Could UFO's be a demonic deception ?

“In the end, the future may well be decided by the image which carries the greatest spiritual power.”

—Fred Polak, quoted in epigraph to Changing Images of Man put out by Stanford Research Institute,

Well, with the Pentagon set to release its info on UFO's 2020 is just getting odder. So I turn to ORTHODOXY and the Religion of the Future BY FR. SERAPHIM ROSE, which turned out to be quite prophetic, especially his chapter on UFO's.

Written in the 70's much since has happened, his contention that aliens may in fact be demons has been the conclusion now of three former chairmen of BUFORA - The British UFO Research Association, the largest UFO society - including the *founding President, Graham Knewstub, along with Capt Ivar Mackay and Roger Stanway, all becaming convinced that UFOs were of demonic origin.



Stanway resigned in 1976, explaining that he and his wife had become born-again Christian's and added: “…furthermore, I now believe that the UFO phenomenon has Satanic origins.”

Others believe the UFO phenomenon is a scientifically controlled artificial religion.

Looking back on Fr Seraphim's work, Hieromonk Damascene writes the following :

"In the area of UFOs, Fr. Seraphim’s conclusions have also been borne out by new developments....

With the experiences described by Whitley Strieber in his book Communion: A True Story (1987), the public has been shown that these so-called “visitors” are in fact cruel, malicious beings who wreak psychic havoc on those who contact them.

“I felt an indescribable sense of menace,” Strieber writes. “It was hell on earth to be there, and yet I couldn’t move, couldn’t cry out, and couldn’t get away. I lay as still as death, suffering inner agonies. Whatever was there seemed so monstrous and ugly, so filthy and dark and sinister....” Strieber also describes peculiar smells associated with his “visitors” — among them, a “sulfur-like” odor such as is mentioned when the ancient Lives of Saints speak of demonic encounters.

Since the publication of Communion, hundreds of thousands of UFO “abductees” have come forward with accounts of their contact with aliens.

Setting forth the evolutionist view that “we are passing into a great change of species,” Strieber writes: “As we express ourselves into the next age, we will come to a prime moment of this species, when mankind gains complete mastery over time and space and lifts his physical aspect into eternity, inducing the ascension of the whole species into a higher, freer, and richer level of being.... As mind frees itself from time and thus approaches singularity of consciousness, nations as we know them — directed by power politics, greed and lies — will end.”

Strieber sees this utopian dream being realized as mankind leaves behind the “the old hierarchies” of the past: “The absolute blackness of the past symbolizes the rigidly authoritarian nature of the past civilization. Indeed, its customs have echoed forward all the way to the present, where they persist still in our governments, our ritual-encrusted religions, and our moral lives with their emphasis on sin.”

As humanity abandons the “religious mythology” of those who “identify [aliens] with their version of demons,” it will become open to the “new world” offered by the visitors: “As we move into [the Age of] Aquarius, we do indeed see authority weakening in almost every human culture and institution. The new willingness to entertain notions like the presence of visitors and to largely reject the refusal of the old authorities to deal rationally with such matters signals a new eagerness to form opinions outside the traditional control mechanisms. As those mechanisms fade, the unknown uses their weakness to attempt to break through into the conscious world, and we find ourselves inundated with reports of UFOs, aliens, and all sorts of weird and wonderful things.”

In order to reconcile the obvious contradiction between the apparently sinister nature of the “visitors” and his own utopian ideas about aliens helping to usher in a New Age, Strieber attempts to blur the distinction between good and evil: “We live in an ethical and moral world that is like the ethical context of the [UFO] phenomenon, full of ambiguities, a place in which plain good and plain evil are rare.”

Strieber’s view, which is shared by many in today’s UFO network, is that the “visitors” are highly evolved beings which want us also to evolve — for their sake as well as ours. He speculates that, in their often terrifying encounters with humans, the visitors are exploiting us and at the same time “tempting” us to advance further in our evolution, to “close the gap” between us and them, so that we may “join [them] as a cosmic species”: in other words, that we may become like them. This, he says, “explains why many people are taken to an evolutionary edge in their experiences” of aliens.

Strieber notes that “In all the past fifty years, there has been no instance of the visitors directly adding resources. Nobody gets the plans to a starship. Nobody gets a map back to the home world. What we get instead are fear, confusion, cryptic messages, and a feeling of being pushed around — and the sense of something beyond price, lying just out of reach.... Rather than satisfying us, they are likely to tempt us further and further — with outrages, with dazzling displays, with promises — with whatever it takes.”

So, here are some portions of Fr Seraphim Rose's chapter on UFO's, and his case for calling them demons :

"....even if these experiences are not fully “real” (as objective phenomena in space and time), the very fact that so many of them have been “implanted” in human minds in recent years is already significant enough. Without doubt there issomething behind the “abduction” experiences also, and recently UFO investigators have begun to look in a different direction for an explanation of them.

Such experiences, and especially the “Close Encounters” of the 1970s, are noticeably bound up with “paranormal” or occult phenomena. People sometimes have strange dreams just before seeing UFOs, or hear knocks on the door when no one is there, or have strange visitors afterwards; some witnesses receive telepathic messages from UFO occupants. UFOs now sometimes simply materialize and dematerialize instead of coming and going at great speeds; sometimes “miraculous healings” occur in their presence or when one is exposed to their light. But “Close Encounters” with UFOs have also resulted in leukemia and radiation sickness; often there are tragic psychological effects: personality deterioration, insanity, suicide.

The increase of the “psychic component” in UFO sightings has led researchers to seek similarities between UFO experiences and occult phenomena, and to seek the key to understanding UFOs in the psychic effects they produce (The Invisible College, p. 29). Many researchers note the similarity between UFO phenomena and 19th-century spiritism, which also combined psychic phenomena with strange physical effects, but with a more primitive “technology.” In general, the 1970s have seen a narrowing of the gap between the “normal” UFO phenomena of the past and the UFO cults, in accordance with the increased receptivity of mankind in this decade to occult practices.




