I am still reading through this series (I finished the second part yesterday and am gonna read the third one soon), but I find it fascinating how you and DBH manage to combine the mysticism with the history without abandoning either and this is really what attracts me to this type of thinking where you can let your mind contemplate the infinite and experience this intimacy without abandoning or making up the history behind the tradition. Thank you, David. And I would really love to read the books you recommend for further reading.
So can we say that even before Plotinus there is a sense of the First God being supranoetic?
I did note when you gave the cosmology it went : Planetary spheres - World Soul - Nous - One; would, in the second century, this hold true, or would it be more like world soul -> demiurgic nous -> highest nous (that is the Good)?
I guess its a pedantic difference at that point; but I would like to hear your, I guess, henography (just to parallel theography/christography).
All I know about the status of the highest god before Plotinus is that Philo and Clement foreshadowed the Neoplatonic apophatic character of the highest god while themselves being Middle Platonist.
I am still reading through this series (I finished the second part yesterday and am gonna read the third one soon), but I find it fascinating how you and DBH manage to combine the mysticism with the history without abandoning either and this is really what attracts me to this type of thinking where you can let your mind contemplate the infinite and experience this intimacy without abandoning or making up the history behind the tradition. Thank you, David. And I would really love to read the books you recommend for further reading.
So can we say that even before Plotinus there is a sense of the First God being supranoetic?
I did note when you gave the cosmology it went : Planetary spheres - World Soul - Nous - One; would, in the second century, this hold true, or would it be more like world soul -> demiurgic nous -> highest nous (that is the Good)?
I guess its a pedantic difference at that point; but I would like to hear your, I guess, henography (just to parallel theography/christography).
All I know about the status of the highest god before Plotinus is that Philo and Clement foreshadowed the Neoplatonic apophatic character of the highest god while themselves being Middle Platonist.