In “the light of Neoplatonism, the humanists discovered in mythology something other and much greater than a concealed morality: they discovered religious teaching—the Christian doctrine itself…Against this background, it was inevitable that the same idea which declining paganism had evolved should occur to the humanists—namely, that all religions have the same worth, and that under their varied forms, however puerile and monstrous in seeming, is hidden a common truth. Marsilio Ficino leans toward a sort of universal theism, with Platonism as its gospel.” 5
“In the earliest of his works—a Christmas sermon preached at Coblenz in 1430—Nicholas (of Cusa) brought together the most diverse types of material…sources which presage the beginning of a new epoch: the Bible and the Talmud, the Sibylline Oracles and Hermetica…The change was the consequence both of Nicholas’ ever-deepening commitment to the…idea of man’s dignity and of the ever-increasing range of sources on which he drew. During the period of his engagement at the Council of Basle (1432-1437), he had broadened immensely his knowledge of the philosophical traditions of late antiquity…He learned the differences between the Platonic tradition and the ‘Aristotelian sect’ which was entrenched in many universities.
“Whereas in his earliest sermons he had drawn on Macrobius for Platonic opinions, he now began to make use of Plato himself—especially the Timaeus—of Philo, Proclus, Pseudo-Dionysius…Nicolas’…synthesis represents a high-water mark in the evolution of the new understanding of reality which appeared in Western Europe…With respect to the creator, man is a ‘human god’ or a ‘second god’ (De coniecturis 2:14)…This new tradition, although forced for a time underground by medieval Aristotelianism…found representatives…” 6
This “new understanding of reality,” which was destined to become the motif of the much-celebrated Church-sponsored “Renaissance Art epoch,” represents a radical departure from the ancient Biblical-Christian understanding of human beings as damaged by original sin and ineluctably subordinate to their Creator. The revolutionary anthropomorphic teleology of the Catholic Renaissance gave rise to a counter-reaction from Martin Luther and John Calvin, who demanded a return to fidelity to the hierarchical Biblical ordering of God and man, and the consciousness of man’s fundamental deformitas naturae upon which the true Church had been founded.
“Luther’s concept of man was in sharp contrast to this exalted picture of human potentiality, for he centered his view on the fall…Luther…insisted that human nature was wholly corrupted by original sin…Man’s high opinion of himself, according to Calvin, had to be deflated, and he had to be convinced of his own corruption and debility.” 7
This is not to deny the imago Dei, the image of God belonging to our first parents at their creation, and intrinsic to it (imago Dei intrinseca). This is acknowledged. As a result of the Original Sin of Adam and Eve however, there was henceforth an alteration of the forma substantialis of humanity toward an acquired inclinatio ad malum acquisita (inclination to do evil). This too must be acknowledged. The Soviet Communist and Hitlerian National Socialist utopian schemas, like all utopian arrangements both religious and secular from the early modern era onward, are essentially rooted in the Renaissance-Kabbalistic theology of the perfectibility of man who, it is insinuated, is like unto God.
“This discovery authorizes the utopian to project man’s actual capacities into a hypothetical future and to describe the biological and historical processes at the end of which a different man—or, rather mankind—will emerge in full possession of the desired attributes. Instead of refining the idea of God, as the religious utopian claims he does, it would be more accurate to say that the above schematized process naturally oversimplifies it and makes it grossly anthropomorphic…Such a new science is supposed to explore the conditions of emergence of man-become-God.” 8
The Renaissance theology is the mother of the modernist heresy, not only in terms of syncretism but in modernism’s utopian futurism and faith in inevitability of human progress. “This Renaissance Platonist vision stressed man’s position as a terrestrial god and combined it with a transformed Gnosticism holding that by the powers of the intellect man will create an earthly paradise.” 9
Man’s dignity and unalienable rights (among them equality before the law), derive from his pre-lapsarian creation, which became congenitally depraved after the Fall and which finds conditional restoration by the grace of Christ in the covenant between believer and Redeemer. We say conditional because this sanctification is dependent on continuing faith in Jesus. “If you are an unbeliever when you die, then Christ did not die for you.” (St. Ambrose).
Plethon’s Illuminati
As we excavate the next step in the progression of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic-Kabbalistic conspiracy within the Church we discover that the ideas of Cusa and his personal colleague Georgios Gemistos (see below), coincide with the rise of secret societies inside the Church. Chief among them in terms of imposing a curtain of secrecy, was the Roman Curia. The Vatican bureaucracy as we know it was extensively developed and enlarged in this time period, and it was at the Council in Ferrara and Florence 1438-1439, that an itinerant Byzantine Neoplatonist, Georgios Gemistos, who was taught by a Judaic “intermediary”—i.e. his handler, “Elissaios, a Jew of Zororastrian background and polytheist inclinations” — commenced his campaign in the West against Aristotle and orthodox Catholicism.
Gemistos (ca. 1360-1452), was called by his cognomen, “Plethon” (sometimes spelled “Pletho”). His lectures in 1439 were published under the title, On the Differences between Plato and Aristotle (De Differentiis). Some of these addresses, a milestone in the overthrow of Aristotle and Aquinas, were sponsored by Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini the Elder and hosted at the latter’s palace, in the presence of Cosimo de’ Medici. Here was the acceleration of the theological and cultural transmission of Neoplatonic paganism into the leading circles of the Catholic Church in Florence.10 In these addresses, Plethon held that there was a profound link between the Chaldeans and the Persian Magi. “The call for a new reading of Plato and the attack on Aristotle in the Differences initiated a lively and long-standing debate regarding the relation between Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophy that has been seen as announcing the end of the medieval theologico-philosophical epoch and the rise of a new way to do philosophy.” 11
Plethon helped to dissolve the traditional theology of the Catholic Church and initiate the rise of paganism in Catholic habiliments; first as a substratum and later as the command ideology of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance papacy.
Antedating the ascendance of what came to be known as the Florentine Platonic Academy, the Eastern Church was dealing with the phenomenon of Byzantine humanism manifested within the Neoplatonic-Hellenist conspiracy as early as the ninth century, emanating from the School of Philosophy of Magnaura, headed by “John the Grammarian” and “Leon the Mathematician,” circa 855 A.D. Leon was the author of a cunning work which foreshadowed the modus operandi of the “pious” Neoplatonist popes and prelates of the Renaissance. Leon’s book, the Thousand Line Theology (Chiliostichos theologia), seemingly denounced Hellenism and paganism. On closer examination however, we discover the Neoplatonic mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius (“Denys”) the Aeropagite. Orthodox Christian dogma on the Original Sin of Adam and Eve and Christ’s incarnation were derogated by Leon. He hinted that salvation is found outside the Church by means of “deciphering the secret language of God.” Leon’s followers included, in the fourteenth century, Petrarch’s teacher, the Pythagorean monk Barlaam of Calabria, and in the fifteenth century, Plethon.
Another slick “conservative Christian” who had promoted occult Neoplatonism under a veil of anti-occult polemics, was the medieval Eastern Orthodox monk Michael Psellos (1018-1078), author of the Chronographia, and compiler of the Magic Oracles of the Magi, which he renamed the Chaldean Chronicles. Psellos added a spurious Christian gloss to its Pythagorean, Zoroasterian and Neoplatonic contents and these were embraced by Plethon nearly three ce
nturies later; inspiring him to circulate the doctrine at the Council of Florence, as an affirmation of gnostic beliefs “mistakenly” rejected by the early Church. Plethon suffered no repression whatsoever from papal Rome as a result of his bold, public, pagan-occult evangelism.
Niketas Siniossoglou, in his notable book, Radical Platonism in Byzantium, elucidates the camouflage by which Psellos, by “explicitly condemning Hellenism in the form of occult divinatory practices, allowed Hellenism to slip in by the back door in the form of speculative philosophical theology,” 12 creating a foothold for the occult philosophy within the Catholic Church, which was the objective of his proselytizing mission.
We know we are confronting the principles of diabolic hermeneutics when these tools of doubletalk and concealment are employed. Four hundred years after Plethon, two of Pope Leo XIII’S most renowned encyclicals were promulgated with similar shrewd misdirection: Humanum Genus and Rerum Novarum. Both are held aloft by supposed “conservative” and “traditional” Catholics as superb examples of the exposition of unalloyed dogmatic certainty and militant rebuke of evil. Look closer however, and we catch sight of the spirit of Michael Psellos hovering over Humanum Genus, the pope’s statement on the occult and Freemasonry which scrupulously avoids the very foundation of the Freemasonic plague, Kabbalistic Judaism. By means of this staggering omission, for generations millions of Catholics have been misdirected away from knowledge of the true root of the masonic order.
