The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  Finally, at the bottom, Aristotle put Prime Matter itself: without form, unlimited, and without extension, with no positive properties.24 Like pure Form, it is invisible to the human eye, but it remains a necessary component for everything sandwiched in between.

  So far so good, if you are an orthodox follower of Aristotle. But Plotinus now put this together with Plato’s picture of God the Demiurge from the Timaeus, the Supreme Creator who crafts the universe out of the image of His own perfection, so that each element reflects the perfection of the whole. All of a sudden, Plotinus gave his generation a whole new luminous way of seeing the world and humanity’s place in it.

  To understand its impact, we need to go back on our first Aristotelian walk through the woods but this time see it through Plotinus’s eyes. We see the same trees and shrubs and stones in the path and the clouds overhead, we hear the same creatures scurrying in the leaves and insects buzzing around our head, and we feel the same sun on our face and the same breeze blowing through our hair.

  But now we see that everything expresses, to an exact lesser or greater degree, the animating life-giving spirit of mind and Being, which connects everything to everything else. From God Himself in the heavens and the sun in the sky, to me and Rover the chocolate Lab with his humanlike alertness and curiosity, the watchful deer in the shadows, the chipmunks and squirrels, the bees and other insects, and then the trees and other flora, down to the dirt and dead leaves: All form an ordered hierarchy of Being.

  I curl a baby lizard in my hand, so transparently orange that it seems made of plastic. But then it moves, its tiny limbs reminding me that it carries the breath of divinity within it, less than that of my own soul but more than the twigs and leaves from which I extracted it—and all in harmonious proportion with one another. When the eighteenth-century poet William Blake spoke of seeing eternity in a grain of sand, he was speaking the language of Plotinus and Neoplatonism.

  “All things follow in continuous succession,” Plotinus told his disciples, “from the Supreme God to the last dregs of things, mutually linked together and without a break.” At the top is the One and the Good, beyond knowledge and description. “As the One it is the first cause, and as the Good the last end, of all that is.”25 As part of its own perfection, the One produces Nous, or Being in Itself, which contains all the perfect intelligible forms necessary for creation. Nous in turn gives birth to the World Soul, just as in Plato’s Timaeus: it is both the generator and the container of the rest of creation, the means by which life flows out into the rest of existence, including the human soul, our direct point of contact with the source of all goodness and perfection.

  The One’s spiritual giving does not stop there. It flows down uninterrupted through the animals and plants, down to the smallest speck of dust and least significant bits of matter, all of which still reflect to some infinitesimal degree the perfection of the whole. From one end to the other of the hierarchy, everything participates in a constant diminishing series of divine emanations.

  These emanations, and the connections they forge, form what comes to be called the Great Chain of Being. Any time a thinker of the Middle Ages or Renaissance talks about “a scale of being” or “the ladder of perfection,” he is borrowing from Plotinus.26 And just as all things spiritual and material form rungs along the ladder, so God “fills them all with life … this single radiance [which] illumines all and is reflected in each, as a single face might be reflected in a series of mirrors.”27

  The cosmos according to Plotinus

  In his search for an ordered intelligible guide to existence, Plotinus had managed to fuse Aristotle’s regard for the material world as the work yard of form with Plato’s Demiurge as the procreative fountainhead of all truth. Yes, Plotinus says, we are born in a cave. But it’s not hard to find our way out. There’s a trail provided for us, because the links in the Chain of Being not only go down, like the steps of a ziggurat, they also lead up. The downward flow of divine perfection is matched by an equal upward striving of all things back toward their original source.

  The human soul, which bears the largest share of that spiritual radiance that fills all material creation, feels that upward tug the most. We don’t have to be dragged forcibly out of the cave to see the light, either, as Socrates seemed to suggest in the Republic. Instead we are gently pulled out by our own innate attraction to perfection: because that perfection is our own true self.

  This would be Plotinus’s great message to his own age and to the future. All of us, whether we know it or not, want to be one with perfection—or as later Neoplatonists will say, to be one with God. No one wants to live in the cave. We all want to see the light; and once we discover the true trail, we can retrace the path of the spirit back to whence it came.

  Of course, finding the trail is the great difficulty. That is why Plotinus set up his famous school in Rome. For a time, it was more famous than the Academy. Plotinus resided in a Roman mansion belonging to two rich aristocratic women, mother and daughter, both called Gemina. There he drew to himself a circle of senators, doctors, well-to-do students, and literary types with whom he conducted a nonstop seminar in the manner of Plato’s dialectic.

  The discussions seem to have gone on for days. They also—and this was unique in Greek or Roman philosophical circles—included women students and children (indeed, a number of distinguished Roman families made Plotinus their children’s guardian). His students were part of a last despairing generation of Romans. They desperately wanted answers. As the emperor Alexander Severus (who was an avid fan of Plato’s Republic) said, they had tried everything else and had found it was a waste of time. So they looked to their teacher, Plotinus, their guru almost, to explain how to find their way back to truth and spiritual health.

  He, on the other hand, was content to take his time. As we know from the Enneads, the discussions ground on day after day, topic after topic. Increasingly, Plotinus realized that no dialectical process, no matter how rigorous, was going to lead to the big breakthrough he wanted: to see the truth for itself and grasp the last mysteries of existence.

  Plato had written about the inadequacy of mere words to express reality—one reason he often turned to myth and allegory.28 The Pythagorean alternative had been to turn to the eternal truths of number and mathematics. But to Plotinus mathematical reasoning, too, seemed a series of clumsy symbols or signs, just as language did, compared with the raw truth of spirit and the One.

  The trail out of the cave suddenly seemed a dead end. Plotinus decided there was only one way out: a leap of mystical illumination.

  According to his student Porphyry of Tyre, Plotinus experienced this mystical union at least four times in the six years Porphyry studied with him. Plotinus’s description of what it was like stretched the normal boundaries of language—proving again to Plotinus the inadequacy of words to capture the most essential features of reality.

  “Often I have woken to myself out of the body,” Plotinus wrote, “[I] had become detached from everything else and entered into myself.” Plotinus found himself surrounded by “beauty of surpassing greatness” and felt assured that “I belonged to the higher reality,” which lay beyond the realm of Intellect and belonged directly with the Divine.29

  In the end, Plotinus’s system is less of a philosophy than a religion.30 At its core is a mystical, even ecstatic, union with God, the final leap in which we transcend all the limitations of matter, time, and space and become one with the One. The closest metaphor Plotinus could find to capture its delight was of a dance with eternity:

  On looking on [the One] we find our goal and our resting-place, and around Him we dance the true dance, God-inspired, no longer discordant.… In this dance, the soul beholds the wellspring of Life, and wellspring of Intellect, the source of Being, [the] cause of Good, and root of Soul.…

  In the divine dance, these highest spiritual qualities appear in themselves, undiluted by their presence in material creation. “They themselves remain, like the
light while the sun shines.”31

  For Plotinus, the task of the wise man is the same as it was for Socrates. It is to prepare the soul for the final revelation of truth. But no one has to wait to die to achieve it. Wisdom can be found here and now, through mystical union with the One that takes us “from this world’s ways and things” to a higher reality.

  All around him and his school, the Roman Empire was steadily coming apart. Plotinus ignored it. He proposed to the emperor Philip creating a new city to be called Platonopolis, where Plotinus and other philosophers could find peace and shelter and study the nature of the universe. Unlike Plato’s original version in the Republic, this utopian city would be set up not to remake the world, but to escape from it.

  Philip listened politely, but nothing came of the plans. With Germans streaming across the Rhine, Goths plundering cities in Greece, and the Parthians hammering away from the east, the emperor had other things to worry about. With Plotinus we have come to the last loosening of the ties of loyalty between the empire and its best and brightest. “The wise man,” Plotinus said, “will attach no importance to the loss of his country.”32 True happiness (eudaimonia) requires a flight from all worldly connections toward a higher end, the final union of the soul with God.

  Plotinus had finally found the cure for the hole in the soul of his world-weary countrymen. The price was any commitment to, or belief in, the value of the Roman Empire or any other kind of politics. Don’t worry about those things, Plotinus said. Stay on the steep ascent to the One, and keep the soul focused on its ultimate goal. On his deathbed his last words were, “Strive to lead back the God within you to the Divine in the universe.”33

  There was only one problem. Plotinus’s solution worked fine for those with the money and leisure to retire to a Roman villa to contemplate the eternal verities. What about everyone else?

  Strangely enough, the answer lay just outside Plotinus’s door.

  * * *

  * That is, since he had defied Julius Caesar and built a temple to his memory.

  † They would inspire Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, with their picture of Rome at its most vicious and X-rated.

  ‡ Similarly, the Stoic notion that all men are brothers because they share the same nature (logos) paid huge dividends in the development of Roman law and of how basic principles of justice can have universal application to all peoples everywhere—a development that is still going on in international law today.

  § Another student of Ammonius Saccas was a sharp-eyed, intense young man named Origen, who would use his master’s lessons very differently. See chapter 10.

  Raphael, St. Paul Preaching in Athens

  Ten

  CHRIST IS COME: PLATO AND CHRISTIANITY

  Since the Logos has opened the eyes of our soul, we see the difference between light and darkness and in every way prefer to stand in the light.

  —Origen of Alexandria, c. 240 CE

  In the fourth year of the emperor Claudius’s reign, more than two centuries before Plotinus’s birth, the city of Athens had an unexpected visitor.

  He came from the busy port city of Tarsus on the Asia Minor coast. This man, however, did not come to Athens on business. Nor did he come to visit Plato’s Academy, already in its fourth century of existence, or the other venerable schools of philosophy in the city, although they were very much on his mind.

  His name was Saul. He had come to Athens to deliver a message. A Jew by birth and a Greek by language and culture, Saul of Tarsus was also a Roman citizen. In fact, it is by his Romanized name, Paul, that we know him best. His message would be delivered in the language of ancient philosophy, in Greek, and would shake the ancient world to its foundations.

  He spoke from the top of the Areopagus, a hill that sat slightly north of the Acropolis. As Paul climbed up, he would have scattered the goats grazing on its rock-strewn slopes. Below him were the buildings of the Academy in their sacred grove; the red marble-columned portico of the stoa; and the Agora, where Socrates had once argued with his fellow Athenians about wisdom and virtue. If he had looked harder, Paul could also have made out a long, low stone building with narrow grilled windows. This was Athens’s municipal prison, where Socrates had drunk his fatal cup of hemlock four and a half centuries before.

  Meanwhile, a crowd of curious onlookers gathered around the tent maker from Tarsus.

  “What will this babbler say?” they were asking themselves. A number of them, we are told, were “certain philosophers of the Epicureans and Stoics,” who had already heard Paul say a few words in the Agora about some strange god and a man from Galilee who had risen from the dead. They and others then followed Paul to the Areopagus to hear more. As our source tells us, the one thing Athenians enjoyed more than talking was hearing someone else talk, especially about some new and exciting philosophical doctrine.1

  “May we know what this new doctrine of yours is?” they asked Paul.

  Paul told them.

  He told them about a God who had made the world and all things. He told them about a God who was Lord of heaven and earth “and hath made of one blood all nations of men.” But he warned them this Lord God did not dwell in any temple made by human hands. He then pointed below to a building he had seen on his way up the hill, dedicated “To the UNKNOWN GOD.”

  He cried out, “Whom therefore you ignorantly worship, him I declare unto you.” That alone must have created a sensation in the crowd, but Paul plunged on. If the people would seek out this Lord God, he said, they would find that He was closer than they thought: “For in Him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also His offspring.’ ”

  And now this God “has appointed a day, in the which He will judge the world in righteousness.” Paul said this would happen through the man whom He had raised from the dead as a sign that all shall rise from the dead on the day of judgment.2

  At that point, the New Testament tell us, Paul began to lose his audience. The dead are going to rise up again and be alive? the Athenians asked one another. Some started to snicker. Whom did he think he was kidding? The crowd drifted away. One or two did stay around to hear more about the need for repentance and about having “faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.”* But on the whole, Paul’s stay in Athens was a disappointment.

  He would move on, first to Corinth and then to other Greek cities. He would even go to Assos, where Aristotle had once walked along the beach, and to Miletus, the city of Thales and the birthplace of rational Greek thought.3 Eventually he ended up in Rome. He would not leave that city alive.

  Before he died, however, Saint Paul the Apostle would transform the ancient world. His journeys and his letters turned Christianity from a small heretical Jewish sect into a major presence among the Hellenized and Romanized populations of the Mediterranean basin.

  Although Paul was a Jew, he devoted himself to preaching to non-Jews—that is, to the Gentiles. The secret of his success was crafting a message that resounded with the deepest emotional needs of a sprawling empire, including its finest minds.

  Here are the answers, he proclaimed, for which you have been searching all your life. Here is a sense of belonging, in an empire where the bonds of community and traditional identities were dissolving.

  Here is a permanence, in a world where bewildering change had become the rule. Here is a sense of moral purpose, where all other institutions seemed to have lost their way.

  Above all, Paul’s Christian message replaced the prevailing pessimism among Rome’s governing classes with a message of hope and confident expectation. “God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance,” he wrote to the church he founded in Corinth, “in order that you will always have enough of everything and provide an abundance in all your good work.” Even though Christ’s resurrection and the day of judgment seemed only a short time away, the tone of all of Paul’s letters is always upbeat, full of energy and joy. “Am I not an apostle?” he told the Corinthians. “Am I
not free?”4 It was a feeling that many, if not perhaps all, in the Roman Empire might envy.

  This was, in the end, the real secret to Christianity’s success in the late Roman and Greek world. It supplied, or claimed to supply, the answers to all the questions Plato, Aristotle, and their disciples had been asking for nearly five hundred years. By accepting the person of Jesus as the son of God and savior, by absorbing His words and life lessons, man’s soul would finally grasp the timeless wisdom that every previous philosopher had said was the key to happiness. Through Christianity, what Socrates had called “the realm of the pure and everlasting and immortal and changeless” was suddenly, amazingly accessible—not only to the trained and disciplined minds of the Academy and Lyceum (or, later, Plotinus’s seminars), but to every human being.

  It was an idea, and a movement, whose time had truly come.

  The Sermon on the Mount, the third-century Christian Apologist Irenaeus told listeners, takes over where Plato’s dialogues left off. Every Christian would realize the elusive goal that Plotinus was seeking in vain: the joyful reunion of the soul with God. He or she could confidently say with Paul, “O Death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” and hear the answer echo all the way back to Socrates’s prison cell.5