CHAPTER 2
IN the second chapter of his Dialogue ivith Trypho (ca. 150 c.E.) the apologist Justin recounts the story of his pursuit of the love of wisdom through the varions philosophical schools culminating in the Platonists. Through their instruction he thought that he had already become so wise that in his words “I wished to see God immediately because this is the goal of Plato’s philosophy” (2.6). ,
see the error of their daims that the soûl can see God by its own power|
because it is unbegotten and immortal, that is, naturally divine (Dial.
4-6).1 But were the Platonists wrong to think that seeing God is the * goal of human life?,
A later Christian story gives a more ambiguous witness to pagan^
and Christian encounter. In the “Alphabetic Collection” of the Sayingsi
of the Desert Fathers, the Abba Olympios tells of the pagan priest whoI
slept in Olympios’s cell at Scete and asked him, “Since you live like this,I
do you not receive any visions (puden theoreite) from your God?” WhenI
Olympios responded that he did not, the priest contrasted the mysteriesI
revealed to pagan priests when they sacrifice with the lack of visions|
of the Christian monks, concluding, “Truly, if you see nothing, then:
it is because you hâve impure thoughts in your hearts, which separatei
you from your God, and for this reason his mysteries are not revealed (apokalyptetai) to you.” The desert elders approved of this judgment when it was reported to them on the grounds that “impure thoughts separate God from man.”2 However we evaluate the religious confrontations tantalizingly revealed in these two texts — radical opposition,
B correction, analogy, appropriation, or transformation — one thing is
obvions: the language involved is not only Greek, but Plato’s Greek, that is, the description of the soul’s return to God through purification (astësis) followed by contemplative vision (theôria). Contemplation is only one of the historically and culturally conditioned forms in which Christian mysticism has corne to birth, but it is one of the most ubiquitous and enduring.3
In his noted book Contemplation et vie contemplative selon Platon, André Jean Festugière remarked, “When the Fathers ‘think’ their mysticism, they platonize,”4 a dictum that is true also for many subséquent Christian mystics. The major influence of Plato and the Platonic tradition on the history of Christian mysticism cannot be denied, though like the use of the term “contemplation,” the import of this influence has also been vigorously debated. Some modem Protestant theologians, beginning with Albrecht Ritschl, hâve judged the history of Christian mysticism to be at root nothing more than an invasion of Christian faith by a fundamentally different and alien Hellenic religious element.5 Even Festugière, who did not see the contemplative idéal as incompatible with Christianity, argued for a fundamental différence between the ascetical spirituality of the early Christians and the philosophical spirituality of mystical contemplation introduced in the third century c.e.6 The purpose of this chapter is not so much to judge these views (they will be more directly critiqued in chapter 4) as to présent the main Unes by which the contemplative idéal of Plato and his followers influenced Western Christian mysticism. This sketch must be sélective, but some issues will require more detailed treatment than others.
To begin with Plato is, of course, to start in médias res.7 Historians of religion hâve devoted much effort to investigating to what degree earlier éléments in Greek religion that influenced Plato, especially Pythagorean-ism and Orphism, and early Greek philosophers, such as Parmenides and Heracleitus, may or may not be termed mystical. Ugo Bianchi, for example, finds in Greek religion two tendencies: an “Olympian,” or distant, conception of divinity, and the “mystical” conception that recognizes an interférence of the divine and human levels. He locates Plato in the third, or “mysteriosophical,” type of Greek mystical religion.8 But these questions need not delay us, since they are only distantly relevant to the study of those Eastern and Western Christians who were influenced, frequently only indirectly, by Plato (ca. 429-347 b.c.e.).
“In the days of my youth my expérience was the same as that of many others. I thought that as soon as I should become my own master I would
immediately enter into public life.” These lines from the Seventh Letter ascribed to Plato introduce a brief but plausible account of the sage’s disillusionment with Athenian politics, especially following the death of Socrates, and his lifelong dedication to philosophy in accordance with his conviction that “the classes of mankind . . . will hâve no cessation from evils until either the class of those who are right and true philosophers attains political suprem-acy, or else the class of those who hold power in the State becomes, by some dispensation of Heaven, really philosophie” (324 B, 326 AB).9 Whether or not the Seventh Letter is really from Plato, it provides us with an insight into the historical context within which the great philosopher pursued his thought.10 Plato lived at a time when the inner crisis of the traditional Greek polis and the religion intimately bound up with it had become évident, and there seems to be no reason to deny that this had a profound effect on his decision to abandon the public arena to cultivate the wisdom necessary to build a more just human society. The reform of the polis meant the reform not only of its citizens, but of its religion as well. If society is out of joint, it can only be because humanity’s whole attitude toward the universe and its divine source was in need of repair. Plato’s philosophy is powered by an unremitting desire for reform: personal, political, and religious.
This is not the place to attempt to give any summary of Plato’s philosophy, however brief. What is needed here is only a sketch of those aspects of his thought that were influential on later Christian mysticism, especially in the West. To call Plato a mystic is a controversial issue, as we shall see, though I hâve no hésitation, along with Festugière and others, in doing so.
Plato views the true human subject, or soûl, as a searcher always restless short of permanent possession of the Absolute Good which béatifiés. Such possession is achieved through theôria, or contemplation, which is the fruit of an ascending purification {katharsis, askesis} of both love and knowledge and which reaches its goal when nous, the divine element in the soûl, is assimilated to its supernal source. We need to inquire more closely into each of these éléments: theôria; its relation to love and knowledge; nous; and its source, the Absolute that Plato referred to as the One, the Good, and the Beautiful.
Plato’s thought is characterized by a sharp distinction (although never an absolute séparation) between the world of appearances and the world of Forms or Ideas, between doxa (opinion) and epistëmë (real knowledge), between temporality and unchanging immortality. Contemplation can be described as the way in which nous, a divine exile in the world of appearances, opinions, and time, unités the two realms through its intuitive contact
with the presence of the Absolute.11 Peter Manchester has characterized the religions context within which Plato wrote as follows:
The religions expérience of eternity and time that is distinctive of Mediter-ranean spirituality in our period is an orientation to temporal presence. . . . It is an expérience of a divine Presence in the human présent, a presence reflected both in the cosmos of nature and in the life of the mind. Here the characteristic religions problem is the compétence of spéculative mysticism to encounter divine Creative power.12
For Plato contemplation provided new access to the divine in an âge when the traditional divinities of the Greek polis had begun to lose their numinosity, at least among the sensitive searchers after truth pictured in Socrates and his circle.13 Just as the Jewish visionaries of the Hellenistic world were to respond to their changing religions situation by finding new ways of access to God, especially ascensions to the heavenly realm, Plato, as Festugière has shown, stands at the head of two new traditions in Greek reflective piety—“the desire of union with the ineffable God,” and “the desire of union with the God of the world, the cosmic God.”14 Both traditions were to affect Christian mysticism, though Christian suspicion of the divinization of the cosmos lessened considerably the influence of the latter tradition.15
No single text in Plato lays out ail the dynamics of his contemplative spirituality, but a brief look at three famous passages will help illustrate the key thèmes. The first of these is Symposium 201D-212A, the speech in which Socrates recounts Diotima’s instruction in “love matters” (ta erotika).
