Return to the One (38 page)

The Legacy of Plotinus and Plato

I
NDEED
, even the church fathers recognized that the Bible needed to be fleshed out, since its philosophical framework is bare bones. For example, answers to questions concerning the nature of God, spirit, and soul, as well as the relationship between these entities, are difficult (if not impossible) to discern by merely reading scripture.

So St. Augustine and other Christian theologians turned to Greek philosophy. Here, notwithstanding the tensions between Platonic and Christian teachings, they found a ready-made conceptual framework that, with a little manipulation, could be wonderfully supportive of the Gospel. Richard Tarnas says:

The Christian world view was fundamentally informed by its classical predecessors…. So enthusiastic was the Christian integration of the Greek spirit that Socrates and Plato were frequently regarded as divinely inspired pre-Christian saints, early communicators of the divine Logos already present in pagan times—“Christians before Christ,” as Justin Martyr claimed.
¹

Augustine, who wrote early in the fifth century, is largely responsible for the form that Christianity took through medieval times. Having been converted after a dual education in the Greek and Roman classics, and the ways of the world, he was well-suited to address both philosophical and moral problems from the new Christian perspective.

In his great work, the
City of God,
Augustine lavishes considerable praise on Plotinus and Plato:

For we made selection of the Platonists, justly esteemed the noblest of the philosophers, because they had the wit to perceive that the human soul, immortal and rational, or intellectual, as it is, cannot be happy except by partaking of the light of that God by Whom both itself and the world were made; and also that the happy life which all men desire cannot be reached by any who does not cleave with a pure and holy love to that one supreme good, the unchangeable God.

… These philosophers, then, whom we see not undeservedly exalted above the rest in fame and glory, have seen that no material body is God, and therefore they have transcended all bodies in seeking for God. They have seen that whatever is changeable is not the most high God, and therefore they have transcended every soul and all changeable spirits in seeking the supreme.

… Plotinus, whose memory is quite recent, enjoys the reputation of having understood Plato better than any other of his disciples…. Plotinus, commenting on Plato, repeatedly and strongly asserts that not even the soul which they believe to be the soul of the world derives its blessedness from any other source than we do, viz., from that Light which is distinct from it and created it.
²

Augustine observes that some of his fellow Christians are amazed when they learn how closely Platonism corresponds to their own faith:

“Certain partakers of us in the grace of Christ wonder when they hear and read that Plato had conceptions concerning God, in which they recognize considerable agreement with the truth of our religion.”
³

He considers possible reasons for this, and then concludes that the most likely explanation can be found in Romans 1:20, where Paul says: “Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.” In other words, even non-Christians such as Plato and Plotinus are able to comprehend much about the creator through a careful study of the creation.

But Augustine still expresses a disturbing possessiveness toward spiritual truth, which helps to explain how he could be both so fond and so mistrustful of Platonic teachings. In a chapter called “Whatever has been rightly said by the heathen, we must appropriate to our uses,” Augustine says that Christians must claim the truths that the Platonists have come to unlawfully possess, and “are perversely and unlawfully prostituting to the worship of devils.”
⁴

Augustine struggles to try to reconcile how Plato and Plotinus’s metaphysics could so closely agree with Christian theology, even though neither Greek philosopher accepted Jesus as savior (Plato died over three hundred years before the birth of Christ, and Plotinus makes no mention of Jesus). This indeed is a significant problem for the Christian faithful. If God became man in the person of Jesus to reveal his hitherto hidden Word, then how is it that these pagan Greeks were able to realize so much of that truth?

This brings us back to a central dispute between Christianity and Platonism: the need for a mediator between God and man. For even though the teachings of these two great spiritual systems differ in other respects (such as reincarnation), they diverge most strongly when it comes

In this regard Plotinus was at odds not only with Christianity but with other contemporaneous philosophies and religions. Émile Bréhier notes that Plotinus’s teachings are unique in the almost complete absence of a savior who mediates between man and God: “The very idea of salvation, which implies a mediator sent by God to man, is foreign to him.”
⁵

Notwithstanding this fact, in one passage Augustine approvingly quotes Plotinus: “We must fly to our beloved fatherland. There is the Father, there our all. What fleet or flight shall convey us thither? Our way is, to become like God.”
⁶

Thus Augustine wholeheartedly shares Plotinus’s goal: to return to the One. And he agrees that the nature of the soul is utterly unlike the “temporal and mutable” things of this world. But whereas Plotinus urges the spiritual seeker to find God by purifying his or her own consciousness of material and sensual preoccupations, Augustine considers that salvation is possible only with Jesus’s intercession.

We need a Mediator Who, being united to us here below by the mortality of His body, should at the same time be able to afford us truly divine help in cleansing and liberating us by means of the immortal righteousness of His spirit, whereby he remained heavenly even while here upon earth…. From this hell upon earth there is no escape, save through the grace of the Savior Christ, our God and Lord.
⁷

To Plotinus, a spiritual guide (such as his own teacher Ammonius) points toward the truth.

To Augustine, there is only one spiritual guide, Jesus, and he is the truth.

For Plotinus, the fundamental essence of the cosmos is unity, so the soul of the mystic philosopher is fully capable of making the journey from manyness back to oneness: the ocean of God is of a piece and can be traversed by anyone able to cast aside the anchor of matter and catch hold of the omnipresent current of spirit.

