THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF NEOPLATONISM

Plotinus and the Gnostics: opposed heirs of Plato

John D. Turner

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century the majority of scholars have tended to see the relationship between Plotinus and the Gnostics as primarily adversarial (see Porphyry, Plot. 16), and characterized by Plotinus’ philosophical critique of specific gnostic doctrines, which is explicit in his anti-Gnostic treatise (Enn. II.9[33]) and the other three treatises of the so-called Großschrift (Enn. III.8[30], Enn. V.8[31] and Enn. V.5[32]), surfacing also at other points throughout the rest of his treatises. But with the appearance of Hans Jonas’ dissertation, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist (Jonas 1934–93), Joseph Katz’s essay “Plotinus and the Gnostics” (Katz 1954), Cornelia de Vogel’s essay “On the Neoplatonic Character of Platonism and the Platonic Character of Neoplatonism” (de Vogel 1953), as well as Henri-Charles Puech’s essay “Plotin et les Gnostiques” (Puech 1960), scholars began to emphasize fundamental similarities between Plotinian and gnostic metaphysics that were thought to stem from their shared environment in the religio-philosophical climate of opinion typical of late antique Alexandria. Since then, additional proponents of this view have arisen, including the present author,¹ but not without the vigorous objection to Jonas’ hypothesis by Armstrong, who maintained that “the thought of Plotinus is profoundly un-Gnostic and anti-Gnostic” (Armstrong 1978: 113).

In the latest study of the relation between Plotinus and the Gnostics, Jean-Marc Narbonne observes that over the course of a roughly twenty-five-year teaching career in Rome beginning during the years 244–6 and ending abruptly in 269, Plotinus developed a number of positions reflecting confrontations with a multitude of issues. This career was marked by several decisive events and many quarrels, among which the battle with the Gnostics certainly took precedence.² Indeed, Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus tells us that a number of gnostic apocalypses circulated in his Roman seminar, principally treatises of the so-called Sethian or “classical” Gnostics, especially the Nag Hammadi treatises Zostrianos and Allogenes. According to Porphyry, Plotinus himself was said to have refuted these treatises many times in his courses, even going so far as to write his own critique in Enn. II.9[33] and mandating even more thoroughgoing refutations of them by his principal disciples, Amelius and Porphyry, during the years 263–8, but the conflict continued until the demise of the seminar in 269, since some of those close to Plotinus – whom he called “friends” – had fallen under the spell of the rival doctrine and were defecting (Enn. II.9[33].10.3–6). From his first days in Rome, Plotinus was surrounded not so much by scholastic Platonists, but by Platonizing Gnostics whom he considered for some time to be his friends (Narbonne 2011: 68–9). This suggests that he regarded them as belonging to the same group as did he and his disciples, namely to the partisans of “Plato’s Mysteries” (Puech 1960: 182–3).

Rather than merely dressing up their mythologies with a superficial smattering of Greek philosophical terminology, the Platonizing Gnostics have turned out to be genuinely innovative interpreters of ancient philosophical traditions, and had a far greater degree of intellectual agency with respect to contemporaneous academic philosophy than is usually supposed. Right alongside Plotinus, these Gnostic interpreters were reading and commenting upon the very same texts as he did. They were activist contemplatives who were spreading a doctrine of salvation that competed with Plotinus’ own and who shared with him several presuppositions, even if certain particular themes made them radical opponents. Indeed, Plotinus’ interpretation of Plato shows itself to be very conscious of this direct competition; as Plotinus states himself, “in general they [the Gnostics] falsify Plato’s account of the manner of the [world’s] making, and a great deal else, and degrade the great man’s teachings” (Enn. II.9[33].6.24–6).³

This chapter offers, first, a description of gnostic and early Neoplatonic metaphysics, and second, using this as a background, a summary of Plotinus’ critique of gnostic doctrines, especially in his treatise Against the Gnostics (Enn. II.9[33]). Third, since Plotinus mainly criticizes gnostic thought for its unacknowledged and “falsifying” appropriation of Plato’s teaching, this chapter will conclude with a comparison of Plotinus and the Gnostics as exegetes of Plato’s dialogues. The reader should be aware that the discussion of these issues here is a work in progress, intended to point the way towards future research rather than to offer a comprehensive treatment.

GNOSTIC AND EARLY NEOPLATONIC METAPHYSICS

One of the novel developments in the transition from the rather static ontologies typical of Middle Platonism to the dynamic emanationism of Plotinus, and subsequent Neoplatonism is the doctrine of the unfolding of the world of true being and intellect from its source in a transcendent, only negatively conceivable ultimate unitary principle which is itself beyond being: first, an initial identity of the product with its source, a sort of potential or prefigurative existence; second, an indefinite procession or spontaneous emission of the product from its source; and third, a contemplative visionary reversion of the product upon its own prefiguration within its source, in which the product becomes aware of its separate existence and thereby takes on its own distinctive form and definition.⁴ The later Neoplatonists named these three stages permanence or remaining, procession and reversion, and – like the Sethian Platonizing treatises – often characterized the three successive modes of the product’s existence during this process by the terms of the noetic triad of Existence or Being, Life and Intellect.

Although Plotinus has often been credited with being the first major philosopher to elaborate such a scheme, it is clear that similar models of dynamic emanation are beginning to develop in gnostic thought, some of which chronologically precedes Plotinus. The main difference is that, whereas for Plotinus, only the spontaneous efflux from the One, but not the One itself, knows or reflexively acts upon itself, for most gnostic models, the supreme principle is capable of reflexive self-knowledge, which knowledge or thought becomes the second principle. Thus in Valentinian thought, at the beginning of the Tripartite Tractate, the ineffable Father has a thought of himself, which is the Son (Tripartite Tractate [NHC I.5] 56.16–57.3), and in Clement of Alexandria’s account of the Valentinian system of Theodotus, the Unknown Father is said to emit the second principle, the Monogenes-Son, “as if knowing himself”.⁵ Similarly, in both Eugnostos the Blessed and its nearly identical but Christianized version, the Sophia of Jesus Christ, the divine Forefather sees himself “within himself as in a mirror”, and the resultant image is the second principle, the Self-Father.⁶ In Hippolytus of Rome’s account of Simonian doctrine, the pre-existent first principle abides in absolute unity, but gives rise to an intellectual principle through self-manifestation: “manifesting himself to himself, the one who stood became the second”.⁷

Plotinus’ familiarity with gnostic thought is probably based on a number of gnostic sources, some lost and some extant. Among the latter, the most important original gnostic compositions are present in the fourth-century Coptic papyrus library from Nag Hammadi, in particular the Platonizing Sethian treatises from codices VII, VIII, X and XI, and from codex I, the Valentinian treatise Tripartite Tractate. The metaphysical schemes of these gnostic treatises, owing in no small part to their similarity to his own, not only invited his criticism, but also probably made positive contributions to his thought.

The following survey of the metaphysics of dynamic emanationism and ontogenetic production in original gnostic sources begins with the somewhat less complex schemes in the Tripartite Tractate and proceeds to the more complex schemes found in the Sethian Platonizing treatises.

THE METAPHYSICS OF THE TRIPARTITE TRACTATE

In the Tripartite Tractate, the generation of all reality other than the supreme principle begins with the generation of a second principle, the Son, when the ineffable Father has a thought of himself:⁸

For it is truly his ineffable self that he (the Father) engenders. It is self-generation, where he conceives of himself and knows himself as he is. He brings forth something worthy of the admiration, glory, praise, and honour that belong to himself, through his boundless greatness, his inscrutable wisdom, his immeasurable power, and his sweetness that is beyond tasting. It is he himself whom he puts forth in this manner of generation, and who receives glory and praise, admiration and love, and it is also he who gives himself glory, admiration, praise, and love. This he has as a Son dwelling in him, keeping silent about him, and this is the ineffable within the ineffable, the invisible, the ungraspable, the inconceivable within the inconceivable. This is how he exists eternally within himself. As we have explained, by knowing himself in himself the Father bore him without generation, so that he exists by the Father having him as a thought – that is, his thought about himself, his sensation of himself and … of his eternal self-standing.

(Tripartite Tractate 56.1–57.3, trans. Thomassen in NHC [Meyer])

The ambiguity in the self-reflexive pronouns, which can refer to either the Father or the Son, resembles similar ambiguities in Plotinus’ language of ontogenesis through self-contemplation, where the ambiguity of antecedents is necessary, since the object of the self-perception of both the first and the second principle are one and the same; that is, the second principle is always prefiguratively present in the first. For example, in Enn. V.1[10].7, the subject of self-perception can be properly called neither One nor Intellect, but is rather a subject that starts out as the One, but by perceiving itself, ends up as Intellect:

But we say that Intellect is an image of that Good; for we must speak more plainly; first of all we must say that what has come into being must be in a way that Good, and retain much of it and be a likeness of it, as light is of the sun. But Intellect is not that Good. How then does it generate Intellect? Because by its return to it it sees: and this seeing is Intellect.

(Enn. V.1[10].7.1–6)

Moreover, the Tripartite Tractate or something much like it seems to have been decisive for central images in Plotinus’ theory of emanation by providing a clear antecedent for the theory of undiminished giving. Compare the images from pages 51, 60, 68 and 74 of the Tripartite Tractate:⁹

The Father is singular while being many …. That singular one who is the only Father is in fact like a tree that has a trunk, branches, and fruit.

(Tripartite Tractate 51.8–19)

The aeons existed eternally in the Father’s thought and he was like a thought and a place for them. And once it was decided that they should be born, he who possesses all power desired to take and bring what was incomplete out of… those who [were within] him. But he is [as] he is, [for he is] a spring that is not diminished by the water flowing from it.

(Tripartite Tractate 60.1–15)

For the Father produced the All like a little child, like a drop from a spring, like a blossom from a [vine], like a …, like a shoot …, so that they needed [nourishment], growth, and perfection.

(Tripartite Tractate 62.6–13)

the true aeon also is single yet multiple … Or, to use other similes, it is like a spring that remains what it is even if it flows into rivers, lakes, streams, and canals; or like a root that spreads out into trees with branches and fruits; or like a human body that is indivisibly divided into limbs and limbs – main limbs and extremities, large ones and small.

