Some Further Comments on Platonic Grace

11 January 2023

Some Further Comments on Platonic Grace

1.  A few days ago I quoted a passage from Plotinus that mentions grace.  Such explicit references to grace are rare in a Platonic context; but I think they have some importance.  And the appearance of the idea of grace in the Enneads has inspired me to gather a few observations on grace in Platonism.

2.  As I have mentioned before, I tend to understand grace in line with the way grace is understood in the Pure Land tradition of East Asian, Mahayana, Buddhism.  In Japan there is a type of guided contemplation called ‘naikan’ that arose in a Pure Land context.  The purpose of naikan is to lead the practitioner to an awareness of how much has been done for them that they are not normally aware of.  Naikan is kind of the opposite of Western therapy with its emphasis on uncovering the wrongs that have been done to the client.  Instead, naikan seeks to uncover the good that has been done for its practitioners.

The view of naikan is that it is natural for people to focus on problems, difficulties, and obstacles in life because we need to focus on them in order to overcome them.  The problem that arises with this focus is that we begin to think of life as nothing but a series of obstacles and miss the countless things that have done for us.

A story from a naikan teacher illustrates this: Someone is walking through a government park.  There was a storm the previous night and a fallen tree blocks the path.  The hiker gets irritated and wonders why things like this ‘always happen’, as well as wondering why the park staff can’t ‘get their act together’.  That same someone two weeks later goes to the same park which now has no fallen trees across its paths; but this person simply accepts the clear path as normal and doesn’t consider that the park staff has worked steadily to allow for this person’s visit to the park to be enjoyable and obstacle-free.

3.  Another naikan teacher I heard said that often we miss what has been done for us because it has not been done specifically for us, that is to say the benefits we receive have not been done with us in mind.  Consider the case of someone who is down on his luck and needs some food.  In one case he receives food from a charity that serves meals to those in need.  In another case, he runs across a bag of groceries that have been accidentally left at a bus stop.  He waits patiently for an hour next to the groceries, and when no one comes by to claim them, he walks away with the groceries which satisfy his hunger.

In the first case it was the specific intention of the charity to feed people like him.  In the second case his hunger was satisfied through a set of unlikely circumstances, but in both cases the hunger is relieved.  From the perspective of naikan, both instances are the same in that they are both instances of the granting of assistance; in both cases the person’s hunger is alleviated.

I see Platonic grace as like the second example of assistance.

4.  The One constantly, ceaselessly, assists us, but not because it has a ‘will’ to do so or because the One is concerned with us as individuals.  The assistance of the One is simply the inevitable consequence of its presence.