Plato & One History * One Bad Earth & One God

[Terrance]

This is a GROSS oversimplification: 


Plato was, above all else, a moralist. His rational for the
presence of evil in the material, in Earth, may be viewed as
a rebellion  against  his "father," Anaxagoras.   (see
Plato's Phaedo).

Plato was not a serious scientist
like Aristotle or even like Anaxagoras. His physics, his
biology, his view of
Nature, of the Earth and the Heavens is not really a serious
study or description of the evolutionary process that
Aristotle was to formulate, but what's important here, is
not Plato's ineptitude as a philosopher of Nature, but the
fact that his Philosophy, being a moral philosophy was a
serious Judgment upon  Nature, the Earth, her bounty and
the men and women that inhabited the Natural World.  In
Plato's system, what is Good, Better, Best, had been
discerned, and a mythical "classification" (ha!) of Nature
had been constructed. 

Although he does not discuss Plato, see *The Hero* by Lord
Raglan, an excellent alternative or compliment to Joseph
Campbell. 

How Gods became Heroes, Heroes became legends, legends
became history, Heroes become God. 

Myth, after men have made them, can pass for, be mistaken
for, become History. When the myth maker is an ancient
Greek,
highly regarded and influential, like Plato, myth can even
pass for Revelation. From Plato and others, Moral Values
came to be regarded as forces at work in Nature. But Nature
was compounded of evil Matter and Perfect form, so if moral
force, perfect and good,  is at work in Nature, it must be
coming from some place outside the imperfect matter of
the Earth.  The Ideal,  excellence, the good, must be in
another place,
a place where men are not, a place that men long for, pine
for, and  pine to be what they are not. The forces at work
in
Nature were accorded supernatural Virtues, dominations, and
powers: all Natural matter would then have its supernatural
angel,  guardian angel, devil, incubus. 

The "religious" corruption present in GR is a  corruption
caused by the rational/mystic perversions of Blicero and the
Rocket, but begins as an internal corruption present in the
early Christian Church and  compounded by history. While we
have discussed the facts pertaining to the history of the
purging of Gnosticism from the Church, how the Church
Father's perspective is what we have mostly, their
invectives against "heresies" we have missed the more
important point, I think, that gnosticism is evil in GR not
because it was or is an evil religion or a "heresy" any more
than it is a good  in GR because it was purged and condemned
by the Church-- a victim, although of course it was not
completely purged (Dante has Gnostic elements, Milton,
Blake, so on). It is an evil trope in GR, for two basic
reasons, first, its contempt for Nature and the Earth and
its stated goal to transcend this evil place, Earth is the
product of a demiurgic process, second because it, like the
particular  Jewish mysticisms in GR that are also a trope of
evil in GR, it has an Elect, the Gnostics, those that know.
BTW, Those that know in GR, the YOU that knows, are made fun
of by the narrator for exactly this reason. This gnostic or
neo-platonic disdain for the earth goes to P's view of
History. 

In the Chapter under consideration, Thanatz is "the angel
[the Erdschweinhohlers] hoped for" because  "it  is that
"something" that the Angel (P's cap.) Thanatz illuminates
"
GR672-73


In Christianity there is a combination of miraculous history
and
symbolic cosmology, Plato  was a "god send."  In the
Platonic system
there was hierarchy of higher and lower beings, concentric
circles, and so on, and Man, sitting on his lump of vile
Earth. The drama must have a Hero, now, remember that  the
Jews had
explained the presence of evil, in a Good world, in their
good bodies,  by the fall of ONE man. Christianity then
provided, in Aristotle's
sense of the Dramatic, A beginning, a Middle, and THE END.
Why is Pointy afraid  
of the end of History? His corruption of the quest. And
there is only ONE story and these events occur ONCE ONLY.

There is one fall, one man, one crucifixion, one Jesus, one
salvation, one form of Grace, One God,  One History. One
return, one Revelation, one, only one. The true History of
man is the story of the fall, the birth and death and
resurrection of Christ, the Return, the END. 

If we reverse the christian myth, back through the Church
fathers, back to the ancient Hebrews, stripped of Plato,
catholic and comparative, American as Apple Pie, we get
Pynchon's "orphic naturalism."