Explanation of the UFO Phenomena

Dr. Jacques Vallee’s newest book on UFOs, The Invisible College, reveals what reputable scientific researchers are now thinking about them. He believes that we are now “very close” to understanding what they are. He notes that the idea of “extraterrestrial” intelligent life has in a few years become astonishingly fashionable, among scientists as well as fortune tellers, as a result of “a great thirst for contact with superior minds that will provide guidance for our poor, harassed, hectic planet” (p. 195). He significantly sees that the idea of visitors from outer space has become the great myth or “wonderful untruth” of our times: “It has become very important for large numbers of people to expect visitors from outer space” (p. 207, emphasis in the original).

Yet he finds it naive to believe in this myth: “This explanation is too simple-minded to account for the diversity of the reported behavior of the occupants and their perceived interaction with human beings” (p. 27). Dr. Hynek has noted that in order to explain the various effects produced by UFOs, we must assume that they are “a phenomenon that undoubtedly has physical effects but also has the attributes of the psychic world” (The Edge of Reality, p. 259).

Dr. Vallee believes that “they are constructed both as physical craft (a fact which has long appeared to me undeniable) and as psychic devices, whose exact properties remain to be defined” (The Invisible College, p. 202, emphasis in the original). Actually, the theory that UFOs are not physical craft at all, but some kind of “paraphysical” or psychic phenomenon, was suggested by a number of researchers in the early 1950s; but this opinion was largely submerged later, on the one hand by the cultists, with their insistence on the “extraterrestrial” origin of UFOs, and on the other hand by the official government explanations, which corresponded to the widespread popular view that the whole phenomenon was imaginary (Keel, UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse, pp. 38–41). Only lately have serious investigators begun to agree that UFOs, while having certain “physical” characteristics, cannot at all be explained as somebody’s “space ships,” but are clearly something of the paraphysical or occult realm.

Why, indeed, are so many UFO “landings” precisely in the middle of roads? Why do such fantastically “advanced” craft so often need “repairs”? Why do the occupants so often need to pick up rocks and sticks (over and over again for twenty-five years!), and to “test” so many people — if they are actually reconnaissance vehicles from another planet, as the “humanoids” usually claim? Dr. Vallee well asks whether the “visitors from outer space” idea might not “serve precisely a diversionary role in masking the real, infinitely more complex nature of the technology that gives rise to the sightings?” (The Invisible College, p. 28).

He believes “we are not dealing with successive waves of visitations from space. We are dealing with a control system” (p. 195). “What takes place through close encounters with UFOs is control of human beliefs” (p. 3). “With every new wave of UFOs, the social impact becomes greater. More young people become fascinated with space, with psychic phenomena, with new frontiers in consciousness. More books and articles appear, changing our culture” (pp. 197–98). In another book he notes that “it is possible to make large sections of any population believe in the existence of supernatural races, in the possibility of flying machines, in the plurality of inhabited worlds, by exposing them to a few carefully engineered scenes, the details of which are adapted to the culture and superstitions of a particular time and place.”

An important clue to the meaning of these “engineered scenes” may be seen in an observation often made by careful observers of UFO phenomena, especially CE–III and “contactee” cases: that they are profoundly “absurd,” or contain at least as much absurdity as rationality (Vallee, The Invisible College, p. 196). Individual “Close Encounters” have absurd details, like the four pancakes given by a UFO occupant to a Wisconsin chicken farmer in 1961;23 more significantly, the encounters themselves are strangely pointless, without clear purpose or meaning.

A Pennsylvania psychiatrist has suggested that the absurdity present in almost all UFO close encounters is actually a hypnotic technique. “When the person is disturbed by the absurd or contradictory, and their mind is searching for meaning, they are extremely open to thought transference, to receiving psychic healing, etc.” (The Invisible College, p. 115). Dr. Vallee compares this technique to the irrational koans of Zen Masters (p. 27), and notices the similarity between UFO encounters and occult initiation rituals which “open the mind” to a “new set of symbols” (p. 117). All of this points to what he calls “the next form of religion” (p. 202).

Thus, UFO encounters are but a contemporary form of an occult phenomenon which has existed throughout the centuries. Men have abandoned Christianity and look for “saviours” from outer space, and therefore the phenomenon supplies images of spacecraft and space beings. But what is this phenomenon? Who is doing the “engineering,” and to what purpose?




Today’s investigators have already supplied the answers to at least the first two questions, although, being without competence in the realm of religious phenomena, they do not fully understand the significance of what they have found. One investigator, Brad Steiger, an Iowa college professor who has written several books on the subject, after a recent detailed study of the Air Force “Blue Book” files, concluded: “We are dealing with a multi-dimensional paraphysical phenomenon, which is largely indigenous to planet earth” (Canadian UFO Report, Summer, 1977).

Drs. Hynek and Vallee have advanced the hypothesis of “earth-bound aliens” to account for UFO phenomena, and speculate on “interlocking universes” right here on earth from which they might come, much as “poltergeists” produce physical effects while remaining themselves invisible. John Keel, who began his UFO investigation as a skeptic and is himself an agnostic in religion, writes:

“The real UFO story...is one of ghosts and phantoms and strange mental aberrations; of an invisible world which surrounds us and occasionally engulfs us.... It is a world of illusion... where reality itself is distorted by strange forces which can seemingly manipulate space, time, and physical matter — forces which are almost entirely beyond our powers of comprehension.... The UFO manifestations seem to be, by and large, merely minor variations of the age-old demonological phenomenon” (UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse, pp. 46, 299).

In a recent bibliography of UFO phenomena prepared by the Library of Congress for the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the introduction states that “Many of the UFO reports now being published in the popular press recount alleged incidents that are strikingly similar to demonic possession and psychic phenomena which have long been known to theologians and parapsychologists.”Most UFO researchers are now turning to the occult realm and to demonology for insight into the phenomena they are studying.

Several recent studies of UFOs, by evangelical Protestants, put all this evidence together and come to the conclusion that UFO phenomena are simply and precisely demonic in origin.25 The Orthodox Christian investigator can hardly come to a different conclusion. Some or many of the experiences, it may be, are the result of hoaxes or hallucinations; but it is simply impossible to dismiss all of the many thousands of UFO reports in this way. A great number of modern mediums and their spiritistic phenomena are also fraudulent; but mediumistic spiritism itself, when it is genuine, undeniably produces real “paranormal” phenomena under the action of demons. UFO phenomena, having the same source, are no less real.

