Eckhart as Philosopher: Background

In Meister Eckhart (German edition 2011; English translation 2015), Kurt Flasch takes issue with common portrayals of Eckhart as a “mystic”. Eckhart, who lived ca. 1260-1328, was the third German, after Albert the Great and Dietrich of Freiberg, to earn the highest academic title of magister at the University of Paris, but his Latin philosophical works have been little studied until recently. Flasch discusses him as a serious philosopher in the tradition of Albert and Dietrich, and describes the social background. Eckhart is known to have had close contact with Dietrich, and may have also directly interacted with Albert. In any case, Eckhart clearly takes up Albert’s notion of natural beatitude.

“Albertus Magnus had harshly criticized the failings of Latin scholars: he did not merely want to incorporate Aristotle, Avicenna, and Averroes into the seemingly harmonious collective wisdom of Christianity, but instead strove to rebuild all the sciences, including theology, from the ground up. He emphasized the autonomous method of philosophy. He complained about obscurantism, something especially prevalent among the Dominicans; he showed that miracles had no place in matters of physics. His autonomous philosophical research became a model for Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia [who have been considered the main targets of the condemnation of 1277]. Thomas Aquinas instead opted for a middle course. His approach was criticized for its inconsistency…. His handling of Augustine and Aristotle was too imprecise, according to Henry of Ghent, Dietrich of Freiberg, and Duns Scotus” (p. 10).

“Since the twelfth century, Western Europe had been developing a new sense of the human individual and his rational and organizational abilities. It was no longer taken for granted that people were subjects to be ruled. Lords had to justify themselves. Authority could be challenged. Several classical authors (Aristotle in his Logic, Cicero, Seneca, and especially Boethius) all contributed to a heightened trust in reason within the more progressive regions of Europe. The experience of urban life, the organization of corporations, legislation not based on customary law or decisions by episcopal lords, supraregional trade and monetary transactions, encounters with foreign cultures, religions, and values — all these created the need for a new way of explaining the world that took in everything, including secular rulers and religious topics…. New ideas and developments were no longer automatically stigmatized…. In science, philosophy, and organization, Christian self-awareness was constantly recreating itself in different and often opposing directions through continual debate. Without these historical and cultural multiplications and disturbances, Meister Eckhart would not have been possible ” (pp. 10-11).

“[The famous classical scholar] Werner Jaeger described the beginnings of philosophy up to Plato as this kind of work: correcting the royal-court model of religion; replacing the feuding heavenly clans with a single God; stressing wisdom over capriciousness, and ungrudging goodness and justice over incontestable power; the world as kosmos and physis, not a mere footstool for God” (p. 18).

Flasch here refers to two of my three candidates for “Enlightenments” before the modern one. (The other — inspired by the great upsurge in translation of ancient philosophical and scientific works to Arabic during what came to be known as the Islamic Golden Age, in which the philosophical work of Alfarabi (roughly 870-950 CE) also played a prominent role — came in between.)

The striking phrase “essence of the criteria” is I think original to Flasch, but he is definitely onto something here. Soul as the essence of criteria sounds like it might begin to take us into the territory of Kantian ethical judgment, and might be not at all wholly unrelated to the normative view of intentionality and consciousness that Brandom attributes to Kant.

He unpacks this a bit, saying “Everything looked different after this philosophical revolution, nature and polis. It changed the way people thought of themselves. They now knew: they were both reason and soul; and they demanded of God that he be reason and be related to them as soul. The meaning of ‘soul’ changed: soul was no longer a vapor of the blood, a breath of life, or the presence of one’s ancestors. Soul became the essence of the criteria. It was subjected to the rule that it had to become as similar to God as possible, a God conceptualized as mind and as wholly good. Greek philosophy dematerialized and ethically ennobled both God and the human soul” (p. 19).

“Plato’s Republic developed the idea of the Good: it was not an individual good, but the indeterminate Good that humans could and should employ to judge everything, even the gods. For the conduct of life, that is, for ethics and politics, that meant man was supposed to live in a way that would make him as similar to the Godhead as possible…. [T]here had to exist a faculty of differentiation and consolidation above sense perceptions. The soul is active, harmonizing and evaluating what has been perceived, especially whether it is good or bad. It is indispensable for finding commonalities among wholly different perceptions. Whether these perceptions are similar or dissimilar, one or many, good or bad, is decided not by individual perceptions themselves, but only by the thinking soul itself. It engages in dialogue with itself; which means: it thinks” (ibid; see also Aristotle on Perception; Aristotle on the Soul.)