In this lengthy account, the seer explains that Love (erôs) is a medium between the beautiful and the ugly, describing his birth as the resuit of the union of Porus (Resource, the son of Cleverness or Craft) and Penia (Poverty or Need). As a mediating daimôn, or spirit, Love connects the heavenly and earthly realms. The lover’s love for beautiful things is essentially a desire for the happinesss (eudaimonid) that cornes from the permanent possession of true Beauty, which is identical with the Good (206D). Such possession cannot be perfect if it cornes to an end, and therefore love involves a longing for immortality (cf. 207A, 2O7D, 208B, 212A).
Diotima’s stress upon love’s striving to gain its object may seem to imply that love is only desire for selfish possession, but she insists that the ultimate goal of love is not for mere possession, but for generous begetting— “It is of engendering and begetting upon the beautiful” (206E). Begetting according to the body is not condemned, but the begetting according to the soûl which brings forth virtues is praised as more noble (208A-209E).
Diotima’s teaching concludes with the famous description of the “straight
path” (orthos) to the “rites and révélations” of love.16 Beginning from the love of one beautiful body, the lover must corne to love ail beautiful bodies. Then he must turn to the beauty of soûls, which will lead him to the beauty of laws and institutions and of every kind of knowledge (epistême). Finally, “turning rather towards the main océan of the beautiful [he] may by contemplation (theôrôn) of this bring forth in ail their splendor many fair fruits of discourse and méditation in a plenteous crop of philosophy” (210D). To the one who has thus prepared himself and been strengthened in this passage, “suddenly (exaiphnês) he will hâve revealed to him, as he draws to the close of his dealings in love, a wondrous vision, beautiful in its nature” (210E). This sudden appearance of the very Form of the Beautiful, “existing ever in singularity of form independent by itself” (211B), brings the lover to contemplation of Divine Beauty (to theion kalon [211E]) and enables him to bring forth true virtue (212A). It makes the lover both a “friend of god” and immortal.17
It is clear from this text that Plato’s notion of love is not purely egotistical and self-serving, as Anders Nygren claimed;18 rather, true erôs is love for the Good that seeks to beget the good, either the good of human offspring or of virtue.19 But is the union with the Beautiful-Good that is attained at the height of the path a personal one? Certainly not in the sense in which later monotheistic mystics strive for union with the God of révélation, but Plato’s description of the unitive vision with the Beautiful-Good is not totally impersonal either. Too easy an imposition of modem views of what consti-tutes the personal over against the impersonal seems to be at work in some interprétations of Plato.20 The fact that Plato describes the Form that takes possession of the lover as a god, or at least as divine, certainly left the door open for personalized readings that may go beyond but that are not neces-sarily contrary to his descriptions of that indescribable suprême moment.21 Nor is it clear that Plato’s view of the goal is as purely intellectual as some hâve argued, that is, that the mind’s gaze upon science or knowledge is only an abstract conception.22 A full case cannot be presented here, but I would be inclined to follow the lead of Festugière, who argues that the seeing involved in Plato’s contemplation is not a defining, but is based on “an immédiate union . . . of a mystical order” in which both knowledge and love play complementary rôles in attaining an intuitive contact with the presence of true Being.23 While béatitude for Plato is essentially a cognitive State, because the Good that is grasped in the act of contemplation is iden-tified with the Beautiful that is the goal of erôs, contemplation also produces loving joy in the soûl.24 René Arnou, in his treatment of Plato’s view of contemplation, summarizes with a clarity that merits full citation:
Platonic contemplation appears as a sudden and immédiate vision of true Being, or, if one ascends as far as possible on the scale of values, a union with the Suprême Good, a mysterious union which is not just the vision of an object by a subject, but the taking possession of the subject by a superior reality in such a way that the love that responds to the attraction of the Beautiful and the Good enjoys a rôle just as necessary as the intelligence which gazes.25
A second passage that will be helpful for illustrating Platonic contemplation is Socrates’ second speech in Phaedrus 243E-257B. Here, in order to prove that the madness of love is not an evil but a gift of the gods, Socrates first gives a dialectical argument proving that the soûl is the uncreated and immortal principle of motion (245G-246A). In trying to describe the form or nature of the soûl, however, Socrates must resort to a myth, the famous comparison of soûl, both divine and human, to a pair of winged horses and a charioteer, a description based on the well-known three parts of the soûl (nous, thymos, and epithymid) found frequently in the dialogues.26 The soûls of the gods ascend the height of heaven’s dôme without difficulty and pass outside to be carried around to view the région where the “divine intelligence” (dianoia theou) and any like it “rejoices in seeing reality (to on) for a space of time and by gazing on truth is nourished and made happy” (247D). The human soûl, however, has lost the wings that enable it to share in the divine nature (246E) and thus has fallen to earth (248CE) to be entombed in the body (250C). Ail human soûls will eventually get their wings back after a ten-thousand-year cycle, but the philosopher has a shortcut to this goal because he can remember when his soûl “rose up into real being” (anakypsasa eis to on ontos [249C]) and was “initiated into perfect mysteries” (ibid.; cf. 250BC).
In our fallen condition it is beauty entering in by means of sight, “the sharpest of the physical senses” (250D), that begins the philosopher’s return. Plato emphasizes the shock and suddenness of the appearance of beauty in the beautiful boy. “But he who is newly initiated, who beheld many of these realities, when he sees the godlike face and form which is a good image of beauty, shudders at first, and something of its old awe cornes over him . . .” (251A). Indeed, the description of love madness that follows (251A-252C) emphasizes the action of beauty on the lover through the eyes as a gift — almost as a grâce.27 The rather complex account of the kinds of godlike soûls found in the beloved (252C-253C) echoes the concern of the Symposium for the begetting of virtues upon the beautiful loved one.
The return to the analysis of love madness in terms of the charioteer and winged-horses myth (253C-256D) makes évident that as long as the better element, or charioteer of the soûl (nous), restrains the lower éléments, or
horses, from the physical consummation of love, the cultivation of virtue will lead the lovers on to the goal of true contemplation. This implies, as Martha Nussbaum has shown, that the Phaedrus differs from the Symposium not only in recognizing the rôle of the madness of love but also in empha-sizing the rôle that personal erotic attachment continues to play in the soul’s ascent.28
One final, even better known, Platonic text, the “Allegory of the Cave” from Republic, book 7 (514A-518B), also deserves comment. In no other text does Plato so poignantly (and pessimistically) describe the contrast between the dim and illusory nature of life in our world of shadows and the possi-bility of a life lived in clear view of the supernal world of Forms where the Good, the Form of Forms, reigns like a suprême sun making ail things visible. One of the prisoners, chained from birth and condemned to watch mere shadows of images cast by firelight (514A-515C), can only with great difficulty learn to progress through the levels of contemplation to gaze even-tually upon the sun itself (516AB). Were he to return to the other captives to try to instruct them and to release them from their prison, he would appear so strange and out of place that they would ridicule and perhaps even kill him, just as Socrates was killed (517A). Nevertheless, the whole purpose of the allegory, as later becomes clear (e.g., 519C-521B), is to insist that such a return is the philosopher’s vocation. He alone can guide the polis of blind captives toward a more just social order, just as most later Christian mystics will insist that the contemplative love of God must yield to active love of neighbor within the body of Christ as long as we remain in this life.
