Part four of Augustine vs the Empire series
By Matthew Ehret
In this fourth installment of this series, we will explore the emergence of a new strategy of warfare against early Christianity.
While efforts to destroy the new movement through fire, lions, and direct persecution failed, a more insidious tactic of infiltration via Gnostic cults became a new technique launched near the end of the first century.
Much of the program for creating an infinitely divisible hydra of Gnostic sects in the place of a unified Christianity followed a template established by a figure named Simon the Sorcerer.
St Augustine’s City of God and the Arc of Universal History
The Origins of the Roman Empire… the Mystery Cults Migrate to a New Host
As Rome Goes Dark, Christianity Emerges onto the Stage of History
Simon the Sorcerer is sometimes known as ‘The Bad Samaritan’ who had been trying to gain influence in the early ministry shortly after Jesus had died, and after demonstrating that he was a disingenuous infiltrator, was basically told: “okay, this is not for you.”
He was caught trying to pay money to attain the superpowers of miracle working, rationalizing that if Christ could do miracles, then with enough money, he could learn this witchcraft as well.
In the Book of Acts, we find the following characterization:
9 Now for some time a man named Simon had practiced sorcery in the city and amazed all the people of Samaria. He boasted that he was someone great, 10 and all the people, both high and low, gave him their attention and exclaimed, “This man is rightly called the Great Power of God.” 11 They followed him because he had amazed them for a long time with his sorcery. 12 But when they believed Philip as he proclaimed the good news of the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women. [Acts 8: 9–12, NIV]
After being denounced by Peter, Simon was expelled from the flock, and quickly traveled to Rome, arriving in 40 AD alongside his sacred prostitute Helen whom he heralded as “The Holy Spirit” to his new Messiah.
Simon proclaimed to be the avatar of God on earth, and professed to have a new secret gospel which superseded the now-obsolete message of Jesus. It did not take long for Simon to be elevated to the status of a god by his followers, and powerful Roman patricians quickly erect statues to him while promoting the lie that Simon’s dark brand of pseudo-Christianity (which involves orgies, human sacrifice, and black magic) was the only genuine Christianity that existed. Early church fathers including Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Hippolytus, Eusibius of Caesaria, and Epiphanius all identified Simon the Sorcerer as the father of the Gnostics.
St. Irenaeus wrote of Simon’s perverse Trinity writing in Against Heresies:
“This man [Simon] was glorified by many as if he were a god; and he taught that it was himself who appeared among the Jews as the Son but descended in Samaria as the Father while he came to other nations in the character of the Holy Spirit. He represented himself, in a word, as being the loftiest of all powers, that is, the Being who is the Father over all, and he allowed himself to be called by whatsoever title men were pleased to address him.”
Within Gnostic scriptures written by the heirs of Simon the Sorcerer during the 2nd through 4th centuries, we find variations of his perverse Trinity, such as in the Apocryphon of John which reads:
“I am the Father. I am the Mother. I am the Son.”
And in the Gnostic text Trimrophic Primal Thought we see the deity saying:
“I am androgynous. I am both Mother and Father, since I copulate with myself and with those who love me… I am the womb that give shape to all. I am Meirethea- the glory of the Mother.”
Needless to say, Simon’s perverse brand of occult Christianity gave early Christians a very bad reputation because many Roman citizens were rightfully repulsed by the demonic behavior of this new group. They were disgusted by the effect it was having on their youth and wanted this cult dismantled. It is very likely that Emperor Nero’s enthusiastic support of Simon the Magician had much to do with the Emperor’s desire to create an evil scarecrow to terrify Romans and then use as an excuse to burn Rome and blame it on the entire Christian movement.
It is noteworthy that when the powerful Committee of 15 (aka: ‘The Quindecimviri sacris faciundis’ which guarded and interpreted the Sibylline Oracles) demanded that Christianity be illegalized as a forbidden cult in 64 AD. However, this edict did not apply to Simon the Sorcerer and his followers who were permitted continue operating by the Committee and Nero. The fact that Nero was also a Mithraic initiate who ruled Rome through the Praetorian guard (which was itself a Mithraic warrior cult infused into Rome via Pontus’s Mithradaites elites in the first century BC) may have something to do with his decision to elevate Simon’s heresy while attacking Christianity.
