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The subsequent history of contemplative mysticism in the pagan Neoplatonic schools is not a short story.¹⁸⁸ In concluding an already long chapter, I will note only the essential aspects of the story, those that exercised real influence on the history of Western mysticism, especially some elements in the thought of Proclus which, through the medium of his disciple the Pseudo-Dionysius and other “cryptoproclean” writings such as the Book of Causes,¹⁸⁹ were important for later Western speculative mysticism.

Porphyry

Plotinus’s pupil Porphyry (ca. 232-ca. 304) was known as a resolute enemy of Christians, but this did not prevent him from having a significant influence on Christian thought, especially in logic. His influence was most marked in the West, where translations of several of his works into Latin made him known both to the fathers and the medieval scholastics.¹⁹⁰ Two aspects of Porphyry’s metaphysics that had an impact on Christian speculative mysticism deserve brief note here.

Plotinus had claimed that the First Principle, or One, must be beyond being, basing his view on the Parmenides and the growing apophaticism of the late antique world. But his reading of the Parmenides was not the only possible one, as fragments of an anonymous Greek commentary that Hadot has ascribed to Porphyry (or at least someone of his school) indicate.¹⁹¹ Although these fragments (esp. nos. 1, 2, and 4) proclaim an apophaticism as radical as anything in Plotinus, in the fifth fragment, commenting on Parmenides 142B, the author refuses to view “being” as a secondary reality, making instead a distinction between two kinds of being—to einai, the infinitive form, and ousia, the traditional substantive.

And so existence {to einai) is double: the first pre-exists being (prouparxei tou ontos), the second is that which is produced by the One that is beyond being {ek tou ontos tou epekeina henos) and which is itself existence absolutely {tou einai ontos to apolyton) like the Idea of Being. ... It is like thinking pure existence {leikon einai).¹⁹²

Seeing the One as the true existence {to einai monon) goes far beyond anything explicitly found in Plotinus (though it is perhaps hinted at in some of the more cataphatic passages in Enn. 6.7 and 6.8). It marks a new stage in the history of Neoplatonic metaphysics,¹⁹³ one that was influential on the Christian Neoplatonist Marius Victorinus in his anti-Arian treatises of the early 360s.¹⁹⁴ Though it does not appear to have had a direct influence on later Christian speculative mysticism, the crucial role of a dialectical notion of God as pure existence in mystical union is foreshadowed in the Porphyrian text.

A second metaphysical theme of import for later Christian speculative mysticism also appears to have first become explicit in Porphyry. In Enn. 6.8.16 (line 34) Plotinus had affirmed that the One as “Awakener without awakening” is “beyond Being and Intellect and Life” {epekeina ousias kai nou kai zoés). A number of passages, building on Plato’s Sophist 248E, use this triad of powers in a generic way to describe the activities of Nous (e.g., 5.4.2; 6.8.8 and 15). In the sixth of the fragments of the Porphyrian Parmenides commentary, a section describing the two states of Intellect,

Intellect in the first state is seen as identical with the ineffable One, while in the second state, the One-Intellect as cause is characterized as Being- Life-Intelligence (hyparxis, zoe, noesis). Here Being signifies the One as Principle, Life as the procession of all things from it, and Intelligence as the revision or return.¹⁹⁵ This incipient absorption of the Neoplatonic triad describing the “One-Being” into the pure One is also found in the contemporary Neoplatonist lamblichus,¹⁹⁶ and was developed in an original way by Victorinus in his anti-Arian trinitarian treatises. Though the dynamic possibilities of this new approach to a triadic expression of transcendence in immanence for Christian Trinitarian mysticism were not to become a reality prior to the dissemination of the Dionysian writings, here too Porphyry’s metaphysics was a harbinger of things to come.

