The Wisdom of Hypatia: Ancient Spiritual Practices for a More Meaningful Life (30 page)

thought, then you can see that they also have the character of mind. That is, they are individual Minds in the Cosmic Mind. Thus each Thought is a coincidence of subject

and object, of Mind and Idea. Plotinus says that each of these Minds is a special form or aspect of the Cosmic Mind. We might describe them as different projections of the totality called the Cosmic Mind, like different shadows of a three-dimensional object. Or, to change similes, as different facets of a multifaceted gem. Since the Ideas are characterized by both causation and cognition, they are in a certain sense alive, and we Platonists attribute power, life, and mind to the Beings populating the Cosmic Mind

and to the Cosmic Mind as a whole.”

Therefore Pagan Neoplatonists also viewed the traditional gods as archetypal Beings

(Minds in the World Mind), for they were considered the causes and explanations of many phenomena in the world. This is reinforced by the belief that the Ideas are, in a timeless sense, alive and thinking. At a somewhat superficial level, ancient Pagans took the gods to be the causes of natural phenomena; for example, Zeus (Jupiter to the Romans) causes thunder and lightning, Poseidon (Neptune) causes earthquakes. But many philosophers

(including the Epicureans and Stoics) sought to explain natural phenomena without re-course to the gods. Now we understand them as the result of atmospheric electricity, plate tectonics, and the like. Ancient Pagans also attributed psychological phenomena to the gods. For example, a sudden feeling of sexual attraction might be understood as an effect of Aphrodite (Venus) or Eros (Amor); everyone is familiar with the idea of being shot by Cupid’s arrow (Lat.
cupido
= desire).

If the gods are Beings in Cosmic Mind, then they are eternal (timeless), which we

would expect, but they are also impassive because they are unchanging; that is, they cannot be affected, they are eternally tranquil. We have seen this view of the gods before, with the Epicureans and Stoics. It implies that the gods cannot be swayed by prayer (although, as I will explain later, that does not imply that prayer is useless). The gods are like other cosmic laws (such as the law of gravity), with which we can cooperate, but which must obeyed and cannot be altered. This may contradict your experience; you might say, “I pray to God or Goddess and they hear me; they intervene directly in my life.” I don’t disagree, but please have patience for a few more pages, and you will learn the Neoplatonic explanation.

Since the Cosmic Mind contains all the Forms that cause and govern the physical pro-

cesses that create everything in the universe, Neoplatonists often identified the Cosmic 150 the macrocosm

Mind with the
Demiurge
(Craftsman), the mythical creator god described in Plato’s
Timaeus
. There is a sense in which the Cosmic Mind is a creator, but anthropomorphizing it can be misleading. First, according to Neoplatonic philosophy, the creation of the world does not take place at a particular point in time, for creation is a continual process of emanation from the eternal Cosmic Mind. Second, this creation is not chosen or willed by the Demiurge, but is a necessary and natural consequence of the Cosmic Mind.

Truth, Beauty, and Justice

Seated upon her dais, Hypatia was perhaps herself an embodiment of austere

and timeless beauty, for in her life she exemplified the perennial Platonic ideals, Truth, Beauty, and Justice. “Among the Ideas in the Cosmic Mind,” our imaginary lecture continues, “is ideal Beauty, but the Cosmic Mind as a whole is also called ‘Beauty’. This is because philosophers identify beauty with harmonious form, which is supremely exemplified by the Cosmic Mind. For, firstly, the Cosmic Mind is the totality of the ideal Forms, and secondly because each such Form includes all of the rest in itself. Therefore, because each is an ‘all-in-all’, the Forms are united into a whole in the most harmonious way possible. This is why Plotinus calls the Cosmic Mind ‘Beauty’, and as you know the Greek word ‘Cosmos’ refers to order, harmony, and beauty.”

A student named Hierocles raises his hand and asks, “For what sorts of things are

there Ideas? It is hard to imagine that there are Platonic Forms of mud and excrement.”

Hypatia nods in agreement. “This is one of the questions addressed by Plato that

he never resolved. We may accept that there is ideal Truth, Beauty, and Justice, that there are immortal gods in the ideal realm, but what about ideal Evil, ideal Disease, and ideal Decay? This is an important question, but I must leave it for another time.”

