How the Sacred and Profane Worlds were Joined

This is an abridged and retitled version of a chapter in The Sacred History of Being, which explores  interconnections between earthly and Divine realities in antiquity. A key thing to observe is that the idea of such interconnections is established on logical grounds. The reality of the Divine world is inferred, on the basis of the visible imperfections of profane reality, but the two worlds must be connected in some way if reality itself is not to be necessarily irrational in nature (this also was argued on logical grounds). Establishing the connection between the worlds was a major preoccupation in antiquity: things should ‘meet and agree’. 

The original chapter contained footnotes, which I have removed for ease of reading. I’ve reduced the number of modes of connection which are discussed also. The essential argument of the chapter however remains the same.

TY February 18, 2018.

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Since the world of the divine is a transcendent reality, the nature of that reality is not going to conform to our secular understanding of the existent world. This is an important point, which would have been considered in antiquity. Thus, there is no reason to presume that extension is represented or has reality in the same way in which extension exists in normal space. There is also no reason to presume that time is represented or has reality in the same way in which time exists in the secular world (the secular world being, by definition, the world of time, or the world existing in time). 

Almost every aspect of the world of existence will have a different nature in the divine world, to the point where we would find it difficult or impossible to establish the connection between one and the other. We are not accustomed to imagining that the ancients thought in such terms, except perhaps within the Academy, or within Parmenides circle.

There are many conceptions which are associated with the divine reality. This may seem a strange way to understand the world of the divine. But it is no more a species of imprecision to do this than it is to create a pantheon of gods, all of which have something of the divine about them. The problem with the divine is that it is forever beyond our capacity to fully understand, by definition. Therefore we can only say things about it from a particular point of view, at a particular time, and under certain circumstances. All within the limitations of the human understanding. Beyond that our interpretation is more or less imperfect. This means that our understanding of the divine is forever contingent – in essence a species of conjecture rather than full understanding.

This is a difficult idea to communicate, given the last two thousand years of theological speculation, and religious struggle in the world. It may seem an unimaginable idea – that the theological ideas of the ancient world were understood to be conjectural, and ultimately contingent on the limitations of the human understanding.

For us, even before the advent of the empirical approach to knowledge during the European enlightenment, we attempted to construct our notions of the world and what is real on what could be established as far as possible, whether what was established was on the basis of logical inference or deduction, on the basis of experience, or was revealed to us by the divine. Conjecture might have been tolerable (or even encouraged to an extent) within the church school and the seminary, but only in so far as it was desirable that scholars produced by religious institutions should be able to use their critical faculties to the best of their ability, in the service of Church and state. But in the end, conjecture is not something we generally wish to face as an important component of our picture of the world.

In constructing ideas of the gods, and creating images of them, the ancients were engaging in the enterprise of framing their understanding of the divine world. They did this on the basis of the idea that the realm of reality (which we have spoken of as Being earlier in this essay), being unchanging in its nature, must still stand behind the world of appearance and existence. This latter world is an image of it, but is not a perfect representation of it. The realm of reality embraces it, but the world of appearance and existence is necessarily a lesser world. However, because it is a good semblance of it, there must be the possibility of aspects of the realm of the reality being manifest in the world. On the basis of their ideas about the nature of the divine, of the supremely perfect Being, we might ask what they would look for in the world which would represent the presence of the supreme Being, woven all through the world, as the soul is woven all through the world in Plato’s model. They would ask: where is it? What shape does it have? How big is it? What properties does it have? And so on.

This is an incomplete list of items which were identified in antiquity as representing what we might term ‘bleedthrough’ from the divine reality. These were things which were regarded as of great importance – in a sense, of more importance than the gods themselves, in that they were aspects of the divine which had reality in our world, and did not depend to the same extent on human conjecture. They are therefore more profoundly real than the gods.

1. Limit: Before the idea of Being, there is no reason to have a sophisticated attitude to limit. One can have the idea that things are separate from other things, or must be separate from other things, and that there is a point of demarcation which marks off where one thing ends and another begins. It is also possible to have the conception that it might be desirable or even necessary to move from one side of the limit to the other. It is also possible to imagine the divine as having existence on the other side of a limit, without there being anything very sophisticated in the conception. A sophisticated conception of a modus operandi of contact with the divine however will not emerge from this, until an intellectual basis for there being a reason why things should be connected is understood. Before Being, one side of the limit or border is the concern. However, once the idea of Being is in play, then the limit itself becomes the focus of interest. The existence of a sophisticated idea of Being means that what exists is understood to be less real than reality itself (the idea of Being from St Anselm onwards was not very sophisticated).

2. Perfection: Before the idea of Being, talking of perfection is focused on the subjective notion of perfection, and the term is used either rhetorically, or refers simply to quality of workmanship or quality of action. It has no bearing on ideas relating to the divine, or to reality. The idea may however be extended to application to the divine and to the gods. By analogy, something which has great perfection will come to be understood to transcend other objects or works of a similar kind, and this transcendence will come to be applied to the divine. It is however a long step to realizing that a proposed perfection means that the divine is actually unintelligible to us, and that the divine is Being itself, beyond any fixed or rigid attributes. Perfection as a quality which may actually connect with the divine, rather than merely showing transcendence of other lesser perfections, is an idea which is dependent on the concept of the divine as Being.