Furthermore, Leo XIII’s encyclical on social justice and the rights of workers to be free of oppression, Rerum Novarum, omits any restoration—or even a suggestion of a groundwork for a reinstatement of a restoration—of the Church’s immutable ban on taking profits from loans. It is upon usury that the backs of the workers are broken and the Money Power made ruler over Church and State. The alibi for this development of the doctrine on money stems from that other principle of Neoplatonism, situation ethics: that which was beneficial in the past may be harmful in the present.13
Out of the doublespeak in Florence supported by the wealth and political authority of Cosimo de’ Medici, came the movement which would convince Renaissance Rome that Neoplatonic-Kabbalistic-Hermeticism was a benefit to the Church and a divinely-ordained development of ecclesiastical doctrine, while reassuring the Catholic people, parish priests and laity, that the Church continued to be an ultrainquisitorial bastion of vigilance against paganism and heresy, a legend widely accepted even in our twenty-first century.
Plethon founded a pagan brotherhood and his principal text, Nomoi, was a blueprint for a pagan utopia. 14 His specific model for realizing this dream was infiltration by Plethon’s secret society of initiates, of which the Greek Catholic Cardinal Basilios Bessarion was a member.15 Plethon’s “philosophicalreligious brotherhood” anticipated “European secret orders such as the Illuminati.” 16 Plethon named his camarilla “Phratria,” after the old hereditary brotherhood that had practiced the sorcerous “Attic arts” associated with Attica, the birthplace of the Eleusinian mysteries in Greece, where the festival of the Phratria had been known as the Apaturia. It took place yearly, over a seventy-two hour period, in the autumn, marked by sacrifices to the gods, mostly animal, but on rare occasions, human beings were ritually sacrificed by the Phratrians. Plethon’s group had chapters in Italy as well as Greece. He wrote his Neoplatonic, Zoroasterian Book of Laws exclusively for his revival of this brotherhood.
A conservative Catholic truly deserving of the name, George of Trebizond, was present in Cardinal Cesarini’s palace for a lecture by Plethon, in the course of which he put a question to the Greek magus. Trebizond recounted his confrontation with Plethon in his book, Comparatio philosophorum Platonis et Aristotelis: “I myself heard him (Plethon) at Florence asserting that in a few more years the whole world would accept the same religion with one mind, one intelligence, one teaching.
“And when I asked him, ‘Christ’s or Muhammad’s?,’ he said: ‘Neither. But it will not differ much from paganism.” 17
Trebizond was outraged by Plethon’s brazen response and by the fact that he was free to offer it under the roof of the cardinal and the protection of the Medici. 18 Trebizond did his best to warn of the “devastating effect that the Platonic contagion…would have on ‘religion and politics,’ as a ‘great apocalyptic drama’ unfolded a real ‘neopagan conspiracy.” 19
Then as now however, Catholic conservatives were obstructed and suppressed by liberal prelates. Trebizond became a victim of an early form of selective, though de facto, censorship, and he was denounced by Plethon’s disciple, Cardinal Bessarion, in the latter’s book, Calumniatorem Platonis (1469). Bessarion was at the head of a large network of influential members of the ecclesiastical elite. They facilitated the wide dissemination of Calumniatorem Platonis, and did all they could to limit the circulation of Trebizond’s book:
“Bessarion’s famous treatise, a reply to his adversary George of Trebizond’s Comparatio philosophorum Platonis et Aristotelis, became one of the most important texts of the Renaissance. It had been written in Greek in the late 1450s and the 1469 first edition was based on Perotti’s rephrasing of Bessarion’s own translation into Latin, with substantial additions by other protügüs of Bessarion’s. The first Aldine edition (based on a copy of the 1469 edition with emendations by a member of Bessarion’s household), was published in 1503…Despite George of Trebizond’s superior Latinity and force of argument, Bessarion’s treatise was widely distributed and became well-known; George’s treatise was only published once, in 1523, in a garbled edition caused by the earlier mis-binding of the manuscript exemplar.” 20
