Neoplatonism: Framework for a Bahá'í Metaphysics

Nima Hazini

Abstract

The term Neoplatonism was coined in the nineteenth century by Thomas Taylor to denote the peculiar type of Platonic philosophy expounded by Plotinus (204/5-270 CE) and his successors and to distinguish it from that of the Old Academy of Plato's immediate successors and Middle Platonism. A quintessential religious philosophy, Neoplatonism has motivated the development of both systematic metaphysical speculation and mysticism in the three Abrahamic traditions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Emerging out of the matrix of an Islamic intellectual ethos, the Bahá'í Faith is informed by many of the central themes of Neoplatonic hought. Such notions as a radically transcendent Godhead (deus absconditus), the overflowing of God or the principle of "undiminished giving," the divine hypostases, the Primal Will (al-mashiyyah al-awwal) as the first self-manifestation of the Absolute and its contemplation of and reversion (epistrophe) to Its Source, creation as emanation and the eternity of the world, and the great chain of being, etc. figure prominently in Bahá'í theological metaphysics and can be traced directly to their Neoplatonic roots. In this paper I will discuss the major concepts of (1) Plotinian and (2) Islamic Neoplatonism, and (3) highlight the dominant features appearing in the Bahá'í system.

The Neoplatonism of Plotinus

For Plotinus the order of reality consists of three primary¹, vertically graded realms or hypostases: the One (to hen) or Good (to agathon), Intellect (nous) and World-Soul (psuche). The One/Good is the first² cause, primal existent, source and goal of all things³ and the central axis upon which Plotinus' overall worldview revolves around⁴. The One is a God-beyond-God, transcending all predications of being, number⁵, essence⁶, existence⁷, name⁸, form, attribute, thought and limitation; a complete and absolute self-contained unity-in-itself. It is the Supreme Reality and Being-beyond-being (metaousia). The One is identified as such so as to deny all multiplicity of it⁹.

From the One proceeds a second principle, the Intellect (nous), which, as the Divine Mind, functions as the efficient cause of all things. Nous is the Intelligible universe holding the Ideal Forms (eidos) or perfect archetypes of every existent within itself and as such is the realm of Being (ousia)¹⁰. Therefore, it would be more correct to call the Intellect Theos (or God) rather than the One. Intellect begets the World-Soul which in turn engenders nature (phusis) and the material cosmos. At the furtherest end of this reality is privational Matter (hyle) - absolute negation and source of evil.

The procession of hypostases from the One to the World-Soul is one of necessary emanation. The One is superabundant source and it overflows and emanates Intellect without in anyway diminishing¹¹. Intellect contemplates its Source, overflows and emanates its offspring, the World-Soul, and so on.

....the One, perfect because it seeks nothing, has nothing, and needs nothing, overflows, as it were, and its superabundance produces and makes something other than itself. This, when it has come into being, turns back upon the One and is filled, and becomes Intellect by looking towards it. Its halt and turning turning towards the One constitutes being, its gaze upon the One, Intellect (Enn. V.2 [1], 7-11)¹².

This creative process of spontaneous¹³ emanation and procession from the One to Intellect and the World-Soul is one of eternal outpouring extending to all levels of the universe down to the lowest levels of the material world. In other words, the universe exhibits a continuous and uninterrupted "Great Chain of Being¹⁴." Since the One is perfect in-itself, it is compelled by its very nature to give, or rather radiate, something outside itself.

Whenever anything reaches its own perfection, we see that it cannot endure to remain in itself, but generates and produces some other thing. Not only beings having the power of choice, but also those which are by nature incapable of choice, and even inanimate things, send forth as much of themselves as they can: thus fire emits heat and snow cold and drugs act upon other things...How then should the Most Perfect Being and the First Good remain shut up in itself, as though it were jealous or impotent - itself the potency of all things?...Something must therefore be begotten of it (Enn. V.4, [1]; V.1, [6]).

The cosmos subsists by this overflowing of the One in all things, while the One itself is not spent in its creation: it is inexhaustible sui generis Source¹⁵. While forever rapt in its own transcendence, the One is at the same time immanent in the world - the cause abounds in its effect and is not spatially separate¹⁶. Given this, Plotinus says that the three hypostases endure within the human microcosm as well as in the universe of the macrocosm.

