Platonic Mysticism

Contemplative Science, Philosophy, Literature, and Art

Arthur Versluis

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781438466347
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Mysticisme

In Platonic Mysticism, Arthur Versluis clearly and tautly argues that mysticism must be properly understood as belonging to the great tradition of Platonism. He demonstrates how mysticism was historically understood in Western philosophical and religious traditions and emphatically rejects externalist approaches to esoteric religion. Instead he develops a new theoretical-critical model for understanding mystical literature and the humanities as a whole, from philosophy and literature to art. A sequel to his Restoring Paradise, this is an audacious book that places Platonic mysticism in the context of contemporary cognitive and other approaches to the study of religion, and presents an emerging model for the new field of contemplative science.

CHAPTER ONE

Platonic Mysticism

In the introduction, we began with the etymology of the word “mysticism,” which derives from mystes (μύστης), an initiate into the ancient Mysteries. Literally, it refers to “one who remains silent,” or to “that which is concealed,” referring one’s direct inner experience of transcendence that cannot be fully expressed discursively, only alluded to. Of course, it is not clear what the Mysteries revealed; the Mystery revelations, as Walter Burkert suggested, may have been to a significant degree cosmological and magical.1 But it is clear that there is a related Platonic tradition that, while it begins with Plato’s dialogues, is most clearly expressed in Plotinus and is conveyed in condensed form into Christianity by Dionysius the Areopagite. Here, we will introduce the Platonic nature of mysticism.

That we focus on this current of mysticism originating with Plato and Platonism and feeding into Christianity should not be understood as suggesting that there is no mysticism in other traditions. Rather, by focusing on Christian mysticism, we will see much more clearly what is meant by the term “mysticism,” and because we are concentrating on a particular tradition, we will be able to recognize whether and to what extent similar currents are to be found in other religious traditions. At the same time, to understand Christian mysticism, we must begin with Platonism, because the Platonic tradition provides the metaphysical context for understanding its latest expression in Christian mysticism.

Plato himself is, of course, a sophisticated author of fiction who puts nearly all of what he wrote into the form of literary dialogues between various characters. Hardly anything he wrote can be attributed fully to him, because what constitutes Plato’s thought really belongs to his characters—making Platonism uniquely oblique as philosophico-religious expression. But such a literary approach allowed Plato to express in coyly allusive ways what I have elsewhere termed “the contemplative ascent” and “illumination.” This approach also meant that Platonism was not bound to ancient paganism but could be introduced comfortably into other religious traditions, including Christianity. The metaphysics is portable.

Plato expresses himself in figures, analogies, symbols: mysticism in Plato is expressed indirectly, in terms of wingéd ascent, as remembrance of truth, as initiation into mysteries, but not, for the most part, in terms of pure transcendence. In Phaedrus, Plato famously describes as a kind of erotic madness the desire of the soul to ascend to authentic and true beauty when seeing beauty on earth, or the beauty of the beloved. What we long for, in this kind of madness, is the “most blessed” “beatific vision” of our initiation into the mystery of the realm of the gods, “shining in pure light.” We remember this primordial vision, Plato tells us, and we long to return to it.2 He describes how the lover, upon seeing the beloved, begins to grow wings and to undergo both pain and joy as he seeks to ascend. Because of our desire for the beloved, we are willing to give up all other earthly things, happily living in poverty if only we can be near our beloved, and through our love we enter into a “happy band” of those who live in the realm of light.3

A very similar vision is outlined in Symposium, where the stranger woman Diotima of Mantinea instructs Socrates on the ascent from earthly to transcendent beauty by initiation through love. One comes eventually upon wondrous and transcendent beauty that does not belong to the realm of change, does not wax or wane, that does not correspond to any physical or intellectual object, but rather is “beauty absolute,” simple and eternal. This essence of beauty cannot be understood by referent to any aspect of existence, but rather by negation; to be rapt in contemplation of it is to enjoy immortality and to become “the friend of God.”4

This Platonic tradition of contemplative ascent through initiatory love recurs in later mystical traditions in Sufism and in Christianity. This kind of ascent is not only devotional, though it is that, but also specifically a kind of contemplative ascent through the image of the beloved, at the center of which is transcendence. The lover’s longing for the beloved, and the spiritual path through the beloved into the transcendence of self and other is clearly a Platonic theme embedded deep in the dialogues, but it is also visible in the forms of love mysticism we find much later in Sufism and in Christian mysticism.

It is true, of course, that both Sufism and Christian mysticism are profoundly indebted to Platonism. The Platonic tradition was transmitted into Christianity through Dionysius the Areopagite, and later through authors like John Scotus Eriugena, to name only the most influential channels. But we should also recognize that the contemplative ascent through initiatory love that we see in Phaedrus and the Symposium is beautifully expressed there but does not require Plato’s dialogues in order to be rediscovered. Plato’s references in his dialogues to ascent through love and beauty refer to an enduring aspect of human inner life that does not require reading the dialogues in order to be rediscovered by the ardent lover. Plato gives expression to what every ardent lover intuitively knows, and what a medieval woman mystic in love with Christ has experienced, too, whether she has heard of Plato or not.

While Plato’s dialogues are obviously pagan and polytheistic, they also are not opposed to monotheism in the sense that one god is sometimes referred to in the dialogues as the supreme one, for instance Zeus, of whom all the others are by implication derivative. And the Platonic tradition often refers to τοεν, “the One,” which is a metaphysical concept that is not monotheistic but could be interpreted as harmonious with some types of monotheism. Hence Platonism can be imported quite easily into those forms of monotheism that assert, as in Islam or Christianity, a single transcendent deity, less easily into those that posit a personal or tribal god. Without doubt, mysticism in Christianity, and no doubt in other forms of monotheism as well, even if it is not explicit, owes an enormous intellectual debt to Platonism.

