Neoplatonism and Christianity – Part 1

Limits and Possibilities of the Human Mind to Assess Dialectically the Whole, the Primary Term, and the Individual Ideas as Phenomenology of Being 

– Philosophical Study –

Georgi Stankov

www.stankovuniversallaw.com

translated from the German book “Neoplatonismus und Christentum“, 176 pages, 2007, into English by the author

 

Preface

This pivotal philosophical study deals with the Gnostic tradition of Christianity and explains how this religion has plagiarized all its basic religious concepts from Neoplatonism of Plotin (Plotinus)– the most congruent gnostic study of human transcendence in the history of Western philosophy. This translation will deepen our discussion on the greatest fraud of humanity which began with the obfuscation of the life of the historical personality of Apollonius of Tyana as that of the fictitious Jesus, St. Paul, and St. John, the Revelator (John of Patmus), who were mythological split personalities of this great teacher in the Antiquity.

This philosophical study is an important introduction to our imminent ascension and appearance as ascended masters, predicted in the bible as the “Second Coming of Christ” at the End Time of Christianity. This will happen simultaneously with the manifestation of the healing centre in Diano Marina, Liguria, Northern Italy, which we are actively building now, and the establishment of Rome and Italy as the world spiritual centre of the new paradigm of ascending humanity.

This spiritual transformation of Italy first and then of the entire world will be based on the new Gnosis of the Universal Law which is eternal and a further development of Neoplatonism (watch also this popular video on Human Gnosis):

This theoretical treatise was based on the German translation of Plotin’s Enneads by Richard Harder, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, 1956. Unfortunately the translator has changed the original order of Plotin’s books as composed by his first editor and disciple Porphyry for no apparent reason, so that all the quotations given in this book as numbers of chapters and books deviate from those of the original Enneads as they have been excellently translated by Stephen Mackenna and B.S. Page in English (see pdf). Therefore the English reader will have to find the appropriate quotations for himself in the English version if he wants to go into more depth in his study of Plotin’s Gnosis, which I would highly recommend.

The quotations given in this book will of course deviate somewhat linguistically from  Mackenna’s translation as they will be an English translation of the German translation done by Harder and this man was not very precise in his translation of the original Greek text and has mutilated some very important passages of Plotin, in particular regarding his description of his transcendental out-of-body experiences, as I found on numerous occasions. What can one expect from a person who was a Nazi-supporter and contributed decisively to the arrest and execution of the siblings Scholl and Professor Huber from the opposition group “White Rose” in Munich during the Nazi regime (for further information read also this energy report)?

The same holds true for my analysis of the books of the neoplatonist Origen (of Alexandria), the founder of bible exegesis and the most important and still unrivaled theologian in the history of Christianity, in particular his classical book “peri archon – De Principiis“, as I had to use the German translations. I apologize for this inconvenience to my English readers and hope that when this essay will be published as an English book one day, it will contain all the quotations from the standard English translations of these classic ancient works.

Georgi Stankov, Diano Marina, Italy

 

Introduction

Every worldview, be it individual or collective, leads to a philosophy and vice versa, even in those cases where philosophy is obviously treated with contempt and disdain, as one can observe at present everywhere. For even a total rejection of philosophy cannot eliminate the transcendental, spiritual-philosophical framework in which human existence unfolds on earth, just as the individual ego cannot remove the existence and the all-encompassing omnipotence of the soul, no matter how stubbornly it denies it.

Because the ego can only exist out of the life-spending force of the soul and do its mischief on earth. The soul thus has the omnipotence to allow the ego to deny her existence – admittedly only to a certain degree, hence the meaning and purpose of karmic experiences, which always reveal the fatefully directing superiority of the soul and shape the life course of the incarnated personality in the sense of her superordinate plan.

This is the ultimate dichotomy on which the incarnation experiment of souls on this planet is based: Man is an unbroken part of the whole and still feels alone and lonely in his separated body. This existential feeling of separation leads to many false views and beliefs, which form the human personality in a profound way. At the same time, the incarnated personality is a constant seeker of the energetic wholeness of the astral realms from which she comes. This wholeness can be experienced in the body only very rarely and imperfectly in brief moments of ecstasy.

I have devoted much of my other Gnostic writings to this subject. I will now show in this study that this realization is a leitmotif of ancient philosophy and especially of Neoplatonism.

The fragmentation of the soul as an earthly personality is achieved by an amnesia with regard to the causal existence and unity of All-That-Is and brings this dichotomy of life to the fore, which, like a fluid, permeates and conditions all phenomena of the visible material world.

