The
Dispensation of the One – Plotinus
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The Universe is organized, effective, complex,
lavish, but it cannot be at once symbol and reality. As we look upon
the world, its vastness and beauty and the order of its eternal march,
and think of the gods seen and hidden, and the life of animal and
plant, let us ascend to its archetype, to the exuberance of the One.
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Plotinus
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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 Gordian III died in unclear circumstances. A disaster on many
levels!
The young 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. In the general confusion
of the retreat, Plotinus made it back to Antioch only with great
difficulty and
then took passage to Italy. In Rome 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, and his personal physician Eustochius of Alexandria.
During his
residence in Rome he lived in the house of Madam Gemina and her two
daughters. One
of Plotinus’ correspondents was the philosopher Cassius Longinus.
Plotinus’ philosophy
was the product of thirty years of thinking and teaching. In our days,
people
may not care much for the philosophy, but his work is still imaginative
literature of the highest order.
This doctrine is a form of pantheism, that in popular form
had been around 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? In his treatise Against the Gnostics, Plotinus responded
to the narcissism of Christian apologists, who 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
religious Plotinus, usually on his best behavior, 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 was Ammonius,
who introduced to Plotinus the idea of “emanation” or involuntary
outpouring. Emanation
is the ancient’s equivalent to proper evolution. Although Anaximander (611 – 547 BC) had already proposed a crude
version of 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
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, although neither a god nor creator, is a
pre-sentient
Universe of eternal presence 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 was
easier to
stomach, since it allows us to participate in the divinity of higher
beings. It
doesn’t explain anything, but makes you feel good. Over the centuries
the idea
has spawned many and sometimes utterly absurd philosophical
derivatives. For
instance the idea of Swedenborg and Madame Blavatsky that man
epitomizes all
the other species, which as such 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, which includes apelike ancestors and rat-like rodents down to the
humble
cauliflower, but of course, that’s not what Swedenborg had in mind.
Porphyry says
that Ammonius’ students, at least four of them – 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.
This
was not what he hoped to find.
“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 else
in his days, Plotinus had no idea that impulse and response correlate
and so
specifically shape our senses for their designated tasks. Our senses
don’t
cheat. We wouldn’t be around if they did. And they don’t betray us
because they
are participants in the phenomenon as such. Yet for Plotinus, like many
who
followed his footsteps, this was a prospect of gloom and chasing
shadows
through the countless intermediaries of sense perception. “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). Apparently Plotinus was
unable to get himself out of a purely semantic trap of his own making. “We must secure
reality and provide for knowledge and for truth. Therefore what exists
must
become 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).
I must admit, I have a hard time taking it seriously. In other
words,
just like Bishop Berkeley, Plotinus was desperate for a shortcut, for
an
immediate way of understanding “dispensed
from
demonstration and from acts of faith” (Plotinus). He probably would have known that such dispensation is by
itself only another act of faith, if there wasn’t 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 many more incarnations of Plotinus and his
vision. He now has become the guru of a 60s commune in Orange County,
denouncing austerity and asceticism for psychedelic acids, and is never
seen
without a pair of sunshades – acids make you hypersensitive to the open
sunlight. There are moments when we feel like remembering our double
and triple
lives. At twilight, a librarian in Maidstone returns from the daily
slog to his
garden plot and unfolds the butterfly wings of a genie from Atlantis. Look more closely when your
country’s prime
minister shows his face on the TV. His public appearance is actually the thin disguise of a Mandrake root; a
fairy had opened for this
little
miscreant the doors to a
political career and the misery of his country. She lives incognito as a schoolmarm who is
remembered
with the same ageless looks of a bespectacled spinster by your
grandfather.
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 in little droplets, of which each is 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