Plato’s explanation of the allegory underlines the message that in the soul’s ascent to the “intelligible région” (ton noëton topon [517B]) the Idea of the Good is the highest and ultimate vision. The philosopher who has beheld these “divine contemplations” (theiôn theoriôn [517D]), later described as “the contemplation of essence and the brightest région of being” by means of the “eye of the soûl” (518C), must always keep in mind how hard the passage of ascent and descent between the two worlds really is.29 Though the “Allegory of the Cave” has been most often mined for its insights into Plato’s metaphysics, spéculation and spirituality cannot be separated in the philosopher. Ancient philosophy, as Pierre Hadot has shown, is always a spiritual exercise, a training for the best form of living.30 The famous “Allegory of the Cave” is essentially an account of the spiritual path that begins with awakening (without the stress on the erotic element in this case) and proceeds through painful purification and graduai illumination to end in vision.31
Let us try to summarize the characteristics of Platonic contemplation on the basis of these three texts, supplementing them where necessary from other places in the dialogues and letters. For Plato, the path to human hap-piness begins with the awakening of the soûl through the manifestation of beauty (generally the beauty of the young male in Plato’s cultural world). Platonic spirituality has been contrasted with Christian as a kind of auto-salvation in which the philosopher raises himself to the goal solely by his own efforts. While there is surely a great distance between Christian conceptions of fallen humanity’s need for grâce and what we find in Plato, there are some surprising analogies that hâve often been missed.32 Many scholars hâve noted that the Symposium and other téxts make clear the necessity for a freely given manifestation or “sudden” (exaiphnës) appearance of the transcendental goal at the end of the process, thus arguing that the summit is not achieved solely by personal effort. But even so acute an investigator as A. J. Festugière misses the importance of the external initiative (might we say “grâce”?) of the “sudden” shock of beauty which begins the whole process.33 To be sure, the gift of beauty given in the beautiful boy is not a direct intervention of the Absolute, but is it not at least its manifestation in our world of shadows?
The ascetic or cathartic process by which the sage both restrains his passions and cultivâtes virtue in his soûl is another aspect of the Greek contemplative tradition beginning with Plato that greatly influenced later Christian spirituality,34 although Plato’s thoughts in this area are less devel-oped than those of later Neopythagoreans, Stoics, and Neoplatonists. We can find in his dialogues a kind of tension between world-affirming views in which material reality and erotic relations are used as intégral parts of the ascension process (e.g., Symposium, and especially the Phaedrus) and more négative views, where discipline of and flight from the body as the soul’s prison give a more pessimistic, almost dualistic tone to the ascetical program.35 Even in the more optimistic accounts, however, Plato stresses the essential importance of the transition from a material to a purely spiritual level of knowing and loving. Various appraisals of the rôle of Platonic and general Hellenic notions of asceticism in the history of Christian spirituality, frequently quite négative ones, hâve been made.36 It is only by following the history of the development and intent of asceticism within the broader context of Christian mysticism, as intended in these volumes, that we can hope to appreciate the complexity of this issue.
The graduai purification of love and knowledge achieved through the philosopher’s moral and intellectual efforts is the necessary préparation for the sudden manifestation of the ultimate reality of the Form of Forms, variously described as Beauty, the Good, and the One. Plato, like later
mystics in the Eastern and Western Christian traditions, insisted that this Ultimate Reality cannot be adequately set forth in language. Nowhere is his profound affinity with much Christian mysticism more évident than in his resolute présentation of what those thinkers who refuse to admit that there can be any form of knowing higher than conceptual thought hâve always considered a nonsensical delusion —the paradox of continuing to try to suggest with words an ineffable First Principle said to be beyond description.37
Négative, or apophatic, theology will form a major part of the story of these volumes, on both the historical and the systematic level. More system-atic issues must be left for the final volume, but it may be useful to introduce some necessary distinctions at this time. As Stephen Gersh reminds us, there are subjective négative descriptions of God or the First Principle according to which God is said to be unknowable and ineffable to our mode of perception and expression. (We can also distinguish between unknowability, which relates to the mind, and inexpressibility, which relates to the mind’s ability to communicate what it knows, though most authors will assert that the latter implies the former.) There are also objective négative descriptions in which God or the First Principle is described apophatically without référencé to our mode of conceiving.38 (The two modes of apophaticism may imply each other—that is, God is unknowable in himself and therefore unknowable to us—but need not do so.) Subjective apophatic descriptions may be further divided into (a) absolute subjective apophaticism in which God is unknowable and inexpressible to ail humans and in every way, and (b) various relative forms of subjective apophaticism in which God is unknowable: (i) only to some or most; (ii) not at ail times (i.e., he may reveal himself); and (iii) not to ail forms of knowledge. Plato’s apophatic thought is not developed in as explicit a way as that of many of his followers, but we can say that it is primarily a form of relative subjective apophaticism that, like many others, combines ail three subtypes.
Throughout Plato’s writings there are affirmations of the transcendental and therefore unknowable nature of the goal of contemplation. What is not clear is whether or not ail these descriptions refer to one and the same reality and whether this reality should be described as the “Really Real” (to ontos ori), or whether it lies beyond ail formulations based on the Greek verb “to be” (einai). Later Platonists who insisted that the First must be superior to everything that in any way “is” (conceiving “is” as being predicated of a “something” that exists) found much warrant for their views in Plato; but this may be reading back more cohérence into the philosopher’s thought than actually to be found in the texts.
Affirmations of at least relative subjective apophaticism in Plato’s texts
are not hard to find. Symposium 211A says of the Beautiful that there is no explanation or knowledge of it (oude tis logos oude tis epistëme). A much-cited text from the Timaeus asserted that “to discover the Maker and Father of this Universe were a task indeed; and having discovered him, to déclaré him unto ail men were a thing impossible (kai heuronta eis pantas adynaton legein [28C]).39 A rather obscure passage in the Seventh Letter, also much quoted by later authors, has Plato say of the knowledge of the highest sub-jects of his teaching that “it does not at ail admit of verbal expression like other studies, but, as a resuit of continued application to the subject itself and a communion (synousios'), it is brought to birth in the soûl on a sudden (exaiphnës), as light that is kindled by a leaping spark” (341CD). At least one text in Plato expresses a more objective apophaticism. In book 6 of the Republic, the Idea or Form of the Good is said to be “not being but still more than being” an affirmation fraught with questions, but one that was a cornerstone for those Neoplatonists, like Plotinus, who placed the First Principle beyond ail being.40 These and other like texts,41 for the ancients at least, provided the background for understanding the dialectical puzzles of the Parmenides, traditionally seen as the height of Plato’s metaphysics.
The fact that the dialogue that was viewed for centuries as Plato’s ultimate wisdom is now seen as a curious puzzle, a philosophical joke, or a purely logical exercise by many modem interpreters is éloquent witness to the gap that séparâtes so much contemporary philosophy from its history.42 Still, a number of recent readings hâve defended the metaphysical interprétation of the ancient Platonists that was the basis for the dialogue’s rôle in the history of mysticism.43
The two parts of the Parmenides deal first with the difficulties involved in the relation of the Forms or Ideas to things in the world (127A-134E), and second with the application of Parmenidean dialectic to to hen, the Form or Idea of the One (134E-166C). The issues in the first part revolve largely around the idea of participation (methexis'), a crucial element in Plato’s metaphysics. The complex argument of the second part is based on the dialectical premise that “one must consider not only what happens if a particular hypothesis is true, but also what happens if it is not true” (136A). As applied to the supposition that the One does or does not exist, this involves considering eight hypothèses — four for the premise that the One exists,44 and four for the premise that it does not exist.45 The clash of the various hypothèses and the problems and possible fallacies in the argument hâve been the subject of learned commentary, ingenious explanation, and outright rejection for millennia. The first hypothesis has been especially important in the history of the apophatic tradition. In arguing that if the One exists, then, because it is not many and has no parts it must lack both
members of contrary predicates like rest and motion, same and different, like and unlike, equal and unequal, Plato concludes by observing that since the One is totally outside time and therefore outside being (ousia): “Then the One has no name, nor is there any description (logos) or knowledge (epistëme) or perception (aisthësis) or opinion (doxa) of it. . . . And it is neither named nor described nor thought nor known, nor does any existing thing perceive it” (142A). Thus, the first hypothesis leads to the conclusion that nothing can be affirmed of the One; it surpasses ail sense as well as rational knowledge, and even ail being, at least being conceived as ousia. We can only say what it is not.46 But if this One is the Absolute Principle, the heart of Plato’s metaphysics, as the Neoplatonists and others hâve claimed,47 it is identical with the Beauty that suddenly reveals itself to the lover in the Symposium (210E) and with the Good of the Republic, which is both the Form of Forms and beyond ousia (506D-509B). The Absolute, though beyond words and beyond being, is capable of revealing itself to the nous in the philosopher’s soûl in a form of direct intuition that Plato sometimes calls noësis. In the words of E. R. Dodds, “The suprême act of cognition will thus not be strictly cognitive at ail, but will consist in the momentary actualiza-tion of a potential identity between the Absolute in man and the Absolute outside man.”48 This is the height of Platonic contemplation —not merely a seeing, but an awareness of identity with the présent Ultimate Principle.49
In describing the real lover of knowledge (philomathës) in Republic 6, Plato had said that he “would hold on his way . . . till he came into touch with the nature of each thing in itself by that part of his soûl to which it belongs to lay hold of that kind of reality . . . and through that approaching it, and consorting with reality really (tô onti ontos), he would beget intelligence and truth . . .” (490B). The contact between the Absolute Principle and the philosopher, therefore, is possible only because the philosopher’s soûl —or, to speak more precisely, the higher dimension of the soûl that Plato often calls nous—is itself of divine origin as Timaeus 90BD insists.
“Like is known by like,” as Greeks as far back as Empedocles had claimed.50 Hence, the soûl is both divine in origin and capable of being divinized, that is, of reviving and perhaps even radicalizing its innate divinity. An important passage in the Thaeatetus says “we should make ail speed to take flight from this world to the other, and that means becoming like the divine so far as we can” (homoios theô kata to dynaton [176B]). Diviniza-
tion then is the goal of Plato’s philosophy: the philosopher gains immortalityj by being assimilated to God.51 Certainly, Plato’s notion of divinization is
not that of later Christian mystics, especially because of his teaching that the soûl is naturally divine and not just divinizable; but the fact that divinization is the culmination of Plato’s journey did much to facilitate the
adaptation and accommodation of aspects of Plato’s contemplative idéal to the service of Christian mysticism.52
But was Plato a mystic? Scholars hâve disagreed, not only because they hâve read Plato differently but even more because they hâve had different understandings of what constitutes a mystic.53 At least three major issues separate the interpreters. First, is Plato’s concept of the goal of theôria a purely intellectual one, and, if so, does this exclude him from the camp of the mystics? Second, is Plato’s view of human perfection something that the philosopher achieves by his own efforts, or does it allow for at least something like a gift or “grâce” from the Source? Third, does Plato’s belief in the divinity and natural immortality of the soûl rule out true mysticism on his part? On ail three issues we can say that Plato shows essential différences from later Christian mystics, but we can doubt if that necessarily means that he is not a mystic.
It is questionable that A. H. Armstrong and others are correct in seeing Plato’s theôria as a purely intellectual vision that does not transcend the level of reason. A. J. Festugière’s view that Plato unités both a rationalist and a mystical tendency in his thought is more convincing.54 And even if Plato were to be convicted of holding a purely intellectual union with the Suprême Idea, why should we deny to him the kind of rational or intellectual mysticism that has been affirmed of a number of Neoaristotelian and Neoplatonic authors?55 On the second point, Plato’s philosophy is not a salvation religion with a distinct savior figure and a developed notion of the necessity of divine assistance, but the “grâce” provided by the beautiful beloved does seem to hâve a necessary if not sufficient rôle at the beginning of the path toward contemplation, and, as we hâve seen above, there is a sense in which both the beginning and the end of the philosopher’s journey to immortal happiness are a “gift.” Finally, while it is true that for Plato theôria is the activation of the soul’s natural divinity, a suprême self-realization quite different from Christian self-abnegation following the model of Christ,56 Plato does not differ from Plotinus in this regard, and it is difficult to see why those who would affirm that the latter is a true mystic should deny the title to the former. To be sure, the question of whether or not Plato was a mystic is not vital to our argument. It is enough to know that he was read as one, and it is to some of those readings, direct and indirect, we will soon turn.
The path from Plato to Proclus is much better known today than it was even a few décades ago. Numerous bibliographies and general accounts,57 as well as specialized studies of individuals and important thèmes hâve recently appeared. The customary divisions in the history of the Platonic
tradition of the Old Academy, that is, Plato’s immédiate school (ca. 350-100 b.c.e.), Middle Platonism (ca. 100 B.c.E.-ca. 250 c.e.), and Neoplatonism (ca. 250 c.e. on), still hâve some use, but more for chronological reasons than as indicating fundamental shifts in working out the inner dynamics of Plato’s thought.58 The world of Middle Platonism, filled with important but shadowy figures whose works often survive only in fragments, has been favored in recent years with a number of useful surveys.59 The rôle of other significant philosophical schools and tendencies, especially Aristotelianism, the Stoics, and the Neopythagoreans, as well as philosophically oriented religious movements like Gnosticism, Hermetism, and that reflected in the Chaldean Oracles, makes the spiritual world of the Roman oikoumenë of the first three centuries c.e. a very complicated one.