As long as man erroneously experiences this dichotomy as a final state of separation in all aspects of his earthly existence and establishes it with the authority of an irrevocable truth in various false scientific doctrines, such as the doctrine of evolution, a biological and social Darwinism, in which even the ruthless competition among men is elevated to the regulating natural principle of economic activity, he is not in a position to perceive, let alone interpret, the essence of the Whole.

Thus modern, agnostic man denies the existence of the soul and the soul worlds, the 7F-creationary realms, from which earthly life arises secondarily. At the same time, man does not realize that through his subjective, rarely objective ideas, thoughts, convictions and beliefs, and the feelings and fears associated with them, he is a self-sufficient creator of his own destiny and of all social structures, and has the energetic potential to shape them creatively in an infinitely diverse manner.

In short, modern man does not recognize the priority of Platonic ideas over the visible phenomena of the secondary, three-dimensional world and falls into the trap of an unholy determinism, which is accompanied by an active, aimlessly compulsive empiricism. Herein lies the gnostic, or rather philosophical boundary of human knowledge. Since all the problems which the incarnated personality must deal with during her short sojourn on earth stem exclusively from this spiritual ignorance, this agnosticism of modern man is, at the same time, the source of all evil in this world.

 

Conceptual Agnosticism in Economy and Religion

This mental insufficiency begins with the fact that man is not in a position to develop a viable, fully valid concept for the Whole and to translate this through his worldview into adequate social forms based on spiritual principles.

The confusion which the lack of proper terminology and perception of the Whole can lead to is demonstrated by the current global economic crisis that I predicted and explained eight years ago (here), which had just begun on July 19th, 2007; it had already led to the first cataclysms and upheavals on the mortgage bond market and was spreading rapidly throughout the entire financial market.

This crisis is the result of the world inflation, deliberately generated by the financial jugglers of our time out of pure greed to make money out of money. At present, economists are neither able to develop a correct idea of the world inflation, nor to comprehend the rapidly progressing decoupling of price from commodity value that has taken place at a breathtaking pace over the last 15-20 years and has completely eroded the global economy.

For this reason, the “experts” are now shocked and surprised by the severity of the “credit crunch”, as they currently interpret the beginning of the world economic crisis, and are unable to grasp that this “credit crunch” is only a symptom of the bursting of the inflation bubble generated by themselves, which represents a necessary dialectical adjustment of the world money supply to the actual material production.

The reason for this blindness of all financial people lies solely in their fear of losing their professional and existential raison d’être. Fear always leads to ignorance and inevitably triggers cataclysms and crises, which then reveal the fear through the negative experience that the person makes in such situations and gradually contributes to its psycho-energetic reduction.

At present, the income of about 35% – 40% of all working people in the western world, especially in the USA and England, is generated directly or indirectly in the financial sector. On the other hand, only about 10-15% of all employees in Western countries work in industrial and agricultural production, i.e. where the actual material added value (as wealth of the nation) takes place in society.

The financial metropolis of London, for example, where virtually no industrial production can be found anymore, contributes 25% to the GNP of this country. According to official statistics, the US financial sector accounts for 1/3 of US GDP. If, on the other hand, one considers the artificial expansion of the dollar volume through options, derivatives, certificates, LBO, CDO and other sophisticated virtual financial products, which also fuel inflation in the industrial sectors, such as the construction industry and the real estate market, over 50% of the statistically generated economic performance in the USA is accounted for by the financial sector, the raison d’être of which has only one consequence: the systematic dollar inflation that the FED and other financial institutions in the country have deliberately created.

The “wealth of the American nation” is largely maintained by foreign investment from the rest of the world on credit (about $4 billion a day).

In these two countries, including all off-shore companies, about 90% of all hedge funds and private equity funds are located with an estimated volume four times larger than the GNP of the third largest industrial nation in the world, Germany, namely over 10,000 billion euros. The CEOs of such funds manage a large portion of the world’s savings and, with the help of unprecedented financial opacity and a lack of state control, they allow themselves lavish bonuses of up to $1.6 billion each year, a fact that until recently was praised by financial experts as a virtue of the free market economy.

By constantly inventing new virtual financial products and the corresponding parasitic professions, these financial sharks nourish the world inflation, which they stubbornly deny as the Primary Term – the total U-set of all economic activity – and transform the world economy into a giant casino; at least until the financial bubble has finally burst (probably in autumn 2007 – spring 2008).

