Transcription
For a myriad of reasons, intellectual productivity doesn't seem evenly distributed through history. Certain centuries and even decades are especially witness to Titanic explosions and philosophical and scientific developments. Of those, the third Century of the Common Era was especially rich.
The intellectual, spiritual, and philosophical ferment of the Alexandria milieu was truly profound. This was a world where no one intellectual tradition had established hegemony, much less state power to enforce a particular orthodoxy. And everyone, from the Stoics, mystery religions, Hermeticists, Roman Imperial religion, indigenous Egyptian beliefs, the Platonists, various species of emerging Christianity, and Judaism, among many others, vied for adherence in the marketplace of both ideas and religious devotion.
It was into this environment that the Egyptian philosopher Plotinus would emerge, and at his school in Rome, would develop one of the most influential philosophical systems in history, what scholars now call Neoplatonism. However, Plotinus's school, which he took to be the true and authentic inheritance of all of accurate Hellenic philosophy, derivative, of course, from the Divine Plato, became infiltrated, one might say, with a rival religious philosophy: Gnosticism.
In his most sustained polemic, Plotinus aims a substantial portion of his famed Enneads at precisely combating the Gnostics. But what did he take their beliefs to be, and what were his central philosophical concerns? While proto-orthodox Christian polemics against Gnosticism, such as those launched by Irenaeus or Hippolytus of Rome, are well known—I've actually done a whole episode on Irenaeus—in fact, the attack launched by Plotinus against the Gnostics is significantly lesser known, mostly because of its highly technical nature and its often very elliptical style.
But with that in mind, let's turn to Plotinus's arguments against Gnosticism as part of a massive collaboration on Neoplatonism here among Religious Studies YouTube. Make sure to check out the description for a full list of the episodes as part of this collaboration. But if you're interested in magic, Hermetic philosophy, alchemy, Kabbalah, or the history of the occult, make sure to subscribe here to Esoterica and check out my other content on topics and other terrorism, including curated playlists. Also, if you want to support my work of providing accessible, scholarly, and free content on topics and other terrorism here on YouTube, I hope you consider supporting my work on Patreon, which you can check out with a one-time donation, with the Super Thanks option, or you can even buy an Esoterica shirt if you like that. But now, let's turn to Plotinus's anti-Gnostic polemic. I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.
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The eventual triumph of state-backed orthodox Christianity over virtually every other rival school of ancient philosophy and religion often skews our ability to see history with much in the way of clarity. For instance, it's easy to think of Gnosticism, as much as it was a particularism in any strong sense, primarily as just a rival or a heresy of Christianity simpliciter. Indeed, that's often how Gnosticism is taught, through the blends of the proto-orthodox polemics launched by people like Irenaeus or Hippolytus of Rome. Despite this, many so-called Gnostics would have understood themselves simply as just Christians, and other variants that now fall under the category of Gnosticism would have likely thought of themselves as completely independent schools of thought.
However, it's clear that not only did some early Christians find fault with what they termed Gnosticism, but so did Plotinus, though for quite different reasons. But before turning to Plotinus's attack on them, what do we know about these particular Gnostics that he had in his sights? Plotinus's most sustained attack can be found in his famous book, the Enneads 2.9, the last section of a much larger treatise that scholars now know as the Gnostic Schrifts. However, despite his lengthy and technical polemic, we actually learn very little about the targets of his attack from the attack itself. Unlike, say, Irenaeus's attack, which actually proceeded by means of religious exposé, explaining in torturous detail the extremely baroque system of emanations precisely to show just how, at least to his mind, ridiculous the Gnostic systems were, Plotinus's method is rather different. It's quite technical, targeted strikes on the philosophical tenets that underpinned those very Gnostic systems. And he also just calls them a lot of names. He just makes fun of them, just by calling them friends at one point toward the end. I mean, with friends like Plotinus, as the saying goes.
However, if we take behind us to student Porphyry, it actually appears that the Gnostic targets of Plotinus were in fact Christian heretics, as Porphyry calls them, for whom revelatory texts attributed to Zostrianos and Zoroaster were actually authoritative. Further, and surely much to the chagrin of Plotinus, these Gnostics tell that Plato had not really penetrated into the depth of intelligible substance. Again, at least according to Porphyry. In fact, we learn that not only did Plotinus attack these Gnostics, but so did his students, producing dozens of volumes to refute the claims of these revelatory texts like Zostrianos. And that sets up the first set of elements that Plotinus found unacceptable about the Gnostics that he aimed at first: these revelatory texts. One of which actually survives in the Nag Hammadi collection, Zostrianos.
