Agnostics is a modern term applied to those who disclaim any knowledge of God or of the origin of the universe, holding that the mind of man is limited to a knowledge of phenomena and of what is relative, and that, therefore, the infinite, the absolute, and the unconditioned being beyond all experience, are consequently beyond its range. Research Agnostics
In philosophy, Conditioned and Unconditioned are terms which were introduced by Sir William Hamilton. The Unconditioned is regarded by Sir William Hamilton as a genus including two species: the Infinite, or the unconditionally unlimited, and the Absolute, or the unconditionally limited; and the thesis which he maintains and expounds, and which forms one of the leading doctrines of his philosophical system, is that the Unconditioned, as thus explained, is entirely unthinkable. The mind is confined, in point of knowledge though not of faith, to the limited and conditioned - the Conditioned being the mean between two unconditionates, mutually exclusive and equally inconceivable, but of which, on the principles of contradiction and excluded middle, one must be admitted as necessary. Thus infinite space is inconceivable by us, while at the same time it is equally impossible to us to conceive of space as finite; yet one of these must be admitted necessary, and our conception is in some sense a mean between the inconceivables. The doctrine was applied by Mansel to determine the limits of religious thought. Research Conditioned
Gnostics is a general name applied to early schools of speculators, which combined the fantastic notions of the oriental systems of religion with the ideas of the Greek philosophers and the doctrines of Christianity. They nearly all agreed on the points that God is incomprehensible; that matter is eternal and antagonistic to God; that creation is the work of the Demiurge, an emanation from the Supreme Deity, subordinate or opposed to God; and that the human nature of Christ was a mere deceptive appearance.
Certain forms of Gnosticism are mere adaptations of the Persian dualism to the solution of the problem of good and evil; while the pantheism of India seems to have been a pervading influence in others. Simon the magician (Simon Magus), of whom Luke speaks in the Acts of the Apostles, is generally looked on as the first of the Gnostics.
The dogmas of the earliest Gnostics may be reduced to the following heads: God, the highest intelligence, dwells at an infinite distance from this world, in the Abyss, removed from all connection with every work of temporal creation. He is the source of all good; matter, the crude, chaotic mass of which all things were made, is, like God, eternal, and is the source of all evil. From these two principles, before time commenced, emanated beings called aeons, which are described as divine spirits, inhabiting the Pleroma, or plenitude of light, which
surrounds the Abyss. The world and the human race were created out of matter by one aeon, the Demiurge, or, according to the later systems of the Gnostics, by several aeons and angels. The aeons made the bodies and the sensual soul of man of this matter; hence the origin of evil in man. God gave man the rational soul; hence the constant struggle of reason with sense. What are called gods by men (for instance, Jehovah, the God of the Jews) are merely such aeons or creators, under whose dominion man became more and more wicked and miserable. To destroy the power of these creators, and to free man from the power of matter, God sent the most exalted of all aeons, to which character Simon first made pretensions.
The Nicolaitans mentioned in the Revelation of St John, so called from Nicolas, a deacon of the church at Jerusalem, were one of the earliest sects, and are described as forerunners of the Cerinthians. Cerinthus, a Jew, of whom John the evangelist seems to have had some knowledge, combined such reveries with the doctrines of Christianity, and maintained that the most elevated aeon sent by God for the salvation of man, was Christ, who had descended upon Jesus, a Jew, in the form of a dove, and through him revealed the doctrines of Christianity, but before the crucifixion of Jesus separated from him, and at the resurrection of the dead will again be united with him, and lay the foundation of a kingdom of the most perfect earthly felicity, to continue 1000 years.
Carpocrates and the sect of the Ophites (beginning of the 2nd century), to whom the term Gnostic was first applied, saw in the Serpent a wise and good being, and carried to its extreme form the inversion of the biblical story. The later Gnostics have been divided into three schools. The first was the Syrian, founded by Menander, a pupil of Simon. This school emphasizes the conflict between Good and Evil - the Supreme Deity on the one hand, and the Demiurge and his angels or aeons on the other. The second was the school of Alexandria, represented by Basilides and Valentinus; the system of the latter being the most complete and ingenious of all. In that light or plenitude, which all the Gnostics speak of as surrounding the residence of the Supreme God, he has placed fifteen male and as many female aeons. The Supreme God, the Unbegotten, the Original Father, whom he also calls the Deep (Bathos), is the first of these aeons; Thinking Silence was his wife, and Intelligence, a male, and Truth, a female, were their children. These produced The Word and Life, the latter a female, who gave birth to mankind and society. These eight constituted the first class of the thirty aeons.
