Return to the One (6 page)

But should we grasp the one of authentic beings, their principle, wellspring, and ‘dynamis’—will we then lose faith and consider it nothing? It is certainly nothing of the things of which it is the origin, being such, as it were, that nothing can be attributed to it, neither being, nor beings, nor life. It is beyond those. If then by withdrawing being you should grasp it, you will be brought into wonder [‘thauma’].
[III-8-10]
³

Sells comments on this passage: “After contemplating the world view of his tradition, the mystic then withdraws being from the source. At this moment the soul ‘fears that there be nothing’ (VI-9-3)…. At this point Plotinus writes of not losing faith. This faith is not a faith in anything but a willingness to let go of being. Such a letting go results in wonderment
(thauma).
”
⁴

I’m struck by how Plotinus and St. John of the Cross, a sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite, have almost exactly the same attitude toward faith. Many people would be surprised that a “pagan” Greek philosopher and a Catholic friar agree on anything, much less the nature of faith, but they do. Since they are mystics, the strongest bond between Plotinus and St. John of the Cross is not their theological or metaphysical beliefs but their conviction that God, the One, transcends any and all beliefs, including their own.

In
The Ascent of Mount Carmel,
a writing about the soul’s ascent to union with God, St. John of the Cross speaks of the secret ladder by which the soul climbs higher:

The secret ladder represents faith, because all the rungs or articles of faith are secret to and hidden from both the senses and the intellect. Accordingly the soul lived in darkness, without the light of the senses and intellect, and went out beyond every natural and rational boundary to climb the divine ladder of faith that leads up to and penetrates the deep things of God.

… Consequently, a person who wants to arrive at union with the Supreme Repose and Good in this life must climb all the steps, which are considerations, forms, and concepts, and leave them behind, since they are dissimilar and unproportioned to the goal toward which they lead. And this goal is God.
⁵

Just as Plotinus’s faith is not a faith in anything particular that can be encompassed by the limited grasp of the senses and reason (but rather in the existence of the ineffable, unlimited, and incomprehensible One), so is the faith of St. John of the Cross. Both mystics urge us to return to God along the path of the
via negativa,
the negative way. Since this material world is at the opposite pole of the cosmos from the spiritual world, a negation of materiality leads to the most positive spirituality.

St. John of the Cross says, “All the world’s wisdom and human ability compared to the infinite wisdom of God is pure and utter ignorance…. Accordingly, to reach union with the wisdom of God, a person must advance by unknowing rather than by knowing.”
⁶
And Plotinus advises, “One must not make it [the One] two even for the sake of forming an idea of it.” [VI-8-13]

Confusion—no cause for concern

N
OW
, when a mystic expresses the idea that it is wrong to express ideas about God, we have a contradiction, at least from the point of view of a logician. “Plotinus just demolished his own argument!” such a person would cry. “Yes, that’s his intention,” another person more attuned to the subtleties of Plotinus’s teachings would respond. Reading the
Enneads,
we find Plotinus, like St. John of the Cross, continually blowing up the conceptual structures he has just constructed with such care.

So don’t be concerned if you get confused in the course of trying to understand Plotinus’s teachings. This is to be expected and, indeed, is to be welcomed.

For at the crossroads of belief and the negation of belief, of sensation and the negation of sensation, of thinking and the negation of thinking, we stand at the juncture of the Known and Mystery. Continue straight on your course down the path of knowledge that got you to the crossroads and you experience more of the same conceptual and sensible scenery. Make an abrupt shift in direction, a genuine leap of faith, and you end up somewhere completely different.

Crossroads are confusing when we aren’t sure in which direction our destination lies. There are no clearly marked signs showing the way to the One. In fact, it seems that if you see anything familiar along the path, including a signpost akin to those you’ve encountered before, you haven’t yet taken the fork that leads most directly to the spiritual summit.

Plotinus continually emphasizes that there is a stark distinction between the everyday reality where almost all of us live now and the spiritual reality of higher domains of consciousness. To be genuinely converted, in his view, is to convert our attention from awareness of material thoughts and things to an inward, intuitive perception of spirit. Even the lowest reaches of the spiritual realm bear little resemblance to the physical universe, and when the soul attains to heaven, less will be familiar.

There are few things here that are also there
[in the higher world]
; and when it is in heaven it will abandon still more.
[IV-3-32]

If little or nothing here will accompany us on our return to the One, what purpose is there in filling our heads with all the concepts contained in the
Enneads
and reiterated in this book you are reading now? Good question. As someone who enjoys playing with ideas, I have to admit, reluctantly, that an entirely defensible answer is: no purpose at all. This presumes, however, that a spiritual seeker’s consciousness is standing directly in front of the passageway that leads to the One, ready and eager to dive in and start the journey. Since usually this isn’t the case, the rational side of Plotinus’s philosophy is intended to prepare us for true mystical experience.

Reaching the end of the line

S
TEP BY STEP
, reason leads us to the point at which rationality ends. When the spiritual seeker is convinced he truly has reached the end of the line down which the train of thought travels, there is nothing to do but get on board some other means of transport. In a Zen context, Hubert Benoit aptly speaks of the need of the Western mind to be led by reason to the edge of the void dividing expressible and inexpressible truth.

It seems that, in order to enlighten an Occidental, dissertations are, within a certain measure that is strictly limited, necessary. Doubtless the ultimate, the real point of view, cannot be expressed in words, and the master would injure the pupil if he allowed him to forget that the whole problem lies precisely in jumping the ditch which separates truth which can be expressed from real knowledge. But the Occidental needs a discursive explanation to lead him by the hand to the edge of the ditch.
⁷

Plotinus, like every great mystic, uses words to urge us to experience what is beyond words. The
Enneads
reflect his great love for the One and his struggle to convey what is ineffable. Pierre Hadot writes: “Plotinus has only one thing to say, and in order to say it, he has recourse to all the possibilities of the language of his time. And yet, he never will say it.”
⁸

He does not because he cannot. What Plotinus points us toward is right before our eyes, so close we are unable to see it. How immensely difficult it must have been for one with a vision of divine reality to try to describe it to the spiritually blind. And how grateful we should be that Plotinus made such a great effort.

Have we said enough now, and can we be released? But the soul is still in the pangs of labor, even more now than before…. For though the soul goes over all truths, even those in which we participate, yet she still evades us if someone wishes her to speak and think discursively.

In order for discursive thought to say something, it must consider its objects successively, for such is the unfolding of thought. Yet what kind of unfolding can there be, in the case of something which is absolutely simple?
[V-3-17]
⁹

The One is simple because it is one. Nothing is simpler than the One, for there is nothing other than the One. So nothing marks the path by which the soul returns to the One. When everything other than the One is discarded, what is left is the irreducible foundation of existence: God.

This is why Plotinus teaches that emptiness is the key to spiritual attainment, just as St. John of the Cross, echoing Luke 18:19, says that “Nothing is good save God only.”
¹⁰
What could be simpler than emptiness? Just as we move from one room to another through an open doorway, the soul passes from one realm of consciousness to another through an ineffable connection.

With the best nature, then, which needs no assistance, we must leave aside everything; for whatever you add, you have lessened by the addition the nature which needs nothing.
[VI-7-41]

Those who desire to escape from Plato’s cave of illusion can feel their way along the reassuringly solid wall of materiality up to the very edge of the cavern opening. Not yet able to perceive the light of reality, groping sightlessly for truth in what a medieval mystic called the “cloud of unknowing,” the spiritual seeker reaches out and touches …
nothing—
i.e., no thing. That nothing is the way to freedom, the opening that connects what is within and without the cave. But to those who have spent their whole lives trusting in shadows on a rock wall, existing without that support is inconceivable and terrifying.

