"28th Degree - Knight of the Sun or Prince Adept" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pike Albert)

Anchises, in the AEneid, taught AEneas this doctrine of Pythagoras, learned by him from his Masters, the Egyptians, in regard to the Soul and Intelligence of the Universe, from which our souls and intelligences, as well as our life and that of the animals, emanate, Heaven, Earth, the Sea, the Moon and the Stars, he said, are moved by a principle of internal life which perpetuates their existence; a great intelligent soul, that penetrates every part of the vast body of the Universe, and, mingling with everything, agitates it by an eternal movement. It is the source of life in all living things. The force which animates all, emanates from the eternal fire that burns in Heaven. In the Georgics, Virgil repeats the same doctrine; and that, at the death of every animal, the life that animated it, part of the universal life, returns to its Principle and to
the source of life that circulates in the sphere of the Stars.

Servius makes God the active Cause that organizes the elements into bodies, the vivifying breath or spirit, that, spreading through matter or the elements, produces and engenders all things. The elements compose the substance of our bodies. God composes the souls that vivify these bodies. From it come the instincts of animals, from it their life, he says and when they die, that life returns to and re-enters into the Universal Soul, and their bodies into Universal Matter.

Timceus of Locria and Plato his Commentator wrote of the Soul of the World, devoloping the doctrine of Pythagoras, who thought, says Cicero, that God is the Universal Soul, resident everywhere in nature and of which our Souls are but emanations. '"God is one," says Pythagoras, as cited by Justin Martyr: "He is not, as some think, without the world, but within it, and entire in its entirety. He sees all that becomes, forms all immortal beings, is the author of their powers and performances, the origin of all things, the Light of Heaven, the Father, the Intelligence, the Soul of all beings, the Mover of all spheres".

God, in the view of Pythagoras, was ONE, a single substance, whose continuous parts extended through all the Universe, without separation, difference, or inequality, like the soul in the human body. He denied the doctrine of the spiritualists, who had severed the Divinity from the
Universe, making Him exist apart from the Universe, which thus became no more than a material work, on which acted the Abstract Cause, a God, isolated from it. The Ancient Theology did not so separate God from the Universe. This Eusebius attests, in saying that but a small number of wise men, like Moses, had sought for God or the Cause of all. Outside of that,
aIl the while Philosophers of Egypt and Phoenicia, real authors of all the old Cosmogonies, had placed the Supreme Cause in the Universe itself and in its parts, so that, in their view, the world and all its parts are in God.

The World or Universe was thus compared to man; the Principle of Life that moves it, to that which moves man; the Soul of the World to that of man. Therefore Pythagoras called man a microcosm, or little world, as possessing in miniature all the qualities found on a great scale in the Universe; by his reason and intelligence partaking of the Divine Nature and by his faculty of changing aliments into other substances, of growing, and reproducing himself, partaking of elementary Nature. Thus he made the Universe a great intelligent Being, like man an immense Deity, having in itself, what man has in himself, movement, life, and intelligence, and besides, a perpetuity of existence, which man has not; and, as having in itself perpetuity of movement and life, therefore the Supreme Cause of all.

Everywhere extended, this Universal Soul does not, in the view of Pythagoras, act everywhere equally nor in the same manner. The highest portion of the Universe, being as it were its head, seemed to him its principal seat, and there was the guiding power of the rest of the world.

In the seven concentric spheres is resident an eternal order, fruit of the intelligence, the Universal Soul that moves, by a constant and regular progression, the immortal bodies that form the harmonious system of the heavens.

Manilius says: "I sing the invisible and potent Soul of Nature; that Divine Substance which, everywhere inherent in Heaven Earth, and the Waters of the Ocean, forms the bond that holds together and makes one all the parts of the vast body of the Universe. It, balancing all Forces, and harmoniously arranging varied relations of the many members of the world, maintains it the life and regular movement that agitate it, as a result of action of the living breath or single spirit that dwells in all parts, circulates in all the channels of universal nature, flashes with rapidity to all its points, and gives to animated bodies configurations appropriate to the organization of each. This eternal Law, this Divine Force, that maintains the harmony the world, makes use of the Celestial Signs to organize and guide the animated creatures that breathe upon the earth and gives each of them the character and habits most appropriate. By action of
this Force, Heaven rules the condition of the Earth and of its fields cultivated by the husbandman; it gives us or takes from us vegetation and harvests; it makes the great ocean over-pass its limits at the flow, and retire within them again at ebbing, of the tide."

