Christ Born of a Woman ping.
Monsignor Pope Ping!
In his book, “The Pagan Temptation,” Dr. Thomas Molnar (1921-2010) describes and devastatingly critiques this ancient evil creed that is lethal in theory and in practice issues in the madness overtaking our culture. He writes that from Plato to Plotinus, it was held as axiomatic that the fall of divine sparks into the evil material realm was either inexplicable or explained as punishment in an earthly hell. At any rate it was a plunge from being as one with or an aspect of the monistic Divine Substance into the multiple, or binary.
Binary means for example that where good and evil were not distinct one from the other and there had not been two sexes but just one androgynous being, now good and evil are opposites and there are two distinct sexes. This being the case, the revolutionary impact of Christian teaching about the supernatural and the natural dimensions, creation ex nihilo, the Incarnation, Resurrection, the fall of man, the two created sexes, the Ten Commandments and Gospel of salvation was nothing less than a scandal to ancient pagan thinkers and completely unacceptable to their modern counterparts. Thus the modern neo-Gnostic Karl Marx declares:
“The idea of God is the keynote of a perverted civilization. It must be destroyed.” (Karl Marx, Marx and Satan, Richard Wurmbrand, p. 59)
The Genesis account of creation ex nihilo was repugnant to ancients because if true meant that matter, which is evil, was of God’s creation and neither eternally pre-existed creation or came into existence by way of an exploding cosmic egg (Big Bang).
The Incarnation was utterly repulsive because for the Divine Substance or Void to incarnate within an evil body was as unthinkable as it is for contemporary neo-Gnostics whose view of depersonalized man, an evil meat machine, holds that the material brain's function is determined by genetics, thus the mind (i.e., divine spark, essence, pattern, pure spirit) is constrained by evil grey matter, chemicals, genes and body fluids. In “Against the Christians” (frag. 77) Porphyry, disciple of Plotinus and Arnobius, writes:
“How can one admit that the divine should become an embryo, that after his birth he is put in swaddling clothes, that he is soiled with blood and bile, and worse things yet?” (The Pagan Temptation, Thomas Molnar, p. 27)
The closest pagan thinkers came to Incarnation was with a purely negative connotation in the teachings of Pythagoras and Empedocles. They taught that souls or sparks fallen from the divine Substance are subsequently incarnated in animal forms as punishment. Salvation was secured through the mystery cults which,
"...afforded their devotees the opportunity to erase the curse of mortality by direct encounter with the patron deity or in many instances by actually undergoing an apotheosis, a transfiguration of human into divine. The process of 'initiation' in the mystery religions, therefore, had as its objective the liberation of the soul from its earthly...chains" (C.K. Barrett cited in "The Interruption of Eternity," Carl A. Raschke, p. 28)
The Light came into the world and banished the ancient evil creed, but men who are evil preferred darkness because they favor the evil creed..