From Jimmy Stephens old notes:

Emanation: all contingent, secondary, “created” reality flows from the more default or prime reality. Unlike creationism, emanationism holds that derived existence involuntarily proceeds from prime reality.

Empedodes and Democritus posited aporrhoea, emanations. Hylozoism might have involved emanations. The Wisdom of Solomon has been cited as first work explicitly positing emanations, where God’s wisdom is depicted as an efflux of power distinct from the Godhead. In all such Greek philosophy, emanations are distinct or abstractable things that derive their distinctness or abstractability from the way they extend from a more basic thing.

This can be pictured as an overflowing fountain producing a stream. Is the stream the fountain? In one sense, yes, in that they are portions of one water body. In another sense, no, because the fountain and stream have varying degrees of independence (e.g., the stream could be cut off from the fountain and become a thin pool), and the stream derives from the fountain, not vice versa (e.g., the fountain might continue spouting water without overflowing).

Emanationism reaches its clearest entrance into philosophy through Philo. Perhaps illogical, and somewhat unclear, Philo and the Neoplatonists gave us a chain of emanations descending and deriving from the One. These Neoplatonist doctrines come from Basilides and Valentinus.

In Basilides, emanations are eons. They are a series of eons flowing in successive stages from the Father.

In Valentinus, emanations are proballien. Literally, the derived reality is “thrown off” by the prime essence and without diminution. (In Neoplatonism, there is diminution or some kind of lessening the more derivative the reality.)

In Neoplatonism, the One by nature involuntarily overflows without losing its completeness and without an end in time. Thus is rooted the chain of being, starting with the most real One, descending from the perfect One to the less perfect, and descending from the One’s ineffable unity to the plurality of emanations.

In Dyonysius the Areopagite, there exists a heavenly hierarchy – emanations. These are effluxes of God. But like those prior to the Neoplatonists, there is no diminution. Or at least, the heirarchy is not ordered in stages of more and less perfection.

And in Erigena, the world is eternally proceeding from God and exists in God, God in the world: causoe primordiales.

^ some old notes I had on emanationism

The major import being:

(1) oddly applicable to the e-E theology of EOs.

(2) emanationism is indistinguishable from EG

Yes, the problem with the One is the very notion is conceptually implosive.

Insofar as the One is ineffable, it’s nonsense to delineate its essence in terms of emanated things. Categories like essence, emanation, cause, laws, properties, and so forth, do not apply to the ineffable.

Insofar as the One is the metaphysical fountainhead of the world, it becomes primus inter pares, an important citizen of the universe. It is fundamentally constricted by and shares in the very laws it is supposed to set forth.

So every time the Neoplatonist tells a story about the One explaining things, he’s suffering amnesia about the One’s abstract transcendence. Every time the Neoplatonist recapitulates to defend the abstract transcendence, there is no longer any room for relation to the cosmos and human expderience.

 

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Neoplatonism