(Tripartite Tractate 74.1–18)

with Plotinus’ image of the One as a spring in which all rivers have their source or as the life of a great plant, eternally giving and yet self-standing:

What is above life is cause of life, for the activity of life which is all things is not first; it itself flows forth, so to speak, as if from a spring. Imagine a spring that has no other origin; it gives itself to all the rivers, yet is never used up by the rivers, but remains itself at rest; the rivers that proceed from it remain all together for a while before they run their several ways, yet all, in some sense, know beforehand down what channels they will pour their streams. Or: think of the life coursing throughout some huge plant while its origin remains and is not dispersed over the whole, since it is as it were firmly settled in its root: it is the giver of the entire and manifold life of the tree, but remains unmoved itself, not manifold but the origin of that manifold life.

(Enn. III.8[30].10.3–14, trans. Armstrong, with alterations)

In all of these passages, the subject of discussion is the emergence of multiplicity from a sole source, wherein the product emanates from its source but the source remains undiminished. Although these common images of water and plants can be found individually in Macrobius and the Corpus Hermeticum,¹⁰ they are all to be found in the Tripartite Tractate.

Another of the Tripartite Tractate’s points of contact with Plotinus’ thought is its account of the divinely willed creation of the physical cosmos (oikoumene) – despite its deficiency – by the logos, the last of the aeons emanated from the Father, as not only necessary and willed by the supreme Father, but also a product of natural, not artificial, wisdom:

It came upon one of the aeons that he should undertake to reach the inconceivability of the Father, and to give glory to it as well as to his ineffability. It was a Word belonging to the unity, [although] it was a singular Word that arose out of the union of the members of the All, nor was it from him who had brought them forth – for he who has brought forth the All [is] the Father. For this aeon was one of those who had been given wisdom, with ideas first existing independently in his mind so as to be brought forth when he wanted it. Because of that, he had received a natural wisdom enabling him to inquire into the hidden order, being a fruit of wisdom.¹¹ Thus, the free will with which the members of the All had been born caused this one to do what he wanted, with no one holding him back. Now, the intention of this Word was good, because he rushed forward [to] give glory to the Father, even though [he] undertook a task beyond his power, having desired to produce something perfect, from a union in which he did not share, and without having received orders.

(Tripartite Tractate 75.17–76.12)

In this respect, Corrigan has argued that, like Plotinus, this author too avoids the notion of a fallen and culpable personal agent behind the world’s creation.¹² The Tripartite Tractate should be compared with Irenaeus’ account of Ptolemy’s Valentinian cosmogonic myth, in which Sophia plays the role of the (Indefinite) Dyad as an outbreak of passion, but, perhaps since she is not here credited with the natural wisdom possessed by the Tripartite Tractate’s logos, she is viewed merely as the culpable cause of multiplicity.¹³

THE METAPHYSICS OF THE SETHIAN PLATONIZING TREATISES

While the Tripartite Tractate clearly presupposes a scheme of dynamic emanation presented largely in metaphors of flowing, growth and even embryology, the equivalent scheme in the Sethian Platonizing treatises is explicitly articulated as an interaction within transcendental triads that form the links between the ultimate source and its products.

The most widely known treatise in the large corpus of the so-called Sethian or classic gnostic literature from Nag Hammadi is the Apocryphon of John. According to its initial theogony, the supreme Invisible Spirit emanates an overflow of luminous water in which he then sees a reflection of himself; this self-vision then becomes the second, intellectual, principle, Barbelo, the divine First Thought. In turn, Barbelo contemplates the same luminous water from which she had originated in order to generate the third principle, the divine Autogenes as the “First Appearance” of the Invisible Spirit’s first power.¹⁴ Within this corpus, the four “Platonizing Sethian” treatises – Zostrianos, Allogenes, the Three Steles of Seth and Marsanes – occupy a special place, especially since Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus 16 tells us that two of them – Allogenes and especially Zostrianos – were studied and critiqued at length by Plotinus and other members of his philosophical seminar in Rome during the years 265–58. Indeed, Plotinus’ own critique in Enn. II.9[33].10 seems actually to cite Zostrianos 10.1–20,¹⁵ which raises the question of the extent to which the doctrines he read in these Sethian texts may have made positive contributions to his own metaphysical philosophy.

The metaphysical hierarchy of the Platonizing Sethian treatises is headed by a supreme and pre-existent Unknowable One, often called the Invisible Spirit.¹⁶ As in Plotinus, this One is clearly beyond being, and can be described only in negative terms mostly derived from the second half of Plato’s Parmenides, especially its first hypothesis (137c–142a).

Below the supreme One, at the level of determinate being, is the Barbelo Aeon, conceived along the lines of a Middle Platonic tripartite divine Intellect. It contains three ontological levels, conceived as sub-intellects or subaeons of the Barbelo Aeon: one that is contemplated (nous noētos), called Kalyptos or “hidden”; one that contemplates (nous noeros or theorētikos), called Protophanes or “first appearing”;¹⁷ and one that is discursive and demiurgic (nous dianooumenos), called Autogenes or “self-generated”.¹⁸

At the highest level, Kalyptos contains the paradigmatic ideas or authentic existents, each of which is a unique, uncombinable paradigmatic form.¹⁹ At the median level, Protophanes contains “those who are unified”; that is, the contemplated ideas that are “all together”²⁰ with the minds that contemplate them, apparently to be distinguished both from ideas of particular things (in Autogenes) and from the uncombinable authentic existents in Kalyptos.²¹ At the lowest level, Autogenes would be a demiurgic mind (nous dianooumenos) who shapes the individuated realm of Nature below him according to the forms in Kalyptos that are contemplated and made available to him by Protophanes (the nous theorētikos).²² As the equivalent of the Plotinian Soul, Autogenes analyses these forms in a discursive fashion (as a nous dianooumenos), and thus comes to contain the “perfect individuals”, the ideas of particular, individual things, as well as individual souls.²³ Somewhat like the three Gods or Intellects of Numenius, the first God is inert and so in some sense “hidden” from all else except the second who contemplates the ideal forms in the first, while the third God is merely the lower demiurgical aspect of the second when he directs his attention downwards to impose these Forms on matter to produce the perceptible cosmos. While the first God gives rise to nothing, the second God both contemplates and creates.²⁴

But, whereas Numenius, as noted above, offers a “static” ontology that does not account for the process by which his three Gods come into being, a number of gnostic thinkers were developing schemes by which a hierarchy of transcendental beings emanated from a single source by a process of dynamic emanation, perhaps derived from Neopythagorean speculation on the generation of the dyad and subsequent multiplicity from the monad.²⁵ In the case of the theologians behind the Sethian Platonizing treatises, a bit of reflection on the significance of the names Kalyptos, Protophanes and Autogenes would suggest that they could designate not just the ontological levels of the Barbelo Aeon, but rather the dynamic process by which the Barbelo Aeon gradually unfolds from its source in the Invisible Spirit: at first “hidden” (kalyptos) or latent within the Spirit as its prefigurative intellect, then “first appearing” (prōtofanēs) as the first moment of the Spirit’s separately existing thought or intelligence, and finally “self-generated” (autogenēs) as a fully formed demiurgical mind, perhaps equivalent to the rational part of the cosmic soul that operates on the physical world below in accordance with its vision of the archetypal ideas contained in the divine intellect, Protophanes.²⁶

Nevertheless, when it came to working out the actual dynamics of the emanation of the Barbelo Aeon, the Platonizing Sethian treatises ended up employing a completely different and distinctive terminology to account for the emergence of the Barbelo Aeon from the supreme Invisible Spirit, namely the noetic triad of Being, Life and Mind.

Indeed, Plotinus himself had employed such a triad, although only hesitatingly as a means by which the One gives rise to something other than itself, as in the generation of intellect from a trace of life emitting from the One.²⁷ However, just as the Sethians confined the Kalyptos–Protophanes–Autogenes triad to their second hypostasis Barbelo, Plotinus mostly confined the function of the noetic triad almost entirely to his second hypostasis, Intellect, where it is used to argue that Intellect is not merely a realm of static being, but is instead living and creative thought.²⁸

By contrast with Plotinus’ implementation, in the Platonizing Sethian treatises, the noetic triad appears as an entity called the Triple Power of the Invisible Spirit, which functions as the intermediary means by which the supreme Invisible Spirit gives rise to the Aeon of Barbelo. It is composed of the three powers of Existence (hyparxis rather than to on, Being), Vitality (zōotēs rather than zōē, Life) and Mentality (nootēs [or Blessedness in Zostrianos] rather than nous, Intellect), and serves as the emanative means by which the supreme Unknowable One generates the Aeon of Barbelo in three phases. (1) In its initial phase, the Triple Powered One is a purely indeterminate Existence (hyparxis or ontotes), latent within and identical with the supreme One; (2) in its emanative phase it is an indeterminate Vitality (zōotēs) that proceeds forth from One; and (3) in its final phase it is a Mentality (nootēs) that contemplates its prefigurative source in the supreme One and, thereby delimited, takes on the character of determinate being as the intellectual Aeon of Barbelo.²⁹

These Sethian treatises present several variations in the ontological relationship between the Unknowable One and/or Invisible Spirit, his Triple Power and the Barbelo Aeon. Thus, somewhat like Plotinus, the Three Steles of Seth tends to portray the Triple Power as a dynamic structure inherent in the second principle Barbelo (but also in the supreme One),³⁰ while Zostrianos tends to portray it as the Invisible Spirit’s inherent threefold power. On the other hand, Allogenes and Marsanes tend to hypostatize the Triple Power by identifying its median processional phase (e.g. Vitality, Life, Activity)³¹ as a quasi-hypostatic “Triple-Powered One” (or Triple-Powered Invisible Spirit) interposed between the supreme Unknowable One and the Aeon of Barbelo, although in its initial and final phases it actually is these two.

It is significant that the anonymous Turin Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides also employs this triad in a derivational context. According to the sixth fragment of the Commentary (Anon. in Parm. 6.10–26) there are two “Ones”: a first One whom the Parmenides’ first hypothesis describes as altogether beyond the realm of determinate being, and a second One, the prototype of all true, determinate being, to be identified with the “One-who-is” of the second Parmenidean hypothesis. In each phase of the unfolding of the second One or Intellect from the first One, a distinct modality of the Intellect predominates at a given phase. First, as a pure infinitival Existence (einai or hyparxis), Intellect is a purely potential Intellect identical with its prefiguration in the absolute being (to einai) of the first One. In its final phase, it has become identical with the determinate or participial being (to on) of Intellect proper, the second hypostasis; it has now become the hypostatic exemplification of its “idea”, the absolute being (to einai) of the One. The transitional phase between the first and final phases of Intellect in effect constitutes a median phase in which Intellect proceeds forth from the first One as an indeterminate Life.

