Faith, reason, and philosophy
‘Many people’, said Hilary Armstrong years ago, ‘are looking for an unorganized and unorganizable Good as the only true object of worship, the source of value and the goal of desire, whose light shines everywhere in this ever-changing world as we contemplate it with our ever-changing minds’ (Armstrong (Reference Armstrong1975), 88). Times, perhaps, have changed: popular assaults on theism – and chiefly Abrahamic theism – typically neglect any such possibility, and assume, without much argument, that ‘humane values’ can easily survive ‘the death of God’, and the end even of ‘disorganized’ religion. It is widely supposed that sincerely ‘religious’ people are bound to be ‘fundamentalists’, and would be ‘murderous extremists’ if they had the courage. The only alternative, it seems, is to make our futures up: we must – simultaneously – accept the limits on our knowledge and future action set by ‘scientific materialism’, and expect that ‘scientific advances’ will one day achieve, for us or our descendants, all that our hearts desire. The cosmos we inhabit will never be ‘on our side’, but we can – perhaps – engineer a little happiness before the darkness falls. Maybe, if the wilder thoughts of transhumanists have any substance, our successors might even remake the worlds to suit us better (but that is another story). Our situation, in brief, is rather like the Late Antiquity of Mediterranean lands – and Armstrong's study of Plotinian spirituality may turn out to be more relevant than at first it seems.
The routine charge made by philosophical pagans against the Christians in Late Antiquity – like modern attacks on ‘believers’ – was that they demanded belief in propositions that they could not prove (at least from within the frame familiar to philosophical pagans).
For some have supposed that Christianity has no reason to support it, but that those who desire the name confirm their opinion by an unreasoning faith and an assent without examination; and they assert that no one is able by clear demonstration to furnish evidence of the truth of the things promised, but that they require their converts to adhere to faith only, and therefore they are called ‘the Faithful,’ because of their uncritical and untested faith. (Eusebius (Reference Eusebius and Gifford1903), 2 [1.1])
Eusebius denied the charge, claiming that there were both reasons in the historical record to support the truth of Christian claims, and reasons to believe as Christians did (namely that the spread of Christian faith had been accompanied by an improvement in morals and civilizationFootnote 1 ). Origen, writing against Celsus, pointed out that even pagans may accept the teachings and discipline of a particular philosophical school for no better reason than that they have come across an impressive teacher, and that everyone relies on indemonstrable assumptions in their daily lives:
Who goes on a voyage, or marries, or begets children, or casts seeds into the ground, unless he believes that things will turn out for the better, although it is possible that the opposite may happen – as it sometimes does? But nevertheless the faith that things will turn out for the better and as they wish make all men take risks, even where the result is not certain and where things might turn out differently. Now if it is hope and the faith that the future will be better which maintain life in every action where the result is uncertain, why may not this faith be accepted by a believer in God more reasonably than by a man who sails the sea, or sows seeds in the earth, or marries a wife, or undertakes any other human activity?Footnote 2
‘To plant a tree, to cultivate a field, to beget children; meritorious acts, according to the religion of Zoroaster’ (Hume (Reference Hume and Selby-Bigge1963), 142 [2.2]) – and all these things are undertaken ‘in faith’, the more unreasonably and absurdly if we have no good ground for expecting that the universe is, in any way, ‘on our side’, or even that we can reliably predict the future.
That some philosophers take their beginning from ‘nous’ and others from ‘revelation’ (though neither can offer any further demonstrative argument for those beginnings) does not mark any clear or convincing difference. ‘Nous’ and ‘Spirit’ are functionally equivalent. And even ‘scientific investigation’ depends on taking a hypothesis as something possibly true, and possibly worth testing: those who believe and act on only what they have already ‘proved’ have little chance of proving anything. ‘A great deal of the scepticism of the present day is for these reasons not worthy of respect. Men reject what they have never tried and condemn what they have never seriously or systematically reflected upon’ (Jones (Reference Jones1922), 67).