3. Completion: The idea of completion is related to the idea of perfection, particularly in connection with the nature of the divine. However completion as a concept relates more closely to the idea of limit, in that it is a property of the concept of Okeanos in Greece, and the all-enveloping Apsu in Mesopotamia. It is an interesting concept in connection with the idea of a circle, since it is impossible to determine the beginning or end of a circle, at least when it is unbroken. The concept may be used in a great many ways, from indicated the completion of a form, nature, or the performance of ritual and liturgy, and so on. It might also be used to indicate the end of a life, or a process. What is completed has some property in connection with the divine, some participation with it, in that the realm of the divine must be complete as opposed to the world of existence, which is incomplete in its general nature. I suspect that the idea of completion was one of the first mundane properties in the world to be identified as a potential access point to the divine world.

4. Excellence: Excellence is a concept which the Greeks had a particular interest in, but it is an idea which, like the ideas of completion and perfection, is referred to throughout the ancient world. To excel is to exceed something. So something which possesses excellence transcends the excellence of some other thing. This is its comparative use, but it is also used intransitively, so that something can be said to have a special excellence of its own, irrespective of the qualities of other things. Hence its use by Aristotle in his moral and ethical treatises. Ultimately it is about transcendence, whether of oneself or of other things. The world of the divine is both more excellent than the secular world, but it also possesses a special excellence of its own. Excellence is something which exists in the world of existence which has a connection with the reality which stands behind it.

5. Greatness: the idea of greatness as we have seen an idea which was pressed into service in the Middle Ages to try to prove the existence of the supreme Being. Greatness is naturally something which the human understanding would wish to associate with the supreme Being. It has been in the past associated with the gods – Herodotus refers to the rituals associated with the cult of the great gods on Samos, without going into any detail, which is frustrating. The great gods were known as the ‘Kaberioi,’ which indicates a near eastern origin for this cult, since kbr is the semitic root for ‘great’. Great however is an imprecise term, merely indicating that these gods transcend other gods, or that that their special excellence is their greatness. It is however an appropriate term to describe men who might be classed in this way, who, through the quality of their greatness, on the field of battle, in their wisdom, and a thousand other attributes, might be understood to have some empathy with the gods.

6. Justice: the focus on justice in the ancient world in general, and not simply among the Greeks, might indicate to the cynical modern sensibility only that justice was in short supply. It might indeed be the case that it was much referenced precisely because there was little access to it. However the discussion of the subject in Plato makes it clear that it is an idea which has its place in this exploration of the earthly corollaries of aspects of the divine nature which have some form of existence here on earth. Justice was presumed to be something which was perfected in the divine world, but justice in the secular world is a different matter. The very nature of the world of existence means that justice – true justice is unobtainable. What we can access is a poor copy of something which can only exist elsewhere. It is interesting that both in Mesopotamia and in Greece it was the Sun god (Shamash and Apollo respectively) which were responsible for the dispensation of justice on earth.

The gods might know what is just, but our capacity to discern it is limited, and the dispensation of justice by the gods is sometimes hard for man to understand and accept. One of the images of the dispensation of justice, is of the participation in battle of the sun god. Assyrian reliefs show Shamash hovering above opposing forces in the winged circle. The meaning of this is at least two-fold: the god is involved in the outcome of the battle, which represents a way of dispensing just decision; and the to-ing and fro-ing of battle represents the difficulty of apportioning justice in the world of existence. It also means that the engagement in battle was understood by kings, priests and generals as a legitimate way of establishing right. In Homer, there is a famous passage where opposing forces are described as being bounded by ropes, which are pulled this way and that in the course of the battle.  These ropes are also found in the iconography of Shamash.  The underlying idea is the same.

7. Proportion: aspects of the divine reality can exist in the secular world expressed in terms of proportion. Thus, in a figure, a side which bears a proportionate relationship to another side, can be regarded as an image or representation of it, in a way similar to the understanding that the image of a god bears a relation to the god itself. Proportionate relationships in a structure, object or image could therefore be used as a way of enhancing the meaning of images and representations which bore a relationship with the divine reality. This is an enormous subject, worth a monograph on its own.

8. Purity: Purity is an attribute which might be associated with the idea of perfection, and often was. But purity can be attributed to things in a different way – not everything which is pure is to be regarded as a perfection. Something which is perfect is just that. Purity on the other hand, is an attribute which can be put on and put off in a way which perfection cannot.  This distinction is of great importance in the Assyrian and Babylonian contexts, since in order to create divine statues, the craftsmen required to be given a temporary divinity. Thus the purity, a temporary perfection, can be put on for the purpose of the work. This was achieved through the perfection of the appropriate ritual. Afterwards it was removed by the performance of another ritual.

9. Wholes and Totalities. Things which are whole are regarded as participating with one another, in that they share the property of wholeness, or totality. This idea is a strong pointer to the essentially subjective nature of the model of the world in which these things are important, since the wholeness of something is sometimes attributed, rather than being a property of an entity. There is a doctrine associated with wholes and totalities, which is attributed to Pythagoras. It is also referenced by Plato. The doctrine however is much older than the middle of the first millennium B.C.E.

