Return to the One (20 page)

Descent Is Debasement

A
RETHA FRANKLIN
nicely summed up a basic human desire when she sang about wanting a little respect.

Yes, almost universally we feel that we deserve a little respect. And generally not just a little but a lot. One wants people to respect one’s ethnicity; maleness or femaleness; sexual orientation; religion; nationality; and role as parent, boss, breadwinner, coach, teacher, spouse, leader, or whatever. It doesn’t matter if we’re poor or rich, smart or dumb, tall or short, fat or thin, old or young, slacker or workaholic. Everyone wants to be respected for who they are.

Plotinus agrees that the pure soul deserves respect. But he unabashedly declares that we have willfully descended from the purity of the spiritual world, thereby debasing ourselves by embracing materiality.

So this has the effect of leveling out the earthly playing field where each of us is trying to stand at least equal to, if not a bit higher than, our fellow humans. No matter what our position is, we’re on the lowest level of the cosmos and don’t have much to be proud about. We’ve descended from the lofty spiritual heights and surrendered much of the power that comes from being a part of the whole rather than just a part.

And so this soul, which belongs to the whole intelligible universe and hides its part in the whole, leapt out, we might say, from the whole to a part, and actualizes itself as a part in it, as if a fire able to burn everything was compelled to burn some little thing although it had all its power.
[VI-4-16]

Each of us, in other words, is now almost totally concerned with the little bit of reality that immediately surrounds us and that we even consider to
be
us. One sign of how far we have fallen is that the slightest worldly affront or failure can have such a great effect on our self-respect. If we hadn’t lost touch with the wholeness of spirit, the solid ground of the true self, we wouldn’t have such a need to prop up our self-images with shaky substitutes.

If I believe that I’m a worthy person because I play golf well, then a string of double-bogeys is going to get me down in the dumps. If my main satisfaction in life comes from my job, then getting fired will be a nightmare. If there is nothing more important to me than my spouse, marital separation by divorce or death will throw me into a tailspin. The problem, says Plotinus, is that we’re no longer solidly centered in the immovable whole of creation, but have come to believe that we are parts who both support, and are supported by, other parts.

But they
[souls]
change from the whole to being a part and belonging to themselves, and, as if they were tired of being together, they each go to their own…. And in its separation from the whole it
[a soul]
embarks on one single thing and flies from everything else.
[IV-8-4]

We once stood on the border between the spiritual and physical worlds. One way, toward spirit, led to light, truth, love, life, and union. The other way, toward matter, led to darkness, illusion, discord, death, and separation. Each of us knows which path we chose: if we are consciously aware only of earthly existence, and all that comes with it, then we embarked on the downward course. Now we’re solidly established in the shadows of reality, and must seek the forsaken spiritual light.

The partial soul, then, is illuminated when it goes towards that which is before it
[spirit and the One]
—for then it meets reality—but when it goes towards what comes after it, it goes towards non-existence.
[III-9-3]

So we come to what Pierre Hadot says is the great Plotinian question:

Why, then, do we not remain up there?
[VI-9-10]
¹

Why would we choose ignorance over wisdom, earth over heaven, shadows over substance, many over the One? If we knew the answer we’d have a clue as to what it takes to move in the opposite direction. It’s much as if we found ourselves standing in the middle of a large supermarket but couldn’t remember why we entered the store. We can’t get rid of a nagging feeling that we came in for something important, so wander the aisles hoping that when we see it we’ll know that
this
is what we were looking for. If we could find it, we’d be able to leave the store and head for home.

However, for most of us there is no end to our shopping. Nothing fully satisfies. Every experience, whether pleasurable or unpleasurable, leads to another need, another want, another craving, another walk down another aisle of this earthly bazaar that promises so much more happiness and well-being than it delivers.

Plotinus asks us to look at our situation from a fresh perspective. Maybe, he suggests, we already have what we came for: ourselves.

What is it, then, which has made the souls forget their father, God, and be ignorant of themselves and him, even though they are parts which come from his higher world and altogether belong to it? The beginning of evil for them was audacity and coming to birth and the first otherness and the wishing to belong to themselves.
[V-l-1]

So that feeling of “I need something more” doesn’t arise because of an unfulfilled desire for something the world has to offer. Rather, our original audacious wish to be a part rather than the whole, to belong to ourselves rather than to spirit and the One, has been granted. Our independence just hasn’t turned out to be as satisfying as we expected. We wanted to live apart from our spiritual parents and now we have. The problem is that our separation has made us heartbroken but we can’t recall what has made us so sad. All we know is our sorrow, not its cause: homesickness.