In The Book of Acts, we are told that the Apostle Peter played a key role in shutting down Simon’s scam resulting in Simon’s “magical powers” failing him while carrying out a demonstration for the Emperor Nero whereby the sorcerer fell to his death. For the crime of exposing Simon the Sorcerer, Nero quickly had Peter killed[9].
Even though Simon was defeated, his followers, known as the Simonians, who transmitted Hermetic doctrines from Alexandria in Egypt across all of Rome, openly expanded their influence until the late fourth century, when they were forced to go underground along with the other cults.
Literally hundreds of other spin-off cults grew out of his movement among the Gnostic sects who each featured “enlightened” gurus who proclaimed to achieve “gnosis” (a species of knowledge attained without any use of creative reason). This supposed ‘knowledge’ was attained through rites of self-hypnosis, sensory deprivation in caves or deserts, extreme fasting mixed with ecstatic experiences of sexual rites, drug use and peculiar breathing techniques, all of which gave these elite gurus the supposed authority to speak in ‘altered states’ with the authority of God. Typically, these self-deified god-men and women were possessed by a “Holy Spirit” much like 19th century trance mediums, or evangelical possessed pastors speaking in tongues during revivalist meetings. These elites would then prophecy and orate new holy gospels for their followers.
Some notable examples of Gnostic prophets who advanced this new dispensation always involving a ‘secret doctrine’ for elites included such notable gurus as Cerinthus, Menander, Marcion, Carpocrates, Montanus, Valentinus, and Basileides (to name but a few).
The Structure of Gnostic Cosmology
Writing in How Jesus and his Followers Saved Civilization (1980), historian Robert Carmen Dreyfuss outlines the higher mystery cults which engineered the new gnostic sects during the 1st through 4th centuries AD:
“The Isis Cult and its sister cults [Magna Mater-Cybele/Attis, Mithra etc] were determined to destroy Christianity from the inside. Gnosticism, by adopting the protective coloration of being a quasi- or pseudo- Christian sect, used that capability to try to introduce the ancient belief structure of the cults back into the Christian movement.”
Among the themes of the Gnostic gospels include 1) a sexualization of God into a bisexual being in who’s image all initiates are made, 2) the elimination of the divinity of Christ, 3) the re-branding of the Biblical God as an evil demiurge, 4) the glorification of secret mysteries only accessible through the abandonment of reasoning powers, and in some cases, 5) redemption through sexual frenzy, and hallucinogenic beverages.
Across the multitude of variations of Gnostic “sacred stories”, we find the existence of sexualized spirit entities called ‘aeons’ that were created by an entity of pure light and emptiness not dissimilar to the zen Buddhist ideal of “Being” as “Not-Being”.
After multiple breedings, these aeon entities became more numerous, and by virue of their separation in “time” from the source Being, they became more impure resulting in the youngest aeon dubbed ‘Pistis Sophia’ (and sometimes ‘Gaia’) who became infested with ignorance and despised masculine energy so much that she procreated with herself creating an abomination.
As the story goes, this abortive child became a sociopathic and self-delusional multi-sex demiurge named ‘Yaldabaoth’, commonly expressed as a snake with lion’s head. Typically, the imagery of Yaldabaoth is conveyed with a sun and moon flanking the monstrocity indicating rituals of ‘ascent’ and ‘descent’ (or Apollonian/Dionysian-Bachanalian types) affiliated with ceremonies of worshipers of the mysteries.
It appears that this rendition of the Gnostic demiurge was lifted directly from the earlier Egyptian solar icon Chnoubis which was used as an amulet to protect against disease and poisons.
This sociopathic demiurge infused darkness with light creating a new force of evil to counterbalance the good and with this evil force, dubbed himself ‘the one and only God’ who created the universe in seven days.
This evil demiurge took on the names ‘Yaldabaoth’, ‘Samael, and Saklas’, and throughout gnostic sects is referred to as ‘Great Archon’ (by Valentinus), ‘Chief Archon’ (by the Apocryphon of John), ‘Great Demiurge’ (by Basilides), or Satan (in the Gnostic Gospel of Nicodemus), and is found throughout the Gnostic scriptures as the ignorant and purely evil God of the Bible, that made the world in his/her image.
