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To Dawn

The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. Douglas Adam

lotinus (204 270 AD) never discussed his ancestry, childhood, or his place or date of birth. But he imparted to his biographer that he had a fixation on boobies like most of us men he liked to lift his nannys tunic and stare at her tits until the age of eight, when he already went to school although he outlived his final years in the company of a man. He was, what we would call camera-shy. The one existing portrait bust was created behind his back; the artist covertly sketched his features during a lecture. From the likeness we can gather that Plotinus was either an Egyptian native or from Syrian parents, perhaps there was a spot of Arab blood in his veins Alexandria was a cosmopolitan hub and the most lively center of trade and culture with a long tradition of eclectic learning and innovation but never really a melting pot of the nations, the multitude of neighborhoods kept very much to themselves. At twenty-seven Plotinus was infected with a passion for philosophy: he listened in to the most highly acclaimed professors at Alexandria; but their lectures left him singularly unimpressed and he gradually sunk into a deep depression. He looked for something to live by; his search was as much the religious quest of a man lacking the gift of faith, as it was a survey of the various philosophical schools. At last a

friend took pity on him and asked Plotinus to follow him down to the harbor front; it was already late and the Sun about to set. They arrived at the bleached latticework of a windswept little shack next to a well-groomed vegetable patch. Plotinus companion gently knocked and from inside a reaching hand opened the door to a small crowd of men and even women from all walks of life if dresses were anything to go by, some of these people seemed to hold high positions in the city council, but here in this lowly place they were seen rubbing elbows with some rather dubious figures from the dregs of the slums. They shuffled together on their seats to open a gap for the newcomers on the wooden bench lining the wall. Plotinus preferred to keep standing in a corner. Everybody listened attentively to the man sitting on a rickety chair in the middle of the room. Plotinus had heard of this man before, in passing, but never had given it a serious thought to actually pay a visit. They called him Ammonius the Porter. The name was as unprepossessing as the entire surrounding here. Yet whether it was the spell of the hour and of the somewhat mystifying circumstances, or the unadorned words of a man speaking from his heart, after a while Plotinus caused a little startle in the growing darkness of the stuffy room, exclaiming: This is the man I was looking for. He continued studying with Ammonius for the next eleven years. The ageing Ammonius Saccas (175 242 AD) Ammonius the Porter was an apostate from the faith of his Christian parents and dragged a living out of carrying sack-loads at the

busiest harbor of the whole empire. The porters apostasy was a reflection of the intellectual turmoil in Alexandria. It was still early days but the Christian papacy in Alexandria already claimed leadership over the plethora of local churches everywhere in the empire. Rome didnt count; not yet! The three or four congregations in Rome were still mostly assemblies of foreigners; their language was Greek, most of them expatriates from Syria and Epirus, living with the locals on a footing of mutual distrust. The message of these fanatics and Christian Taliban just didnt sound right. The Syrian Tatian (110 180 AD), with the zeal typical of a convert, called for the total demolition of Hellenistic culture and learning. He couldnt wait to see fire fall from Heaven. In response to characters like this Tatian, Plotinus published a treatise under the title: Against the Gnostics. It raises the question whether Gentile critics of the new religion could actually see the difference between Gnosticism and Christianity, in fact whether there ever had been such a difference to begin with? In our time the animistic belief in the ultimately numinous nature of all being has faded away thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath (Swinburne, 1837 1909) but in the third century it was still the lynchpin in the beliefs of a religious Gentile. So when such a Christian Taliban kept proclaiming in a loud voice that he was not to worship Gods creation, because the Sun and the Moon were made on our account. How then shall I worship my own

ministers (Tatian, Against the Greek), it was perceived as a flagrant sacrilege. We can see now how and why the Gentile authorities of the period could charge the Christians with atheism. Plotinus raises the same accusation: Human temerity, he wrote, is only too willing to accept such grandiloquent ravings. The simple folks hear: People whose worship is inherited from antiquity are not His children - you are! So you address the lowest of men as brothers, but you deny this courtesy to the Sun and disown your ties with the Cosmos? In 242 AD Ammianus the Porter passed away. Plotinus applied for an appointment with the cartographers and scientists on the staff of the imperial army. Emperor Gordian III was assembling forces to launch a campaign against Persia. After some initial successes in Iraq, a clique of staff officers around Philip the Arab poisoned first the chief of staff Misitheus who also was the legal guardian of the eighteenyear-old Gordian, and then the emperor himself. The Roman Empire possessed still enough vitality to absorb a disaster on a distant frontier, but the death of Gordian was the beginning of something more sinister than a mere regime change. Gordian III came from a wealthy family of accomplished civil servants, himself being still a minor, he and his guardian had ruled in close cooperation with the Senate of Rome, and his legislation from 244 AD bestowed on the age the closest approximation of habeas corpus ever achieved in Roman law. It prohibited the use of torture on everyone, whether free or slave, without a conviction in a court of law.

In a sense the high watermark of imperial Rome, a splendid justification for the idea of empire: welfare, roads and the rule of law for every nation under the same roof, although the welfare-bit was a bit of an uphill struggle. The currency was in decline and a mutinous military was more concerned with perks and internal rivalry than upholding the authority of central government. But there was still some life in the constitution of the state. When the able and successful Emperor Aurelian was assassinated again it happened on a campaign in Iraq the armies turned to the Senate of Rome for a resolution: The fortunate and brave armies to the Senate and People of Rome, greetings. Our Emperor Aurelian fell victim to the guile of one man who misled otherwise good and honest people to assassinate the commander. Conscript Fathers! Cast your vote for the apotheosis of Emperor Aurelian and from your assembly choose a worthy successor, since we shall not brook anybody among those who acted in error or knowingly committed a crime to take command over the troops. Plotinus would not live to see this moment of constitutional glory, and even if he had, he was not interested in politics, not a bit. Which is understandable after what he had seen during the campaign of Gordian. Parched and covered in dust, Plotinus straggled with the rearguard and barely made it to Antioch where he boarded a merchant vessel to Ostia in Italy. From Ostia he sailed up the Tiber to a life of impoverished obscurity in Rome; fortunately his landlady was generous and forgiving, the only other woman ever mentioned by Plotinus biographer, apart from the nanny. Meanwhile Gor-

dians assassin, Philip the Arab (244 249 AD) was reaping the reward for his treason. It was he, and not Constantine, who became the first Christian emperor of Rome. (Philip the Arab was a Christian since birth.) His reign didnt sit well with the senate and he proposed his abdication at a time when Plotinus began earning a reputation and attracted a devoted circle of students and friends, among them his sponsor and biographer Porphyry from Syria and the Roman Neo-Platonist Amelius Gentilianus from Tuscany. A correspondent and fellow student from the days of the porter, the philosopher Cassius Longinus arranged for the noted Eustochius of Alexandria to attend to Plotinus as his personal physician. The good doctor and his patient became very close friends. Apparently a good number of Plotinus students came from the medical profession: there was Paulinus, the doctor of the city of Scythopolis (in those days physicians still practiced on the public budget) and a certain Zethos, an Arabian by descent to whom Plotinus felt very attached. The medical care became a necessity since public hygiene had become a matter of growing neglect. The new religions taught the mortification of the flesh, and Plotinus was not exempt from the spirit of the age. Consequently he suffered severely from ulcers and eczema and when he dismissed his students with the customary kiss after class, we are told that some students would rather do without the kiss. In the world outside of his lecture hall, the successor to Philip the Arab, Emperor Decius (249 251 AD), issued his infamous decree that every citizen was obliged, on pain of death, to perform a compulsory sacrifice to the gods

which had to be certified in a written document. The decree was the opening salvo to the empire-wide persecution of Christians, the first of altogether two. One cant help sensing a good deal of escapism from the horrors of the period, when we see men of influence and culture lining up to Plotinus lectures. This circle of trust among the initiated included such prominent figures as the rhetorician Serapion of Alexandria and the poet and critic Zoticus. The senator Castricius Firmus made all money worries go away and bestowed on Plotinus a country estate six miles from Minturnae; the senators Marcellus Orontius, Sabinillus, and Rogantianus opened doors to the Imperial Court: they sensed the potential for an ideological revival that could resurrect the faltering empire and infuse a new sense of purpose. They arranged for an audience with the Emperor. The aristocratic Emperor Galienus had a mother-load on his plate. The state was bankrupt. It left the emperor with no other choice but hat in hand to entreat the senate for a bailout, which Galienus was fortunate enough to get. Meanwhile France and Syria seceded from the empire and the Eastern armies waged civil war. But despite of everything, Emperor Galienus still could make time for an audience. The emperor was an easygoing aristocrat who didnt stand on formality. He invited Plotinus to met him in the extended gardens of Sallutius villa, for many centuries the crown jewel of the imperial estates. Yet the polite and cultivated conversation ended in mutual disappointment:

neither got what he had hoped for. Emperor Galienus was not particularly known for intellectual pursuits, he preferred to sweat it out behind a pack of baying hounds on the trail of the boar, but he knew first hand what it means to entrust imperial rule to the ambitions of a hungry soldiery. In the ranks there was a rising awareness that even loyalty had a price-tag attached and the haughty chiefs of the top brass had come to consider the empire as their personal estate, something to be farmed and squeezed of resources to the last drop of blood. Rome was one step away from a military lootocracy. Emperor Galienus realized the need for shoring up imperial authority in a broader ideological consensus; some form of (albeit pagan) monotheism the favorite companion of political tyranny perhaps a kind of mandatory cult at the heart of the state. Maybe this Plotinus could come up with a workable idea? Yet workable ideas were not exactly the domain of Plotinus, he was not a practical man. Instead he asked for a donation to his pet project, a Neo-Pythagorean community in the south of Italy. With a little shrug, the emperor waved at him an empty wallet. These were awkward moments in his social life; yet once he spoke from his elevated seat in the lecture hall, Plotinus became a different person. His razor-sharp analytical mind sniffed out hairsplitting subtleties like a hound on the trail; he reasoned with power and conveyed with conviction. Only when it came to putting his thoughts on paper, according to his biographer who was also his friend and editor, Plotinus suffered from dyslexia and was plagued with extreme astig-

matism. So whatever was put in writing was done for good, Plotinus refused to read it ever again, not even for corrections. Plotinus philosophy was the product of thirty years of thinking and teaching, putting together a well-considered synthesis of a long line of distinguished forerunners, beginning with Pythagoras (570 495 BC). Pythagoras had already imagined a Universe entirely composed of numbers and was the first to suggest that the Sun is at the center of the solar system (preventing our Earth and her hypothetical twin from the opposite side of the circular trajectory to see each other). Pure speculation of course, but he had good instincts. Pythagoras also insisted on the ploy of not leaving anything in writing. He was a scientist, an elitist politician, a cult leader and a charlatan all rolled together in one package. In their days the Pythagoreans had many and powerful enemies. Plotinus on the other hand, lacked the inclination and the gift of duping the rubes. The doctrine of Neo-Platonism has been addressed as a form of pantheism, although not quite the kind of vague pervasiveness the educated Gentile was used to find in his classics: Some say that bees even have their share in divine intelligence, and drink from Gods own life, says the poet Virgil (70 19 BC), for the Divine Presence, it is said, is everywhere, in Earth, and Ocean, and the unknown sky, and flocks, herds, men, and beasts of every kind, draw at birth this fine essential flame, even return to God at last, to be absorbed; no room is left for death (Georgics 4:

227). (What a lovely motto for a funeral parlor.)

In the days of the prophet Jeremiah a certain Anaximander of Miletus (611 547 BC) had already concluded that all life must have sprung from maritime organisms, yet the bigots then as now, bypassed the idea of evolution as irreligious. Especially the educated found Anaximanders idea a tad too undignified for a believer in the immutable and noble nature of the Platonic archetypes Natures purely mathematical and immaterial cookie cutters for just about everything in existence, the DNA of the Universe, if you will. That doesnt mean the thinkers of the period turned a blind eye on the specter of incessant changes that are surrounding us; they found it disturbing, like a long spidery shadow encroaching from the fringes of chaos. Plotinus teacher, the humble porter finally came up with an acceptable answer: he postulated a kind of evolution upside down, a constant flux of creative energy from an indistinct primeval unity through ever more diverse and articulated agencies all the way down to humans, animals and inanimate matter. This flux had no beginning in time; it is supposed to sustain a permanent suspense, like the block universe in Professor Stephen Hawkings proposition. There seems to be a love affair between the Vatican and Big Bang. I was there when Abbe Georges Lemaitre proposed the theory of Big Bang for the first time, said the Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven (1908 1995), one of the truly exceptional physicists of his period. Lemaitre was both a member of the Catholic