Middle Platonic and Neopythagorean sources prior to the anonymous Commentary, the Platonizing Sethian treatises, and to Plotinus himself seem to offer no explicit implementation of such a process of contemplative self-generation. Various Neopythagoreans certainly derived a dyadic second principle from a primal Monad,³² but not from the Monad’s self-cognition, and, except for Moderatus and Philo of Alexandria, their second principle is not generally an Intellect. And when Middle Platonists – for whom the supreme principle is generally an Intellect rather than a hyperontic One – apply the Aristotelian (e.g. Metaph. 1072b13–14) notion of a self-contemplative Intellect thinking the Platonic Forms as its own thoughts, the self-contemplation of the supreme principle does not give rise to a hypostatically distinct secondary principle; indeed, it is sometimes unclear whether the object of contemplation is or is not hypostatically distinct from the thinking subject. In the extant fragments of the anonymous Parmenides Commentary the doctrine of generation through contemplative self-reversion is more implied than clearly elaborated: the two Ones are here related by participation, but it is never clearly stated that the second One unfolds dynamically from the self-conception of its prefiguration in the first One.³³ All this suggests that Plotinus and the author of the Commentary may be indebted to gnostic thinkers for various details of their metaphysics of dynamic emanation and perhaps even the Being–Life–Mind triad itself.

PLOTINUS’ CRITIQUE OF GNOSTIC DOCTRINE

Enn. II.9[33], perhaps completed in the year 265, is the only treatise in the Enneads where Plotinus explicitly and at length criticizes his contemporaries whom Porphyry identifies as Gnostics, whose erroneous opinions threaten to mislead the intimate members of his own circle.

Points of disagreement with extant gnostic treatises

Plotinus is critical in general of the Gnostics’ unnecessary multiplication of hypostases, since he regards the supreme One as entirely transcendent to Intellect; there is no being that exists between them as mediator, nor may one distinguish between a higher intellect in repose containing all realities (onta) and a lower one in motion, or a One in act and another One in potency (Enn. II.9[33].1). Nor may one distinguish between an intellect at rest, another that contemplates them and another demiurgic mind (or soul) that reflects or plans (Enn. II.9[33].6), as did Numenius and even Plotinus himself on one occasion (Enn. III.9[13].1). This partitioning is reflected in many sources, including the fragments of Numenius’ On the Good and the Chaldaean Oracles, but most clearly in the doctrine of the Kalyptos, Protophanes and Autogenes levels of the Barbelo Aeon as found in all four Platonizing Sethian treatises.³⁴

With even greater vehemence, Plotinus attacks doctrines found principally in Zostrianos, especially its teaching on Sophia (Zostrianos 9.16–11.9). Of course, he agrees that a certain wisdom (Sophia) presides over the making of everything (Enn. V.8[31].5): the primal wisdom is “neither a derivative nor a stranger in something strange to it”, but is constantly consubstantial with true being and thus with Intellect itself, not a derivative of it (Enn. V.8[31].5). But he attacks the idea that Soul or Sophia – the two are certainly distinct, since Plotinus is able to ask whether both descended together or one was the instigator of a shared transgression (Enn. II.9[33].10.19–24) – declined and illuminated the darkness, producing an image (eidōlon) in matter, which in turn produced an image of the image (but see Plotinus’ own version of this in Enn. III.9[13].3). His opponents apparently describe this illumination as a downward tendency of the soul itself (as Sophia in the Apocryphon of John and Valentinian sources) or as a luminous efflux, which does not diminish the magnitude or station of its source (as in Zostrianos 9.16–11.9). The image of the soul, we hear in one place, is reflected in the darkness, and then the image of that image, pervading matter, assumes the shaping and ordering functions of the Platonic demiurge (Enn. II.9[33].10.25–33). Unlike Nature’s “tranquil vision” of the things above (Enn. II.9[33].2; cf. Enn. III.8[30].4, 8.6) this creator figure pursues not true being, but only images thereof (Enn. II.9[33].10.25–27). Since he is incapable of the full and instantaneous apprehension either of the true soul or of its primary reflection – which the Gnostics call his mother (Enn. II.9[33].12.10) – he works from his own reason and imagination in a chronological succession (since the other elements must await the preparation of fire, Enn. II.9[33].12.13–15). To such a claim that “there was within her (i.e. Sophia) no pure, original image” (Zostrianos 9.10–11, NHC [Meyer]), Plotinus elsewhere objects that “there is in the Nature-Principle itself an ideal archetype of the beauty that is found in material forms” (Enn. V.8[31].3.1–3). Indeed, in Enn. II.9[33].10, Plotinus actually cites about eleven lines from Zostrianos (Enn. II.9[33].10.19–33 ≈ NHC Zostrianos 9.17–10.20).³⁵

Another clear point of contact with Zostrianos (and Marsanes) is Plotinus’ critique of the nomenclature of the psychic aeonic levels extending below the Barbelo Aeon, namely the Repentance, Sojourn and Aeonic Copies (Enn. II.9[33].6.6–7),³⁶ which he characterizes as “terms of people inventing a new jargon to recommend their own school”. Then Plotinus continues with what seems to be his fundamental criticism – the Gnostics plagiarize and then falsify Plato:

They contrive this meretricious language as if they had no connection with the ancient Hellenic school, though the Hellenes knew all this and knew it clearly, and spoke without delusive pomposity of ascents (anabaseis) from the cave and advancing gradually closer and closer to a truer vision (thean alēthesteran). Some of their ideas have been taken from Plato but others – all the new ideas they have brought in to establish a philosophy of their own – are things they found outside the truth. For the judgments too, and the rivers in Hades and the reincarnations come from Plato. And the making a plurality in the intelligible world – Being and Intellect and the other Maker and the Soul – is taken from the words in the Timaeus, for Plato says: “The maker of this universe thought that it should contain all the forms that intelligence discerns contained in the living being that truly is” (39e7–9). … And in general they falsify Plato’s account of the making and a great deal else, and degrade the great man’s teaching as if they had understood the intelligible nature, but he and the other blessed philosophers had not …. They themselves have received from them what is good in what they say – the immortality of the soul, the intelligible universe, the first god, the necessity for the soul to shun fellowship with the body, the separation from the body, the escape from becoming to being – for these doctrines are there in Plato.

(Enn. II.9[33].6.7–43)

Plotinus’ major criticisms are thus directed at gnostic interpretation of Plato’s Timaeus, at its un-Hellenic failure to respect the beauty and divinity of the cosmos and its gods and its multiplication of divine agencies or hypostases, as well as any suggestion of interruption in the continuous generation of reality from the primal source or of any downward declination of divine beings, especially the World Soul.

Points of agreement with extant gnostic treatises

On the other hand, Plotinus does not seem to attack the general scheme of the unfolding of the divine world implemented in these treatises. In the case of the Tripartite Tractate discussed earlier, he accepts the principle of undiminished giving. In the case of the Platonizing Sethian treatises, he accepts the notion of the traversal of vitality or life from its source in the supreme deity until its realization in the hypostasis of Intellect (Enn. III.8[30].8–10; VI.7[38].17.13–26; cf. Allogenes 49.5–21 and note 27). He also accepts the notion that spiritual beings – the Platonic ideas as minds united with their objects of thought – are simultaneously present in their entirety as “all together” in the Intellect (Enn. V.8[31].7–9), which Allogenes and Zostrianos expressed by the phrase “those who are united” (in Protophanes),³⁷ and the Tripartite Tractate’s characterization of the aeons in the Pleroma:

His offspring, the ones who are, are without number and limit and at the same time indivisible. They have issued from him, the Son and the Father, in the same way as kisses, when two people abundantly embrace one another in a good and insatiable thought – it is a single embrace but consists of many kisses. This is the Church that consists of many people and exists before the aeons and is justly called “the aeons of the aeons.” … These [are a] community (politeuma) [formed] with one another and [with the ones] who have gone forth from [them and] with the Son, for whom they exist as glory.

(Tripartite Tractate 58.21–59.16)

In the matter of the practice of mystical ascent, Plotinus seems to accept the notion that, through a series of contemplative self-withdrawals into the aspirant’s primordial self, the One’s self-image in us is elevated to silent union with God through contemplation, a technique extensively narrated in Allogenes (cf. also Zostrianos 44.1–5):

There was within me a stillness of silence, and I heard the Blessedness whereby I knew [my] proper self. And I withdrew to the Vitality as I sought [myself]. And I joined it and stood, not firmly but quietly. And I saw an eternal, intellectual, undivided motion, all-powerful, formless, undetermined by determination. And when I wanted to stand firmly, I withdrew to the Existence, which I found standing and at rest. Like an image and likeness of what had come upon me, by means of a manifestation of the Indivisible and the Stable I was filled with revelation; by means of an originary manifestation ³⁸ [61] of the Unknowable One, [as though] incognizant of him, I [knew] him and was empowered by him. Having been permanently strengthened, I knew that [which] exists in me, even the Triple-Powered One and the manifestation of his uncontainableness. [And] by means of a originary manifestation of the universally prime Unknowable One – the God beyond perfection – I saw him and the Triple-Powered One that exists in them all. I was seeking the ineffable and unknowable God of whom – should one know him – one would be completely nescient, the mediator of the Triple-Powered One, the one who subsists in stillness and silence and is unknowable.

(Allogenes XI.60.14–61.22)

Compare Plotinus’ description of contemplative vision through withdrawal into one’s prenoetic, primordial self, which, rather than “originary manifestation”, he denominates as the “first life” (see also note 27) in Enn. III.8[30].9.29–39:³⁹

What is it, then, which we shall receive when we set our intellect to it? Rather, the intellect must first withdraw, so to speak, backwards, and give itself up, in a way, to what lies behind it – for it faces in both directions (dei ton noun hoion eis toupisō anachorein kai hoion heauton aphenta tois eis opisthen autou amphistomon onta); and there, if it wishes to see that First Principle, it must not be altogether intellect. For it is the first life, since it is an activity manifest in the way of outgoing of all things (Esti men gar autos zōē prōtē, energeia ousa en diexodōi tōn pantōn); outgoing not in the sense that it is now in process of going out but that it has gone out. If, then, it is life and outgoing and holds all things distinctly and not in a vague general way – for [in the latter case] it would hold them imperfectly and inarticulately – it must itself derive from something else, which is no more in the way of outgoing, but is the origin of outgoing, and the origin of life and the origin of intellect and all things (arche diexodou kai arche zōēs kai arche nou kai tōn pantōn).

Plotinus likewise accepts, but does not further develop the technique of “learned ignorance” found in Allogenes, by which the mystical aspirant knows the One by “unknowing” him,⁴⁰ as in Enn. VI.9[9].7.16–22:⁴¹

abandoning all external things, she [the soul] must revert completely towards the interior, and not be inclined to any of the external things, but un-knowing (agnoēsanta) all things – both as she had at first, in the sensible realm, then even in that of the forms – and even “un-knowing” himself (agnoēsanta de kai auton), come to be in the contemplation of that one; and, having come together and having had as it were sufficient intercourse with that, must come to proclaim the communion up there, if possible, also to another.

Besides this mixture of acquiescences, objections and corrections, it may be that Plotinus’ encounter with the Gnostics also caused him to tighten up on his own doctrines;⁴² for example, in Enn. III.9[13] he once toyed with a tripartition of the divine Intellect based on an interpretation of Plato’s Timaeus (esp. 39e) that is very similar to that of Numenius and the Sethian Barbelo Aeon, but later explicitly rejects it in Enn. II.9[33].6. In Enn. VI.6[34] On Numbers, produced immediately after his antignostic treatise, he changes the order of the triad Being–Life–Mind occasionally applied to the unfolding of the Intellect from the One (based on his interpretation of the first two hypotheses of the Parmenides) in some of the earlier Enneads to the order Being–Mind–Life, and restricts its presence to the internal structure of Intellect.⁴³

In sum, gnostic sources such as the Sethian Platonizing treatises and the Tripartite Tractate may have had a decisive influence on some of the most distinctive features and images of Plotinus’ thinking. In fact, not only was gnostic thought a genuine forerunner of, and “Platonic” competitor with, some of those features of Platonic interpretation habitually thought to be distinctively Neoplatonic, such as the Being–Life–Mind triad, but also of major features of Plotinus’ thought, not only because these ideas were part of a shared milieu, but also because Plotinus was involved in a dialogue with them for virtually the whole of his writing career.

PLOTINUS AND THE GNOSTICS AS EXEGETES OF PLATO’S DIALOGUES

As exegetes of Plato’s dialogues, neither Plotinus nor the Gnostics concerned themselves with the main questions of a given dialogue, but centred their attention on specific affirmations – often in the form of isolated assertions – that supported the exegetes’ own central metaphysical concerns, rarely paying attention to their original context.⁴⁴ Rather than following the letter of the Platonic text, each succeeded in producing and developing a new form of thinking, Plotinus in the service of explicating what he thought to be the actual intention of Plato’s philosophy, and the Gnostics in the service of undergirding the authority and efficacy of their mythological revelations. As a result, in various places Plotinus uses important images or ideas from Plato which are clearly shared by the Gnostics in their portrayal of (a) intelligible reality, (b) their analysis of the modes of Being and Non-Being, (c) their use of the dialectical method of collection and division, and (d) their portrayal of the ascent and descent of the soul in the reincarnational cycle.

Intelligible reality

Both Plotinus and Zostrianos draw on Plato to describe the content of the intelligible world. In Enn. V.8[31], Plotinus describes the “true earth” and “true heaven”:⁴⁵

but the gods in that higher heaven, all those who dwell upon it and in it, contemplate through their abiding in the whole of that heaven. For all things there are heaven, and earth and sea and plants and animals and men are heaven, everything which belongs to that higher heaven is heavenly … for it is “the easy life” (cf. Il. 6, 138) there, and truth is their mother and nurse and substance and nourishment – and they see all things, not those to which coming to be, but those to which real being belongs, and they see themselves in other things (heautous en allois); for all things there are transparent, and there is nothing dark or opaque; everything and all things are clear to the inmost part to everything; for light is transparent to light.

(Enn. V.8[31].3.30–36)

Zostrianos offers a similar vision of intelligible reality, but without the Plotinian theme of mutual transparency:⁴⁶

At each of the aeons I saw a living earth, a living water, luminous [air] and an [unconsuming] fire. All [these], being simple, are also immutable and simple [eternal living creatures], possessing a variety [of] beauty, trees of many kinds that do not perish, as well as plants of the same sort as all these, imperishable fruit, human beings alive with every species, immortal souls, every shape and species of intellect, gods of truth, angels dwelling in great glory with an indissoluble body [and] ingenerate offspring and unchanging perception. (Zostrianos VIII.48.3–26)

In their portrayal of the realm of Intellect as containing the intelligible archetypes of physical realities such as earth, sea, animals, plants, men and gods, both Plotinus and Zostrianos draw upon the visions of the upper world enjoyed by the gods and those souls who “follow” them in two of Plato’s most famous myths, Phaedo 109d–114c and Phaedrus 247a–249c.⁴⁷

The modes of Being and Non-Being

Zostrianos further describes the contents of the Kalyptos Aeon – the topmost level of the intelligible Barbelo Aeon – using terminology derived from Plato’s Timaeus, Sophist and Parmenides to show that it contains the archetypes of the entire realm of reality extending from the divine light itself all the way down to chaotic matter:

It is there that all living creatures are, existing individually, although unified. The knowledge of the knowledge is there as well as a basis for ignorance. Chaos is there as well as a [place] for all of them, it being [complete] while they are incomplete. True light [is there], as well as enlightened darkness [i.e. intelligible matter] as well as that which truly is non-existent [i.e. gross matter], that [which] is not-truly existent [i.e. souls], [as well as] the non-existent ones that are not at all [i.e. sensibles].

(Zostrianos VIII.117.1–14)

Here, the Kalyptos Aeon contains the archetypes of all polarities, ultimate knowledge and ignorance, unordered chaos and organized place (that is, the receptacle, cf. Ti. 52a8–b5), “true light” and “that which is truly non-existent” (ontōs ouk on, namely gross matter), “that [which] is not-truly existent” (to ouk ontōs on, souls as source of motion and change) and the sensible entities that are moved by them, “the non-existent ones that are not at all” (ouk ontōs on). These same categories or modes of being appear as well in Allogenes XI.55.17–30:

Then [the mother of] the glories Youel spoke to me again: [“O Allogenes], you [shall surely] know that the [Triple-Powered] One exists before [those that] do not exist, [those that exist] without [truly] existing and those that exist, [and those that] truly exist. [And all these] exist [in Divinity and Blessedness and] Existence, even as non-substantiality and non-being [Existence].”

In Enn. I.8[51], “On what are and whence come evils”, Plotinus employs similar propositional categories to identify matter as the ultimate source of evil:

If, then, these (the One, Intellect, and Soul) are what really exists and what is beyond existence (ta onta kai to epekeina tōn ontōn), then evil cannot be included in what really exists or in what is beyond existence; for these are good. So it remains that if evil exists, it must be among non-existent things, as a sort of form of nonexistence (en tois mē ousin einai hoion eidos ti tou mē ontōs on), and pertain to one of the things that are mingled with non-being (tōi mē onti) or somehow share in non-being. Non-being here does not mean absolute non-being (mē on de outi to pantelōs mē on) but only something other than being (heteron monon tou ontos); not non-being in the same way as the movement and rest which affect being, but like an image of being or something still more non-existent (all’ hōs eikōn tou ontos ē kai eti mallon mē on). The whole world of sense is non-existent in this way, and also all sense-experience and whatever is posterior or incidental to this, or its principle, or one of the elements which go to make up the whole which is of this (non-existent) kind.

(Enn. I.8[51].3.1–13)

If, then, there really is something in mirrors, let there really be objects of sense in matter in the same way; but if there is not, but only appears to be something, then we must admit, too, that things only appear on matter, and make the reason for their appearance the existence of the real beings, an existence in which the real beings always really participate, but the beings which are not real, not really; since they cannot be in the same state as they would be if real beings did not really exist and they did.

(Enn. III.6[26].13.50–55)

The ultimate source of these categories of being – which become virtual Neoplatonic definitions of intermediate metaphysical entities – are traditional propositional categories taken from Plato’s Sophist and Parmenides.⁴⁹ In the Parmenides Plato uses them to examine Parmenides’ assertion of the unity of the universe and his claim that it is impossible to speak of “what is not”. In the Sophist, he uses them to show that the false teaching of the Sophists is equivalent to saying “what is not”, a reality which – contrary to Parmenides – turns out to be intelligible after all.

In the Parmenides, both being and non-being can be the subject of both affirmations and negations, while in the Sph. 238c, which distinguishes the copulative and existential senses of “be” (“not to be x” does not mean “not to exist”), regards “that which is not” (to me on auto kath’ auton) as beyond all predication, discourse and thought. Thus the absolute One of the first hypothesis and the “One that is not” of the fifth hypothesis are both beyond all predication, discourse and thought. On the other hand, according to the Sph. 240b1–13, Forms are that which truly exists (ontōs onta) and are the object of thought, while copies are not that which truly is (ouk ontōs onta, ouk onta ontōs), and thus cannot be the object of thought. According to Sph. 254d, the supreme category is to on while to me on is indeterminate and may or may not really be non-existent (to me on hōs estin ontōs me on).

In the process, the Sophist presents a new theory of the Form of Being and its relation to the other most comprehensive forms, but without arranging them into a hierarchy of metaphysical levels of reality as did subsequent interpreters, such as the authors of Zostrianos and Allogenes, and later on other Neoplatonist philosophers and patristic thinkers, notably Marius Victorinus. The use of these logical categories indicates that these gnostic authors were students of Plato’s dialogues, not only of the popular protology of the Timaeus, but also of comparatively more abstruse dialogues such as the Sophist and Parmenides.

Dialectic

For Plotinus, dialectic is the science of intelligible reality, conceived on the model of the dialectical method of Plato’s late dialogues, the Sophist, Statesman and Philebus, which employs methods of collection, division and definition in order to induce contemplation of the Ideas as the contents of the divine Intelligence.

[Dialectic] is the science which can speak of everything in a reasoned and orderly way, and say what it is and how it differs from other things and what it has in common with those among which it is and where each of these stands, and if it really is what it is, and how many really existing things there are, and again how many non-existing things, different from real beings … feeding the soul in what Plato calls “the plain of truth,” using his method of division to distinguish the Forms, and to determine the essential nature of each thing, and to find the primary kinds, and weaving together by the intellect all that issues from these primary kinds, till it has traversed the whole intelligible world; then it resolves again the structure of that world into its parts, and comes back to its starting-point; and then, keeping quiet … it busies itself no more, but contemplates, having arrived at unity.