Those are nine phenomena which can appear in the world of existence, which were understood to allow and enhance connection with the divine reality which stands eternally behind the physical world. This is an edited list, but it is sufficient to illustrate what was in the mind of man attempting contact with the divine.

Other things which we might consider, which were of great importance in the ancient world, include the idea of reduplication, principally of concepts, attributes and properties. The point of reduplication is emphasis. Two collocated symbols, meaning the same, could be understood to double the power of the image and the connection.

Another related idea is ‘collection’, sometimes expressed in ancient texts as ‘heaping up’. This refers to the bringing together, usually of good things (but not always), sometimes in the context of an altar and a priest. There may be several reasons for creating such a collocation, depending on the objects involved, but ‘heaping up’ is a good thing in itself, if the intention of the supplicant is to multiply and reduplicate the offering. It is obvious from the study of ancient iconography that many images are reduplicated directly, in a way which does not amount to a purely aesthetic distribution of images, and in addition, the meaning of symbols and tableau are reduplicated using different images. The effect is of reduplication, and to make such assemblages identifies to the informed viewer, what is the same among what is apparently different. These assemblages are of course addressed to the gods, and the divine.

Another action which was understood to convey an aspect of the divine world in the physical world is ‘division’. This concept is very closely associated with the ideas of justice and of decision, but it is possible for division to be separated from these ideas, in that division can take place without the wish or need for justice, or of decision. At least in terms of our modern understanding of what justice is. Ultimately the connection between the ideas is about ‘good order’, and ‘meeting and agreeing’.

The association of justice and the power of division with kingship is very strong in the ancient near east – the sun god Shamash is often represented as holding a saw, and the Egyptian kings were also represented with the symbol of the Neteru (axes). In both cases, the instrument for deciding the fate of anything is clearly not a weapon but a tool (though weapons of war also were understood as legitimate tools of the gods). If it is possible to understand the creation and generation of the world as a decision of the gods, then the nature of reality has been divided, at least insofar as there is now a world of existence which has descended into secular time, and which is cut down from Being itself. The power of kings to deal justice comes from their participation in the nature of the divine Being, though they live and function in the world of existence.

Division is also important in gaining an apprehension of what is real and what is not, and in understanding how one thing is different from another. Ultimately it is the basis of logic and classification which we find in developed form among the Greeks in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E. Sumerologists were puzzled to find tablets listing things together which to us had no meaningful connection, such as a large list of objects which have the property of ‘being white’. To the Sumerian scribe who assembled this list, the characteristics of whiteness would have determined the worth of the list. The items were separated out from a (hypothetical) list of all known items, and collected together as a classification of items of the same property. These properties are in a sense subjective, but only because we do not know the function of white objects in the Sumerian model of the world.

Another notion of great importance in antiquity is the idea of ‘drawing near’ to a god. This might be represented by proximity to an altar or symbol of the god, or by the device of showing the supplicant being introduced to the god by a third party, whether another god or by a priest of the divine cult. There is however a technical idea behind this concept. The idea is that by being near, you already participate in the nature of the god, to a limited extent. The connection is open, even if transaction with the divine is not in operation. Drawing near can be achieved through a collocation of offerings, through benefactions to the priesthood and the temple, through other good works, the virtue of the individual, and so on.

Intentionality, Conjecture, and what is Holy

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

This was originally a suppressed chapter (to use the jargon) from The Sacred History of Being (2015). I removed it, together with some other chapters along the way, in order to focus the argument of the book more tightly. It looks at the role of intentionality in establishing commerce with the Divine, and the essentially phenomenological nature of how the Divine is both made and known by us. It draws parallels between the creation of gods in antiquity, and the setting up of saints in Heaven. Both represent instantiations of what is Holy.

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It is unclear that the realm of the divine has reality. It is real, and at the same time it is not.  The only argument for the world of existence is that it is a poor copy of the divine world. And the divine world is uncertain. So how ‘real’ is the world of existence? What is the way out of this dilemma?

The answer is intentionality. The objective world is subject to change, as is the understanding of men. We cannot know the full properties of God, because, among other things, God is transcendent of human understanding. How can mortal man then understand the properties and nature of the divine, and how can the gods have a genuine involvement in the world? The answer arrived at, it would seem, is that the human understanding does not need to encompass the actual nature of the divine in order to have commerce with it. 

This is an exceptionally important point, since, beyond legitimizing commerce with the divine despite the definition of God as beyond human understanding, it also provides the intellectual basis for the creation of multiple gods. Essentially therefore the idea of isolating the properties of God, insofar as they can be understood, was understood to be a way of accessing the nature of these properties, and therefore to allow operations to take place, establishing a commerce between the divine and the world of change.

Intentionality explains why the ancients created a multiplicity of gods. If the divine itself cannot by definition be completely defined and understood, at least certain properties and attributes can be understood. These can therefore be defined and named as ways of accessing the divine. This does not at all conflict with the idea that the reality of the divine is in question. Instead this view argues that there is in fact a subjective component in the reality of the divine, at least insofar as it is possible for us to have commerce with it. That is to say, some aspects of the divine are accessible to the human mind. We cannot prove that it is real or that it exists in any sense, but despite this uncertainty, there are certain properties of the divine which are indisputable. Proof of the whole nature of the divine is unimportant, since this cannot, by the definition of the divine, be demonstrated.. We might then say that all connection with the divine therefore is an act of faith rather than certainty. The nature and power of the divine can be understood, defined, invoked and accessed by man.