Pagan philosophers – perhaps especially the Cynics (see Downing (Reference Downing1992)) – could agree with many Christian aphorisms, even if they did not accept their historical or theological ideas: to that extent, they were all engaged in trying out ways of life at odds with conventional notions of success. ‘A man has not failed if he fails to win beauty of colours or bodies, or power or office or kingship even, but if he fails to win this and only this’ – namely the enjoyment of an abiding beauty (Plotinus Ennead I.6 [1].7, 34f.).Footnote 3 Of course he may fail in this as well – and so come to think his enterprise misguided. Hermotimus had ‘heard everyone saying that the Epicureans were self-indulgent and pleasure-loving; the Peripatetics were avaricious and argumentative; and the Platonists arrogant and vainglorious. But many said that the Stoics were manly and understood everything, and that the man who followed their path was the only king, the only rich man, the only wise man, and the only everything’ (Lucian (Reference Costa2006), 95). But he has in the end to acknowledge that neither he nor his teacher had achieved the equanimity their school had promised. The Christian Churches were a little wiser, remembering instead that we are all still sinners, ‘and if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us’ (1 John 1.8). It remains true that such ongoing and sometimes unrepentant failures may cause ‘a loss of faith’ – not a reasoned rejection of the associated credal propositions, but the same sort of dejection that may end a marriage, a profession, or a life. Without some such faith it is unlikely that even science survives. As Charles Taylor remarks, ‘we should treat our deepest moral instincts, our ineradicable sense that human life is to be respected, as our mode of access to the world in which ontological claims are discernible and can be rationally argued about and sifted’ (Taylor (Reference Taylor1989), 8).
Sometimes the similarities between Christian and pagan schools suggest a personal association. Plotinus's teacher, Ammonius Saccas, had once – it was said – been a Christian:Footnote 4 Eusebius indeed claimed that he continued thus to his life's end (Eusebius (Reference Eusebius, Cushman, Philip Schaff and Wace1890), 196 (6.19.4)). Amongst Ammonius’ other pupils were Heraclas, later Bishop of Alexandria, and Origen, an influential Christian writer later judged to be on the verge of heresy (and possibly identical with the Origen who was one of Ammonius’ inner circle). Amelius, Plotinus's earlier editor, had read at least the opening of John's Gospel (Eusebius (Reference Eusebius and Gifford1903), 11.9.1; see Dillon (Reference Dillon, Vassilopoulou and Clark2009)). Numenius, himself an influence on Plotinus, knew, respected, and commented upon passages of the Hebrew Bible (see Dodds (Reference Dodds1960)). One of Porphyry's own friends, Fabricius, converted to Christianity, and abandoned the Pythagorean diet (so provoking Porphyry into writing the first major defence of our duties towards the non-human: Porphyry (Reference Porphyry and Clark2000)). Porphyry himself wrote vehemently, both in that latter treatise and elsewhere, against the Christians – whether or not he wrote a specific treatise Against the Christians (Berchman (Reference Berchman2005)). Some have thought that the target of Plotinus's own indignation in the grand treatise ‘against the Gnostics’ (II.9 [33]) was at least a Christian sect – though one heretical by the standards of the Orthodox tradition.
‘Heresy’ is not a category confined to Christians! The other principal pagan attack on Christians was that they had abandoned their own tribes’ traditions. Jews, though they stood aside from the consensus gentium, at least had their own, unusual, traditions: Christians, being drawn from every race and station, had betrayed their own ancestral gods, the values and distinctions in which they and their ancestors were reared – as of course Abram and his father Terah had done long before (Genesis 11.31–12.5). ‘It is impious’, Celsus said, ‘to abandon the customs which have existed in each locality from the beginning’ (Origen (Reference Origen and Chadwick1953), 283 (5.26)). This criticism might almost seem ‘postmodern’: the only truth worth minding about, the critics might have said, was the ‘truth’ of our consensual reality. What reason – and especially what reason acceptable to traditionalists – could there ever be to step aside from tradition, however absurd or even vile the customs seem to other eyes? As Origen pointed out, this is as much an assault on those philosophers ‘who teach men not to be superstitious’ but rather ‘to present the soul to the Creator’ as on the Christian churches (Origen (Reference Origen and Chadwick1953), 291 (5.35)). There is an issue here: on the one hand, none of us can do more than begin from where we are, with the character and axioms we have inherited or imbibed; on the other, it is required by those very axioms that we should seek a real truth and virtue, and not be content with seemings. Whether this will ever be possible without a direct intervention from Elsewhere remains uncertain.Footnote 5 Even Odysseus needed the intervention of Hermes, on Circe's island and Calypso's.
