Plotinus and the Ascent. How the Pagan Mind Climbed, Alone, Without Help

The life of Plotinus opens with a sentence you cannot get past: "Plotinus, the philosopher our contemporary, seemed ashamed of being in the body." So writes Porphyry – the student who lived at his teacher's side in the last years and edited his works. Ashamed. Of having a body. Plotinus would not say which city he was from, who his father was, in what year he was born. When his student Amelius pressed him to sit for a portrait, he refused with an argument rather than a whim: "Is it not enough to carry about this image in which nature has enclosed us? Must I also leave behind, as a desired spectacle to posterity, an image of the image?" The body is already a copy of the true self; a painting would be a copy of the copy.

This man, Plotinus, arrived in Rome around 245 CE, when he was forty, and opened a school in the house of a devoted friend named Gemina. The empire around him was tearing apart. The Goths were raiding the Balkans. The Persians had destroyed the army of Emperor Valerian, and he died in the Shah's prison. In five years Rome cycled through fifteen emperors. It was not an age in which you wanted to live.

Hadot cautions us not to rush to a diagnosis of that shame at the body: "If there is psychosis here, it is that of an entire age." The whole third century was sick with this disgust, not one fragile soul.

Plotinus lived in it quietly. His students – among them senators – would name him as arbiter in their hardest disputes. He took in orphans, became their guardian, managed their property until they came of age, audited their books, went to court for them. "Until the young people take to philosophy," he used to say, "their fortunes and revenues must be kept intact for them." In twenty-six years in Rome, Porphyry reports, he never made an enemy of a single citizen. This is the same man who four times in his life went through an experience that Hadot would later call "union with the One."

Small scenes prove this better than any thesis. A valuable necklace was stolen from the widow Chione, who lived in his house with her children; the slaves were lined up before Plotinus, and after one glance he pointed to a man: "That one is the thief." The man confessed and gave it back. And when Porphyry himself was contemplating suicide, Plotinus sensed it, came to him, and said the wish came "not from a spiritual condition, but from some kind of melancholic illness," and ordered him away, to Sicily. Porphyry went – and lived. Hadot sums it up: Plotinus' gentleness "was a conscious spiritual attitude which presupposed all of his spiritual experience." He was "no sage, hiding in an ivory tower."

Strange stories circled this sober, practical man: an Egyptian priest who evoked his guardian spirit in the Roman Temple of Isis found it was no lesser daimon but a god – "the guiding-spirit within you is not of the lower degree but a God."

Notice the strange contrast. He was a doer. He did not lift off the ground. But inside him something was moving in a direction that neither Plato nor Aristotle had yet described with precision. In Plotinus, philosophy becomes an inner ascent. Not an argument. Not a dialectic. An ascent.

For Plotinus, reality is not a flat row of things. It is a multi-story building, and each floor is a more real level of being than the one beneath it.

At the very top is the One (Hen). It is so simple that nothing can quite be said about it. It does not "exist" – because to exist already means to be some thing, and the One is beyond any determination. It does not "think" – because to think requires an object, and the One has nothing to set over against itself. It is the source without a source.

Out of the One, like light from the sun, emanates the second level: Intellect (Nous). This is the realm of Plato's Forms, a reality full of eternal, unchanging structures from which everything else is then built.

Out of Intellect emanates the third level: Soul (Psychē). The Soul is the border across which Intellect touches time. Here motion, duration, history first appear.

Out of Soul emanates the fourth level: nature and matter. This is our everyday reality – plants, animals, our bodies, our errands.

These levels are not "places" somewhere outside of you. They are levels inside you. Hadot underscores this: "All these levels of reality become levels of inner life, levels of the self." Somewhere inside you, right now, is a part still in the One. Somewhere in you is Intellect, contemplating the Forms. Somewhere in you lives a Soul moving in time. And somewhere is your body, holding a phone. All of this is you, on different floors.

For Plotinus, philosophy is to climb from the lower floor to the upper. Not in imagination – in reality.