Many of these schools and movements had at least some relationship to early Christianity and its mysticism, but in this context it is impossible to consider them ail. One important general tendency of the era was the shift toward conceiving of philosophy as an exegetical enterprise based on auth-oritative, even revealed, texts. From the time of the collapse of the Athenian schools in the first century b.c.e., we can trace greater emphasis on the foundational texts of the various philosophical traditions, a growing emphasis on textuality over orality.60 This did not mean that philosophy lost its goal as a form of life, a spiritual path. Rather, the increasing rôle that documents like the Orphie Hymns and Chaldean Oracles played in school exegesis heightened the religious dimensions of philosophy even over what we hâve seen in Plato. This is évident in many figures, but especially in three central philosophers whose thought is both représentative of the time and also directly relevant to Latin Christian mysticism — Philo (ca. 20 B.c.E.-ca. 50 c.e.), Plotinus (205-270 c.e.), and Proclus (410-485 c.e.).61
Philo was an Alexandrian Jew who was roughly a contemporary of Jésus and Paul. (Christian legend has him meeting St. Peter in Rome!). Jerome’s treatise On Famous Men (based mostly on Eusebius) says of Philo, “Among the Greeks the popular saying was ‘Either Plato philonizes or Philo platon-izes,’ so much were they alike in thought and expression” (Famous Men 11 [PL 23:659]). Philo, however, was more than just another platonizer; he was the first figure in Western history to wed the Greek contemplative idéal to the monotheistic faith of the Bible, a union since applauded by many, but condemned by others, both Jews and Christians, as a form of miscegena-tion. Philo’s spécial place in the history of Judaism, Platonism, and even Christianity—for his most avid ancient readers were Christians62 — résides
in his attempt to use the best Greek philosophy (largely Platonic) both apologetically, that is, to prove that Judaism was the true religion, and speculatively, that is, to draw out the inner meaning of the biblical narratives and ritual practices that formed the heart of Judaism. From the perspective of contemporary Greek philosophy, he was doing with the Bible what other philosophers were already engaged upon with other “sacred” texts; from the perspective of his later Christian readers, many of his techniques and his conclusions foreshadowed how they were to seek to join biblical révélation and Greek philosophy in the service of a mystical idéal.
Philo’s mystical thought anticipâtes classic Christian mysticism especially in its exegetical character. For the great Jewish thinker the meaning of life had been revealed in the scripture, but not ail had the eyes to read it. As David Winston puts it, “If the main intent of the Philonic enterprise is a Grecojewish réconciliation, its main instrument is a vast and detailed allegorical interprétation of Scripture, partly through a line-by-line exegesis, known as the Allegory of the Law, and partly through a more thematic treatment designated as the Exposition of the Law.”63 The nature of Philo’s allegorical exegesis has been much studied, but still remains controversial in some aspects. Philo came at the end of what was apparently a lengthy line of philosophically-minded Jews who made use of pagan techniques of allegorical interprétation in the service of effecting a rapprochement between faith and philosophy.64 Adopting a middle position between the extreme allegorists who “frivolously neglect the letter” and the small-minded literalists, Philo urged readers of scripture “to go forward in quest of the allegorical interprétation (tropikas apodoseis), in the conviction that the words of the oracles are as it were shadows cast by bodies, whereas the significations therein revealed are the things that hâve true existence” (De confinions linguarum 190).65 The major purpose of the intricate and dense forest of Philonic allegory is to show the soûl its way home to God.66
While some scholars hâve denied Philo the title of mystic,67 many of the major Philo students of the présent century, from Erwin Goodenough to David Winston, hâve argued convincingly that the Jewish philosopher should be understood in light of a form of Middle Platonic mysticism widespread in the late Hellenistic world.68 Philo’s importance rests on the merger he effected between this form of Greek contemplative piety, with its growing emphasis on the transcendence of the divine First Principle, and his Jewish faith grounded in the Bible and in the practices and laws of his people. This réconciliation was achieved not only by seeking a deeper and more universal meaning in the scriptures, but also by transforming Platonic contemplation into a more personalistic mode.69 Although H. A.
Wolfson’s interprétation of Philo, which seems to transfer to the Jewish philosopher Plato’s rôle in A. N. Whitehead’s famous remark about Western philosophy being a sériés of footnotes to Plato, is doubtless exag-gerated, the Jewish thinker’s status as a pioneer in Western mystical thought cannot be doubted.
One reason why Philo was able to serve as a model for Christian authors was the rôle he gave to the Logos, or Divine Word or Reason, as an intermediary between the absolutely transcendent and unknowable God and the human soûl.70 Philo’s Logos doctrine has deep roots in Hellenistic Judaism’s spéculation about the figure of Sophia, or Wisdom,71 as well as in certain aspects of Middle Platonism, especially in the gradually emerging intradeical interprétation of Plato’s world of Ideas (i.e., the teaching that the Ideas are to be found in the mind of God). Aristotle’s criticism of Plato’s theory of Ideas (e.g., Metaphysics l:978b-991b) had shown how difficult it was to maintain a separate realm of Ideas as in some sense a cause of the world. One solution, first explicitly found in Philo but almost certainly something he inherited from previous Middle Platonists, was to move the Ideas into God, to identify them with the Divine Mind that causes the universe.72
Like the One of the first hypothesis of the Parmenides, Philo’s God is * beyond ail the predicates of human language, that is, he is subjectively apophatic. “Who is capable of asserting of the Primai Cause that it is incorporeal or corporéal, or that it possesses quality or is qualityless, or, in general, who could make a firm statement concerning his essence or quality or State or movement?” (Legum allegoriae 3.206 [Winston, p. 141]).73 But Philo’s God, the biblical God who gives his name in Exod 3:14,74 is not beyond being; he is “the Existent which truly exists” (to on ho esti alëtheian on [De mutatione nominum] 7). Although no proper name can be given to him (ibid., 8-12), “the bare fact that he is” (to einai monori) can be apprehended (Quod deterius 89).75
The existence of the inconceivable God can be known through analogy because he reveals himself in two ways, first, through the intelligible universe, or elder son, that is, his Logos, and, second, and derivatively through the sensible universe as through a younger son.76 Philo’s teaching about the Logos is rich and controversial; a broad picture will hâve to sufiice here. The Logos is “the Idea of Ideas (idea ideon)” (De migratione Abrahami 103),77 the first-begotten son of the Father (De confusione linguarum 63; De posteritate Caini 63), a “second God.”78
To his chief messenger and most venerable Logos, the Father who engendered the universe has granted the singular gift, to stand between and separate the
créature from the Creator. . . . “And I stood between the Lord and you” (Deut 5:5), neither unbegotten as God, nor begotten as you, but midway between the two extremes, serving as a pledge for both. . . . (Quis rerum divinarum heres sit 205 [Winston, p. 94])
The Logos, then, is both a Platonic mediating principle, the medium that joins two extremes (see Timaeus 31C), and more, insofar as he is a “vivid and living hypostatization of an essential aspect of deity, the face of God turned toward création,” as David Winston puts it.79 As the manifestation of the hidden God, the Logos reveals the two essential aspects of God’s relation to the world, the Creative power (poietikë dynamis) and the ruling or conserving power (basilikë dynamis).30
The Logos is also central in the soul’s return to God, both primordially and consequently. “For just as God is the Pattern of the Image [i.e., the Logos], which was just named Shadow, so does the Image become the pattern of others, as Moses makes clear at the beginning of the Law Code by saying, ‘And God made man after the Image of God’ (Gen 1:27); thus the Image had been modeled after God, but man after the Image . . .” (Legum allegoriae 3.96 [Winston, p. 101]).81 The Logos is immanent in ail things, but in a spécial way in the human mind. The presence of the Logos within the soûl, that is, within the higher dimension or nous (Philo followed Plato in adhering to a tripartite understanding of the soûl) (Leg. 3.115 [Winston, pp. 119-20]), makes possible both knowledge of the existence of God (e.g., De migratione Abrahami 184-86) and the return of the soûl to God from its présent fallen State.