Gods, daimones, and the material
Pagan Platonism influenced the development of Christian thought, both in the West and in the East, as it also influenced Islamic philosophy. Some elements of the pagan version were reckoned inconsistent with the Abrahamic faiths. Gregory Palamas, for example, writing in the thirteenth century, summed up the Orthodox critique as follows:
These people have arrived at a certain conception of God, but not at a conception truly worthy of Him and appropriate to His blessed nature. For their ‘disordered heart was darkened’ by the machinations of the wicked demons who were instructing them. For if a worthy conception of God could be attained through the use of intellection, how could these people have taken the demons for gods, and how could they have believed the demons when they taught man polytheism? In this way, wrapped up in this mindless and foolish wisdom and unenlightened education, they have calumniated both God and nature. They have deprived God of His sovereignty (at least as far as they are concerned); they have ascribed the Divine Name to demons; and they were so far from finding the knowledge of beings – the object of their desire and zeal – as to claim that inanimate things [that is, the stars] have a soul and participate in a soul superior to our own. They also allege that things without reason are reasonable, since capable of receiving a human soul; that demons are superior to us and are even our creators (such is their impiety); they have classed among things uncreated and unoriginate and coeternal with God, not only matter, and what they call the World Soul, but also those intelligible beings not clothed in the opacity of the body, and even our souls themselves. (Palamas (Reference Palamas, Gendle and Meyendorff1983), 26 [I.1.18])Footnote 6
Some of this criticism rested on familiar misunderstandings of the pagan philosophical tradition, and are matched by the pagans’ own misunderstandings of the Abrahamic. Each side thought the other culpably irrational. But there are real issues to debate, whether or not they are the ones that Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Julian, and other pagans, on the one hand, supposed, or those identified by Philoponus, Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, or Palamas on the other. My own stress here is phenomenological or psychological rather than metaphysical (though the metaphysical theories themselves have psychological effects). Whether the material world has always existed; whether it is constituted as a single living being; whether we ourselves have been, and shall be, for ever; and whether or to what extent we can rise up or return from exile by our own endeavours: all these are questions without fully agreed or authoritative answers. All that we can usually manage here and now is to realize what difference might be made by entertaining one thought or another (or by withholding any rash consent). Christians, in the main, concluded that this world here had a beginning, and would have an end (although it might be resurrected as immortal diamond along with all God's Chosen, and have no end thereafter). They also, in the main, preferred to think that space, the universe, the whole material world was a neutral arena for the children of God to play in, rather than the largest of living things itself. We too had our beginnings, in our mothers’ wombs, and could hope to be resurrected as the individual persons we now think ourselves,Footnote 7 rather than being simply phases or stages or twigs of an eternal spirit which was somehow both eternally at rest in God and struggling over generations in the material world. And our rescue from material corruption could only be by God's good grace. At the same time, Christians expected ‘to judge angels’ (Paul, 1 Corinthians 6.1–4),Footnote 8 and reckoned themselves superior in rank and – hopefully – in eventual virtue even to the highest of created spirits. This – in all the Abrahamic traditions –was the sin of Satan: not to acknowledge Adam (which is to say, Humanity) as God's Chosen. The angels’ fall, so tradition tells us, began in Satan's outrage that he could be expected to bow down before an animal!Footnote 9 Angels, gods, and daimones, even if they are real and more powerful or cleverer than us, are still not to be worshipped: ‘These gods are visions of the eternal attributes, or divine names, which, when erected into gods, become destructive of humanity . . . When separated from man or humanity, who is Jesus the Saviour, the vine of eternity, they are thieves and rebels, they are destroyers’ (Blake (Reference Blake and Keynes1966), 571). The aphorism that we, as human beings, may err by becoming or imitating ‘beasts’ (Ennead III.2 [47].8, 9–13) in this life or another, should be balanced by a similar warning against too readily thinking ourselves ‘gods’: ‘as intemperance and sensuality make us Beasts; so Pride and Malice make us Devils’.Footnote 10 Pagan Platonists, though they too reckoned that gods and daimones were only our fellow creatures, and not to be given any absolute authority, preferred to remember that they were our natural superiors, and at least deserved respect (Ennead II.9 [33].9, 53–60) – though it was also important that they be contained within Zeus or Kronos rather than rebelling against Him. Whereas Christians in particular were persuaded that this world here was fallen, and that there might and should ‘one day’ be a better world, God's Kingdom, pagan Platonists thought this too disrespectful: how could there be a better material world than this?