Viewed in this way, we can see that each of the gods we encounter in ancient accounts represents a slice through the nature of divinity, so that one god has a special interest in one thing as opposed to another, a special set of characteristics or attributes, which more directly can be understood than an abstract and indefinable numinous concept of divinity. However the underlying numinous concept, in fact the objective numinous reality itself, requires to be real and present as the ground of being behind the multiplicity of gods. 

This explains the phenomenon of henotheism, found in ancient polytheism. Pharaoh, for example, as the incarnation of the the divine on earth, could ‘appear’ as himself, or could appear in any appropriate form of the divine. When smiting his enemies for example, he might appear as ‘Montu, in his great form.’ He might be depicted on a temple wall as Montu, rather than in the form of the king. It might also be the case that a divine pronouncement might involve the speaker moving successively from the voice and vocabulary associated with one god, to the mode of speech associated with another god, as appropriate. This has been found in Assyrian records, where someone recorded in a state of divine possession, speaks successively as the voice of different gods.

Considered in this way, the divine world is filled with a variety of gods. Some of these have been defined, and subsequently invoked. Other aspects of the underlying divine reality have not been defined or invoked, and remain as possibilities. In the world of existence, the divinities which have been defined were given representation in the form of images and statuary.

None of this should be taken to imply that polytheism initially arose from such a complex and philosophically subtle theory as this. We have much information about the growth of local pantheons in the near east, and the way in which local gods were absorbed into state pantheons, given increased importance over time, or diminished in importance, according to requirements. They would be given family relationships which they did not possess when they first arrived, and gain attributes and characteristics which they did not have when they were first born in the smaller urban centres. 

We cannot easily know to what extent there was an intellectual model behind the creation of polytheistic belief and worship from its first appearance in the archaeological and textual record. It is likely that much of what has been written about ancient polytheism from an anthropological perspective is probably correct, and valuable to our understanding. It is just that the account is incomplete from this limited perspective, and anthropologists have hardly ever seriously considered the possibility that some intellectual ideas might underpin the phenomenon as well.  

Those notionally equipped to explore this territory, the specialists in ancient philosophy and perhaps theologians, have had many reasons to stay out of this territory. For them, the possibility of the ancient presence of a sophisticated intellectual model, based on logical argument, is not something which can be easily entertained. This is something which belongs to the Greeks. Though the Greeks were polytheists, their polytheism antedates the beginnings of philosophy in the historical record, and therefore polytheism has no bearing on philosophy, or vice versa. Many writers on both Greek religion and philosophy have found this arrangement to be conveniently tidy and a boon to scholarship. But it is not the case.

Shortly before I began this work, Pope Benedict visited the UK in connection with the Beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman. When I read the details of the process of Beatification (essentially of making saints), I was struck by the resemblance between the idea of this in the Catholic Church, and the idea of setting up gods in antiquity (which will be explored in more detail later on).  The idea is that someone has to request (in ancient parlance this would be to ‘invoke’) the assistance of a person, now deceased, who showed especial virtues in life, and has to receive a response to this request which amounts to a miracle.

This is worth unpicking in detail, in order to understand the logic which is involved. It is not clear why someone would invoke someone less than the divine itself, if the divine is on offer, unless the virtues of a lesser being seem more appropriate. In other words, the prospective saint offers what looks like a channel which is more likely to be successful than the supplicant making a direct appeal to a God who is both difficult to define, and to know. 

The Catholic Church itself promotes the idea of sainthood, and unambiguously points at likely candidates. Newman has been one of those for quite sometime. Two miracles are required for the final elevation to sainthood. Why miracles? Because miracles are defined as things which cannot be accounted for in terms of earthly understanding. These may (in the extreme) be things which defy our understanding of physics, but ordinarily are occurrences such as unexpected remission from terminal illness, which ‘defies’ orthodox medical science. This was indeed the case for the supplicant who invoked the assistance of John Henry Newman.

The argument therefore runs as follows: Newman has special status in Heaven because an appeal for his assistance was answered. Because the assistance defied earthly understanding and expectation, the result was a miracle which otherwise could not have occurred. Therefore his status in Heaven is proved*[1]. Thus it is that the Catholic Church sets up saints on earth, and also in Heaven.

The Catholic Church is not based on polytheistic belief.  So it is rather surprising to find that it supports the idea that divine intervention can occur via the saints, rather than directly through the divine father, or his incarnation on earth.

The only significant difference between the Vatican’s idea of saints and the ancients idea of gods is that all of the saints are supposed to have lived human lives before being elevated to a divine status in Heaven. The ancients did not subject themselves to such an unreasonable constraint, and created gods who had never lived, and who could never have endured existence in the world. They could do this because they understood a formal and technical mechanics underpinning connection between the earthly world of existence, and divinity. The mechanics are still available to us in the records.   

It might be in order here to recap a little on the nature of the intellectual model of reality which underpins polytheistic belief, as we find it reflected in Greek texts, particularly those by Plato.

The most perfect entity it is possible for man to conceive is God. God is reality itself. The world of existence as understood by man is imperfect, and consists of imperfect representations of reality. The world of appearance as understood by man is subject to change and corruption, whereas the world of divine reality as conceived by man is eternal.

