Alchemy or Theosis - different paths to different illuminations

 In the current time, despite the ever-increasing attractiveness of the New Age, the occult and the Eastern religions, we tend to have a materialist outlook.  Even our dabbling in the occult or other religions are seen  more as useful and about self-fufilment rather than worship.  This is to be contrasted with true religion, founded on humility before the Divine.  

It is somewhat counter-intuitive to link dry and objective science with anything mystical, but science originated in the esoteric worlds of alchemy and the occult.  Newton was fascinated by occult ideas and early chemistry sprang from esoteric alchemy.  Indeed, scratch the surface a little and we find the same underlying desire in both the occult and the scientific mindset - the grasping of power to manipulate the world.  Nature is then, in Heideggerian terms, standing reserve and we impose our will on it to exploit it from a position of Machenschaft.

Today we see a re-emergence of pseudo religious ideas in the manifestation of singularity and the technicians' belief in immortality through technology - the creation of own own hands that seems to be controlling us and that we worship.

In today's world of objective and rationalist science we see the reappearance of old and esoteric beliefs that are premised on attaining power, immortality and deification through our own manipulative efforts.  It might seem incongruous, but what manifests in both magic and science was there from the beginning, - the grasping at the fruit of knowledge, contrary to God's plan for his naive and immature creation, Man.

Such a spirit underpinned many of the pagan rites of initiation whether in the tradition of Mithras or Pythagoras.  The Neoplatonists made use of theurgy, which was a formulaic way of achieving deification.  By using certain incantations to invoke the divine, one is entering magical practice and thereby the manipulation of the divine or nature to achieve one's ends.  And these same processes as used in magic and theurgy, whether neoplatonic or alchemist, are in fact a form of techne - the manipulation of the world for own own ends and the attainment of power over God or the cosmos.

From the perspective of faithful humility the praxis of magic, theurgy, alchemy, science and technology are forms of  manipulation and domination, therefore being regarded to an extent as Luciferian.  Despite false dichotomies presented today, from the perspective that matters, one of humility, these different forms of praxis are all linked to the Fall - they are all grasping attempts at manipulation.

Humility is then the key distinction from these manipulative forms of praxis.  How we should have acted in the Garden was through a spirit of humility, not through pride attempting to seize power to achieve eternal life and knowledge disregarding our Creator.

There is a way to deification and it is not through the self realisation of alchemic or occult theurgies.  It is in a spirit of humility and faithful trust expressed in prayer.  Saint Seraphim of Sarov spoke of acquisition of the Holy Spirit as achieved by a life of Christian virtues.  Primarily the grace of the Holy Spirit is attained through prayer.  Prayer is the act of asking, not grasping and to ask is to act in the spirit of humility and trust.

To attain theosis the Fathers teach is to be deified.  And the means is a life of Christian virtue and prayer,  The possibility of acquiring the Holy Spirit is only possible because "God became Man that men might become gods" as both Saint Irenaeus of Lyons and Saint Athanasius, the great opponent of Arianism, said.

What this means is that any dichotomy between technology and the occult or chemistry and alchemy is false if the scientific work is in the spirit of pride, defiance and acquisitiveness.  If we are grasping at power to be like gods, while bypassing God, be that through creating artificial intelligence, developing the atom bomb or engaging in New-Age meditation, we are replaying the story of the Fall from the Garden.  Furthermore, we are mistaken if we attempt to separate the cold rationalism of science from the esoteric world of magic and the occult.  These are different sides of the same coin when science becomes scientism and both have their origin in Luciferian pride, and are the ensnaring by Lucifer the beautiful evening star who distracts us from the Father of Lights and our salvation. 

   

The Mean Old Scrooge of Philosophy

 Parsimony is not considered a virtue.  We look upon those who exhibit this trait as mean, grasping, miserly and lacking in generosity or the milk of human kindness.  And yet in the world of intellectual discourse we are encouraged to be mean and unrelenting.  The intellectual rule in question is quite explicit as to the sentiment that motivates it - I mean the rule of ontological parsimony.

William of Ockham, that medieval thinker who struck a blow against philosophical realism, contrived a methodology that allowed little to no room to explain much of what the human being intuits and indeed little room for that which gives life and the cosmos meaning.