Despising the universe and the gods in it and the other noble things is certainly not becoming good. Every wicked man, in former times too, was capable of despising the gods, and even if he was not altogether wicked before, when he despised them he became so by this very fact, even if he was not wicked in everything else. (Ennead II.9 [33].16, 1–5; see also II.9 [33].4, 25–32)
Wasn't the hope of a new creation vulgar, or – at best – a misunderstanding of an expectable phase, the Golden Age, of cosmic history? Origen's errors – as they were later, and perhaps mistakenly, supposed – were of a piece with this: he thought that we were eternal spirits, and that even once we had been restored to ‘heaven’ we might still, over the unending ages, fall again.Footnote 11 This was at once our misfortune, and a necessary element, as Plotinus also seems to have thought, of the whole cosmic enterprise. ‘The nature of this universe is of a kind to bring these sorts of misfortune [as being captured in war], and we must follow it obediently’ (Ennead I.4 [46].7, 41–42).Footnote 12 Any expectation that the earth – the material or the phenomenal universe – will ever be so full of the knowledge of the Lord that none will ever hurt or destroy another (as Isaiah 65.25) seems no part of late pagan religion. Origen has also been criticized, also perhaps unjustly, for so emphasizing the allegorical interpretation of Scripture as to disregard the historical: ‘for Origen, history was merely symbolic or parabolic of higher truths, not a place or event where God encounters people’ (Martens (Reference Martens2012), 8, summarizing Hanson (Reference Hanson1959)). It is easy to suppose that pagan Platonists in general would have thought the same – except that Plotinus is emphatic that the divine is at work in the visible cosmos, and in human history: justice is always being done, even if no final justice. And conversely, Christians were insistent that ‘God hates nothing that He has made’, not even matter.Footnote 13 Pseudo-Dionysius may seem to be contradicting the Plotinian message, but they are closer than their followers admitted:
There is no evil in our bodies, for ugliness and disease are a defect in form and a lack of due order. What is here is not pure evil but a lesser beauty. If beauty, form, and order could be destroyed completely the body itself would disappear. It is also obvious that the body is not the cause of evil in the soul. Evil does not require a body to be nearby, as is clear in the case of demons. Evil in minds, in souls, and in bodies is a weakness and a defect in the condition of their natural virtues. There is no truth in the common assertion that evil is inherent in matter qua matter, since matter too has a share in the cosmos, in beauty and form. If matter lacked these, if it were inherently deficient in quality and form, if it lacked even the capacity to be affected, how could it produce anything?Footnote 14
Mere Matter is a fantasy, a metaphor, an extrapolation. Actual material things, precisely because they are actual things, have their own form and beauty, and ‘evil’ resides in the choice of a lesser beauty, a failure to be at one (with themselves or with their neighbours and the world).