We’re orphans. We’ve lost our father, the One, and our mother, spirit. We thought it would be lots of fun to descend from the close-knit familial unity of the spiritual world and live on our own. Well, things haven’t worked out so rosily and now we’re in a good news/bad news situation.

The good news is that nothing prevents us from returning to our spiritual home. The bad news is that we’re no longer just “us,” but our true selves and something more. What has been added on to each of us is an ego that is unwilling to give up its separate existence, and considers unconscious material things to be more interesting and important than the conscious soul that is doing the considering.

This is a bizarre state of affairs made all the more bizarre by how natural it seems to most of us. It’s merely unfortunate to be abjectly poor, but it’s crazy if someone chooses to forget about his vast wealth and live as a pauper all the while wanting to be rich. It would be insane to revere others who are well-off and despise one’s own poverty while a forgotten treasure gathers dust in the attic. Yet this is what we are doing.

There is nothing more precious than the pure soul and this is what each of us truly is. Sadly, our inner spiritual wealth remains unnoticed while we chase after worthless material baubles. Every longing for something outside of ourselves is a reflection of how far we have fallen. “That is more worthy than me” is the unspoken declaration that accompanies every worldly desire.

Since they
[the souls]
do not any more see their father or themselves
[as pure soul]
, they despise themselves through ignorance of their birth and honor other things, admiring everything rather than themselves.
[V-l-1]

Here’s an important point: Plotinus makes it clear that earthly things don’t debase the soul. The cause of our debasement is giving material things greater honor than they deserve and forgetting our true nature. It isn’t the world that draws us away from spirituality but rather our inability to control what is meant to be under our command. Rather than mastering materiality we have become mastered by it.

If it
[soul]
escapes quickly it takes no harm by acquiring a knowledge of evil and coming to know the nature of wickedness, and manifesting its powers…. But when it wants to direct a part
[of the universe]
it is isolated and comes to be in that part in which it is.
[IV-8-5, IV-7-13]

What should have been a brief visit to this physical plane has turned into a lengthy sojourn. Plotinus says that souls come here to show off, so to speak, what they can do. The Soul of the All provides us with a playground, the universe, and the individual souls are free to romp around within it. A city is built here, a farm springs up there; a painting is created by this soul, a song by that one.

We don’t lose anything by simply coming into physical existence, for the soul is eternal and unchangeable. The danger is that something will be added onto us, an inordinate concern for matter rather than spirit. A child happily plays with a doll, but when her mother asks her to put it away a furious tantrum erupts. Pleasure turns into pain. Attachment to a physical object creates emotional distress. Mind is controlled by matter, a reversal of the natural order of the cosmos.

The mystic philosopher, then, treads lightly through the world. He or she is happy to explore this furthest emanation of the One, if only to realize that here is not the best place to be. Light is made manifest by darkness as is truth by falsehood. If we had never experienced what it is to be a part there would not be such a longing to return to the whole. We were free to come and now we are free to go if we so desire.

But if the souls came willingly, why do you blame the universe into which you came of your own free will, when it gives you leave, too, to get out of it, if any of you dislike it?
[II-9-8]

Coming into a physical body doesn’t necessarily degrade us because it is possible, though rather rare, to live in accord with spirit even while sojourning in matter. Those who are able to do this may be called saints, prophets, or sages. Universally they tell us that, when rightly viewed, earthly existence is the best possible material reflection of spiritual reality and so should be revered.

However, spiritual blindness afflicts us when we lose perspective and worship what has been created rather than the creator. Even worse, says Plotinus, our idolatry becomes focused on just a small slice of creation, the relatively few people, places, and things with which we are immediately concerned. How can we even dream of returning to the One when we are so immersed in caring for bits and pieces of the many?

Evil Is Emptiness

A U
NITED
S
TATES
Supreme Court justice famously said about pornography, “I know it when I see it.” Most of us can say the same about evil or at least what we consider to be evil. For evil, like pornography, is much easier to recognize than to define. That pain, suffering, harm, and hate exist is undeniable. Every person has experienced the undesirable side of life, which is a useful (if general) definition of evil.