They are just that, their revelation rather than philosophically reasoned positions. Now, Plotinus had no problem with mystical ecstatic states. He underwent such states in his own life. But he maintained that the truths of reality had to be settled through reasonable philosophical analysis, and not just, "I saw it in a dream or a vision." Secondly, Plotinus, despite his own Egyptian origins, maintained a kind of Hellenic chauvinism, with Plato being the sole authentic source of philosophical wisdom, thus rejecting these vaguely Eastern, even Persian, God forbid Persians, as the Greeks' sources of wisdom. Simply put, Zostrianos and Zoroaster were foreigners, and their revelations, barbaric stupidity, as Plotinus puts it. I'm not kidding. He calls them bumpkins at one point.
Of course, if that were all of his arguments, if it was just making fun of them and saying it wasn't really Greek, then we'd find it rightly wanting. I mean, it's funny seeing an otherwise sublime philosopher like Plotinus calling his Gnostic opponents idiotic bumpkins, but it being funny doesn't really make it a compelling objection to Gnostic philosophy itself. Generally speaking, we can conclude the specific Gnostics that Plotinus targeted were probably some species of Christians who subscribed to a variant of Gnosticism that scholars now recognize as Platonizing Sethianism. That's a mouthful, so-called because of the salvific role played by the third son of Adam in its mythology, and it was heavily influenced by Platonism, specifically the Stoic-Aristotle-infused Platonism of that period that we now call Middle Platonism.
But before turning to Plotinus's objections, it's worth very briefly, very briefly, to summarize that very Gnostic mythology that he probably had in his sights, and to do so, I'll be recounting a variant most classically described in a text called the Apocryphon of John. In fact, if you want to dive deeper into that text and its mythology, I've made a whole episode about it, so feel free to check it out in the card above. But the basic myth begins with the great invisible Spirit, the utterly transcendent Father, the Monad, gazing into himself in a kind of primordial water. This inward gaze produces a reflection, the Divine Mother or Barbelo, out of which the rest of reality will flow. Indeed, with the consent of the Father, Barbelo actually emanates a series of Aeons or eternities, eventually resulting in the production of the Divine Sun or Autogenes, the self-generated one, though it does come from Bythos, who was given authority over those very Aeons. From the Sun flow further luminaries, from which 12 more Aeons also emanate. If you want Aeons, they got Aeons, they got Aeons for days around here.
The last of which is the Divine Wisdom, or Sophia. It's Sophia who actually sought out to generate further reality, though without the consent of the Father, that ultimately generates the horrible, demonic Demiurge, who, in its jealous blindness, creates the physical universe as we know it, ruled over by the horrifying planetary Archons. Lovecraftian. Following the repentance of Sophia, a Divine spark is smuggled into the physical creatures of clay made by Yaldabaoth, that'd be us human beings, which can guide them out of the prison world of physical reality back to the true spiritual world. Eventually, the Savior appears and teaches the truth, which was actually known and taught by Seth. It's Seth, the in part of that Middle Platonizing Sethian Gnosticism, about the origins and tragic fall of the world out of its pure spiritual state until the dungeon of physical existence. Indeed, it is knowledge, or gnosis, of this reality and the possibility of escape that makes the system truly Gnostic. It is this esoteric gnosis, or wisdom, or knowledge, that proves ultimately salvific in the system.
Now, to be sure, there are lots of variants of this myth to be found, even within the Sethian literature. Zostrianos is a mess of this kind of stuff. But the main features here: the primal transcendent Monad, the emanation of the Aeons, the tragedy of Sophia, and the creation of the Demiurge and the physical cosmos, along with the role of the Savior, especially Seth and Jesus, to provide the Divine salvific knowledge, remain fairly consistent. And it's precisely along those lines, or at least the philosophical substructure of this myth, that Plotinus is going to take aim.
But what's first striking and interesting about Plotinus's objection is that he basically never outlines or even directly combats this rather elaborate mythology. Unlike his Christian counterpart, Irenaeus, the reason for that should be relatively clear from the earlier discussion. It's revelation, and getting into a dogmatic dispute is pointless for Plotinus, as it is for anyone else. What matters for him are the philosophical suppositions which underwrite that mythology. Of course, if he's able to show the fundamentally illogical nature of all these suppositions, then he'll be able to dispense with the whole mythological superstructure as well. If you show the philosophy as nonsense, then the myth goes with it.