Only then will the people, who likewise do not worry about the Primary Term of the world inflation, realize that even the Croesuses of our time cannot feed on gold alone. At the same time, they will have to realize that they, being the gullible depositors and financiers of this speculative amok game, will find themselves naked and with empty pockets, because all their savings and pension accounts will be irrevocably wiped out.

The illiquidity of the fifth-largest bank for financing in the construction sector in England, Northern Rock, which caused a panic among its depositors, is currently giving us a foretaste of what is yet to come. Within a day, the depositors, standing in long, sometimes tumultuous queues, have withdrawn over a billion pounds from their accounts, making Northern Rock as good as bankrupt and should now be taken over by other banks. Yet this is only the beginning of the world crisis, the extent of which no one can really imagine.

A number of people queuing at the door of a branch of the Northern Rock bank.

The current confusion among the “financial experts” is similar to the confusion among religious believers. Since religions cannot develop a valid term for the Whole, the Divine, the Numinous in the sense of energy, they are in constant discord with God and themselves and make up for it with dubious, anthropocentric surrogates that suppress or undermine every individual religious feeling.

Their frustration over the failure of their own doctrine of God must then be compensated by the faithful in warlike conflicts with antagonistic religions, in the hope that in this way they will find again the lost religious meaning of their lives, although in these activities they mostly lose their faith and often also their lives.

Similarly, the “financial experts” of our time cannot develop an adequate understanding of the world inflation that they themselves have caused; by overlooking the resulting decoupling of price from commodity value, they seek the causes of the beginning of the world crisis in such secondary phenomena as “credit crunch” and “new risk pricing”, which are merely consequences of the world inflation.

While they bitterly deplore the bursting of the mortgage bubble and its expansion (unwinding, spillover effects) to corporate bonds and money transactions between banks at present, and as young souls, deeply inspired by the concept of debt and atonement, pursue the “blame game” with enthusiasm, they helplessly scream again for low key interest rates, to fix the self-inflicted liquidity crunch, although they should have known better.

The low interest rate policy of the FED and other central banks in Greenspan’s style, which encouraged them to manipulate their finances in the first place, contributed significantly to this crisis. The financial speculators are currently behaving like drug addicts in a withdrawal delirium, pleading for more drugs until they finally get the “golden shot”.

The early Christians must have behaved similarly when the promised and desired resurrection from the dead and the Second Coming of Christ failed to take place, and God was nowhere to be found except in the narrow Trinity dogma or, as in the case of the Muslims, in the stupid incantations about the greatness of Allah. That nothing better could emerge from this primitive mindset than the innumerable cruel religious conflicts and genocides, with which the horrible history of mankind over the last two thousand years has been full of, should be obvious to everyone.

But since this separation of the individual from the Whole is only superficial – it is merely a camouflage, a mutually agreed cloaking of the souls, in order to make the incarnation experiment on earth temporarily credible in the earlier phase of soul unfolding on this planet – every human being carries within himself an unmistakable intuition of the continuity of all existence, which he perceives as an individual religious feeling and expresses more or less comprehensively according to the medial abilities of his incarnated soul fragment.

To this inherent, transcendental urge to interpret eschatologically the individual destiny and fate of mankind we owe both the emergence of philosophy and of all religions and esoteric schools. As I will show with the example of the Christian religion, which is known to be a syncretistic teaching that rests on Greek philosophy, it is, however, not possible to separate the basic philosophical ideas that mankind has produced in its short written history and have survived the forged human historiography from the religious ones.

Only in times like the present, in which religions turn their backs on their philosophical origin and inevitably manoeuvre themselves into a self-inflicted identity crisis, can the appearance that religions can manage without philosophy be temporarily maintained. In the course of their alienation from the sources of philosophy, religions increasingly flatten out and degenerate into compulsive, extremely narrow moral doctrines of seemingly eternal validity and make the extremely aggressive claim to comprehensively regulate and dictate all aspects of life.

The recognition and experience that modern life is less and less oriented towards the guidelines of religions – whether Christianity, Islam or Buddhism – increases religious rigidity and zeal through the narrowing of the worldview; countless violent, horrific, destructive conflicts arise from this, which are spoken of daily in the mass media. As religiously motivated conflicts worldwide mutate more and more into “body counts” in the mass media, and religious leaders see their spiritual task solely in proving that the religions antagonistic to them are the more violent ones, current religions only reveal their total failure as gnostic teachings, which were created by the soul worlds in order to convey the energetic unity of all existence to human beings in an understandable language.