A key point to stress about this process is that it does not occur in time. Plotinus, somewhat contrary to Plato's account in the Timaeus - but in general agreement with Aristotle - maintains the eternity of the world and by extension the eternal outpouring, or undiminshed giving, of the Divine: there cannot have been a time when the world did not exist. The conventional Judeao-Christian-Islamic notion of temporal creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing in time) is a repugnant idea to Plotinus, as it implies change and reflection in the Godhead. Hence, like Plato before him, Plotinus declares time to be the moving image of eternity (Timaeus 37d 5).

The One is attributeless. Nothing can be said of it positively, as it is beyond any positive (katophatic) enumeration, and any pronouncement can only be made in figurative reference and to negate what it is not; for it is everything and no-thing, everywhere and nowhere, the container of all things but itself uncontained, the possessor but unpossessed, etc.

The One is all things and no one of them; the source of all things is not all things; all things are its possession - running back, so to speak, to it - or, more correctly, not yet so, they will be (Enn. V.2, [1]).

This dialectical interplay between transcendence and immanence is called the via negativa or apophasis (unsaying)¹⁷, since, except to point the way, the One is beyond description: "we say what it is not, not what it is..." (Enn. V.3, [49], 14-7). A poignant example of this apophatic theology is the following passage:

....It is...not a determinate being, is without quality and quantity, and is neither Intellect nor soul; it is not in motion nor yet at rest; not in place, not in time, but 'self-contained, unique form' (Plato, Symposium 211 b1) - or, rather, formless, existing before all form, before movement, before rest; for these are attributes of Being, which make it manifold. Why, then, if not in motion, is it not at rest? Because it is to Being that one or both of these must pertain, and Being is at rest in virtue of rest, and is not identical with rest; so it will have rest as an attribute and cease to be simple. Even to describe the One as cause is not to attach a predicate to the One, but to ourselves, because we take gifts while it exists in itself. Strictly speaking, we should not say 'it' or 'exists', but we chase round about it in our desire to make sense of our experiences, at times coming close, but sometimes falling aside in the perplexity that it causes us (Enn. VI.9, [3]).

In Ennead III.8 [30], 8, we read that the relation of the nous (the Intellect) to the One is like a wave surging and moving outward like a concentric circle from its center. As the One is a complete unity-in-itself, the Intellect, the second hypostasis, is a unity-in-diversity¹⁸: its nature is undivided while multiplicity simultaneously subsists within it¹⁹.

Everything is clear, altogether and to its inmost part, to everything, for light is transparent to light. Each, There, has everything in itself and sees all things in every other, for all are everywhere and each and every one is all, and the glory is unbounded; for each of them is great, because even the small is great: the sun There is all the stars, and each star is the sun and all the others (Enn. V.8, [31], 4, 5-10)²⁰.

The Intellect is held to be the logos of its prior hypostasis and the arche (principle) of the subsequent. That is, it represents the One on a lower level of existence as a formative and governing principle and the World-Soul on a higher²¹. The Intellect's self-activity arising out of its principle unity-in-diversity is categorized by Plotinus as Existence/Being, Motion, Rest, Sameness and Otherness.

The nous (Intellect) is in effect the Divine Mind contemplating itself, or the intelligible realities susbsisting within itself, the perfect archetypes of all things. Not only does it contain the universal genera of every form but even those of particular species and differentia in an infinity (albeit not a numerical infinity). Everything tht exists in the sensible world has its perfect counterpart in that world. For example, both the forms of man (as genus) and particular men mutually co-exist there²². Moreover, each one of the Ideal forms is a living mind, and Intellect the unified totality of all minds²³. Plotinus says this life of Being is Eternity itself: an absolute fullness of being and plenitude in an eternal now.

...in that world...there is no poverty or impotence, but everything is filled full of life, boiling with life. Things there flow in a way from a single source, not like one particular breath or warmth, but as if there were a single quality containing in itself and preserving all qualities, sweet taste and smell and the quality of wine with all oher flavors, visions of colours and all that touch percieves, all too that hearing hears, all tunes and every rhythm (Enn. VI.7 [38], 12, 22-30).

Moreover, in this fullness of being even thought and life are a unity and all truth(s) immediately self-evident.

This life is wisdom, wisdom not acquired by reasoning, but always present, without any failing which would make it need to be searched for (Enn. V.8, [31], 7).