Incarnation and theiosis
All three major Abrahamic faithsFootnote 15 acknowledge the significance of Torah, Koran, or Logos, and all agree that this derives its being from God. Judaism and Islam are more easily reconciled with Plotinus than is orthodox Christianity, in that Torah and Koran alike are subordinate realities, even if they are true expressions of what God requires of all. All three traditions also speak of the divine Spirit that proceeds from God, and is – variously – as much of God as creatures have any present hope of experiencing. In Christendom, the Logos is as clearly God as the Father is. Though it is permissible to reckon that the heavenly Koran is uncreated, and – perhaps – enscripted or ‘inlibrated’,Footnote 16 God can have no companion or necessary helper. Nor is it just one copy of the Torah that is the Word. That the heavenly Word should be identical with a particular, contingent entity, something ‘which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled’ (I John 1.1) seems absurd or blasphemous, even though it could more readily be agreed that some contingent entity housed or represented that Word, very much as the dedicated philosopher might ascend to an equality with the World Soul, and self-identification with Intellect. Plotinus does allow the abstract possibility of Zeus's taking human form (and looking like Pheidias's Zeus: Ennead V.8 [31].1),Footnote 17 and any of us may rise to the level of ‘a god’, the god we once were or eternally still are, but God the Intellect isn't the One's equal, and can't be localized. In a way, Zeus (the Soul) already is embodied, multiply, but not always in bodies worthy of Soul, or fully representing the whole Soul. Even the World Soul, which has a worthy body, is not All the Soul There Is, let alone the Intellect or the One. But, as Augustine pointed out, Platonists cannot then consistently deny the possibility of a divine incarnation: ‘You (sc. Porphyry) who say that all body must be avoided, kill the universe! You are saying that I should escape from my flesh: let your Jupiter [taking Jupiter here to be the World Soul] escape from heaven and earth!’Footnote 18 At best, they could suggest that our bodies are incapable of embodying the divine, whereas the whole cosmos, and the stars, are worthier vehicles, as also (according to Porphyry) are statues of wood, bronze, or stone.Footnote 19
Plato identified the goal of philosophical virtue as the imitation of the divine, with a view to becoming a god (Plato, Theaetetus 176a7; see also Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 10.1177b33), and the same aim (seemingly) was expressed in Christian doctrine: God became Man so that Man might become God.Footnote 20 It does not follow that pagan and Christian meant just the same by this. Stoic philosophers reckoned that Dion, if wise, was the equal of Zeus himself (Plutarch, On Common Conceptions 3.246, Long & Sedley (Reference Long and Sedley1987), I, 380 [61J]) because they were ‘of the same mind’, but that ‘mind’ rested in the intellectual recognition of necessity. Paul's suggestion that we should have the ‘same mind’ that was in Christ Jesus (‘who being in the form of God thought not to snatch at equality with God, but became obedient to death, even the death of the cross’ (Paul, Philippians 2.6) could be taken with similar effect – but was rather an ‘ethical’ than an intellectual choice, and not merely a decision to accept ‘what always happens’.
