Plotinus

Plotinus was born in Egypt about 205. Dying in Rome in 270, he had lived through an era of great turmoil in Roman history, though this would be difficult to detect from his writings.124 His treatises were edited and published by his pupil Porphyry in the early fourth century in six books of nine treatises called the Enneads. They are among the greatest masterpieces of mystical as well as of philosophical literature.

Investigations of Plotinus’s mystical thought hâve been many, from pioneering studies such as those of Joseph Maréchal and René Arnou, through the more recent work of scholars like A. H. Armstrong, Jean Trouillard, Pierre Hadot, Werner Beierwaltes, and others.125 From this literature a general picture emerges that corrects many earlier misconcep-tions, though given the difiiculty of Plotinus’s thought a number of issues remain problematic.

Plotinus certainly enjoyed what modems would call mystical expériences. His pupil Porphyry in the fascinating life he wrote of his master testifies: “his end and goal was to be united (henothênai), to approach the God who is over ail things. Four times while I was with him he attained that goal” (Life of Plotinus 23).126 Plotinus himself speaks in autobiographi-cal tones in several passages, such as the famous opening of Ennead 4.8.1:

Often hâve I woken up out of the body to myself and hâve entered into myself, going out from ail other things; I hâve seen a beauty wonderfully great and felt assurance that then most of ail I belonged to the better part; I hâve actually lived the best life and corne to identity with the divine; and set firm in it I hâve corne to that suprême actuality, setting myself above ail else in the realm of Intellect. Then after that rest in the divine (en tô theiô stasin), when I hâve corne down from Intellect to discursive reasoning, I am puzzled how I ever came down. (LC 4:396-97)

This passage deals with union or identity between the self or soûl and the Intellect or Nous. It has usually been taken as indicating a brief ecstatic

expérience of the kind described by Porphyry, but Dominic O’Meara argues that the “often” refers not to the union itself, but to the philosopher’s expérience of puzzled reflection upon the habituai State of union of the higher soûl with the Intellectual Principle.127 Plotinus actually seems to want to hâve it both ways, because elsewhere he daims that the unitive State is both an ontological constant, though not consciously so to the lower soûl (see, e.g., 4.8.8; 5.1.12; and 6.4.14), and also the conscious goal which his mysticophilosophical teaching is designed to foster. Philosophy exists to raise the lower soûl or self to consciousness of its higher identity, the transcendent self which enjoys identity with pure Intellect, and through Intellect even with the unknown One. This expérience must always be short and exceptional as long as the soûl remains in the body.128

A passage from Enn. 5.8.11 helps to clarify this. Here he describes in a fashion that must be autobiographical a form of oscillation between (1) discursive préparation for mystical encounter, in which there is still a distinction between the one who sees and what is seen, and (2) the unity of mystical awareness, which is necessarily followed by (3) a return to a new, but refined, discursiveness.

No other ancient author has portrayed the psychology of mystical States with their complex passages between the consciousness of duality and unity with greater subtlety than Plotinus.129

Another noted passage from Enn. 6.9.9 speaks in an even more personal tone:

Anyone who has had this expérience will know what I am talking about. He will know that the soûl lives another life as it advances toward the One, reaches it and shares in it (metaschousa autoù). . . . It needs nothing more. On the contrary, it must renounce everything else and rest in it alone, become it alone (toute genesthai), ail earthiness gone, eager to be free, impatient of every fetter that binds below in order so to embrace the real object of its love with its entire being that no part of it does not touch the One.130

Such texts show that not only did Plotinus try to portray the expérience of

the passage between the unity of mystical consciousness and the duality of everyday thinking, but that he also had a dual notion of unification, one that involved union with the Nous, or Intellect, as well as a higher uniting with that which is beyond ail thought and being, the unknowable One (to hen). The differing modes of union portrayed in Plotinus’s mystical accounts form the experiential basis for the understanding of the structure of reality that he developed out of the classical philosophical tradition.131

Plotinus’s ability to combine abstruse philosophical analysis with a tone of deep personal feeling is unique — reading him is like being invited to embark on a journey of exploration into uncharted territory in search of hidden treasure: a bracing and perhaps dangerous enterprise. His doctrine of the One, for example, certainly has its roots in the négative theology of his predecessors, but is far richer than that found in earlier authors. The constant interpénétration of metaphysics and mysticism in his thought means that a brief sketch of Plotinian metaphysics is needed before turning to a more detailed considération of his notion of mystical contemplation and union.

