Dear Readers: It has been a while since this home page and blog of mine was last refreshed with new content, but, as my followers on Academia.edu are aware of, I have not been (entirely) idle, and since the beginning of 2022, I have actually composed several new papers and e-books. I have also produced corrected and expanded versions of some of my work, including my 2020 master’s thesis, and I have participated in a number of very interesting Academia.edu discussions (such as this one). Let me begin this overview of what I have been doing by presenting some the above mentioned documents and papers to you:

Visions of the Suprarational: A Study of the Concept of Spiritual Sight in the Works of Plato and St. Augustine of Hippo (master’s thesis; new version w. minor corrections and some additions)

My master’s thesis, which one could say is the culmination of more than ten years of research into the nature of Platonism and Christianity, mysticism and religion, as well as of a very long personal, spiritual journey, is now available for download as an e-book/PDF-file. This is the longest and most significant literary work I have published since the completion of my first collection of poems, On the Mystical Road of Longing (my second book), back in 2008. I have called it A Study of the Concept of Nous, since this is an academic paper, and since the nature of Nous or «Intellect» (as it is often translated) is its primary focus, but it could also have been styled The Platonic Heritage of Traditional Christianity, or Why Christians Should Acknowledge That They Are Platonists, or Why We Need To Recover A Direct Connection To The Divine. For in this study, I describe some rather startling discoveries, such as the existence of a Platonic theology resembling the theology hinted at by Christ himself, in his sayings in the Gospels, and later expressed in the Nicene Creed. When one calls to mind that Plato lived some 400 years before the emergence of Christianity, and some 700 years before the council was convened at Nicea, this cannot but be viewed as staggering.

Another discovery I elaborate on is the distinction which may be made, on the basis of Plato’s own words, between the Good (Itself) and the Idea of the Good (or the «Form» of the Good, as it is sometimes called), and that this distinction could be seen as referring to the same metaphysical realities (or divine entities) as those Christianity calls Father and Son, or Father and Eternal Word. In fact, Plato himself uses the metaphors of Father and Child (or Offspring), and it seems highly probable that St. Augustine of Hippo was aware of this when he spoke of the Idea or Face of God, as I show the chapter on St. Augustine. This distinction is closely related to yet another realization I have arrived at, namely that the two different «roads» to or «modes of apprehending» the Supreme God, the «Via Positiva» and «Via Negativa», usually seen as originating with late Platonism (so-called «Neoplatonism») or early medieval Christianity (St. Denis or «Pseudo-Dionysius») are in fact present in the works of Plato himself.

I also touch on the multiple levels of meaning built into the Republic (Norwegian: Staten), which is arguably Plato’s most important dialogue, and why this means that the Republic, the main title of which in Greek is Politeia, should actually be called Government, since this term preserves the several levels of meaning alluded to by the original one. But the most important part of my thesis has to do with Nous (or Noos), and is about the recovery, in both a linguistic, educational and psychological sense, of a complete anthropology, as one might call it, meaning a view of the human being (the individual Soul) which takes into account and aims to reawaken the ability to connect with the Above, i.e. with the metaphysical realities beyond this world of nature and of matter, and, ultimately, with the Supreme Deity, the source of Wisdom and Objective Knowledge.

I find it difficult to believe that I am almost alone, at least in the present day and age, in having seen the astonishing aspects of Platonism (and the momentous implications) I have here mentioned or alluded to, but it does indeed look that way to me at present. One possible way to interpret the near absence of academic works dealing with these subjects is avoidance, meaning that a number of people have found what I have found, but that almost all of them have chosen not to commit their discoveries to writing. Another possibility is that the vast majority of readers of Plato and St. Augustine are so mentally dominated by the zeitgeist (which is that of Materialism and Reductionism, Nominalism and Anti-Essentialism), and by certain schools of interpretation, that they are quite incapable of seeing what the ancient texts actually state and imply. Both are probably contributing to the strange status quo.

I should mention, however, that I am greatly indebted to a modern-day Platonist who, back in the 1990s, gave and published a long series of lectures on Platonic philosophy, namely Dr. Pierre Grimes – as I have stated in the introduction to my thesis. That long series of absolutely fantastic lectures contributed significantly to the first kindling in me of an interest in the Platonic worldview, back in 2009 and 2010. I did not fully understand everything that was said, but many of the surprising messages and the fascinating perspectives remained with me, and when I began the systematic research for my master’s thesis, in September 2019, I was able to draw on and take advantage of what I had learned around a decade earlier.