Proclus

The main channel of communication for these and other tendencies of late Neoplatonism to Christian thought was Proclus, the last great pagan philosopher, whose thought forms an indisputable background to the Dionysian corpus. According to John M. Rist, “where Plotinus is a mystic, Proclus seems to know only a theory of mysticism.”¹⁹⁷ This view does not square with the picture of Proclus drawn in his pupil Marinus’s life of his master, though Proclus’s writings, with their dry and logical style, are rarely as gripping as the Enneads. Such views seem based on a confusion of the autobiographical and the mystical which I continue to find dubious.¹⁹⁸

With Proclus the evolution of the ideal of contemplative piety that began with Plato reaches its culmination. For the Athenian philosopher, theology is an exegetical science,¹⁹⁹ a form of knowing (episteme) which is also a spiritual exercise (gymnasia) that consists in the proper understanding of Plato’s thought, particularly in the Parmenides.²⁰⁰ As he put it in the prayer that opens his commentary on the dialogue: T beg all the divine classes to form in me a perfect disposition for participating in Plato’s thoroughly epoptic and mystical doctrine, which he himself reveals to us in the Parmenides” (In Parm. 1.618).²⁰¹ It comes as no surprise that Proclus’s major work was entitled the Platonic Theology.²⁰² It should be noted, however, that while Plato’s philosophy formed the subject matter of Proclus’s mystical or “epoptic” science, it did so merely because it was the best epistemic manifestation of the reality more easily accessible in oracular revelation (the Chaldean Oracles) and through the theurgic manipulation of the divine character traits or symbols found in all things. As a passage from the Platonic Theology puts it:

There are three true characters which fill divine beings and extend across all the divine classes: goodness, knowledge, and beauty; and there are also three true characters which bring together what has been filled . . . : faith, truth, and love. Through them the world is preserved in existence and joined to the primordial causes by an intermediary, whether it be love’s madness, divine philosophy, or theurgic power, which is better than all wisdom and all human knowledge. . . . (1.25)²⁰³

Proclus’s mystical philosophy thus contains a ritual element lacking in both Plato and Plotinus.

What the Athenian found in the hypotheses of the Parmenides and the other Platonic dialogues was a complex hierarchical world of levels of reality based on Plotinus’s three hypostases and evolving according to the fundamental dynamic law of remaining in the source (rnone), proceeding from it (proodos), and returning to it (episirophé). As proposition 35 of his Elements of Theology puts it: “The effect must either remain simply, or revert simply, or proceed simply, or combine the extreme terms, or combine the mean term with one of the other two; or else combine all three. By exclusion, then, every effect remains in its cause, proceeds from it, and reverts upon it.”²⁰⁴

This dynamic principle is well illustrated in what Proclus has to say about the famous triad of Being-Life-Intellect (on-zóé-nous) in Elements of Theology, prop. 103:

All things are in all things, but in each according to its proper nature: For in Being there is life and intellect; in Life, being and intellect; in Intellect, being and life; but each of these exists upon one level intellectually, upon another vitally, and on the third existentially.²⁰⁵

However, this first and highest triad that interpenetrates all things is not the First Principle, but is the product of the utterly unknowable Unity of the One. “Immediately beyond Being must stand a not-Being which is Unity and superior to Being” (kreitton tou ontos kai hen).²⁰⁶ Stephen Gersh, following E. Corsini, has shown how Proclus and his predecessors based this derivation of transcendental plurality from Absolute Unity on an interpretation of the Parmenides that understood the negations of the first hypothesis as dealing with the One and the affirmation of the second as treating of the procession of the One into triads.²⁰⁷ The revolution that was to take place in the Christian Neoplatonism of the Pseudo-Dionysius was when both hypotheses were applied to the same trinitarian God as negative and positive expressions of the single Creative Source.²⁰⁸

The same law of remaining-proceeding-returning is also illustrated in the distinctive teaching about the divine henads that Proclus developed from lamblichus and other predecessors. The henads, outlined in the

Elements of Theology propositions 113-65, are participated forms of the One found throughout all reality and identified with the traditional Greek gods.²⁰⁹ They serve a function both metaphysical — insofar as they mediate between the One and the many—and religious — because it is through them that Proclus incorporates a notion of “provident love” (pronoetikos eras) into his vision of the universe. It is by means of their presence in us that the soul is able to return to its source.