Plotinus conceived of three transcendent levels of reality, or hypostases, beyond the visible universe—the One, the Intellect, and the Soûl. In reality, this scheme is made more complex by his distinction of Soûl into upper and lower levels: the higher Universal Soûl (psyché); and Nature (physis), or that Soûl as embodied in matter. To show the roots of Plotinus’s hypostases in the évolution of Greek thought, with the One or Absolute Unity being a development of the Parmenidean-Platonic tradition, the Intellect (One-Many) a combination of Aristotelian and Middle Platonic éléments, and the World Soûl (One and Many) partly Platonic and partly Stoic in héritage, is not to reduce Plotinus to a mere compiler, nor is it to settle the question of whether or not he is a consistent thinker—an issue that does not seem to hâve much bothered his ever-questing mind.132

Plotinus’s three hypostases hâve been interpreted in a number of ways, most often as a hierarchical structure, a map of the ontological levels of reality in which the lower stages flow from the higher ones through the necessary nontemporal process of procession or émanation (proodos) and return through conversion (epistrophe).133 Many interpreters hâve also stressed an introspective reading of this hypostatic structure, seeing Plotinus’s thought as a “metapsychology,” that is, as a présentation of the reality of ail things through the analysis of consciousness.134 As Gérard O’Daly puts it: “‘Procession’ and ‘conversion’ (or return) are temporal metaphors for the moment in which the selfs originative vision of its principle — a vision that is permanent — is made conscious to itself as pre-intellectual, in an instant of unmediated contact.”135

Both views are correct and highlight important dimensions of the Plotinian enterprise, but they are incomplète without the invocation of a third approach, the dialectical one. On the basis of Plotinus’s own critique of the notion of levels of being implied in the émanation model (e.g., 6.4-5; 6.8), as well as his attempts to express—insofar as it is open to expression — how the One both is and is not the reality of ali things, and both is and is not conscious, Plotinus présents a mystical dialectic of immanence and transcendence whose purpose is to lead the soûl to its ultimate libération.136 Freedom cornes through the realization of what it means to say that “the One is ail things and not a single one of them” (Enn. 5.2.1).

Each of these aspects of Plotinian thought gives rise to different mystical possibilities that together generate a complex of ideas that had great importance for subséquent Christian mysticism.137 The hierarchical scheme of émanation and return is the best known. Its spiritual possibilities are well illustrated in the famous treatise on Beauty (Enn. 1.6). Here the controlling metaphors are those of journey, ascent, passionate striving, return to the source, and vision, as in the Symposium on which the text is based. This inquiry into the nature of beauty and its rôle in the soul’s return to its source begins, as did Plato, with the beauty of bodies, which Plotinus holds does not résidé in the symmetry of parts but in the participation of the higher Form (1.6.1-3). The récognition of the true nature of bodily beauty is the starting point for an ascent that proceeds to the beauty of “ways of life and kinds of knowledge” (1.6.4), then to the beauty of the soûl purified by virtue so that it is “entirely belonging to the divine” (1.6.6), until finally, “passing in the ascent ail that is alien to the God, one sees with one’s self alone That alone (auiô mono auto monon ide), simple, single and pure, from which ail dépends and to which ail look and are and live and think” (1.6.7).138 The text concludes with a passionate invocation of the necessity for purification and introversion in order to reach “the Fatherland from which we hâve corne” (1.6.8),139 as well as the reminder that this process is one of déification — “You must become first ail godlike and ail beautiful if you intend to see God and beauty” (1.6.9).140