The cardinal epistemological, gnostic problem of philosophy and all religions thus lies in its inability to precisely define the Whole as the Primary Term of human awareness, in order to derive from it the seemingly infinite variety of phenomena in the three-dimensional world in a logical and coherent way: they are not up to their task as a Phenomenology of Being.

This task was solved for the first time by myself in a comprehensive, didactically exemplary way with the discovery of the Universal Law and the development of the new physical and mathematical Axiomatics. The new scientific pantheory, which starts from the energetic nature of the Whole, the Primary Term, and describes and explains all natural phenomena of the physical and organic world and society in a logical, stringent and consistent way, is not only the pinnacle of modern science, which is a relatively new, short-lived, and already failed intellectual achievement, but also the climax and thus inevitably the end of philosophy and religions in their present form, which look back on a common history of over 2,500 years.

Some things are preserved therein, much is, however, discarded. I will not go any further into this matter here as I have already done it so comprehensively in several works. What this philosophical study is aiming at, is to analyze how far the ability of ancient philosophers was evolved in order to correctly grasp the essence of the Whole, and what spiritual aberrations led to this epistemological-theoretical knowledge being buried or consciously suppressed by the Church.

 

Neoplatonism and Christianity in the Historical Perspective

When Pope Ratzinger deeply regretted in autumn 2006 on the occasion of his visit to Bavaria in his unfortunate Regensburg lecture the three waves of the “De-Hellenization of the Christian religion” (full text), this central concern of the church was completely lost in the superficial indignation and dispute in the mass media about the inappropriate quotation of the head of the Catholic church about the bloodthirstiness of Islam. In this alleged De-Hellenization of the church the former German professor of theology Ratzinger believed to have found the primary cause for the present intellectual and sense crisis of Christianity.

Yet no other intellectual authority, not even communism, which was notorious for its historical obfuscation, has contributed as much to the twisting, falsification, vulgarization and dogmatic stigmatization of ancient philosophical thought as the church itself, and this although, rather precisely because this religious doctrine would not have been conceivable without the spiritual achievements of the ancient thinkers.

A classic example of the falsification of history by the church was provided by Pope Ratzinger himself in his lecture on John Chrysostom on September 19th, 2007 in front of thousands of pilgrims at St. Peter’s Square. He paid homage to this saint for his steadfastness against the Arians (see below) – “against the opponents of the divine nature of Jesus Christ” – as he called them, but did not mention at all that John Chrysostom, as Patriarch of Constantinople and sympathizer of the persecuted Origenistic monks, was deposed from his post by the opponents of Origenism, among them Hieronymus (St. Jerome), at the “Synod of the Oak” in 403, and at their instigation was subsequently sent to exile by the Emperor, where he died abandoned. It is no exaggeration to say that most of the saints and martyrs of the Church, on closer examination of the historical facts, turn out to be victims of this very Church. So much for Christian hypocrisy, which is too human a quality.

The conscious tendency of the occidental spirit to spiritual alienation from Hellenistic thought did not begin first with the Renaissance, as this Pope wants to make us believe in his Regensburg lecture against better knowledge of the spiritual source of this pioneering epoch, but already in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, when the first Gnostic and New Testament writings appeared.

The burgeoning Christianity collided with Neoplatonism with tremendous force, whose bloom also unfolded in the 3rd century and cultivated an unbroken tradition to the classical philosophy of Plato and Aristotle through Middle Platonism.

Neoplatonism reached its peak with the two disciples of the founder of this teaching, Ammonios Sakkas (died 242), who lived in Alexandria and gave his platonic lectures there: With the Christian Origen, the father of Christian exegesis and by far the most important thinker and scholar not only of ancient early Christianity, but perhaps in the entire history of the Church, and with the actual founder of Neoplatonism, Plotin, who spent his later years in Italy, near Rome, and exerted a decisive influence not only on the philosophy of the late Roman period, but beyond that on the entire Western thinking. He completed the synthesis of the two important philosophical schools of antiquity, which had already been the goal of countless Platonists and Peripatetics for several centuries.

No wonder that Plotin was already regarded by his contemporaries during his lifetime as the incarnation of the teacher Plato, even though he was no less close to the teachings of Aristotle, especially to his Metaphysics, if one carefully analysed his writings. Thus, for example, his closest pupil and later editor of Plotin’s famous “Enneads”, Porphyry, also wrote the best “Introduction to the Categories” of Aristotle that has been delivered to us from that time.

