Last time we were talking about this interaction and confluence between nascent Christianity, the transformation that’s undergoing the Platonic tradition in Neoplatonism, and Gnosticism. We had ended up by talking about Plotinus, and how he brings about this grand unification of the best science of the time (Aristotle), the best therapy of the time (Stoicism), and the best spirituality of the time (Platonism). This is done all in a way that powerfully integrates mystical experience, achieving higher states of consciousness, and rational argumentation. Things that we now experience as diametrically opposed: science and spirituality, reason and tranformation, therapy and realness, all of these things were not; they were instead powerfully mutually supportive.
Again, Vervaeke on returning to something that ‘worked’ in the past:
So, because they represent the radicalization of the Axial Revolution, there is much to learn from Gnosticism. I do not, I am not advocating an attempt to resurrect it or bring it back. What we need to do is understand and that’s what these individuals [Tillich, Jung, Corbin] represent. Notice that at least one of them was one of the most courageous opponents of the Nazis. Tillich was the first non-Jewish academic to be fired by the Nazis because from the very beginning and consistently he identified them and resisted them.
So keep this whole framework in mind; we can salvage from Gnosticism gnosis and some of its radical message about how we can reconfigure, how we can have a non-theistic non-supernaturalistic understanding of sacredness? Can we do that and avoid the conspiratorial way of thinking they have that can be so damaging, and has been?
See, one of the things that Gnosticism can quickly elide into is those utopian ideologies that give you the great conspiracy theory and tell you that you belong to the chosen few, the chosen race, or the chosen class, and that violence is acceptable because the system is evil and must be destroyed.
Episode 18: Plotinus and Neoplatonism
Again, Vervaeke on returning to something that ‘worked’ in the past: