But we… Who are we?
Plotinus was ashamed to live in his body. Thus Porphyry begins the story of his teacher’s life. But let’s not rush to diagnose some sick trait in our philosopher because of that. Even if it is a psychosis, it is not the psychosis of an entire epoch, as I once thought and as is often thought, but rather the one that was characteristic of a certain spiritual and literary environment in that era. In the first three centuries of the Christian era, gnosticism and mysterious religions spread. Man feels like a stranger in this world, as if exiled into his own body and sensory world. The popularization of Platonism partly contributed to this: the body was considered a tomb and a prison, the soul had to separate from it because it was akin to eternal ideas, and our true self is purely spiritual.
We must also consider astral theologies: the soul is of celestial origin and descended to this world through a journey among the stars, during which it was enveloped in increasingly coarser coverings, the last of which is this earthly body. under the influence of widespread Platonism, there is a certain aversion towards the body. This was, after all, one of the reasons for pagan opposition to the mystery of the incarnation. Porphyry clearly states:
How can one accept that the divine became an embryo, that after birth it was put into swaddling clothes, all dirty with blood, bile, and even worse?
However, Christians themselves will quickly realize that this argument can be turned against those who, like Platonists, believed in the preexistence of souls in a higher world:
If souls, as it is said, are of the Lord’s lineage, they would always live at the King’s court and never leave that blessed place… they would never thoughtlessly enter these earthly realms where they live in opaque bodies, mixed with blood and bodily fluids, in filth of excrement, in impure vessels of urine.
It can be said that all philosophies of that time seek to explain the presence of the divine soul in the earthly body and to answer the anxious question of people who feel like strangers in their own bodies. In this world.
Who were we? What have we become? Where were we? Where are we thrown? Where are we going? Where does our liberation come from?4
Even within Plotinus’s school, some gave a gnostic answer to this gnostic question. According to them, souls fell into the sensory world as a result of a drama they have no control over. The Evil Force created the sensory world. Souls, fragments of the spiritual world, are trapped in it against their will. However, since they come from the spiritual world, they retain their spiritual nature. Their unhappiness only arises from the place they are stuck in. When the Evil Force is defeated at the end of the world, their suffering will come to an end. They will return to the spiritual world, to the Pleroma. The salvation of the soul comes therefore from outside, consisting of a change of place and depending on the struggle between higher forces.
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In his speeches and writings, Plotinus vehemently opposed this teaching which, adorned with Platonic feathers, threatened to deceive his students. Namely, despite superficial similarities, his fundamental experience opposes this view. It is diametrically opposed to the viewpoint of the Gnostic. Plotinus, like the Gnostics, feels in his body that he is still what he was before entering the body. His self, his true self, is not of this world. However, he does not have to wait for the end of the sensory world for his self, his spiritual essence, to return to the spiritual world. This spiritual world is not some supernatural or supercosmic place separated by heavenly vastness. Nor is it some original, irretrievably lost state that can only be restored by divine grace. No, that spiritual world is nothing but his deepest self, and it can be reached directly by withdrawing into oneself. Waking up often from his own body into himself, being then outside of everything else, and within himself, contemplating the wondrous beauty, convinced to the greatest extent possible that he belongs to a higher world, experiencing the noblest life, becoming identical to the divine, being established in it, achieving the highest work and surpassing every other spiritual accomplishment. In the realm of reality, when, after that divine rest, I once again descend from Spirit into rational thinking, I ask myself: how could I ever descend again, how could my soul even enter the body, if it is already in such a state as it appeared to me. (IV. 8, 1, 1.)
This is actually about the mystical experience of seeing our own self in which one seems to identify with the divine Spirit in a state of miraculous beauty, and in which one is aware of living on a higher level of life and action. It is not yet a contact with the highest Principle, One or Goodness, but with what is on the first lower level: Spirit. Plotinus here speaks of privileged moments, not a permanent state. Then there is a kind of awakening: something that had been unconscious until then floods the field of consciousness. Or rather, one finds oneself in a state that is usually not experienced, acting in a way that transcends one’s usual forms of consciousness and way of thinking. What interests me is how all that traditional language is used to express inner experience. These levels of reality thus become levels of inner life, levels of our true self. Here we encounter Plotinus’s central intuitive realization: a person’s self is irreversibly separate from their eternal model, the one that exists in the divine mind. That true self, that self in God, is within us. In certain privileged moments that increase our inner tension, we identify with it, we become that eternal self; we are touched by its inexpressible beauty. By identifying with it, we identify with the divine Thought itself in which it resides.