Thus it is no longer by means of a poetic fiction only that heavens and the earth become animated and personified, and a deemed living existences, from which other existences proceed. For now they live, with their own life, a life eternal like th bodies, each gifted with a life and perhaps a soul, like those man, a portion of the universal life and universal soul;
and the other bodies that they form, and which they contain in the bosoms, live only through them and with their life, as the embry lives in the bosom of its mother, in consequence and by means a the life communicated to it, and which the mother ever maintains by the active power of her own life. Such is the universal life the world, reproduced in all the beings which its superior portion creates in its inferior portion, that is as it were the mnatrix of the world, or of the beings that the heavens engender in its bosom.

"The soul of the world," says Macrobius, "is nature itself" [as the soul of man is man himself], "always acting through the celestial spheres which it moves, and which but follow the irresistible impulse it impresses on them.

The heavens, the sun, great seat of generative power, the signs, the stars and the planets act only with the activity of the soul of the Universe. From that soul, through them, come all the variations and challges of sublunary nature, of which the heavens and celestial bodies are but the secondary causes. The zodiac, with its signs, is an existence, immortal and divine, organized by the universal soul, and producing, or gathering in itself, all the varied emanations of the different powers that make up the nature of the Divinity".

This doctrine, that gave to the heavens and the spheres living souls, each a portion of the universal soul, was of extreme antiquity. It was held by the old Sabaeans. It was taught by Timaeus, P]ato, Speusippus, Iamblichus, Macrobius, Marcus Aurelius, and Pythagoras. When once men had assigned a soul to the Universe, containing in itself the plenitude of the animal life of particular beings and even of the stars, they soon supposed that soul to be essentially intelligent and the source of intelligence of all intelligent beings. Then the Universe became to them not only animated but intelligent, and of that intelligence the different parts of nature partook. Each soul was the vehicle and as it were the envelope of the intelligence that attached itself to it and could repose nowhere else. Without a soul there could be no intelligence and as there was a universal soul, source of all souls, the universal soul was gifted with a universal intelligence, source of all particular intelligences. So the soul of the world contained in itself the intelligence of the world.

All the agents of nature into which the universal soul entered, received also a portion of its intelligence, and the Universe, in its totality and in its parts, was filled with intelligences, that might be regarded as so many emanations from the sovereign and universal intelligence.
Wherever the divine soul acted as a cause, there also was intelligence and thus Heaven, the stars, the elements and all parts of the Universe, became the seats of so many divine intelligences. Every minutest portion of the great soul became a partial intelligence, and the more it was disengaged from gross matter, the more active and intelligent it was. And all the old adorers of nature, the theologians, astrologers, poets and the most distinguished philosophers, supposed that the stars were so many animated and intelligent beings, or eternal bodies, active causes of effects here below, whom a principle of life animated, and whom an intelligence directed, which was but an emanation from, and a portion of, the universal life and intelligence of the world.

The Universe itself was regarded as a supremely intelligent being. Such was the doctrine of Timaeus of Locria. The soul of man was part of the intelligent soul of the Universe, and therefore itself intelligent. His opinion was that of many other philosophers Cleanthes, a disciple of ZENO, regarded the Universe as God, or a the unproduced and universal cause of all effects produced. He ascribed a soul and intelligence to universal nature, and to this intelligent soul, in his view, divinity belonged. From it the intelligence of man was an emanation, and shared its divinity.

Chrysippus, the most subtle of the Stoics, placed in the universal reason that forms the soul and intelligence of nature, that divine force or essence of the Divinity which he assigned to the world moved by the universal soul that pervades its every part.