So they grope their way back into the depths of the cave, muttering

“What a waste to come all this way and find nothing at all!” If only they had realized that they were only a few steps away from their goal, needing only to boldly embrace the cave opening’s nothingness in a genuine leap of faith rather than shrink away from it. For there is a gulf between the One and Many that cannot be bridged by anything familiar to everyday experience; everything that is known now is a characteristic of our starting place, not our destination.

In spirituality a leap of faith is needed but it is a leap based on true unknowing, not on false knowing. It is a leap to the mystery beyond, not a shuffle-step to the more-of-the-same close at hand. Plotinus urges us to learn how to embrace mystery rather than push it away by premature explanation. This happens when beliefs or concepts about the true nature of life’s mysteries are too quickly accepted as facts rather than as hypotheses to be confirmed or denied by direct experience.

In Plato’s “Apology,” Socrates is reported to have found, after talking with a man who was thought by many to be wise, that actually the man wasn’t what he seemed to be. “Well,” says Socrates, “although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is,—for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him.”
¹¹

Ignorance, if not bliss, at least borders on knowledge. Take one truthful step and the border is crossed. However, when we are ignorant of our ignorance we stand considerably farther away from the border zone since a wall of illusory understanding must be broken down before truth can be approached. So mysteries should remain mysterious until they are cleared up.

Reading the Writings of Plotinus

B
EFORE WE MOVE
into the body of this book and start studying the details of Plotinus’s philosophy, I want to explain how I went about researching, organizing, and writing
Return to the One
and also present for consideration the spirit in which I believe Plotinus’s teachings should be read.

First, I’ve already stressed that
Return to the One
is not intended to be a scholarly examination of Plotinus’s teachings. I am not qualified to write such a book, and even if I was, there were would be little point in duplicating the work of the distinguished Plotinian scholars who are cited throughout these pages. Rather, my purpose is to expose the general reader to the writings of a marvelous mystic philosopher whose teachings have greatly influenced Western thought and spirituality but, unfortunately, are little known by the world at large.

Selling Plotinus

M
ICHAEL CHASE
, a classics scholar and translator of Plotinus, shared with me the “selling points” he would use to try to convince the general public to examine Plotinus’s philosophy. To my mind, Chase makes a persuasive argument in favor of reading the writings of Plotinus.

Since the dawn of time, mankind has sought answers to a certain limited number of questions: Who are we? Why are we here? Why is there something rather than nothing? What happens after we die? Lots of people toss off trashy books in an afternoon that purport to answer these questions, which gnaw at the consciousness of human beings every bit as much today as they did two thousand years ago. It is arguable that ancient Greek philosophy developed as a response to these needs, and Plotinus represents the culmination of hundreds of years of Greek philosophy.

If you, the reader, are looking for answers to life’s questions, then why not try the solutions proposed by Plotinus? His answers to these very same questions have been taken seriously for seventeen hundred years by people in the Islamic East, the Medieval Latin West, and in Byzantine Greek Orthodoxy. Why not try to find out what so many people, from so many different times and cultures, found so deeply satisfying about the teachings of Plotinus?

Choosing translations

Y
ES
, why not try? This is what I asked myself when I made my own decision to learn more about Plotinus, having been intrigued by brief mentions of his philosophy that I had come across in several books. I then had to decide which of the available translations of the
Enneads
to study. In 1930 Stephen MacKenna completed the first English translation. It is still in print, and is admirably literary. But scholars acknowledge that MacKenna’s work has been superseded by A.H. Armstrong’s more definitive translation completed in 1988.

Hence most of the Plotinus quotations in this book have been drawn from Armstrong’s translation of the six
Enneads,
or treatises, published in seven volumes by the Loeb Classical Library. These quotations are indicated by a bracketed notation such as [IV-3-12], where the Roman numeral denotes the treatise, the middle number the section in the treatise, and the last number the chapter in the section.

Notwithstanding the strength of Armstrong’s translation, this book also includes many quotations from the
Enneads
translated by another well-respected scholar, the aforementioned Michael Chase. There is a certain artistry involved in translating and I feel that Chase wonderfully captures the spirit as well as the letter of Plotinus’s writings. When the notation is followed by a endnote, such as [IV-3-12]
³
, this usually means that the Plotinus quotation is a Chase translation included in Pierre Hadot’s book,
Plotinus or The Simplicity of Vision.
Two quotations with endnotes were translated by other scholars.