There was an analogue of the Christian Saviour available to the pagan imagination, more influential than an abstract ‘Dion’ or philosophical sage. Might they expect Heracles – or at least our image of Heracles – to help us free from our chains (Ennead IV.3 [27].14, 16–18)? Consider the obvious congruence between that pagan hero and the Christian: both Heracles and Jesus were reputed Sons of God, born of a mortal mother, required to labour in the service of humanity despite – or because of – being the rightful king. They were both tempted, and resisted the temptation, to take the easier, pleasanter path. They perished through the treachery or folly of a trusted friend, but were raised up to Heaven and thereafter served as an ideal, an inspiration, even a supernatural aid. Both harrowed Hell. Their double nature led some to suppose that there were two of each – one in Heaven, and the other (a mere shadow) in the land of the mortal dead (Ennead IV.3 [27].27 after Homer, Odyssey 11.601ff.). Christians preferred, in the main, to insist that there was only one such Jesus, with two natures united in one identity – a doctrine lying outside my present brief. The much easier option for the early Church would have been to follow the Heraclean and Hellenic model, distinguishing one Heracles from another, or at least the archetype from the image: he was identified with a Mesopotamian god, Nergal, as well as with the Tyrian Melqart (see Kingsley (Reference Kingsley1995), 274–275). His name was also given to the First Born of creation.Footnote 21 Worshippers – for example on Thasos – distinguished the Olympian, to whom they gave the sacrifices due an immortal, from the other to whom ‘they delivered funerary honours as with a hero’ (Herodotus, History 2.44). The Cynics especially took him as their patron, as one who had chosen the path of VirtueFootnote 22 and showed it was possible to live entirely by one's wits and courage, even in the face of celestial – that is, Hera's – malice. ‘It is generally agreed that during the whole time which Heracles spent among men he submitted to great and continuous labours and perils willingly, in order that he might confer benefits upon the race of men and thereby gain immortality’ (Diodorus, History I, 1.2.4). Socrates had sworn by him, and Xenophon's band of mercenaries regularly prayed to ‘Zeus the Saviour and Heracles the guide’ (Xenophon Anabasis 4.8; 6.5). He was honoured in Carthage as well as Rome, and by emperors as well as wandering Cynics.
The imperial theology of the greatest of the persecutors [for example, Diocletian (ad 244–311)] had important features in common with the religion which they persecuted. Jupiter is the supreme god. His son, Hercules, acts as his executive representative, and is a benefactor of man. The resemblance to Christian theology is obvious.Footnote 23
The resemblance, however obvious, is also superficial. Jupiter (Zeus) and Hercules (Heracles) are – theologically – distinct entities in a way that the First and Second Persons of the Christian Trinity are not (though this thought seems not to have convinced other Abrahamic believers).Footnote 24 And though this image was a possible anagogic resource it does not seem likely that the mass of Mediterranean peoples could place their trust even in the Olympian Heracles, even though he shared their troubles (including enslavement, treachery, madness – and his own sins and follies). Nor were his followers encouraged to think themselves part of ‘the Body of Heracles’, illuminated by a divine Spirit. His elevation to the heavens was an escape, and his harrowing of Hell had only rescued Alcestis. Christ, by contrast, rescued all who would come with Him. Plotinus interpreted Prometheus’ rescue by Heracles as Prometheus’ own self-liberation (Ennead IV.3 [27].14, 16–7) – and perhaps this might be allegorically significant: whatever help the gods, as Porphyry supposed, might offer, we must learn to liberate ourselves.
And yet there might still be something to learn from pagan thought and religious feeling. Escape is not the only way of thinking about our rescue from the ‘dream and delirium’ of ordinary life (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.17.1). As Plotinus insisted,
We cannot get there on foot; for our feet only carry us everywhere in this world, from one country to another. You must not get ready a carriage, either, or a boat. Let all these things go, and do not look. Shut your eyes, and change to and wake another way of seeing, which everyone has but few use. (Ennead I.6 [1].8, 16–28)Footnote 25
There may be more metaphysical implications of the comment than I need address here and now. But the simplest way of taking Plotinus's remark is that we have no need to go anywhere, but only to look differently at things. I am here, for the moment, endorsing Armstrong's suggestion that Plotinus’ account of the One actually marks the end of two-world thinking: we are not being invited to abandon this world in favour of some quite other realm, but to begin to experience this world differently. There are not, on Platonic terms, two real worlds, but only one. That one world is perceived, more or less reliably, from many different points and personalities: phenomena are plural. We come closer to that one real world by allowing Nous its say. ‘The Eternal Mind seems to become something very like our minds seeking God, and the Eternal World our world seen “from the inside”’ (Armstrong (Reference Armstrong1975), 84, 85; see Wagner (Reference Wagner1982)).
By Aristotle's account – which is only a step away from the Plotinian – God actually is theoria, and in living thus ‘theoretically’ (that is, in mindful enjoyment of reality) we live by what is most divine in us, and at the same time what is most really human.
