Plotinus · Philosophy
Plotinus’ spiritual path: the soul, having descended from the divine through the levels of emanation, can <em>ascend back</em> - turning inward and upward, purifying itself, rising through contemplation of Mind to a final, ineffable union with the One: ‘the flight of the alone to the Alone.’
Plotinus’ metaphysics of emanation - reality flowing out from the One through Mind and Soul down to the material world - is not merely a cosmology; it is, at the same time, a map of the soul’s journey, and the most important part of that journey is the return. For if the soul has flowed out from the One, through the levels of the emanation, then the soul can also flow back - can retrace the path of its descent, rising through the levels from which it came, ascending toward union with its divine source. This ascent is the heart of Plotinus’ philosophy as a way of life. The human soul, he teaches, is a divine and immortal thing, a fragment (so to speak) of the great procession from the One, which has descended into a body and become entangled in the material world, forgetting its high origin. The whole work of the spiritual life is to remember that origin and to return to it - to turn the soul around, away from its absorption in the body and the senses, and to begin the homeward climb.
This gives Plotinus’ thought its characteristic inward and upward direction. The soul does not find its source by looking outward, at the material world, or by traveling anywhere in space; it finds it by turning inward and upward - inward, because the higher realms are present within the soul itself (the soul’s own depths open onto the Divine Mind and beyond); upward, because the ascent is a rising through the levels of reality, from the sensible to the intelligible to the One. ‘Withdraw into yourself and look,’ Plotinus famously advises; the way to the divine is not out but in, not away but deeper. The soul that turns from the distractions of the body and the multiplicity of the sensible world, and gathers itself inward and upward, discovers within itself the path back to its source - for the higher levels of reality from which it descended are not far away in space but present in the soul’s own interior depths, waiting to be rediscovered by the soul that turns to seek them.
The soul’s ascent is not a single leap but a graded climb, requiring both moral purification and a rising contemplation that mounts from lower beauties to higher. The first stage is purification (katharsis): the soul must free itself from its excessive attachment to the body and the material world, from the passions and appetites that bind it to the lowest level and disperse it among multiple, fleeting things. This is the work of the virtues, which Plotinus understands as instruments of ascent - they purify the soul, detach it from the body’s tyranny, and turn it toward the higher. As the soul is purified, it becomes able to contemplate higher and higher realities, and here Plotinus draws on Plato’s great image from the Symposium: the ladder of beauty. The soul ascends by rising through the levels of beauty - from the beauty of particular bodies, to the beauty of all bodies, to the beauty of souls and virtues and laws, to the beauty of the Forms and the intelligible world, and finally toward the source of all beauty, the Good itself. Each level of beauty draws the soul upward, awakening its love and longing, and serves as a step toward the next.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that for Plotinus the soul, having descended from the divine, can ascend back - by turning inward and upward, purifying itself of attachment to the body, rising through the contemplation of Beauty and the Divine Mind toward a final, ineffable union with the One, ‘the flight of the alone to the Alone.’ Expl…
Leads to Aristotle.
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