So, what are his actual philosophical objections? In general, the Enneads 2.9 contains about 20 philosophical objections to Gnosticism, which can be vaguely grouped into three interlocking categories: metaphysical objections, cosmological objections, and moral objections. So let's tackle each of those in turn.
The metaphysical objections center on the triadic structure that Plotinus builds out of Plato's metaphysics. As a brief reminder, from the utterly transcendent One, the first emanation is Plotinus's Nous, or the Divine Mind, or Logos, typically identified both with the Demiurge and Plato's Timaeus, but also, kind of, the realm of the Platonic Forms more generally. From Nous flows the World Soul, of which there is a higher and lower dimension; the lower dimension being identified with nature. From the lower World Soul flows individual human souls, and finally Hyle, or matter, the lowest ontological register before everything sort of tatters off into non-being.
For Plotinus, this triadic structure of the One, Mind, and Soul is both metaphysically and logically exhaustive, and thus the introduction of any other metaphysical registers into the system is either going to prove to be redundant, unnecessary, or just mistaken. Thus, it follows that the introduction into this elegantly triadic Platonic system of the Divine Mother, or Barbelo, and all those Aeons, so many Aeons, or Sophia as wisdom, distinct from Nous or Mind, much less the hideous Creator demon Yaldabaoth—this all introduces not only entities beyond ontological necessity, to kind of crib William of Ockham, but it also introduces logical incoherence into the immanentory process itself.
Interestingly enough, this kind of critique is also deployed by Irenaeus as well. We're both polemicists see logical contradictions in how, for instance, Nous or Mind works in the Gnostic mythology. That Sophia can be distinct from Nous is incoherent to them. Thus, for Plotinus, not only are all these baroque hypostatic entities of the Gnostic mythology unnecessary or redundant, they also confuse the very process of emanation itself by muddying the ontological structural hierarchy and, by extension, the very function of those entities in the broader metaphysical system. In other words, Plotinus feels that the elegant triadic system he's inherited or developed from Plato is both necessary and sufficient for the metaphysical, ethical, and soteriological analysis of reality, and the Gnostic mythology only serves to confuse what is an otherwise perfectly fine Platonic project.
Further, Plotinus projects the idea that any soul can fall in any metaphysical sense or become alienated from its source. For him, soul remains soul, regardless of how it becomes associated with the physical body. While he does admit of a kind of logical distinction between higher and lower registers of soul, he rejects the idea that this logical distinction tracks any kind of conditional shift in the quality of the soul as such. Though, frankly, I'm not sure the Gnostics did either. The Gnostic concept of the soul is that it is a divine spark smuggled into physical reality, which allows human beings a chance at salvation despite being born into this whole prison cosmos business. So, insofar as it is actually a divine spark, it is divine and not fallen in the ontological sense. But that's Plotinus's mistake to make, not ours. I think he also just doesn't like the idea of soul being somehow alienated from its nature. But again, I'm not sure the Gnostics make that mistake.
Of course, this purely metaphysical line of objection leads directly into the most famous objection by Plotinus against the Gnostics: their metaphysical denigration of the physical cosmos. As I mentioned earlier, most versions of this Gnostic mythology have the creation of the world as the kind of end result of Sophia's mistaken production of the horrible, blind Demiurge. That Demiurge, or Saklas, the Blind One, is the jealous God of the Old Testament itself, goes on to create the physical world to rule over in his ignorance of the higher spiritual reality from which all things truly flow. Thus, for the Gnostics that Plotinus has in mind, this cosmos is a kind of prison ruled over by evil planetary Archons.
This is profoundly mistaken, according to Plotinus. In his system, the emanation of the cosmos is an extension of the spiritual goodness and beauty of those higher spiritual realms, not a tragic break with those realms. In keeping with the traditional position of Plato, as it's found in the Timaeus, the Neoplatonic Demiurge impressed upon matter the absolute best forms they were able to. Thus, given the ontological limitations of matter—again, while the lowest ontological register before, you know, becoming non-being—but certainly matter isn't evil for Plato or Plotinus, although they kind of talk like that sometimes. The physical cosmos simply has certain limitations inherent to the nature of matter itself, and that's not the fault of the Demiurge. In other words, the Plotinian Demiurge created the best possible world given the building materials at hand. Those limitations are to be spiritually overcome, not denigrated as matter as somehow inherently evil, as the Gnostics had it, at least the Gnostics that Plotinus is arguing with.
