The ONE of Neoplatonism

I.The One

(εἷς, μία, ἕν/heís, mía, hén; μονάς, ἑνάς, μόνωσις, ἑνότης/monás, henás, mónōsis, henótēs, “unity”) is a term adopted by Plato and his successors to refer to what they also called “the Good,” and by later theologians to refer to God. Plato was taken to have shown in his dialogues such as De re publica and Parmenides that nothing can be said of that One without contradiction: it is not to be conceived as something that can be perceived or known as a reality distinct from anyone’s perception or knowledge of it, nor does it exist, even as a unique example of an imaginary kind. Existence itself is something that has only a secondary or derived reality: not everything that can be conceived actually does exist, but everything that can be conceived depends upon the One. It follows, so Plotinus argued, that the highest cognitive state was not strictly intellectual: even perfect intellectual knowledge, as enjoyed by the divine intellect, in which there is no chance of error because there is no chance that the act of knowing and what is known could be separated from each other, still embodies two distinct aspects (knowing and what is known), which are each derived from something, the One, that transcends them both (Plot. Enneads 6.9.2). On the one hand, the One contains, implicitly, whatever can be; on the other, it is nothing that we – or anyone – could think or imagine (Plot. Enneads 5.2.1). Even the One itself is not “conscious” of itself, and neither does it have any plans, intentions, memories, or expectations.

II.

It is often supposed that Plotinus and his successors believed that it was possible to rise to the spiritual level of the One, a state beyond mere intellectual knowledge, in which there was no further distinction between the knower and the known. Whereas the mass of humanity could only hope, at best, to experience the presence of the divine intellect, in recognition of the abiding forms of being, a few adepts could be blessed by the presence of the One itself, and return from that condition unable to say anything coherent about it. According to Plotinus’s biographer Porphyry (Vit. Plot. 23), Plotinus had achieved mystical “union with the One” four times. Plotinus’s own writing make that interpretation suspect: “being united with the One” may only be to be unified, and the experience be only that intellectual grasp of reality which Plotinus identifies as the second hypostasis. In his rebuttal of the “Gnostics” (Enneads 2.9), Plotinus condemns those who think themselves endowed with any superior, non-intellectual access to God. Only the One is independent, and it is only by being, or becoming, Intellect that anything can be aware of its presence (Plot. Enneads 6.9.3f.).

III.

If nothing can be truly said about the One and no one can ever report, even after “mystical union,” what the One is like, what reason can there be to refer to it at all? Standard, admittedly misleading attributes (as that it is formless, unknowing, and without plans or memories) make it almost as close to Nothing at All as is “pure matter,” and seem to place it well beyond any serious religious interest. How could the God of Abraham, or Jesus, be identified with a blank? Alternatively, if we suppose that the One is present everywhere (since nothing can exist as anything without being one such a thing) and in every act of knowledge (since to know anything is to know it as one devoid of contradiction), how can something that is compatible with any thing or any cognition have any explanatory or ethical force? It is not surprising that the kind of negative or apophatic theology associated with mystical unknowing is rarely welcomed by ordinary believers.

IV.

Nothing can be truly said about the One, since any such statement will involve predicating one thing of another, and so misleadingly distinguishing what cannot be divided. Neither can the One be subject to the laws of fate or physics (or possibly even logic), since the laws there are only laws at all because the One so “wills.” It may seem to follow that any imaginable world and any imaginable code of ethics could as easily express the One – and hence that there is nothing to express, nor any use in postulating it. But a clearer sight of what Plotinus and his successors intended may resolve the problem. Seeing clearly and seeing whole, they reckoned, would help us realize the life and beauty that spills continually from a single source – or rather, is that source so far as we can apprehend or experience it. When the Intellect sees the One, Plotinus declares, it sees it as Many (Plot. Enneads 3.8.8). What is said about the One may never be strictly true: it may still awaken the appropriate experience in us – the experience, that is, of every thing as a particular expression of the beauty that is eternally willed. What lies beyond beauty is what we label “the Good,” “the One,” or even “the Hyperbeautiful” (Plot. Enneads 1.8.2). Knowing it as such is not to “be” it in any any stronger sense than that anything at all already is (since anything at all derives its being from one and the same source). Rather than a “mystical” theology, Plotinus offers a “sacramental” theology, as generations of Platonizing poets and theologians (cf. Thomas Traherne) have recognized.

