Moreover, Celsus was out of step with his time; he asked men to behave like gentlemen skeptics when they were withdrawing from a society that enslaved so many of them into a mystic world that made every man a god. That consciousness of supersensible powers which is the foundation of religion was prevailing universally over the materialism and determinism of a prouder age. Philosophy was abandoning the interpretation of that sense experience which is the realm of science, and was devoting itself to a study of the unseen world. Neo-Pythagoreans and Neoplatonists developed Pythagoras’ theory of transmigration, and Plato’s contemplation of the Divine Ideas, into an asceticism that sought to sharpen spiritual perception by starving the physical senses, and to reclimb by self-purification the steps by which the soul had been degraded from heaven into man.
Plotinus was the culmination of this mystic theosophy. Born at Lycopolis in 203, he was a Coptic Egyptian with a Roman name and a Greek education. In his twenty-eighth year he discovered philosophy, passed unsatisfied from teacher to teacher, and found at last, in Alexandria, the man he sought. Ammonius Saccas, a Christian converted to paganism, was attempting to reconcile Christianity and Platonism, as his pupil Origen would do. After studying under Ammonius for ten years, Plotinus joined a Persia-bound army in the hope of learning the wisdom of the Magi and the Brahmans at first hand. He reached Mesopotamia, turned back to Antioch, went to Rome (244), and remained there till his death. His school of philosophy became so fashionable that the Emperor Gallienus made him a court favorite, and agreed to help him establish in Campania an ideal Platonopolis, to be governed on the principles of the Republic. Gallienus later withdrew his consent, perhaps to spare Plotinus an ignominious failure.
Plotinus restored the repute of philosophy by living like a saint amid the luxuries of Rome. He had no care for his body; indeed, says Porphyry, “he was ashamed that his soul had a body.”43 He refused to sit for his portrait, on the ground that his body was the least important part of him—a hint to art to seek the soul. He ate no meat and little bread, was simple in his habits, kindly in his ways. He avoided all sexual relations, but did not condemn them. His modesty befitted a man who saw the part in the perspective of the whole. When Origen attended his class, Plotinus blushed and wished to end his lecture, saying, “The zest dies down when the speaker feels that his hearers have nothing to learn from him.”44 He was not an eloquent speaker, but his devotion to his subject, and his absorbed sincerity, were good substitutes for oratory. Reluctantly, and only late in life, he put his doctrines into writing. He never revised his first draft, and despite Porphyry’s editing, the Enneads remain among the most disorderly and difficult works in the history of philosophy.III
Plotinus was an idealist who graciously recognized the existence of matter. But matter by itself, he argued, is only the formless possibility of form. Every form that matter takes is given it by its inward energy or soul (psyche). Nature is the total of energy or soul, producing the totality of forms in the world. The lower reality does not produce the higher; the higher being, soul, produces the lower—embodied form. The growth of the individual man from his beginnings in the womb, through the slow formation of organ after organ to full maturity is the work of the psyche or vital principle within him; the body is gradually molded by the longings and directives of the soul. Everything has soul—an inward energy creating outward form. Matter is evil only insofar as it has not received mature form; it is an arrested development; and evil is the possibility of good.
We know matter only through idea—through sensation, perception, thought; what we call matter is (as Hume would say) only a bundle of ideas; at most it is an elusive hypothetical something pressing against our nerve ends (Mill’s “permanent possibility of sensation”). Ideas are not material; the notion of extension in space is obviously inapplicable to them. The capacity to have and use ideas is reason (nous); this is the peak of the human triad of body, soul, and mind. Reason is determined insofar as it depends upon sensation; it is free insofar as it is the highest form of the creative, molding soul.