The heart of mysticism is the transcendence of subject-object duality, and that is what we find expressed in different ways in Plotinus’s extraordinary and virtually inexhaustible exposition in Enneads. Whereas in the modern idiom, “mysticism” is often synonymous with “the irrational,” Plotinus effortlessly joins reason and its transcendence: he is consummately rational in his efforts to express different facets of what we may term transcendental consciousness. In Ennead 5, for instance, he writes about the distinction between “one thing thinking another, and something thinking itself.” The latter, he continues, “goes further towards escaping being two.”5 Following the same logic, he continues, “that which is beyond the primary thinking principle will no longer think,” because thinking requires an object of thought, hence duality, whereas what is beyond being is also beyond thinking. Perfection and perfect unity/identity is beyond thinking that requires objects of thought. This transcendence is not opposed to thinking; it is not irrational, but it encloses and transcends rationality.

Plotinus also beautifully engages the religious language of the ancient gods to express much the same point. In Ennead 5, Plotinus writes about the contemplative ascent to intelligible beauty in terms of ascent to the realm of the gods, among whom Zeus is the most illuminating and beautiful. Zeus, the closest to pure transcendence, illuminates and dazzles everything and everyone, and those who gaze upon him see different facets of his transcendence but all are illumined and transformed by seeing him.6 What is more, all those who ascend to such beauty and illumination themselves become illumined by it, as if suffused with the red-gold light of a transcendent earth upon which they now walk in the presence of the gods.

And here Plotinus concludes with a key point: for those are not merely spectators of the gods; there is “no longer one thing outside and another outside which is looking at it,” for “the keen-sighted has seen [what is] within, although having it, he for the most part does not know he has it.” One has the vision of the god in oneself; for this magnificent visionary spectacle does not entail external objects to be perceived; it is, rather, a revelation of what is within, and ultimately it is a revelation not of duality but of unity, of transcendence. This higher reality has its own light, and that light never changes; it is only we who do or do not perceive it and that which it illuminates in the higher, intelligible realm where lives beauty surpassing any earthly beauty.7 And all of this is within, not outside us; it is more intimate to us than we ourselves.

But the language of the ancient gods is not necessary to express the transcendence to which Plotinus refers, and in fact at other points in the Enneads his language, while not monotheistic, nonetheless works both in a pagan and in a Christian context. He writes about transcendence that one should not try to understand it through other things, that is, through similes or metaphors, but should seek to grasp it as it exists in “itself, pure, mixed with nothing, in which all things have a share, though nothing has it.”8 It cannot be measured and “does not come within range of number”; it is not limited; it has no shape, no parts, and no form.9 He likens this transcendence to participation in the Mystery rites and remarks that “men have forgotten that which from the beginning until now they want and long for.”10 But he also uses theistic language, remarking that “the Good” that “transcends all things” “makes them and lets them exist by themselves, while he remains above them.”11

Still, neither polytheistic nor theistic language is actually necessary for Plotinus; later in the fifth book, he offers a different analogy. All men, he says, begin with sense perception when they are born, and there are some who during life begin to awaken to what is above the sensory. But there is “a third kind of godlike men who by their greater power and the sharpness of their eyes” are raised above the clouds, “overlooking all things here below,” and “delighting in the true region which is their own, like a man who has come home after a long wandering to his own well-ordered country.”12 And what is this region of which Plotinus writes? It is beauty, and wisdom, but these are characteristics or expressions of it. In essence, it is “true Intellect.”13 This Intellect is beyond the soul, beyond being; and since it “possesses itself in peace, is everlasting fullness.”14

The Platonic tradition as represented in the work of Plato and Plotinus—as well as Proclus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Damascius, and others in this lineage—is not philosophical in the modern sense of discursive analytical disputation, but rather represents the headwaters for what in Christianity becomes known, broadly speaking, as mysticism. Of course Platonism expresses itself through discursive exposition—no doubt of that. So too, often, do mystics. But the discursive exposition of a Plotinus, for instance, is not an end in itself; it is rather at the service of the contemplative ascent and transcendence, as is clear in these passages from Plotinus’s Enneads. The word “mysticism” in this context refers to the contemplative ascent from a condition of perceived duality (divided subject and object) and suffering, to the transcendence of duality or subject/object division, and a concomitant beatitude or joy. This ascent is clearly there in Plato’s dialogues, especially Phaedrus and Symposium, as also in Plotinus, and in the many mystics who belong to the broader current of Christian Platonism.

The headwaters of this tradition are to be found in the works of Dionysius the Areopagite, who probably lived in the fifth century AD, but about whose identity there is still much speculation and little certainty, even with regard to which century he belongs. There are, of course, others whose work is also important to understanding subsequent mysticism in the Christian tradition—one thinks here of Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Evagrius Ponticus, and the Desert Fathers, for instance. All of these are important in different ways for understanding mysticism as it develops through subsequent centuries. Clement of Alexandria, for instance, distinguished an authentic Christian gnosis from false gnosis, hence providing a precedent for understanding a current within Christianity as having gnostic insight at its center. But among the many important figures during the early period of Christianity, Dionysius the Areopagite remains essential for contextualizing and understanding subsequent currents of mysticism.

That Dionysius’s works belong to the larger current of Platonism, but diverted into Christianity, can hardly be gainsaid. There are, of course, differences, as indeed there are major distinctions to be made between Platonists proper. Just as Proclus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus are each distinctive, so too each of them is distinct from Dionysius. Whereas all Platonists properly speaking are pagan, Dionysius is incontrovertibly Christian, and his subsequent influence on mystics in both the West and the East is vast. What makes Dionysius so remarkable is that he preserves essential elements of Platonism, but in a new Christian theological context.

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