In fact, just as in Plato, it's precisely by first recognizing the beauty of the physical world, even just beautiful people, beautiful people, that our souls awaken the possibility of contemplating Beauty and Goodness as such, beauty and goodness in themselves, the Forms of Beauty and Goodness, something utterly unimaginable for the Gnostics, for whom, again, matter was just purely and simply evil. By extension, far from being malevolent Archons, the planetary beings are exalted and beneficent, extending and communicating the influence of Divine Providence down the chain of being to us. I mean, stars and planets are pretty to look at. They're beautiful. This Plotinian theory of evil as privation, of course, would be taken up by Augustine, with Orthodox Christianity generally in agreement with the rejection of metaphysical evil as such. Evil is a privation in this philosophy.
And not only does Plotinus reject the idea that physical creation is evil, but he also takes the idea of creation in time or a creation by a demonic Gnostic Demiurge as just being logically nonsensical. If the transcendent One is beyond all space and time—a position that actually Plotinus and the Gnostics shared—then it makes no logical sense to speak of a creation outside of eternity. What is the ontological totality, including matter, is simply always already in the sea of eternity, all in all. Given the immanentory system employed by both Plotinus and the Gnostics to some degree, Plotinus felt that it was a logical and metaphysical mistake to conclude that the physical cosmos was in any way evil, or that our souls were somehow ontologically marooned or alienated from the Divine etiology while embodied.
Indeed, for Plotinus, this mistake on the part of the Gnostics led to his final polemical attack against them. But the Gnostics were not only wrong about first philosophy, or metaphysics, and the physical cosmos, but that those errors led them to become morally erroneous, misunderstanding and failing to achieve what was most important in human life: for that life to be lived virtuously. The basic moral failure on the part of the Gnostics, for Plotinus at least, was twofold and pretty classically Greek moral failures. The first was the moral failure of hubris, which flows from the Gnostic cosmology, and the second, flowing from that hubris, was a uniquely bivalent failure of quietism on the one hand, and antinomianism on the other. Let's take both of these in turn.
Because the Gnostics take the physical world to be evil, only their souls—and recall that some Gnostics even felt that only a tiny group of human beings, the pneumatics or spirituals, could ever really be redeemed—but their souls, and their souls alone, were the only good things in the entire cosmos. Thus, for Plotinus, these Gnostics exalt their own souls over and against all of the rest of the cosmos, including what he took to be the planetary and stellar beings, those of a much higher spiritual dignity, given their greater proximity to the spiritual realm up there. Thus, for Plotinus, the Gnostics were guilty of, among the worst sins, aside from, you know, mucking up Plato, which he really can't abide, they were guilty of hubris for thinking that their souls, and their souls alone, were the only ontologically good entities in the whole of the universe.
Of course, the Gnostics also posited what they and other Christians held to be the New Earth. This is another realm of spiritual fiction, which the spirituals or pneumatics escaped to after physical death, or would come at the end of the world as a release from this realm. In fact, he also attacks the idea that the Gnostics could use magic or charms to manipulate the higher planetary or astral beings, because those astral beings were spiritually inferior to the spiritual Gnostics. Now, this issue of magic and theology would go on to prove pretty decisive as Neoplatonism developed, but go check out Angela's episode for that, and I'll be working on it myself in the future. But for Plotinus, all of this was an outrage because it mistook the ontological hierarchy, which was precisely what he took to be evidence of the providential goodness and beauty emanated by the One. The One, the Gnostics also allegedly believed in, as well. By elevating themselves above this world, they were engaging in a Titanic moral blunder, blasphemy, really, against the very One they thought they were escaping to, at least according to Plotinus.
Further, that the world could be divided into spirituals and intellectuals and the fundamentally irredeemable folks like myself, probably was logically nonsense. Atop hubris, and insofar as all human beings were emanated as a species and dealt with soul and intellect equally to some degree. In this way, Plotinus is a kind of metaphysical egalitarian, and also a kind of Hellenic conservative, which is an interesting combination.
