Plotinus as Mystic

History of ancient and medieval philosophy testifies to the existence of a “golden chain” of metaphysical thinkers, both Western and Eastern, who not only speculated about the true nature of reality but also strove to experience it directly; who were, in other words, mystics. Many scholars often include in this succession men like Parmenides, Plato, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Saint Bonaventure and Meister Eckhart, and among the Eastern sages, Laozi and Shankaracharya. Any such list will be incomplete without mentioning Plotinus, one of the last great pagan philosophers of antiquity, usually considered to be the most important Neoplatonic thinker.

Despite the occasional voices that try to devalue Plotinus’ image as a mystic within the academic community, there seems to be a general consensus as to the authenticity of his mystical experiences, the testament of which is his masterpiece – Enneads. That said, this testament mostly refers to the objective side of the experience, since Plotinus almost entirely removes himself from the account. What therefore we are allowed to say about Plotinus understood not as the author of philosophical works of mystical value, but as a man who actively walked the mystical path? The most detailed biographical source from antiquity is the text On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of his Works, written by Porphyry, Plotinus’ disciple and editor of his philosophical treatises. This short biography gives us a basis and a starting point for reflection on Plotinus as a man and on his experience.

It’s quite easy to deduce from Porphyry’s statements that Plotinus’ spirituality didn’t have a religious character (in contrast to the spirituality that characterized later Neoplatonism as a pagan reaction against the growth of Christianity in the Roman Empire). Porphyry recounts that his master once said, when asked by his disciple Amelius to go with him to offer a sacrifice in a pagan temple, that it’s the gods who should come to him and not the other way round (see section 10). In turn, Dominic O’Meara in his Plotinus: An Introduction to the Enneads states that Plotinus’ thought excludes the “religious shortcut” in inducing higher states of consciousness and prescribes an individual effort of strictly philosophical asceticism, which begins with rational discourse and then abolishes it in the meditative practice of introspection. That would distinguish Plotinus strongly from other pagan Neoplatonists, who often employed theurgy – pagan magical rituals – as a means of achieving union with the divine. Although it’s hard to disagree with such statements, it can be argued that Plotinus’ thought was, nevertheless, religious.

First of all, let us note that it would be wrong to consider Plotinus a “secular mystic,” because secularism is a modern phenomenon, completely foreign to the ancient mentality. Moreover, such wording can be seen as fairly inadequate even today. The Latin word religio derives from the verb religare, which means “to re-bind,” “to re-unite,” “to re-connect,” i.e., to restore the lost state of union (similarly to the Sanskrit word yoga, which means “to join” or “to unite”). Every genuine mysticism is therefore religious, because it’s directed towards the union with the sacred, regardless of whether the sacred is natural or supernatural, immanent or transcendent (and it’s obvious that in the case of Plotinus the sacred is both supernatural and transcendent). For this reason, even some modern phenomena that fall under the term “secular mysticism” reveal a religious dimension that can manifest itself even without explicit religious adherence.

Plotinus may have kept some distance from the ritual life of his community, but it doesn’t mean that he didn’t have religious inclinations altogether. The same Porphyry in the same section reports that Plotinus agreed to participate in a séance at the temple of Isis in Rome, where an Egyptian priest evoked his guardian spirit. When revealed, this spirit turned out to be one of the gods, not ordinary spirits. We can find even more evidence by opening Plotinus’ Enneads, where the philosopher shows that he not only understood Greek mythological and religious symbolism well, but also used it without hesitation to explicate various metaphysical realities, albeit somewhat flexibly. For example, in his treatise on Eros Plotinus seems to identify the three hypostases with the triad Ouranos–Kronos–Zeus (see Enneads III, V, 2; also on Zeus cf. V, VIII, 10); however, he also recognizes that mythological symbols can have many complementary interpretations and hence Zeus can be a symbol of any divine hypostasis (see Enneads III, V, 8). Finally, Plotinus suggests that his writing about gods is not a mere wordplay when he mentions that man can turn inward and reach the state of contemplation of the Divine Intellect either through his own effort or with the help of Athena (see Enneads VI, V, 7).

Let us return to Porphyry, who points to another crucial aspect of Plotinus’ mystical life: his actual experiences. We read in Porphyry’s work that during his six-year sojourn in Plotinus’ school in Rome his master four times united himself with “God over all,” “who has neither shape nor form but sits enthroned above the Intellectual-Principle and all the Intellectual-Sphere” (section 23), ergo: with the One Itself. At the same time, we can speak of Plotinus’ mystical “life” in the truest sense of this word, because, as this same Porphyry testifies, Plotinus’ mysticism was not the case of a few separated “ecstasies,” but that of a stable and continuous awareness. According to this testimony, although Plotinus had many obligations and cared dearly for many people, his soul was constantly attuned to the “invisible world”. Porphyry writes in section 8 about Plotinus’ “unbroken concentration upon his own highest nature,” and in section 9 that “all this labour and thought over the worldly interests of so many people never interrupted, during waking hours, his intention towards the Supreme” (interestingly, in both fragments we find the same phrase: πρὸς τὸν νοῦν, which implies the intellect, either Plotinus’ or divine).

Plotinus in Enneads writes about himself only once, but this confession is very valuable. It informs us that the philosopher many times had experiences which, initiated by separating consciousness from outer impulses and turning the soul within, led to a direct experience of the noetic cosmos, crowned by the step beyond all noetic structure:

Many times it has happened: Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvelous beauty (θαυμαστὸν ἡλίκον ὁρῶν κάλλος); then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life (ζωήν τε ἀρίστην), acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatsoever within the Intellectual (ὑπὲρ πᾶν τὸ ἄλλο νοητὸν) is less than the Supreme: yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the soul ever enter into my body . . . (Enneads IV, VIII, 1)

Finally, let us add that some scholars noticed that between the lines of Enneads one can find other relevant information about Plotinus the mystic. Mateusz Stróżyński in his work Mystical Experience and Philosophical Discourse in Plotinus points out that Plotinus many times in his treatises motivates his readers not to be content with the contemplation of the Divine Intellect, but to strive to transcend it. However, he would not encourage the spiritually younger adepts to do so with such emphasis if he had not been constantly connected with the Intellect and if he had united with the One only four times. At the same time Stróżyński stresses that two errors must be avoided while interpreting Enneads: treating them, on the one hand, as only a metaphysical theory, and, on the other hand, as a kind of spiritual memoirs; there is no ground for claiming that every fragment of Plotinus’ work is an expression of some mystical experience.

It’s impossible, of course, to tell how many contemplations and ecstasies Plotinus had during his life, but this shouldn’t bother us too much. After all, a true mystic is a mystic not only when he has mystical experiences. Because of his fundamental state of mind, he is a mystic at all times.

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