This is not a metaphor. Plotinus has a concrete technique. In treatise V.1 he describes it tersely: "Turn your gaze inward."

Step one: realize that you are not your body. You use a body – but it is not you. It is an instrument. Watch yourself using it – and notice in you the one who watches.

Step two: realize that you are not your thoughts. Most of what you think is noise – anxiety, plans, envy, gossip. That is the surface level of the Soul. The one who can notice that this is noise is not the noise. It is the one who hears it.

Step three: raise your attention to Intellect. Here mathematics, music, mirror-precise structures live. You move from noise into beauty. For some people, this happens through art. For some, through geometry. For some, through the rhythm of conversation with someone they love.

Step four – the hardest, the rarest. Raise attention beyond Intellect, to the One. Here there are no objects. No forms. No you. There is only – Hadot again – "encounter. A sudden, instantaneous experience that has no duration and no content other than itself." Plotinus himself describes it as the coincidence of two centres: "he is one with the One, as the centre of one circle coincides with the centre of another." And Hadot's key point: the experience can be alluded to, not taught.

Porphyry, our one witness, puts himself into the sentence too: "Four times, during the period I passed with him, he achieved this Term by the ineffable Act. To this God I also declare, I, Porphyry, that in my sixty-eighth year I too was once admitted and I entered into Union."

Four times in six years – on the word of a man who reached it once himself, at sixty-eight. And that is a ceiling, not a permanent dwelling. Hadot describes the way itself as a "conversion of attention" rather than a stair you settle on: you rise, fall back into consciousness, which is "more of a memory than a presence," and rise again. Four is four peaks of that oscillation over six years. Remember that number. It is the most important thing we know about pagan mysticism.

If Plotinus has the single greatest short text in all of ancient philosophy, it is Ennead I.6, "On Beauty." A grace note: in Porphyry's chronological list, "On Beauty" stands first – literally the first thing Plotinus ever wrote. And he wrote strangely, never rereading a line, working the whole design out in his head, then "wrote it all out at one jet, as though he were copying from a book." Read it. Twelve pages. It will do something to you.

He begins simply. What is beauty? Why do we notice it? Why does one symmetry move us and another not? The standard Greek answer was: beauty is proportion. Plotinus refuses it. The color of an evening sky is beautiful. A single star is beautiful. A single pure sound is beautiful. If beauty is proportion, what is proportional in one star?

His answer: what we call beauty is the gleam of a higher level of reality breaking through a lower one. A beautiful face is not the geometry of that face. It is the moment when, through the matter of the face, we see what stands behind it – a soul touching Intellect, Intellect rooted in the One. Beauty is the trace of God in things.

Therefore when we love something beautiful, we are not "making a mistake" by imagining that matter can save us. We are correctly recognizing a sign. The mistake is to get stuck on the sign. The task is to pass through the sign to what it points at. Love of bodies is a beginner's level of love. It is not false. It is incomplete.

In the same treatise he gives the method, as an image of the sculptor working a block that must become beautiful: "never stop sculpting your own statue, until the divine splendour of virtue shines in you." Hadot warns that this carving takes away rather than adds. The statue is already in the marble; you uncover it by removing, you do not mould a new face.

And the image itself is no ornament. For Hadot it is the motto of Plotinus' whole project: his treatises "are spiritual exercises in which the soul sculpts herself: that is, she purifies and simplifies herself, rises up to the plane of pure thought, and finally transcends herself in ecstasy." To read "On Beauty" is already to pick up the chisel.

This is perhaps the most beautiful argument about beauty in the history of philosophy. And it is a pagan argument. Without a Creator God. Without an Incarnation. Without a Cross. By inner ascent alone.

Augustine will read Plotinus before his conversion and say: "I found there almost everything. Almost everything." What was the "almost"? That is the next lecture.

Plotinus must be read with respect. He is the highest, the most honest pagan thinking about the way upward. No Greek went so far. No one.

And yet there are three things he cannot give.