Consequently, nous is the efficient cause of whatever engages in cognitive activity (as well as that of anything which maintains substance/essence and lives).²⁴

Plotinus took issue with those philosophers like Numenius of Apamea who posited two or more Intellects. Rather, he insisted on the necessity of three - and only three - vertically graded hypostases. Accordingly, Plotinus adds the World-Soul (psuche) as the mediate hypostasis between the spiritual world of nous and the material universe. Of Plotinus' three three hypostases the World-Soul, which roughly approximates the peripatetic Agent or Active Intellect (nous poietikos), is "the most wide-ranging and various in its activities²⁵." As the Intellect is a unity-in-diversity, the World-Soul is a unity-and-diversity. Transcending all corporeality, it enjoys eternal nearness to its source, the Intellect²⁶, and, like the other two hypostasis, is simultaneously immanent and transcendent.

Taking his cue from Timaeus 37d 5 (i.e. "time as the moving image of eternity"), Plotinus defines time as "The Life of Soul in movement" (Enn. III.7, [9]). Whereas intellection in nous is immediately present in a boundless and eternal now, that of the World-Soul is successive and sequential: its internal processes is like that of discursive reasoning, logically moving from premises to conclusions, so to speak. It is this "restless nature" which separates the World-Soul from nous' natural disposition of tranquility and which is the progressive mutation towards a more complex form of life suffered by each lower hypostasis in turn which is tolma: self-assertion and the fallen nature (a Neoplatonic version of the primordial "Fall"). Plotinus declares this life of movement and action on the part of psuche to be an aberration from the life of simple contemplation and immediate presence characterized by Intellect.

The creative procession of the material universe from the World-Soul is an unplanned and spontaneous act arising out of the formers contemplation of its parent, the Intellect. However, it is the lower principle of the World-Soul, the mediate soul or Nature (phusis) -- Plotinus also calls it the "governing providence" -- and not the higher aspect which enjoys perpetual union with Intellect, that is actually responsible for producing the material world. Nature for its part is completely unconscious in its ordering. It is important to note that this image of spontaneity and involuntariness is in sharp contrast to both Plato's account in the Timaeus and those of the Judeao-Christain-Islamic teachings of conscious design and planning on the part of God.

In Enn. IV.3, [6], Plotinus asserts that our world and all entities are ensouled. The World-Soul is immanently present everywhere and everything. The plurality of souls, moreover, are nothing more than the particularized subsistences within a totality²⁷: individual souls are in fact the many facets of the world soul itself. Plotinus, repudiating the materialistic conception of the Stoics, the Pythagorean theory of harmony, and Aristotle's entelechy²⁸, argues that the body is embodied in an incorporeal, immortal soul and not vice versa. The literal interpretation of certain obscure passages of Plato's Phaedo, Phaedrus and Meno led Plotinus to espouse metempsychosis and the transmigration of souls as a result.

In the Physics and On Generation and Corruption, Aristotle made the important distinction between potentiality and act to explain the phenomena of genration, change and decay in the material world. Our sage uses the Stagirite's postulate as his point of departure on the issue of matter (hyle). For Plotinus Matter by itself is nothing but pure, uncompounded potentiality.²⁹ It is neither modified nor tempered by the forms which are reflected in it and as such (against Aristotle's thesis) it is utter privation, non-existent, completely impassable and the principle of evil; it is a mere phantom, as is our entire material world.³⁰

In spite of Plotinus' dubbing of Matter as evil, or the source thereof, it must be stressed that this image is used for no other purpose than, perhaps, as a rhetorical point.³¹ The theodicy of Neoplatonism will not admit of any independent source of evil in the universe; by definition the world generated by the One/Good cannot be but good³². Therefore, Matter is no more than the furtherest limit of possibility in the indefinite dyad, or tolma. On the other hand, in an interesting passage of Enn. IV. 8, [6] Plotinus admits that Matter is good by virtue of the fact that it participates in the One/Good:

Nothing is debarred from participation from the Good, to the extant of its receptivity...Matter, therefore, if it always existed could not but share in that Source that bestows Good on its creatures, universally and to the capacity of each; and if it came to birth of necessity as a consequent of prior causes, not even so could it be excluded from the Good. For he who brought it to existence in his gift could not withhold himself through failing power.