God is real. Existence is full of representations, more or less false, more or less true. Reality and existence are opposed. Man can apprehend that this is the case.

Since existence is suspended from reality, as a poor image of it, it is subject to change. Since man is an existent creature, man’s perception of reality is also subject to change. Both the nature of things which are existent, and man’s perception of these changeable things, are perpetually in flux.

Man cannot have full understanding of the nature of the divine, since, by definition, the divine transcends the world of sensible reality, and existence. It is in essence transcendental, and to the fullest extent.

However there are a number of ways in which the world of existence can access the divine reality. Several characteristic features of the divine remain in the sensible world, and retain their divine natures.  The connection does depend absolutely on the idea that the divine is complete, is total in its nature, is the ultimate limit of reality, and is the final end.  These things have analogues in the world of existence, and so there is a route of commerce open between the world of the divine and the world of existence.

Man has connection with the world of the divine through things and properties which are present in the world of existence which participate in the nature of the divine. These things include: completion, totality, the limit, the end, the perfection of a thing, a nature, a property, or an act, and so on. It also includes infinitive and superlative action, and also its extreme opposite, inaction. Greatness too, which we found to be an insufficient concept in the medieval version of an ontological argument concerning the divine, is also something which may open the way to the divine. The ancients also included ‘fame’ as one of the properties which connect man with the divine. We can explore the wide range of concepts and properties which can connect us with the divine along the way.  We shall find that justice, beauty, magnanimity, ethical and moral perfection, and honour, are also included in this list.

It is not necessary for us to have a complete understanding of the divine in order to access aspects of that higher reality. In fact a focus on particular characteristics, a ‘bracketing’ of the most relevant aspects of the divine, increases the efficacy of the commerce with the divine. Thus the intentionality of the supplicant is a factor in the opening of contact with the divine. There are other ideas associated with the strengthening of the connection with the divine which we shall explore. These include reduplication, the striking together of images and concepts, the collection or heaping up of things, especially where these result in reduplication of properties; the act of drawing near to the divine, or to the image of the divine, and so on. The deliberate opposition of ideas and images is also relevant to the business of establishing a commerce with the divine. For connection with the divine represents an alteration of state.

And to reiterate a key point, none of this proves the reality of God. It merely establishes a range of correspondences between a concept of God and a hypothetical Being who might or might not have reality. Instead, the entire intellectual system underpinning polytheism, at least in its later stages, was rooted in the paradoxical and transcendent notion of the divine, which necessarily defied human comprehension. So, there was no proof available, but within this world view, ‘proof’ conclusive to the human understanding would have demolished the entire edifice.

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[1] It is proved by the fact that it could not ordinarily have happened. This is a tacit admission that what is real, what is possible, at the level of divine reality, may be entirely contrary to what we understand as possible in the world of existence. 

The Idea of the Plenum in Babylon

The Babylonian Creation was twofold. The first creation was the product of a plenum, and describes a hail of impossible animals tumbling out of it, with features and limbs which were interchangeable, resulting in some creatures which were utterly fantastic. The creation is from a plenum, because all the characteristics of living creatures are already present, though the way these characteristics are distributed is the stuff of nightmares. This first creation was without reason and rational order, and chaotic.

We are also told that the creatures shared each others features. This is another characteristic of a plenum. All things can pass into everything else. Nothing is fixed. The initial state of the world does not have fixity of any sort.

Were the gods already present? Some of them were, at least in a sense. The Babylonians had the idea that they could call gods into existence, by naming and describing them, and performing ritual which set them up in the Babylonian Heaven. 

There is a curious aspect to the Babylonian creation story, in that the god Marduk, who became the head of the pantheon of Gods, and was the defining power for the organisation of the second creation, was said to have been ‘held prisoner’ during the time of the first creation. This imprisonment can be understood in at least two ways. First of all, if Marduk had been active at the time of the first creation, why would he have allowed its irrational nature? Therefore it was decided that the explanation for his inaction was that he was not free to act. A second interpretation of his imprisonment may be that the initial irrational creation was inevitable, and had to happen before it was possible to establish good order. Something about the first creation resulted in his release and his presence.

In either case, the idea of the plenum is indicated, and in its most pure form.

The gods in the Babylonian creation story are indicative of abstract powers and properties, and some of them have reality before the advent of the second creation. Anshar, is King of Heaven for example (in fact he has no name as such, since An Shar is the description ‘King of Heaven’. It is important to know what he is).  The Babylonian Heaven is clearly the underlying plenum, where all things are present as potencies, so Anshar is the abstraction of the potency of the plenum. In the complex narrative of the liturgy for the New Year Festival, Anshar is father to Marduk, but Marduk is also presented as the equal of Anshar. In fact as Anshar himself. Marduk is also the equal of other important gods representing abstract ideas in the earliest times of the creation.

Description of these early gods natures, associations, and actions is a way for the Babylonians to discuss and understand the nature of the plenum from which the gods emerged. What Marduk eventually became as head of the Babylonian pantheon, described in the passage in the liturgy known as 'The Fifty Names of Marduk', is the totality of the powers of Anshar and the other gods, and therefore signifies that Marduk embodies the character of the underlying pleroma. 

