The Odyssey of Soul from Plotinus to Augustine

We who live today take for granted the notion that Odysseus was a noble figure, a sort of archetype for the soul’s yearning for home. This hasn’t always been the case. For much of antiquity, even into the Renaissance—as most especially evidenced by Dante’s Inferno—Odysseus was a far less noble figure: a trickster, a deceiver, a liar. How, though, did the slow reinterpretation of Odysseus as an archetype of the soul’s journey home come about? Through the philosophy of Plotinus and his allegorization of epic poetry and mythology as revealing the truths about human nature.

To a Christian audience, Plotinus is an unknown father of theology despite never being a Christian. His works influenced the greatest theologian of the Latin West, Saint Augustine. His works were also influential over the mystical theology of the Greek-speaking East, especially Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Although the idea of the individual soul occupying a middle-rank between divinity and materiality, heaven and earth, had long been around by the time of Late Antiquity it was Plotinus’s monumental revision of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Greek mythology that permitted the eventual rise of a worldview seeing the soul as navigating two worlds to its eternal, divine, homeland in the form of a journey – or a “pilgrimage” to use Christian language.

Joseph Torchia, OP, gives a splendid account of the meaning of the soul’s middling rank in the philosophy of Plotinus and theology of Augustine in Plotinus and Augustine on the Mid-Rank of Soul. Given Plotinus’s growing importance in contemporary scholarship, including the recognition of his shadow over Christian theology, an account of the philosophy of Plotinus is given to the reader. Understanding several major themes in Plotinus is important for a reader to know before delving into Augustine’s account of the soul in the cosmos given Plotinus’s influence over Augustine.

First, “For Plotinus, the adventure of the human lies in the challenging task of striving to rediscover the authenticity of selfhood as ‘we’ navigate our way through the shifting currents of a changing world of sense experience.” According to Plotinus, our authentic selfhood, personhood, is through understanding our place in a “great participatory network in which all things are in the One’s diffusiveness.” In other words, the cosmos is an interconnected reality, nothing exists in isolation, all existence is interrelated and stems from The One (God). Authenticity is about understanding the nature of reality and our place within it, not mere expressionism.

Second, the means by which humans understand their authentic selves in relation to this cosmos of interrelated existence is through the soul. The soul is superior to the body in that it possesses rational capability and therefore has the ability to know right and wrong, truth and falsehood. The soul is what maintains humanity “mid-rank among natures,” in between The One and the material world. The soul is our most innate self as Torchia goes on to explain, “Plotinus thus identifies the essential human being with the rational soul and the activities of the soul with which ‘we’ engage in reasoning.”

Third, the reasoning power of the soul desires to return to The One. The adventure of existence, the mid-rank we occupy, is essentially an odyssey – a journey – through the material world and all its trials, temptations, and tribulations which seek to ensnare the rational soul, and through these trials, temptations, and tribulations the soul returns to The One. This odyssey of rational pilgrimage to reunite with Truth (The One) constitutes the adventure of life. To illustrate his point, Plotinus allegorizes the myths of Hesiod and Homer and the other Greek poets and the broader poetic tradition as expressing this fundamental reality (but in bodily, rather than soulful, form).

From Plotinus we can see the inheritance that Augustine would build upon: existence is an interconnected reality pointing to God; authentic selfhood and personhood is found through the soul’s rational abilities to discern the Good, True, and Beautiful; human existence desires reunion with the Author of Life (God). Augustine also allegorizes poetry, in his case Virgil, and theologizes history (in deconstructing the myths and history of Rome) to point to our divine destiny with God. (This is also drawn from St. Ambrose’s hermeneutic and shouldn’t be considered entirely indebted to Plotinus despite the obvious connection.)

Where Augustine differs somewhat significantly from Plotinus is in the personal dimension of the soul. While Plotinus grants some room to personality and selfhood, his doctrine of the soul is more homogenous and universal whereas Augustine’s is personal and particular. We do not, for instance, encounter the person known as Plotinus in The Enneads. We do, by contrast, encounter the person known as Augustine in The Confessions. For Augustine, even though all human souls share a common nature, each soul is unique and personal to the individual filled with individual loves and lusts that define it.

This leads Torchia to then examine Augustine’s account of creation and the fall through the mid-rank of the soul in a tantalizing and exciting read of the “allegorical” dimension to the great saint’s hermeneutic. Drawing upon Augustine’s rebuttals to the Manicheans, De Trinitate, and other works we discover a complex anthropology that is at the heart of Augustine’s thinking about the nature and destiny of sin and salvation and where the soul sits in relationship to this conflict. In the end, Torchia writes:

Augustine monitored his approach to God on the basis of the movements of mind and will, the defining principles of human nature. His conception of the fallenness of humanity (both on a universal scale and on a personal level) is bound up with an analysis of mind’s orientation toward unchanging reality or toward transitory temporal and corporeal images, and conversely, the will’s gravitation toward the true good or its counterfeit claimants. But mind and will do not act independently; they complement and reinforce each other in their respective operations. The mind that seeks knowledge is motivated to do so by the will, while the will pursues the good that the mind discerns as its desirable end.

The fall, then, as Torchia explains in reading Augustine, was in the soul’s turning away from discerning higher reality for lower reality, coming to determine (by deception) that lower goods were the ultimate good, which led the will to act upon this half-truth. Furthermore, the reading of the Bible becomes a medium for the soul’s mid-rank to prove itself—whether the soul can discern the inner reality of Scripture (the spiritual meaning often hidden by the literal-historical meaning) and therefore turn back to God and higher reality and begin its spiritual ascent to paradise. The multifold sense of the Bible is also a reflection of the hierarchal existence of reality and the soul’s ability to understand the lower and higher and properly order the senses to ultimate reality. “Broadly speaking,” Torchia comments, “Augustine’s interpretation of the ordo of reality (along with his theory of the soul’s mid-rank) bears a Neoplatonic, and more specifically, a Plotinian imprint.”

In coming to understand the multifold sense of reality, ordering that reality from lower to higher, and discerning ultimate reality the soul becomes the bridge linking the two worlds: the spiritual and physical, the eternal and created, the divine and human. Existence is the pilgrimage of the soul and, importantly for Augustine, the heart, in reuniting reality from its discord that stems from false understanding. Understanding and loving what is true and good is the pathway home, “According to the dictates of the essentialism that defines Augustine’s metaphysics, created reality exhibits the intelligibility, for, and order that runs to God’s very nature. Indeed, God imparts to creation everything that bespeaks the harmony and proportion inherent in a cosmic vision of reality as a whole.”

Plotinus and Augustine on the Mid-Rank of Soul is an excellent work that ties together two of the greatest thinkers of Late Antiquity. It builds on the preceding decades of scholarship that recognize Augustine’s debt to Plotinian philosophy. It also defends Augustine’s uniqueness despite that indebtedness, highlighting the biblical dimension to Augustine’s elusive and alluring hermeneutic. Anyone who has an interest in the philosophies of Late Antiquity and the theological thought of Augustine will benefit tremendously from this work.

Plotinus and Augustine on the Mid-Rank of Soul: Navigating Two Worlds
By Joseph Torchia, OP
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023; 252pp

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