Return to the One (37 page)

Plotinus terms the essential nature of all things the One. Hence, if we want to know God most completely, we are advised to seek for the divine within—or, more accurately,
as
—one’s own self. Porphyry, echoing Plotinus, tells us that “Indeed, when one is present to oneself, he possesses the existence that is present everywhere; when one departs from himself, he also departs from it.”
⁷
Thus the universal is to be found in the personal, which admittedly is a seeming paradox.

However, the paradoxes in the
Enneads
are more accurately viewed as reflections of the unfathomable unity that lies beneath appearances. For example, in addition to saying that the universal is the most personal, Plotinus also tells us that detaching from people and things leads to the greatest intimacy; in the formless is found true substance; the highest wisdom comes from embracing ignorance; and God is found by traveling nowhere.

In each apparent paradox (and more could be given) a circle is closed. Just as a man walking along a looping path initially moves away from his starting point, only to find that he eventually returns to that beginning place from the opposite direction, so did Plotinus teach that soul will return to God by moving in an unexpected fashion.

The spiritual path follows a course opposite to worldly ways. It means doing what comes unnaturally: shutting down the senses, turning away from thoughts, distancing from desires, abjuring actions, ignoring I-ness.

And then, seeing what happens. Wondrously, our own seeing will, with practice, become the divine happening that we seek so deeply with all our heart. Meister Eckhart speaks of this great mystic truth: “The eye with which I see God is exactly the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowledge and one love.”
⁸

Neoplatonism and Christianity

W
E NOW HAVE
to ask how it is that two mystics, the “pagan” Plotinus and the Catholic Eckhart, can agree so closely about the nature of God and spirituality while the perspectives of Neoplatonism and traditional Christianity are not nearly as compatible.

To begin with a little history Plotinus’s mystical philosophy as part of the broader current of Neoplatonism that co-existed with Christianity in the initial centuries of the first millennium, never penetrated into the mainstream of Mediterranean beliefs. Though his ideas were highly influential among the educated and philosophically inclined, they failed to take root among the masses.

Christianity, on the other hand, did, spreading with remarkable rapidity throughout the Greco-Roman world. In the fourth century a Roman emperor, Constantine, was converted to this relatively new religion and thereafter used his considerable imperial power to propagate Christianity.

The ascendancy of Christianity did not come without a struggle, however. One skirmish in this battle for the soul of Western culture was fought by Porphyry, the student of Plotinus who edited the treatises in the
Enneads
into their present form after Plotinus’s death in 270. Porphyry was a noted philosopher in his own right, and had an expert knowledge of Hebrew.

R. Joseph Hoffman says that Porphyry developed an intense dislike for popular religion and regarded Christianity as a pernicious disease that was infecting the Roman empire.
¹
He wrote fifteen books that came to be known as
Kata Christianon (Against the Christians).
In 311, the church ordered all existing copies to be burned.

Presently all that is known about
Against the Christians
comes from fragments of Porphyry’s words preserved in refutations written by Christian faithful, which one can expect do little justice to the scope and persuasiveness of Porphyry’s arguments.

Unwittingly, the Christian authorities validated one of the central objections Porphyry almost certainly raised to Christianity: its elevation of blind faith over enlightened reason. Hoffman says, “From the standpoint of Socratic method, the Christian style was distinctly un-Socratic, consisting of injunctions to have faith and
believe
rather than ask questions. The Christian concept of truth consisted of revealed propositions in search of philosophical legitimation; it was doctrinaire where Platonism was dynamic.”
²

In writing
Against the Christians,
Porphyry was engaging in the same sort of exercise by which he came to be persuaded of the truth of Plotinus’s teachings. Recall that, after beginning to attend Plotinus’s school, Porphyry raised an objection to a central issue. He was asked to explain the basis of his objection and another student then responded to his response. And so it went, ideas playing against ideas until Porphyry realized the emptiness of his argument.

Christianity, however, considered that there was room for only one person, Jesus, on the platform where divinity is revealed. Since in this view there is only one perfect incarnation of God and one perfect revelation, debate is senseless. If scripture and revelation are the sole repositories of divine truth, no purpose is served in respectfully considering the perspective of a Greek philosopher who held differing views.