These privileged experiences reveal to us that we do not lose and have never lost contact with our true self. We are always in God:
And, if I may say more clearly what seems right to me despite what others think: not even our soul has completely sunk into the sensory world, but there is a part of it that eternally resides in the spiritual world. It is so, everything is within us and we are in everything. Our self extends from God to matter because we exist simultaneously in the higher and lower realms. As Plotinus says, quoting Homer, “our head turns towards the heavens.” However, doubt immediately arises. If we have something so great within us, why are we not aware of it? Why do we leave these powers inactive? Why do some people never activate them?
Plotinus immediately provides an answer. This is because everything that is in the soul is not immediately perceived, but it only reaches “us” when it touches our senses. Any activity that does not stimulate our senses does not affect our entire soul. We are unaware of it because human beings naturally rely on sensory perception. A person is not just a part of the soul, but a whole.
Therefore, we are not aware of this higher level of ours, which is our self in divine Thought or, rather, the divine Thought of our self, even though it is only a part – the highest part – of our soul. Can it really be said that we are something of which we are not aware? And how can we explain that unawareness?
But we… Who are “we”? Are we part of the soul that eternally resides in the Spirit, or are we what has been added to it and is subject to changes over time?
But before our birth, we were there and we were different people – some of us even gods – we were pure souls, Spirit, united with the totality of being, parts of the spiritual world, without separateness, without division: we belonged to Everything (and even now we are not separated from it).
But the truth is that now, to this human here, another has been added: he wanted to exist and finding us… he assigned himself to us and joined the human we originally were… and so we became two and often the one we became after merging with is no longer active and somehow not present. (VI. 4, 14, 16.)
Awareness is a point of view, a center of perspective. For us, our self coincides with that point. our native language fully unless we are aware of it, just like our psyche. The opening of our view on the world or on our soul is therefore necessary for a psychological activity to be true. Consciousness – and our self – is, therefore, like an intermediate space between two areas of shadows that stretch above and below it: the quiet and unconscious life of our self in God and the quiet and unconscious life of the body. Through reason, we can discover the existence of this higher and lower level. However, we will not truly be what we are until we become aware of it. If we could become aware of the life of the spirit, feel any part of this eternal life within us, just as we can feel our physical heart if we pay attention, then the life of the spirit would flood the field of our consciousness, it would truly become us, it would truly become our life.
They are active towards what is above, and they only affect us if they reach the central part [=consciousness]. So what then? Aren’t we also what is on a higher level than that central part? Of course, but we need to be aware of it. Because we do not fully utilize it. It is not always what we possess, but only when we direct the central part of our soul either upwards or in a different direction, or when we achieve what exists within us only in potential. (I. 1, 11, 2.)
1 V. P. 1, 1.
2 Porphyry, Against the Christians, frag. 77.
3 Arnobius, Against the Pagans, II., 37.
4 Clement of Alexandria, Extracts from Theodotus.
5 St. Ambrose (in his sermon De Isaac (On Isaac) IV, 11, Corp. Script. Latin, vol. XXXII, Vienna, 1897, p. 650, 15-651,7) compares Plotinus’ ecstasy to the ecstasy of St. Paul (cf. 2 Corinthians, 12, 1-4): Blessed is the soul that penetrates the secrets of the Word. For, waking up from the body, becoming a stranger to everything else, it searches within itself, it investigates in order to know how it can attain divine being. And when it finally reaches it, surpassing every other spiritual reality, it establishes its dwelling in it and nourishes itself with it. That was the case with Paul, who knew that he was taken up to paradise; however, he did not know if he was taken up in his body or outside it. Because his soul awakened from his body and moved away, detached from emotions and physical bonds, and by becoming a stranger to itself, he received in himself inexpressible words that he heard but couldn’t convey because, he says, it is not permitted for humans to speak such things. Saint Ambrose was surprised by the fact that, on one hand, Saint Paul spoke about not knowing whether he was lifted up in his body or outside of it, and on the other hand, Plotinus talks about awakening from the body. Therefore, he does not hesitate to describe the ecstasy of Saint Paul using words borrowed from Plotinus’ own ecstasy.
6 IV. 3, 12, 5; cf. Homer, Iliad, IV, 443, and Plato, Timaeus, 90 a.
7 Plotinus often uses the term “ekei” – Gr. “up there” to refer to the transcendent world, that is, the One and the Spirit that contains the world of Forms.
Source: Pierre Hadot, Plotinus – Simplicity of Vision, Chapter II.