Plotinus was a resolute intellectualist, but the profoundly erotic tone of Enn. 1.6 shows us that he did not think that knowing alone could bring the soûl back to its source.141 Even in Plato, as we hâve seen, erôs was not so much a selfish desire for personal possession and enjoyment of the beautiful as a créative desire to beget beauty on the beloved. In Plato, however, because erôs always involves a deficiency of some sort, it could not be ascribed to the divine world. In Plotinus, erotic love has an ambit both more cosmic and more transcendental. Ennead 6.8.15 says of the Good,

“He is at once lovable, and love, and love of himself” (kai erasmion kai erôs ho autos kai hautou erôs). Of course, the One or Good is absolutely self-sufficient (6.8.10), without any hint of desire for anything outside itself (3.8.11). But in recognizing that erôs is not defined by need, Plotinus made a major breakthrough in classical thought that enabled him to speak of a Suprême Reality in which seeker and sought become truly one. Although this transcendental erôs has no concern for what is below it (Plotinus explicitly déniés that God loves the world [e.g., 5.5.12]),142 we must remember that the erotic One remains the source for ail that is and that the whole universe is essentially erotic in the sense that its being is marked by passionate striving for return to the Source (e.g., 3.5.1-2 and 4).143 From a Christian perspective, Plotinus’s inability to relate erôs above and below, transcendental Eros and human eros in our terms, is a limitation, though he does afiirm that ail love for beauty is in some way a reflection of the Good (e.g., 6.7.22 and 31), and that “the Good is gentle and kindly and gracious, and présent to anyone when he wishes” (5.5.12).

The rôle of love in the soul’s return to its source is among the most constant thèmes in Plotinus’s thought. Drawn upward by the shock of beauty, the soûl eventually becomes love itself (6.7.22). When it has attained union with Nous, it will be able to exercise both of the inhérent powers of this suprême Intellectual Principle:

Intellectual-Principle, thus, has two powers, first that of grasping intellec-tively its own content, the second that of an advancing and receiving whereby to know the transcendent; at first it [the soûl] sees, later by that seeing it takes possession of Intellectual-Principle, becoming one only thing with that: the first seeing is that of Intellect knowing, the second that of Intellect loving; stripped of its wisdom in the intoxication of the nectar, it cornes to love; by this excess it is made simplex and is happy; and to be drunken is better for it than to be too staid for these revels. (Enn. 6.7.35)144

Nous erôn is what makes possible the final stage of union with the One.145 Plotinus is not afraid to describe this erôs in language adopted from lower, more common, forms of love: “And if anyone does not know this expérience, let him think of it in terms of our loves here below, and what it is like to attain what one is most in love with” (6.9.9). As “many lovers of the One” (6.5.10), our destiny is to continue to enjoy loving union with the One as far as possible in this life and the next (e.g., 1.6.7; 3.5.4).

The second approach to Plotinus’s thought, stressing the introspective and metapsychological dimension, is also well illustrated in many texts. According to Emile Bréhier, what was new in Plotinus

. . . was ushering into the intelligible world the individual subject itself with the concrète richness and infinity of its déterminations. . . . For nothing like

things exist in true reality. There exist only subjects which contemplate and in which contemplation exists in a varying degree of concentration and purity. . . . Pure subject—the One; the subject ideally separated from its object—Intelligence; finally, the subject which scatters and disperses itself in a world of objects.146

More recently, Werner Beierwaltes has analyzed the Plotinian One as the nonreflective element in reflection, “the Aujhebung of the reflexive into the pre-reflexive which is its consummation.”147 It would demand an extensive textual présentation to follow the details of Plotinus’s introspective under-standing of the nature of Soûl and Intellect. Here it must suffice to consider how the “metasubjective” understanding of the One is the undercurrent of ail of Plotinus’s mystical thought.

