Course XXV - Teaching 3: Ecstatic Mysticism of the Ancient World

Plotinus was born in Lykopolis, Egypt, in 205.
All details about the life of this great being are full of deep meaning in relation to the mission developed by him on Earth. As he had to bring from the East to the West through the Neoplatonic bridge the wisdom of ecstatic beings, he comes into being in Egypt, cradle of religious mysticism, and is initiated in the Great Science of inner concentration. He is educated by Ammonius Saccas, founder of the Neoplatonism, and teaches and dies in Rome, the future seat of Christendom.
The young Plotinus had a happy childhood and adolescence. He was loved by his parents and estimated by all. Under the tutelage of a wise preceptor he studied all sciences of his time, grammar, oratory, mystique, geometry, astronomy and mathematics.
Owner of great talents, he excelled soon in his studies and felt the need of extending his horizons; so, when he was sent to Alexandria, he took with himself the treasure of Egypt.
In the city of the Ptolomei, because of his pleasant appearance, the beauty and sensual living influenced him. But he reacted very soon.
Gradually, through study and search for great treasures of Serapion’s Library, he entered the enchanted world of the spirit. And he could see God face to face, in the silence of his heart, teaching this only reality to men of the West, to the future victorious race. Little by little he isolated himself from studies and intellectual pleasures, especially influenced by Ammonius Saccas.
Plotinus lived with him for eleven years and followed with unbreakable will the hard discipline of his master. During a period of time also he followed, on a hill to South Alexandria, the training of the “therapeutes”, an ascetic organization integrated by celibate men who would get psychic powers and cure with mental power.
At the beginning of 244, a Persian revolutionary, Ardexir, invaded Mesopotamia. Plotinus enlisted the ranks of Gordian as a patriotic duty and first of all urged by Ammonius’ advices, to go in pilgrimage to the East. When Gordian died, victimized by Philip, Plotinus could take refuge in Antioch and from there finally to pass to Rome.
Before long he acquired great prestige in the Eternal City.
But he had to stand a hard trial. Olympus, a very educated Alexandrian, really knowledgeable in all philosophical schools, as soon as Plotinus arrived, said he had gained the preferences of Ammonius. Surprised by Plotinus’ spiritual superiority, he used magical arts to damage him. But soon he had to realize Plotinus’ soul was so strong that every evil directed to him had affected his aggressors.
He had many and illustrious disciples, among hem Porphyry; Amelius, who assisted the Master until his death; Rogaminus, a Roman senator, and Gemina, a Roman matron that offered her house to Plotinus, which he accepted and tried to live with her.
Plotinus taught continuously. His whole philosophy is valuable because he defines that the highest philosophy is to love God and strive to find Him, being united with Him through concentration.
After his two realizations of God in close and divine union, Plotinus died in 272.
Plotinus was versed not only in history of religious and philosophical doctrines, but also in geometry, arithmetic, mechanics and music. He had studied astronomy, possibly more from the viewpoint of astrology than from metaphysics, but having recognized the falsehood of several predictions he left aside this so-called science and even wrote to contradict it as such.
Despite his defective pronunciation and absolute lack of method, he was very eloquent in his teachings. In fact, he did not lecture, but would respond with fervor to any question.
Ten years after the beginning of his teachings, he started his writings.
He was convinced that he had the last word in philosophy, which was an initiation in his view, that is, patrimony of sages and selected souls, and not a heritage of mankind.
Herennius and later Origen, who had sworn like him not to publish the doctrine of their master Saccas, were the first who did not honor their word, and just when this occurred, Plotinus decided to write. Without the habit of writing and without orthography and by unfinished sentences he hardly expressed his reasoning, and all this hindered the dissemination of his ideas. He became eloquent, without any art, by the power of his thought. He never tried any plan; sometimes he developed a doctrine of his concern or contradicted a book just appeared.
These pieces scattered, reunited and corrected by Porphyry, formed 54 books divided into 6 Eneads. Even after Porphyry’ revision, made after the death of his master, the Eneads are just a body of philosophical discourses about every possible subject, through which we have to seek with certain difficulty the unity in Plotinus’ thought.
These words had been written over the gates of the Platonic sanctuary: “It is difficult to discover the author and father of the world, and when he has been found, it is impossible to know men”. It is known that the noble spirit of Plato would stop there the effort made by science.
Beyond the being, the last scientific term he wanted to accept, he would clearly perceive the higher Unity of being, but he did not dare accept this principle, since reason demanded to place this principle over being itself but, at the same time, reason could not understand it or to explain through it the existence and life of the rest of ideas and of all phenomena. So, the whole chain of dialectical deductions was rational and rigorous, provided it remained unfinished, since the last term of reason contradicts itself and, on the other hand, if reason refused to say this last word not only would invalidate the existence of a principle that the very reason did not dare pose in its extreme consequence, but reason itself would remain without a conclusion and therefore without a true system. One can see in Parmenides and in the sixth book “Republic” to what extent Plato was worried by this capital difficulty.