(Enn. I.3[20].4.2–18)

A similar implementation of dialectic is found in three of the four Platonizing Sethian treatises. In Marsanes, the preliminary stages leading to Marsanes’ vision of the supreme principles are occupied by discursive dialectic reasoning, specifically the same technique of collection and division:

For I am he who has [intelligized] that which truly exists, [whether] individually or [as a whole], by difference (kata diaphoran, cf. R. VI.509d–511e). [I knew] that they [pre]-exist [in the] entire place that is eternal: all those that have come into existence, whether without substance or with substance, those who are unbegotten, and the divine aeons, as well as the angels and the souls without guile and the soul-[garments], the images of [the] simple ones [souls?]. And [afterwards they] were mixed with [those (i.e. their bodies) that were distinct from] them. But [even the] entire [perceptible] substance still resembles the [intelligible substance] as well as the insubstantial. [I have known] the entire corruption [of the former (the perceptible realm)] as well as the immortality of the latter. I have discriminated (diakrinein, cf. Soph. 253d–e) and have attained the boundary of the partial, sense-perceptible world [and] the entire realm of the incorporeal essence. (Marsanes X.4.24–5.21)

And if one understands their origin, how they are all manifest in a single principle, and how all who are joined come to be divided, and how those who were divided join again, and how the parts [join with] the wholes and the species with the [genera] – when one understands these things – one has washed in the baptism of Kalyptos.

(Zostrianos VIII.23.6–17)

Similarly, dialectic activity prefaces Allogenes’ contemplative ascent:

I was able – even though flesh was upon me – to hear from [you] about these things. And because of the teaching that is in them, the thought within me distinguished things beyond measure from unknowable things. Therefore I fear that my wisdom has become excessive.

(Allogenes XI.50.9–17)

These Platonizing treatises have here drawn again from Plato’s dialogues, in this case, the Phaedo, Sophist and perhaps the R. 509–11. In Phdr. 265d–266c, Plato distinguishes two kinds of dialectic: an ascending or “synoptic” (R. 537c) dialectic that moves (by recollection) from idea to idea to the supreme idea, and a descending, “diairetic” dialectic that moves from the highest idea and by division distinguishes within the general ideas particular ideas until one reaches ideas that do not include in themselves further ideas. One thus moves from multiplicity to unity and from unity to its expressed multiplicity:⁵¹

Now I myself, Phaedrus, am a lover of these processes of division and bringing together (diaireseōn kai synagōgōn), as aids to speech and thought; and if I think any other man is able to see things that can naturally be collected into one and divided into many, him I follow after and walk in his footsteps as if he were a god. And whether the name I give to those who can do this is right or wrong, God knows, but I have called them hitherto dialecticians (dialektikous).

(Phdr. 265b3–266c1, trans. Fowler)

THE ASCENT AND DESCENT OF THE SOUL

Already in Enn. II.9[33].6.10–16 Plotinus had recognized that gnostic teaching on the plight of the human soul was drawn from Plato: “Some of their ideas have been taken from Plato … the judgments too, and the rivers in Hades and the reincarnations come from there” The revelation of Ephesech in Zostrianos 44.1–46.31 offers a particularly convincing example (see Z. Mazur 2013):

[44] Now the person that can be saved is the one that seeks itself and its intellect and finds each of them. And how much power this [type] has! The person that has been saved is one who has not known about these things [merely] as they [formally] exist, but one who is personally involved with [the] rational faculty as it exists [in him]. He has grasped their [image that changes] in every situation as though they had become simple and one. For then this one is saved who can pass through [them] all; [he becomes] them all. Whenever he [wishes], he again parts from all these matters and withdraws into himself; for he becomes divine, having withdrawn into god. …

[45] When this one repeatedly withdraws into himself alone and is occupied with the knowledge of other things, since the intellect and immortal [soul] do [not] intelligize, he thereupon experiences deficiency, for he too turns, has nothing, and separates from it [the intellect] and stands [apart] and experiences an alien [impulse] instead of becoming a unity. So that person resembles many forms. And when he turns aside, he comes into being seeking those things that do not exist. When he descends to [or: happens upon] them in thought, he cannot understand them in any other way unless [46] he be enlightened, and he becomes a physical entity. Thus this type of person accordingly descends into generation, and becomes speechless because of the difficulties and indefiniteness of matter. Although possessing eternal, immortal power, he is bound in the clutches of the body, [removed], and [continually] bound within strong bonds, lacerated by every evil spirit, until he once more [reconstitutes himself] and begins again to come to himself.

Therefore, for their salvation, there have been appointed specific powers, and these same ones inhabit this world. And among the Self-generated ones there stand at each [aeon] certain glories so that one who is in the [world] might be saved alongside [them]. The glories are perfect living concepts; it is [im-]possible that they perish because [they are] patterns of salvation, that is to say, anyone receiving them will be rescued to them, and being patterned will be empowered by this same [pattern], and having that glory as a helper, one thus passes through the world [and every aeon].

(Zostrianos VIII.44.1–22; 45.12–46.15)

According to Enn. IV.8[6], “The descent of the soul into bodies”, the lower part of Soul in its desire to break away in isolation from its higher part in communion with Intellect inevitably becomes buried in the body.⁵²

The individual souls, certainly, have an intelligent desire consisting in the impulse to return to themselves springing from the principle from which they came into being, but they also possess a power directed to the world here below … and they are free from sorrow if they remain with universal soul in the intelligible … for they are then all together in the same [place]. But they change from the whole to being a part and belong to themselves, and, as if they were tired of being together, they each withdraw into each of their individual selves. Now when a soul does this for a long time, fleeing from the All and standing apart in distinctness, and does not look towards the intelligible, it has become a part and is isolated and weak and preoccupied and looks towards a part and in its separation from the whole it embarks on one single thing and flies from everything else … it has left the whole and directs the individual part with great difficulty; it is by now applying itself to and caring for things outside and is present and sinks deep into the individual part. Here the so-called “molting” (Phdr. 246c) happens to it, and “the coming to be in the fetters of the body,” since it has missed the immunity which it had when it was with the universal soul … and so, having fallen, it is caught and engaged with its fetter, and acts by sense because it is being prevented from acting according to intellect, and is said to be “buried” and “in a cave,” but, when it turns to intelligence, it is freed from its fetters and ascends, and started upon the contemplation of reality by recollection: for, in spite of everything, it always possesses something transcendent in some way.

(Enn. IV.8[6].4.1–29)

These passages are clearly built on a reading of Plato’s dialogues, the Phaedrus’ myth of reincarnational cycles, the Phaedo’s myth of post-mortem punishments, and the Republic’s myth of the ascent from the Cave. One’s ability to see the simplicity and unity of the ideal forms whose images comprise the furniture of the world guarantees its salvation,⁵³ since one can withdraw at any time from the world of images and inhabit the transcendent domain of the rational part of the soul that not only travels with the gods, but in fact is itself divine:

The lovers of knowledge, I say, perceive that philosophy, taking possession of the soul when it is in this state, encourages it gently and tries to set it free, pointing out that the eyes and the ears and the other senses are full of deceit, and urging it to withdraw from these, except in so far as their use is unavoidable, and exhorting it to collect and concentrate itself within itself, and to trust nothing except itself by itself and that thing itself among existing things which soul itself intelligizes by itself.

(Phd. 83a–b)

Yet despite the soul’s ability to withdraw from the world of images into itself and intellectually assimilate to the divine realm, it still lives in the world and inevitably becomes occupied with other matters, with the result that its intellection becomes inhibited. Such souls experience a cognitive deficiency, “a loss of wings” (Phdr. 246; 249); they are dragged down from the heights (Phdr. 248a–b; cf. Phd. 81c–d; 109e) away from unity by appetition for the physical delights that do not have true existence. The result is the reincarnation of the soul in the realm of becoming.⁵⁴ In spite of its immortal power, the soul is caught in the reincarnational cycle, bound in the clutches of a physical body, temporarily freed at death, and then rebound in another reincarnation (Phd. 81d; 83d), lost in suffering (Phd. 108b), in the indeterminateness of formless matter (cf. Phlb. 41d).

While there is a strong similarity between Plotinus’ and Zostrianos’ appropriation of Platonic teaching, it is clear that for Plotinus the point of departure is Zostrianos’ announcement of the availability of certain “glories” as divine helpers that ensure the ultimate salvation of souls, a notion that has no warrant in the thought of either Plato or Plotinus.

CONCLUSION

The preceding instances of the interpretation of key elements of Plato’s teaching by both Plotinus and gnostic authors, particularly those of the Sethian Platonizing treatises, demonstrate that these gnostic authors were thoroughly immersed in the dialogues of Plato. While the gnostic authors fail to acknowledge Plato as the originator of these teachings and instead ascribe them to divine revelation, one cannot escape the conclusion that the common knowledge of their readers would have grasped allusions to these dialogues – some popular and some not so popular – in their understanding of these treatises as not only divinely revealed but as reinforced by the traditional wisdom of “the ancient philosophy”.

NOTES

1. J. M. Robinson (1977), J. D. Turner (1980, 1986, 2000a, 2000b, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2007), Jufresa (1981), Böhlig (1981), Abramowski (1983), Pearson (1984), Sinnige (1984), Attridge (1991), Bos (1994), Bechtle (2000) and Corrigan (2000, 2001), Narbonne (2008) and Z. Mazur (2010).

2. Narbonne (2011: 115–16). As early as 2001, Corrigan (2001: 42) stated: “I propose that we should be alive to the real possibility that all of the treatises after the Großschrift, especially those with cognate interests such as VI.7[38] and VI.8[39], will bear similar traces of such a dialogue. In which case, and in the sense we have specified, Plotinus is certainly influenced by the Gnostics, for some of his most mature thought is shaped by an implicit conversation with them.”

3. All translations of Plotinus’ Enneads are based on Armstrong (1966–88).

4. Cf. Enn. V.2[11].1.8–13: “It is because there is nothing in it that all things come from it: in order that Being may exist, the One is not being, but the generator of being. This, we may say, is the first act of generation: the One, perfect because it seeks nothing, has nothing, and needs nothing, overflows, as it were, and its superabundance 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 towards the One constitutes Being, its gaze upon the One, Intellect. Since it halts and turns towards the One that it may see, it becomes at once Intellect and Being.”

5. Clement of Alexandria, Excerpta ex Theodoto 7 [Casey]: ὡς ἂν ἑαυτὸν ἐγνωκώς, … προέβαλε τὸν Μονογενῆ.

6. Eugnostos (NHC III.3) 74.21–75.12: “The Lord of the Universe is not rightly called ‘Father’ but ‘Forefather.’ For the Father is the beginning (or principle) of what is visible. For he (the Lord) is the beginningless Forefather. He sees himself within himself, like a mirror, having appeared in his likeness as Self-Father, that is, Self-Begetter, and as Confronter, since he is face to face with the Unbegotten First Existent. He is indeed of equal age with the one who is before him, but he is not equal to him in power.” Also 72.10–11: “It looks to every side and sees itself from itself” Cf. The Sophia of Jesus Christ (NHC III.4) 98.24–99.13 & 95.6. Unless noted otherwise, translations of Nag Hammadi treatises are taken from Meyer (2007).