In the Gnostic Sethian treatise called ‘The Nature of the Rulers’, we find the evil demiurge saying:
“I am God; there is no other but me”. When he said this, he sinned against [the Realm of All]. This boast rose up to Incorruptibility and a voice answered from Incorruptibility and said “You are wrong, Samael”- which means “blind god”… His thoughts were blind. He expressed his power- that is, the blasphemy he had uttered- and pursued it down to chaos and his mother the abyss, at the instigation of Pistis Sophia”. She established each of his offspring according to its power, after the pattern of the eternal realms above. For the visible originated from the invisible.”
Describing the break of the souls of Yaldabaoth and his corrupt co-creating Archons, from the realm of spirits which are incorruptible beings of light, the author of the Sethian text states: “Her [Sophia’s] image appeared as a reflection in the waters, and the authorities [demiurge and top Archons] of darkness fell in love with her. But they could not grasp the image that appeared to them in the waters [since]… what is only soul cannot grasp what is of spirit. For the authorities [see archons-creator beings of material world and the realm of reason] were from below, but the image of Incorruptibility was from above.”
Within this Gnostic cosmology, the figure of Christ becomes an aeon/archon who delivered the secret mysteries to mankind through the figure of the serpent in the Garden. The figure of Yaldabaoth was so enraged by this heresy that he fooled the world into thinking that the serpent, or Lucifer was evil, but in truth was always the path to light.[1]
In the Gospel of Seth (which at various times is the name for Noah’s supposed third son and also the snake of the garden), a ritual is even promoted for anyone wishing to “know” the heavens… simply cut out a womb from a living pregnant woman:
“Heaven and earth have a shape similar to the womb… and if… anyone wants to investigate this, let him carefully examine the pregnant womb of any living creature, and he will discover an image of the heavens and the earth.”
Whether or not this was in the minds of the satanic murder of Roman Polanski’s pregnant wife at the hands of the Scientology-connected Manson family is a question that has not been addressed by any known researcher in this author’s opinion.
In another gospel found among the Nag Hamadi scriptures in Egypt in 1947, we have the Trimophic Protennoia speaking as the voice of God saying:
“I am the Voice… [it is] I who speak within every creature… Now I have come a second time in the likeness of a female, and have spoken with them… I have revealed myself in the Thought of the likeness of my masculinity.”
In the Gnostic gospel ‘Thunder, Perfect Mind’ we hear the same voice go even further saying:
“I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore, and the holy one. I am the wife, and the virgin. I am the mother and the daughter… I am knowledge and ignorance… I am shameless; I am ashamed. I am strength and I am fear… I am foolish and I am wise… I am godless and I am one whose God is great.”
The theme which all of the aforementioned adopt is the notion that the “pure Christianity” was found in the pre-Nicene Gnostic mystery cults- which in truth were nothing more than pseudo-Mithraic/Cybele/Demeter sects having adopted a mere Christian veneer.
Recall that within the Mithraic underground temples found all across Europe and Africa, the image of the Leontecephalus is a recurring theme featuring motifs of the serpent encoiled around an initiate’s nude body having adopted a lion’s head. Like in the case of the Yaldabaoth demiurge, this is just one of many pieces of evidence demonstrating that the Gnostics were merely socially engineered cults spawned out of the womb of much older mystery cults.
On top of the Gnostic sects threatening the early Christian movement, there were other influential splintering groups of Christianity that disagreed on fundamental interpretations of the Trinity, free will, destiny, morality and everything in between. Some groups stated that the Trinity is something that’s susceptible to sense perception which people could literally see and feel and taste and smell. Others promoted the notion that the figure of Jesus was pure spirit devoid of matter, while others asserted that the essence of Jesus (and by default all mankind) was entirely separate from the Creator.
The Donatist Heresy
Then there were the Donatists- followers of a charismatic self-professed prophet named Donatus Magnus of Carthage born in 270 AD.
Donatus’ followers preached that if you have committed a sin, then you cannot be involved in the church, since the church is only for people who are absolutely perfect and without sin. But who on earth could ever attain that? Certainly not anyone who had even an ounce of humility.
Under the influence of the Donatists– which for a period became the dominant sect of Christianity across Northern Africa– many members of the Church were condemned for having sinned during the Diocletian persecutions. During this dark period, many Christians saved their own lives by paying homage to various Roman gods which were placed in Christian churches. For the Donatists, this was unforgiveable since the Church was only open for Saints who were without sin (interestingly the very opposite of Christ’s teachings).