It’s worth mentioning that over the centuries there have been many objections

to Plato’s theory of Forms and its successors. The “problem of universals,” the nature of universal terms, such as “horse,” and their relation to the world and our minds, is a perennial problem in philosophy. Fortunately, for the purposes of spiritual practice, we do not need a definitive solution.

Are the Ideas defensible? In the
Sophist
Plato has the Stranger say that the contest between materialist and idealist explanations of reality is like the mythological battle between the giants and the gods. The giants are dragging down all things from heaven and from the unseen to earth, and they literally grasp in their hands rocks and oaks; of these they lay hold, the macrocosm 151

and obstinately maintain that only the things that can be touched or handled have being or essence, because they define being and body as one, and if any one else says something incorporeal is real, they are utterly contemptuous and will not listen to another word.206

On the other side, the gods are cautiously defending themselves from above, out of

an unseen world, mightily contending that true essence consists of certain intelligible and incorporeal Forms. The bodies of the materialists, which by them are maintained to be the very truth, they break up into little bits by their arguments, and affirm them to be, not real Being, but generation and becoming.207

That is, materialists always mock the notion that there is anything of significance in the world that they can’t—metaphorically speaking—lay their hands on. Against them the idealists contend that the impermanent physical objects out of which the materialists build their reality cannot stand up against the timeless, immutable Ideas or Beings that govern the Platonic cosmos. The empirical universe of the materialists is built on a foundation of forms, ideas, and consciousness.

The World Soul

If the World Mind and the Ideas it contains are eternal—outside of time—organized in an immutable structure, a timeless connection of Idea to Idea, then there cannot be much
thinking
taking place, for thinking, as we ordinarily understand it, is a process taking place within time. Or to use the scientific analogy, the World Mind is like a static system of equations. Although these equations, like Newton’s laws of motion, may describe how objects move, the equations themselves are not changing at all. How does a static description of motion get translated into actual motion? Furthermore, how can a single law of motion govern many moving objects?

We can listen in, as Hypatia continues her explanation. “Our world is manifestly not a world of static, eternal Ideas. It is in flux and ever changing, but in an orderly way; it is a living organism, growing, developing, and evolving. What connects the timeless Being of the Cosmic Mind to the flux of Becoming we see around us in the Cosmic Body?”

She pauses and scans her audience. “It is the Cosmic Soul. For just as any living thing has a soul, which is the principal of orderly motion that governs its body in accord with its proper Form, so the Cosmos in its entirely has a Soul that includes the souls of everything inside it. The timeless form Horse is an abstraction, an Idea, but each living horse has a soul, which is an orderly and organized system of processes that govern, in 152 the macrocosm

accord with the timeless Form of its species, the matter and energy that constitute the individual horse’s body. Thus the Cosmic Soul connects the unity of the ideal Horse to the plurality of individual horses.”

“But wait,” you might object, “modern biology has shown that biological species, such as the horse, are not timeless ideal forms; they are populations of interbreeding individuals, which evolve slowly through time.” That is correct. Nevertheless, it makes scientific sense to talk about horse physiology, horse anatomy, horse diet, horse behavior, the horse genome, and so forth. That is, the horse species (say,
Equus ferus
, to be precise) is a well-defined, stable scientific concept and subject of scientific investigation. Certainly, species evolve, but biological evolution itself is a natural process, subject to mathematical laws, and thus a manifestation in time and space of an ideal form.

To return to the Cosmic Soul, consider a more contemporary example: you may have

a CD with the latest video game on it, but it is a coded, static description of the program, which includes descriptions of how the people, species of animals, and kinds of objects behave; this is analogous to the Cosmic Mind. You need a computer to read the disk, interpret the program code, and enact the static description into dynamic behavior in time, which is analogous to the Cosmic Soul. In particular, the executing computer creates in its memory instances of the people, animals, and other objects that behave in accord with the descriptions of their kinds. With the aid of the computer, the images of individual things appear on the screen and interact with you; you see them with your eyes, hear them with your ears, and interact with them using your hands and input devices.