First: he cannot give community. The ascent in Plotinus is the affair of one person gathering himself inwardly and climbing alone. Yes, he had students; they climbed together. But technically you climb alone. The one below is not your problem. The one who cannot climb is not your problem. The will of the One does not come down to catch the fallen. Mirror symmetry: only the one who has already begun to climb can climb further. The one stuck below stays below. The Enneads themselves end on this line: "a solitary flight to the Solitary One." MacKenna's celebrated rendering – "the flight of the alone to the Alone" – lends it a poetry the literal text does not carry.

And a bitter irony: once, Plotinus did try to give community a body. He asked the emperor Gallienus for a ruined city where his circle could live under the laws of Plato – Platonopolis. The court, out of petty jealousy, buried the plan. Even his one communal project died.

Second: he cannot give blood. The God of Plotinus does not suffer. He does not know death. He does not love personally. He is the highest perfect source of light, complete in himself, who does not need those he made. And yet this is no cold abstraction of a god: the highest Good in Plotinus is "gentle, mild, and very delicate, and always at the disposition of whomever desires it." It simply waits for you to climb, and does not come down after the one who has fallen. If you lost a child, Plotinus would say to you: "the child's soul returns to its level, which is higher than matter. Rejoice." That is not empty. It is even deep. But it is not an embrace. It is not a God who sat down beside you in the dirt and wept with you. That is not in Plotinus, and he would say that to look for it is to misunderstand what God is.

Third: he cannot give equality. In his hierarchy some souls are higher, some lower. A woman's body is lower than a man's. A slave is lower than the free. It is not hatred – it is simply the structure of reality as Plotinus sees it. If you were born at the bottom, your business is to climb. The stairs are open to all, but the hierarchy itself is sacred.

And he died as he had lived – alone. Worn down by an illness that took his voice and his sight, he withdrew to Campania; only the physician Eustochius reached him in time – Porphyry was not there, for years earlier Plotinus himself had sent him away to Sicily. "I have long been waiting for you," Plotinus told him. "I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All." As he spoke, a snake crept under the couch and slipped away into a hole in the wall; at that same moment Plotinus died. He was sixty-six. You could not invent a fitter ending for this philosophy – and it is a solitary one.

Here the hinge turns. A hundred years after the death of Plotinus, in North Africa, a Christian Latin-speaking boy will read Plotinus and say: this is it. Then he will add: no, this is not yet all. Because the One I am looking for came down himself. No stairs. He descended.

This is Augustine. That is the next lecture.

If Plotinus had been thrown out of history, we would have lost one of the most beautiful possibilities of being human.

Because there are people for whom religion does not work. There are people who will never be able to kneel. There are people who have only reason, only honesty, only the desire for truth. For them Plotinus is a lifeline. He says: you can get there. Not to a personal God – to the highest. On your own. By discipline. Silence and attention will do the rest.

Not every student who passed through his school converted to Christianity. Some remained pagan – and lived beautiful lives. The Emperor Julian, the last pagan emperor of Rome, was a Neoplatonist. He was a good man by every standard – just, disciplined, merciful, faithful to duty. He simply did not believe what his neighbors had begun to believe.

And here is what matters. The Christian tradition that comes next does not throw Plotinus out. It does not burn his books. Augustine takes him as a teacher. Pseudo-Dionysius (whom we may one day make a lecture on) rewrites him entirely in Christian terms. Duns Scotus, Thomas Aquinas, even Meister Eckhart – all read Plotinus.

This is a noble act of civilization. The highest pre-Christian thought was not destroyed. It was lifted inside. What human reason had reached on its own was recognized as real – insufficient, but real. This is grace that does not destroy nature but perfects it. Aquinas will later give us that formula. But it was already at work here.

If you want to feel what it means to be an heir of civilization, read Plotinus through. Twenty pages of I.6. Then you will be ready to read Augustine the way his own contemporaries read him: knowing that he goes further, but not further than where Plotinus pointed.

"Almost everything," said Augustine. "Almost everything."