In the Phaedrus, as we hâve seen, Plato constructed an elaborate myth of the fall of the soûl. Philo did not need to do this, since Genesis supplied him with the story of Adam, Eve, and the serpent in the Garden of Eden. For the Jewish writer, the Genesis account was not a collection of mythical fictions (mythou plasmata), “but modes of making ideas visible, bidding us to resort to allegoricai interprétation guided in our renderings by what lies beneath the surface” (Op. 157 [LC 1:125]). Philo’s allegoricai reading, in which the serpent stands for the pleasure that tempts the woman (woman here represents sense perception, i.e., aisthësis) in order to pull the “sov-ereign mind” (hegemonë nous) of the man away from heavenly realities and down to the things of this world, was the first in a long line of interprétations of the Eden story as a timeless message about the inner conflict and fall in every soûl (Op. 157-59 [LC l:124-34]).«2
If the story of the Fall signifies the disordered soûl which has forgotten its true nature as image of the Logos, the hidden message of the other books of the Pentateuch, especially the historiés of the patriarchs and the story of Moses, présents a typology of those soûls who hâve regained their true
nature by following the path to mystic contemplation.83 Like Plato, Philo holds that ultimate bliss résides in the vision of God, or “knowledge of him who truly is” (epistërriê tou ontos ontos; see De decalogo 87 [LC 7:46]).84 “For the beginning and end of happiness is to be able to see God” (Quaestiones et Solu-tiones in Exodum 2.51 [LC Suppl. 2.99]). Also like Plato, the Jewish philosopher describes the true contemplative in terms taken from the language of the Greek mysteries. Thus Moses, “entering into the dark cloud, the invisible région, abides there while being initiated into the most holy mysteries. He becomes, however, not only an initiate, but also a hierophant and instructor of divine rites (hiérophantes orgiôn kai didaskalos theiôn), which he will impart to those clean of ear” (De gigantibus 54 [Winston, p. 69]).
This ascent into an invisible région in order to be initiated into mysteries begins with a discipline of the body and an ascetical life-style that Philo sketched in his treatise The Contemplative Life (Péri biou theoretikou, or De vita contemplation), written in praise of the Therapeutae, an Essene-like Jewish contemplative group near Alexandria.85 They are described as aiming “at the vision of the Existent” (Cont. 11) and as having secured “God’s friend-ship” (theou philia [Cont. 90]) through virtue.
The power that motivâtes the contemplative life leading to the vision of God is a divine erôs (De somniis 2.232 [Winston, p. 165]), but Philo makes it clear that this love is not a native gift of the soûl but is rather an inspiration by which God calls us upward to himself.86 Philo gives greater emphasis than Plato to the rôle of ecstasy (ekstasis, literally, “standing out-side” [the self]) in the upward path:
. . . but escape also from your own self and stand outside from yourself, like persons possessed and corybants seized by Bacchic frenzy and carried away by some form of prophétie inspiration. For it is the mind that is filled with the Deity and no longer in itself, but is agitated and maddened by a heavenly passion, drawn by the truly Existent and attracted upward to it. (Her. 70 [Winston, p. 169])87
Andrew Louth has pointed out another différence between Philo and Plato. Since the Jewish thinker holds that the soûl is only a created image of the Logos, not a part of the Logos itself, to corne to know one’s inner self on the journey up to the Existent is to gain an awareness of the “absolute nothingness of created being” (en pasi tou genetou . . . oudeneian). “And the man who has despaired of himself is beginning to know him that is” (Som. 1.60 [LC 5:326-29]).88 Divinization for Philo thus implies a self-naughting absent in much of the pagan mystical tradition, though we shall see an analogue in Plotinus.
Philo was the first to introduce into mystical literature the famous
oxymoron of “sober intoxication” (methë nephalios) to describe the way in which the mind is taken ont of itself in the upward way. “It longs for the intelligible, and on beholding in that realm beauties beyond measure, the patterns and originals of the sensible things in the world below it is pos-sessed by a sober intoxication, like those seized with corybantic frenzy . . .” (Op. 71 [Winston, p. 173]).89 Nevertheless, it is not clear in Philo if ecstasy and sober intoxication are to be seen as stages characterizing the way to the contemplative goal or as attempts to express aspects of that goal itself.
David Winston has claimed that “man’s highest union with God, accord-ing to Philo, is limited to the Deity’s manifestation as Logos.”90 But some texts, at least, seem to hold out the possibility for vision of the Existent in himself, not, of course, a compréhension or understanding of his nature, but some form of contact with that which is. In one place he says, “It is fitting for those who hâve entered into comradeship with knowledge to long to see the Existent (to on idein), but if they are unable, to see at least his image, the truly holy Logos . . .” (Conf. 97 [Winston, p. 171]).91 Other texts seem even clearer about the possibility of some form of vision, or cleaving,92 and, in at least one case, union (henôsis) with God, the Existent One,93 though, like Plato, Philo holds that this happens suddenly,94 and that its duration is brief.95
Philo goes beyond Plato, however, in ascribing the suprême vision (how-ever we are to conceive it) to the historical figures of the Bible —Enoch, Abraham, other patriarchs, and most especially to Moses. The leader of the Jewish people is described as having a “prophétie mind” which becomes “filled with God” and therefore “like the monad” so that “he is changed into the divine” (QE 2.29 [LC Suppl. 2:69-70]; cf. 2.40). Making Moses the idéal mystic, the divinized man, marks an important moment in the history of mystical traditions, for both Jews and Christians, if only because it links the generalized and often abstract subjective apophaticism of the Hellenic tradition with a personal life story that could, at least in part, be imitated — the account in Exodus of how Moses ascended to meet God in the cloud and darkness that hung upon Sinai.96
The mention of Moses’ prophétie mind points to modem disputes about the nature of Philo’s account of contemplation. H. A. Wolfson argued that the direct mode of access to God of which Philo speaks is always the resuit of a divine prophétie révélation that bypasses human reason, while David Winston distinguishes between ecstatic and hermeneutical prophecy, view-ing Philo’s notion of contact with God as an intellectual expérience based on reason’s intuitive function, a development of an “ontological” proof for God’s existence innate in the mind.97 The latter position, stressing the intellectual character of contemplation, seems doser to Philo’s texts, but
one still wonders if it does full justice to the ecstatic and apophatic éléments found in Philo’s frequent appeals to Bacchic frenzy and the divine darkness that Moses experienced. Did Philo himself enjoy such expériences? At times the Alexandrian speaks of the inspiration that he had enjoyed during his philosophical studies,98 or in writing," but it is questionable whether he wishes to equate this with the vision of God, the Suprême Existent.