The Pelagians
Another schismatic sect that arose during this time were ‘The Pelagians’ who promoted the concept that God’s grace was an obsolete concept because anyone could be freed from sin through the sheer power of their stoic will and ascetic lifestyles. The Pelagians were the followers of the Neo-Druidic leader Pelagius of the British Isles who was a contemporary of Augustine and lived from 350-420 AD. Pelagius brought his ideology to Rome in 385 AD becoming extremely influential among the Roman Patrician class.
Like the Donatists, Pelagius taught that Absolute perfection was possible, with the difference that the Pelagians made it more universal asserting that perfection was mankind’s natural state, and that the belief in sin itself was the cause of our imperfectability. Perhaps most repulsive to Augustine was Pelagius’ concept that mankind’s fundamental motive to do good was the fear of burning in hell for eternity… whereas Augustine taught that it was the joy and love of God as a positive force which was the only true cause of doing good and avoiding sin.
Unlike Pelagius, who asserted that mankind could freely will to do evil, Augustine asserted mankind could only freely will to do good, as evil itself had no claim to ontological existence in his worldview… that is beyond existing as an absence of the Good. This equal standard of good and evil embedded in reality, was considered by Augustine to be a noxious concept at the heart of much superstition and destruction. Which brings us to…
The Manicheans
In the Cult of the Manicheans, to which Augustine had once himself belonged[10], he identified a rotten inner core not dissimilar to the fallacies of the Pelagians and Donatists if not more complex in appearance.
The Manicheans hid their secret teachings from the uninitiated through complex rites and theories but ultimately held to the false belief that adepts would also attain literal perfectibility (gnosis). The Manicheans also promoting the false notion that evil itself was a positive and necessary counter-balancing force to Goodness, and that both had equal claims to existence. Augustine, on the other hand, asserted that evil could only be understood as a negation of substance itself, generated as the effect of free will, self-delusion, and perverse/unnatural yearnings which were the consequence of ignorance.
“…evil whose origin I sought is not a substance…To You [God], then evil utterly is not—and not only to You, but to Your whole creation likewise, evil is not…”
Augustine’s view of evil (which he adapted from Plato) was supported by the writings of the New Testament itself… especially in the writings of Paul to the Hebrews where we find an insightful assessment of the cause of sin- not as ‘caused’ by God as the Manicheans assumed, but entirely inner-driven by the disharmonies of a soul that doesn’t know itself or its own health:
“Never, when you have been tempted say: ‘God sent the temptation; God cannot be tempted to do anything wrong, and he does not tempt anybody. Everyone who is tempted is attracted and seduced by his own wrong desire. Then the desire conceives and gives birth to sin and when sin is fully grown, it too has a child and the child is death”
Augustine used the example of light and darkness in a manner very different from the Manicheans. He observed that since light could extinguish darkness while darkness could not extinguish light… so too was Goodness capable of extinguishing evil, but evil could not extinguish light through any positive influence within itself. Just as darkness was merely the absence of light, so evil was the absence of the good.
Augustine would carry out a major battle with all three sects of Manicheans, Pelagians and Donatists—all three powerful sects which he successful defeated during his lifetime.
In response to the Donatists, Augustine made the point that Christianity was a theology of forgiveness, and most importantly that no mortal is without sin. No one was without flaws, and so it is delusional to think of oneself as perfect, or God without Grace.
Many people are understandably uncomfortable with the extreme emphasis which Augustine places on sin throughout his writings, and there is no doubt that great damage was done over the centuries by Church leaders who used shame of sin and fear of hell to control many Christians. But it is important to realize that the reason for Augustine’s arguments on sin were directly connected to this specific existential battle with the Donatists and Pelagians.
Augustine made the point in many of his writings that were it not for Forgiveness, Repentance and Grace, then Christianity would have no value. There would have never emerged a Paul out of a Saul of Tarsus. Saul was after all a fanatic and murderer while serving with the Pharisees spending years hunting down and murdering Christians. Upon his famous Road to Damascus conversion, Saul repented for his sinful ways and took on a new more potent identity.
Although Saul of Tarsus may have felt justified killing Christians while serving as a Pharisee, he always knew deep down inside that it was wrong. And he saw the light, felt intense shame and he changed. So, Augustine argued, who are the Donatists, who profess to believe in the works of Paul, to say that Christianity is for people who have only ever lived a life of purity and have never sinned?
Augustine: Life at the End of an Empire
As stated earlier, in 395 AD, The Roman Empire broke up into an East-West division. It is also during this period that Christianity is officially established as the new official state religion.