After Marduk established control, and began to call the other gods into existence, these later gods now represent something like a human understanding of the world, and how it might be made.  The gods represent in abstract form the good things in human life and social organisation. Each god is represented as an aspect of Marduk and his exemplification of good kingship. Thus the gods names and descriptions indicate that he supplies places of refuge for man, the cultivation of crops, the provision of quays and landings for trade, the maintenance of good order in the world, and so on.

Sometimes the gods are brought into being as twins, with slightly different names. This can indicate a division between an abstract concept and a state. Marc Van De Mieroop in his book ‘Philosophy Before the Greeks’ gives an example of a pair of these names from a genealogy of divine names, one of which means ‘mud’ and the other means ‘muddy’.

  

Physics and the Origins of the Universe (II)

Current popular understanding of how the universe came into physical existence depends on some improbable ideas, such as the existence of physics where physics cannot be present, and that there was a physical explosion of something into a place which did not yet exist. This doesn't seem to trouble the popular understanding. More importantly, it does not seem to trouble most physicists. 

I've written elsewhere about how we got into this difficulty. In short, the west ditched certain ideas about reality between the time of Newton and the Enlightenment, and consequently also ditched the intellectual tools necessary to understand how and why we have physics and a physical existence.

What follows is a description of creation as it might have been framed, if the west had not offloaded the concepts and tools which enable an understanding of the origins of the universe not requiring us to believe several impossible things before breakfast.  

Essentially this argument proposes that physical existence is the consequence of an underlying plenum, whose nature transcends our understanding of what is real. The nature of this plenum is what gives rise to physics and the physical world, through the necessity of retaining its own nature. As a result, the physical world has a logical origin, rather than an origin requiring a strange pre-existence of physical laws.  

The second part of this discussion (Physics and the Origins of the Universe III) concerns the Kaluza-Klein hypothesis, whose implications suggest that the idea of a plenum, in the form of a fifth dimension, is critically important in connecting Einstein's field equations, and Maxwell's equations for electrodynamics. 

The Plenum and its Properties (I)

The Plenum is, as it is, undefined in any way. We can say that it is what it is, and that its properties are those which can be said to characterise the plenum: it has no shape or form, or size. It does not move (there is as yet no space), and it has no age (there is as yet no time, which is a vector of change).

What are the properties of the plenum? It is one undivided thing, which has no physical existence, no location, and is something which remains unaltered and unalterable. It is literally eternal. It is utterly transcendent of the categories of our understanding, and is not subject to the laws of physics. Though it is one undivided thing, it is beyond characterisation as one undivided thing. It is just that which is, before dimensions and time, and categories of understanding.

It is neither one thing nor another.  It can be understood as a fullness, since it is not an absence. But in itself, it is not a presence either. It has potential. This does not mean that its nature will change, but that there is potential within its nature for the appearance and perception of change, size, form and shape.

So we are building up a picture of the plenum, or the initial state of the cosmos. It is one not two, (there is no ‘two’). It is beyond definition. It is unmoving and is not subject to change. It contains the potential for all of these things, including time and space, since it is undefined. It can contain these things as entities which appear, in the context of other things which can perceive entities which appear. At the earliest stages, perception can mean as little as detection of, and response to, things which appear. Not consciousness of any sort that we would understand.

All physical reality that may ever have existence is, in a sense, already present within the plenum. That is, physical reality is already present in potential.

All possibility is present in the plenum. Nothing is fixed or determined, at least initially (we are looking back at the initial conditions, so ‘initially’ references our own point of view, not that of the plenum. It is not in development. It does not change).

So the plenum is, conceived from the outside, is a formless, churning and foaming potency.

What other things can we say of the Plenum? It is infinite, in that it not finite, since it is undefined. It is also infinitesimal, for the same reason.

The parameters in which the apparent realities of the physical world can have their existence include binary opposites.  We can oppose the ideas of the infinite and the infinitesimal, but we can also oppose the ideas of the infinite and the finite. These are different oppositions involving the same concept. We can do the same with other oppositions, such as the unlimited and the limited, and the limitless and the limited. These may appear to be the same, but the unlimited is something which has not been subject to limit. The limitless is simply that which is without limit.  Likewise with the ideas of great and small. But the great can be contrasted with the not-great, which is not limited to the idea of small.

These may appear to be footling distinctions between abstractions, but the abstractions are the earliest things which can be present in the plenum, before the plenum can give rise to the appearance of a physical reality (abstractions are by definition beyond particular physical instances). So the churn in the plenum is in a sense a logical one, rather than anything resembling a physical reality. It is a chaos of logical possibilities, and also of logical contradictions. The Plenum does not have a consciousness, at this level of the creation.

The plenum has been defined as one, and itself. What may the one be contrasted with? The many? Or the absence of the oneness of anything? The idea of the many can be contained within the plenum as an abstract idea, without compromising the oneness of the plenum. Likewise, the absence of oneness. Each of these opposing abstractions within the plenum represents a potential subdivision of its nature, by which a physical creation increasingly becomes a possibility. All of this is present in the plenum from the beginning. This chaos of conflicting abstractions is eternal.  For a physical and ordered world to exist the conflicting abstractions need to marshalled.