Plotin observed with a critical eye the amateurish and careless handling of the spiritual heritage of the ancient philosophers by the uneducated early Christians. In his famous writing “Against the Gnostics” Plotin turns in reality against all Christians by seeing in Christianity a barbaric twist of Platonic heritage.

His pupil Porphyry was also a passionate opponent of the Christians and expressed this in a book,

which was often so difficult to refute that the Christian emperors burned it. In rigorous research, he compiled the contradictions of the Gospels, recognized that the book of Daniel was a forgery from the time of Antiochus IV Epiphany, and criticized the scantness of Christian prophecy evidence. He accused Christians of stealing, without admitting it, from Greek myth and philosophy; he criticized their ethos, especially the courtship of rich women’s money. In Jesus he saw a powerless political conspirator of oppressed groups and in Paul a contradictory sophist ” (1).

At this point, I must clear up a fundamental conceptual misunderstanding that has run like a red thread throughout the whole history of philosophy and Christian doctrine and has led to countless confusions. Under the influence of Christianity the term”Gnosis” is currently interpreted extremely narrowly and with a noticeably negative undertone. In the broadest sense, Gnosis means “knowledge” or “epistemology” as understood by the ancient philosophers, whereby in their opinion the significant part of this knowledge must always be directed towards the invisible, transcendental, superordinate worlds of the soul. Only from this realization can one understand and shape the visible and very imperfect lower world of the material forms that arises secondarily from these higher realms.

For this reason, all ancient philosophers very precisely distinguish between the sublime, transcendental ideas of philosophy, the look-up to the “One” (Nous), the Beautiful, the Perfect, the Divine, which lifts up the incarnated, in the material world entrapped, debased soul fragment, and the ordinary opinions and beliefs of mortal, spiritually uneducated people, which are the opposite of philosophy.

At the same time it is a momentous error of all modern thinkers to believe that all Platonists and Neoplatonists were idle, introverted thinkers who have turned away from the unpleasant reality, and were merely exploring the inwardness of their thoughts, as for instance B. Russell claims in his “History of Western Philosophy” about Plotin.

Plotin was not only a transcendental thinker, but also a renowned pedagogue throughout the ancient world, under whose influence a large part of the Roman politicians were at that time; furthermore, he developed very concrete, progressive plans to found a new city, Platonopolis, in southern Italy, in which the citizens would live according to pure philosophical principles.

The fact that this plan could not be realized in the turbulent times that accompanied the fall of the Roman Empire must not be taken as a proof that the Hellenistic philosophers emulated their spiritual exercises inactively and powerlessly, far from any reality. They stood in the middle of life and did what is still the main task and occupation of an intellectual today: To participate in the current theoretical discussions and to take a stand, whereby the social significance of gnostic dispute in the Hellenistic and late Roman period was much greater than in today’s agnostic, anti-philosophical age. From antiquity until the fall of Constantinople, Gnosis was the uninterrupted foundation of every theory of state (see footnote 54).

When the Neoplatonists, the true Gnostics of antiquity and heirs of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, witnessed how the uneducated early Christians misused their philosophical heritage and in excessive overestimation called themselves “Gnostics”, they felt compelled to take a stand on these Christian escapades at the lowest spiritual level, to write “against the Gnostics” and to distance themselves from the early Christians.

It was only later, when the canonization of the New Testament was completed and most of the Gnostic writings of early Christianity were put on the index, that the first Orthodox Christians, who were far too attached to earthly life and for whom even the naive metaphysics of the early Christian Gnostics was too much for them to comprehend, began to use the word “Gnostics” as an insult. The term “Gnosis” has retained this negative connotation to this very day. The many prejudices which adhere to the concept are at the same time an expression of the collective rejection of the transcendental dimension of all earthly existence, to which even the prominent opponent of Christianity (2) and Neopositivist B. Russell is not immune:

“The Christianity of the Synoptic Gospels is almost innocent of Metaphysics. The Christianity of modern America, in this respect, is like primitive Christianity. Platonism is alien in popular thought and feeling in the United States, and most American Christians are much more concerned with duties here on earth, and with social progress in the everyday world, than with the transcendental hopes that consoled men when everything terrestrial inspired despair ” (3).

There can, therefore, be no question that only the modern spirit of the Renaissance, essentially the spirit of the Neoplatonic Florentine Academy, the Enlightenment and the more recent anticlerical exegesis of the German philosophical school of the 19th and 20th centuries contributed to the decline of Christian teaching, as the Pope claims. This was done by the Church Fathers themselves at a very early historical point in time.