By this time Augustine, still a young man, converted to Christianity in 385 AD.
He had been converted by St. Ambrose, the first Christian who Augustine had ever encountered who did not simply lecture at him or promote blind obedience to the Bible. Over the course of many months, and countless extended dialogues, Ambrose, who was extremely cultured, was able to generate rational arguments to support the thesis why Jesus’ teachings were reasonable.
Speaking in his Confessions, Augustine described the effect which Ambrose’s teachings had upon his mind as he was struggling with the realization that his former Manichean faith (and his guru Faustus) was nothing but a castle built on sands devoid of any genuine wisdom:
“And to Milan I came, to Ambrose the bishop, famed through the whole world as one of the best of men, thy devoted servant… To him I was led by thee without my knowledge, that by him I might be led to thee in full knowledge. That man of God received me as a father would, and welcomed my coming as a good bishop should. And I began to love him, of course, not at the first as a teacher of the truth, for I had entirely despaired of finding that in thy Church–but as a friendly man. And I studiously listened to him–though not with the right motive–as he preached to the people. I was trying to discover whether his eloquence came up to his reputation, and whether it flowed fuller or thinner than others said it did. And thus I hung on his words intently, but, as to his subject matter, I was only a careless and contemptuous listener. I was delighted with the charm of his speech, which was more erudite, though less cheerful and soothing, than Faustus’ style. As for subject matter, however, there could be no comparison, for the latter was wandering around in Manichean deceptions, while the former was teaching salvation most soundly. But “salvation is far from the wicked,” such as I was then when I stood before him. Yet I was drawing nearer, gradually and unconsciously.”
Through reason, Ambrose didn’t say that things were true simply because “the Bible said so” but demonstrated there was a deeper logic and love behind creation itself. Ambrose was extremely cultured and adept in Greek and the classics, which earned Augustine’s deep respect. And Ambrose was himself a lover of Plato, just like Augustine.
In 410 AD the first sacking of Rome took place under the Visigoths. It was a devastation, and the timing could not have been worse for Christianity. The timing of Christianity becoming the official ideology followed closely by the pillage of Rome by the Visigoths led many Romans to blame Christianity itself for their misfortunes.
The Eastern Empire was still standing, but the Western Empire was breaking apart from these invasions.
The following painting by the American painter Thomas Cole taken from his Course of Empire series illustrates quite viscerally what Rome would have experienced during this terrible invasion.
As is always the case at the end of empires, you not only had war, strife and starvation, but you had plagues constantly wiping out large chunks of the people. And of course, everyone’s blaming Christianity, saying that “if we had not left and abandoned our pagan gods, this would not be happening. Our lives would be better.”
Without Augustine’s brilliant defense of the fragile new religion at this moment of collapse, it is doubtful that the institution itself would have survived these precarious years. In his City of God, Augustine explains that it is not Christianity’s fault that Rome is collapsing. He writes:
“Rome, having been stormed and sacked by the Goths under Alaric their king, the worshipers of false gods, or pagans, as we commonly call them, made an attempt to attribute this calamity to the Christian religion and began to blaspheme the true God with even more than their wanton bitterness and acerbity. It was this which kindled my zeal for the house of God and prompted me to undertake the defense of the city of God against the charges and misrepresentations of its assailants.”
One of the points he makes is that Christianity had saved the lives of countless pagans during the invasion, because Alaric pledged to not harm anyone seeking sanctuary inside Christian churches. He then points to Rome’s hypocrisy since the empire had spent centuries sacking other cities yet never spared anyone seeking sanctuary in holy temples the way Alaric did.
More often than not, Rome would enslave and pillage their victims before absorbing them into the imperium.
Another point which Augustine makes is that the causes of Rome’s downfall go back far earlier than the birth of Christ.
And he cites the philosopher Cicero who had been murdered 45 years prior to Jesus’ birth and wrote in his Treatise on the Commonwealth that “a community of commonwealth is not an association of units, but an association united by a common sense of right and a community of common interest.”
Cicero was writing during the last breaths of the Roman Republic and was doing everything he could to restore the spirit of the Republic, and argued that only a society which is led by Justice as a commonwealth was fit to survive. Sadly Rome had failed that test.