Plotinus’s refusai to allow any predicates to be ascribed to the One in proper fashion is among the best-known aspects of his thought.148 To use the terminology adopted above, his apophaticism is both objective and subjective, and it would appear at first absolutely so. “It is . . . truly ineffable (arrêton): for whatever you say about it, you will always be speaking of ‘something’” (ti) (5.3.13). Objectively, it is frequently described as “beyond being” (epekeina ousias, or tou ontos, following Republic 509B),149 and also beyond knowing— “The One, as it is beyond Intellect, so is beyond knowledge (gnôsis), and as it does not in any way need anything, so it does not need knowing. . . . For knowing is one thing [or “one something” —hen ti kai to gignôskein]; but That is one without the something” (5.3.12).150 But Plotinus does qualify his apophaticism, not only by his admission of some form of contact with the One but also through his struggle to construct a critical dialectical language about it. His linguistic strategies are évident in many places in the Enneads, but nowhere more profoundly than in the second half of Enn. 6.8 (7-21), “On Free Will and the Will of the One.”

In trying to understand in what sense will and activity can be used in relation to the One, Plotinus experiments with a new language based on ungrammatical and frequently puzzling usages and expressions qualified throughout by the particle hoion (“quasi,” or “so to speak”), a language designed to suggest the eminent reality of the One without attempting the impossible task of circumscribing or objectifying it in any way.151 The One can never be objectified, because it is a pure transcendent subject,152 and hence it is through a sériés of appeals to the immanent activity of acting, knowing, and willing that Plotinus créâtes his new language. Basically, he invites the reader to try to imagine a spontaneous immanent activity not directed at an object and not proceeding from a subject, but which in some indescribable way is the subject itself.

The Good does not exist either by necessity or by chance (6.8.7). It is as

it must be, but without any “must” — “being what it wills to be (toulo ousan ho thelei), or rather projecting into existence what it wills, itself higher than will, will a thing beneath it” (6.8.9).153 The Good or First is described as having an activity (energeia) identical with itself, but this is not the kind of activity that can be distinguished from essence (ousia). Rather, the form of willing that can be ascribed to the One (hoion) is to be found in the formula “he is as he willed himself to be,” as long as this willing is not distinguished, even mentally, from essence or nature (6.8.13). Activity in the One can be described as a “quasi essence” (hoion ousia [9.8.13, 7-8, 26-28]). This is why Plotinus can go on to identify the One with Love, or at least Self-Love (see 6.8.15, the passage already referred to). In 6.8.16 the contortions of lan-guage are expanded in new directions, as Plotinus concédés to the One a “quasi intellect” (hoion nous), or a “super-intellect” (hypernoësis), which does not hâve but is the knowing that it loves.154 This eternal “self-directed activity” (energeia menousa) is the being of the One. “If then this Act never came to be but is eternal —a waking without an awakener, an eternal wakening and supra-Intellection —he is as he waked himself to be” (6.8.16).155

This profound exploration of the inner dynamics of the One helps explain the complex relations between the First Principle, or One, and Nous, or Intellect.156 In 6.8.18 Plotinus says that in seeking the One we seek what is within ail things just as the center of a circle is within its radii and circumference.157 That which is “around” the center is preeminently the Nous, or Intellect, which both is and is not the One in a more radical sense than any other reality. Insofar as Nous is essence, being, and thought, it is projected outside the One (6.8.19). But this is to understand Nous as the product or term of an activity, whereas in its more proper sense Nous is an activity, a fact that makes it more difficult to make an easy distinction between Nous and the One that makes itself. Plotinus’s language usually tries to suggest how the One is active without the self-reflexivity which is of the essence of Nous, but one controversial passage seems to move self-reflexivity back into the One and thus bring Nous and the One even doser together. Enn. 5.1.7 appears to say, “In turning towards itself the One sees. The seeing is Nous” (ë hoti të epistrophë pros hauto hëora; hë de horasis hautë nous).158 Thus we should beware of excluding Nous from having a rôle even in the highest stage of mystical union. Hadot argues that in one sense we never surpass the level of Nous, because we “reach and share” in the One (6.9.9) by becoming Nous in the first constitutive moment or stage of its reality—not Nous as it thinks itself and consequently ail things, but Nous as it is lovingly one (nous erôn) with its Source before it is projected forth.159

What does this complex apophaticism based on the analysis of reality as a form of transcendental subjectivity mean for Plotinian mysticism? This

will not become fully évident until we consider the dialectical element in Plotinian thought—a component that qualifies the emanational picture and provides a more inclusive metaphysical perspective for the metapsycho-logical account.