Trebizond, defender of the Catholic theology of all time, was opposed by Pope Nicholas V, who had him dismissed from his position in the Vatican bureaucracy. “He was made secretary to Nicholas V, but lost the favor of the pope by his fierce advocacy of Aristotle against Bessarion, Pletho, and other learned Greeks.” 21
Trebizond was, however, championed by conservative elements in the leadership of the Greek Orthodox Church, including no less a figure than Georgios-Gennadios Scholarios, the future patriarch of Constantinople, who had written a polemic, Against Plethon.22 Scholarios was no Orthodox bigot or rustic. He was a sophisticated theologian with a life-long admiration for St. Thomas Aquinas, the Roman Catholic theologian who wrote after the schism between the Latin and Greek churches. “There has been a tendency to describe the clash between Scholarios and Plethon as a conflict between a reactionary theocrat and a visionary reformer, but a serious examination of their work reveals that Scholarios was capable of foresight and pastoral sensitivity…while Plethon was known to advocate ideological repression far greater than any he himself ever suffered, as in his suggestion that all dissenters… ‘found teaching against our doctrine shall be burned alive.” 23 Fourteen years after Plethon’s death, around 1464, Patriarch Scholarios alerted his flock to the menace of rabbinic Judaism in his Refutatio erroris Judaeorum.
The coming struggle over the Neoplatonic-Hermetic takeover of the Church of Rome was presaged by the arrival of Plethon, the Christ-denying heretic, who was advanced and defended by Cardinals Cesarini and Bessarion, as well as Pope Nicholas V. After Nicholas of Cusa, Plethon was the most high profile, public purveyor of the occult toxin inside the bowels of the Church in the fifteenth century, when we qualify his profile as being that of an infiltrator whose theology was completely undisguised. 24
The devious legion of Church infiltrators who followed Plethon would, contrary to him, paint themselves in pious hues, as devoutly Christian-Platonists, Christian-Hermeticists and Christian-Kabbalists, in defiance of the fact that their Neoplatonic, Hermetic and Kabbalistic dogma represented demonic forces that are, patently, spiritually irreconcilable with the Gospel, and profoundly hostile to it.
Plethon’s influence over the Council of Florence and in the Catholic salons of that city helped to spread the Neoplatonic contagion to the patricians of the Church of Rome. Let us track Plethon’s anti-Christian ideology
. In Plato’s Timaeus, the philosopher’s intellect alone guides him to knowledge of ultimate reality. From this rationalism, disconnected from Biblical revelation, proceeds the conceit of man’s tikkun olam, according to Plotinus (ca. 204-270 A.D.), one of the founders of Neoplatonism: “It is…announced in Plotinus according to whom the descent of the soul in this world occurs for the sake of the perfection of the universe…Plethon’s revival of this model acquires a revolutionary dimension… a metaphysical mundus inversus…” 25
In this inverted world, in the imagination of philosophers, humans are placed above the hierarchy of divine creation as revealed in the Scriptures (God and the angels above, and man below)—to become co-redeemers of the universe. This notion of co-redemption of God’s creation by a human being is a tenet of both the Kabbalah and Neoplatonism and finds overt expression in post-Renaissance Church of Rome theology, in the form of a de facto belief in the Blessed Virgin Mary as “Co-Redemptrix of the Universe.” 26
Plethon was the Saul Alinsky of his day, using religion as a vehicle for social engineering. In Nomoi, Plethon’s main text, he relates that revolutionary change requires religion as its vehicle. His “…ideological and political reforms presuppose religious reformism, the shift from Christianity to paganism.”27 As we observed earlier, according to Plethon, to enforce the occult “reform” those who object to it must be executed.
Cosimo de’ Medici considered Gemistos Plethon a second Plato, and dedicated himself to founding a Neoplatonic academy in Florence to perpetuate the legacy of this serpent in the Quattrocento. The Roman Catholic Church would never be the same.
1 Stefano Ugo Baldassarri and Arielle Saiber, “Introduction,” in Images of Quattrocento Florence, (Yale University, 2000), pp. xxvi-xxvii.
The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome Page 17