Desperate for Shortcuts

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.

Plotinus

Plotinus’s philosophy was the product of thirty years of thinking and teaching. In a popular form the doctrine 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, 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). But it was Ammonius Saccas (175-240/245 AD.) who introduced the idea of “emanation.” He postulated a kind of evolution upside down, the constant flux of creative energy from a primeval all encompassing unity through ever more diverse agencies all the way “down” to humans, animals and matter in various stages. His students, Herrenius, Origen of Alexandria, Cassius Longinus and Plotinus then elaborated on the idea.

Plotinus’s reasoning is not difficult to follow, his premise is of 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 do the rules of engagement between the forces of chaos - also known as “natural laws” - create the mere illusion of sustained structure and order?

Before he got to the point Plotinus came clear about the possibility to actually get it wrong: "Consider 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." But this was not what he was hoping for.

“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 says. Like almost everybody 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. But for Plotinus, like many who followed his footsteps, this was a prospect of gloom and chasing shadows.

“If these objects of intellection are in the strict sense outside of the intellect, 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 really think this was a meaningful statement? And who is to say that everybody is finding “grandeur” in the same thing? So, what is Plotinus’ solution here, if indeed a solution were required?

“The only way is to leave nothing outside of the intellect,” he says, “and so, in an act of identification with the object we cannot forget, and don’t need to wander about searching.” The idea seems to anticipate Berkeley. 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, the more I read of it, the harder I find it to be a meaningful statement. Plotinus was desperate for a shortcut, for an immediate way of understanding “dispensed from demonstration and from acts of faith” (Plotinus), and it is here where the fickleness of his heart tripped up the philosopher. Otherwise Plotinus would have understood that such shortcuts could only lead to more and equally unfounded acts of faith. However a series of seizures compelled him to believe in a genuine mystical experience which, in his own words, made him abandoned "the duality of seer and seen,” and enter a realm where he could no longer “distinguish, nor even imagine a duality.”

“You have changed, you no longer own yourself,” he says, “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 his beliefs, 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 unifying harmony with the Universe. Plotinus was lecturing under the patronage of Emperor Gallienus. It was an auspicious meeting between the imperial establishment and what seemed an agreeable form of monotheism. A move with political consequences.

Under Gallienus’ successors monotheism in a different form would become the ideological vehicle for absolute tyranny.