The nature of nous

NOUS
is the second grand realm of reality in Plotinus’s metaphysical cosmology, the immaterial World of Forms. Armstrong translated
nous
as “intellect,” whereas Chase generally chose “spirit.” I am sympathetic to Chase’s choice, as “spirit” does seem to come closer than “intellect” to expressing the nature of
nous;
“intellect” has a rational connotation not found in Plotinus’s writings. Similarly, I prefer Chase’s usual translation
of noêtos
as “spiritual” to Armstrong’s “intelligible.”

So, in my commentary I generally speak of spirit rather than intellect and of the spiritual rather than the intelligible. To remind the reader that
nous,
spirit, and intellect all refer to the same unitary reality that is beyond words, periodically you will find me writing “spirit or intellect.” I have chosen to leave these terms in lower-case, reserving capitalization for the ultimate in Plotinus’s metaphysics: God, the One, the Good. Armstrong and Chase, though, capitalize Intellect and Spirit (except when “intellect” refers to the lower state of individual rational consciousness).

When a bracketed explanatory term in a translation has been added by the translator, it is shown in italics:
“He [the One] …
” When a bracketed term is shown in plain type,
“He
[the One] …, “I have added it.

Concerning Plotinus’s use of the masculine “he” in referring to God, I am sure that he would agree with my wife, who never fails to remind me that ultimate reality doesn’t have a male sex organ. Plotinus also sometimes uses “man” in the sense of “humanity.” Similarly, when readability demands it, you will find me using “he” in the sense of “he or she.” I am hopeful that readers sensitive to the sexist use of language will forgive Plotinus and me for bowing to literary tradition in these instances.

Spiritual self-absorption

U
NDERSTANDING
that Plotinus asks us to become self-absorbed (in the most spiritual fashion) is the key to appreciating the fashion in which his writings should be read. The mystic philosopher seeks to be fully conscious of his own consciousness, completely absorbed in the One that is both the root of himself and the root of the cosmos. So, in the
Enneads
Plotinus continually turns the reader back upon himself, challenging him to discern who he is when he is not busy being someone he is not.

In her book,
Reading Neoplatonism,
Sara Rappe says, “Plotinus demands a kind of ultimate privacy from the person who wishes to gain self-knowledge. He demands an activity of the mind that is entirely self-directed…. The appeal to introspection invites a scrutiny of the assumptions that the knower makes about himself.”
¹

Whoever I am, I am not an object that I can look upon, separate from the consciousness doing the looking. In Plotinus’s philosophy, the highest aspect of
psyche,
or soul, is identical with
nous,
or spirit, the universal consciousness that contains the essential forms of everything in creation.

This is a special sort of containment because spirit
is
the objects contained within itself. By contrast, ordinarily we are not the objects contained within our minds—all those thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and whatnot that ceaselessly occupy our attention. This is why we can forget what we once knew and not know the entire truth about anything external to ourselves.

Sara Rappe notes that when a person stops identifying with the contents of consciousness and tries to experience consciousness apart from its usual contents, his or her customary identity begins to erode. When we aren’t thinking, feeling, or perceiving, we are who we really are, pure souls.

Speaking of the unspeakable

I
AM HOPEFUL
that this discussion has helped the reader better understand that, as a philosopher, Plotinus has much to say. Yet, as a mystic, Plotinus has nothing to say. So how does he resolve the tension that results from having to say what can’t be said, to speak of the unspeakable? By using words to point toward what is beyond words, the mystery of the One. The pointing is not the goal; the One is. This largely explains why it is so difficult for scholars to agree about what Plotinus means.