hierarchy and an accomplished scientist. He said in private that this theory was a way to reconcile science with St. Thomas Aquinas' theological dictum of creation out of nothing. Accordingly, in 1951, in a speech before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Nazis favorite Pope, Pius XII offered his enthusiastic endorsement: It would seem that present-day science, with one stroke across the centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to the august instant of the primordial Fiat Lux, when along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, and the elements split and churned and formed into millions of galaxies. The Pope went on to conclude that Big Bang proved the existence of God: Thus, with that concreteness which is characteristic of physical proofs, science has confirmed the contingency of the universe and also the well-founded deduction as to the epoch when the world came forth from the hands of the Creator. Hence, creation took place. We say: therefore, there is a Creator. In 1978 the Vatican invited the cosmologist Professor Stephen Hawking (*1942) for a guest lecture before the Pontifical Academy of Science and awarded him with the Pius XI Medal. In his book A History of Time, Hawking, somewhat tongue in cheek, claims that Pope John Paul II had tried to discourage him and other scientists from trying to figure out how the universe began, which is not utterly out of character with this Pope. I was glad then, Hawking said, that he did not know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference the possibility that spacetime was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of creation. Stephen Hawk-

ing brought forward the scenario of a universe expanding from Big Bang towards a maximum and then falling back into the big crunch without actually doing either. Instead of a linear progression from alpha to omega, he proposed the layout of a Universe suspended in a dimension of simultaneous occurrences beyond our cognitive categories of time and space. The quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, he argued, in which there would be no boundary to spacetime and so there would be no need to specify the behavior at the boundary. One could say: The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary. The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just be. In Hawkings analogy the Universe expands from the pole symbolizing Big Bang towards the equator, and further on shrinks back to the point of collapse at the other pole. Yet we continue on our travel, reach again the equator and then the opposite pole, and so on, indefinitely. It is not supposed to be the story of a cyclical event though, but the travel through a one off permanence. The Universe, says Professor Hawking, if completely selfcontained, having no boundary or edge, would have neither beginning nor end: what place, then, for a creator? (sic!) If the laws of physics could break down at the beginning of the Universe, why couldnt they break down anywhere? The good professor then continues on a matter of principle: To admit a singularity is to deny a universal predictabil-

ity to physics, and, hence ultimately, to reject the competence of science to understand the Universe. That is an interesting statement by the very man who made a career out of the research of black holes, which are physical singularities by definition. Subsequently Professor Hawking dedicated his life to unraveling the physical features of black holes. He came to the conclusion that these singularities have a limited lifespan that ends in a bang. Plotinus didnt think of the ultimate source as a god or creator; instead the porter had taught him to envision it in its immaterial and pre-sentient eternity, one could almost say as a purely mathematical entity, which involuntarily pours out into the material world, because that is its nature, and in the process gradually generates entities with sentience and form. This process was understood to be a gradual decline from some or other state of absolute purity and perfection. The attentive reader will notice that the concept is based on a good deal of semantic fallacies. The porters idea reflects the way we go down from generalizations to more specific matters of fact, but Granny Nature doesnt know of generalizations, all she does is to entangle specific facts in ever more complex patterns. Yet there was an ideological benefit in Plotinus system for the wide spectrum of cults and religions of the empire. The presumably divine nature of established traditions and of the Olympic pantheon was not to be challenged, the only difference being that Zeus and his tribe were assigned to