The formless abstractions are ideas, which are subject to the power of other ideas. This stage can be understood as a second creation, in which logical decisions are made. At this point we could speak of the presence of a consciousness, though all that is meant is that an ordering process begins to take place, replacing a senseless churn of abstractions and oppositions.

The oppositions represent the sameness of the plenum with its difference. In the case of the infinite and the finite, the infinite is the sameness, and the finite is the difference. In both cases, the same and the different are the same plenum, understood differently, and looked at with different categories of understanding.  In a sense the plenum begins to understand itself after the second creation. The idea of finitude is crucial to the creation of physical reality, and is created as a qualifier of the idea of infinity.

Another property of the plenum is the completeness of what it is. But completeness can imply boundedness, rather than the boundless. Is the plenum bounded and therefore limited and finite because it is complete? Again, it is a matter of the categories of understanding which are brought to bear.

With finitude, and the idea of the many, physical reality becomes possible. The abstractions can be understood in terms of number, while still being abstract.  With the presence of number, all kinds of processes and constructs become possible.  But we are still (from our point of view) before space and time in any sense we would understand. 

The unmoving abstract concept of the plenum gives rise to the idea of a possible opposite, which is a cosmos of movement. So space and time become abstractions by which numbers and their interactions may be represented. Once you have space and time, the representation of numbers can move beyond points to geometrical shapes, and eventually three dimensional form.

Space and time are generated by the same process of opposing the same and the different. Ultimately they are both representations of understandings of the plenum.

So what populates the cosmos? The earliest occupant of the newly generated physical cosmos will be hydrogen, since it is the simplest element, made up of two different electrical charges. These charges will have been created as a consequence of the same principle of opposing the same and the different. A myriad of representations of one or more of the original polarities contained (as a possibility) in the plenum. 

It is possible to see opposing electrical charges as a representation of the same and the different in the context of finitude.  Whereas the raw state of the plenum is foaming and churning (from our point of view), hydrogen represents a stable opposition of electrical charges in a dynamical relation. The foaming and churning has, in this representation, been reduced to a resonance. Order has emerged from chaos.

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There was a well-known toy for drawing complex patterns when I was a child (Spirograph). It had its limitations as a toy, but it taught me that a simple ratio could imply something very complex, depending on how that ratio was expressed. Similarly so with the development of patterns in animal fur, which Alan Turing investigated at the end of his life – the underlying mathematics were often simple, but the process could produce startlingly complex patterns.  The complexity we see in physical reality can have its roots in something very simple, such as the generation of numbers (real or imaginary).

I learned to use log tables and a slide rule while at school. That taught me that a process such as multiplication could be represented as addition, depending on the adopted point of view.  In the case of logarithms, through the use of reciprocal numbers.  Again, the same, represented in both form and process, by the different.  And patterns emerge from the encounters of the same with the different. So interaction between the plenum itself with its difference, and the representations of its relationship with its difference, can be understood in terms of ratio. The old sense of what is rational descends from this idea – what accords, what is consonant, etc. 

Two logical modalities underpin the descent of aspects of the plenum into physical reality. One can be understood in terms of entities possessing identity with itself, of not being something else while it is itself, and not partaking of itself and something else while it is itself. The other logical modality is startlingly different, but it is a completely rational modality. Since the encounter of the same with the different is happening within the underlying plenum, and is in a sense powered by the properties of the plenum, it is the case that all things can pass into one another. That is, what is the same as itself, can pass into what is different from itself.

It is not possible however for the same to always pass directly into something which is different from it. It must pass from itself to what is different through a rational process. It is possible for the same to do this, since it necessarily shares aspects of its nature with the plenum within which it has its reality. This is how this logical modality is rational, and not chaotic.

When I learned music, I found that the possible scales were patterns within the octave which reflected mathematical ratios based on the octave itself. That is, each of the notes possessed a relationship with the root note of the octave which expressed a ratio which existed outside the octave. Music works because we are hearing the intervals, and the progressions of the intervals, all of which are in a sense beyond the actual notes played. So we are appreciating the rationality of the relationship of one to the other.  The expression of those relationships can be understood as a rational and logical interplay between what is the same, and what is its difference; multiplied, and in different sequences, both horizontally and vertically.

One particular ratio, is defined by ‘the smaller is to the larger, as the larger is to the whole’. This is of course the golden ratio, where each of the parts bears a relationship to the whole, and, is not dependent at all on any scalar values. So it has a reality which exists apart from any particular instance in which this ratio may be expressed. It refers to itself, without necessary reference to anything which has physical reality. It is an abstraction which refers only to sameness, and to difference. It is therefore a conception of great importance, and we should expect to find it often represented in the continuum of reality. And we do.  It is the plenum, the thing which is itself, reminding us of how the world of physical reality came into existence.

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The two logical modalities both draw their natures from the properties and characteristics of the plenum. They appear to be contradictory, but then the nature of the plenum contains a number of apparent contradictions. Nevertheless, it must be itself, whatever itself is. But it must also share its identity with every aspect of itself, since, in reality, there is nothing other than the plenum. Accordingly, the world of appearances is just that – the world of abstractions and concrete instances, of ideas, number and physical form, is just an array of different perspectives on the plenum. The plenum is the one true thing, and all that there is.