And so again citing Cicero, Augustine writes:
“[Cicero] says that the morality has passed away and we are bound to be called to account for this disaster. For we retain the name of a commonwealth, but we have lost the reality long ago. And this was not through any misfortune, but through our own misdemeanors.”
The misdemeanors Cicero is referring to are Rome’s aggressive wars, and destruction of Carthage.
When Rome broke the peace treaty with Carthage and decided to destroy her former ally via the three Punic Wars, both Cicero and Augustine understood that Rome lost its connection to Natural Law. Despite Carthage’s request to surrender peacefully during the third and last Punic War, offering to give up all weapons and even territories, Rome denied the request, and instead slaughtered every man while putting every woman and child into slavery.
Cicero was repulsed by that. And he knew that that was the moment of transition of Rome losing her soul.
St Augustine wrote:
“After the destruction of Carthage and before Christ’s coming, the degradation of traditional morality ceased to be a gradual decline and became a torrential downhill rush.”
In his City of God, Augustine spends a lot of time discussing the question: How could Rome have avoided its current calamity?”
He wrote:
“If the values of Christ’s teachings had been practiced rather than licensed, Rome would be prospering. But now there is despair, and even the true Christians must submit to endure the wickedness of an utterly corrupt state, and by that endurance to win themselves a place of glory in that holy and majestic assembly, as we call it, on the heavenly commonwealth whose law is the will of God.”
Here we see again this idea of Augustine’s City of God which is developed in a similar way to Plato’s The Republic or Cicero’s treatment of his Treatise on the Commonwealth. These are profound intellectual exercises which both diagnose the causes of the diseases plaguing humanity while at the same time, laying out a transcendental blueprint of what a healthy society may become.
In the case of Plato, it was a society that had a longing for Justice which served to open up the dialogue of The Republic.
But Plato, being a teacher and dialectician did not like giving final crystalized answers to his students but preferred the art of posing questions and grappling with paradoxes. As such he embedded certain paradoxes into his works for his students to wrestle with throughout his dialogues. These were tricks of logic which he consciously infused into the dialogues which steered lazy minds into horrific conclusions when fundamental assumptions were permitted to go un-examined. Plato would implicitly ask his students: “what could you do better to make this imperfect argument more perfect?”
In the same sense, the world of man is intrinsically blemished, it is flawed, it is imperfect, and influenced by ignorance and lies, but if we have faith that we were destined for something better, more Just and more natural, then something may awaken within each of our hearts and minds to influence the troubled world we were born into. It is up to each one of us to choose to develop ourselves, to feed ourselves with truth and love truth ever more each day, in order to increase our wisdom, discernment, and power of action. When men and women devote themselves to this path, humanity’s creative power is expressed most beautifully in ways that no occultist can understand. In those best of ties, humanity doesn’t merely live thoughtlessly according to the laws of nature, but discovers more laws, and even creates laws which square ever less imperfectly with God’s law… with Natural Law.
Plato and Augustine both reasoned that if the universe could ever be completely perfect, that would itself be a very imperfect universe because God, the creator of said universe, would have been prevented from making things better. People who imagine this kind of “perfect” universe don’t realize that they assume a dead God… infinitely separated from the Creation he may have put into motion like a watchmaker winds a watch, but entirely incapable of participating in any living form of creative perfectibility.
In this sad universe, free will would then have no place, since no one would be capable of making errors, and so without the possibility of erring in thought and action, there would no longer be beauty in doing Good. There would be no purpose for Grace in redemption.
Augustine’s Platonism
Despite Plato living long before the time of Jesus, Augustine saw no dissonance between Christian teaching and Platonic philosophy (unlike so many other Christians who demanded the abandonment of all things ‘pagan’). Augustine writes:
“In the questions concerning the existence of one God or of many, as it relates to the truly blessed life which is to be after death. For those who are praised as having most closely followed Plato, who is justly preferred to all the other philosophers of the Gentiles, and who are said to have manifested the greatest acuteness in understanding him, do perhaps entertain such an idea of God as to admit that in Him are to be found the cause of existence, the ultimate reason for the understanding, and the end in reference to which the whole life is to be regulated.”
There are more references to Plato than any other philosopher in City of God.
Augustine says of Plato:
“If Plato says that the wise man is the man who imitates, knows and loves God, and that participation in this God brings man happiness, what need is there to examine the other philosophers? There are none who come nearer to us than the Platonists… Plato defined Sovereign Good as the life in accordance with virtue and he declared that this was possible only for one who had the knowledge of God and who strove to imitate him; this was the sole condition of happiness.”