William of Ockham is famous colloquially for Ockham's razor, by which is of course meant cutting away all complicated reasons and looking to the simplest explanation as the most likely.  As a rule of thumb through life it works fairly well in limiting overly speculative and unsupported claims about things we come across in life.  It is simple to regard crop circles as a consequence of something manmade, be that farm equipment or a hoax, rather than assuming the patterns in the field are the consequence of extra-terrestrial activity.

Importantly, and what is sometimes forgotten is that Ockham's razor is only claiming that the simpler explanation is more likely, not that a more complicated explanation is proved as impossible.  Ockham's razor is like a working solution until more is known and it cannot rule out conclusively a more complicated explanation.

The idea of ontological parsimony is closely related, but more specific to philosophy and theology.  It is a rule of  ontology that we are not justified in making speculative claims about ontology.  From Ockham's point of view as an example, Platonic forms violate ontological parsimony.  While Plato is logically coherent, he is for Ockham going too far ontologically in relying on forms outside space and time to account for the world of becoming and imperfection.  Essentially what is meant by ontological parsimony is that ontological entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.  Thus if the world can be explained materially, then it is not necessary to rely on immaterial explanations be that Platonic forms, God or anything from outside space and time.  The more ontological claims you make the more likely you are to make a slip.

Now in modern Western thought, right down to the Man on the Clapham Omnibus, this is considered a holy and inviolable law.  That though misses the point.  The rule cannot prove that more ontological layers to a theory are bound to be false, only that you require more justifications for more ontological layers and this need can be avoided by not making any extra ontological claims beyond those absolutely necessary.  A frugal and somewhat pusillanimous approach indeed that never actually proves or claims to prove new or speculative ontological claims are by necessity false; only that there is a greater need for justification.

As a result of the way this frugality of thought has seeped into our culture, atheism seems correct because it rules out all ontological claims.  There may though be justifications for metaphysical and theistic claims bar the need to be an ontological necessity.

This parsimonious way of thinking means there is an inherent bias towards a simpler theory such as Darwin's idea of evolution because it does not need to rely on any greater ontological claims.  But there may be very good reasons for giving credence to more ontological claims than those that are only strictly necessary.

This parsimony really is a frugal meanness of thought that impoverishes our intellectual realm in the West.  If there is no ontological realism, by which is meant that certain universal or metaphysical concepts are considered real, we lose much that enriches life - the Good, the True the Beautiful.

Relying on a purely material explanation of reality gives us a very simple philosophy, but it is impoverished and means we must omit much that we intuit is real and not simply real on the periphery of reality, but central - be that ethics, the soul, the divine, love, even logic..

And so by adopting a philosophically frugal methodology we are bound also to adopt an impoverished Weltanschauung.  We must rule out much of value, not because we have proved it as non-existent, but because we will only allow the most narrow of reasons to explain the world.  But while this approach means less risk and less need for complicated ontology, it is equally possible that the cosmos is not at all simple, but baroque and beautifully ornate.  The methodology is not proof in itself of a minimalist reality.

There are other reasons to think philosophical realism is justified.  Indeed it is the opposite thinking to Ockhamite parsimony.  A more generous way of thinking allows for us to give serious weight to immaterial but highly important ideas that we live by - love, God, beauty.  

Evolution is often referred to as a beautiful theory, but that is because of its simplicity.  There are other forms of beauty than minimalism and the human soul often craves a more intricate and ornate beauty.  Minimalism is not necessarily superior to the Gothic or the Baroque.

If we look at the Church Councils and the Fathers they used a different methodology.  For the Fathers it was what ensured theological concepts were coherent and non-contradictory that made up the methodology.  Again there was a form of minimalism, in that it was not thought wise to over-dogmatise.  Church Tradition was considered sufficient on the whole unless a heresy arose and only then would it be necessary to theologise on dogma.  This thought is in the opposite sprit to the mean frugality of Ockham.  Instead it gave liberal space to Tradition and personal spirituality unrestricted by dogma unless strictly necessary to avoid heresy.  And so Patristics is generous not mean.  

And Ockhamite parsimony really is mean spiritually.  There is an ethical question about adopting a methodology that dismisses and derides the most precious aspects of being human, cutting us off like a crusty old miser, a Gradgrind, from the Good, the True, the Beautiful - the Transcendent.