People who have actually contacted the UFO beings have much worse experiences; the beings sometimes literally “possess” them and try to kill them when they resist (UFOs: A Better Explanation, pp. 298–305). Such cases effectively remind us that, quite apart from the meaning of UFO phenomena as a whole, each UFO “Close Encounter” has the specific purpose of deceiving the individual who is contacted and leading him, if not to further “contacts” and spreading of the UFO “message,” then at least to personal spiritual confusion and disorientation.

The most puzzling aspect of UFO phenomena to most researchers — namely, the strange mingling of physical and psychic characteristics in them — is no puzzle at all to readers of Orthodox spiritual books, especially the Lives of Saints. Demons also have “physical bodies,” although the “matter” in them is of such subtlety that it cannot be perceived by men unless their spiritual “doors of perception” are opened, whether with God’s will (as in the case of holy men) or against it (as in the case of sorcerers and mediums).26

Orthodox literature has many examples of demonic manifestations which fit precisely the UFO pattern: apparitions of “solid” beings and objects (whether demons themselves or their illusionary creations) which suddenly “materialize” and “dematerialize,” always with the aim of awing and confusing people and ultimately leading them to perdition. The Lives of the 4th-century St. Anthony the Great and the 3rd-century St. Cyprian the Former Sorcerer are filled with such incidents.

It is clear that the manifestations of today’s “flying saucers” are quite within the “technology” of demons; indeed, nothing else can explain them as well. The multifarious demonic deceptions of Orthodox literature have been adapted to the mythology of outer space, nothing more; the Anatolius mentioned above would be known today simply as a “contactee.” And the purpose of the “unidentified” object in such accounts is clear: to awe the beholders with a sense of the “mysterious,” and to produce “proof “ of the “higher intelligences” (“angels,” if the victim believes in them, or “space visitors” for modern men), and thereby to gain trust for the message they wish to communicate. We shall look at this message below.



The Meaning of UFOs

What, then, is the meaning of the UFO phenomena of our time? Why have they appeared just at this time in history? What is their message? To what future do they point?

First, UFO phenomena are but one part of an astonishing outpouring of “paranormal” events — what just a few years ago most people would have considered as “miracles.” Dr. Vallee, in The Invisible College, expresses the secular appreciation of this fact: “Observations of unusual events suddenly loom into our environment by the thousands” (p. 87), causing “a general shifting of man’s belief patterns, his entire relationship to the concept of the invisible” (p. 114). “Something is happening to human consciousness” (p. 34); the same “powerful force [that] has influenced the human race in the past is again influencing it now”

In Christian language this means: a new demonic outpouring is being loosed upon mankind. In the Christian apocalyptic view (see the end of this book), we can see that the power which until now has restrained the final and most terrible manifestation of demonic activity on earth has been taken away (II Thess. 2:7), Orthodox Christian government and public order (whose chief representative on earth was the Orthodox emperor) and the Orthodox Christian worldview no longer exist as a whole, and satan has been “loosed out of his prison,” where he was kept by the grace of the Church of Christ, in order to “deceive the nations” (Apoc. 20:7–8) and prepare them to worship antichrist at the end of the age. Perhaps never since the beginning of the Christian era have demons appeared so openly and extensively as today. The “visitors from outer space” theory is but one of the many pretexts they are using to gain acceptance for the idea that “higher beings” are now to take charge of the destiny of mankind.

Second, UFOs are but the newest of the mediumistic techniques by which the devil gains initiates into his occult realm. They are a terrible sign that man has become susceptible to demonic influence as never before in the Christian era. In the 19th century it was usually necessary to seek out dark séance rooms in order to enter into contact with demons, but now one need only look into the sky (usually at night, it is true).

Mankind has lost what remained of basic Christian understanding up to now, and now passively places itself at the disposal of whatever “powers” may descend from the sky. The new film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is a shocking revelation of how superstitious “post-Christian” man has become — ready in an instant and unquestioningly to believe and follow hardly- disguised demons wherever they might lead.

Third, the “message” of the UFOs is: prepare for anti-christ; the “saviour” of the apostate world is coming to rule it. Perhaps he himself will come in the air, in order to complete his impersonation of Christ (Matt. 24:30; Acts 1:11); perhaps only the “visitors from outer space” will land publicly in order to offer “cosmic” worship of their master; perhaps the “fire from heaven” (Apoc. 13:13) will be only a part of the great demonic spectacles of the last times. At any rate, the message for contemporary mankind is: expect deliverance, not from the Christian revelation and faith in an unseen God, but from vehicles in the sky.

It is one of the signs of the last times that there shall be terrors and great signs from heaven (Luke 21:11). Even a hundred years ago Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, in his book On Miracles and Signs (Yaroslavl, 1870, reprinted by Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, New York, 1960), remarked on “the striving to be encountered in contemporary Christian society to see miracles and even perform miracles.... Such a striving reveals the self-deception, founded on self-esteem and vainglory, that dwells in the soul and possesses it” (p. 32). True wonderworkers have decreased and grown extinct, but people “thirst for miracles more than ever before.... We are gradually coming near to the time when a vast arena is to be opened up for numerous and striking false miracles, to draw to perdition those unfortunate offspring of fleshly wisdom who will be seduced and deceived by these miracles” (pp. 48–49).

Of special interest to UFO investigators, “the miracles of antichrist will be chiefly manifested in the aerial realm, where satan chiefly has his dominion. The signs will act most of all on the sense of sight, charming and deceiving it. St. John the Theologian, beholding in revelation the events that are to precede the end of the world, says that antichrist will perform great signs, and will even make fire to come down out of heaven upon the earth in the sight of men (Apoc. 13:13). This is the sign indicated by Scripture as the highest of the signs of antichrist, and the place of this sign is the air; it will be a splendid and terrible spectacle”

Even the secular investigators of UFO phenomena have seen fit to warn people against their dangers. John Keel, for example, writes: “Dabbling with UFOs can be as dangerous as dabbling with black magic. The phenomenon preys upon the neurotic, the gullible, and the immature. Paranoid schizophrenia, demonomania, and even suicide can result — and has resulted in a number of cases. A mild curiosity about UFOs can turn into a destructive obsession.