a lesser more subordinated detail. In the neo-Platonic scheme of things they acted as mere intermediaries of the great outpouring, which came cascading down in a complicated hierarchy of gods, stars, angelic beings, demons and heroes, with us lesser mortals feeding at the bottom, yet each and everyone carrying the divine spark and being ultimately a rung of the ladder coming down from the ultimate source. No need for crusading against the gods of old in the name of a new deity. On the contrary: there were visitations from the unseen world by angelic beings thought to take on human form. The philosopher Sosipatra was raised by no less than three of these angelic beings; her father had hired them, thinking they were farmhands. Sosipatra became the Madam Blavatsky of her time and later married the Neo-Platonic philosopher Eustathius of Cappadocia. In 358 AD, Emperor Constantius II sent the couple on a diplomatic mission to Persia. The Iran offered a safe haven from the Christian ayatollahs at home and the two decided to settle there for good. So, how did Plotinus and his teacher know about this golden chain of being that is holding together everything that breathes? Their reasoning is not difficult to follow; the premise is of endearing simplicity: It is unity that makes a being. The members of every plant and animal form a unity; separation means loss of existence (Plotinus). Over the centuries this idea has spawned many and sometimes utterly weird derivatives. Swedenborg and Madame Blavatsky told their followers that man contains in himself

the nature of every other species. Accordingly the ancestor of my cat through several intermediate stages has degenerated from the ancestor of the human race, and so has every other animal. One can of course always find a kernel of truth in such musings, since everybody carries in his genome the entire history of our evolutionary past, including that of our next cousin from six hundred million years ago, the ancestor of the humble cauliflower, but thats not what Swedenborg and Madame Blavatsky had in mind. One must admit the system of Neo-Platonism leaves the barn wide open for gross superstitions, the price, it seems, one inadvertently pays for trying to be all-inclusive. (It reminds of the history of Buddhism. Nobody knows for sure how pure and unaffected by current superstition the proclamation of the Shakyamuni (500 420 BC) really had been. The demon- and angel-ridden exuberance of current Mahayana Buddhism may be closer to the original teachings than a western purist would like us to imagine.) Plotinus lived at a time when everybody and I mean everybody dreaded the demonic powers whose hearts do not know how to be touched by human prayer (Virgil, Georgics). The Christians in Africa continued to observe the pagan cult of daemon coelestis (Salvian, I, c, and lib VII, VIII). In the eyes of his subjects even the emperor held a semi-demonic status and Christian clerics encouraged their parishioners to overthrow statues and hack away noses and genitalia, not because of the sculptures immodest nudity, but out of a foxy belief that

statues, in a ghostly way, were living things, with an indigenous demon nesting inside. Pagan is a derivative of the word peasant, yet the once elfin fauns and dryads had acquired a sinister aspect, the spirits guarding the lintel and the fire on the hearth had lost their benignity, the spirits of the rushing waters began demanding a protocol of appeasement; Lamias suckled blood from the teats of the wed nurses. Often edged on by an irresponsible religious propaganda of the new cults, and despite the best efforts of secular poets to allegorize the genies of forest and orchard, the mob of the uneducated and barely literate learned to dread such manifestations of the numinous as messengers of the eternal darkness. The Great Pan became an image of Satan. Across the board of cults and denominations, Gnosis (meaning knowledge) no longer sufficed to guarantee salvation; painstaking ritual became all-important, trying to draw the line here to a collective form of obsessivecompulsive disorder is impossible. Even human libido was defamed as a demonic force. St. Jerome tells us of a youth who fell in love with the girl next door. She was earmarked to become a virgin of Christ, with the prospect of slowly shriveling away in domestic seclusion. (These days we hear of Brides of the Quran in Pakistan. Same thing! Now as then it saves the family the ruinous expenses of a dowry.) Usually subdued and pallid, the girl suddenly seemed to glow and for no apparent reason smiled with a flush on her cheeks. The parents became suspicious

and surprised the girl standing at the window undoing her hair for the boy to see. Jerome then speaks of a direct encounter with the demon of love, and he didnt mean it as a metaphor. The family called for a holy man from the desert, which duly exorcised the demon (Jerome, Vita Hilarionis). Whether Gentile or Christian, everybody knew where these messengers of Hell came from: the netherworld, the place where trees and undergrowth duck under the horror of a great darkness and the tormented souls are driven about, as if winter-storms chase myriads of birds into the twilight of greenwood boughs (Virgil, Georgics). In nocturnal sances the thought made people bend with queasy faces under the beating wings of the hellish fowl. His biographer is depicting Plotinus as staying aloof from the superstitions of the common run, but he also mentions a contest between Plotinus and a fellow philosopher to establish who is the better conjurer of the demon housing in the temple-statue of a demigod. A relatively harmless affair. There were laws prohibiting magic practices and especially necromancy, but in Rome even the deputy-chief of police resorted to sances, trying to extract information from the dead (Ammianus, XXVIII: 1). Christians were just as guilty on the same score. The notorious incident at Bethany (Jn. 11: 1-45) was not the only one of its kind. Saint Severin called upon his recently deceased presbyter, (Eugippius, Vita S. Severini, XVI) and Bishop Spyridon of Trimithousa in Cyprus, a participant at the first Ecumenical

