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Back to the Mysticism of Plotinus: Some More Specifics JOHN M. RIST 1. INTRODUCTION PHILOSOPHERSDIFFERin their accounts of their predecessors--but unevenly: there are more versions of Plato than of Hume. In the last half century at least two Plotinuses have emerged: one a mystic with philosophical pretensions, some of which are increasingly held to be well-founded; the other a latter-day Greek rationalist fighting for his Hellenic life against variegated approaching theophanies. Nowhere does this contrast appear more striking than in accounts of Plotinus' "mystical" experiences themselves. Are they the catalyst for his philosophical activities, the key he was vouchsafed to unlock the puzzles of the rather arid Platonism of his day, or did they arise (like acts of levitation) as a kind of bonus, or even as an accident of his metaphysical success? Part of the difficulty in getting beyond such crude alternatives is that when we say that Plotinus held that our soul rises to the level of nous and through nous to union with the One, we are either not sure what we mean by nous or we are not sure what we mean by union. The problem about nous is highlighted by our collective scholarly failure to reach an agreed translation (or even at least an agreed set of connotations) for the word. I shall return to this a little later. As for the other question, about the meaning of"union," I argued some twenty years ago that it refers to a union of the theistic type,' that is, that it does not suggest or imply that we are in fact ("in reality") identical with the One itself. As Hadot has again put it recently, "L'fime, dans l'exp~rience mystique, ne coincide donc pas avec l'Absolu (ce serait impossible)."~ To many this has always seemed obvious,s and J. M. Rist,Plotinus: The Road of Reality (Cambridge, x967),213-3o. P. Hadot, "L'union de l'~meavecI'intellectdivin dans l'exp~riencemystique plotinienne," inProdus et son Influence (Ztirich, 1987),17In a reviewof my Plotinus H. J. Blumenthal (Phoenix 23 [1969]:326) described my discussion of Plotinus' mysticismas "a convincing demonstration of the almost obvious that is, but [183] 184 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 27:2 APRIL 1989 certainly it is hard to suppose that any sensitive reader of the Enneads could come away imagining Plotinus yelling (or even thinking) from time to time, "I am the One," or even "I was the One." But since there has been at least one substantive attempt to re-formulate the still surviving belief that Plotinus' mysticism is monistic, not theistic# I will begin with a brief resum6 of some of the arguments I used in favor of a theistic interpretation and then add a few further points of expansion and clarification. 2. "THEISTIC" AND "MONISTIC" MYSTICISM By "theistic mysticism" I refer to the explanation of mystical experience in terms of the union of the soul with a transcendent being: the theistic mystic insists that despite his experience of union, the soul and that transcendent being cannot "ultimately," or "in the last resort," be identical. By a "monistic" explanation I mean an explanation given by a man who believes that he is "ultimately" identical with God, the One, the Absolute, or whatever such name he gives to the first cause of the universe. Needless to say theistic mystics, on my account, can belong to many different religious faiths, or to none. Plotinus belonged to none in any serious sense; he is legitimately to be called both a theistic mystic and a non-practising pagan.5 My principal original arguments, which I shall not now repeat at length, that Plotinus was a theistic mystic--some of which were foreshadowed by Arnou--were as follows: 1. That Plotinus talks of the One making all things and leaving them outside himself, that is, that his One is both transcendent and immanent. 2. That, although human souls have no temporal beginning or end, the One (alone) is infinite being. 3. That Plotinus' language about two becoming one and returning to two suggests that the separateness of the soul as what I called a "spiritual substance" cannot be...

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