Hypatia continues. “The Cosmic Soul is the enactment of the Ideas in time and

space. This enactment takes place on the stage of the Cosmic Body, that is, the plane of material reality. Thus, the Cosmic Soul creates Becoming from the Being of the Cosmic Mind. It is the plane between the planes of the Cosmic Mind and the Cosmic Body, a

mediator or middle principle joining the other two together. It therefore has intermediate properties, for while the Cosmic Mind is eternal (timeless) and unchanging, and everything in the Cosmic Body is mortal (of finite duration) and changing, the Cosmic Soul combines one characteristic of each, for it is eternal (that is, unending) but changing. Likewise, the Cosmic Soul mediates between the non-spatiality (or spacelessness) of the Ideas and spatiality (or existence in space) of physical things by multiplying each Form into a multitude of individual souls, which are instances of the Form gov-the macrocosm 153

erning physical processes in time and space. The Cosmic Soul joins the One and the

Many.”

Hypatia moves on to a deeper level of inquiry. “If we think carefully, we see that

each level of reality has three aspects, which we call Abiding, Proceeding, and Returning (turning backward). This is the
Triadic Principle
and many of the threes in Platonic philosophy are a consequence of it. (This might seem to be an inessential technical

detail, but I mention it for the sake of my more advanced students, for it helps us understand Platonic spiritual practices. Those who intend to navigate the nonmaterial

realms need to know their way around.) According to this principle, the Cosmic Mind

abides
in itself as an eternal system of Ideas. However, it also
proceeds
out from itself and, just as
we
utter
our
ideas, it creates a temporal expression of itself, thus generating the Cosmic Soul, which enacts the Ideas in time. However, the Cosmic Soul also
turns
back
, looking toward the Cosmic Mind, ‘contemplating’ the Ideas, which means that the Cosmic Soul acts in accord with these ideal forms. Thus the Cosmic Mind simultaneously abides in itself, while proceeding outward to produce the Cosmic Soul, which simultaneously turns back toward the Cosmic Mind.”

In more modern terms, the procession of the World Mind creates the possibility of change (the unprogrammed computer, as we might say), and the looking back of the World Soul to the Forms in the World Mind (the program) makes change orderly and law-like.

Nature, Wisdom, and Daimons

“The Triadic Principle applies at each level,” Hypatia continues, “and so the Cosmic Soul in its turn abides in itself, but also produces the material world, the Cosmic Body, which in its turn looks back toward the Cosmic Soul to get its guidance.

“According to Plotinus, the Cosmic Soul ‘orders, administers, and governs’ pro-

cesses in the material world.208 Since these processes are self-organizing, living, and evolving, the Cosmic Soul is the generative and vivifying principle of the universe. In particular, the Universal Soul is the origin of all orderly motion in the Universe, and hence of all life.

“Plotinus calls the Cosmic Soul ‘the final goddess’ because everything below her is

material reality, which she produces.209 She stands at the gateway between the realm of the gods (the Cosmic Mind or Empyrean) and our world. And she has a name, for

according to Plotinus, Nature (
Physis
in Greek,
Natura
in Latin) is the part of the Cosmic 154 the macrocosm

Soul that is nearest to material reality, lowest on the plane of the Cosmic Soul. But highest on this plane, that is, the highest part of the Cosmic Soul, in direct contact with the Cosmic Mind, is Wisdom (
Sophia
,
Sapientia
).210 Thus the goddess of Nature and the goddess of Wisdom stand as guardians at the extremities of the Cosmic Soul.

“The Cosmic Soul as a whole is a temporal unfolding of the Cosmic Mind, and thus

an image of it. Therefore Plato defined time as ‘the ensouled image of eternity’.211 Furthermore, each individual Idea or Being (which, you will recall, is a sort of life and mind) has images in the Cosmic Soul, which are individual souls.”

This remark will be easier to understand if you know that the word “soul” (
psyche
in Greek,
anima
in Latin) is used in ancient philosophy to refer to the animating force of anything that is self-moving. And so, in this sense, plants have souls.