When Pope Ratzinger recently set himself the task of bringing the origins of Christian doctrine closer to the agnostic believers of our time in a series of dusty professorial lectures on the most important Church Fathers, he recently lectured in front of more than ten thousand pilgrims at St. Peter’s Square on Origen. Thus he raved about the intellectual brilliance of this martyr’s countless writings on Christian exegesis, but did not mention with a single word that the greatest scholar of ancient Christianity, upon whom all later theologians, including himself, lived and thrived, was condemned by the Church as a heretic in 399, during the long and very cruel dogmatic struggles for the Trinity dogma (see Trinitarian dispute from 324 to 451 below) and, so that it holds twice better, this judgment was definitively confirmed in 543.

In this way, the pope of today voluntarily followed in the footsteps of the unfortunate Hieronymus, another church father and forger of Origenism, about whom Carl Schneider judges as follows:

“The actual tragedy was only triggered by the intervention of the most characterless of all early Christian church teachers, the Dalmatian Hieronymus (St. Jerome, before 350 around 420). He too was initially an Origenist, had belonged to the Cappadocians (4) and throughout his life not only translated Origen into Latin in a world that was not exactly sensitive to plagiarism, but also wrote it out under his own name, often in a questionable manner.

Perhaps it was the shame or the honest knowledge of the ambitious and vain man to be inferior to Origen that made him suddenly break with the Origenists in 397, above all with Didymos, Rufin and John, and now take action against the old friends in a violent attack that remained unsurpassed in its barbaric tone in the old church. Especially Rufin (5) has been reviled, persecuted and denounced by himself with an unprecedented hatred. He felt that he could not cope with the Origenists in the East and that he was outshone by Augustine’s splendour in the West. So he took the side of the uneducated monks more and more and even wrote the weirdest monk legends at the lowest levels instead of the previously learned translations and commentaries.” (6)

Obviously this last Pope (The current black Jesuit pope Bergoglio is actually not the real head of the Catholic Church as Ratzinger has only retreated from his administrative duties but still keeps his spiritual power over the Catholic church as long as he is alive; read here) has in mind a Christian renaissance of the Old World, at least figuratively, in order to contain to some extent the progressive disintegration of the church authority in the West, whereby in this timid, very academic salvation attempt he overlooks diligently that in today’s Turkey the early Christian tradition is not even to be found as a historical-folkloristic epi-phenomenon for tourists.

So much for the founding fathers of the Church, of whose Patristics the present Pope is so proud that he wants to make them the basis of Christian renewal. The helplessness of the Church is so obvious shortly before the Parousia and the manifestation of the Evolutionary Leap of Mankind, whose fulfillment I have been chosen to accomplish in this lifetime. But, as the early Christian prophets vaguely suspected, this is part of the “divine plan” for this planet. Only for the world religions will this unprecedented renewal of humanity become the “Last Judgement”, the “Revelation” (Apocalypse) of their gnostic failure, as this study will show concretely on the basis of Christianity. For the majority of the world population this event will lead to an unimaginable spiritual liberation.

Footnotes:

1. Carl Schneider “Christianity” in Propyläen World History, vol. 4, 463-464, 1991.

2.Why I am not a Christian.

3. History of Western Philosophy“, p. 290, 1975.

4. Among the three great Cappadocians are the early Church Fathers and Saints, Basileios, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and both friend Gregory of Nazianz, whose role in the establishment of the Early Church was highlighted by the Pope during his recent visit to Turkey. All three Cappadocians were convinced Origenists and looked back on a long family origenistic tradition, even if they could not approach the greatness of the master. All three were true representatives of Neoplatonic epistemology. I mention this fact at this point to draw the reader’s attention to the unbroken tradition of Neoplatonism in all epochs of Christianity, especially in the pre-Constantinian period. This tradition is not only completely unknown to today’s Christians, who look back with a pure heart on a long history of spiritual ignorance, but also to the few philosophers of our time for whom Neoplatonism is a foreign word.

5. Rufin’s censored translation of Origen’s “Peri archon tomoi (De principiis libri IV)” is the only copy of this interpretative work that has survived (around 400). He wanted to protect his master from the attacks of the church and removed all dangerous places or simply rewrote them. This is especially true for the valuable neoplatonic passages dealing with the immortality of the soul and the nature of the soul worlds (Nous). The German edition by Herwig Gürgemanns and Heinrich Karpp from 1976 (Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt), which I use here, takes into account both Rufin’s translation and the plagiarisms of Hieronymus.

6. Carl Schneider “Christianity” in Propyläen World History, vol. 4, 472-473, 1991.

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