We must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything. (Nicomachean Ethics 10.1177b30ff.)
So ‘contemplating God’ is the same as ‘contemplating contemplation’: ‘knowing God’ is the same as ‘God's knowing’ (Metaphysics 1.983a5). And what is it that God knows? According to Aristotle's analysis, Himself (Metaphysics 12.1072b18ff.).
This notion – taken literally – was criticized very early. According to the author of the Ps-Aristotelian Magna Moralia, ‘whoever is preoccupied with himself is counted as insensible: a god like that would be absurd’ (Ps-Aristotle, Magna Moralia 1213b4ff.). But later Platonic and Aristotelian tradition lived happily with the supposed absurdity, recognizing that God's knowledge, if it is to be incontrovertible, must somehow contain its objects. God is not, as we are, merely externally related to the things He knows, for if He were He could not Himself be sure that reality was as it was represented, even to Him. ‘If intellect (nous) were not the same as what it intuited (ta noeta), there will be no truth; for the one who is trying to possess realities will possess an impression different from the realities, and this is not truth’ (Ennead V.3 [49].5, 23ff: see Clark (Reference Clark1997)). God's thinking, the divine thinking, is one with what is thought (Metaphysics 12.1075a4). Conversely, the one real world is God, or is at least contained in Him.
But this is not merely the conclusion of an abstract argument, and it has more than merely epistemological implications. As I remarked forty years ago (Clark (Reference Clark1975), 179), this description of ‘divine intelligence’ is strikingly like Buddhist (and other mystagogic) accounts of Enlightenment. It is a ‘knowing without touching things: that is, without making things into objects in one's consciousness’.Footnote 26 ‘Sunyata is experienced only when it is both subject and object . . . “Knowing and seeing” sunyata is sunyata knowing and seeing itself’ (Suzuki (Reference Suzuki and Barrett1956), 315). And as Aristotle also said, ‘on such a principle depend the heavens and the world of nature. And it is a life such as the best that we enjoy, and enjoy for but a short time . . . So that life and aion continuous and eternal belong to the god, for this is what the god is’ (Metaphysics 12.1072b13f.). God is Eternity – as Boethius also said some centuries later: ‘the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life’ (Boethius (Reference Boethius and Watts1999), 132 [5.6]). It follows that we ‘know’ God in the only way that God can be known, when we experience the life that identically is God, when God lives us.
Or remembering for a moment another parallel: ‘God is love; he who dwells in love is dwelling in God, and God in him’ (1 John 4.16). ‘Theorein ton theon’ is not to reason one's way to an abstract conviction that there is a god, an ultimate authority or good, but to experience, to live, a certain sort of life, the sort to which all other lives aspire, and which does not depend for its existence on our experiencing it – since it is experienced, exactly, as something that is forever. And what is forever, for Plotinus as well as for John, is love: the One, Plotinus says, is at once beloved, lover and the love between (erasmion kai eros ho autos kai autou eros: Ennead VI.8 [39].15).
