English is not my mother tongue so I apologize if there are mistakes in the text.
Greetings, first I would like to say that the blog really is wonderful, as someone who is just starting on the path I have found it very useful, I think almost all of us agree that the pagan traditions are not oriented towards dogma but towards praxis and personal experiences with the divine, however, the writings of the sages can be of great help to understand the great mysteries, perhaps if Romanism had survived we would have seen something similar to India with numerous schools of theological thought.
I must admit that I am not a scholar of Platonism and neither do I claim to speak for Butler as I have barely read a few loose articles by him, but I think the key to explaining how the Henads and the one can be above intelligence without affecting the unity or simplicity of the one lies in our concept of the one. To understand the one as a particular entity endowed with personality would be a mistake, instead we would have to consider it as a kind of abstraction, being fundamentally an underlying principle, the one would be the principle of uniqueness, individuation and also the good. The Gods would therefore not be aspects of a single God, but the whole would be within each of them following the Pythagorean maxim of Panta-en-pasin, In the same way each God would be within each God but expressing his omnipotence according to his own Hyparxis, his own personality and essence.
It is important to note that the phrase “The One neither is nor is One.” Not coming from Butler but from (Parmenides Plato, 141e), this phrase can perhaps be interpreted to mean that the one is beyond being and likewise is not a singular entity.
Finally, I want to point out that saying that the Gods are only one God using many masks is somewhat problematic (and is also something like monotheism with more steps) mainly because it does not explain how something like a pantheon can exist without reducing the Gods to their mere functions. If we observe for example the ancient Paphos we will see that its citizens did not consider Aphrodite only as the Goddess of love and not only prayed to her for love matters but also prayed to her for health, money, protection, etc. Something similar can be found in the hymns of Greece and Egypt where each God is assigned qualities that usually are not characteristic of them and even omnipotence is attributed to them.
I leave some additional links that I found interesting and that can help to enrich the discussion.
What a great read. Really appreciate your courage for speaking out against the ideas of Proclus, which many accept without question as a matter of faith. I've never really liked the idea of 'henads', partly because it felt to me as though we were making the same mistake the classical theists of Abrahamic religion were making. They wanted their God to be "The Ineffable One" while simultaneously have this God be a being that speaks to them through scripture and judges them and so on and so forth.
To me, a person who never understood classical theism, that just doesn't make sense. Either God is a being that speaks to us and and cares about us and understands us and all that stuff, or God is beyond being, beyond scripture, etc.
I like your idea of the 'energies' of the One. These energies can be seen as the most basic forces of existence that pre-exist even the Gods. For example, Love. Love is an energy that no God creates, but eternally emanates from the One who is above all.
In a way, your idea can help bridge the gap between the Jungian understanding of the Gods vs the more traditional understanding. There are the forces and archetypes which eternally emanate from the one, and perhaps then there are the Intelligent Gods who rule over these forces and archetypes. This also brings in those who believe the Forms are higher than the Gods. The God of Justice does not create Justice out of thin air, but rather upholds the Form of Justice that eternally emanates from the One.
A lot to think about here, and I'm not gonna pretend I understand it all just yet. But thank you for writing this. Definitely an interesting read and one which should be read by all serious Platonists.
I always personally felt like the Henadic characterization was unnecessarily clunky and detached from real Pagan practice. The Romans, at least, clearly recognized the gods as having a mutually inclusive relationship with ideas or forms, as many Roman gods shared a name with ideas or concepts. If there is any utility for the Henads, I suppose it would be that it justifies the sort of Kathenotheism that people insist exists in the Vedas. However, intellectual gods can still be treated as kathenotheistic, only with respect to the intellect instead of the ineffable one.
This is one of the simplest, cleanest explanations of “The One” that I’ve ever seen and is indeed the way I conceive of “God.” As someone reared in an abrahamic religion, and that’s studied them, the current notion of “god” is very anthropomorphic, anthropocentric, and I’ve even say “saturnian.” I remember the sense of a huge and dreadful weight lifting when I read Plotinus for the first time.
For the glory of Jove indeed.
Had to read through some of the paragraphs more than once but I think I finally get it.
English is not my mother tongue so I apologize if there are mistakes in the text.
