The Dispensation of the One – Plotinus

 

Plotinus (204 – 270 AD) never discussed his ancestry, childhood, or his place or date of birth. In 242 AD, he joined the cartographers and scientists on the staff of Emperor Gordian’s taskforce against Persia. After some success the campaign took a turn to the worse and the young Gordian III died in unclear circumstances. Rome had still enough vitality to absorb a military disaster on a distant frontier, but the death of Gordian meant more than a mere regime change. Gordian III came from a wealthy family of accomplished civil servants, he had ruled in close cooperation with the Senate of Rome, and his legislation represented the closest approximation of habeas corpus ever achieved in Roman law. From this point on the empire was facing an uphill struggle to maintain the territories and the rule of law. In the general confusion of the retreat, Plotinus made it back to Antioch only with great difficulty and then took passage to Italy. In the capital he attracted a circle of devoted students and friends: his biographer Porphyry, the Neo-Platonist Amelius Gentilianus of Tuscany, the senators Castricius Firmus, Marcellus Orontius, Sabinillus, and Rogantianus, his personal physician Eustochius of Alexandria. Plotinus also corresponded with the philosopher Cassius Longinus.

Plotinus’ philosophy was the product of thirty years of thinking and teaching.

His doctrine is a form of pantheism, which had been around in popular form since the days of Virgil (70 – 19 BC): "Some say that bees even have their share in divine intelligence, and drink from God’s own life,” says the poet, “for the Divine Presence, it is said, is everywhere, in Earth, and Ocean, and the unknown sky, and flocks, herds, men, and beasts of every kind, draw at birth this fine essential flame, even return to God at last, to be absorbed; no room is left for death" (Georgics 4:227). It was during his early years in Alexandria, when Plotinus met Ammonius Saccas (175 – 240/245 AD) – the “porter” – an apostate from the faith of his Christian parents, who dragged a living out of carrying sack-loads on the docks. What was the reason for Ammonius’ apostasy? Maybe Plotinus’ treatise Against the Gnostics, a response to the narcissism of Christian apologists, opens a glimpse. These people proclaimed that they were “not to worship God's creation made for our use,” because “the Sun and the Moon were made on our account. How then shall I worship my own ministers" (Tatian, Against the Greek). The deeply religious Plotinus was usually on his best behavior, but here he replied in strong terms: "Human temerity is only too willing to accept such grandiloquent ravings. The simple folks hear: 'People whose worship is inherited from antiquity are not His children - you are!' So you address the lowest of men as brothers, but you deny this courtesy to the Sun and disown your ties with the Cosmos?" It gives us an idea why the Gentile world used to accuse the early Christians of atheism.

Ammonius Saccas introduced Plotinus to the idea of “emanation” or involuntary outpouring. Emanation is the ancient’s equivalent to evolution. Although Anaximander (611 – 547 BC) had already proposed a crude version of proper evolution in the days of the prophet Jeremiah, concluding even that all life must have sprung from marine organisms, his idea never caught on. It was too irreligious even for a heathen and too undignified for a believer in the Platonic archetypes. Ammonius therefore sought for a compromise and postulated a kind of evolution upside down, the constant flux of creative energy from the primeval and all encompassing “One” through ever more diverse agencies all the way “down” to humans, animals and matter in various stages.

The ultimate source is neither a god nor a creator; it is the eternal and purely intellectual realm of a pre-sentient Universe, constantly pouring out into the material world and in the process gradually acquiring sentience. This devolution from a state of absolute perfection towards the multitude of us “lesser” critters has the benefit of letting us participate in the divinity of the process. Over the centuries this idea has spawned many and sometimes utterly absurd derivatives. For instance the idea of Swedenborg and Madame Blavatsky that man epitomizes all the other species, which each present only a degenerated aspect of the human person. One can of course always find a “kernel of truth” in such speculations, since everybody carries in his genome the entire history of our evolutionary past, but of course, that’s not what Swedenborg had in mind. 

Porphyry says that among Ammonius’ students Herenius, Origen of Alexandria, Cassius Longinus and Plotinus had vowed to impart their master’s teachings only by word of mouth. When Origen broke the agreement, Plotinus was persuaded to do the same. Plotinus may also have felt that he could not afford to leave Origen's interpretation of the Holy Trinity unanswered: it hijacked the Platonic trinity of the “One,” the logos and the “soul, for a foreign purpose, thus staining with mean superstition the transcendental purity of the great Unity from which everything else had generated.

How did Plotinus know about this chain of being that supposedly holds together all that exists?

His reasoning is not difficult to follow, the premise has an endearing simplicity: "It is unity that makes a being. The members of every plant and animal form a unity; separation means loss of existence" (Plotinus). So this is the question: is there such a thing as an underpinning unity in the larger scheme of things? Are we citizens of a Cosmos, or is this world the reflection of a momentary equilibrium in the antagonism of chaotic forces which is creating the mere illusion of sustained structure and order?