We live near the end of this fearful age of demonic triumph and rejoicing, when the eerie “humanoids” (another of the masks of the demons) have become visible to thousands of people and by their absurd encounters take possession of the souls of those men from whom God’s grace has departed. The UFO phenomenon is a sign to Orthodox Christians to walk all the more cautiously and soberly on the path to salvation, knowing that we can be tempted and seduced not merely by false religions, but even by seemingly physical objects which just catch the eye."

How Renaissance art led to modernity and the mathematization of the cosmos.

Johannes Hoff’s The Analogical Turn: Rethinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa is remarkable, he posits an “alternative modernity” in which Renaissance accounts of space, perspective, and perception leads to modernity’s narcissistic hyperreflexity, and use of analytic rationality and individuality. He instead offers Cusa’s doxological epistemology” - doxology = right praise - where one loves to know.

Here is a part of John Betz’s take on the book, and a snippet of Hoff’s response, found HERE :

“…modern dialectics have blinded us to reality—either in the way that modern scientific rationalism tries to extort from creatures a univocal meaning they have never had, or in the way that postmodernism denies that creatures have any intrinsic meaning at all that is not a function of culture, the will to power, or the play of différance. In short, both of these extremes—“the univocity of modern scientific rationality and the ambiguous equivocity of post-modern pop culture” (xv)—have rendered reality opaque. And so we need to go back to Cusa’s analogical rationality if we are to go forward into an apocalyptic future in which the world will be seen for what it is, a transparency of divine things, and one can “see in every creature an image of the divine amabilitas”

Hoff traces back to the work of Cusa’s contemporary and fellow priest, Leon Battista Alberti (1406–72), who “applied the mathematical methods of Euclid to the art of painting” . On the face of it, there does not seem to be anything problematic here: Alberti’s mathematical mapping of perspective can subsequently be seen in the geometrical art of Piero della Francesca, who is best known and admired for his paintings of gospel scenes (e.g., The Baptism of Christ from 1450). Nevertheless, Hoff sees a problematic turning point here that will subsequently define the “world picture” (in the Heideggerian sense) of the modern age.

The problem, as he sees it, is that the vanishing point of the work of art mirrors that of the viewer, eo ipso “putting the latter in the position of a sovereign observer who can control the space of his perception as if it were nothing but a mirror image of his subjective position” (48). In other words, from this point on, Hoff argues, modern perspective is defined not by a “being seen” (as one is seen by the gaze of an icon) or by a misty seeing of the invisible through the visible—one could just as well say, of the infinite through the finite—but by the dominant viewer (the new and only topos noetos) and this viewer’s imaging of reality in narcissistic terms, according to his conception of it. In short, reality is now configured in my image and according to my representation of it. Thus, according to Hoff’s genealogy, the “winged eye” of Alberti (which appears on the flipside of his portrait medallion) leads directly to the “thinking I” of Descartes’s cogito —and thence, one might add, to the synoptic transcendental ego of Kant.

At this specular point a distinctly modern perspective is established (which for Hoff is also the presupposition of modern individualism).

.....the symbolic universe of the Middle Ages gives way to the “digital universe of Descartes and Leibniz” . Corporeal entities, as for Descartes, come to be regarded as “nothing but ‘extended things’ (res extensae) that can be represented analytically, based on functions and equations, without remainder” (; and so, inspired by visions of a mathesis universalis, matters of symbolic concern are “pushed aside in favor of simpler strategies of scientific progress”

Thus, as Hoff keenly observes, it was ironically modern artistic innovation...

.....he nevertheless maintained that “mathematical comparisons can only provide us with conjectures and not precise descriptions of our analogical world” (67). In other words, anticipating Kurt Gödel mutatis mutandis by nearly half a millennium, Cusa argued that because the world is structurally analogical, and opposites coincide in God alone, an exhaustive mathematical account of reality is impossible. In short, nothing can be pinned down and mastered; the Continental, Hegelian desideratum of a complete system and the Anglo-American desideratum of a final analysis are equally impossible. 

For in our world, in which everything is “enmeshed in the comparative logic of excedens (exceeding) and excessum (exceeded), of larger and smaller” (68), “nothing has the analytic ‘property’ [of being] one with itself. We may make rational conjectures about the identity of individual substances, but they are never analytically precise”

..

Whereas, on the modern model, which funds “the liberal societies of the modern age,” “every singularity is identical with its essence” and thus a “one” unto itself, for Cusa “nothing but God is One and identical with itself” .

....but, as Hoff notes, as analogical singularities, “the uniqueness of created individuals is neither analytically accountable nor conceivable as a ‘property’ that creatures ‘have’” . Rather, “the miracle is that every creature and every person is a singularity, not despite, but exactly because it owes everything it is to a giver whose perfections cannot be owned” . Indeed, rather than being one’s own property, according to Hoff’s Cusa-inspired metaphysics I cannot but “receive the gift to be one with myself” .

But, once again, such a metaphysical vision is inaccessible to the modern man, who is immured in his modern perspective—the perspective of “the modern Narcissus,”1 who puts himself “in the position of the eye point of a mathematically generated picture” , and precisely thereby makes his eye unreceptive to the light of the vision of God. As Hoff puts it, quoting Kleist, “it’s just a pity that the eye molders that is called to the vision of glory"

- John Betz

Now here is Hoff’s partial response to the above :

“The Cartesian promise that everything will straighten out if we only stick to the linear principles of representational security and analytical rigor has failed on every level of philosophical, mathematical and scientific research.

In the wake of thinkers as different as the early Romantics Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kurt Gödel and Martin Heidegger, we have learned that scientific reason is not reducible to true or false propositions.