Anybody who reads Plato’s writings instead of relying on Wikipedia or academic authorities to think for them, discovers quite quickly that for Plato, the key to true happiness is to love Virtue, love Wisdom, love Truth, and love its Creator.
And that is how Socrates also lived his life. That is why he was happier to let his mortal body suffer an injustice of execution by the Demos of Athens rather than suffer a sickness of his soul by abandoning his lifelong principles.
As Plato demonstrates in the Euthyphro Dialogue, the reason Socrates earned the ire of the ruling elite of Greece who accused him of “corrupting the minds of the youth” and “denying the multitude of pagan gods”, was because Socrates argued that Gods must be morally coherent unto themselves and with each other, which means obedient to a higher unifying moral law for them to be worthy of any respect. You cannot have different truths represented by different gods. If that is accepted, then truth itself looses its meaning.
That higher Logos which Plato believed to be the necessary cause of all had to be the cause of all Harmony giving Order and Purpose to everything physical and metaphysical in Creation.
Augustine made another point:
“If the philosophers had reached any conclusion which could be a sufficient guide to the good life and to the attainment of ultimate felicity, it would be such men who would more rightly be accorded divine honors. How much better and honorable would it be to have a temple to Plato where his books were read, rather than to have temples to demons where Galli are mutilated, eunuchs are consecrated, and madmen gash themselves, and every other kind of cruelty or perversion, pervertedly cruel or cruelly perverted, is regularly practiced in the rights of such gods as these.”
Galli were the priests of the Temples of Cybele which were pervasive in Rome and which had been introduced into the Pantheon as a powerful sanctioned cult during the second Punic War in 204 BC. Since the Cult of Cybele idealized an androgynous God, it was expected of Galli priests to castrate themselves while the lower members worshipped in rites that often included ‘sacred orgies’.
On True vs Profane Love: The Key to the City of God
Augustine is very clear that the only way to develop a society which is morally fit to survive, means awakening a love of real knowledge. And this pursuit necessarily entails following Plato’s method of dialectic and self-examination in order “to know thyself” before you can know anything outside of yourself. It means learning the humility necessary to let go of false axioms in place of better hypotheses about reality, and it meant learning how to love goodness, beauty and truth more than anything else.
Augustine hammered at this point in his On Christian Teaching:
“When a man’s resolve is to love God and to love his neighbor as himself, not according to man’s standards, but according to God’s, he has undoubtedly said to be a man of goodwill because of this love. This attitude is more commonly called caritas [agape] in holy scriptures, but it appears in the same sacred writing under the appellation of love. When the apostle is giving instructions about the choice of a man to rule God’s people, he says that such a man should be a lover of the good.
There is indeed a love which is given to what should not be loved, and that love is hated in himself by one who loves, the love which is given to a proper object of love. For these can both exist in the same man, and it is good for men that what makes for right living should increase in him, and what makes for evil should die away until he is made perfectly sound and all his life is changed to the good.”
Augustine firmly believed that it was mankind’s ultimate destiny to build on earth a society of laws that would be inspired by the eternal laws of the City of God. For this great mission to be fulfilled he understood that each person had to find within themselves the ultimate spark of Love of God, and love of others upon which a firm love of self could be grown. The altered states of ecstatic experience practiced by the oracles and mystery schools prevalent in Augustine’s age were not lawful paths to liberation from the shackles of ego and fear of death as those Galli, Mithraic, and gnostic priests and priestesses promised. To speak in tongues, and prophecy like Simon the Magician, or his Gnostic followers without a genuine love of Truth, Reason and Goodness means nothing.
These would be the same lessons advanced by the great St. Paul three centuries earlier, who wrote in his first letter to Corinthians:
If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love,
I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,
but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease;
where there are tongues, they will be stilled;
where there is knowledge, it will pass away.
For we know in part and we prophesy in part,
but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.
When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.
For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.
Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love.
But the greatest of these is love.[11]
As Plato demonstrated implicitly throughout his dialogues, and which Paul, the Apostles and Augustine demonstrated explicitly… without Agapic Love animating the hearts and minds of the members of a church then that church will be doomed. Without these sentiments animating a society, that society were also doomed. For it is only in cultivating Agapic Love as outlined by Paul in 1: Corinthians 13, and by Plato in Socrates’ speech in the Symposium, that leaders are fit to lead and citizens fit to choose the best destiny for themselves and their children[12].