But what produces evil? Is it a creation of the mind of man, a purely personal concept that reflects only subjective likes and dislikes? Or is it an objective reality, like gravity or electromagnetism, part and parcel of nature’s universal order?

There is no end of answers that have been proposed to such questions. Debates about moral relativism and moral absolutism have raged for millennia, and show no sign of abating.

Unfortunately, in modern times these arguments usually bring out far more rancor, judgment, stridency, rigidity, and holier-than-thou sanctimoniousness than cool reason and calm discourse. So it is refreshing to ponder Plotinus’s teachings about evil, for he is much less concerned with laying out a code of conduct than with understanding what such a code should be based on.

As an aid to understanding Plotinus’s perspective, consider the difference between saying “It’s hot” or “It’s cold” and knowing that temperature is a measure of molecules in motion. The temperature of something is objective. It can range from absolute zero to near-infinity, as in the earliest moments of the big bang. However, the interpretation we give to that temperature, hot, warm, cool, cold, is subjective. What a polar bear feels in icy water must be quite different from what a human feels.

Similarly, Plotinus teaches that evil is a name given to the lower range of what might be termed the good scale. This varies from in-finity with the One, to essentially zero with undefined matter. Thus Plotinus comes down squarely on the objectivist side of the ethics debate, for he says that ethics is inseparable from reality.

The greatest good is the One, for this is ultimate truth, unchanging and eternal. Whatever is not the One is less than Good. Thus as emanation proceeds—spirit from the One, soul from spirit, materiality from soul—goodness steadily diminishes along with reality (or being), just as the sun’s heat is lower in the distant reaches of the solar system.

In general, we must define evil as a falling short of good; and there must be a falling short of good here below, because the good is in something else.
[III-2-5]

How simple. Evil is a falling short of good, just as darkness is a falling short of light and cold is a falling short of warmth.

Let’s consider how this understanding can liberate us from some unproductive misconceptions. First, we mustn’t think that evil stands alone as a substantial reality in its own right, that there is a Devil or force of darkness engaged in some sort of cosmic battle with God or the forces of light. Plotinus teaches that immaterial forms are the foundation of everything that manifests within physical or spiritual creation. And evil isn’t one of those forms.

For there is no Form of Evil…. But the nature which is opposed to all form is privation…. So if there is evil in the soul, it will be the privation in it which will be evil and vice, and nothing outside.
[V-9-10, I-8-11]

Everything is good in itself; nothing is evil in itself. If I’m bad it isn’t because the Devil made me do it. I’m just insufficiently filled with the Good. Wrongdoing is produced by an internal absence, not an external presence. Nothing is more of a nothing than evil. Absolute zero isn’t the presence of something called cold; it is the complete absence of the energy of molecular motion, or heat.

So this brings us to another common misconception: that evil is unnatural and that it is both possible and desirable to eradicate it. If we can pull up weeds from our gardens it might seem that we should be able to rid the earth of evils, especially since Plotinus says that evil is nothing, a privation. How difficult could it be to do away with nothing?

Well, it is so difficult as to be impossible. Evils never can be done away with because anything other than the One will not be the absolute Good. So if there is to be a creation there must be evil, for evil is absence of good. Or, if we wish to speak positively (though less accurately), the presence of less-than-good.

Then are the evils in the All necessary, because they follow on the prior realities? Rather because if they did not exist the All would be imperfect.
[II-3-18]

Still, it is difficult to understand why some things exist. I often think after being served some food containing disgusting crimson chunks of gustatory evil, “Wouldn’t the world be a nicer place without red peppers?” Of course, I’m not a great lover of spicy food, so I’m biased. Which is precisely Plotinus’s point. He reminds us that everything in creation is a useful part of the whole, even what we call evils. If we possessed a broader vision we would see this clearly.

As Pierre Hadot says, “Evil is not extraneous to the order of the universe; rather, it is the result of this order…. To accept the universal order is to accept the existence of degrees of goodness, and, thus, indirectly, to accept evil. We must not criticize the order of the world just because there are consequences in it which seem bad to us.”
¹

We are like people who know nothing about painting and yet reproach the artist because he did not put pretty colors everywhere, whereas the artist distributed the appropriate color to each and every spot. Cities, too—even those which have a good constitution—are not made up of equal citizens.