In an anticipation of Immanuel Kant, Plotinus considered the possibility of getting it wrong. "Think of perception,” he said. “Its objects, it seems, are most patently an artifice, yet the nagging doubt remains whether the apparent reality may not lie in the states of the percipient rather than in the material before him." Yet this concession was halfhearted. He looked for something more affirmative.

“Even granting that what the senses grasp is really contained in the objects, none the less what is thus known by the senses is an image. Sense can never grasp the thing in itself; this remains for ever outside,” he said. Like everybody in the 2nd century, Plotinus had no idea that impulse and response correlate and so specifically shape our senses for their designated tasks. In fact such correlation can be so overpowering that evolution has “invented” from scratch an organ like the eye seven times over. Our senses don’t cheat. We wouldn’t be around if they did. Yet for Plotinus sense perception was a prospect of gloom and chasing shadows. “If these objects of intellection are in the strict sense outside of the intellect,” he said, “we must see them as external and invariantly we cannot possess the truth of them. So what we perceive is belief rather than truth; we are content with something very different from the object of our perception” (Plotinus). Unable to disentangle himself from a purely semantic trap of his own making, Plotinus asserted, that “we must secure reality and provide for knowledge and for truth,” by making “what exists knowable in essence, and not merely as a quality which would give us a mere image or vestige of reality in lieu of possession, intimate association, and absorption” (Plotinus). Because if that were not so: “Where is its worth, its grandeur,” he asks.

Did Plotinus actually think this was a meaningful question? And who is to say that I find “grandeur” in the same thing as you? So, what is Plotinus’ solution here, if indeed a solution were required?

“The only way is to leave nothing outside of the intellect,” he said, “and so, in an act of identification with the object we cannot forget, and don’t need to wander about searching.” He concluded, that since we cannot confirm the existence of phenomena outside of the intellect, there “must” be an all encompassing primary intellect that encloses everything including us and allows us to participate: “Truth at once is there as the seat of authentic existence, and becomes alive and intellective” (Plotinus). An early version of Bishop Berkeley’s doctrine! Plotinus was desperate for a shortcut, for an immediate way of understanding “dispensed from demonstration and from acts of faith” (Plotinus). In the end he probably would have come to the realization that such “dispensation” is in and by itself just another act of faith, had he not experienced a personal affliction, which seemed to confirm his reasoning. He suffered from a series of seizures, which compelled him to believe in a genuine mystical experience. In his own words, it made him abandon "the duality of seer and seen,” and to enter a realm where he could no longer “distinguish, nor even imagine a duality. You have changed” he said, “you no longer own yourself, you belong to the One, a center in sync with the center. You will see a solitary light suddenly revealing itself, not from some perceived object, but pure and self-contained."

Modern research into the pathology of our introversions has established reproducible evidence for this kind of experience. Depending on background and belief, the afflicted tends to identify such “seizure by the spirit” (Teresa of Avila, 1515 – 1582, El Castillo Interior) as an encounter with divinity itself, an experience of the unifying harmony with the Universe.

Since then there have been countless reincarnations of Plotinus’ vision. He now has become a guru from Orange County, a relic of the sixties, denouncing austerity and asceticism in exchange for psychedelic acids – he’s never seen without a pair of sunshades; acids make you hypersensitive to the open sunlight. Everybody has moments when he feels like remembering his double and triple alter egos. At dawn you wake up to be a librarian in Maidstone, when the sun is setting you return to your garden plot and unfold the butterfly wings of a genie. Look more closely when your country’s prime minister shows his face on the TV. He is actually a Mandrake root; a fairy has unwittingly opened for this little miscreant the doors to a political career by combing away his ugly exterior. This fairy lives incognito as a schoolmarm and if you ask your grandfather he already remembers her ageless looks of a bespectacled spinster. Your neighbor behind the garden fence is the incarnation of a silver thistle, and his petite wife is actually a princess; don’t let yourself be misled by the wispy mustache on her upper lip. Physically, we all are separate embodiments; the great outpouring has dispersed us in little droplets, with each being a minor dissonance in the great empathetic consonance of the Universe. “A network of interwoven threads, finer than the finest spider’s web, which seem endless, as they twine out of the mind into some entity invisible even with the aid of a microscope, generating a medley of flowers assuming human shape, and of people melting into the earth and gleaming forth as stones and metals. Among them move all manners of strange animals, incessantly changing their shapes and speaking wondrous languages. None of these entities matches another, and the heartrending melancholy ringing through the air seems to be an expression of the dissonance among them. Yet this very dissonance is adding new splendors to the underpinning harmony that triumphantly breaks through, uniting all apparent discords in an eternity of unutterable pleasure” (E.T.A. Hoffmann, Master Flea).

© – 1/27/2009 – by michael sympson, 2,000 words, all rights reserved