Often Plotinus’s goal is to produce in the reader what Michael Sells calls a “meaning event.” This event, Sells says, is “the semantic analogue to the experience of mystical union. It does not describe or refer to mystical union but effects a semantic union that re-creates or imitates the mystical union…. We might call the event, then, the evocation of a sense of mystery.”
²

I don’t know if I really understand what a meaning event is, or if I’ve ever truly experienced one while reading the
Enneads.
However, I do know that there have been times, many times, when I would read a passage and be left with an ineffable realization that I could only vaguely express as, “Ah, yes; just so.” Plotinus’s words would lead me to intuit, however dimly, that there is One, lying just beyond my conscious awareness; and I cannot lay hold of it, for it is the very ground of my consciousness, that which makes me aware.

But when the soul wishes to see [
the One
] by itself, it is just by being with it that it sees, and by being one with that it is one, and it is not capable of thinking that it possesses what it seeks, because it is not other than that which is being known.
[VI-9-3]
³

Knowledge is one, not many

T
HE
ENNEADS
are a paradox through and through since all the thoughts Plotinus expresses are ultimately intended to lead the reader to stop thinking. The wisdom the mystic philosopher seeks can’t be found with the discursive mind, which thinks one thought after another.

Rather, wisdom is part and parcel of the intuitive intelligence that is spirit. We as souls participate in spirit—and indeed are virtually identical with spirit—when we stop participating in lower activities such as reasoning, emoting, and perceiving sense objects.

In the
Enneads,
Plotinus points us toward the only way of unmasking the deepest mysteries of life: become the mystery you wish to unmask and be nothing else. If you want to know what the essence of life is, simply be alive. If you want to know what the essence of consciousness is, simply be conscious. If you want to know what the essence of the One is, simply be the One.

Sara Rappe says, “What characterizes the faculty of insight is unitive knowing, non-separation of subject and object, or complete assimilation to and identification with the object of knowledge.”
⁴

Obviously, our everyday lives are far removed from this sort of unitive knowledge. We don’t know everything about anything, including our own selves, which is the place where Plotinus advises us to start in accord with the Socratic adage “Know yourself.” His goal, then, is to help the reader form his or her consciousness into an empty receptacle for receiving (or becoming) wisdom. This is much more a process of emptying the mind of erroneous conceptions than of filling the mind with accurate information.

From this perspective, if we come to know only one thing, the nature of the One, we are wise; if not, we are ignorant, no matter how many facts about how many separate things we may possess.

A Buddhist sage, Ching K’ung, puts it nicely:
“Prajna
[wisdom] means having a profound and correct understanding of the true nature of all things. It is completely different from what is known in this world as intelligence.”
⁵

This helps explain why it is normal to feel uncomfortable at times while reading this book. Plotinus challenges us. He forces us to compare what we believe about God and spirituality with what we know as an indisputable fact because it is identical with our very beings. He asks us to consider if what we are confident is true actually is.

Plotinus isn’t comfortable

A
LONG THESE LINES
, when I wrote Michael Chase complimenting him on the tone of his translations, he responded that he tried to bring urgency to his scholarly work, adding, “Whatever else one may say about Plotinus, he is
not comfortable.”
I heartily agree. But different readers of the
Enneads
find Plotinus’s teachings uncomfortable in different ways.

For example, scholars struggle with the difficulty of making sense of Plotinus’s highly idiosyncratic and apophatic use of the Greek language. Chase told me that in 1999 a seminar was held at the Sorbonne that attracted the world’s best Plotinus scholars to speak on a single section (V-3) of the
Enneads.
“Scarcely any two experts gave the same interpretation of the same texts,” he said. Certain sections of the
Enneads,
Chase added, are “some of the most ragged, jagged, harsh, and just plain difficult philosophical prose ever written, in any language.”

I can testify to the truth of this statement. Plainly put, I wouldn’t wish reading the
Enneads
straight through on any but my worse enemies. Even though I’m a glutton for intellectual punishment, making my way through the seven volumes of Armstrong’s English translation, pen and highlighter in hand, definitely tested my fortitude. Plotinus can write marvelously passionately and simply; he also is capable of writing horribly dryly and complexly.