Unlike Plotinus, Proclus never says that the Ultimate One is in any way eros, but he goes further than Plotinus in giving yearning erds a consistent cosmic role. Speaking of the highest level of henads in his Commentary on the First Alcibiades, Proclus asserts that from these three intelligible henads or gods (that is, Goodness, Wisdom, and Beauty) the triad of faith, truth, and love “proceeds thenceforward to all divine orders and radiates to all union with the intelligible.”²¹⁰ Thus, universal eros gives harmony to the cosmos. “From above, then, love ranges from the intelligibles to the intra-mundane making everything revert to divine beauty. . . .”²¹¹ Love comes down from the gods themselves in order to make possible the loving return: “So gods love gods, the superior their inferiors providentially (pronoetikos eros), and the inferior their superiors reflexively” (epistreptikos eros).²¹² Erbs now, even more clearly than before, is not just an expression of human need, but is a universal force binding together all levels of reality and drawing them up toward the One. Proclus seems to have been helped in achieving this synthesis by his recognition that in its origin, eros is not a passive state, something caused in us by the sight of the beautiful object, but that it is primarily an activity coming down from above. “We must observe that divine love is an activity, wanton love a passivity; the one is coordinate with intellect and divine beauty, the other with bodies.”²¹³

Finally, Proclus’s metaphysical system established an apophaticism of such daunting purity that it may be difficult to see how the soul could ever contemplate or come to mystical union with a source so remote. “Affirma- tions cut off reality in slices,”²¹⁴ and Proclus was ever a man for the whole. Negations may provide access to the higher realms of emanation, but even they do not allow any penetration to the Ultimate One beyond the One that in some way produces what is below it. The only form of negation that may in some way approach the Ultimate is the “negation of negation,” a mysterious transcendental movement to another dimension. Although there are texts in Plotinus that implicitly affirm a negation of negation in relation to the One (e.g., 6.8.9, lines 39-41), Proclus is the first Western thinker to give the negation of negation a central role in his metaphysics. In the second book of the Platonic Theology (e.g., 2.10), and especially toward the conclusion of the seventh book of his Commentary on the Parmenides (a part

that survives only in the medieval Latin translation of William of Moerbeke), we find classic texts on this important theme.²¹⁵

Proclus distinguishes the One which participates in Being (unum par- ticipatur ab enté) from the unparticipated and exalted One (le unum imparti- cipatum, le unum le exaltatum, in the terminology of scholastic Latin). It is our bond with the former which makes possible the return to the latter: “For all things are connected with the One Being inasmuch as they all participate in existence (substantia): the One Being is the monad of beings. Through it they move mystically to the One it contains, and then through this to the One that transcends the existent” (In Parm. 7).²¹⁶ Proclus claims that this Supreme One lies beyond even oneness and that no attribute taken from anything else is applicable to it.²¹⁷ It is completely unknown and inexpressible, though in a supereminent way: it possesses superexcellentia even with regard to itself.²¹⁸ Even negations express nothing about it: “negative propositions that have been stated do not express anything about the One, but do refer to the One.”²¹⁹ It alone transcends the principle of contradiction.²²⁰

What then are the meaning and religious significance of the act of referring to the One? Here Proclus takes what we might call a psychological or introspective turn, one not unlike what we have seen in the metapsycho- logical interpretation of Plotinus, but more explicitly formulated. As he puts it:

The question arises, however, how is it that we call it “one” when the thing itself is altogether unnameable? We should rather say that it is not the One that we call “one” when we use this name, but the understanding of unity which is in ourselves. ... All [things] long for the first cause and have a natural striving towards it. And this fact shows us that the predilection for the One does not come from knowledge, since if it did, what has no share in knowledge could not seek it; but everything has a natural striving after the One, as also has the soul.²²¹

So the attempt to name the One is really naming our natural desire for the One, that is, activating the One’s image in us. This imprint, characterized as striving, or eras, is what makes the mystic ascent possible.²²²

Proclus then, like Plato and Plotinus before him, insisted that it was because of a divine something in the soul that return was possible, though unlike Plotinus he thought that the soul was totally fallen and not still partly in the upper realm.²²³ Plotinus, as we have seen, located this divine element in the Nous, though he sometimes spoke of something more Nous than Nous itself, a “supreme aspect of Nous” (6.9.3, line 27), or “inner Nous” (5.3.14, line 15). Proclus identifies it with the anthos nou, or “flower of Nous,” a term he found in the Chaldean Oracles. In one place he also refers to the