It is as if one were to criticize a drama because all the characters in it were not heroes, but it also contained a slave and a foulmouthed hayseed. And yet they make the play complete, and it wouldn’t have been any good if you took them away.
[III-2-11]
²

If there is to be a beginning, there has to be an end. A start does not exist without a finish. We can rail all we want about the suffering, depravities, ignorance, ugliness, and evils in this world, yet Plotinus’s simple logic speaks softly and clearly: after the First must come a last.

Since not only the Good exists, there must be the last end to the process of going out past it, or if one prefers to put it like this, going down or going away: and this last, after which nothing else can come into being, is evil.
[I-8-7]

The furthest emanation of the One is matter. So primordial matter is evil in the sense that it is deprived. It is as empty of spiritual form as anything can be. Hence, if we live in the material world we live in a world of evil. Marsilio Ficino says, “Since souls are divine, why do they live such unholy lives? Because they inhabit an unholy house in an unholy land.”
³

But whenever reading the
Enneads
gets us depressed about our miserable, lowly condition, Plotinus kindly offers us a hand up. He is an incurable optimist. Just as every shadow heralds the presence of light, so does the emptiness of evil pronounce the fullness of the One, or God.

Moreover, it
[evil]
provides, in and of itself, many useful side effects: it wakes us up, and awakens the spirit and intelligence, as we are forced to stand against the inroads of wrongdoing; and it makes us learn how great a good is virtue, by comparison with the evils which are the lot of wrongdoers.

Now, it was not for this purpose that evils came about, but since they have come about, the world makes use of them as appropriate…. This is a sign of the greatest power: to be able to make good use even of evils.
[III-2-5]
⁴

If we were content with our lives here on earth we wouldn’t have much desire to seek a greater good. “Absence,” it is said, “makes the heart grow fonder.” Sometimes closeness breeds a certain contempt, or at least a blasé taken-for-grantedness. Just as a person often enjoys the company of his or her spouse more after being apart for a while so is it possible for the soul to more passionately embrace the better after experiencing the worse.

In those whose faculties are too weak for them to be able to know evil by the mere faculty of knowledge, prior to any experience, the experience of evil makes the knowledge of the Good more clear.
[IV-8-7]
⁵

We don’t fully appreciate good health until we get sick. Something negative, an absence, can more clearly define its opposite, a presence. Air is never so precious to a man as when he is hit in the stomach and loses his breath for a few seconds. In like fashion, our longing for the One intensifies when the presence of that Good is feebly felt but deeply desired.

The soul remembers, albeit unconsciously, what it was like to be fully immersed in God. Now, like fish out of water, we lie gasping for goodness on the arid shore of physical existence. This is why matter is absolute evil, for it is absolutely deprived of the Good.

The soul doesn’t become evil by simply descending into the physical universe. At that point the soul is merely deficient in spirit, having departed from the incomparable abundance of the world of forms. It is still good, just not as good here as it was there. Materiality, however, provides the opportunity (not the necessity) for the soul to fall into desperate straits, and most of us have done just that.

Evil, being emptiness, is akin to a pit that is ready to receive the unwary. If the soul treads carefully in the world there is no problem. But even a single misstep toward matter and farther away from spirit can have dire consequences. If we’re walking along the edge of a deep abyss, losing our balance on a few loose pebbles can take us all the way to the bottom.

But living beings which have of themselves a movement under their own control might incline sometimes to what is better, sometimes to what is worse. It is probably not worth enquiring into the reason for this self caused turning towards the worse; for a deviation which is slight to begin with, as it goes on in this way continually makes the fault wider and graver.
[III-2-4]

So Plotinus’s oft-repeated advice is for the soul to remain firmly rooted in higher realms of consciousness. Then there is no danger of falling into evil. We can do this on Earth right now, right here, even though materiality is nothing other than the ultimate emptying of goodness. With the aid of philosophy, the pursuit of wisdom, it is possible to pass through the world like a teetotaler enjoying a stroll in a beer garden. All one needs to do is say, “No thank you,” to what is being proffered.

We must consider, too, what Plato means when he says “Evils can never be done away with,” but exist “of necessity.” … But when he says “we must take flight from thence” he is no longer referring to life on earth. For “flight,” he says, is not going away from earth but being on earth “just and holy with the help of wisdom.”
[I-8-6]