The second class, of five couples, at the end of which stood the Only Begotten, and the third, of six couples, at the head of which stood the Comforter, were, in a similar manner, descended from Mankind and Society, and consisted, like the first, of personified ideas. The officers of this heavenly state are four male aeons - Horus, who guards the boundaries of the region of light; Christ and the Holy Ghost, who instruct the other aeons in their duties; and Jesus, whom all the aeons of the kingdom of light begat in common, and endowed with their gifts. Man and the world were formed by a demiurge out of matter which was partly material, partly spiritual, partly soul-like. Christ, the Saviour of men, when he appeared on earth had a visible body made of the spiritual and the soul-like substance only. At his baptism the aeonJesus united itself with him, and instructed mankind.
A third school of Gnosticism, whose centre was Asia Minor, was represented by Marcion of Pontus, the son of a Christian bishop, who lived about the middle of the 2nd century. Marcion assigned to Christianity, as the one absolutely independent religion, a complete isolation from the Old Testament revelation, the author of which was, in his opinion, merely a just but not a good being. The true God begat many spirits, among which were the creator of the world, the righteous God, and the lawgiver of the Jews. The last, through the prophets, promised Christ; but Jesus, who actually appeared, and is the true Redeemer, was the Son of the truly good God, and not the Jewish Messiah.
Towards the end of the 2nd century Tatian, a Syrian Christian, adopted Gnostic doctrines, and founded a sect. Bardesanes, a Syrian, and Hermogenes, an African, who, in the reign of the Emperor Commodus, apostatized from Christianity, and established sects, bordered, in their hypotheses concerning the origin of good and evil, upon Gnosticism. There have been no Gnostic sects since the 5th century; but many of the principles of their system of emanations reappear in later philosophical systems, drawn from the same sources as theirs. Research Gnostics
Grey describes the infinite shades of colour between brilliant white and black.
Pearly - A very pale bluish-grey colour, paler than slate grey.
Silver - A greyish-white.
Slate - A pale bluish-grey colour. Slate grey implies hardness, conjuring images of the hard, cold natural stone.
Steel - A pale bluish-grey colour. Steel grey implies hardness in much the same way as slate grey, but with the image of the metal rather than the mineral.
Alighieri Dante was an Italian poet. He was born in 1265 at Florence and died in 1321. Of a family belonging to the lower nobility, his education was confided to the learned Brunetto Latini. He is said also to have studied in various seats of learning, and it is certain that either at this time or in the course of his wandering life he made himself master of all the knowledge of his time.
He seems to have been quite a boy, no more than nine years of age, when he first saw Beatrice Portinari, and the love she awakened in him he has described in that record of his early years, the Vita Nuova, as well as in his later great work, the Divina Cornmedia, in terms which make it hard to distinguish the real personality of Beatrice from some ideal power of beauty and virtue of which she is to Dante the symbol. Their actual lives at least went far enough apart, Beatrice marrying a noble Florentine, Simone Bardi, in 1287, and dying three years afterwards; while the year following Dante married Gemma dei Donati, by whom he had seven children. At this time the Guelfic party in Florence became divided into the rival factions of Bianchi and Neri (Whites and Blacks), the latter being an extreme party while the former leaned to reconciliation with the Ghibellines. Dante's sympathies were with the Bianchi, and being a prior of the trades and a leading citizen in Florence he went on an embassy to Rome to influence the pope on behalf of the Bianchi.
The rival faction of the Neri, however, had got the upper hand in the city, and in the usual fashion of the time were burning the houses of their rivals and slaying them in the open street. In Dante's absence his enemies obtained a decree of banishment;
against him, coupled with a heavy fine, a sentence which was soon followed by another condemning him to be burned alive for malversation and peculation.
From this time the poet became, and to the end of his life remained, an exile; and his history, first lost by the indifference of contemporaries and then hallowed by the legends of later generations, becomes semi-mythical. He has told us himself how he wandered 'through almost all parts where this language is spoken,' and how hard he felt it 'to climb the stairs and eat the bitterbread of strangers.' During this period he is said to have visited many cities, Arezzo, Bologna, Sienna, etc, and even Paris.
In 1314 he found shelter with Can Grande della Scala at Verona, where he remained until 1318. In 1320 we find him staying at Ravenna with his friend Guido da Polenta. In September 1321 his sufferings and wanderings were ended by death. He was buried at Ravenna, where his bones still lie.
His great poem, the Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy), written in great part, if not altogether, during his exile, is divided into three parts, entitled Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The poet dreams that he has wandered into a dusky forest, when the shade of Virgil appears and offers to conduct him through hell and purgatory. Further the pagan poet may not go, but Beatrice herself shall lead him through paradise. The journey through hell is first described, and the imaginative power with which the distorted characters of the guilty and the punishments laid upon them are brought before us; the impressive pathos of these short histories - often compressed in Dante's severe style into a couple of lines - of Pope and Grhibelline, Italian lord and lady; the passionate depth of characterization, the subtle insight and intense faith, make up a whole which for significance and completeness has perhaps no rival in the work of any one man.