This is the essence of Justice as understood from the highest realm of understanding, and its truth was outlined over 1600 years after Augustine died when Martin Luther King Jr. stated:
“One may well ask: ‘How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?’ The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’
Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.”
One could say that Rome’s defiance of Natural Law was at the heart of the empire’s ultimate slide towards decay, imperial expansion and ultimately death. The lack of cultivation of the characteristic of Agapic Love from the hearts of both the elites and the masses resulted in religions that became mere rituals, rules, and ecstatic states of heightened eros masquerading as “spirituality”. Whether the decay and absence of adherence to Justice, Love and Goodness is expressed as an Athens, Persia, Carthage, Rome or today’s western alliance of NATO… the effects are always the same.
And unless that society suffering in the pangs of sickness have the good fortune to rediscover those universal truths which gave rise to the movements out of which Solon, Plato, Cicero, Jesus, Paul and St. Augustine had sprung, then the fate of that society were bleak indeed.
In the next installment, we will review the continued battle led by genuine followers of Augustine and Plato in the years after St Augustine’s death in opposition to the Neo-Platonic sorcerers obsessed of destroying Christianity from within.
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Footnotes
[8] When Simon saw the miracle work of the apostles, he offered them money, saying, ‘Give me also this power so that anyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit.’ But Peter said to him, ‘May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain God’s gift with money! You have no part or share in this, for your heart is not right before God. Repent therefore of this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord that, if possible, the intent of your heart may be forgiven you. For I see that you are in the gall of bitterness and the chains of wickedness.’ -Acts
[9] We also know through the writings of the early church historian Eusebius who wrote during the 3rd century, that Peter was collaborating in Rome very closely with the great Jewish Platonist Rabbi Philo of Alexandria fighting against these cults together.
[10] Manicheanism originated in the Sassanid Empire in the early 3rd century and featured an elaborate fusion of Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Marcionism, Hellenistic and Rabbinic Judaism, Gnosticism, Ancient Greek religion, Babylonian religion, (along with other Greco-Roman mysteries)
[11] Paul, 1: Corinthians 13
[12] In Plato’s Symposium (on Love), Socrates delivers an homage to the Goddess of Love as was taught to him by his teacher Diomede. In this speech, Socrates identifies a love beyond Eros and Philia and also identifies it not as a thing but as a causal principle linked more to a yearning, or prima mobile. This principle he links to a harmony of contradictions of the finite/mortal with the infinite/immortal. Socrates says: “Marvel not,’ she said, ‘if you believe that love is of the immortal, as we have several times acknowledged; for here again, and on the same principle too, the mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is only to be attained by generation, because generation always leaves behind a new existence in the place of the old. Nay even in the life of the same individual there is succession and not absolute unity: a man is called the same, and yet in the short interval which elapses between youth and age, and in which every animal is said to have life and identity, he is undergoing a perpetual process of loss and reparation—hair, flesh, bones, blood, and the whole body are always changing. Which is true not only of the body, but also of the soul, whose habits, tempers, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears, never remain the same in any one of us, but are always coming and going; and equally true of knowledge, and what is still more surprising to us mortals, not only do the sciences in general spring up and decay, so that in respect of them we are never the same; but each of them individually experiences a like change. For what is implied in the word “recollection,” but the departure of knowledge, which is ever being forgotten, and is renewed and preserved by recollection, and appears to be the same although in reality new, according to that law of succession by which all mortal things are preserved, not absolutely the same, but by substitution, the old worn-out mortality leaving another new and similar existence behind—unlike the divine, which is always the same and not another? And in this way, Socrates, the mortal body, or mortal anything, partakes of immortality; but the immortal in another way. Marvel not then at the love which all men have of their offspring; for that universal love and interest is for the sake of immortality.’
Bio: I am the editor-in-chief of The Canadian Patriot Review, Senior Fellow of the American University in Moscow and Director of the Rising Tide Foundation. I’ve written the four volume Untold History of Canada series, four volume Clash of the Two Americas series, the Revenge of the Mystery Cult Trilogy and Science Unshackled: Restoring Causality to a World in Chaos. I am also host of the weekly Breaking Free of Psyops on Badlands Media and host of Pluralia Dialogos (which airs every second Sunday at 11am ET here).
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