Following the Path of Light

30 November 2022

Following the Path of Light

“The First, then, should be compared to light, the next, to the sun, and the third, to the celestial body of the moon, which gets its light from the sun.”

(Plotinus, Ennead V.6.4, Plotinus Ennead V, translated by A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1984, ISBN: 9780674994898, page 211.)

Brian Hines glosses this quote as follows:

“The First, then, should be compared to light, the next [spirit] to the sun, and the third [soul] to the celestial body of the moon, which gets its light from the sun.”

(Brian Hines, Return to the One, Adrasteia Publishing, Salem, Oregon, 2004, ISBN: 9780977735211, page 72.)

 

1.  One of the reasons I enjoy reading Plotinus is that he frequently offers readers helpful analogies, like this one.  This keeps Plotinus’s writing from getting too abstract and gives the reader a way of accessing what Plotinus is teaching through image as well as inference.

2.  The analogy is a helpful way of accessing the idea of emanation, a central understanding of the Platonic tradition.  From immaterial light we move to the material sun, and from the material sun we move to the denser realm of the material moon. 

3.  This series also helps us to understand how the things of the world can lead us back to the One.  If we trace back light to its source, if we trace the light of the moon to the material sun, and if we then trace the material sun to the spiritual sun, we enter into the origin of all things that is, at the same time, beyond all things.

 

 

Beauty is Beyond

15 November 2022

Beauty Is Beyond from Return to the One, by Brian Hines

“After all this talk about the One being formless, limitless, and ineffable, the reader may be getting an impression that the One is some sort of amorphous blob of pure existence without any qualities: shapeless, featureless, colorless.  In a sense this is correct, since the highest encompasses all that is below and so is not any particular thing, but all things.  Yet Plotinus leaves no doubt that the One is the source of all beauty.

‘Therefore the productive power of all is the flower of beauty, a beauty which makes beauty.’ [Ennead VI-7-32]

“Thus the spiritual seeker desiring to return to the One needs only a simple direction.  Follow beauty . . .

“. . . Plotinus tells us that what we dimly recognize in every beautiful object is the beauty beyond.  We dart from one delight to another yet remain unsatisfied.  For we never are able to gaze upon pure spiritual Beauty, only its shadowy material reflection.

‘The lower . . . has a kind of memory of beauty.  But he cannot grasp it in its separateness, but he is overwhelmingly amazed and excited by visible beauties . . . Then all these beauties must be reduced to unity, and he must be shown their origin.’ [Ennead I-3-2]”

(Brian Hines, Return to the One: Plotinus’s Guide to God-Realization, Adrasteia Publishing, Salem, Oregon, 2004, page 65, ISBN: 9780977735211.  Note: Hines quotes from the translations of A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library.)

 

1. There is a wonderful balance in Platonism between its teaching of turning away from the world of the senses and the recognition that Platonism has of the beauty of that same world.  It may, at first, seem like a contradiction, but I don’t think it is.  Because for Platonism beauty is a sign of the transcendental in a material context.  From a Platonist perspective, beauty is the material cosmos reminding us of the source of beauty which is the same as The Good and The One.

2. I write poetry with a strong, though not exclusive, emphasis on Japanese forms.  These days I am primarily focused on English Language Haiku (ELH).  As I was studying the brief history, about 100 years, of English Language Haiku, I came across an article written in an early English Language Haiku Journal that explicitly rejected a Platonist view of beauty.  It seems that this idea had legs in the ELH community in the 70’s and 80’s; that beauty is something to be left behind in writing contemporary ELH.  This surprised me because it has no basis in Japanese poetic theory; it is strictly a feature of modernist theories of art.  It arises from thinking of beauty as nothing more than a culturally contingent preference; and it is often depicted as something less than that.  From this perspective, beauty is an arbitrary claim that has no real significance. 

3. I believe the Platonist view of beauty emerges from direct experience of higher hypostases, such as the forms, in Platonist contemplation.  By this I mean that when Plotinus writes about beauty it is on the basis of contemplative experience of Beauty as such, the source of all beauty that we observe in the material world. 