From hell the poet, still in the company of Virgil, ascends to purgatory, where the scenes are still mostly of the same kind though the punishments are only temporary. In the earthly paradiseDante beholds Beatrice in a scene of surpassing magnificence, ascends with her into the celestial paradise, and after roaming over seven spheres reaches the eighth, where he beholds 'the glorious company which surrounds the triumphant Redeemer.' In the ninthDante feels himself in presence of the divine essence, and sees the souls of the blessed on thrones in a circle of infinite magnitude. The Deity himself, in the tenth, he cannot see for excess of light.
There are many notable translations of Dante's great poem. Amongst English versions we may mention those of Gary, Longfellow, and Dean Plumptre, and an excellent prose translation by Dr. John Carlyle. The Vita Nuova has been admirably translated by D. G. Rossetti in his Early Italian Poets.
Dante's other works are: Il Convito (the Banquet), a series of philosophical commentaries on the author's canzoni; Il Canzoniere, a collection of poems; a Latin treatise, De Monarchia, a work intended to prove the supremacy of the head of the holy Roman Empire; a treatise on the Italian language entitled, De Vulgari Eloquio; and an inquiry into the relative altitude of the water and the land, De Aqua et Terra. Research Alighieri Dante
Anaxagoras was an Ionian philosopher. He was born in 488 BC at Clazomense and died in 428 BC. When only about twenty years of age he settled at Athens, and soon gained a high reputation, and gathered round him a circle of renowned pupils, including Pericles, Euripides, Socrates, etc. At the age of fifty he was publicly charged with impiety and condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted to perpetual banishment. Thereupon he went to Lampsacus, where he died. Anaxagoras belonged to the atomic school of Ionic philosophers. He held that there was an infinite number of different kinds of elementary atoms, and that these, in themselves motionless and originally existing in a state of chaos, were put in motion by an eternal, immaterial, spiritual, elementary being, Nous (Intelligence), from which motion the world was produced. The stars were, according to him, of earthy materials; the sun a glowing mass, about as large as the Peloponnesus;
the earth was flat; the moon a dark, inhabitable body, receiving its light from the sun; the comets wandering stars. Research Anaxagoras
Anaximander was an ancient Greek philosopher. He was born in 611 BC at Miletus and died 547. The fundamental principle of his philosophy is that the source of all things is an undefined substance infinite in quantity. The firmament is composed of heat and cold, the stars of air and fire. The sun occupies the highest place in the heavens, has a circumference twenty-eight times larger than the earth, and resembles a cylinder, from which streams of fire issue. The moon is likewise a cylinder, nineteen times larger than the earth. The earth has the shape of a cylinder, and is placed in the midst of the universe, where it remains suspended. Anaximander occupied himself a great deal with mathematics and geography. To him is credited the invention of geographical maps and the first application of the gnomon or style fixed on a horizontal plane to determine the solstices and equinoxes. Research Anaximander
Anaximenes was an ancient Greek philosopher. He lived about 550 BC. According to him, air was the first principle of all things. Finite things were formed from the infinite air by compression and rarefaction produced by eternally existent motion; and heat and cold resulted from varying degrees of density of the primal element. Research Anaximenes
Baruch De Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher. He was born in 1632 at Amsterdam and died in 1677. At first a student of theology, his unorthodox ideas caused him to be excommunicated and an attempt made to kill him. As a result he left Amsterdam and devoted himself to philosophy, declining an offer of a professorship at Heidelberg lest it interfere with his studies, and instead earned a living polishing lenses.
His philosophy is based upon that of Descartes, but set forth according to a rigorously geometrical method. His most important work was entitled 'Ethics', a form of pantheism. In it he starts from the definition of substance as that which is in itself and is conceived by itself, he argues that there is only one substance - God, the absolutely infinite. This infinite substance he argues possesses infinite attributes, of which we only know two, thought and extension. Spinoza further argued that each of these attributes carries with it an infinity of modes; the totality of these modes is the world. By attribute he meant that which constitutes the essence of substance; by mode that which is in something else by which also it is conceived. Research Baruch De Spinoza
Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle was a French writer. He was born in 1657 at Rouen and died in 1757. In 1674 he went to Paris, and soon became known by his poetical effusions and learned works. Before the age of twenty he had assisted in the composition of the operas of Psyche and Bellerophon, which appeared under the name of his uncle, Thomas Corneille. In 1681 he brought out his tragedy Aspar; but it and the other dramas and pastorals with which he opened his literary career were on the whole unsuccessful. In 1683 appeared his Dialogues of the Dead, which were favourably received. His Discourse on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) was the first book in which astronomical subjects were discussed with taste and wit. Among his other works are the History of Oracles and an Essay on the Geometry of the Infinite. Research Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
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Abbreviations
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