7. Hippolytus, Ref. VI.13 [Marcovich]: φανεὶς γὰρ αὑτῷ ἀπὸ ἑαυτοῦ ἐγένετο δεύτερος.

8. See also the Valentinian Exposition (NHC XI.22.31–9), where it is unclear whether the generation of the second principle is due to the second thinking the first or the first thinking the second.

9. This and the following observation on the Tripartite Tractate I owe to Kevin Corrigan in Corrigan & Turner (2012).

10. Macrobius, Somn. Scip. 2.6.23 [Willis]: “fons … qui ita principium est aquae, ut cum de se fluvios et lacus procreet, a nullo nasci ipse dicatur”. Cf. Corpus Hermeticum IV.10 [Festugière]: ἡ γὰρ μονάς, οὖσα πάντων ἀρχὴ καὶ ῥίζα, ἐν πᾶσίν ἐστιν ὡς ἂν ῥίζα καὶ ἀρχή.

11. Coptic: . This natural wisdom is specified in 75.27–30 as a “wisdom each of whose thoughts are preexistent”, suggesting that this natural wisdom was based on its possession of the divine ideas.

12. Corrigan (2001: 49): “Take, for example, the following passage from 5.8[31].5.4–8 where Plotinus traces all products of art or nature back to the wisdom of Intellect: ‘the craftsman goes back to the physical wisdom (σοφίαν φυσικήν) according to which he has come into existence, a wisdom which is no longer composed of theorems, but is one thing as a whole (ὅλην ἕν τι), not the wisdom made into one out of many components, but rather resolved into multiplicity from one.’ Plotinus implicitly emphasizes that this recognizably traditional view concerns physical wisdom (not manipulative or artificial thinking), evidently with the purpose of excluding any fallen, demiurgic Sophia who seeks to contract or reconstruct the world in a discursive manner.” It is striking that the only extant parallels for Plotinus’ usage of physikē sophia are Alexander of Aphrodisias’ in Metaph. 266.2–18 [Hayduck] on Aristotle, Metaph. 1005b1–2 (itself an indirect parallel) and the Tripartite Tractate.

13. Irenaeus, adversus Haereses 1.2.2.13–23 [Doutreleau & Rousseau]: “The last and youngest aeon of the Duodecad emitted from Man and Church, that is Sophia, rushed forward (προήλατο) and experienced a passion apart from her consort ‘Willed’ (ἔπαθε πάθος ἄνευ τῆς ἐπιπλοκῆς τοῦ [συ]ζυγοῦ τοῦ Θελητοῦ). This passion originated among those associated with nous and Truth, but erupted in this errant aeon (ἀπέσκηψε δὲ εἰς τοῦτον τὸν παρατραπέντα), on the pretext of love, but actually of presumption (πρόφασιν μὲν ἀγάπης, τόλμης δέ), since she lacked the communion with the perfect father (διὰ τὸ μὴ κεκοινωνῆσθαι τῷ Πατρί) enjoyed by nous. The passion is the search for the father, for she wished as they say to comprehend his magnitude. Since she was unable to do this because she had undertaken an impossible task (διὰ τὸ ἀδυνάτῳ ἐπιβαλεῖν πράγματι), she was in deep distress.”

14. Ap. Jn. BG 8502.2 (cf. also NHC II.1, III.1, IV.1) 26.1–30.4: “For it is he (the Invisible Spirit or Monad) who contemplates himself in his own light that surrounds him, which is he himself, the source of living water …. The fountain of the Spirit flowed from the living luminous water and provided all aeons and [27] worlds. In every direction he contemplated his own image (εἰκών), beholding it in the pure luminous water that surrounds him. And his Thought (ἔννοια) became active and appeared and stood at rest before him in the brilliance of the light. She [is the Providence (πρόνοια) of the All] the likeness of the light, the image of the invisible One, the perfect power Barbelo …. [29] Barbelo gazed intently into the pure Light, [30] and she turned herself to it and gave rise to a spark of blessed light, though it was not equal to her in magnitude. This is the only-begotten (μονογενής) one, who appeared from the Father, the divine Self-generated One (αὐτογενής), the first-born Child of the entirety of the Spirit of pure light.”

15. This dependence was first discovered by Michel Tardieu (2005).

16. From certain earlier Sethian treatises (Apocryphon of John, the Trimorphic Protennoia and the Gospel of the Egyptians), the Platonizing treatises have inherited a tendency to identify the supreme deity by the somewhat Stoicizing name “the Invisible Spirit”. While the Three Steles of Seth (VII.125.23–5) calls this supreme pre-existent One a “single living Spirit”, Zostrianos identifies this One as “the Triple Powered Invisible Spirit”. On the other hand, Allogenes tends to distinguish this One from both the Invisible Spirit and the Triple-Powered One, while Marsanes supplements them all with a supreme “unknown silent One”.

17. Cf. Phanes, Orphicorum Hymni 52.5–6 [Quandt]; Papyri Magicae IV.943–4 [Preisendanz & Henrichs]; cf. Orphic Argonautica, line 16 [Dottin]: Φάνητα … καλέουσι Bτοτοί· πρώτος γάρ έφάνθη.

18. Cf. Codex Bruce, Untitled 242.24–253.2 [Schmidt & MacDermot]: “Moreover the power that was given to the forefather is called first-visible because it is he who was first manifest (πρωτοφανής). And he was called unbegotten because no one had created him. And he was (called) the ineffable and the nameless one. And he was also called self-begotten (αὐτογενής) and self-willed because he had revealed himself by his own will.” On the demiurgic activity of Autogenes, see Allogenes XI.51.25–32: the Barbelo Aeon is “endowed with the divine Autogenes as an image that knows each one of these (individuals), acting separately and individually, continually rectifying defects arising from Nature”.

19. See Allogenes XI.46.6–35 [Meyer]. In Zostrianos 82.8–13 Kalyptos emerges as the second knowledge of the Invisible Spirit (the first being Barbelo), “the knowledge of his knowledge”; in 119.12–13 Kalyptos is associated with “his ἰδέα”.

20. Coptic .Cf. Enn. IV.1[42].1.5–6: “There the whole of Intellect is all together and not separated or divided, and all souls are together” (ἐκεῖ δὲ (i.e. ἐν τῷ νῷ) ὁμοῦ μὲν νοῦς πᾶς καὶ οὐ διακεκριμένονοὐδὲ μεμερισμένον, ὁμοῦ δὲ πάσαι ψυχαί); V.8[31].10.16–22: “the gods individually and together (οἱ θεοὶ καθ’ ἕνα καὶ πᾶς ὁμοῦ), and the souls who see everything there and originate from everything … are present there (in the intelligible realm) so long as they are naturally able, but oftentimes – when they are undivided – even the whole of them is present.” Cf. Corpus Hermeticum, frag. 21 [Nock & Festugière]: “The preexistent one is thus above those that exist and those that truly exist, for there is a preexistent one through which the so-called universal essentiality of those that truly exist is intelligized together, while those that exist are intelligized individually (προὸν [ὂν] γάρ ἐστι, δι’ οὗ ἡ οὐσιότης ἡ καθόλου λεγομένη κοινὴ νοεῖται τῶν ὄντως ὄντων καὶ τῶν ὄντων τῶν καθ’ ἑαυτὰ νοουμένων).”

21. Cf. the status of Plato’s “mathematicals” apud Aristotle, Metaph. 987b14–18; 1080a11–b14.

22. These functional distinctions within the divine intellect were justified by a reading of Timaeus’ (Ti. 39e) doctrine of a transcendent model contemplated by a demiurge who then orders the universe in accord with the model: “According, then, as Reason (the Demiurge) perceives Forms existing in the Absolute Living Creature (the Model), such and so many as exist therein did he deem that this world also should possess,” reflected in Numenius (Frags. 11, 13, 15, 16 [des Places]), Amelius (Proclus, in Ti. I.306.1–14; I.309.14–20; I.431.26–28), and the early Plotinus (Enn. III.9[13].1, but rejected in Enn. II.9[33].1).

23. Coptic . Originally Aristotle’s distinction (cf. Michael Psellus, de Anima et Mente 68.21–2 [O’Meara]: ἔτι ὁ νοῦς ὁ πρακτικὸς περὶ τὰ μερικά, ὁ θεωρητικὸς περὶ τὰ καθόλου); in Enn. III.9[13].1.26–37 this third hypostasis is called Soul and the products of its discursive thought are many individual souls. For Plotinus, the equivalent of Autogenes is Soul: its highest level dwells in Intellect (the equivalent of Protophanes) and contains all souls and intellects; it is one and unbounded (i.e. having all things together, every life and soul and intellect), holding all things together (πάντα ὁμοῦ), each distinct and yet not distinct in separation (ἕκαστον διακεκριμένον καὶ αὖ οὐ διακριθὲν χωρίς, Enn. IV.4[22].14.1–4). On individuals in Plotinus, see Blumenthal (1966, 1971b).

24. Cf. Bechtle (2000: n. 74): “Barbelo really is equivalent to mind. … Barbelo corresponds to Numenius’ second mind. Insofar as the second mind is participated in and used by the first, i.e. insofar as the second mind is prefigured in the first and thus is the first in a certain way, we have Kalyptos. Insofar as the Numenian second mind is identical with the third and acts through the third it can be compared to Autogenes. Stricto sensu the second mind as second mind is comparable to the Protophanes level of the Sethians.”