Conclave at Nicene, conjured up his own daughter from the grave to inquire the whereabouts of a piece of jewelry on loan. Wrapped in her shroud, the girl told her father where to look and then walked back into her sepulcher. (Sozomen, Hist. Eccles. I: 11; Socrates Scholasticus, 1: 12; Rufinus, I: 5). No wonder then, when the validity of esoteric doctrine was gauged by the power it promised to exert over the demonic world. Miracle working became the ultimate credential: If I with the finger of God cast out devils, how can you doubt, said a cult leader from Galilee (Luke, 11: 20). Plotinus was in the same boat with his contemporaries; in fact he was one of the originators of this subterranean murk. But unlike the NeoPlatonic charlatan Iamblichus (242 327 AD), whose disciples knew disciples who had heard from close confidants how they had seen the master levitating as high as to the ceiling, Plotinus did not abuse his imaginary powers. He was too honest and too shy for a stunt like this. Instead, his biographer Porphyry assures us that between the four of the porters best and brightest pupils, Herenius, Origin of Alexandria, Cassius Longinus and Plotinus, there was an agreement, in good Pythagorean fashion, to impart their masters doctrine only by word of mouth and only to people that could be trusted. Herenius was the first to break the agreement, followed by Origin. This finally persuaded Plotinus to put his philosophy in writing as well. He felt, he should not allow anybody, especially not this

unhinged Origin who by now made a name for himself as the periods leading theologian of Christianity to hijack the Platonic Trinity of the One, (the ultimate source), of Sentience (the logos) and of the Soul (the carrier of the Platonic archetypes) for some or other purely ideological purpose. The purity of the whole concept seemed at stake. It didnt stop the ways of Origin, not until he castrated himself turning into a leper with colleagues of his own profession. It made being a celibate just too easy. Since then a lot of water has passed under the bridge, our cosmologists have developed a strong penchant towards big bangs (coming to think of it an explosive outpouring upside down) and unified theories of everything in a single formula, just right to be printed on a T-shirt. Its a fad, and the nonsense will pass. Infinity has all the time in the world, even when waiting for the acknowledgement of smartass cosmologists. And yet Plotinus philosophy still offers interesting aspects and poses a valid question: Is there such a thing as an underpinning unity in the larger scheme of things? Are we citizens of a Cosmos, or is this world the product of an eternal conflict that balances the incompatible forces of chaos in the scales of a temporary equilibrium, thus creating the mere illusion of sustainable order? I think there is an answer to this. It can be found not in other and even more superfluous editions of elegant string theories and paradoxical quantum theories but in the work of

the mathematician Benot B. Mandelbrot (1924 2010). Yet for Plotinus and his time the mere thought of such nonlinear harmony out of the rolling warp of chaos was of course too outlandish even to be contemplated. Just as outlandish as to us does appear the mathematical prove for the indisputable existence of more than one infinite set, or the fact that each of these Cantor sets can differ in size. This doesnt mean Plotinus or his colleagues were stupid or dishonest at least not all the time. Plotinus did consider the possibility of getting it wrong. In an anticipation of Immanuel Kant, he said: Think of perception. Its objects, it seems, are most patently an artifice, yet the nagging doubt remains whether the apparent reality may not lie in the states of the percipient rather than in the material before him. This concession to caution and fairness, however, was halfhearted. Plotinus looked for something more affirmative. Even granting that what the senses grasp is really contained in the objects, none the less what is thus known by the senses is an image. Sense can never grasp the thing in itself; this remains for ever outside, he said. Like everybody else in the third century, Plotinus had no clue as to how impulse and response correlate and so specifically shape our senses for their designated tasks. To him it was the eye, as the physical agent of the soul that was sending out rays in order to see. Patent nonsense, yet even the above mentioned Anaximander in his day and age could not have imagined the sheer power of such correlation between