Once again, we see that this ancient and medieval notion of intellect (nous) is anything but entirely passive. The differently inflected Augustinian mens (mind) also seems to have a largely active character. Numerous later medieval writers emphasized this aspect of Augustine rather strongly.

Flasch continues, “This Platonic deliberation… refutes the false impression we have of certain epochs, that is, the legend of antiquity — and even more so of the Middle Ages — as ‘objective ages’ that had no knowledge of the productive nature of the mind-soul, of ‘consciousness’ or the ‘subjectivity’ of knowledge” (p. 20).

In slightly different wording, this is a point I have recently been attempting to make. The translator uses the English “mind”, which I generally try to avoid as prejudicial, due to its many modern connotations that are quite different from those of nous in Plato and Aristotle. I usually go with “intellect” for nous, even though it may sound stilted, because it brings in fewer connotations that are alien to Aristotelian or Platonic discourse. “Mind” makes me think of Descartes and Locke and modern empirical psychology and self-help, which I lump together as a sort of modern “mentalism” that is not to be recommended.

“Mind, nous, intellectus, was seen as essential and as the true human. We can read it thus in Aristotle; Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas adopted his position. Living according to the mind is the right kind of living; it is the life that pleases God. Mind is the possession of those criteria that determine what a true God must be and how a rational human has to conceptualize himself. Mind is an active ground of unity; it is synthesis” (ibid; see also Figurative Synthesis).

Here he comes back to the intriguing phrase about “criteria”. He goes on to more closely characterize Aristotelian nous:

“Mind has nothing in common with anything else. It is not a natural thing; none of the determinations with which we define the world apply to it. It is essentially energy and activity. It is the active nothingness of the world; it is the energy not to be like the world…. Mind is the possession of the universal. Everything is its object…. It is the possession of its contents. It is its contents. It becomes what it thinks” (p. 21).

Aristotelian energeia (act or activity or actuality) is not usually translated “energy”, though it does begin to acquire energy-like connotations in later writers (e.g., Proclus and some late medieval theologians).

“It is divine; it is the divine. Since Plato and Aristotle, European philosophy has based its general view of humanity, of nature, of politics, and of religion on nous as its model. Instead of being represented as a royal court, religion became the relation between God and the mind-soul” (ibid).

Flasch echoes Aristotle’s statement that of all things, intellect most deserves to be called divine. Because I want to highlight the more specific character of this broadly Aristotelian “intellect”, I would not claim it has been adopted by European philosophy as a whole, but I do believe it is taken up by those strands that remain relatively closer to Plato and Aristotle. This is especially true of the “Albertists” that Flasch spent much of his career studying. The dominant modern traditions stemming from Descartes and Locke develop their own rather different notions of reason and consciousness, their place in the world, and our relation to them.

“For Augustine, the rational soul represented the essence of all criteria…. God is the true God only if he adheres to the rules of reason. It was Augustine who created this standard, and it was he who later destroyed it” (p. 22).

Again there is a much longer story here. Flasch nicely captures the ambiguity (or perhaps change, motivated by his late polemic against the Pelagians) in Augustine’s attitude toward philosophical reason.

“For Albertus Magnus, the object of the intellect is the universal, a universal that exists in reality, which is the foundation of individual things…. This universal informs the particular things; it makes them into what they are. The mind…is the possession of the principles from which all knowledge develops. That is why the intellect finds itself in all objects. It is the reason why Plato’s definition of philosophy is quintessentially true: philosophy is the knowledge of one’s self…. If, through understanding, the intellect is linked to the first Truth and Good, then it is itself divine, divinus, and as Homer says, it no longer seems like the son of a man, but the son of God. That is why Hermes Trismegistus says of the intellect that it is the link between God and the world” (pp. 22-23).

Albert is known as a strong defender of realism about universals, as opposed to nominalism. This actually quite facinating and extraordinarily rich dispute is something I have barely touched upon to date. But here Flasch brings out a less familiar, more neoplatonic-sounding angle about the ennobling presence of the universal in the human soul, which will be central for Eckhart.

“The intellect is man, and it connects God and the world… Albertus Magnus cites pagan authorities for his concept of divine filiation…. There is nothing super-natural in this for him; he calls it the most natural, the naturalissimum” (p. 23).

This identification of intellect with the human that he attributes to Albert is interesting, and stands in sharp contrast to some other theologians at this time, who seem to have identified intellect with divine illumination, or with something angelic. I have not been sure where Albert stood on this. Of course Aquinas embarked on a major campaign to locate intellect entirely within the human soul, even siding with the so-called materialist Alexander of Aphrodisias against Averroes, and even though he continued to speak of illumination in a more expressly theological context. (See also Pseudo-Dionysius on the Soul.)