25. For these thinkers, the Monad becomes a Dyad by a process of self-doubling (διπλασιασμός, ἐπισύνθεσις ἑαυτῇ: Theon of Smyrna, Expositio 27.1–7; 100.9–12 [Hiller]; Nicomachus, Intro. Arith. 113.2–10 [Hoche]; Sextus Empiricus, Hyp. Pyrrh. 3.153 [Mutschmann]; M. 10.261 [Mutschmann & Mau]; Hippolytus, Ref. 4.43), or begetting [Iamblichus] Theol. Arith. 3.17–4.7 [de Falco & Klein]), or by division (διαχωρισμός: [Iamblichus], Theol. Arith. 5.4–5; 8.20–9.7; 13.9–11), or by ἔκτασις or progression from potentiality as in a seed (ἐπέκτασις in Nicomachus apud [Iamblichus] Theol. Arith. 3.1–8; 16.4–11; Pseudo-Clementine, Homilies 224:34 [Rehm & Irmscher]: κατὰ γὰρ ἔκτασιν καὶ συστολὴν ἡ μονὰς δυὰς εἶναι νομίζεται; cf. ibid.: 234:18 ἀπ’ αὐτοῦ εἰς ἄπειρον ἔκτασιν), or by receding from its nature (κατὰ στέρησιν αὐτοῦ χωρεῖν: Moderatus, apud Simplicius, in Ph. 230.34–231, 27 [Diels]; recedente a natura sua singularitate et in duitatis habitum migrante: Numenius, frag. 52 [des Places]), or by flowing (ῥύειν, ῥύσις: Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Math. 3.19; 3.28; 3.77; 7.99; 9.380; 9.381; 10.281). See also the testimonia on Eudorus, apud Simplicius, in Ph. 9.181.10–30 [Diels], Alexander Polyhistor apud Diogenes Laertius 8.24.7–25.10, on Archaenetus, Philolaus and Brotinus apud Syrianus, in Metaph. 165.33–166.6 [Kroll], and on Pseudo-Archytas apud Stobaeus, Anth. I.41.2.1–50 = 1.278–9 [Wachsmuth & Hense]. Hippolytus shows that the Simonian Megale Apophasis (Ref. 6.18.4–7) – like the Valentinians (Ref. 6.29.5–6) – used the concept of emanation (προβολή, προέρχεσθαι) of a Dyad pre-existing in the Monad. Also in the Sethian Platonizing treatises, one finds the notion of self-production by self-extension (Marsanes X.32.5–33.2; Allogenes XI.45.22–4), by division (Three Steles of Seth VII.121.25–123.14), as well as by ἔκτασις (in Enn. VI.6[34] Plotinus calls it ἀπόστασις which also very well picks up the idea of dynamic ontologies [Zostrianos VIII.81.1–20], self-contraction [Allogenes XI.45.22–4], and self-withdrawal [Marsanes X.9.1–21]). On Plotinus’ version of dynamic ontology, see Slaveva-Griffin (Chapter 13), below.

26. In ad Candidum 14.11–14, Victorinus hints at a similar progression: “For what is above ὄν is hidden (cf. Kalyptos) ὄν; indeed the manifestation (cf. Protophanes) of the hidden is generation (cf. Autogenes), since ὄν in potentiality generates ὄν in act.” In an earlier version (2000), Corrigan raised the possibility of an echo of the Sethian figures Kalyptos, Protophanes and Autogenes in Enn. V.5[32].7.31–5: “Thus indeed Intellect, veiled (καλύψας) itself from all the outer, withdrawing to the inmost, seeing nothing, beholds – not some other light in some other thing but the light within itself alone, pure, suddenly apparent (φανέν), so that it wonders whence it appeared (ἐφάνη), from within or without, and when it has gone forth, to say ‘It was within; yet no, it was without.’”

27. For example, VI.7[38].17.13–26: “Life, not the life of the One, but a trace of it, looking toward the One was boundless, but once having looked was bounded (without bounding its source). Life looks toward the One and, determined by it, takes on boundary, limit and form … it must then have been determined as (the life of) a Unity including multiplicity. Each element of multiplicity is determined multiplicity because of Life, but is also a Unity because of limit … so Intellect is bounded Life.”

28. Justified by Plato, Sph. 248e–249b: “Are we really to be so easily persuaded that change, life, soul and intelligence have no place in the perfectly real (παντελῶς ὄν), that is has neither life (ζωή) nor intelligence (νοῦς), but stands aloof devoid of intelligence (φρόνησις)?” and Ti. 39e: “the Nous beholds (καθορᾷ) the ideas resident in the veritable living being (ὅ ἐστι ζῷον); such and go many as exist therein he purposed (διενοήθη) that the universe should contain”. Intellect is not a lifeless being, but an act (Enn. V.3[49].5.33–44; cf. II.4[25].3.36; II.9[33].6.14–19; V.5[32].2.9–13; VI.9[9].9.17). This restriction perhaps owes to his aversion to Middle Platonic and even gnostic theologies that multiply the number of transcendental hypostases beyond three.

29. For example, Zostrianos 81.6–20: “She (Barbelo) [was] existing [individually] [as cause] of [the declination]. Lest she come forth anymore or get further away from perfection, she knew herself and him (the Invisible Spirit), and she stood at rest and spread forth on his [behalf] … to know herself and the one that pre-exists.”; Allogenes 45.22–30: “For after it (the Barbelo Aeon) [contracted, it expanded] and [spread out] and became complete, [and] it was empowered [with] all of them, by knowing [itself in the perfect Invisible Spirit]. And it [became an] aeon who knows [herself because] she knew that one”; XI.48.15–17: “it is with [the] hiddenness of Existence that he provides Being, [providing] for [it in] every way, since it is this that [shall] come into being when he intelligizes himself”; Allogenes 49.5–26: “He is endowed with [Blessedness] and Goodness, because when he is intelligized as the Delimiter (D) of the Boundlessness (B) of the Invisible Spirit (IS) [that subsists] in him (D), it (B) causes [him (D)] to revert to [it (IS)] in order that it (B) might know what it is that is within it (IS) and how it (IS) exists, and that he (D) might guarantee the endurance of everything by being a cause for those who truly exist. For through him (D) knowledge of it (IS) became available, since he (D) is the one who knows what it (IS; or he, D?) is. But they brought forth nothing [beyond] themselves, neither power nor rank nor glory nor aeon, for they are all eternal.” Cf. Apocryphon of John, cited above, note 14, where the living waters of the baptismal rite have become a transcendent emanation of luminous, living and self-reflective thinking.

30. Cf. the Three Steles of Seth 123.18–26: “Because of you (Barbelo) is Life: from you comes Life. Because of you is Intellect: from you comes Intellect. You are Intellect: you are a universe of truth. You are a triple power: you are a threefold; truly, you are thrice replicated, O aeon of aeons!” with 125.25–32: “You (the preexistent One) are a single, living spirit. How shall we say your name? It is not ours to say! For, it is you who are the Existence of them all. It is you who are the Life of them all. It is you who are the Intellect of them all.”

31. Allogenes 66.30–38: “From the One who constantly stands, there appeared an eternal Life, the Invisible and Triple Powered Spirit, the One that is in all existing things and surrounds them all while transcending them all.”

32. See above, note 22.

33. See the arguments of Z. Mazur (2005: 14): “It seems more likely that the anonymous Parmenides Commentary is vaguely using an already existing gnostic doctrine of contemplative self-reversion to explain the relationship between the Ones of the first two hypotheses of the Parmenides. After all, the author does seem to be familiar with the Chaldaean Oracles; why not Gnostics also? The clearest instances of such doctrine are contained in the pre-Plotinian gnostic Platonizing treatises Zostrianos and Allogenes. Even if one grants that the anonymous Parmenides Commentary implies a doctrine of primordial self-reversion, it still seems unlikely that Plotinus adopts this idea solely from his use of the Commentary or its equivalent. If it were read in Plotinus’ circle, it may also have influenced the schemes of primordial self-reversion and Being–Life–Mind triads in the Platonizing Sethian treatises, but this still would not account for widespread instances of the motif of primordial self-reversion, not only in Plotinus’ earlier treatises, but also in other and perhaps earlier gnostic systems, such as those attributed to Simon Magus and Basilides, which may have influenced Plotinus well before his contact with the Platonizing Sethians in his immediate circle. But this would also require the anonymous Parmenides Commentary or a contemporary equivalent to have informed a number of disparate early gnostic systems in addition to the Platonizing Sethian treatises, but without having left a trace of its doctrine in contemporaneous Neopythagorean or Platonic sources.”

34. Corrigan (2000; cf. 2001: 60) raised the possibility of an echo of the Sethian figures Kalyptos, Protophanes and Autogenes in Plotinus’ treatment of the veiling, “first appearing” and “self-appearing” of intellect in Enn. V.5[32].7.31–5: “Thus indeed Intellect, veiled (καλύψας) itself from all the outer, withdrawing to the inmost, seeing nothing, beholds – not some other light in some other thing but the light within itself alone, pure, suddenly apparent (φανέν), so that it wonders whence it appeared (ἐφάνη), from within or without, and when it has gone forth, to say ‘It was within; yet no, it was without.’”

35. Cf. Enn. II.9[33].10.19–32: “For they say that Soul declined to what was below it, and with it some sort of ‘Wisdom’, whether Soul started it or whether Wisdom was a cause of Soul being like this, or whether they mean both to be the same thing, and then they tell us that the other souls came down too, and as members of Wisdom put on bodies, human bodies for instance. But again they say that very being for the sake of which these souls came down did not come down itself, did not decline, so to put it, but only illumined (supplied form to) the darkness, and so an image from it came into existence in matter. Then they form an image of the image somewhere here below, through matter or materiality or whatever they like to call it – they use now one name and now another, and say many other names just to make their meaning obscure – and produce what they call the Maker, and make him revolt from his mother and drag the cosmos which proceeds from him down to the ultimate limit of images” with Zostrianos 9.17–10.20: “When Sophia looked [down], she saw the darkness, [illumining it] while maintaining [her own station], being [a] model for [worldly] things, [a principle] for the [insubstantial] substance [and the form]less form […] a [shapeless] shape. [It makes room] for [every cosmic thing …] the All [… the corrupt product. Since it is a rational principle that persuades] the darkness, [he sows from his] reason. Since it [is im]possible [for the archon] of [creation] to see any of the eternal entities, [10] he saw a reflection, and with reference to the reflection that he [saw] therein, he created the world. With a reflection of a reflection he worked upon the world, and then even the reflection of the appearance was taken from him. But Sophia was given a place of rest in exchange for her repentance. In consequence, because there was within her no pure, original image, either pre-existing in him or that had already come to be through him, he used his imagination and fashioned the remainder, for the image belonging to Sophia is always corrupt [and] deceptive. But the Archon – [since he simulates] and embodies by [pursuing the image] because of the superabundance [that inclined downward] – looked down” This dependence was first discovered by Tardieu (2005).