An interlocutor in Cicero's work, De Natura Deorum, formally argues that the Universe is necessarily intelligent and wise, because man, an infinitely small portion of it, is so. Cicero makes the same argument in his oration for Milo. The physicists came to the same conclusion as the pllilosophers. They supposed that movement essentially belonged to the soul, and the direction of regular and ordered movements to the intelligence. And, as both movement and order exist in the Universe, therefore, they held, there must be in it a soul and an intelligence that rule it and are not to be distinguished from itself; because the idea of the Universe is but the aggregate of all the particular ideas of all things that exist.

The argument was, that the Heavens and the Stars which make part of them, are animated, because they possess a portion of the Universal Soul; they are intelligent beings, because that Universal Soul, part whereof they possess, is supremely intelligent and they share Divinity with Universal Nature, because Divinity resides in the Universal Soul and Intelligence which move an rule the world, and of each of which they hold a share. By this process of logic, the interlocutor in Cicero assigned Divinity to the Stars, as animated beings gifted with sensibility and intelligence, and composed of the noblest and purest portions of the ethereal substance,
unmixed with matter of an alien nature, an essentially containing light and heat. Hence he concluded them to be so many gods, of an intelligence superior to that of other existences, corresponding to the lofty height in which they moved with such perfect regularity and admirable harmony, with a movement spontaneous and free. Hence he made them "Gods," active,
eternal, and intelligent "Causes"; and peopled the realm of Heaven with a host of Eternal Intelligences, celestial Genii or Angels, sharing the universal Divinity, and associated with it in the administration of the Universe, and the dominion exercised over sublunary nature and man.

We make the motive force of the planets to be a mechanical law, which we explain by the combination of two forces, the centripetal and centrifugal, whose origin we cannot demonstrate, but whose force we can calculate. The ancients regarded them as moved by an intelligent force that had its origin in the first and universal Intelligence. Is it so certain, after
all, that we are any nearer the truth than they were; or that we know what our "centripetal and centrifugal forces" mean; for what is a force? With us, the entire Deity acts upon and moves each planet, as He does the sap that circulates in the little blade of grass and in the particles of
blood in the tiny veins of the invisible rotifer. With the Ancients, the Deity of each Star was but a portion of the Universal God, the Soul of Nature. Each Star and Planet with them was moved of itself, and directed by its own special intelligence. And this opinion of Achilles Tatius, Diodorus, Chrysippus, Aristotlc, Plato, Heraclides of Pontus, Theophrastus, Simplicius, Macrobius, and Proclus, that in each Star there is an immortal Soul and Intelligence, part of the Universal Soul and Intelligence of the Whole, this opinion of Orpheus, Plotinus, and the Stoics, was in reality, that of many Christian philosophers. For Origen held the same opinion; and Augustin held that every visible thing in the world was superintended by an Aneglic Power and Cosma, the Monk, believed that every Star was under the guidance of an Angel; and the author of the
Octateuch, written in the time of the Emperor Justin, says that they are moved by the impulse communicated to them by Angels stationed above the firmament. Whether the stars were animated beings, was a question that Christian antiquity did not decide. Many of the Christian doctors believed they were. Saint Augustin hesitates, Saint Jerome doubts, if Solomon did
not assign souls to the Stars. Saint Ambrose does not doubt they have souls; and Pamphilus says that many of the Church believe they are reasonable beings, while many think otherwise, but that neither one nor the other opinion is heretical.

Thus the Ancient Thought, earnest and sincere, wrought out the idea of a Soul inherent in the Universe and in its several parts. The next step was to separate that Soul from the Universe, and give to it an external and independent existence an personality; still omnipresent, in every inch of space and in every particle of matter, and yet not a part of Nature, but its Cause and its Creator. This is the middle ground between the two doctrine of Pantheism (or that all is God, and God is in all and is all), on the one side, and Atheism (or that all is nature, and there is no other God), on the other; which doctrines, after all, when reduced to their simplest terms, seem to be the same.