#eric perl

[tail-feathers]

[anaxerneas]

the world and ourselves, as we find them, are less than fully existent because we do not perfectly love God

In Theophany by Eric Perl, when covering Dionysius on the nature and causes of evil, Perl ends with a wonderful explanation of the fact that

But this does rely on a Neoplatonic understanding of evil as privation or the (mere) absence of good which I struggle to see.

[yuri-rimsky-blog]

Maximus regards the act of creation not as the production of new or additional beings over against God, in such a way that God an d the world would be two distinct things, but as the ontological participation of the creature in God .God, who in himself is beyond being, and is thus, in Dionysius’s and Eriugena’s terms, Nothing, not anything , becomes in creating the form al being of all things, the being in which they participate and in virtue of which they are beings.

Eric Perl, Metaphysics and Christology in Maximus Confessor and Eriugena

[yuri-rimsky-blog]

For example, the divine activity according to which I am created, my paradigm or, takes effect, is revealed, and in that sense ‘acts,’ only when, at a particular moment in history, I come into being. But this does not mean that God, at that point in time, exercises a new activity. Rather, that activity is pre-contained in the one eternal act of creation by which God, in his eternal present, creates the entire expanse of time and all things in it.

Eric Perl, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Metaphysics of Creation,”

[yuri-rimsky-blog]

To be is to be intelligible, Neoplatonism vs Nihilism

The alternative to the principle that to be is to be intelligible, therefore, is the nihilism which afflicts so much of contemporary thought and culture. For if being is not what is apprehended by thought, then thought does not apprehend being. This in effect means that there is no being, since whatever we call “being” is not being but a projection, interpretation, illusion—in short, nothing. If reality is not as thought must apprehend it, then there is no such thing as reality. Conversely, if thought is not the apprehension of being, then all thought, in that it never apprehends being, is illusory. Nihilism may indeed be said to consist most fundamentally in the denial of the intelligibility of being.

Eric Perl, Theophany pages 111-112

[yuri-rimsky-blog]

The removal of all symbols is not a knowledge of God unveiled, as if God could be an object of knowledge, but the cessation of intellectual activities, the union above intellect, the darkness of unknowing.

Eric Perl, Theophany page 105

[yuri-rimsky-blog]

God is known both through knowledge [γνώσεως] and through unknowing. And of him there is both intellection and reason and knowledge [έπιστήμη] and touching and sense-perception and opin¬ion and imagination and name and all other things; and he is nei¬ther thought [νοείται] nor spoken [λέγεται] nor named. And he is not any of beings, nor is he known in any of beings. And he is all things in all things and nothing in any, and he is known to all from all and to none from any.16 (St Dionysios DN VII.3, 872A)

Eric Perl's translation of St Dionysios 

[yuri-rimsky-blog]

That which is generated, when it has come into being, reverts to the One and is filled, and becomes Intellect by looking towards it. Its halt and turning towards the One constitutes being, its gaze upon the One, Intellect. Since it halts and turns towards the One that it may see, it becomes at once Intellect and being” (Plotinus V.2.1.10–14).

Eric Perl, Theophany page 92