How to go out of this difficulty without escaping from the field of reason?
Only a mystic could find the solution.
Reason begets dialects and dialectics, taken to its last consequence, contradicts reason; therefore Plotinus concluded that reason is only a subordinate faculty. In his view, rules of reason stop being absolute, and if a man lacks a higher faculty than reason there is, however, a means to flee from the empire of faculties and to know without their help; this instrument is ecstasy.
Ecstasy is participation of man in the bliss and intelligence of God by a complete and momentary fusion of the infinite nature with the individual nature. Thanks to ecstasy, God, the highest consequence of dialectics, at the same time can contradict it and, despite it, this result can be acceptable.
Also Plotinus’ psychology goes in parallel with his metaphysics. He accepts the value of senses, places over them reason with principles, general laws and the whole system of ideas; and over reason he places ecstasy that discovers us the absolute unity for which the laws of reason were not made.
At this point of Plotinus’ system here are the three problems posed:
1st) What is ecstasy?
2nd) Who is that God demonstrated by reason, but that reason does not know how to understand?
3rd) How to come back from God to Man?
Ecstasy is a state of union of the spirit of man with God, in whose state the physical body becomes an empty palace, without his master and without any other law than those laws belonging to its organic nature. It is an anticipated death; rather, it is an anticipated life, since, first of all in mystics, it is extremely real the Plato’ sentence that reads: “To die is to live”.
It is death of multiplicity, consciousness and personality. It is momentary absorption of the individuality in God.
There are three causes of ecstasy: love assisted by knowledge and will.
Knowledge dissipates veils that darken our spirit and places us in front of the Unity; the will strives to escape from the variability and to break the last cover behind which the Absolute shines in its glory; and ultimately, love, which finally finds the only capable object to nurture it, rushes as a living flame, and unification is achieved through it.
Virtue and prayer make us worthy of this supreme happiness, but Plotinus translates prayer as a fervent aspiration, as a vigorous drive of love toward the end. As the school advances and the force of inspiration decreases, first prayer will yield its place, and then theurgical rites will occupy the place of love. In Plotinus, enlightenment is a philosophical doctrine full of depth in spite of its excesses; in Jamblichus it will be only superstition.
Plotinus’ God responds to all problems proposed by Plato and solves them through every solution backed by Plato. Plato had understood that the last grade of dialectics is, in certain way, the last aspiration of the human spirit; it is absolute unity, higher unity of being. With no hesitation, Plotinus proclaims that the absolute unity is really the fittest aspect for the true perfection of God. But at the same time that he left aside the Divine from those inaccessible depths where movement and variability were banned, Plato would see an insuperable abyss between his God and the world. And his staggering mind stopped at the edge of this abyss. In the universe, everything demonstrated to him that the king of the world must be intelligent and active; in the mind, everything constricted him to raise his God over the action of the intelligence.
Thence in his doctrine we see those oscillations between Parmenides’ dreams and Timaeus’ statements. Plotinus neither dreams nor hesitates. Obviously God should be organized; so, he admits God. God is King, Father, Organizer, Providence, Demiurge, living and active God whose energy begets the whole energy, whose life is life of all lives: who expands ceaselessly torrents of universal life and makes them ceaselessly return to his bosom. Because he lives, this God is movable; a principle, and as it were a loftier God hovers over this God endowed with movement, the intelligence. Was not Plato raised also up to there? This God that in Timaeus separates light from darkness and gives movement to matter, is the same God that in Parmenides, in Phaedrus and even in Timaeus is the king of the intelligible world, the sun of the mind, this immovable intelligence about which Aristotle, by formulating the same doctrine of his master, will say is thought of thought.
Following to Plato, Plotinus is raised to this perfect and divine intelligence, and not shivering as Plato in front of these contradictory needs, resolutely he places the immovable intelligence, which is the first of beings, over the movable activity, which is the king of the world of variability, and under a third concept, even more complete, that is the absolute, higher unity of being, with which he forms the first term of the divine trinity. So this God, this divine triad, would solve all problems. God produces the universe necessarily, without beginning and end. He produces it such as it is, because such is his nature, which the universe should have. In short, God could not help creating it or making it otherwise.
As we get used to judge things according to our own nature, we try to judge the power of God through our own weakness. If God could make the universe with different form, God would not be free; but he is free because he had no possibility of choosing. What is choice but the possibility of choosing the worst route between two? To suppose that God chooses, is to suppose that He can hesitate as to his judgment or that He can succumb as to his action, that is, to suppose that He is imperfect.
The possibility of making a mistake or of failing would diminish the power and consequently the divine freedom. Plotinus is not the only pantheist that, by wishing to chain the creative power to the hands of God, has called freedom this unavoidable need and consided that this consecration of fatality is a hymn to freedom.