But wait, there's more. From this hubris also developed, again, at least according to Plotinus, a further bivalent moral failure of quietism and antinomianism. Quietism, or the failure to act in the pursuance of virtue or the avoidance of vice, was precisely the result of the belief that physical action takes place in the theater of the physical world, which again is utterly evil and thus utterly incapable of being redeemed or reformed. The goodness of the soul is at a profound ontological remove from it, all according to these Gnostics. Thus, the external world, even from the indifference of the external goods and ills, the diaphora, that were the subject of a lot of criticisms against my Stoic buddies, was simply not worth interfering in at all.
Thus, Plotinus kind of ribs them by wondering out loud that they just don't go escape reality as soon as they learn the truth about all this evilness of realities, go jump off a pyramid or something. Thus, no action in the physical world could ever be good, ever, because it was fundamentally and ontologically evil to begin with. So why not just go jump off a building to escape all of this? For Plotinus, that the Gnostics would remain in this world at all, much less have families or children, aside from perhaps to spread the Gnostic truth to other pneumatics or spiritual types, kind of Gnostic Bodhisattva style, was just profound hypocrisy on their part.
On the other hand, if the world is just evil and the Divine spark within us is never affected by our contact with the physical world, then why not just indulge in all the pleasures of the body while we're while we're in one? Thus, Plotinus, along with some Christians, actually accused some of the Gnostics of the worst kinds of moral and sexual outrages. You know, simply enjoying rampant physical pleasure because, again, physical bodily pleasure can in no way contaminate the Divine spark within the Gnostics, at least according to the Christians and Plotinus here. Thus, they accused the Gnostics of engaging in every kind of sexual debauchery and general antinomianism. You know, stuff like eating babies and incest. Looking at you, Carpocratians. I don't think they did it.
Yeah, of course, this is just a damning criticism from Plotinus, who was famously ashamed to be in a body, according to his student Porphyry, which kind of sounds like a Gnostic humbleflex, if we're being honest. Regardless, the final outcome for Plotinus is that Gnostic hubris prevents them from cultivating the spiritual virtues, which actually does allow for the soul to reach back up through the process of emanation and recession to become reunited with the Primal Unity of goodness, beauty, and truth. Without those virtues, you don't get to go back to the One, and the Gnostics simply eschew virtue entirely.
In the end, Plotinus likens his disagreement with the Gnostics by appealing to the analogy of the house. Two people are born into the same house. One only sees the perfections and deficiencies and judges the house horrible and its builder even worse. The other person also notices the imperfections of the house but sees its beautiful elements as well, realizing that the builder did the best they could with the materials at hand, making the best of the situation. They're still looking forward to the day in which they get to move out, but in the meantime, they're going to make the best of it. It's a subtle but important distinction between how Plotinus himself and how he sees the Gnostics as they view this world.
We often think of the Gnostics primarily as the targets of attack by the so-called early proto-orthodox Church, but it's interesting to see the criticisms of Gnosticism by a perfectly good pagan, perfectly good pagan, along strangely similar but also distinctly non-Christian Platonic lines as well. One also suspects that a very similar line of attack would have actually been taken up by Hermetic philosophers as well, but no such polemical texts survive. They were probably too busy cleaning their souls of diamonds or something, probably.
Regardless, while Gnosticism is, for some degree of popularity, a more pagan-friendly or pagan-adjacent variant of Christianity, it's important to note that who has come down to us as the premier pagan philosopher of that period also had sustained and powerful criticisms of Gnosticism in his milieu. And in that way, it only enriches my profound appreciation of the third Century intellectual, philosophical, and religious ferment. The literature around Plotinus and the Gnostics is truly vast. First, I'd just go read the Apocryphon of John and Zostrianos in the Nag Hammadi Library, and then I'd turn to Plotinus's attacks in Ennead 2.9. Or, if you're really hardcore, you'd read the entire Gnostic Schrifts to see how Plotinus sets up his philosophy in some ways as a giant counter to what he takes to be Gnosticism in general. It's a pretty amazing text once you reshuffle the deck after Porphyry scrambled everything. So, it's an amazing text, and perhaps the best of Plotinus for a sustained study of Plotinus and his Gnostic targets, the study by Burns is a truly powerful analysis and well worth the effort. It's highly specialized, however, but I mean, you're watching this episode, aren't you?
I also, again, check out the other episodes in this amazing, vast Neoplatonism collaboration with other fine folks here on Religious Studies YouTube. I have to say, I'm truly humbled and blessed to be in their digital presence. So check out the links in the description and go watch their videos as well for a Neoplatonism Extravaganza. But until soon, more Neoplatonism and Gnosticism content to come, so stick around for that. Until then, I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and thank you for watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.