impulse and response that has caused evolution to invent from scratch a complex organ like the eye seven times over. Our senses dont cheat. We wouldnt be around if they did. Yet for Plotinus and the so-called idealists, well up to the age of Bishop Berkeley (1685 1753) and Immanuel Kant, the proposition of empiricism remained just a gross prospect of gloom and chasing shadows. John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) just made this point when losing himself in a maze of secondary qualities. As if in anticipation of Lockes essay, Plotinus produced an alluring counter argument. If these objects of intellection are in the strict sense outside of the intellect, he said, we must see them as external and invariantly we cannot possess the truth of them. So what we perceive is belief rather than truth; we are content with something very different from the object of our perception. Unable to disentangle himself from this purely semantic trap of his own making, Plotinus then asserted, that we must secure reality and provide for knowledge and for truth, by making what exists knowable in essence, and not merely as a quality which would give us a mere image or vestige of reality in lieu of possession, intimate association, and absorption. Because if that were not the case: Where is its worth, its grandeur, he asks. Did Plotinus really think this was a meaningful question? Who is to say that I find grandeur in the same thing as you? But the rushing train shall not be stopped in its tracks:

The only way is to leave nothing outside of the intellect, Plotinus unrelentingly observed, and so, in an act of identification with the object we cannot forget, and dont need to wander about searching. He concluded, that since we cannot confirm the existence of phenomena outside of the intellect, there must be an all encompassing primary intellect the second entity of the Neo-Platonic trinity that encloses everything including us and allows us to participate: Truth at once is there as the seat of authentic existence, and becomes alive and intellective. An early version of Bishop Berkeleys doctrine, perhaps even the good bishops initial inspiration, who with a sigh of relief gleaned from Plotinus proposition a way of dismissing not only the empirical maze of Lockes primary and secondary qualities and of a layered reality out there but also of doing away with the out there altogether. Driving the idealistic proposition to the point of absurdity, Berkeley stipulated that all our inert notions are the actual things in and by themselves. Like Plotinus, Bishop Berkeley was desperate for a shortcut, for an immediate way of understanding dispensed from demonstration and from acts of faith. Berkeley believed to sidestep all riddles and pitfalls by an appeal to the divine presence inside of us as the one and only external source for our perceptions. But if everything is just the god inside me, how do we explain the existence of evil in this world, the things I just cant think away, the tsunamis, the holocausts and my diarrhea of

last night? Why do I have nightmares and cant forget the death of a loved one? Plotinus was of course aware of the darkness lurking in the crevices of the Universe, and he felt prepared to confront this bugbear head on. He explains the evils of the world as an increasing imperfection down the ladder; the grand design must suffer in the process of emanating copies of the perfect archetype and then copying the copies ad infinitum. Over the generations the Universes DNA, i.e. the Platonic archetypes deteriorate and suffer mutations. It is a sensible way of avoiding the Manichaean trap of an eternal duel between good and evil, Hollywoods and the Bible thumpers favorite myth. As if such tug of war, if you think of it, isnt ultimately a conflict between peers! After pulling each other by the hair, bite the other guys toes and make him scream in the final daddy-splash, you find God and Satan at the bar peacefully sipping their pia colada and discussing the moves for tomorrows show. Plotinus would have nothing of this. He was convinced that ultimately this Universe and with it human nature, even in its fallen state of remoteness from the source, is nothing to complain about, despite the undeniably rough edges. The shadows of tragedy may darken the day, but there is no place for the morose notion of original sin. The ultimate source is cleared from all wrongdoing: the evils in this world emerge as the inevitable byproduct of the process; a matter

