Many a year a go, an intelligent and well read Catholic school teacher, who was politically Left-wing, said to me that “Social Justice” meant no more than the concepts that Thomas Aquinas discussed and anyone who had a problem with “Social Justice” was dissing the Western world’s Christian heritage. This is a cute little Motte & Bailey fallacy, the use of which is not limited to one purported political wing and not another. The question of “Natural Law” is also under attach using the same fallacy, as is hereinunder discussed, quoted in full below due to the limitations of Twitter/X embeds.*
The term “Natural Law” has been hijacked and repurposed by esoteric, occult, and Hermetic traditions in ways that profoundly distort its classical meaning. Many well-meaning people today are confused because they hear the same words (“Natural Law”) but they are being used to mean entirely opposite things, with opposite consequences for truth, morality, liberty and personhood. Thank you to @ChartingLiberty for prompting this thread, sorry it’s a bit late!
Let’s perform a scalpel-precise forensic distinction between:
Classical Natural Law (Aristotle → Aquinas)
vs.
Hermetic “Natural Law” (Gnostic / Occult / Esoteric)
The “gnostic” concept does tend to rear it’s head quite often, doesn’t it?
Classical Natural Law ~ Rooted in Logos
Source; Aristotle, developed and completed by Aquinas within realist metaphysics and Christian theology. Grounded in Logos; intelligible, moral order of the universe, reflecting eternal law in created things.
Key Principles:
Reality is real and knowable
Man has a nature (rational, moral, social)
That nature is ordered to an end (telos): truth, virtue, beatitude
Natural law = participation in eternal law via reason (Summa Theologica I-II, Q.91–94)
Morality = conformity to what is
Rights and duties = rooted in being, not will or assertion
Law is objective, discoverable by reason, and binding in conscience
Moral Order:
Objective good and evil
Conscience judges reality, not just emotion
Human law must conform to natural law (Aristotle/Aquinas)
Personal liberty = freedom to pursue the good
Implications:
You don’t invent morality; you recognize and conform to it
Self-governance = moral formation to align will with truth
All human persons share equal dignity because of shared endowed rational nature.
Hermetic “Natural Law” ~ Rooted in Self as God
Hermetic texts (e.g., Corpus Hermeticum, Kybalion), revived in Renaissance Neoplatonism, Theosophy, occultism and gnostic, New Thought, pop culture reinterpretations connected to alchemy, astrology, “hidden wisdom,” secret initiations – much of which has been Intelligence Operations/Social Engineering with “guru”/Change agent actors/operatives.
Key Claims (often disguised in spiritual or mystical language):
“As above, so below” – correspondence, not participation in Logos
“The All is Mind” – idealism; reality is mental, not ontological. Codified as cademic default ‘Cogito’
The “law” of nature = impersonal cosmic laws (e.g. vibration, polarity, cause/effect)
“Natural law” = system of energy dynamics or behavioural consequences (like karma)
Good/evil = relative to consciousness or vibration
Man is divine or becoming divine (self-deification) “Evolution” & Transformational Pedagogy
Self is the source of law & truth (gnostic autonomy) Subjectivist/Constructivist Philosophy/Pedagogy
Moral Order:
Subjective or functional (e.g., “don’t violate others’ free will”)
Conscience = inner energy alignment or mystical gnosis
Sin = ignorance of your own divinity
Freedom = uncoerced self-expression or alignment with cosmic flow
Implications:
You don’t conform to truth; you manifest it
There’s no fixed human nature; only evolutionary ascent
Rights are based on consciousness or will; not being
Hierarchies of “awakening” justify technocratic or spiritual control
Diagnostic Summary
Aquinas:
Law is participation in divine order; freedom is obedience to truth.
Hermeticism:
Law is manipulation of hidden forces; freedom is assertion of Self.
There is a discernible point (not merely historical but philosophical) at which Neoplatonic forces subverted Aristotle/Aquinas’ classical Logos realism.
Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition begins with being and proceeds to knowledge through participation in the real.
Neoplatonism begins with emanation from the One and leads to knowledge as recollection or ascent out of matter
The two are ontologically and teleologically incompatible, predicated as they are, on opposing metaphysics, philosophy and theology. Your eyes may be glazing over with a sense of ‘what has all this got to do with my day to day real life’?
Everything – as it informs, animates and controls Education, Law, Governance and Institutional Policy and Practise.
It controls you
The difference in metaphysical starting point is the root of the subversion and while tensions were always present, the full inversion of Logos by Neoplatonism did not consolidate until a series of historical/philosophical turning points:
Key Points of Subversion
Plotinus (3rd century AD):
Founded Neoplatonism as a mystical ascent away from material being toward “The One” replacing participation in being with escape from being.
Subversion:
Being becomes a problem, not a good; creation is not celebrated but “overcome.” E.g. Currently animating “Gender sophistry”
Pseudo-Dionysius (5th–6th century AD):
Christianized Neoplatonism by cloaking it in theological language (veilcraft & polysemy). Introduced the via negativa (apophatic theology), hierarchical cosmology and mystical ascent.
Subversion:
Introduced ambiguity and set up a metaphysical dualism between God and world; contradicting Aquinas’ analogia entis (analogy of being).
John Scotus Eriugena (9th century)
Brought full Neoplatonic emanationism into Christian metaphysics. His synthesis blurred the Creator-creature distinction and this distinction is key for understanding the terms ‘self evident’, ‘inalienable’ and the endowed function of moral agency.
Subversion:
Eroded ontological realism; reality became a symbolic map of ascending divinity, not a world with stable natures and moral order. This is highly relevant for Popular Sovereignty and Self Governance.
The Renaissance Hermetic Revival (15th century)
Ficino and Pico della Mirandola resurrected Neoplatonic and Hermetic texts, especially the Corpus Hermeticum. Their claim; that man could ascend through intellect and magic to divine status.
Subversion:
Directly undermined Aquinas’ doctrine of humility before a created order. Human will replaced divine Logos as the source of moral law.
Early Modern Philosophy (17th–18th centuries):
Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant & Ferrier transformed metaphysics into ‘epistemology™️’. Focus shifted from being to knowing, from nature to representation.
Final Inversion:
Reality became a projection of mind. Logos was redefined as structure of consciousness, not divine order.
Was it always happening?
On and off. The Aristotelian-Thomistic synthesis was an explicit bulwark against Neoplatonic-Gnostic tendencies. But
Neoplatonic ideas were always lurking in the margins of Christian theology. They became dominant when the focus shifted from ontology to epistemology, especially post-Kant and were weaponized by intelligence psychological warfare/social engineering, secret societies, esoteric cults and eventually secular technocracies.
The subversion was gradual and intentional, culminating in the metaphysical shift from participation in being (Logos) to projection from mind (gnosis). Aquinas was the high point of realism; what followed was a strategic and well financed (by the Houses of Finance controlling institutional funding strings) regression to the soft totalitarian system being installed and completed now – for which the ‘human’ (rational with moral agency) is an obstacle. The system requires post humanity; moldable ‘clay’ – adaptive nodes in the system of Algorithmic Governance.
Hermetic “Natural Law” is perfect for this in the ‘decentralized’ networked states system.
Aristotle/Aquinas Classical Natural Law remains the only bulwark against it.
The System counts on the People not recognizing the difference and not caring that there even are seismic differences which will determine their liberty and sovereignty both personally and nationally.
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Funny how so many people who claim to fight for “Western Civilization” embrace what Western Civilization rejected…