4. In Platonism the beauty of a poem, of a well-constructed house, of a stone found on a beach, of a melody, of a sunset, all have a common transcendental source.  It is possible to experience that source.  In this way beauty in the world is a gate that is at the same time a path, to The Good and The One.

5.  In Beauty It is Finished

On a sleepless night while the crickets sang

I took a road that went under the sea,

Following the sound of the bells that rang

At the gate that leads to eternity.

 

I wasn’t the only one on that road,

Numberless people were walking with me,

It was effortless, we carried no load,

We were unencumbered, totally free.

 

The waves of the sea, the sound of the bells,

Light in the distance that glows ceaselessly;

They are always speaking, they always tell

Of the way to end all hatred and greed.

 

Follow the beauty to its source, its start;

There’s the pure well of the infinite heart.

 

(Jim Wilson, A Night of Many Sonnets)

 

 

4 November 2022

We Need a Handbook of Platonism

Over the last ten to fifteen years there has emerged a growing interest in classical thought.  In particular there is a growing interest in Stoicism.  Before I retired this year, the small spiritual bookstore that I worked at had a section on Stoicism which we first created three or four years ago in response to growing interest.  In addition, authors of these contemporary books on Stoicism are interviewed on podcasts, often have their own youtube channel, and in general find a place in the growing regions of online social interaction.

Many of these authors create what I would call a ‘handbook’ of Stoicism.  Typically, these books contain chapters about basic Stoic concepts, and simple Stoic contemplations that the reader can easily use in daily life.  If you go to Amazon and search ‘Stoicism’ under books quite a few of these handbooks will appear. 

There used to be a handbook of Platonism.  It was by Alcinous who was a second century Platonist.  This handbook was used, intermittently it seems, in the Middle Period of Platonism, in the Byzantine Empire, and in the West from the Renaissance into the 1800’s. 

It is no longer in use.  I can understand why.  A significant part of the Handbook of Platonism is about cosmology and teaches that topic from a classical perspective.  Cosmology has radically changed and those sections simply do not speak to a modern reader with any sense of authority.  Apropos this point, many of the contemporary handbooks on Stoicism I referred to above leave out Stoic cosmology, concentrating instead on Stoic ethics and methods of self-cultivation.  I think this makes sense.  In a similar way, for example, contemporary Aristotelians tend to not dwell in Aristotle’s cosmology.

There are some spiritual traditions that I think of as having a weak cosmological commitment; by this I mean that their teachings are not necessarily linked to a particular cosmological scheme such as geocentrism vs. heliocentrism.  Buddhism is an example of such a tradition; as Buddhism was transmitted from one culture to another throughout Asia it tended to accept the cosmology of those cultures.  This is because Buddhism’s primary focus is on ascetic ethical cultivation and meditative practice.  For example, the First Noble Truth of suffering does not depend on whether or not the sun or the earth is at the center of the solar system.

In my opinion Platonism is similar to Buddhism in this regard.  The central teachings of Platonism, such as emanationism, the existence of forms and that material objects are instantiations of these forms, and the virtue ethics that drives the practice of Platonism, do not depend on a particular material cosmology for their efficacy.

What would a contemporary Handbook of Platonism include?  Offhand, the following comes to mind: A little about Plato and the history of Platonism, something about Socrates, an overview of the spiritual ascent, perhaps using the parable of the cave as a frame for this, a discussion about the ultimate goal of The Good, The One, and The Beautiful, a little about rebirth, and the deep peace that comes from walking the Platonic path.  The structure might begin with a look at the human condition, followed by the suggestion that Platonism offers a way to resolve the negatives of that condition, followed by the methods of ethics, asceticism, and contemplation.

There has been one attempt, sort of, for such a handbook.  I am thinking of the book ‘Return to the One’ by Brian Hines.  ‘Return to the One’ is an introduction to Plotinus and I have often suggested it when people ask me about how to access the writings of Plotinus.  ‘Return to the One’ does have an introductory character, and it has its virtues, but I am thinking of something simpler, something that could be read by a High School student.

Perhaps someone is already working on such a handbook; it wouldn’t surprise me.