of failing maintenance, not a question of evil intent: The Universe Plotinus wrote, is organized, effective, complex, lavish, but it cannot be at once symbol and reality. As we look upon the world, its vastness and beauty and the order of its eternal march, and think of the gods seen and hidden, and the life of animal and plant, let us ascend to its archetype, to the exuberance of the One. I guess at some point an analyst as discerning as Plotinus would probably have realized that his idea of universal dispensation is just another act of faith, but thanks to a pathological affliction he felt he had physical affirmation or his views. Plotinus suffered from seizures, which compelled him to believe in a genuine mystical experience. In his own words, it made him abandon the duality of seer and seen, and enter a realm where he could no longer distinguish, nor even imagine a duality. You have changed he said, you no longer own yourself, you belong to the One, a center in sync with the center. You will see a solitary light suddenly reveal itself, not from some perceived object, but pure and self-contained. Others some of them highly regarded in religious circles had similar experiences. Modern research has established reproducible evidence for this kind of seizure by the spirit (Teresa of Avila, 1515 1582, El Castillo Interior). The afflicted tends to fall into a speechless torpor and unaware of anything in his surrounding you may prick the person with a needle feels an overwhelmingly bright light washing through the mind, an experience of unifying harmony with the Universe.

Depending on culture and belief, it seems to the person only natural to interpret the experience as an encounter with the divine agent itself. Yet the experience is as uniform as a good orgasm, and modern research even conjures up at will the bright light and the sweetness of the Universe with a dose of one hundred to two hundred-fifty micrograms of psilocybin per kilogram of body weight. The modern Plotinus doesnt do sances anymore; he is now a guru from Orange County, a relic of the sixties, denouncing austerity and asceticism in exchange for psychedelic acids hes never seen without a pair of sunshades; acids make you hypersensitive to sunlight. Apart from the physical aspect, the frantic copying and reproducing of platonic archetypes in Plotinus Universe continues to make sense for many of the more creative minds, even if theyve never heard of Plotinus. Everybody has now and then a moment when he feels like remembering his double and triple alter egos. At dawn you wake up being a librarian in Jakarta and at sunset you return to your garden plot and unfold the butterfly wings of an elf. Dj-vu, incognito and role-play is everywhere. Next time look more closely when your prime minister shows his face on the TV. He is actually a Mandrake root from the Hungarian plains. A traveling fairy, disguised as the abbes of a French convent, found the miscreant snarling and squealing at the wayside, took pity on him and spraying sparkles from her comb

combed away almost all of the exterior ugliness; well, almost. She couldnt make him taller. The Mandrake roots real name is Nicolas Paul Stphane Sarkzy de Nagy-Bocsa like certain parts of his body, its a mouthful. In his days he became president of France. As for the fairy some remember from school the ageless looks of a bespectacled and slightly worried smile in a nuns habit; she was the schools biology teacher, of all things. Strangely, the entries in the register of Nantes mention the same and only person as abbes of the convent since the great fire had destroyed all records prior to 1728, the year when the French burned their last witch. Today we write 2012. I also have reservations about my current neighbor I just know the wooden panels of the garden-fence are there to shield from sight his transformation to a silver thistle on every full moon. Otherwise he is a nice enough fellow, I see him treating his petite wife like a princess; she has a wisp of down on her upper lip. And when her husband morphs into that prickly being climbing the garden fence, she spreads out her arms, surrounded by a sudden cloud of quivering Red Admirals, and her neck becomes thin and long with a pair of pointy pincers growing at the front, and then she rises up into the air flapping her huge wings like unwieldy pieces of wet laundry and a surprisingly hoarse croak is coming from her beak, before the Moon pulls a curtain of misty air. Physically we all are separate embodiments of the great outpouring, little droplets widely dispersed, with each of us

being a minor dissonance in the great empathetic consonance of the Universe, a network of interwoven threads, finer than the finest spiders web, which seem endless, as they twine out of the mind into some entity invisible even with the aid of a microscope, generating a medley of flowers assuming human shape, and of people melting into the earth and gleaming forth as stones and metals. Among them move all manners of strange animals, incessantly changing their shapes and speaking wondrous languages. None of these entities matches another, and the heartrending melancholy ringing through the air seems to be an expression of the dissonance among them. Yet this very dissonance is adding new splendors to the underpinning harmony that triumphantly breaks through, uniting all apparent discords in an eternity of unutterable pleasure (E.T.A. Hoffmann, Master Flea). His physician and companion Eustochius has given us an account of Plotinus last moments. Eustochius went away for a patient call to Puteoli. When he came back and stepped into Plotinus bedroom, Plotinus received him with the words: I have been a long time waiting for you; I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the Universe. As he spoke a snake crept under the bed on which he lay and slipped away through a hole in the wall: at the same moment Plotinus died. He was sixty-six.