Philo, even more than Plato, raises the question of the relation between Greek mystical philosophy and the ancient mystery religions. Erwin Good-enough saw Greek philosophy as the prime instrument in the metamor-phosis of the various oriental mythologies into the mystery religions. He viewed Philo as the summation of a process by which “Judaism was at once transformed into the greatest, the only true Mystery. . . . The objective of this Judaism was salvation in the mystical sense.”100 Though Goodenough may hâve pushed his evidence too far in some instances (as in his arguments for secret Jewish mystery rituals), his interprétation does bring out Philo’s relation to his Hellenistic milieu and the spécial character of his Judaism. Hans Jonas, who held that the transition from myth to mystical philosophy was in part mediated by the mystery cuits, also understood Philo as playing an important rôle in the complex interactions between myth, mystery, and mysticism at the beginning of the common era.101 His interprétation sought to draw the Jewish philosopher doser to the thought world of Gnosticism.102 What was the relation between the mystery cuits and traditions of late antiquity and the Greek contemplative idéal?
Despite the study devoted to them since the nineteenth century, basic puzzles remain in our knowledge of the mystery religions—or, perhaps better, mystery cuits.103 Their origins, both individually and as a general phenomenon, are still in doubt, though now there seems to be some agree-ment that the mysteries are fundamentally products of Greek piety, even that the “Oriental” mysteries are the resuit of Hellenic interprétations of Eastern myths. As to whether or not the great mysteries, like those of Eleusis, Dionysius, Orpheus, the Magna Mater, Isis, and Mithras, are to be seen as in some way “mystical,” judgments hâve varied depending largely on the view of mysticism employed. Ugo Bianchi, with his broad distinction between the Olympian and the mystical strains in Greek religion, has no difficulty in granting them mystical status because they witness to the interférence of the divine and human levels of reality.104 Walter Burkert, on the other hand, understanding mysticism as “the transformation of con-sciousness by méditation,” déniés that the mysteries were mystical.105
Nevertheless, he admits that “in religions terms, mysteries provide an immédiate encounter with the divine,”106 an expérience that might well be described as implicitly mystical. Previous investigators, such as Albrecht Dieterich and Hans Jonas, gave the mysteries a major rôle in the development of late antique mysticism, both pagan and Christian. In his study of the images of union between a god and a human found in the mysteries (eating, sexual congress, divine sonship, rebirth, and the heavenly journey), Dieterich claimed to hâve uncovered a form of thought found in ail mysticism and argued that Catholic Christianity was the “universal heir of ancient mysticism.”107 Hans Jonas utilized Dieterich’s materials, but gave the mysteries only an intermediary rôle in the transition from myth to mysticism.108 Today it seems likely that whatever rôle the mysteries had in the development of Christian mysticism, it was largely one mediated through the philosophical appropriation of the myths of the mystery cuits.109
The relation between the mysteries and Greek philosophy, according to Kurt Rudolph, is based on the philosophers’ conviction that “knowledge of God was attainable only by a path resembling the one followed in the mysteries at the ritual and religious level.”110 The occasional use of the language of the mysteries in Plato eventually broadened to include full allegorical readings of the myths and rituals of the cuits, a process that reached its fulfillment in Neoplatonism. Pierre Hadot has argued that even though the Neoplatonists use the adjective mystikos only sparingly, the notion of intuitive experimental vision of mystery as the summit of philosophical contemplation was something that the philosophers adopted from the traditional use of mystikos found in the Greek mysteries.111
The mutual interaction between philosophy and mystery in late antiquity was certainly influential on Gnosticism (an issue to be taken up in chapter 4); it is évident also in texts such as the Chaldean Oracles and the Hermetic treatises. The importance of the Chaldean Oracles for later pagan mystical philosophy was first demonstrated by Hans Lewy in his Chaldaean Oracles and Theurgy: Mysticism, Magic, and Platonism in the Later Roman Empire.112 Written in the late second century, probably by Syrian magicians, the Oracles, which became a sacred scripture for many Neoplatonists,113 are a good example of the “sacramental mysticism” of Greek mysteriosophical religion.114 A number of key thèmes in these obscure texts, especially the insistence that it is only through a secret highest level of human intelligence described as the “flower of nous” (anthos nou) that contact with the “Father Above” is possible, were to be important in later apophatic mysticism.115
Even more important were the Hermetic writings, or Hermetica, ascribed to the Egyptian god Thoth, who was identified with the Greek Hermes. Composed under Egyptian, Jewish, and Greek influence between the first
and third centuries c.e., the philosophical Hermetica (popular treatises on the occult sciences were also ascribed to Hermes) were widely known in late antiquity and were to exercise both direct and indirect influence, if only of a secondary nature, on the history of Christian mysticism.116 Although the writings of the Corpus Hermeticum are too varied to speak of a single Hermetic doctrine, these revelatory texts display the basic concerns of Alex-andrian Hellenism on two central issues: the nature of God, especially the opposition between the Cosmic God and the unknown Primary God, and the story of the soul’s fall into and ascent from the earthly realm.117 An oscillation between optimistic and pessimistic views of the universe, even more marked than in Plato, is évident. Some passages display a strong mystical character. In the tenth treatise of the standard corpus (called “The Key”), Hermes instructs his disciple about the possibility of the vision of the Good, or “the God and Father,” aflirming that it can be briefly and imperfectly enjoyed in this life, but that the perfect vision (theà) “that changes the whole person into [divine] being” (kai holon auton eis ousian metaballei) and “makes the soûl a god” (psychën apotheothênai) must wait until death.118
The négative theology of the Hermetic literature has been well studied by Festugière in the fourth volume of his La révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste. Through the treatise known as the Asclepius, a third-century work surviving in a fourth-century Latin translation, Hermetic apophaticism had some direct influence on the West.119 Indeed, a central element in ail the religious literature of the second and third centuries c.e., both the properly philosophical and the mysteriosophical, was the growing stress on the tran-scendence and unknowability of the Highest God. Middle Platonists such as the philosopher Albinus, Neopythagoreans such as Numenius, Gnostics of various persuasions, the authors of the Chaldean Oracles and the Hermetica, as well as Christians such as Clement and Origen, despite their marked différences of opinion on many issues, ail insisted on the radical, if not quite absolute, unknowability of God.120 However unknowable the First remained in its own nature, second-century thinkers such as Numenius also believed that some form of contact was possible in this life. In a famous fragment from his lost treatise On the Good {Péri tagathou) Numenius compared the contemplative to “a man sitting on a watch-tower, having caught a quick glimpse of a small fishing-boat, one of those solitary skiffs, left alone by itself. . . . Just so, then, must a man withdraw far from the things of sense, and commune in solitude with the Good alone (homilësai tô agathô mono monon). . . .”121
The many forms of mysticism, or at least of mystical philosophy, of the first centuries c.e. defy easy categorization. A. J. Festugière proposed a
typology of late Hellenistic mysticism (i.e,, 100 b.c.e-400 c.e.) that distin-guished between theoretical forms stressing the sage’s ability to raise himself up to contact with the First Principle, the Father beyond ail understanding, or at least the astral God of this world, and the mysticism of salvation based on a pessimistic view of the world and emphasizing the necessity for divine intervention to effect the movement up to the divine goal.122 These forms were united in finding the vision of God the ultimate aim and goal.123 This rich background was absorbed and transformed into something new by Plotinus, the purest mystic of pagan antiquity.