36. Plotinus lists them as μετάνοιαι, i.e. of Sophia; ἀντίτυποι, i.e. the Archon’s counterfeit aeons; and παροικήσεις; cf. J. D. Turner (2001: 109–11, 558–70) and Codex Bruce, Untitled 263.11–264.6 [Schmidt & MacDermot]. Cf. also the “alien earth”, Enn. II.9[33].11 with the “ethereal earth” of Zostrianos 5.10–29; 8.9–16; 12.4–21, etc. (perhaps the moon, as in Macrobius, Somn. Scip. 1.11.7). He also rejects the sort of magical incantations and sounds found in the Platonizing Sethian treatises generally (Enn. II.9[33].14.2–9; cf. Zostrianos 52; 85–88; 118; 127.1–6; Allogenes 53.32–55.11; Allogenes VII.126.1–17; Marsanes 25.17–32.5). Yet this criticism is offset by his own quasi-incantational etymologies in Enn. V.5[32].5: “this power (of the One) sees and in its emotion tries to represent what it sees and breaks into speech, sounds which strive to express the essential nature of the universe produced by the travail of the utterer and so to represent, as far as sounds may, the origin of reality” and even by the appeal to non-discursive Egyptian hieroglyphs in Enn. VI.8[39].6.

37. Cf. “those who are unified”, Allogenes XI.45.7–8, 46.21, 48.6–8, 55.14–15 and Zostrianos VIII.21.10–11: “undivided, with living thoughts” and 116.1–6: “All of them exist in unity, unified and individually, perfected in fellowship and filled with the aeon that truly exists.”

38. ~ prophaneia.

39. Cf. Enn. V.8[31].11.1–8: “Further, one of us, being unable to see himself, when he is possessed by that god brings his contemplation to the point of vision, and presents himself to his own mind and looks at a beautified image of himself; but then he dismisses that image, beautiful though it is, and comes to unity with himself, and, making no more separation, is one and all together with that god silently present, and is with him as much as he wants to be and can be.”

40. Allogenes 60.38–61.8: “As if I were incognizant of him, I [knew] him [i.e. the Unknowable One] … I knew the (Triple Powered One) that exists in me.” Cf. also the anonymous Parmenides commentary, frags. II and IV and Porphyry, Sent. 25: “By intellection (κατὰ νόησιν) much may be said about that which transcends intellect (τοῦ ἐπέκεινα νοῦ), but it is better contemplated by incognizance than intellection (θεωρεῖται δὲ ἀνοησία κρείττονι νοήσεως).”

41. Cf. also Enn. VI.9[9].6.50–52; VI.7[38].39; V.3[49].12.48–53.

42. As suggested by Puech (1960: 184): “Il est plus significatif encore que la crise marquée par la rédaction du traité II 9 ait conduit, semble-t-il, Plotin à modifier l’expression de certaines de ses thèses antérieures, de celles qui, précisément, pouvaient prêter à confusion et paraître le rendre solidaire des gnostiques” (“It is even more significant that the crisis marked by the redaction of treatise II.9 had apparently led Plotinus to modify the expression of certain of his previous theses, precisely those which could have given rise to confusion and appear to show his solidarity with the Gnostics”).

43. The order Being–Mind–Life (Enn. III.6[26].6.21–8; VI.6[34].6.15.1–3, 8.17–22; V.3[49].5.30–35) seems to derive from the influence of the Ti. 39e and Soph. 248e–249b cited above, note 28, and is used mainly in “noological” contexts where the structure of Intellect and its relation to Soul as locus of animation is of uppermost concern, while the order Being–Life–Mind (Enn. V.4[7].2.39–44; V.9[9].2.21–5; V.5[32].1.32–8, 2.9–13; VI.6[34].8.9–15, 18.29–36; VI.7[38].2.19–21, 16.6–22, 17.6–43), possibly based on the Parmenides, is used mainly in derivational contexts where the relation of Intellect or determinate being to its indeterminate, unitary source is of uppermost concern. But it is also possible that Plotinus moved in this direction in response to the Sethian Existence–Vitality–Mentality triad that Allogenes tended to present as an intermediate quasi-hypostatic figure, the Triple-Powered One, to which he may have objected as implying an unnecessary intermediate hypostasis between the One and Intellect (i.e. the Barbelo Aeon).

44. See the observations of Schwyzer (1970) concerning Plotinus’ interpretation of the Philebus.

45. Cf. also Enn. III.8[30].1–8; VI.2[43].21–22; VI.7[38].1–12.

46. Cf. also Zostrianos 55.13–26 and 113.1–114.19; Zostrianos 116.1–6.

47. Cf. also Grg. 523a–6c and R. 614b–621b.

48. Enn. III.6[26].13.50–55: Εἰ μὲν οὖν ἔστι τι ἐν τοῖς κατόπτροις. καὶ ἐν τῇ ὕλῃ οὖτω τὰ αἰσθητὰ ἔστωῥ εἰ δὲ μὴ ἔστι. φαίνεται δὲ εἶναι. κἀκεῖ φατέον φαίνεσθαι ἐπὶ τῆς ὕλης αἰτιωμένους τῆς φαντάσεως τὴν τῶν ὄντων ὑπόστασιν. ἧς τὰ μὲν ὄντα ὄντως ἀεὶ μεταλαμβάνει. τὰ δὲ μὴ ὄντα μὴ ὄντως. ἐπείπερ οὐ δεῖ οὖτως ἔχειν αὐτὰ ὡς εἶχεν ἄν. τοῦ ὄντως μὴ ὄντος εἰ ἦν αὐτά.

49. The significance of these various combinations of negative terms is clarified by Proclus, in Ti. I.233.1–4: “Accordingly certain of the ancients call the noetic realm ‘truly existent,’ the psychic ‘not truly existent,’ the perceptible ‘not truly non-existent,’ and the material ‘truly non-existent’” (διὸ καὶ τῶν παλαιῶν τινες ὄντως μὲν ὂν καλοῦσι τὸ νοητὸν πλάτος. οὐκ ὄντως δὲ ὂν τὸ ψυχικόν. οὐκ ὄντως δὲ οὐκ ὂν τὸ αἰσθητόν. ὄντως δὲ οὐκ ὂν τὴν ὕλην). According to Tournaire (1996: 63), the predicate ὄν means innately organized (intelligible or psychic), οὐκὄν means innately unorganized (sensible, material), while the qualifier ὄντως signifies what is stable or stabilized (intelligible or material), and οὐκ ὄντως signifies perceptible or intelligible reality subject to change; cf. P. Hadot (1968: vol. 1, 147–211) and Henry & Hadot (1960: vol. 2, 712). In Marius Victorinus, ad Candidum 11.1–12 [Henri & Hadot] one finds the sequence quae vere sunt, quae sunt, quae non vere non sunt, quae non sunt, quae non vere sunt, vere quae non sunt. These terms and distinctions seem to originate with Plato; for example, in the Sph. 240d9–240a1 and 254d1 there is the series ὄντως ὄν. οὐκ ὄντως οὐκ ὄν. ὄντως μὴ ὄν, and in the Prm. 162a6–b3 there is the series εἶναι ὄν. εἶναι μὴ ὄν. μὴ εἶναι μὴ ὄν. μὴ εἶναι ὄν. In de Caelo 282a4–b7 (reflected also in the Categories), Aristotle makes similar distinctions, using ἀεί instead of ὄντως. An attempt to invoke the same categories also occurs in a revelation cited in Codex Bruce, Untitled, 237, 20–23 [Schmidt & MacDermot]: “And when Phosilampes understood, he said: ‘On account of him are those things which really and truly exist and those which do not exist truly. This is he on whose account are those that truly exist which are hidden, and those that do not exist truly which are manifest.’” Here the categories alternate between modes of being (ὄντως ὄν, both absolute and “hidden” being, intelligibles and perhaps souls) and non-being (ὄντως οὐκ ὄν, both absolute and visible non-being, matter and perhaps sensible bodies), rather than exclusively between modes of non-being. Cf. also Melchizedek NHC IX.6.12–14; 16.18–19.

50. Largely in response to the metaphysical puzzlements that drive him to despair just prior to his ascent: “How can beings – since they are from the aeon of those who derive from an invisible and undivided self-generated Spirit as triform unengendered images – both have an origin superior to Existence and pre-exist all [these] and yet have come to be in the [world]? How do those in its presence with all these [originate from the] Good [that is above]? What sort [of power] and [cause, and] what is [the] place of that [one]? What is its principle? How does its product belong both to it and all these? How, [being a] simple [unity], does it differ [from] itself, given that it exists as Existence, Form, and Blessedness, and, being vitally alive, grants power? How has Existence which has no being appeared in a power that has being?” (Zostrianos VIII.2.25–3.13).

51. The same dialectical procedure is further described in the Sph. 253d–e: “[Stranger:] Shall we not say that the division (διαιρεῖσθαι) of things by classes and the avoidance of the belief that the same class is another, or another the same, belongs to the science of dialectic (διαλεκτικῆς … ἐπιστήμης)? [Theaetetus:] Yes, we shall. [Stranger:] Then, surely, he who can divide rightly is able to see clearly 1) one form pervading a discrete multitude, and 2) many different forms contained from without by one higher form; and again, 3) one form unified into a single whole and pervading many such wholes, and 4) many forms, existing only in separation and isolation. This is the knowledge and ability to distinguish (διακρίνειν κατὰ γένος ἐπίστασθαι) by classes how individual things can or cannot be associated with one another. [Theaetetus:] Certainly it is. [Stranger:] But you surely, I suppose, will not grant the art of dialectic to any but the man who pursues philosophy in purity and righteousness. [Theaetetus:] How could it be granted to anyone else? [Stranger:] Then it is in some region like this that we shall always, both now and hereafter, discover the philosopher, if we look for him.”

52. Already in his earliest treatise (Enn. I.6[1]) Plotinus held that, although the soul’s share in the governance of the world requires its descent into the body, the embodied soul nevertheless becomes like a stranger clothed in ugly and alien garments, and must seek her return to her homeland where her father lives (Enn. I.6[1].8.16–21); to find this homeland is for the soul to turn inward and find itself (Enn. I.6[1].5.53, 8.4, 9.21–2).

53. Phdr. 249c: “For a human being must understand an utterance according to its Form, collecting into a unity by means of reason the many perceptions of the senses; and this is a recollection of those things which our soul once beheld, when it journeyed with God and, lifting its vision above the things which we now say exist, rose up into real being.”

54. Phdr. 248c–d: “And this is a law of Destiny, that the soul which follows after God and obtains a view of any of the truths is free from harm until the next period, and if it can always attain this, is always unharmed; but when, through inability to follow, it fails to see, and through some mischance is filled with forgetfulness and evil and grows heavy, and when it has grown heavy, loses its wings and falls to the earth, then it is the law that this soul shall never pass into any beast at its first birth, but the soul that has seen the most shall enter into the birth of a man.”