Despite the way ontological parsimony and Ockham's razor permeate our way of thinking in the West at every level of society, making us a materialistic culture facing a meaning crisis, there are other methodologies that are more humane and generous that give credibility to all that the human soul intuits, giving a philosophical and theological structure through Scripture, testimonies, Councils and canons that protect this intuition from solipsism on the one hand and from a reductive ontology on the other.

Autocracy and Surrogate Imperators

With the recent death in prison of Alexey Navalny, the Russian politician opposed to President Putin, there has been much media attention given to what is happening; far more than that given to the late Gonzalo Lira, American citizen and critic of Zelensky, who died in similarly suspicious circumstances in a Ukrainian gaol a few weeks before.  Russia is being contrasted as an autocratic regime in opposition to the enlightened democracies of the West.  This promotion of the West, predicated on human rights and liberalism is still assumed to be the better system, despite protesting farmers, the yellow vests and in America a political divide too deep to be able to envision an American common weal.

These abstract human rights that the West sees as its foundation have become the only way to value human beings.  In contrast religious faith did not conceive of abstract rights to be able to live a certain way or do certain things, it thought rather that man's sanctity lay in being created in the image and likeness of God.  This view of human nature encompassed freedom, creativity and the sanctity of life, but remained categorically different from the abstract and individualistic idea of human rights.  It gave men a telos of virtue.  This perspective also honoured the Emperor, pagan as well as Christian, persecutor of the Church as well as the Christian Basileus.

In Dante's great work, Brutus as the betrayer of the emperor is in the very depths of Hell alongside Judas, the traitor to Christ.  The Emperor, as the Pauline epistles make clear, is to be honoured not for his individual virtues, but by dint of his role.  In the second epistle to the Thessalonians, Chapter Two, verse six, Saint Paul gives a clear explanation of the role of the Emperor.  And this was written centuries before the Edict of Milan:

"And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time."

The Church Fathers understood that the Emperor withholds the coming antichrist who will subvert all order and seemliness.  It is impossible that Saint Paul regarded the dissolute personality of Caesar Nero as good, but his role as Emperor has a function in Christian eschatology.  It is for this reason that Saint John of Shanghai understood that the regicide of the Tsar, Passion Bearer and New Martyr Nichols II meant there was no one to hold back the coming antichrist in these last days.

What are we to understand from this?  We see in the West much that is promoted in the name of freedom and rights that is very much in the sprit of Sodom and Gomorrah.  We see that in Western democracies today all is subverted in a post-modern celebration of degeneracy, particularly unseemly sexual degeneracy.  

Meanwhile citizens from those countries deemed an alliance of evil often have not lost touch with religious faith, high literature and art, philosophical thinking and something even more significant - they, the citizens have not lost a certain decorous innocence. Whatever the accusations of corruption and oppression we in the West throw at Iran or Russia (and these are two very different countries), their people on the whole retain a dignity that people in the West have lost.  They have not lost their intelligence or virtue on the whole.  While we in the West see scenes of degradation of the human person celebrated as freedom, in other parts of the world they would still blush.  We are somehow degraded by the celebration of the sexual passions in particular.  it goes further though, there is disrespect for elders, for figures of authority, we mock that which is sacred and celebrate that which is degrading of the human body.  Saint Peter in his second Epistle wrote of such a type of person:

 "But chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government.  Presumptious are they, selfwilled, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignitaries"

Saint Paul in his letter to the Romans strongly affirms monarchical rule:

"For he is a minister of God to thee for good.  But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain:  for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil."

And the Church held to this throughout the persecution by the Empire, only resisting the Emperor on matters of religious faith.  Putting to one side the virtues and sins of emperors throughout history for the moment, it is clear that to be a rebel against ordained authority one is stepping into a path that also entails moral dissolution.  Note that those who oppose Putin, go by names such as "Pussy Riot" and many wave the flag of Western sexual liberation - the six coloured flag of LGBT.  The concept of human rights often seems a cover for living by the passions and rejecting virtue.

Being an obedient and orderly subject is part of the virtuous life.  In the West, since the top-down revolution of the elites and their secret societies, overturning the order of Christendom and expressing oneself sexually is seen as liberation.  It is by such a subverted and revolutionary ethos that we now live.  The Jacobins run our political structure.