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.
(1) . . . one of us, being unable to see himself, when he is possessed by that god brings his contemplation to the point of vision, and présents himself to his own mind and looks at a beautified image of himself. . . .
(2) . . . but then he dismisses the image, beautiful though it is, and cornes to unity with himself, and making no more séparation, is one and altogether with god silently présent, and is with him as much as he wants to be and can be.
(3) But if he returns again to being two, while he remains pure he stays close to the god, so as to be présent to him again in that other way if he turns to him again. (LC 5:272-73)
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.
The subséquent history of contemplative mysticism in the pagan Neo-platonic 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 exer-cised real influence on the history of Western mysticism, especially some éléments 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 spéculative 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 médiéval scholastics.190 Two aspects of Porphyry’s metaphysics that had an impact on Christian spéculative 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—/o 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 hâve had a direct influence on later Christian spéculative mysticism, the crucial rôle 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 spéculative mysticism also appears to hâve 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 zôës). 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, zôë, noêsis). Here Being signifies the One as Principle, Life as the procession of ail things from it, and Intelligence as the révision or return.195 This incipient absorption of the Neoplatonic triad describing the “One-Being” into the pure One is also found in the contem-porary 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 dissémination of the Dionysian writings, here too Porphyry’s metaphysics was a harbinger of things to corne.
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 évolution of the idéal of contemplative piety that began with Plato reaches its culmination. For the Athenian philosopher, theology is an exegetical science,199 a form of knowing (epistêmê) 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 ail 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 cornes 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 révélation (the Chaldean Oracles) and through the theurgic manipulation of the divine character traits or symbols found in ail things. As a passage from the Platonic Theology puts it:
There are three true characters which fill divine beings and extend across ail 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 ail wisdom and ail 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 hypothèses 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 (monë}, proceeding from it (proodos), and returning to it (epistrophë). As proposition 35 of his Eléments 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 ail 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-zôë-nous) in Eléments of Theology, prop. 103:
Ail things are in ail 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 interpénétrâtes ail 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 dérivation of transcendental plurality from Absolute Unity on an interprétation of the Parmenides that understood the négations 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 révolution that was to take place in the Christian Neoplatonism of the Pseudo-Dionysius was when both hypothèses were applied to the same trinitarian God as négative 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
Eléments of Theology propositions 113-65, are participated forms of the One found throughout ail reality and identified with the traditional Greek gods.209 They serve a function both metaphysical — insofar as they médiate between the One and the many—and religions — because it is through them that Proclus incorporâtes a notion of “provident love” (pronoetikos erôs) into his vision of the universe. It is by means of their presence in us that the soûl is able to return to its source.
Unlike Plotinus, Proclus never says that the Ultimate One is in any way erôs, but he goes further than Plotinus in giving yearning erôs a consistent cosmic rôle. 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 ail divine orders and radiâtes to ail union with the intelligible.”210 Thus, universal erôs 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 cornes down from the gods themselves in order to make possible the loving return: “So gods love gods, the superior their inferiors providentially (pronoetikos erôs), and the inferior their superiors reflexively” (epistreptikos erôs).212 Erôs now, even more clearly than before, is not just an expression of human need, but is a universal force binding together ail levels of reality and drawing them up toward the One. Proclus seems to hâve been helped in achieving this syn-thesis by his récognition that in its origin, erôs 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 soûl could ever contemplate or corne to mystical union with a source so remote. “Affirmations eut off reality in slices,”214 and Proclus was ever a man for the whole. Négations may provide access to the higher realms of émanation, but even they do not allow any pénétration to the Ultimate One beyond the One that in some way produces what is below it. The only form of négation that may in some way approach the Ultimate is the “négation of négation,” a mysterious transcendental movement to another dimension. Although there are texts in Plotinus that implicitly affirm a négation of négation in relation to the One (e.g., 6.8.9, lines 39-41), Proclus is the first Western thinker to give the négation of négation a central rôle 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 médiéval Latin translation of William of Moerbeke), we find classic texts on this important theme.215
Proclus distinguishes the One which participâtes 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 ail things are connected with the One Being inasmuch as they ail par-ticipate 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 Suprême 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 négations express nothing about it: “négative propositions that hâve 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 refer-ring to the One? Here Proclus takes what we might call a psychological or introspective turn, one not unlike what we hâve seen in the metapsycho-logical interprétation 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. ... Ail [things] long for the first cause and hâve a natural striving towards it. And this fact shows us that the prédilection for the One does not corne 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 soûl.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 erôs, 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 soûl that return was possible, though unlike Plotinus he thought that the soûl was totally fallen and not still partly in the upper realm.223 Plotinus, as we hâve seen, located this divine element in the Nous, though he sometimes spoke of something more Nous than Nous itself, a “suprême 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
“flower of the whole soûl” in a manner which seems to indicate a still higher imprint in the soûl that forms the point of contact for union with the unknowable One.224
Proclus remains subjectively apophatic in an absolute sense, at least insofar as any form of knowledge of the imparticipable One is concerned. But he does believe that union, that is, henôsis, with the One is possible. The term is found often in his works, having one of its most impressive statements in book 7 of the Parmenides commentary:
[The soûl] mounts towards the incompréhensible supereminence of the One itself, borne in its direction by a longing for its nature, revolving round it, wanting to embrace it, seeking with suprême passion to be présent to it, unifying itself as far as possible and purging ail its own multiplicity so that somehow it may become perfectly one. Impotent to comprehend that incompréhensible or to know the unknown, yet according to the manner of its own procession it loves its inexpressible appréhension of participation in the One. For in order to receive something, the soûl must first co-exist with that thing; but what would this mean in the case of the intangible? Thus the One transcends ail discursive knowledge and intellection and ail contact. And only unification (unio, henôsis) brings us near the One, since just because it is higher than any existence it is unknown. (In Parm. 7)225
This is “the ecstasy which frees us from ail other préoccupations so that we can unité ouselves to god alone.”226 Like his Greek forebears, Proclus continues to refer to it as a contemplation, one which for him- reaches its goal through the négation of négation. “For by means of a négation Parmenides has removed ail négations. With silence he concludes the contemplation of the One” (In Parm. 7).227
Proclus’s influence on Christian mysticism through Dionysius is évident not only in the notion of cosmic love and the quasi-theurgic éléments of Dionysian sacramentalism, but especially in the dialectical view of the One as the négation of négation. The appropriation of these éléments into Christian thought involved profound adjustments and transpositions that will occupy us in the chapters to corne.228 Proclus forms an interesting example of an anti-Christian writer in an explicitly Christian world who managed to exercise a profound influence on the religion he hated. Christian Procleanism was to be of singular importance both in metaphysics and in mysticism —a paradox that highlights the many ambiguities in the relations between the Greek contemplative tradition and Western Christian mysticism.