I have outlined this more extensively in my publications on the necessity of replacing the radicalized phenomenological reduction (or epoché) of Foucault and Derrida by a “doxological reduction.”3 The above summary of Cusa’s method built on this research when it distinguished between two aspects of “truth” that interfere with each other and undermine every attempt to think in straight lines:

Our selection of true propositions (truth2) is regularly crossed by acts of wonder and praise (truth1) that guide our decisions about what deserves our attention and what does not.

If every knowledge starts with the commitment to a truth that transcends our reflexive comprehension, then it is no longer possible to draw a clear demarcation line between the straight lines of evidence-based, secure thinking patterns and the tentative, helical lines of walking paths that are sensitive to delusive shortcuts and attentive to performative indicators and narratives that structure the space that we inhabit.

As Michel de Certeau has pointed out, only subsequent to the fifteenth century did the “maps” that guide our cognitive and spatial movements become “disengaged” from the nonlinear “conditions of the possibility” of space.

( In another place, Hoff puts the matter like this, “…philosophers resisted the inclination to draw a clear demarcation line between the scientific cultivation of rational arguments and the religious cultivation of the symbolically charged spiritual practices that guide our attention”)

Cusa built on this Dionysian tradition—although he emphasized more than Albert (and in line with Aquinas) the unity of theology and philosophy: As in the case of doxological acts of prayer and praise, our intellectual power is a gift that we receive from the “father of lights.” And this gift is never received passively. Rather, the gesture of attentive receptivity coincides with the gesture of return: To receive the gift of the father of lights is tantamount with the realisation that my whole being is a gift that actualizes itself through acts of giving.”

- Hoff

The Christian Platonist Cudworth on materialism and atheism - by D. Hedley

Cudworth was a Christian member of the Cambridge Platonsist's in the 17th C, The following is a portion of 'Gods and Giants: Cudworth’s Platonic Metaphysics and his Ancient Theology" by Douglas Hedley, 

Cudworth on materialism and atheism

The Cambridge Platonists were the first Platonists to accept modern science. Cudworth notes of Ficino that he “lived before the restoration of this mechanical philosophy, and therefore understood it not” (A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, 37). The curious historiography is not an exercise in the study of history but a rather convoluted justification for the fusion of atomism and Platonism. Ancient philosophy is discussed because of the contemporary significance of atomism, and not least the philosophical deployment of the new science by Hobbes and Descartes. Cudworth discusses Gassendi (cf. TIS, I, 105) or Hobbes (ibid., I, 108–109) and explicitly refers to res extensa and “extended substance, body or matter in the philosophy of Descartes” (ibid., I, 117–118).

 Cudworth was building on Pierre Gassendi’s seminal work. Gassendi (1592–1652) was the key figure for the dissemination of Epicureanism in the 17^th century. Levitin writes: “The historiographical obsession with labelling Cudworth a Platonist has obscured the fact that the contemporary with whom he engaged most on the issue of matter theory was Gassendi” (Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 355). It is true that Cudworth draws upon Gassendi’s work but he is far from supporting the Frenchman. Philosophically, Cudworth is utterly opposed to Gassendi:

We may observe the Fraud and Juggling of Gassendus, who…extols and applauds Epicurus, as one who approached nearer to Christianity than the other Philosophers, in that he denied the World to be an animal; whereas according to the language and Notions of those times, to deny the Worlds animation, and to be an Atheist or to deny a God, was one and the same thing (TIS, II, 175).

One might note that Cudworth accuses Gassendi of “Fraud and Juggling” and that his atheism was cognate with his denial of the animating presence of the Divine in the world. Cudworth’s key hermeneutical principle is that “All great errours have ever been intermingled with some truth” (True Notion of the Lord’s supper, 1). 

The problem of ‘atheism’ is a defining question for the Cambridge Platonists as a group. Henry More published his Antidote Against Atheism in 1652. Smith’s Select Discourses, published posthumously in 1660, contains chapters on atheism or the soul’s immortality, where he attacks “the Epicurean herd”, presents the true metaphysical and contemplative man in whom the soul has already attained to communion with the Divine Nature (Smith, Select Discourses, 17). 

The splendid frontispiece of the 1678 first edition of  The True Intellectual System of the Universe constitutes a visual image of Cudworth’s thesis (the engraving is by R. White after a painting by Jan Batista Caespers). On one side we see the “Theists”, including Socrates, Pythagoras and Aristotle, contemplating or gesturing towards the heavens. There is a wreath with the word “Victory” inscribed upon a column behind them. On the other side are the wilting atheistic ancients, Anaximander, Strato and Epicurus, appearing somewhat dejected and gazing downward. Next to them we see crumbling wreath bearing the word “Confusion”. The presence of Pythagoras rather than Plato expresses what Gerson calls the Ur-Platonism thesis.

As we shall see later, much of the controversy depends upon the philosophical questions about the nature of mind and cause. One aspect of this is the acceptance of atomism or corpusculareanism. This is not an argument for claiming that the ‘Platonism’ is diluted or misattributed. The sundering of atomism from Democritean fatalistic atheism was a central aim of the True Intellectual System (cf. Clucas, ‘Poetic atomism in seventeenth-century England). Cudworth cites Posidonius, Sextus Empiricus and Strabo in attributing the doctrine of atomism to a Phoenician called Moschus and the first Greek atomist was Pythagoras. Democritus and Leucipus, however, took atomism as a materialistic theory. They “derive the original of all things in the universe from senseless atoms…so that there could not be any God…” (TIS, I, 33–34). 

Lloyd Gerson in his recent book From Plato to Platonism has argued that Plato’s own Platonism, so to speak, was produced out of a matrix he calls “Ur-Platonism” (Lloyd Gerson, From Plato to Platonism, 9–19). On Gerson’s account, Ur-Platonism is the conjunction of five robust refusals: the rejection of naturalism, nominalism, mechanism, materialism, relativism, and skepticism. Gerson plausibly and powerfully represents Plato’s Platonism as the endeavour to attempt to develop a coherent alternative to the various forms of skepticism, relativism, materialism, mechanism, nominalism and naturalism that flourished in Antiquity and which remerged with great force in the Renaissance and Early Modern period. 