V.

Theologians in the Platonic tradition may rely more than most on a lengthy intellectual discipline, whereby they may come to see and experience things as the play or emanation of something that demands their complete devotion. “The One” simply labels the direction of their flight, which is (as Plotinus said) no journey for the feet (Plot. Enneads 1.6.8). Talking, or not talking, about that journey may both be ways of journeying. But Platonizing theologians, also more than most, make some attempt to find appropriate metaphors for how the One creates. Such cosmologies may be something other than literal: Plotinus makes clear (e.g. in Enneads 4.3.9) that narratives about the supposed history of things are only devices to help with the analysis of an eternal reality. In describing how the world is unfolded from the One, Plotinus may be describing how we come to experience it in the light of the One. But theologians have usually, with some justice, thought that the analysis was metaphysical as well as anagogical. The divine intellect exists in the contemplation of the One and is filled with all the forms of being that singly and collectively reflect or represent what is otherwise unconceivable (Plot. Enneads 6.7.15). The soul in turn exists in contemplation of the intellect, experiencing separately and successively what exists unchangingly in the intellect. The world of nature, our immediate location, is the last derivative reality: nothing is real that is not beautiful (Plot. Enneads 1.6.5), but even that nothingness which is darkness and mere matter is a product of the One, at its furthest reach (Plot. Enneads 4.3.9). Without the light there would be no darkness, without the One there could be no multiplicity.

VI.

Whence, then, is evil? A fully monistic system which urges us, equivalently, to see the One in everything (both singly and collectively) and to believe that everything is as the One selects must always seem at odds with our own sensual and ethical experience. It certainly does not seem that everything is as everyone (or anyone) would wish. Maybe everything is good as it “exists,” potentially or intellectually, in God – but once things come to exist in nature, what counts as good for one thing often or invariably seems to be at odds with what is good for another. Materiality, so Plotinus sometimes thinks, is the root of evil (Enneads 1.8.4) – though he also firmly denounces those who think the world of nature base: what better material world could we imagine (Enneads 2.9.4)? Maybe much that we find amiss with things is no more than our own forgetfulness: thinking ourselves confined within particular times and spaces we complain about what are no more than robust childhood games (cf. Plot. Enneads 3.2.15). Maybe the soul’s fall into materiality is the product of a wish to have things “for our own” which cannot be owned by individuals (Plot. Enneads 5.1.1) or of an error of location: everything we see as good and beautiful within the world of nature is a reflection of the soul’s own beauty (as it in turn is a reflection of the intellect as it is of the One). Those who realize that they already possess, within themselves, a truer value than they can find “out there” have less occasion to be greedy, angry, or despairing. But the original fall or error remains incomprehensible. Granted that, with the gods’ gratuitous assistance,we might retrieve our error, why did “we,” or Soul, or Intellect, first make it, and why should such a world be what the One ordains?

VII.

For Plotinus the very nature of the One is to be generous rather than demanding. It neither needs nor begrudges any being’s good (Enneads 5.5.12). There is plenty of room for every thing, and matter itself – considered as pure extension – is indeed a fitting image of the One, as the world of nature is an image, in turn, of Intellect. The challenge to those of us (all of us) trapped here and now in the world of nature is to look “up” or “back” to that sole Good, which can be enjoyed by everything without cost or diminution. If we continue to compete instead for lesser images of what is good, or else resent their loss it is an easy error which provides a spectacle that the gods and even “we ourselves,” in some less confined condition, could appreciate.

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