I can only applaud Albert’s apparent remark about the “most natural”. Medieval theologians were not all immoderate supernaturalists; the example of Peter Abelard also comes to mind. Virtue is not opposed to nature; it just doesn’t automatically come along with nature. It involves the cultivation and flowering of “second nature”.

For Albert, according to Flasch, human reason “is not supposed to obey, but to conceptualize itself, the world, and God…. [F]or Albertus Magnus, the intellect as developed in the Aristotelian-Arabic tradition was a part of man’s relation to God…. [I]n fact, it was man’s relation to God” (p. 24).

This is truly fascinating. Flasch is saying human reason as understood by the philosophers itself plays a fundamental theological role for the great theologian Albert, as I think it also does in Alfarabi’s neoplatonizing account of intellect. For these writers, our participation in intellect “is” the human’s relation to God.

Flasch goes on to relate all of this to Eckhart.

“Eckhart explains how he wants men to conceive of God: God is that which fulfills reason’s highest criteria. He must be just…. It is only through justice that God becomes recognizable and worthy of recognition…. God does not belong to whatever exists, not even as the pinnacle. Reason must break through to the true content of the term ‘God’. Which is justice” (p 35).

Eckhart apparently agrees with what Leibniz later said, that God should be identified with justice rather than with infinite power. Flasch emphasizes the “negative” aspect of Aristotelian intellect, which to me suggests a possible Aristotelian source for this important theme in Hegel.

“[T]he soul forms itself according to its objects. It becomes what it is after. It does not simply exist. It is not a fixed component of the world; it obtains its essence through attention and rejection…. What is essential is the ability of the soul to actively give itself a form, to shape itself” (pp. 35-36).

Here too I can’t help but recall Hegel’s talk about spirit giving birth to itself. Flasch notes that Hegel was among Eckhart’s admirers.

“Eckhart is stating the premises for a radical reform of living. Man must grasp that he is a creature of relations: he becomes that which he decides; he exists as intentional activity” (p. 43).

Again, Flasch introduces huge implications in a few words. The human is a “creature of relations”. Language and culture begin to take us to shareable meaning that is beyond the immediacy of apparent things with which we physically interact. As Kant might say, as beings with intelligence we actively “take” things in various ways, and our talk about how the world is is actually subordinate to that.

Later, we will see Eckhart speak of a divinisation of the human, which Flasch will explain as primarily rooted in Aristotle and neoplatonism, rather than in revealed theology.

Averroes to Eckhart?

I’m looking at the French edition of 2005 lectures given at the Sorbonne by German philosopher Kurt Flasch, who is responsible for the modern editions of the Latin translations of Averroes, Avicenna, and Maimonides, as well as publication of the Latin works of Albert the Great’s students Dietrich of Freiberg, Ulrich of Strasbourg, and Berthold of Moosburg.

Flasch has contributed greatly to scholarship on Meister Eckhart, who also stands in the tradition of Albert the Great, and may have studied with him at Cologne. Eckhart has been known in modern times as a “mystic”, mainly on the basis of his popular German writings. But a consideration of his Latin works suggests that he was also and primarily a scholastic philosopher, close to Albert the Great and Dietrich of Freiberg. Even when he comments on scripture, he explicitly does so per rationes naturales philosophorum, “in terms of natural philosophical reasons”. This post will mainly cover Flasch’s discussion of Averroes.

I think this all makes a fascinating counterpoint to Rorty and Brandom’s provocative but nearsighted Deweyan historical storytelling about the rational maturation of humanity, which tends to treat premodern philosophy as if it were monolithic and all the same, and as if only in modern times did any worthwhile philosophy emerge. My own view is that there have been at least three other “Enlightenments” that substantially recognized the autonomy of reason, before the modern Enlightenment — one initiated by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; another with the rise of philosophy in the Islamic Golden Age; and another with the spread of Aristotelian learning to previously backward Europe. Just as with the modern Enlightenment, these developments were sharply contested, and very uneven in their results. The historical picture is far more complex and nuanced than any simple “Whiggish” linear progress.

Flasch first gives an account of Averroes. Later, he will discuss how Averroes’ work is used by Albert, Dietrich, and Eckhart. He calls heretical “Averroism” an invention of theologians and of the 19th-century scholar Ernest Renan. Averroes and those who are sometimes called Averroist simply thought of themselves as Aristotelians.