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The plenum is complete, and whole. Every other thing which has reality has it because it participates in the plenum through its completeness. Anything which is whole participates in wholeness, and wholeness is an abstraction which provides connection with the ultimate abstraction of wholeness, which is the plenum. All parts of things also participate in the plenum through the wholeness they share as the parts of things which are whole. If they are whole or completed parts, they again participate in the wholeness of the plenum. So in sense, the part and the whole are not entirely separable concepts. They can be understood as the same and the different. They may also pass into and out of one another.

Because nothing can have reality or existence, or come to be and pass away, change, or move, without the underlying ground of reality, it can be argued that the plenum must be real for the illusion of these finite things to function.

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This is an account of a creation from abstractions, which have no firm location in time or space, even where there is time and space present. So it is possible to conceive of them having reality before time and space came to be.  The need to explain the presence of the physical world in terms of a physical creation is removed, which is plainly a species of category mistake: the presence of the physical world does not need to be explained in terms of a physical creation, which approach has saddled our understanding with the need to find a prime mover.

There is also no need for the idea of a creation ex nihilo. The presence of a plenum (which is neither presence nor absence) allows for a rational creation from the interplay of abstractions. The plenum contains all things which may be thought, and which may come into existence. Hence we can understand reality by studying its properties, as well as come to understand why the physical world is the way it is. This approach is not the opposite of a scientific understanding of reality, it is the root of a scientific understanding of reality, and of its subset, the physical world.

Thomas Yaeger, 21-2 February 2016.

Pleroma, Cosmos, and Physical Existence

As suggested elsewhere, there isn’t much we can say about the initial state of physical reality at a notional time of its emergence, if the various parameters of what can be said of it don’t have any existence. That’s the problem physics has when it is looking for causes and mechanisms.

However it is possible to talk about the initial state of reality in terms of logical argument, which is how it was done in antiquity. They were familiar with talking about reality in terms of extreme states: does it exist? What is it? Is it one or two? If it is two is reality other than itself? Is reality complete in itself? Is physical existence a copy based on the pattern of reality itself? If it is a copy, has the nature of reality itself been compromised?

Whatever the initial conditions might have been, we can say that those conditions are at the edge of physical existence. Which is not to suggest that they actually occupy some kind of space at the edge of physical existence. Just that, since the initial conditions don’t participate in the conditions of our physical existence (extension, vectors, time, etc), then these conditions will, to us, appear to be something which we can find at the extremes of physical existence.

This is the root of the idea of the telos. It is about beginnings and endings – how things start and finish. When what is ultimately real is considered in this way, it is susceptible to logical analysis, and an idea of a prime mover beyond the properties of the telos itself is not required.

A discussion of this conception of the telos should be untarnished by the general deprecation of teleological argument in any kind of scientific analysis. We aren’t looking for purpose. But we are looking for the beginning, and how things might have unfolded from that beginning. The concept of the telos as a plenum, a pleroma undefined by the kind of parameters we find in our physical existence, as opposed to the idea that physical existence just appeared ex nihilo, can be discussed. Nothing as absence is very hard to discuss, except in the context of its opposite. In fact it cannot reasonably be conceived without that context.

The discussion of Aristotle (elsewhere) places his laws of thought into a wider context. The laws represent tools in the Greek dialectical armoury. So do the techniques used by Plato. But they are quite different and produce different kinds of argument and result in different conclusions. They belong to the same armoury (a discussion for another time). It is possible to understand some things with Plato’s approach which would not be possible with a rigorous application of Aristotle’s laws of thought. It isn’t the case that one logical approach is correct, and the other not. But they are appropriate to different contexts.

A plenum can be understood as identical with itself, and so, in that sense, can be thought of as consistent with the first of the laws of thought. But its properties, as understood from the point of view of physical reality, cannot be self-consistent, since it is beyond definition in physical terms. So the plenum must have a paradoxical aspect (literally meaning it is beyond human understanding), and therefore must breach the other two laws of thought (it can be one thing or its opposite; and it may also be neither one thing or its opposite).

There are several ways an argument about an initial and ever-present plenum can be taken forward. One is to take the view that physical reality represents a partial view of the plenum. Or can be understood as an assemblage of partial views of the plenum. It contains consistencies and regularities, but at a granular level (particularly), it behaves with apparent inconsistency, being best understood in terms of probability. That is how the plenum is, or at least the best way it can be understood by us. It isn’t one thing or the other. But occasionally its granularity looks like one thing or the other. And sometimes both at the same time. We can describe what is going on in terms of probabilities, which is how physics handles it, but it is not understood except in terms of mathematical description. The idea of the plenum, as established through a purely logical analysis, gives us insight into how the universe is actually operating.

It could be argued that physical reality behaves as it does at the quantum level because, for all practical purposes, the plenum has no size. So, at the quantum level, we are looking more closely at the nature of the plenum as it is, or rather as it must, on account of its nature, look to us.

Quantum entanglement might have a similar basis, on the ground that what is happening is actually happening in the plenum, rather than in physical space. Despite it having no size, it must necessarily be (in a sense) distributed throughout space and time.

In future I will be discussing Bell’s Theorem; Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen; and Klein-Kaluza. Also about the fact that Maxwell’s equations can be derived from Klein-Kaluza, and why the maths of Klein-Kaluza has two states.