By burning
Against the Christians,
the church authorities acted in a manner that would be unthinkable in the scientific community. It’s difficult to conceive of a scientist responding to an article critical of his or her theory by destroying every copy of the offending publication. Unfortunately, even today it is all too common to find religious advocates attempting to repress or belittle beliefs that are at odds with their own instead of debating the nature of spiritual truth in an open forum.

Further, it is a fundamental premise of science that it takes effort to reveal the hidden mysteries of the cosmos. After all, if the deepest truths of existence were lying around in the open, they wouldn’t need to be searched for. Thus Porphyry objected both to the Christian belief that Jesus possessed a knowledge of divinity unavailable to other men and women, and to the Christian premise that faith alone was sufficient to unlock the gates of heaven.

In a letter to his wife Marcella, Porphyry wrote, “We must have faith that our only salvation is in turning to God. And having faith, we must strive with all our might to know the truth about God. And when we know this, we must love Him we do know.”
³

Here we see the nature of Plotinian faith, which perhaps is more accurately described as a working hypothesis, so long as the zeal and passion the mystic philosopher brings to his or her spiritual experiment are not lost in the translation. For Porphyry says that faith in the possibility of salvation, which for him is the soul’s return to the One, must be followed by mighty striving to know God. Mere belief is not enough.

Once God is known, truly and fully known, love follows naturally. This makes sense. How is it possible to love anyone or anything that isn’t known to us? Even if we believe we love that person or entity, we really don’t love them as they are but as we envision or imagine them to be.

So Plotinus and Porphyry certainly wouldn’t have disagreed with the emphasis Christianity (and Jesus) placed on love. But they viewed love more as the result of contemplation upon spirit and the One, than as a prerequisite for such contemplation. They also would have been ready to admit the possibility that Jesus was divine, perhaps even possessing unsurpassed divinity. However, the caveat would have been that Jesus’s spiritual attainment was not different in kind from the godly knowledge of others who both preceded and followed him.

John N. Findlay says that in Plotinus’s Platonism, there can be a human who participates more fully in the Absolute than any other human. But this will be a matter of degree, not of kind. Further, says Findlay, even if the divine
Logos
fully incarnates as a person, it “may have other sheep that are not of a given fold, and may shepherd many who have never heard of or acknowledged his Christian manifestations.”
⁴

The Christian doctrine that God became man one time and one time only clearly was at odds with Plotinus’s teaching that divinity could be manifested in every purified human soul. R. T. Wallis says that “it was well-nigh impossible for Hellenic thinkers to accept a unique once-for-all incarnation of divinity,” and so they “found the new religion’s claim to a unique revelation especially distasteful.”
⁵

The Christian idea of a suffering god also was anathema to Porphyry and other Neoplatonic philosophers, who considered that all who become godlike imbibe the qualities of God, including a serene detachment from the illusory pleasures and pains of physical existence. Wallis says, “To the Hellenic sage all suffering is a matter of indifference; hence, Jesus’s lamentations before his death attracted particularly unfavorable comment.”
⁶

Still, despite the many conflicts between Plotinus’s mystical philosophy and Christianity, it is important to recognize that the Platonically-inspired teachings of the
Enneads
and the message of the Gospels have much in common. Richard Tarnas lists some of the Platonic principles evident in the New Testament:

The existence of a transcendental reality of eternal perfection, the sovereignty of divine wisdom in the cosmos, the primacy of the spiritual over the material, the Socratic focus on the “tending of the soul,” the soul’s immortality and high moral imperatives, its experience of divine justice after death, the importance of scrupulous self-examination, the admonition to control the passions and appetites in the service of the good and true, the ethical principle that it is better to suffer an injustice than to commit one, the belief in death as a transition to more abundant life, the existence of a prior condition of divine knowledge now obscured in man’s limited natural state, the notion of participation in the divine archetype, the progressive assimilation to God as the goal of human aspiration.
⁷

But the similarities between the two great worldviews of Platonism and Christianity tended to be overshadowed by the inherent differences between an inward-looking and an outward-looking spirituality. For even though Christianity was esoteric in comparison to the excessively ritualized Judaism of the time, it was decidedly exoteric in comparison to Plato and Plotinus’s teachings.