The body is both the organ and the prison of the soul. The soul knows that it is a higher kind of reality than the body; it feels its kinship with some vaster soul, some cosmic creative life and power; and in the perfection of thought it aspires to join again that supreme spiritual reality from which it appears to have fallen in some primeval catastrophe and disgrace. Plotinus here surrenders discursively to the Gnosticism that he professes to reject, and describes the descent of the soul through various levels from heaven to corporeal man; generally he prefers the Hindu notion that the soul transmigrates from lower to higher, or from higher to lower, forms of life according to its virtues and vices in each incarnation. Sometimes he is playfully Pythagorean: those who have loved music too much will become songbirds in their next avatar, and overspeculative philosophers will be transformed into eagles.46 The more developed the soul is the more persistently it seeks its divine source, like a child strayed from its parent, or a wanderer longing for home. If it is capable of virtue, or true love, or devotion to the Muses, or patient philosophy, it will find the ladder down which it came, and will climb it to its God. Let the soul, then, purify itself, let it desire the unseen essence passionately, let it lose the world in meditation; suddenly, perhaps in some moment when all the noise of the senses is stilled, and matter ceases to pound on the gates of mind, the soul will feel itself absorbed in the ocean of being, the spiritual and final reality. (“Sometimes,” wrote Thoreau, idly drifting on Walden Pond, “I ceased to live, and began to be.”) “When this takes place,” says Plotinus,
The soul will see divinity as far as it is lawful. . . . And she will see herself illuminated, full of intellectual light; or, rather, she will perceive herself to be a pure light, unburdened, agile, and becoming god.47
But what is God? “He” too is a triad—of unity (hen), reason (nous), and soul (psyche). “Beyond Being there is the One”: 48 through the seeming chaos of mundane multiplicity runs a unifying life. We know almost nothing of it except its existence; any positive adjective or prejudiced pronoun applied to it would be an unwarrantable limitation; we may only call it One and First, and Good as the object of our supreme desire. Emanating from this Unity is the World Reason, corresponding to Plato’s Ideas, the formative models and ruling laws of things; they are, so to speak, the thoughts of God, the Reason in the One, the order and rationality of the world. Since these Ideas persist while matter is a kaleidoscope of passing shapes, they are the only true or enduring reality. But Unity and Reason, though they hold the universe together, do not create it; this function is performed by the third aspect of the godhead—the vitalizing principle that fills all things and gives them their power and predestined form. Everything, from atoms to planets, has an activating soul, which is itself a part of the World-Soul; every Atman is Brahman. The individual soul is eternal only as vitality or energy, not as a distinct character.49 Immortality is not the survival of personality; it is the absorption of the soul in deathless things.50
Virtue is the movement of the soul toward God. Beauty is not mere harmony and proportion, as Plato and Aristotle thought, but the living soul or unseen divinity in things; it is the predominance of soul over body, of form over matter, of reason over things; and art is the translation of this rational or spiritual beauty into another medium. The soul can be trained to rise from the pursuit of beauty in material or human forms to seeking it in the hidden soul in Nature and her laws, in science and the subtle order that it reveals, finally in the divine Unity that gathers all things, even striving and conflicting things, into a sublime and marvelous harmony.51 In the end beauty and virtue are one—the unity and co-operation of the part with the whole.
Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful, yet act as does the creator of a statue … he cuts away here, he smooths there, he makes this line lighter, the other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked . . . and never cease chiseling your statue until . . . you see the perfect goodness established in the stainless shrine.52
We feel in this philosophy the same spiritual atmosphere as in contemporary Christianity—the withdrawal of tender minds from civic interest to religion, a flight from the state to God. It was no accident that Plotinus and Origen were fellow pupils and friends, and that Clement developed a Christian Platonism at Alexandria. Plotinus is the last of the great pagan philosophers; and like Epictetus and Aurelius, he is a Christian without Christ. Christianity accepted nearly every line of him, and many a page of Augustine echoes the ecstasy of the supreme mystic. Through Philo, John, Plotinus, and Augustine, Plato conquered Aristotle, and entered into the profoundest theology of the Church. The gap between philosophy and religion was closing, and reason for a thousand years consented to be the handmaiden of theology.