At the summit of the divine hierarchy, the alleged 'Chaldaeans' seem to have conceived a 'transcendental first Fire'. They call this 'Fire' the 'Father' or 'Hypercosmic Paternal Abyss'. This father 'has created all things in perfection': he has conceived them in the intelligible world. But this supreme God is a 'triadic monad'. He is simultaneously 'one and threefold', like the God of the Christians. In fact, he dominates the triad which he forms with a second Intellect and an intermediary 'Power', that the Oracles call Hecate. The second Intellect is the 'craftsman of the igneous world', a kind of demiurge of the Empyrean.
The scheme of this 'Father-Power-Intellect' triad which is typically Chaldaean but of philosophical origin, recurs frequently in the argumentation of the Neoplatonists. The 'Power' of Hecate both unites and dissociates the first and second Fires, which the oracles seem to identify respectively with the 'transcendentally One' (hapax epekeina) and the 'transcendentally Two' (dis epekeina), although Psellos in his Summary Outline of the ancient beliefs accepted 'among the Chaldaeans' places this triad after many others, taking his inspiration from an infinitely more complex theology, ascribable to Proclus and perhaps already reconstructed by Iamblichus. There is not even unanimity on the translation itself of the mysterious hapax and dis epekeina!
link: The Chaldaean Oracles
0 comments:
Post a Comment