For example, great emphasis was placed in Christianity on the divinity of Jesus, a unique historical personage who was considered to be the exclusive source of truth in the cosmos.

The Christian who sought God thus looked outward to Jesus, for even if man is the image of God (the
Imago Dei
doctrine), Christianity held that the perfection or realization of this image can only take place through the mediation of Christ and within a community of believers. By contrast, a believer in the Plotinian message looked inward to the divine reality of his or her own soul, which could be purified without any intermediary, and thereby returned to its natural state of near-identity with spirit and the One.

In addition, Plotinus never failed to emphasize the universal, whereas Christianity has a decided bias toward the particular. This helps explain why, in contrast to the Gospels, the
Enneads
are almost completely devoid of any reference to individual lives, personal stories, discrete historical events, specific forms of worship, or any other particular way the divine might be reflected in this physical world. Plotinus isn’t interested in unique instances; he cares only for what applies always and everywhere.

The Neoplatonist perspective is that while an individual may be honored for pointing humanity toward divinity we dishonor the absolute by reducing eternity to a particular time, omnipresence to a particular place, omniscience to a particular idea, omnipotence to a particular act.

This is one of the points John N. Findlay makes in an essay (quoted from earlier), “Why Christians Should Be Platonists.” He says that in both the Old and New Testaments there is “a considerable element of the arbitrary,” such as “the choice of a particular human nature for fusion and transfiguration by the divine, timeless Logos…. This large element of the arbitrary, in my view, tarnishes the Absolute’s image.”
⁸

Further, says Findlay, the traditional Christian emphasis on an individual incarnation of God at one time and one place in the universe’s history sets into place an unbridgeable gap between us and the Absolute. Though Jesus may have spanned this divide, having one foot on earth and one in heaven, conventional Christian dogma holds that it is heresy to consider that we can do so ourselves by our own efforts.

So Findlay observes that in Christianity, humans are relegated to being puppets of the Absolute because there is an immense gap between the Absolute and its dependents that must be bridged by an individual who incarnates as a unique instance of divinity. By contrast, in Platonism the Absolute is universal, and can communicate what it has, or is, in various degrees to what falls beneath it.
⁹

Plato and Plotinus taught that God can be fully known and fully loved by us because the One is not restricted in any fashion. Jesus can know and love God; Plotinus can know and love God; anyone, including you and me, can know and love God. Just as an apple falling from a tree in Argentina does not diminish the force of gravity in Australia, so is the One ever-present to those capable of realizing the power behind all other powers, regardless of who else has attained this realization.

Thus Findlay praises to Christians (and, by implication, those of other faiths) the virtues of what he calls Platonic and Plotinian absolutism.
¹⁰
By teaching that the One, spirit, and soul are universal aspects of reality, Plato and Plotinus downplay the importance of individual instances of absolute patterns, such as persons, rites and rituals, books, religious institutions, and so on.

We can only imagine how early Christianity must have appeared at the time to serious students of Neoplatonism who believed so firmly in the unchanging transcendence and ineffability of the One. Living as most of us do in a Christian culture, where “pagan” often is considered to be virtually equivalent to “heathen,” it is difficult to appreciate that to Plotinus and his philosophical brethren it was the followers of Jesus who appeared irreligious and disrespectful of God.

To hold that God reveals himself through miraculous manipulations of matter, that the eternal spiritual laws of the cosmos were cast in a new direction with the virgin birth of a carpenter’s son in Palestine, that God’s plan is for the souls of the faithful to one day be rejoined with their long-dead physical body, that spiritual realization is reserved only for the select who were fortunate enough to live after Jesus’s incarnation—all this and more seemed wildly fanciful in comparison to the more transcendent and coherent teachings of Plato and Plotinus.