Cudworth’s position overlaps neatly with Gerson’s approach. Through Hobbes’s radical nominalism and mechanistic determinism, Cudworth could harness anew the ancient arguments employed by Platonists against Stoic materialism and Epicurean reductionism and the skepticism of Sextus, not the least the problems linked to mind and causality. This is the age of Hobbes and Spinoza, and the de facto atheism of these critics of traditional theism. Plato in the tenth book of the Laws presents mechanistic materialism, what we would call reductive materialism, as the source of atheism. Plato’s counterargument is that the harmony and order, i.e. techne of the universe cannot be the product of accident, tyche, and requires a governing mind. This is the position that Aristotle presents in book twelve of his Metaphysics, as do all Platonists afterwards, not least Plotinus and Proclus. Only a top down metaphysics, in that sense a theological metaphysics can explain a genuinely intelligible universe.

The subtitle of The True Intellectual System is significant: Wherein, all the reason and philosophy of atheism is confuted: and its impossibility demonstrated. The true intellectual system is concerned with the question of the existence of God, in which Cudworth endeavours to show that monotheism is natural to mankind, yet the confusion of atheism can be traced to very ancient sources. One of the quotations is from Book 10 of the Laws 887d: 

φέρε δή, πῶς ἄν τις μὴ θυμῷ λέγοι περὶ θεῶν ὡς εἰσίν; ἀνάγκη γὰρ δὴ χαλεπῶς φέρειν καὶ μισεῖν ἐκείνους οἳ τούτων ἡμῖν αἴτιοι τῶν λόγων γεγένηνται καὶ γίγνονται 

Well now, how is it possible, without getting angry, to argue for the existence of gods? Clearly, one necessarily gets cross and annoyed with these people who put us to the trouble and continue to put us to the trouble of producing these explanations (The Laws, 414).

One might perhaps sense some of Cudworth’s own frustration at the length of his own endeavour to defeat atheism, a target he depicts in dramatic terms as “a certain strange kind of monster, with four heads, that are all of them perpetually biting, tearing, and devouring one another” (TIS, I, 143). The emergence of powerful critiques of theism in Hobbes and Spinoza and the development of Neo-Stoicism and Neo-Epicureanism drove Cudworth to the opinion that Plato was right that the metaphysics of atheism needs to be challenged. Cudworth viewed the essential debate in the mid to late 17^th century as an instance of Plato’s perennial conflict of the Gods (friends of forms) and the Giants (materialists) in the Sophist 246a–c:

Wherefore the same Plato tells us, that there had been always, as well, as then there was, a perpetual war and controversy in the world, and, as he calls it, a kind of gigantomachy betwixt these two parties or sects of men; the one, that held that there was no other substance in the world besides body; the other, that asserted incorporeal substance (ibid., I, 35).

Cudworth views all forms of atheism as emerging out of “pneumatophobia” or “a fear of spirit and a near superstitious reverence for matter as the only numen” (ibid., I, 200. See Kroll, The Material Word). The motivating idea of the entire True Intellectual System of the Universe is whether matter should be understood as derived from mind or the other way around. The atheist position, and here Cudworth is agreeing with Plato’s diagnosis of the atheist in book 10 of the Laws, is that “all animality, sense and consciousness, is a secondary, derivative and accidental thing, generable and corruptible, arising out of particular concretions of matter organized and dissolved together with them” (ibid., I, 202–203). The debate about atheism and theism is inextricably linked to the problem of the “stubborn necessity of matter” (ibid., II, 594) and the claim that “the divine Mind and Wisdom hath so printed its seal or signature upon the matter of the whole corporeal world, as that fortune and chance could never possibly have counterfeited the same” (ibid., I, 602). 

Materialism seemed in part vindicated if nature could be explained in exclusively physical properties of location, shape and size without recourse to immaterial or spiritual causality. The radical Cartesian sundering of spirit and extension seemed to threaten the intelligibility and presence of the Divine. The existence of spirit on the Cartesian model, and indeed the supreme spiritual Divine substance, was thereby shut off from the physical world. 

Cudworth observes: “They make a kind of dead and wooden world, as it were a carved statue, that hath nothing vital nor magical at all in it. Whereas to those, who are considerative, it will plainly appear, that there is a mixture of life or plastic nature, together with mechanism, which runs through the whole corporeal universe” (ibid., I, 221). The physical world is likened to a physical artefact, wholly distinct from its source and maker, or without any transcendent informing principle. Henry More is cited with a reference to his Enchiridion Metaphysicum as an expert defender of the thesis that “all the effects of nature come to pass by material and mechanical necessity, or the mere fortuitous motion of matter, without any guidance or direction, is a thing no less irrational that it is impious and atheistical” (ibid., I, 220). 

The upshot and conclusion of all is, that [according to the Atomists] there is no such scale or ladder in nature as Theists and Metaphysicians suppose, no degrees of real perfection and entity one above another, as of life and sense above inanimate matter, of reason and understanding above sense; from whence it would be inferred, that the order of things in nature was in way of descent from higher and greater perfection, downward to lesser and lower, which is indeed to introduce a God (ibid., III, 341).

It is not philology but metaphysics and theology that provides the motor of Cudworth’s thought. He is intent on employing the riches of an ancient tradition in order to contribute to the debates of his own age. Philology is the ancilla theologiae and the aid to metaphysics. Other philosophers saw Cudworth as an expert guide. Locke endorsed the “Accurateness and Judgement” of Cudworth’s narrative of the “Opinions of the Greek Philosophers” (Hutton, ‘Some Thoughts concerning Ralph Cudworth’, 146). 

Hume’s Natural History of Religion is another example. In the case of Hume, history is employed in a manner diametrically opposed to Cudworth. As to the “theists of antiquity”, “polytheism is the original religion of mankind” (sentence?). Cudworth’s genealogy of religion is turned on its head. Rather than history supporting ‘orthodoxy’, history becomes an organ of critique. And it is buttressed by Hume’s naturalism: “What a peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe?“ (Hume, Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, 50). It is hard to conceive of Hume not writing with Cudworth’s ‘system’ in mind, whether he is criticizing causation or received histories of monotheism. George Berkeley was a great admirer of the “learned Dr Cudworth”. He notes:

Proclus, in his Commentary on the Theology of Plato, observes there are two sorts of philosophers. The one placed Body first in the order of beings, and made the faculty of thinking depend thereupon, supposing that the principles of all things are corporeal; that Body most really or principally exists, and all other things in a secondary sense, and by virtue of that. Others, making all corporeal things to be dependent upon Soul or Mind, think this to exist in the first place and primary sense and the being of bodies to be altogether derived from and presuppose that of Mind (The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, V, 124). 

