Perception of God: Beauty and the soul, according to Plotinus
But what if the evidence is so obvious that people have become blind to it?
These ideas certainly aren’t new, and have been addressed at length by some of the most brilliant minds, throughout human history. In the West, some of the most minute explorations of these matters can be found in the ancient Greek heritage.
Plotinus (ca. 205–270) is considered to be the father of Neo-platonism. He studied philosophy in Alexandria, Egypt, at a time when Christianity met Greek thought. His ideas, edited and published by Porphyry under the name Enneads, profoundly influenced Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and pagan metaphysicians and mystics, as well as the more secretive, esoteric undercurrents of those religions. If there was a central theme to Plotinus’ thought, it would be the relationship between the universe and it’s source, and how it may return to this source.
This, of course, is a theme that I have developed at length in several places before.“The Fatherland to us is There whence we have come, and There is The Father.” (Enneads I, 6-8)
Plotinus taught that there is a supreme, transcendent “One” that is indivisible, beyond “existence" or “being”, and that is the origin of everything. The One (to en) emanates. First, it emanates thought (nous), from which proceeds the soul (psyche)—including the world soul and the individual human soul. Then comes matter (physis). This procession descends further and further away from the One, from good, from perfection.
Plotinus’ first treatise addresses beauty[1]. It doesn’t deal with aesthetics in the modern sense, but is rather an introduction to his philosophy and to its psychological implications. Indeed, Plotinus considered that Beauty was arguably the most approachable manifestation of the One.
Beauty first appeals to sight, but it can also be found in other senses, behaviour, or conduct.
So what unites such diverse realities under the single notion of beauty? For Plotinus, beauty does not depend on the relative proportions of the elements that compose the beautiful object or behaviour, contrary to the claims made by stoics. Harmonious arrangement of the elements in a painting for example can participate in its beauty, but they do not cause beauty. First, because if a composition is found beautiful, it cannot be made of ugly parts. Rather, the constitutive simple elements of a beautiful object must carry some beauty in them. Indeed, beauty can be found in simple objects: a beautiful colour, a beautiful sound, a beautiful metal. Plotinus referred to gold, fire, and lightening as examples of beauty in nature, for which no artifactual intent can be responsible. Many things are intrinsically perceived as beautiful; harmony in multiplicity is an effect rather than a cause of beauty. The cause must be “temporally and hierarchically” superior to its effects.“Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight; but there is a beauty for the hearing too, as in certain combinations of words and in all kinds of music, for melodies and cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift themselves above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life, in actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect; and there is the beauty of the virtues.” (Enneads I, 6-1)
So what is the true origin of beauty if it is not in a harmonious combination or structure? Plotinus, using the central element of Plato’s doctrine, called it a Form (eîdos). According to this notion, elements of the sensual world are only maintained in existence through their participation to archetypal, intelligible Forms. The Forms are in a way the core reality that is expressed more or less accurately by the material world, which is but a world of shadows. True beauty is that of the intelligible.
This directly links beauty to the soul, as matter proceeds directly from psyche according to platonism. Plotinus argued that the soul is fed feelings through the senses, and that beauty gives it an object worthy of its interest, because of a correspondence between beauty and the intelligible. And better than physical beauty, the soul is attracted to moral beauty, which one may call virtue. However, beauty can also be found in non-sensual things such as an elegant mathematical proof. The beauty of sciences is only accessible to those who understand those sciences, which points to a higher source of beauty than the senses.
On the other hand, ugliness is to the soul like mud, that impedes the soul’s access to beauty.“But what is it that awakens all this passion? No shape, no colour, no grandeur of mass: all is for a Soul, something whose beauty rests upon no colour, for the moral wisdom the Soul enshrines and all the other hueless splendour of the virtues. It is that you find in yourself, or admire in another, loftiness of spirit; righteousness of life; disciplined purity; courage of the majestic face; gravity; modesty that goes fearless and tranquil and passionless; and, shining down upon all, the light of god-like Intellection. All these noble qualities are to be reverenced and loved, no doubt, but what entitles them to be called beautiful? They exist: they manifest themselves to us: anyone that sees them must admit that they have reality of Being; and is not Real-Being, really beautiful? ” (Enneads I, 6-5)
[…]“Let us then suppose an ugly Soul, dissolute, unrighteous: teeming with all the lusts; torn by internal discord; beset by the fears of its cowardice and the envies of its pettiness; thinking, in the little thought it has, only of the perish able and the base; perverse in all its the friend of unclean pleasures; living the life of abandonment to bodily sensation and delighting in its deformity. What must we think but that all this shame is something that has gathered about the Soul, some foreign bane outraging it, soiling it, so that, encumbered with all manner of turpitude, it has no longer a clean activity or a clean sensation, but commands only a life smouldering dully under the crust of evil; that, sunk in manifold death, it no longer sees what a Soul should see, may no longer rest in its own being, dragged ever as it is towards the outer, the lower, the dark?”
The soul is attracted to its likeness. How can the soul therefore be purified, once fallen? Beauty acts as a form of purification, by which the soul turns away from the body, to look into itself. Thus, according to Plotinus, man is not only to “do good”, he must also desire good by contemplating the Forms that derive from it. Action must therefore be rooted in the contemplation and desire of true justice.“So, we may justly say, a Soul becomes ugly — by something foisted upon it, by sinking itself into the alien, by a fall, a descent into body, into Matter. The dishonour of the Soul is in its ceasing to be clean and apart.” (Enneads I, 6-5)
Therefore, because beauty is perceived first by the senses, and then leads us to consider the beauty of morality and ethics, as well as intellectual, Beauty is presented by Plotinus as way path to purity, and to the ultimate Good, the One. Thus, through the contemplation and the desire of Beauty, the soul is drawn away from evil, towards good. In Beauty lies a path for the “fallen” soul, that will bring it to its reconciliation with the One, as Plotinus called it, or with God.“And so the Soul; let it be but cleared of the desires that come by its too intimate converse with the body, emancipated from all the passions, purged of all that embodiment has thrust upon it, withdrawn, a solitary, to itself again — in that moment the ugliness that came only from the alien is stripped away.” (Enneads I, 6-5)
This takes time, patience, and perseverance. Getting used to Good is a gradual process, just as Plato described how a too brighter light hurts the eyes of those who walk out of the cave for the first time.“What then is our course, what the manner of our flight? This is not a journey for the feet; the feet bring us only from land to land; nor need you think of coach or ship to carry you away; all this order of things you must set aside and refuse to see: you must close the eyes and call instead upon another vision which is to be waked within you, a vision, the birth-right of all, which few turn to use.” (Enneads I, 6-8)“Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.” (Enneads I, 6-9)
“If the eye that adventures the vision be dimmed by vice, impure, or weak, and unable in its cowardly blenching to see the uttermost brightness, then it sees nothing even though another point to what lies plain to sight before it. To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen, and having some likeness to it. Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.” (Enneads I, 6-9)
[1] On Beauty, Enneads I, 6