Well, without further ado, as they say, I present to you my thesis, and invite you to download it and read it, free of charge. Please see link below. P.S.: I welcome polite and Truth-oriented discussion, so if you have questions or comments you believe to be well-founded, or you are a researcher with a similar or different perspective, I would love to hear from you. This paper may also be viewed on and downloaded from my homepage at https://edmund-schilvold.com/ This is a new version of the master’s thesis published here on Academia in late 2020. You can still find the old version elsewhere on my profile.

You can also find this new version of my thesis on Academia.edu

A new and ground-breaking analysis of the Socratic and Platonic concept of the Good (or God) (updated)

This is a paper exclusively devoted to a comprehensive analysis of and certain musings regarding what one might style the ontological nature of Plato’s Good, which, as I believe I have come very close to proving, actually consists of two distinct, albeit virtually inseparable ontological entities.

If that sounds a little mysterious, then please allow me to assure you that the paper itself is, like my master’s thesis of 2020, composed in a fairly easy-to-understand and jargon-free English, and that the claim that the Good of Socrates and Plato in fact consists of two different, but intimately related natures, styled the Idea of the Good and the Good Itself, is likely to look much clearer to you once you have read the initial pages.

I believe I am among the first in modern times to perceive and articulate this distinction that Plato arguably makes between the «inner» and the «outer» nature of the metaphysical and universal Good, and to make the case for this new hermeneutical or interpretive approach to the Republic, and I would venture to say that this distinction is as important to grasp, if not even more important, as the one I established between Nous and Dianoia, Divine, Mental Seeing and Logical, Discursive Reasoning, in my master’s thesis.

In both of these cases, that of the Highest Metaphysical or Divine Entities and that of the highest mental faculties or powers available to the Incarnated Human Being, the original and highly sophisticated conception held by Plato, and partially set forth in his dialogues, appears to have gradually become distorted and misconstrued, partly as a result of the challenges inherent in the act of translating certain crucial Greek terms into other languages, such as Latin or English, partly because of the overarching tendency towards Simplification observable in almost all the fields of human activity since well before the dawn of the Modern Era (and particularly when it comes to the phenomenon of language), and partly as a result of the two merciless prongs of that which has been the increasingly dominant strand of intellectual and academic thought in Europe for perhaps a thousand years now, namely the radically assertive, dogmatically religious one, completely divorced from Contemplation, Inspiration and Knowledge, and therefore a form of Empiricism, and of Irrationality, and the narrowly «rationalistic», purely logical and calculating and deliberating one, which is also totally cut off from Noesis, from Spirit and from Wisdom, and also, therefore, empirically oriented and irrational, and between which the remains of Ancient Platonism, and of the once living Platonic tradition, have now been caught for a very long time.

In addition to the above mentioned analysis of the Nature or Natures of Socrates’ and Plato’s Good, which is really a study of Socratic or Platonic theology (which was styled «philosophy» because Platonic philosophy was, at its core, about the Seeking Out and Loving of Wisdom, Sophia), I go into some detail as regards the nature of the Platonic Ideas in general, and the clues to the ancient spectrum of signification of the term «idea» (ἰδέα; idea) provided by its exceedingly ancient Indo-European roots, as well as by probable cognates of that Greek term in present-day Norwegian.

Hint: The disappearance of the «v» in Greek has obscured one of the likely meanings of Plato’s crucial term, which was probably closely related to the concept of seeing and being seen. Once the implications of this are grasped, the vistas that open up are truly amazing. The title of the paper is The Nature of Plato’s Good Revealed: Platonic Theology and Its Relation to Christianity and Judaism: The Case for Distinguishing between the Idea of the Good and the Good Itself.

You can also find this updated paper on what is arguably the core of Platonic metaphysics and Platonic theology on Academia.edu

Ancient Mysteries in Novel Wineskins: A bold new translation of the famous dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus in John 3/John iii

With extensive commentary evidencing the link between the concept of being «born again from above» and the ancient Mysteries, arguably alluded to in the Platonic dialogues Jesus and Nicodemus – new light shed on the climactic nightly meeting

© Edmund Schilvold (M.Th.) 2023

Other papers and presentations in this series: The Nature of Plato’s Good Revealed: Platonic Theology and Its Relation to Christianity and Judaism: The Case for Distinguishing between the Idea of the Good and the Good Itself

This new exegesis of John 3:1–15 can also be found on Academia.edu

Tracing the Changing Conceptions of Nous (Νοῦς) through the Ages: A Survey of Vestiges of the Ancient Idea of the Third or Inner Eye, Commencing with Ancient Egypt and Culminating in John Scotus Eriugena

