PHILOSOPHICAL IDEALISM:

ARTICLES

Philosophical Idealism | Epistemology

BOOKS

Kant : Critique of Pure Reason | Hegel: Science of Logic

CLASSES

Empiricism | German Idealism | Platonism | Rationalism

DEVOTEES

Bonaventure | Descartes | Eleatics | Eriugena | Fichte | Hegel | Kant | Leibniz | Mathematicians | Gregory of Nyssa | Pythagoreans | Plato | Schelling | Spinoza

TOPICS

Immaterial Substance | Monism & Pluralism | Object/Substance & Subject/Shadow

"And I turned to the nature of the mind, but the false notion which I had of spiritual things, prevented my discerning the truth." Augustine, Confessions

NOTE: At this time, it is only for the sake of "covering all the bases" that the "Philosophical Idealism Study Archive" is being developed here.  It seems to me that the study which focuses on knowledge and the mind is fundamentally in opposition to the method and focus of this website -- and that it is ultimately helpless to discern or define everlasting things, anyway.  For proof of this trend, the endless failures of natural men using natural means to seek the Supernatural Mind will be cataloged here.    Certainly, a study of both shadow and substance can be simultaneously pursued... and the theologian who is able to balance both, without being lost to Rationalism or Skepticism, is to be admired.  Therefore, this archive will stick its toe in the sea of Philosophical Idealism by focusing primarily on theologians who, in pursuing the spiritual mind of Jesus Christ, are able to use the substance to properly define the shadow, as opposed to those who attempt to define the substance by meditating on the natural shadows of the flesh.

Historical Idealist: Saint Bonaventure "From memory and intelligence is breathed forth love, which is the tie between the two. These three--the generating mind, the word, and love--are in the soul as memory, intelligence, and will, which are consubstantial, coequal, and coeval, mutually immanent. If then God is perfect spirit, He has memory, intelligence, and will; and He has both the begotten Word and spirated Love. These are necessarily distinguished, since one is produced from the other--distinguished, not essentially or accidentally, but personally. When therefore the mind considers itself, it rises through itself as through a mirror to the contemplation of the Blessed Trinity--Father, Word, and Love--three persons coeternal, coequal, and consubstantial; so that each one is in each of the others, though one is not the other, but all three are one God."

• Abelard, Peter (1079-1142)
• Albertus Magnus (1193-1280)
• Anselm (1033-1109)
• Apollinarius the Younger (c 310-c 392)
• Aquinas, St. Thomas (c 1225-1274)
• Augustine of Hippo (354-430)
• Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860)
• Berkeley, George (1685-1753) - Subjective Idealism
• Biel, Gabriel (c 1425-1495)
• Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus (480-524)
• Bonaventure, Giovanni (1221-1274)
• Boston, Thomas (1677-1732)
• Bowne, Borden Parker (1847-1910)
• Bultmann, Rudolf (1884-1976)
• Burgh, William George de (1866-1943)
• Butler, Joseph (1692-1752)
• Edward Caird (1835-1908)
• Calixtus, George (1586-1656)
• Comte, Auguste (1798-1857)
• Descartes, Rene (1596-1650)
• Eckhart, Meister (c 1260-1328)
• Locke, John (1632-1704)
  
   

Gnostic Philosophy:

• Philosophy/Gnostic: The Gospel According to Pagels "Dealing with each topic in her book, Ms. Pagels does not mention crucial evidence concerning Gnostics and Catholics, and distorts what she does mention. She falsely maintains that Catholics insisted upon a physical view of resurrection (as compared to the Gnostics), when a spiritual view is clearly represented from Paul in the first century until Origen in the third century. She asserts that Gnostics did not concern themselves with authority, when in fact they often branded those who disagreed with them as corrupt materialists who were constitutionally incapable of understanding the world of spirit. Attempting to say that the Gnostics were feminists, she ignores texts from Nag Hammadi, as well as Gnostic sources that had been known for centuries before the library's discovery, that portray "Wisdom" (Sophia), the feminine counterpart of the true, masculine God, as literally hysterical — jealous of divine power, but unable to create life on her own, and therefore vindictive. Martyrdom was a common threat to Gnostics and Catholics, and not at all a fate that the Fathers of the Church wanted Christians generally to seek; Gnostics could be as ferocious as Catholics in claiming unique insight, and the knowledge that transcends this world was every bit as much a Catholic as a Gnostic quest.

  Appearing in a book as well written as Ms. Pagels's, her anachronisms have undermined public understanding of early Christianity. Gnosticism proved to be the most powerful philosophical and religious movement of its time because it insisted without compromise that the only truth that matters transcends this corrupt world. Gnostics often denigrated women as creatures of corruption, condemned any disagreement with their teaching as materialist fantasy, and denied that sexuality had any place in the realm of spirit. Trying to turn this orientation into existentialism, or feminism, or an embrace of the world's physicality, will only work with an extremely selective handling of the evidence, and deploys a laundered view of its subject.