Berkeley may have been thinking of a passage like:

Mind [...] is a greater reality in nature, [...] the things, which belong to souls and minds, to rational beings as such, must not have less, but more reality in them, than the things in inanimate bodies. [...] it being impossible for a greater perfection to be produced from a lesser, [...] from whence things gradually descend downward, lower and lower, till they end in senseless matter“ (TIS, III, 434–435).

The issue for Cudworth is that of rational explanation of the universe, and a top down explanation that avoids the randomness of Epicurean and Neo-Epicurean theories of nature. 

Nature, transcendent Causality and Divine Will

Le Clerc noted that “Cudworth also correctly and excellently remarks that the being, whose property it is to make another being commence its existence, must not only be possessed of all the perfections which the being produced by it is supposed to enjoy; but must also have a power of action by which it can be the cause of something” (TIS, III, 133–134). The theism advocated in Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe is distinct from the ‘mechanic theism’ of Descartes. Cudworth is the inheritor and exponent of a form of Neoplatonic theism that could be called “mystical monotheism” (I am using the terminology of Kenney, Mystical Monotheism: A Study in Ancient Platonic Theology). 

Plotinus, Scotus Eriugena and Eckhart would all constitute instances of the downplaying of creatio ex nihilo in favour of creatio ex Deo. The whole world is Deus explicatus (cf. TIS, I, p. 515). Cudworth’s discussion of the ‘Pagan Theists’ and ‘Theologers’ should include some consideration of the thorny problem of the metaphors of procession or influx or emanation. The much-used (but little understood) word ‘emanation’ does not correspond to any one Greek philosophical term but a group (some might say cloud) of metaphors in Plotinus and other Neoplatonists (usually of light, water or seeds). 

The roots of this language lie in the materialistic Stoic theory of the fiery breath that comes from and returns to the sun. Plotinus, however, always rejects the pantheistic implications of such Stoic language. It is the correspondence or analogy between the κόσμος νοητός and the κόσμος αἰσθητός that is crucial. It is important to bear in mind the distinction between the intelligible cosmos (κόσμος νοητός, kosmos noetos, sometimes νοητικός, noetikos, Latin mundus intelligibilis) and the physical cosmos (κόσμος αἰσθητός, kosmos aisthetos or in the Latin mundus sensibilis). This contrast between an intelligible world and the physical cosmos is of Platonic provenance, and was firmly established in Middle Platonism, drawing especially upon Plato’s Timaeus 27d-47e. 

The κόσμος νοητικός is the eternal world of ideas, while the κόσμος αἰσθητός is the image of that in the changing physical world. In medieval philosophy the Book of Causes (Liber de causis), and the manifold commentaries written on it, employs the language of procession, influx or emanation. Cudworth wishes to sustain the vision of a universe originating in its transcendent Cause and suffused with the energy of that First Cause into the lower levels of Being as “radii Deitatis” and “rays of the Deity” (TIS, I, 515). “God expanded or unfolded, and when they call the creatures, as St. Jerome and others often do, radios Deitatis, ‘the rays of the Deity’ System (TIS, III, 80–81).

The Neoplatonic structure of Cudworth’s thought, as opposed to some more generic ‘Platonism’, can be seen in the stress upon the following four tenets of ‘emanative power to create’. These can be listed as:

1. Procession or causality is a movement from the greater to the lesser: 

In the things Generated from Eternity, or Produced by way of natural Emanation, there is no progress upwards, but all Downwards, and still a Gradual Descent into Greater Multiplicity…’ That which is Generated or Emaneth, immediately from the First and Highest Being, is not the very same thing with it, as if it were nothing but that Repeated again and Ingeminated; and as it is not same, so neither can it be Better than it. (Plotinus, Enneads, 5, Bk 3, chp 15). From whence it follows, that it must needs be Gradually subordinate and Inferiour to it (TIS, II, 391.).

Cudworth refers explicitly to Plotinus but equally he could have taken this from Proclus: “Accordingly every cause properly so called, inasmuch as it both is more perfect than that which proceeds from it (prop. 7) and itself furnishes the limits of its production, transcends the instruments, the elements, and in general all that is described as a by-cause” (Proclus, Elements of Theology, 73).

2. That which processes from its source is both like and unlike its originator. The Wisdom of God furnishes ‘its Stamps and Signatures every where throughout the World’ (TIS, III, 597) or ‘Nature is not the Divine Art Archetypal but Ectypal’ (ibid., I, 281). 

The natural order, for Cudworth, is reflecting its transcendent source, both distinct from its origin and yet participating in it.

3. The reflection in the effect of the cause is present since the effect is coterminous with the transcendent cause, just as the mirrored image depends upon the presence of its source. Cudworth says that “the Plastick life of Nature is but the mere Umbrage of Intellectuality, a faint and shadowy Imitation of Mind and Understanding; upon which it doth as Essentially depend, as the Shadow doth upon the Body, the Image in the Glass upon the Face, or the Echo upon the Original Voice” (ibid., I, 172).

4. The Source remains unreduced by its procession. The frequent misunderstanding of Neoplatonism as pantheism rests upon the failure to appreciate this point. Cudworth writes of God as the “fountain of love and goodness” (ibid., III, 463) and as “fountain of life and understanding” (ibid., III, 453). Yet the Divine is not abated by its procession. In part this is due to the doctrine of divine ideas. The mind of God contains all that is and can be and is the noetic paradigm of the physical cosmos: 

The Mind of God is nothing but the intelligible essences of things, or their natures as conceivable, and objects of the mind. [...] So that the true meaning of these eternal essences is indeed no other than this, that knowledge is eternal; or that there is an eternal mind that comprehendeth the intelligible natures and ideas of all things, whether actually existing or possible only, their necessary relations to one another, and all the immutable verities belonging to them. [...] that there is one eternal unmade Mind and perfect incorporeal Deity, a real and substantial Ghost or Spirit, which comprehending itself, and all the extent of its own power, the possibility of things, and their intelligible natures, together with an exemplar or platform of the whole world, produced the same accordingly’ (ibid., III, 401).