How was created the Universe? Outside God, may something serve as receptacle of his emanations?
In Plotinus’s view, the space is nothing. Matter, as it is in beings, descends into them at the same time that the form, because every principle begets under it the multiplicity, that is matter, and unity, that is form or image of the very principle. This way there is nothing outside God, neither space nor matter. If something is outside God, even the universe itself, God would be limited, which is impossible. Therefore everything is in God and fatally He produces the universe in Himself.
So as the divine intelligence is bond of the spirits, so the divine soul is bond of the bodies.
Such is the law that explains the origin of the universe and in certain way it is necessary to look for the law of movement and go the stream up. Everything is expansion and concentration in the vital movement. Through these pairs of opposites the universe remains indefinitely similar and equal to itself. As soon as a being is begotten, he starts fighting to return to the original source.
All goes out of God and has to return to God.
Plotinus’ God is also equal to the alpha and omega of the Scriptures; it is the beginning of the movement because he begets it and also is the final cause, because he brings it back. He is not only perfection but also good. He is not only the sun of any intelligence, but also the hankered centre of every love.
Plotinus’ moral is similar to that of Plato: pure, austere, detached from the world, invariably applied to reproduce the ideal of divine perfection.
Philosopher’s virtues are for Plotinus purifying initiation virtues which completely untie us from the world and prepare us for ecstasy. These virtues are justice, wisdom and love. According to him and Plato, wisdom is a virtue because raises him and begets love, and over all virtues as a culmination of them, the union with God arrives that is, ecstasy does.
Amelius or Amerius, a disciple of Plotinus, flourished around the end of third century, in the Christian era. He had come into being in Etruria and his name was Gentilianus. Likely he wished to emphasize his contempt for worldly things and chose the name of Amelius, which means: “negligent” in Greek.
In the beginning he accepted the stoic Lysamachus, but Numenius’ writings, which are lost now, fell in his hands and attracted him in such a way that he learnt them by heart and copied them by his own hand. From this moment, of course, he belonged to the school of Alexandria, where Plotinus was the most enlightened representative. Amelius went to Rome to meet him and, for 24 years, from 246 to 270, followed his lessons with rare assiduity.
He would write everything he would hear from his master’s lips, adding his own commentaries and this way, according to Porphyry’s sayings, he prepared 100 volumes. Unfortunately none of them reached our days; possibly they would dissipate many existing clouds over the Neoplatonic philosophy. This loss becomes so much appreciable because Plotinus considered Amelius one of his disciples who would understand better the sense of his doctrines.
Of the works attributed to Amelius, there was one, which would show the difference between Plotinus’ ideas and Numenius’s ideas and would justify the first of the above-mentioned philosophers, in regard to the accusation that he had plagiarized Numemius.
After Plotinus’ death, Amelius left Rome and settled in Apamee, Syria, where he spent the rest of his days.
Like other philosophers of the same school, he had tried to raise the dying paganism by means of philosophy.
About Jamblichus, a philosopher and outstanding representative of the school of Alexandria, whose dates as much of birth as of death are unknown, we only know that he was born in Chalcais, Coelesiria, from rich and considered fathers and that flourished in the kingdom of Constantine.
He is taken as the first master a man called Anatolius, who introduced him to Porphyry. When Porphyry died, he was the oracle of the school of Alexandria, where disciples gathered. Despite his austere language and arid forms of teaching, his ascendancy was such that once his disciples would be attached to him they never abandoned him, eating at his table and following him wherever he would go. So great was the enthusiasm he aroused in them that they would attribute him the gift of miracles, levitation, et cetera.
Of his numerous works a life of Pythagoras and an Exhortation to Philosophy are the only ones that reached us.
By Proclus’ commentaries, his philosophical theories are known, which if they were a continuation of Plotino’s and Porphyry’s teachings, diverge from Jamblichus in some aspects. For instance: about the variability of individual beings. Porphyry would attribute it to matter; on the contrary, Jamblichus explains this variability by making a difference in the intelligible world between principles of unity and identity on the one hand and principles of diversity on the other hand.
Unlike their predecessors, Plotinus and Porphyry, Jamblichus’ philosophy attests a spirituality that is less severe and less absolute; Jamblichus reproaches Plotinus that he has made of the soul a principle impassive and ever thinking and consequently because he had identified it with the very intelligence. On this hypothesis, Jamblichus wonders: who would fail in us when dragged by the irrational principle we rush in disorders of imagination? And if on the other hand we admit that the will has failed, what could the infallible soul remain? In his doctrines, Jamblichus is more moderate and more Platonic than his predecessors. His very morality is his more temperate asceticism. He repeats man is the true author of his actions and it is to himself his own demon –daimon– but also, by following the masters he adds that the end that a soul pursues is the contemplation of divine things and that virtue is the instrument to reach it, and despite that in his theology he is more superstitious than Plotinus and Porphyry, he professes a more practical and human morality.