In Enn. 6.5.12, at the end of the double treatise investigating the omniprésence of being, Plotinus asks how the Ail is to be found in everything. The answer is discovered in the rejection of particularity:

Now it is because you approached the Ail and did not remain in a part of it, and you did not even say of yourself “I am just so much,” but by rejecting the “so much” you hâve become ail. . . . You will increase yourself then by rejecting ail else, and the Ail will be présent to you in your rejection. . . .” (LC 6:358-59)160

In numerous other places the philosopher asserts that “ail things are one” (6.5.1), or “we are ail and one” (6.5.7), or that the three hypostases exist within us waiting for us to turn our attention to them (5.1.5-7, 10-13). The critique of the metaphors of émanation (useful as they are for expressing certain truths about the relation of the One to ail things) found in 6.4-5 (especially 6.4.7 and 11, and 5.3) emphasizes an understanding of the omniprésence of the One in ail things that Plotinus found he could best express in dialectical language drawn from Plato’s Parmenides.161 This dialectical presence of the One is nowhere more powerfully presented than in Enn. 6.9, the famous treatise on the Good or One that is perhaps the best summary of Plotinian mysticism.

AH things must share in unity in order to exist, but what is the source of unity? It is not in the Soûl (6.9.1), and not even in the Being that is iden-tical with Nous (6.9.2), because (adopting the négative pôle of the dialectical view of the One) Nous-Being is ail things and the One cannot be aH things and remain the One. In 6.9.3 Plotinus applies the full range of Parmenidean négative dialectic to the One, arguing that contrary terms such as rest and motion cannot be properly predicated of it because these apply in proper fashion only to the realm of being. Our rising up to contemplation of the One is a form of progressive simplification which does not directly penetrate the One, “but revolving, as it were, around it, tries to express our own expérience of it, now drawing nigh to it, now falling back from it as a resuit of the difficulties involved.”162 This mode of attainment is not through scientific or philosophical reasoning (epislëmë, noësis), but through “a presence transcending knowledge” (kata parousian epistërriës kreittona [6.9.4]).163 In a passionate plea emphasizing the personal responsibility of the lover to rise up to the One, Plotinus concludes with a statement that

expresses both the négative and the positive pôle in the One’s relation to ail things:

The One is absent from nothing and from everything. It is présent only to those who are prepared for it and are able to receive it, to enter into harmony with it, to grasp and to touch it by virtue of their likeness to it, by virtue of that inner power similar to and stemming from the One when it is in that State in which it was when it originated from the One. Thus will the One be “seen” as far as it can become an object of contemplation. (Enn. 6.9.4, trans. O’Brien).164

The affirmation of mutually opposed predicates to indicate the simul-taneous transcendent-immanent nature of the One grounds a brief survey of négative theology (6.9.5-6) and the famous concluding sections of the text (6.9.7-11) in which Plotinus explores the positive (#8-9) and négative (#10-11) aspects of the “constant presence-in-absence of the One.”165 In order to attain the One, the soûl must strip itself of ail other forms and turn to the god within in order to be able to reveal to others “transcendent communion” (synnousian [6.9.7]).166 Using his familiar metaphor of the circle, Plotinus now stresses the immanence of the One in ail things as the center of the entire spiritual circle of reality, or as the conductor of a chorus whose members hâve become distracted (6.9.8).167 “We are not separated from the One, not distant from it, even though bodily nature has closed about us and drawn us to itself’ (6.9.9). The One is the source of the divine erôs that burns in the soûl and of which earthly unions are only a shadow— to love and be united with the One is to be divinized, “it is like a flame” (ibid.).

Finally, in 6.9.10-11, Plotinus puzzles over the duration and nature of the union attained at the height of contemplation. Vision attained in this life is always of brief duration because of the way in which the body binds us to things below, but the actual union is an identity of seer and seen in which “the man who obtains the vision becomes, as it were, another being. He ceases to be himself, retains nothing of himself.”168 Like two centers that co-incide but are still potentially separable, we sense the goal not as “other, but as one with us” (ouk . . . heteron alla hen pros heautori). Invoking the language of the mystery cuits to describe the expérience, one not so much of seeing as of being “oned,” (më hëoramenon ail’ henômenon [6.9.11]), Plotinus ends by piling up descriptions of this ekstasis (#11, line 22) in which like joins like. Mystical union is both a self-transcendence and a pénétration to the soul’s true identity: “when it is not anything else, it is nothing but itself. Yet, when it is itself alone and not in a being, it is in That [i.e., the One]” (6.9.11, my translation). As Hadot puts it, “One can define Plotinian mystical expérience as the arousing of the presence of the transcendent ‘I’.”169

The use of ekstasis to describe this union, though rare, is a significant element in Plotinus’s mystical thought.170 Jean Trouillard suggests that the term enstasis might actually be more fitting, though both words would mean the same thing for Plotinus.171 But it is now time, having examined some représentative texts, to summarize what Plotinus meant by contemplation and union with the First Principle, or the One.

A full study of the many Plotinian texts on contemplation is beyond our scope here.172 Following the lead of Arnou, it is possible to give a brief summary of what theôria and its équivalents meant for Plotinus.173 “Contemplation and vision hâve no limits” (kai gar ouk exei peras hë theôria oude to theôrëma'), according to Enn. 3.8.5. This indicates that contemplation is the very life of the soûl, both the “making” that produced it and its reductive longing to return to its Source. “Ail things corne from contemplation and are contemplation” (3.8.7). The living contemplation of itself that charac-terizes Nous still implies a duality, however, and Nous’s contemplation of the One is not a contemplation of the Source precisely as one. The One itself, of course, is beyond contemplation and desire (3.8.11), but because we possess its likeness in ourselves we can attain it by a kind of “simple intuition” (epibolë athroa [3.8.9]). The intuition found at the summit of contemplation is described by a broad range of metaphors throughout the Plotinian corpus—illumination, influx, fecundation, possession, etc.174 As in Plato, it appears “suddenly” (exaiphnës [e.g., 6.7.34 and 36]) in the form of a presence (parousia) surpassing ail forms of knowledge.175 In the suprême moment the soûl loses consciousness of itself (e.g., 6.7.34), taking on the mode of “knowing” ascribed to the One in texts like 6.8.16. This expérience béatifiés and divinizes the soûl.176

Considérable discussion has been devoted to this union through contemplation. The term henôsis is not used in the Enneads for union with the One, but Beierwaltes has argued that Plotinus’s mysticism centers on henôsis conceived of as a form of unio mystical7 The texts that we hâve reviewed, such as 6.7.34 and 6.9.9 (where the verbal form henôthenai occurs), support this case. Plotinus’s view of union is not pantheistic as some still daim — the One both is and is not ail things.178 It has been debated whether or not it should be termed monistic. The crucial issue, according to John Rist, is “can this ‘otherness’ which divides the soûl from the level of Nous and the One be annihilated, and what would the conséquences be of such an annihilation for Plotinus’s System in general, or at least for the nature of his mysticism?”179 Others hâve rightly questioned whether the ascription of modem understandings of terms like monism and theism makes sense when applied to a thinker as distant in time and as subtle and original in thought as Plotinus.180

The comparison of union to the coincidence of circles in 6.9.10, the use of the term tautotës (“the self-same”) to characterize the union in 6.9.8 (line 29),181 and the frequent appearance of phrases stating that the two become one (e.g., throughout 6.9),182 ail seem to argue for a form of identity; but most recent interpreters daim that a careful study of Plotinus actually indicates that he does not teach any form of annihilation of the soûl or absolute identity with the Suprême.183 It appears more correct to characterize Plotinus’s view of mystical union as a dialectical one. The One always is the soûl transcendentally, but since the One is also always more than Soûl, the two can never be absolutely identified, even when the soûl rises from its ordinary conscious “I” to the transcendent “I” présent with the Source. During this life, the philosopher’s goal is to cultivate the identity pôle of the dialectic, to attempt to realize the supranoetic loving union that is the soul’s deepest reality; but this can never be achieved in more than transitory fashion while in the body: the centers that coincide will always separate. Will it be different after death? Plotinus obviously hopes that it will, but he maintains a discreet silence. Perhaps what exists now will always be the case.

Plotinus, the greatest of pagan mystics, has often been viewed through Christian eyes. While paying tribute to his serenity of spirit and profundity of thought, many hâve noted how far he is from Christian mystical ideals. There is no reason to deny or even to downplay these différences, but they did not prevent him from having a powerful effect on many Christians, both in the East and the West.184

Like Plato, Plotinus has an important place for a givenness by which the One suddenly manifests itself to the mystic,185 but this unexpected appearance of the Suprême is not what Christians hâve generally meant by grâce. As a kind of automatic reflex from above attendant on the soul’s efforts to awaken its divinity, it is certainly far from Augustine’s view of grâce and even from the more synergistic théologies of grâce found in the Greek fathers. The essential root of this distance is that Plotinus had quite a different conception of the nature of the human person from Augustine and other Christians (and even from many later Neoplatonists). As A. H. Armstrong puts it, “Plotinus . . . , on the strength of his own expérience, knew perfectly well that he was two people,”186 that is, his true self was the undescended soûl living in union with Nous, the divine transcendent I, not the reflexively conscious lower self. Where the soûl is naturally divine, rather than a created spirit, the Christian concept of grâce can hâve no real place.

Plotinus has also been accused of advocating a kind of “auto-salvation” in which the philosopher realizes his own divinization through intense self-effort—a charge not totally accurate perhaps, given the subtlety of his views

on freedom and necessity, but one that tries to express the important différence between Plotinian and Christian contemplation found in Plotinus’s assertion that “to obtain the vision is solely the work of him who desires to obtain it” (6.9.4).187 Is salvation even the right term to use in relation to Plotinus’s thought? For Plotinus, the One, or perhaps better, our récognition of the One in us, is a true libération (e.g., 6.4.14-15; 6.5.12; 6.8.12), but it is not the work of a liberator or savior. Despite the “subjective” model Plotinus used to understand the nature of reality, and the personalistic tone of his moving accounts of union (e.g., 6.7.35; 6.9.11), the One and the Intellect are not persons in the sense that Jésus Christ as Savior is, nor does Plotinian contemplation culminate, the way most Christian mysticism does, in union with a personal (or tripersonal) God. Discrète personality as we know it here below has no place in the Plotinian goal.

Plotinus closes Ennead 6.9 with the famous phrase about the “flight of the alone to the Alone” (phygë monou pros monon), a theme that underlines the essentially private and individual nature of his mysticism. It is true that there are qualifying factors to Plotinian individualism, both external and internai — for example, his life of teaching and spiritual guidance to others, and the cosmic piety reflected in his use of the metaphor of the chorus and dance of ail things about the One—but the libération that Plotinus strives for is a private and personal affair, as well as one that seems limited to a philosophical elite. No community or church, even the community of phil-osophers, has a constitutive rôle in it. Nor does this mysticophilosophical goal hâve anything to do with any spécifie historical person or event: it is eternally présent and needs no historical process to bring it to realization. It would be difficult to exaggerate the distance between this and contem-porary Christian notions of mystical union, as we shall see. Despite these différences, I hope that this brief exposition has suggested some of the reasons why Plotinian thought was worthy to be one of the major formative influences on Christian mysticism, in the West as well as the East.