Proclus might seem like a philosophical apologist for Greek polytheism and an unlikely ally for Cudworth. Cudworth is not without some criticism of Proclus “who had some peculiar fancies and whimsies of his own, and was indeed a confounder of the Platonic Theology, and a mingler of much unintelligible stuff with it” (ibid., 510). Yet Cudworth’s use of Proclus as his ally has its justification. Proclus’s vision of intelligible deities, his ‘henadology’, constitutes a level of reality subordinate to the ineffable and unparticipated One. 

The seminal importance of Proclus for the works of Dionysius the Areopagite has long been recognized. Moreover, his influence upon Western theism was enormous through the Arabic paraphrase of his theology (with some elements from Plotinus) called the Book of Causes (Liber de causis), a text, based upon Proclus’s Elements of Theology, translated from Arabic into Latin in the twelfth century, and attributed to Aristotle. Hence a Neoplatonic text was viewed as the culmination of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Albert the Great commented upon it, as did Thomas Aquinas (on the subsequent history, see Calma [ed.], Neoplatonism in the Middle Ages: I. New Commentaries on Liber de causis). The metaphysics of the Book of Causes is a model of absolute causality. The transcendent cause is the archetype of the world and as infinite plenitude. There is a hierarchy of perfection and a gradual descent from the greater to the less. Moreover, the effect participates in the cause like the image in the archetype.

Just as the cosmos is a theophany of the transcendent Principle, so too the different religions are all reflections of a true monotheism. Yet this is different from what Assmann designates as “cosmotheism”, which Cudworth in fact critiques. Cudworth explicitly rejects the idea that matter is self-sufficient – this Stoic materialism is cognate with the foundational error of Stoicism that matter can generate mind without a transcendent intellect superior to the world. This is also linked to the monstrous error of determinism. As an Origenist (and Plotinian) Cudworth is radically opposed to Stoic determinism. Cudworth’s own adherence is to a radical dialectic of immanence and transcendence: a Platonic via media between radical transcendence and Stoic immanence. 

Hence the question is not merely the conflict between theism and atheism joined to the problem of mind. It is also about the kind of theism at stake. As Lutz Bergemann has recently argued, Cudworth’s metaphysics is a philosophy of power: God, as Plotinus insists, is δύναμις πάντων, the power and source of all/to all and yet not arbitrary power (Lutz Bergemann, System aus Transformation). Indeed Cudworth explicitly uses Plotinus’s magnificent treatise On the Freedom and the Will of the One. In this remarkably theistic treatise, the causal source of the physical cosmos is the immaterial abounding transcendent cause and is also presented through the image of the King (ὁ βασιλεὺς).

 In VI 8, 15 (cf. Leroux, Traité Sur la Liberté, 305), Plotinus writes: 

“It is this, then, and not something else, but what it ought to be; it did not happen to be like this, but had to be like this; but this ‘had to be’ is principle of all things that had to be.” 

Cudworth adds θεός (Theos) to the Greek. The passage reads: ”θεός ὅπερ ἐχρῆν εἶναι· οὐ τοίνυν οὕτω συνέβη, ἀλλ´ ἔδει οὕτως· τὸ δὲ «ἔδει» τοῦτο ἀρχὴ τῶν ὅσα ἔδει: 

God is essentially that, which ought to be; and he therefore did not happen to be such as he is: and this first ought to be the principle of all things whatsoever that ought to be” (TIS, III, 463) 

One might legitimately object to Cudworth’s resolute harnessing of Plotinus to the theistic camp, but Cudworth can draw upon a precedent in Ficino and others in identifying the supreme principle that is both transcendent and immanent in the cosmos with the Christian godhead (on Ficino’s momentous synthesis of Plotinian metaphysics and Christian theology, see Ficino, Marsilio. Platonic Theology). The supreme being is absolute freedom but this is not to be understood in a crude anthropomorphic manner: “God’s will is ruled by his justice, and not his justice ruled by his will; and therefore God himself cannot command what is in its own nature unjust” (TIS, III, 494. Cf. ibid., III, 512).

 Indeed, the mistake of the atheists is to confuse this anthropomorphism with the genuine concept of God: “In the next place, this wish of Atheists is altogether founded upon a mistaken notion of God Almighty too, [...] His will is not mere will, such as hath no other reason besides itself; but it is law, equity, and chancery” (ibid., III, 494). This is not the voluntaristic power of the ultra-Calvinistic deity but “the abounding fecund energy that is the μέτρον πάντων or measure of all that is both ‘measureless to man’ while the gauge and boundary of Being, (omnia in mensura et numero et pondere disposuisti, “Thou hast ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight”, Wisdom, 11,21). (See W. Beierwaltes, 'Augustins Interpretation von Sapientia 11, 21'). 

While “some fanaticks of latter times have made God to be all in a gross sense, so as to take away all real distinction betwixt God and the creature, and indeed to allow no other being besides God” (TIS, I, 513), there is no diminishing of the cause in its procession into the physical cosmos. The Cause, while not exhausted or lessened by it procession, remains within its effect. Yet the paradigm of divine immanence, Cudworth insists, is “a very ticklish point and easily liable to mistake and abuse” (ibid., I, 515). 

While it is unlikely that Cudworth would have read Spinoza’s Ethics, with its strident Deus sive natura, it is most likely that he was apprised of its existence by Van Limborch and Cudworth quotes Spinoza in the True Intellectual System as ”that Late Theological Politician” (ibid., III, 4; cf. J. Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 152). Sections of Spinoza’s Ethics were in circulation in 1663 and a full draft by 1665 (cf. Nadler, Spinoza: A Life, 225). Spinoza regards the notion of the will of the Divine as an evident absurdity.