For Augustine, creation is marked by a battle between the dualities of good and evil, or God and Satan, and humankind has aligned itself so strongly with the wrong camp that God had to send his own son to set things right: left to our own devices, we can never separate ourselves from the forces of darkness and embrace the light.

In Plotinus’s spirituality, each individual must experience the wisdom and love that is God for him- or herself. The path that returns to the One is traveled by each soul independently; hence, great effort is needed to purify each of our consciousnesses of all that is physical or personal so that we may attune ourselves to the immaterial universality of spirit and the One.

In Augustine’s spirituality, Jesus incarnated in the world to redeem all sinners. The way to God is through the church and the embrace of a collective Christian identity; thus, great faith in Jesus is all that is required to enjoy, for eternity, God’s company after death.

Both Plotinus and Augustine were firmly committed to discovering the ultimate truth that would lay bare the mysteries both within and without every human soul. There was, however, a stark difference in how Platonism and Christianity viewed this divine research.

Plotinus believed that all of the means necessary to discern divine realities already are present in a spiritual seeker’s consciousness. If the
psyche
or soul could be restored to its original likeness to spirit and the One, the seeker would intuitively realize the highest truth in a wonderfully simple and direct fashion: by becoming it.

Augustine believed the only truths that really mattered had already been revealed through the loving sacrifice of Christ, who, by his crucifixion, corrected all the errors of humanity and revealed the wisdom of his Father.

Richard Tarnas says, “In contrast to the previous centuries of metaphysical perplexity, Christianity offered a fully worked out solution to the human dilemma. The potentially distressing ambiguities and confusions of a private philosophical search without religious guideposts were now replaced by an absolutely certain cosmology and an institutionally ritualized system of salvation accessible to all.”
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On the face of it, this sounds great, for who wouldn’t be happy to trade confusions for certainties? Picking up an already revealed truth certainly is preferable to having to go through the trouble of discovering it on one’s own. Why bother to cook a meal when dinner is waiting on the table?

But the question seems to come down to whether a promise of spiritual sustenance is sufficient to satisfy a hunger for God. For mainstream Christianity, in common with all traditional religions, asks the faithful to wait until after death to enjoy the main course: salvation. Those who are starving for an unequivocal, direct experience of spirit and God are expected to have faith that all will be revealed after the believer’s last breath.

Basically, Christians are asked to trust that the desired results of their God-experiment will be produced when soul separates from body. This is a science of sorts, but a science in which promised spiritual effects are separated by the gulf of death from their purported causes—grace, faith, good works, prayer, and so on. When it isn’t possible to connect a cause and an effect within the span of a single lifetime, faith becomes all-important. But faith is a promissory note for truth, and there are those who yearn to have God’s treasure in hand,
now.

Plotinus was one such person, as are all true mystics. Through contemplation, they desire to die to this world before their physical death in order to know as soon as possible the truth of what lies beyond life. Lovers are impatient to be united with their love. The mystic philosopher, lover of the wisdom that is God, embraces a death to all that is bodily or physical so that his or her soul may unite fully with the spiritual. Porphyry says:

Nature releases what nature has bound. The soul releases what the soul has bound. Nature binds the body to the soul, but it is the soul herself that has bound herself to the body. It, therefore, belongs to nature to detach the body from the soul, while it is the soul herself that detaches herself from the body.

There is a double death. One, known by all men, consists in the separation of the body with the soul. The other, characteristic of philosophers, results in the separation of the soul from the body
⁹

Plotinus sought God within himself. So did Augustine, but this search took place in the company of the Gospel of Jesus and the Holy Church, for Augustine believed that the gap between him and the divine could be bridged only by an intercessor who incarnates at the behest of the Lord to redeem souls by faith and grace alone. Richard Tarnas summarizes these different perspectives on spirituality:

Augustine differed from Plotinus in positing an increased distinction between Creator and creation as well as a more personal relation between God and the individual soul; in stressing God’s freedom and purposefulness in the creation; in upholding the human need for grace and revelation; and above all in embracing the doctrine of the Incarnation.
¹⁰

Augustine’s personal relationship with God, mediated by Jesus, was founded on a felt distance between humans and the divine that was utterly foreign to Plotinus’s experience. Thus it is rather strange that Augustine could feel closer to God by embracing a religion that posited a gulf between him and God, and rejecting a philosophy that placed the One at the very center of his own self

It seems that by making God into a person, Jesus, Christianity offered Augustine a personal relationship with a separate being. By contrast, Neoplatonism taught that there is, in essence, no difference between the soul and the One, other than the fact that a drop is distinct from the ocean. So it isn’t possible to have a relationship with God when, in truth, the soul is God.

As Émile Bréhier says, “Piety, in the usual sense of the word, is almost absent in him [Plotinus]…. Prayer never has a personal note. It never expresses an intimate relation of the soul with a higher person…. Now the One of Plotinus is neither a thing nor an object. It is the pure, absolute, single subject, without any relation to external objects.”
¹¹

Thus a study of the
Enneads
can lead to a conclusion quite different from what Augustine came to: that there is nothing more personal than realizing God as the essence of our personhood, nor anything more intimate than uniting with spirit and the One. As for the
Logos
(or spirit) becoming flesh, Plotinus teaches that there is a sense in which this happens with every birth. Meister Eckhart echoes this conception in his mystical Christian theology: