and form; perfection is reached in the triad, the first to surpass the composite quality of the dyad, so that the Divinity neither remains constrained nor expands to infinity.” St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 23 (De pace3), 8; P.G. 35, col. 1160C. See also Or. 29 (Theologica3), 2; P.G. 36, col. 76B.  (Lossky, “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Theology”)

But back to Farrell’s argument.  Because the above model is written in quasi-mathematical terms, and because it couldn’t exist without a conscious observer (or Mind), this means we have an information-creating system.  This is a system that doesn’t reduce to a closed cosmos (and thus Aristotle is false).

Farrell says the hermetic occultist Giordano Bruno was advocating something like that.  Maybe. The problem is that Bruno couched all of it in what we call New Age terminology, and that’s partly why he got burned at the stake.  There might have been another reason why he got burned: he advocated a way of approaching the world, and particularly finance, that attacked the Aristotelian and (ironically) usurious system of the Venetians.  Bruno thought he could tap into the primordial medium.

Excursus:  Is it possible to tap into this medium?

Let’s say some sort of “zero-point” medium exists.  Is it possible to tap into it and should we? I think it is possible, but I think it is very dangerous to do so.  This might explain the phenomena behind remote viewing. The mind is a non-local entity (and that’s good Christian doctrine).  Therefore, it is somehow connected with this Medium, or at least it has access to it.

I think it is kind of like looking through the Palantir in Lord of the Rings.  Other entities are also using it and you could accidentally open a gateway.

Another problem with Bruno’s interpretation of the Medium is that he saw the descending forms as mutable gods.  There are two legitimate ways to respond to Bruno: say that Plato’s forms aren’t gods but rather pockets of mathematical information.  That is what the physicist Werner Heisenberg argued. We could also say that yes, indeed, they are gods. They are the fallen beney elohim.  That also does an end-run around Farrell’s use of Babylonian entities in the Cosmic War and Giza Death Star Destroyed.

 

Review: Orthodoxy and Esotericism (Kelley)

My friend James Kelley gave me a complimentary copy.

It is common parlance to say, “We should apply our faith to culture.”  In such slogans the words “faith” and “culture” are never defined and always used in the most abstract categories.   Kelley does us a service by bringing an advanced level of Patristic theology to such wide-ranging topics as history and esoterism.  One can go a step further: Kelley’s insights regarding (Joseph Farrell’s usage) of Sts Maximus the Confessor and Athanasius can provide us a useful compass in witnessing to those trapped in the occult.  I don’t know if Kelley himself holds that view, but it is something that came to my mind.

Ordo Theologiae

The first part deals with rather esoteric thinkers like Paul Virilio, Joseph P. Farrell, and Phillip Sherrard.  Special interest goes to Farrell.  

Here is the problem: In order for the Plotinian one to account for creation, it must already contain within himself all plurality.  Therefore, epistemology and ontology had to proceed by dialectics.  We know something by defining it by its opposite.

How was the Church to respond to this?  The best way was by simply breaking its back.  Kelley shows this by examining Athanasius’s response to Arius and Maximus’s response to monotheletism.  

For Athanasius there are three primary categories that should not be confused: nature, will, and person (Kelley 35).  The person of the Father generates the Son according to essence (since the hypostasis of the Father is the font of essence).  Creation, by contrast, is according to the will.  This leads later fathers (such as Basil) to identify three categories:

(1) Who is doing it?

(2) What is it they are doing? (energies)

(3) What are they? (essence)

The key point, however, is that Person, Nature, and Energy are not to be identified, or we have something like Plotinianism or Arianism.  

Maximus is even more interesting:  the human will cannot be passive nor defined by its contrary, the divine will.  That would mean because the divine nature/will is good, then the human nature must be evil (41). If we define something by its opposite, then we are also saying that said something (God) needs its opposite.  

I must stop the analysis at this point.  But know that the section on Joseph Farrell is a crash course in advanced theology.

Esoteric Studies

Kelley places the Nation of Islam’s cosmogony within the earlier Gnostic myths (89).  He has a fascinating section on Jim Jones.  It almost reads like a novel or a news article.  His larger point is that in these cults (NOI, Scientology, etc) there is a dialectic of a “life-force creating (or self-creating) within a primordial darkness.”

His chapter on Anaximander’s apeiron is worth the price of the book.  But what makes it interesting is Kelley’s tying Anaximander’s apeiron with Tillich’s Ungrund and Barth’s unknowable God.  The problem:  How can this “god” have any contact with creation?  Anaximander gives us a dialectically unstable answer:  this apeiron already contains within it the coincidence of opposites.

Conclusions and Analysis

Like all of Kelley’s works, this cannot help but be interesting.  How often do you read a theology book and you ask yourself, “I can’t wait to turn the page to see what happens next”?  But normally that level of excitement is for fluff.  This it most certainly is not.  Some chapters are very advanced theology, while others, like the one on Paul Virilio, are probably out of my league.

My only quibble is he set up a great dismantling of Karl Barth’s theology and then didn’t do it.  I understand that could be for space reasons.  Is Barth’s Unknowable God the same as Anaximander’s apeiron?  Maybe.  If they are, then one has at his fingertips a very destructive critique.

Aside from that, this book is most highly recommended.

Note: I received this as a complimentary copy and was under no obligation to post a positive review.

Athanasius, Orations Against the Arians

This work is a step up from Athanasius’s smaller treaty on the Incarnation.  Here we begin to see a fully worked-out theological ontology.  This review, however, will not deal with the controversies concerning Proverbs 8 in the Nicene world.  That would take up too much space.

One needs to see Arius’s thought in context before one can appreciate how Athanasius fundamentally destroyed the Hellenistic mindset.  It’s not simply that Arius thought Jesus was created.  He did, but Arius also thought he was being faithful to the conservative philosophical tradition in Alexandria.  That tradition is best seen as the shadow of Neo-Platonism.  It’s not a pure Neo-Platonism (if such a monster even exists), but it’s close enough on issues like simplicity.

Disclosure: I relied heavily on Joseph Farrell’s (D.Phil Oxford, Patristic Theology)  analysis of the Athanasian crisis, as well as conversations with several of his students.  Any faults are entirely my own.

Establishing the Dialectic

Short answer: Arius defined the deity in terms of a specific property of the Father (unbegottenness), but behind this definition was embedded a philosophical dialectic, which, if left unchecked, would control orthodox categoreis. The Arians saw divine simplicity unicity of a nontransferable monadic state, to use John McGuckin’s fine phrase. If the Father is simple essence, and the Son is not the Father, then the Son is of a different essence.  The problem is that the Hellenistic/Arian mind identified God’s essence with a particular property (unbegottenness). It was Athanasius’s genius to break the back of this system by noting that essence isn’t the same as person or property.

Arius shows what Origenism looks like if taken to its Neo-Platonic conclusion.  The One is utterly simple and beyond.  It is beyond subject and object, yet if the One “thinks” (or makes any kind of distinction, be it the idea to create the world or the decision to beget the Son), and given that person-will-essence are identical, and that ideas/operations are now simply effluences of the essence, Arius is forced to one of several conclusions:

1. a) The ideas produced by the one are also identical to the one
2. b) It is completely separate from the one by means of duplication and distance.
3. c) If the Son is eternal, then Creation, being an object of willing, is also eternal, since the act of will is equal to the eternal essence per Arian simplicity.  Simply put, for this tradition, there can’t be distinctions between operation and essence, because the essence itself does not allow for any distinctions!

Why does (c) follow? If God has the property of being-Creator as well as the property of being-Father, and the essence is eternal, and the essence is identical to the act of will/property, then he must be eternally creator, which draws out another inference

cc) Creation is eternal

Smashing the Dialectic

d) The generation of the Son is according to the essence, since the being is from the Father, while the creation of the world is according to the divine will.  

As James Kelley notes, for “Arius the category of what God is (nature) is the same as what God does (operation).”

Now for the actual text….

Discourse I

* The Father and Son were not generated from some pre-existing origin….but the Father is the Origin of the Son and begat him (I.5).

*The Difference between Work and Begetting: “The work is external to the nature, but a son is the proper offspring of the essence” (I.8.29).

Discourse II

* The Word must be the living Will of the Father, and an essential energy (enousion energia), and a real Word” (II.14.2). Athanasius’s point is that the Word can’t be a product of the Father’s will since he is the Father’s will.  

That blunts Arius on one point but it raises another problem: isn’t making the Word the Father’s will confusing person with nature, which is what Arius did?  One could say that Athanasius isn’t defining the Deity of the Son in terms of a specific divine property.  

Elsewhere Athanasius notes that the Son is in the Father and the Son’s being is proper to the Father.  And given that Athanasius follows the Patristic ordo in reasoning from Person to Operation to Essence, then the Son’s being the living will points to a unity of operation.  Hence, we now see that the Son reveals the common operation and energy, and so reveals the common essence.

Discourse III

* The Son doesn’t “participate” in God.  This is a break with Platonism (III.23.1).

* The Son is in the Father….because the whole Being of the Son is proper to the Father’s essence….For whereas the Form and Godhead of the Father is the Being of the Son, it follows that the Son is in the Father and the Father in the Son” (III.23.4).

Christ’s being in the flesh deifies the flesh, and only God can properly deify (III.27.38).

Nota Bene:

Athanasius has a robust angelology

1. Angels are not the same as the Thrones, nor the Thrones the same as the Authorities (II.16.19).