Greetings, first I would like to say that the blog really is wonderful, as someone who is just starting on the path I have found it very useful, I think almost all of us agree that the pagan traditions are not oriented towards dogma but towards praxis and personal experiences with the divine, however, the writings of the sages can be of great help to understand the great mysteries, perhaps if Romanism had survived we would have seen something similar to India with numerous schools of theological thought.
I must admit that I am not a scholar of Platonism and neither do I claim to speak for Butler as I have barely read a few loose articles by him, but I think the key to explaining how the Henads and the one can be above intelligence without affecting the unity or simplicity of the one lies in our concept of the one. To understand the one as a particular entity endowed with personality would be a mistake, instead we would have to consider it as a kind of abstraction, being fundamentally an underlying principle, the one would be the principle of uniqueness, individuation and also the good. The Gods would therefore not be aspects of a single God, but the whole would be within each of them following the Pythagorean maxim of Panta-en-pasin, In the same way each God would be within each God but expressing his omnipotence according to his own Hyparxis, his own personality and essence.
It is important to note that the phrase “The One neither is nor is One.” Not coming from Butler but from (Parmenides Plato, 141e), this phrase can perhaps be interpreted to mean that the one is beyond being and likewise is not a singular entity.
Finally, I want to point out that saying that the Gods are only one God using many masks is somewhat problematic (and is also something like monotheism with more steps) mainly because it does not explain how something like a pantheon can exist without reducing the Gods to their mere functions. If we observe for example the ancient Paphos we will see that its citizens did not consider Aphrodite only as the Goddess of love and not only prayed to her for love matters but also prayed to her for health, money, protection, etc. Something similar can be found in the hymns of Greece and Egypt where each God is assigned qualities that usually are not characteristic of them and even omnipotence is attributed to them.
I leave some additional links that I found interesting and that can help to enrich the discussion.
An article by Butler
https://henadology.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/wp32-butler-pp3538-version-2.pdf
A couple of articles from a blog I found interesting.
https://willdam20.wordpress.com/principles/
https://willdam20.wordpress.com/lessons-faqs/
An additional article
https://symmetria.substack.com/p/the-one-is-each-god?s=w.
PD: I really enjoyed your book
What a great read. Really appreciate your courage for speaking out against the ideas of Proclus, which many accept without question as a matter of faith. I've never really liked the idea of 'henads', partly because it felt to me as though we were making the same mistake the classical theists of Abrahamic religion were making. They wanted their God to be "The Ineffable One" while simultaneously have this God be a being that speaks to them through scripture and judges them and so on and so forth.
To me, a person who never understood classical theism, that just doesn't make sense. Either God is a being that speaks to us and and cares about us and understands us and all that stuff, or God is beyond being, beyond scripture, etc.
I like your idea of the 'energies' of the One. These energies can be seen as the most basic forces of existence that pre-exist even the Gods. For example, Love. Love is an energy that no God creates, but eternally emanates from the One who is above all.
In a way, your idea can help bridge the gap between the Jungian understanding of the Gods vs the more traditional understanding. There are the forces and archetypes which eternally emanate from the one, and perhaps then there are the Intelligent Gods who rule over these forces and archetypes. This also brings in those who believe the Forms are higher than the Gods. The God of Justice does not create Justice out of thin air, but rather upholds the Form of Justice that eternally emanates from the One.
A lot to think about here, and I'm not gonna pretend I understand it all just yet. But thank you for writing this. Definitely an interesting read and one which should be read by all serious Platonists.
Wishing you all the best.
I always personally felt like the Henadic characterization was unnecessarily clunky and detached from real Pagan practice. The Romans, at least, clearly recognized the gods as having a mutually inclusive relationship with ideas or forms, as many Roman gods shared a name with ideas or concepts. If there is any utility for the Henads, I suppose it would be that it justifies the sort of Kathenotheism that people insist exists in the Vedas. However, intellectual gods can still be treated as kathenotheistic, only with respect to the intellect instead of the ineffable one.
This is one of the simplest, cleanest explanations of “The One” that I’ve ever seen and is indeed the way I conceive of “God.” As someone reared in an abrahamic religion, and that’s studied them, the current notion of “god” is very anthropomorphic, anthropocentric, and I’ve even say “saturnian.” I remember the sense of a huge and dreadful weight lifting when I read Plotinus for the first time.