Some of the milestones treated of are Ancient Egypt, including the theology centered around the concept of the Amen-Ra, and recent scientific discoveries corroborating a certain very important date of which Solon (Σόλων), the celebrated Athenian lawgiver and statesman, was informed by Egyptian priests (according to Plato’s Timaeus), Pythagoras and his journey to Phoenicia (now part of Israel and Lebanon) and the land of the Nile, the early Christian church father Origen, the possible friendship between that Origen and Plotinus, and Porphyry’s descriptions of his own and Plotinus’ mystical experiences, the “pocket Platonism” of St. Gregory of Nyssa, quite characteristic of a number of the Fathers of the Church, the conundrum represented by St. Dionysius, the Areopagite, now better known as Pseudo-Dionysius, since he never was an areopagite (that much is clear), and the stunning implications of his carefully executed infusion of Proclus’ Platonic theology into early medieval Christendom, and, finally, the mind-bending survey of the “divisions” of Nature and of Man carried out by John Scotus Eriugena.

This historical overview, a survey of the changing conceptions of Nous, can also be viewed and downloaded on Academia.edu

Is the Biblical «Genesis» partly based on an ancient Indian creation story? (Pioneering e-book)

This paper, probably one of the first of its kind to be presented to the public in Europe and America since the days of Sir William Jones, Henry Thomas Colebrooke, Horace Heyman Wilson and Friedrich Max Müller, consists primarily in a partial and most painstaking digitization of the 1863 edition of the Lawbook of Manu, so-called, with Kulluka Bhatta’s ancient, integrated gloss, as translated into English by Sir William Jones, as well as in commentary on the digitized passages, in which the striking parallels between parts of the Manava Dharma Shastra and two exceedingly famous and influential but very different literary works usually thought of as more or less “Western” in nature and origin, and as having no relation to ancient Indian or Vedic literature whatsoever.

The two “Western” pieces of literature here referred to are Genesis, with its two creation stories and extensive genealogies, traditionally attributed to Moses, and Plato’s singular study of human psychology and its relationship to the evolution and the fortunes of a society, the famous “Republic”. (“Western” is here used in a very loose and somewhat novel sense, of course, encompassing not only the so-called “Occident”, but also much of the region now styled the Middle East.) The facet of the greatest interest to Western researchers and scholars will likely prove to be the systematic comparison of certain features of the extensive creation story narrated by the Indian Manu (known as Swayambhuva/Svayambhuva Manu) to the two shorter “Biblical” creation accounts so familiar to most Westerners due to the inclusion of “the Pentateuch” in the category of Christian Holy Writ – a comparison which, for the sake of convenience, has been summarized in a table – while those primarily interested in metaphysics, or in ascertaining the Path to Spiritual Enlightenment and Wisdom, of which Plato’s philosophy is one prominent manifestation, will probably find the subsequent parts of the abridged version of Manu’s Laws, such as those taken from the chapter “On Transmigration and final Beatitude”, to be even more conducive to the rekindling of the Inner Fire.

In addition to this, the reader will also, near the end of the paper, find a short discourse on “the Saraswati river controversy”, as one might call it, and on the bearing the ongoing discussion of the history and historicity of the Saraswati river has on another and equally contested issue, namely that of just how old the ancient Indian or Vedic literature – including, but not limited to, the Vedas – actually is. Whatever the eventual outcomes of these debates, it seems safe to say that the ancient high civilization now often spoken of as the Indus river valley civilization, or the Harappan civilization, is in fact partially, or perhaps even wholly, synonymous with the ancient Northern Indian or Vedic civilization which, according to the ancient Sanskrit texts and legends, was founded by Manu and the Great Sages, and of which both this legal treatise and the Ramayana epic poem and the Vedas speak, at great length. In other words, if Manu was, in some sense, the founder of the Indus valley civilization, or at least a part of it – whether he ever appeared on Earth or not – then there could hardly be an ancient literary work deserving of greater attention than the one attributed to him, since only two other civilizations in the recorded history of human kind, the ancient Egyptian and the Sumerian-Akkadian, can compete with the Harappan one, which some have proposed should be styled the Sindhu-Saraswati civilization instead, since the Saraswati river was at the very heart of its imagination.

At the beginning of the paper, the reader will find Sir William Jones’ own extensive and insightful, albeit somewhat too critical, foreword – a wonderful and most scholarly essay which remains a true gem, in spite of the c. 250 years which have gone by since Jones’ composed it. E.S.

This digitization and study of Sir William Jones’ superb translation of the Lawbook of Manu, and of the Saraswati river controversy, can also be viewed and downloaded on Academia.edu

For the sake of my fans (they do exist, believe it or not), I conclude this update with a few images of me, Edmund Schilvold, from the time when I had only just begun my spiritual journey.