Naturalism and nightmare
Where I differ from Armstrong is made clear in his comment – concerning Plotinus's recognition of the star-gods – that ‘it would be difficult for us, imaginatively as well as intellectually, to recognize and venerate the goddess Selene in the dreary, dusty receptacle for excessively expensive junk with which we have all become so boringly familiar of late years’.Footnote 27 On the contrary, we have cause to be grateful, in a way, to just that goddess. Looking only at the material, we may suppose that the Moon, Selene, is indeed no more than rubble. But consider instead what it is to look back from the Moon. Consider the images of Earth seen from the Moon which have decorated websites and student bedrooms for the last thirty or more years. That vision of our little segment of the wider world, the blue and silver bubble against a darkened sky, has helped to remind us – at the deepest imaginative level – that we do indeed inhabit a single, beautiful world, and that our political and social divisions must fade before that insight. Looking in turn towards the Moon herself what we should see is the love that binds, the universal sympathy that makes causality possible. What Plotinus called magic or enchantment we now recognize as universal law – but our words make no clearer than Plotinus's what explains that law, that magic. Those who can think of the Moon – or the Earth itself – as no more than rubble may indeed feel themselves to be in that imagined hell which Armstrong evoked in his account of third-century sensibility:
It was a period in which the sense of individual isolation in a vast and terrifying universe was perhaps more intensely felt than even immediately after the breakdown of the city-state into the Hellenistic world. For in the Roman Empire, under Babylonian influence, the view of the ruling power of the universe as a cruel, inaccessible Fate, embodied in the stars, worship of which was useless, had come to its full development. The individual exposed to the crushing power of this Fate, and the citizen also of an earthly state which seemed almost as vast, cruel and indifferent as the universe, felt to the full the agony of his isolation and limitation.Footnote 28
The hell-world is one that we ourselves create, by looking on things as meaningless collections or expanses of stuff governed by immutable and indifferent law. That is why Matter as such is Evil (or the principle or beginning of evil) – not because bodies are evil, but because our seeing bodies (that is, entities) as stuff encourages us to despise them, and drags us further down into depression. According to Northrop Frye, in his reading of the Bible, we shall not escape the hell-world ‘until [we] know thoroughly what hell is, and realize that the pleasure gained by dominating and exploiting, whether of [our] fellow man or of nature itself, is part of that hell-world’ (Frye (Reference Frye1982), 76).
People who live in a traditional, anthropomorphic universe will necessarily deal with it in human terms. Those who live in an abstract universe will deal things and others as abstractions. Those who live in a mechanistic universe will treat everything as a machine. Those who find the universe cold and uncaring will reciprocate. (Chittick (Reference Chittick2007), 87)Footnote 29
Might the pagan religious thought and feeling I have described go some way to satisfying the wish that Armstrong identified for an ‘unorganizable good’? Might my description, on the other hand, serve simply to identify what is missing, by comparison with the orthodox Christian gospel, and what modern naturalistic theory, in its turn, neglects? There are still other forms of ‘pagan’ sensibility that may fit more easily the naturalistic story – most obviously the Norse expectation of Ragnarok, and the absolute destruction of whatever grace and meaning has emerged from Fire and Ice. In the words of a recent revisionist short story, based in H. P. Lovecraft's mythos:
All of man's other religions place him at the center of creation. But man is nothing — a fraction of the life that will walk the Earth. Earth is nothing — a tiny world that will die with its sun. The sun is one of trillions where life flowers, and wants to live, and dies. And between the suns is an endless vast darkness that dwarfs them, through which life can travel only by giving up that wanting, by losing itself. Even that darkness will eventually die. In such a universe, knowledge is the stub of a candle at dusk. . . . What our religion tells us, the part that is a religion, is that the gods created life to try and make meaning. It's ultimately hopeless, and even gods die, but the effort is real. Will always have been real, even when everything is over and no one remembers.Footnote 30
But that sort of paganism leaves us without any reasonable hope even of discovering how this world works, nor any secure recourse against depression. If that hope is to be realistic then something more like Plotinian paganism is the better bet, honouring the forms of beauty in the world and in our intellects. Whether it allows us also to hope that we may have any help in this, is moot. These pagans perhaps made one important error, in supposing that it was Pheidias's Zeus, however benign his lordship, which best represented Godhead:
That error also includes the notion that there can be no better material world than this, and that our piety must consist – at best – in glad or glum endurance. These are notions, certainly, that have not been wholly absent from later Christian (and other Abrahamic) thought and practice. But there is another possibility, better in tune with the original.
If we must choose what meaning to give, or to accept, then we had better acknowledge both the vast cruel emptiness that so often seems to surround us, and also a faith that there is a real escape, not on the heels of Heracles but of the risen Christ. If that is not a faith that we here and now can manage, the old pagan answers, of their various sorts, will perhaps be the best we can.Footnote 31
