The Flight of the Alone to the Alone
The Teaching
Often I have woken to myself out of the body and entered into my own interior, having abandoned all other things. I have seen a beauty wonderfully great, and I have felt assured that then chiefly I was a partaker of the better life. I have actualized the best life and come to identity with the divine.
Firmly established in the divine, I have attained that perfect self-activity, placing myself above all intelligible being. Yet after that rest in the divine, when I have come down from intellect to reasoning, I am puzzled how I ever came down.
This is the life of the gods and of the divine and blessed among men — the flight of the alone to the Alone.
Commentary
The flight of the alone to the Alone, perhaps the most beautiful phrase in all of Neoplatonism. The individual soul (the alone) returning to the universal ground (the Alone), alone not as isolated but as undivided, singular, non-composite.
This is Dogen’s ‘body and mind drop away.’ This is the Buddhist Nirvana, not extinction but the extinction of the separate-self illusion. This is what Merton experienced in Louisville and what Eckhart spent his life pointing at.
The puzzlement upon returning, ‘how did I come down from that?’, is the universal mystical grief of the contemplative who has glimpsed the ground. Rumi’s Reed Flute is the same lament: the reed cut from the reed bed, longing for return.
Themes
Connections 11
Unsure
Plotinus joined a Roman campaign in 242–243 hoping to learn Persian and Indian philosophy. Whether Indian ideas reached him is argued.
Travelled
Neoplatonism reached Christianity by 355 CE. Marius Victorinus used Plotinus (c. 355–362), Augustine read ‘the books of the Platonists’ (c. 386; Confessions VII), and Dionysius (c. 500) built on Proclus.
Travelled
Neoplatonism reached Sufism by 840 CE. The ‘Theology of Aristotle’, a 9th-century Arabic paraphrase of Plotinus, circulated under Aristotle’s name, and Sufi metaphysics drew on the tradition.
Travelled
Neoplatonism reached Christianity by 355 CE. Marius Victorinus used Plotinus (c. 355–362), Augustine read ‘the books of the Platonists’ (c. 386; Confessions VII), and Dionysius (c. 500) built on Proclus.
Unsure
Plotinus hoped to learn Indian philosophy (Porphyry, Life 3). Indian influence on him is argued.
Travelled
Gnosticism reached Neoplatonism by 260 CE. Plotinus wrote against Gnostics who came to his seminar (Enneads II.9).
Arose apart
Both took shape before Judaism and Neoplatonism were in documented contact (from 900 CE).
Travelled
Neoplatonism reached Christianity by 355 CE. Marius Victorinus used Plotinus (c. 355–362), Augustine read ‘the books of the Platonists’ (c. 386; Confessions VII), and Dionysius (c. 500) built on Proclus.
Arose apart
Both took shape before Christianity and Neoplatonism were in documented contact (from 355 CE).
Travelled
Neoplatonism reached Sufism by 840 CE. The ‘Theology of Aristotle’, a 9th-century Arabic paraphrase of Plotinus, circulated under Aristotle’s name, and Sufi metaphysics drew on the tradition.
Travelled
Greek thought reached Neoplatonism by 250 CE. Plotinus read himself as Plato’s interpreter.