Moreover, in the same passage Plotinus engages yet another positive example, that of evolutionary unfoldment and plenitude, to illustrate the natue of Matter as the underlying substrate by which things come to be in our world from the primary hypostases:

The process is like the unfolding seed, moving from simple origin to termination in the world of sense, the prior always remaining in its place, while begetting its successor from a store of indescribable power - power that must not halt within the higher realm, as if circumscribed by jealousy, but continue to expand until the universe of things reaches the limit of its possibility, lavishing its vast resources on all its creatures, intolerant that any one should have no share in it...³³

Like any good Platonist, Plotinus believes the physical cosmos to be a reflection, albeit an imperfect and shadowy reflection, of the intelligible world³⁴. Hence, unlike his contemporaries, the Gnostics, Plotinus does not share in the conviction that this world is inherently evil or created in error. Compared to its progenitor, the World-Soul, the world is corrupted - no doubt - but that is only because it falls short of the image it symbolizes, the world of Forms. Thus its defectiveness must be blamed upon lack and not purpose. This world is unreal, a mirage if you will, and Plotinus takes serious issue with those like the Peripatetics and Stoics who uphold the rality of bodies and objects of sense³⁵. In a Zen-like passage of Enn. III.6, [6], Plotinus declares "physical objects like mountains, rocks and the whole solid earth, and the matter which underlies them," to be illusary and "unreal." However, the world of sense is in a way real as well; real - and only so - because it shares in the eternal beauty of the intelligible world.

One of the most engrossing positions propounded in the Enneads is that of cosmic sympathy. Paraphrasing Timaeus 30 d3-31 a1, in Enn. IV.4, [32], Plotinus states that the universe is "one giant living organism embracing all living beings within it," or, as the Peripatetics would claim, "the world is an ontological bloc without fissure³⁶." This is due to the inherently ensouled nature of the universe itself (see above) and the fully integrated nature of the whole. All things share in degrees of participation in psuche and universal sympathy pervades the entire cosmos as a consequence. Prayer, and including magic, are effectual due to this cosmic, universal sympathy and not because God, or the gods, consciously or deliberately answer the prayers of men³⁷.

...the sun or other stars [do] not listen to...prayer. The prayer is answered by the sympathy of the universe, connecting part with part as in a single taut string, which if plucked of one string is sensed by another, in harmony with it and tuned to a similar scale; and vibration can pass even from lyre to lyre, so great is the sympathy. In view of this, throughout the universe, though composed of contraries, a single harmony exists, and even those contraries share an affinity and kinship (Enn. IV.4, [41]).

Strife and conflict is the requisite corollary of the diversity of the material universe and the necessary imperfection of its parts vis-a-vis the whole. Notwithstanding, the overall pattern of the whole must by definition be good in-itself, since by the regulation of the Intellect, the divine logos, "...unity results, even if composed of opposites (Enn. III.2, [17])." Thus, actions are not predetermined eo ipso, yet our choices do contribute to the providential order of the cosmos. Like all Platonists, Plotinus cleaves to the Socratic dictum that no one does wrong voluntarily but only as a result of ignorance. Yet, punishment for evil³⁸ is dictated, almost like a Newtonian law, by providential reason. Fate, therefore, operating in the world here below through the agency of higher providence, ensures that "...virtue is everywhere in control (Enn. III.3, [3])."

Man in the Neoplatonic scheme is not completely of this world and his membership here is only partial. Our lower soul is of the physical universe, but the higher nature, independent of the body, belongs eternally to the realm of Intellect, the world of Being³⁹. However, we have lost our primordial, pristine unity by being thrust into this physical world and "another person," as it were, has emerged and been embodied in an individual receptacle which we falsely identify as our real selves.⁴⁰ Hence, we must seek to free ourselves from this mortal coil ("cut away," says Plotinus) through the contemplative life of the intellect (noesis) -- true freedom⁴¹ and happiness (eudaimonia) and that which guides us to the One/Good. It is the striving "...to lead the divine within you to the Divine in the All" (Vita Plotini).

The salvation⁴² of the soul does not end with its realization of the intellectual realities. Its "journey home" and final awakening - to use a Buddhist metaphor - is its ascent and union with the One, "...the flight of the alone to the Alone" (Enn. VI.9, [10]). To attain this union the intellectual soul must cut away everything it has witnessed in nous, move to the center of being and into the voidal emptiness of the One. There it will find its true identity with the Ground of Being which it was never divorced from to begin with, despite the mundane illusion of separation.

Existence finally resolves where it began, with the One: the chain of being moving from a circle of descent out to the world and of an ascent back to the One. In point of fact, the whole ladder of existence is nothing more than the facets of the One itself. Thus, the cosmos is a journey of the One to the One by the One in the One.

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