Elsewhere, in more autocratic countries, fallible men have taken absolute power to themselves.  In a 2009 Russian film by Pavel Lungin, entitled Tsar, this very problem is confronted.  The autocrat has become not dissolute but cruel and mad.  His close friend and companion and Metropolitan of Moscow, later to be canonised as Saint Philip of Moscow confronts and chastises this cruel Tsar, Ivan IV, known with the epithet Grozny or Terrible.  As a Christian Philip cannot stop by and watch the wanton cruelty meted out upon Tsar Ivan's innocent subjects.  In the end Philip himself is martyred, strangled to death by one of Ivan's henchmen.  He though witnessed against the Emperor, the vicar of God.  And mad as Tsar Ivan might have been, he began to build Moscow to be the Third Rome of Orthodox Christianity.

We therefore have a paradox - the Emperor there to safeguard the Christian world can himself become another Nero,  And yet Paul wrote those words as Nero, who would put him to death reigned and terrorised Rome.

There is something deep here.  If democracies subvert Tradition and order with their subversive human rights, the danger of arbitrary rule so despised by Anglo Saxon liberals still seems to hold as a criticism.  Do Christians turn a blind eye to abuse of power?

Perhaps one way to understand it is that the Emperor fulfils his role insofar as he does not fall into sin himself.  There is also a distinction between personal sin and being a public ruler, although usually private sins enter the public realm when an empire is ruled by a person rather than a constitution.

The Church though sees the bigger picture.  With Saint Philip, in the tradition of Saint John the Forerunner, the Church challenges the ungodly exercise of power, but like Saints Paul and Peter the church recognises the sacred role of the Emperor and that for all the personal faults a personal ruler is superior to a constitutional republic - the system of deists and freemasons.

It is something to do with Monarchy that keeps countries from going down the road of abstract rights and maintaining personal relationships at the core of the polity.  These personal relationships define the State as a family, rather than a constitutional system of rights and processes.  With a monarch at the heart of the nation, the polity is not a codified document, but a family.

Today the post Soviet republics are not hereditary monarchies. They are ruled by presidents, but to a certain extent these presidents from Putin to Lukashenko are more like autocrats and whatever their personal faults and however much these faults creep into their public roles, they are withholding forces, restraining as Saint Paul would put it, the diabolical forces that so torment the West today.

What though is it that they protect?  Is it really more precious than the West's human rights?  It is a different culture, one of more restraint, innocence, decorum and intelligence.  Each undemocratic regime can be held to account for abuses of power, for special favours to the members of the inner circle and to downright cruelty towards political prisoners.  What though keeps support for a Putin or Lukashenko is the deep fear of a return to the times of chaos and foreign exploitation.  In that sense what the West sees as an opposition leader can look more like a traitor, especially when funded by the very country that had engaged in the asset stripping in the nineties.

That though is not the most precious thing that is protected.  In the West our culture has been so dumbed down that we are kept placated and stupid under the power of modern-day bread and circuses, be that football or reality television.  We are detached from our high culture and our history.  We have lost our identity.  We have been manipulated so as not to be able to discern the most precious aspects of life.  Swearing, promiscuity, sexual deviancy, disrespect for sacred things, blasphemy, disregard for the elderly, rejection of our culture have been normalised.  However brutal some foreign despots their people still have access to their religion, their culture and their identity.  This is not something to be lightly dismissed.  It is striking that a Russian or Iranian is likely to be more cultured than a Westerner.

That though is not to mistake the image for the real thing.  The undemocratic and anti- Western regimes all have their roots in revolution.  They are not emperors in the real sense, the traditional sense of the hierarchical religious societies of Tradition.  Instead they mimic their pre-revolutionary predecessors and there is a strange overlap between this return to Tradition and roots in the Marxist revolutions of recent history.  

Nonetheless, it can be seen that those in authority in Orthodox countries particularly are resisting the cultural subversion that is turning the West mad, which is even becoming confused over gender.  In that sense today's autocrats are restrainers of the worst excesses of the revolutionary West that has fallen prey first to Jacobins and rationalists and now to postmodernists and LGBT.  In the East meanwhile there is an example of trusting in God to bless the people with a good king.