Flasch highlights four broad characteristics of the thought of Averroes — a strong insistence that accidents depend on substance; sharp distinction of a “metaphysical” or first-philosophical point of view from ordinary logical and physical points of view; an exclusion of efficient causality from metaphysics (in favor of an emphasis on substantial form); and a notion of natural intellectual beatitude. Most of Averroes’ Long Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics has still only been published in Latin, and Flasch mentions something new to me, that Averroes excludes not only efficient causality but also final causality from metaphysics, giving pride of place to substantial form instead. From Flasch’s account, it sounds like Averroes is the major proximate source for Latin scholastic notions of substantial form, which do not come from Aristotle.

“The way in which Averroes constructs the relation between the individual human and the intellect is not very different from the way in which Christian theologians envisage the action of divine grace in the human: having a certain degree of accomplishment of representation (indeed of imaginatio [imagination], the individual human is united with the intellect that illuminates the images of representation by making their universal character appear. The perfection of the human consists in her union, her copulatio, with the intellect that contains all the intelligibilia. This union is realized in each act of intelligence, since knowledge of the universal liberates the individual human from spatio-temporal determination. This universalization of mental contents can also be interpreted as a certain divinization, given that it makes the human participate in the supratemporality of the universal” (D’Averroés á Maître Eckhart: les sources arabes de la “mystique” allemande, p. 37, my translation throughout, emphasis in original).

“In a human life consecrated to intellectual work, the singular human becomes more and more close to the intellect. The active intellect, which produces all the intellectual contents, becomes in this case more and more our form, and no longer an efficient cause. This transformation is our highest perfection, in this life and possibly in a future life. It is in this conjunctio [conjunction] that our beatitude resides” (ibid).

“According to Averroes, intellect is not a superhuman being, a sort of angel in the beyond, but a virtus animae [virtue of the soul]” (p. 40).

“Aristotle… proceeds to introduce a series of extraterrestrial, quasi-divine predicates for intellect, even as he calls it a part or a power of the human soul. In fact, these are negative predicates: to be capable of knowing ‘all’ (omnia), all that one could see or imagine, it is necessary that intellect be none of that all, it must be amiges, that is to say unmixed with things…. Indeed it has no determinate essence, non est hoc aliquid [it is not a this-something], so that it is capable of becoming all things…. To describe the non-natural nature of intellect, Aristotle repeats the Platonic formula in saying: the intellective soul is the place of ideas (topos eidon)” (p. 41).

“Its activity is its substance, it is what it thinks…. This identity signifies not only that its activity and its object are identical, but that the action of intellect is its substantial nature” (p. 43).

“[K]nowledge is (also) receptive…. But as we have seen, intellect is immaterial and impassible. Intellect cannot be directly determined by a thing of the exterior world. If it has a phase of receptivity, it is necessary to understand this receptivity according to the measure of its intellectual nature; it is an active receiving of an intellect that accepts something from an intellect…. Before being realized, this function is nothing…. It cannot be actualized by any bodily thing…. Only intellect — as active intellect — can actualize it. This active principle is the other face or function of intellect, that is the intellect called agent that produces all the intelligible contents. Intellect as center of activity merits all the predicates Aristotle attributes to nous: it is the light that illustrates all, it is activity in its essence, identical with its content” (p. 44).

“[I]t has nothing in common with anything, it must be void of the physical character of its objects to be identical with them, in the same way that the eye must be without color to be capable of seeing all the colors. We find all these metaphors in the texts of Albert the Great, of Dietrich, and of Eckhart…. These phrases of Aristotle speak with such insistence of the proper character of intellect and of its substantial negativity that those who have not mastered Aristotelian terminology inevitably take them for ‘mystical'” (p. 45).

“These are the Aristotelico-Averroist formulas and the metaphors that we find again in Dietrich and Eckhart. All these expressions are formulas of the negative philosophy of mind [esprit]. This is the principal message of [Averroes’] commentary on the De Anima…. Categories derived from physical nature and usual conceptions no longer serve: to understand intellectual knowledge, the philosopher must make a radical change of perspective.”

“From this point of view, Averroes has established a concrete criterion for our evaluation of the philosophers of the 13th and 14th centuries: have they or have they not realized the radicality of this general conversion in the way of thinking? Have they understood, have they accepted this challenge? If I speak of a challenge, I am not thinking of the heresies of the unity of the possible intellect and the eternity of the world, but of the consequences of the negative philosophy of the intellect” (p. 48).

Here I think we also see the ultimate origin of Hegel’s specialized discourse about the negative. I don’t mean that Hegel read Averroes, but he reached a similar Aristotelian conclusion that goes beyond anything Aristotle explicitly said.

“Averroes insists in any case on the following fact: if intellect, as Aristotle suggests, is impassible, (apathes), if it is separable and simplex, then it is not permitted to speak of it in the terms that are characteristic of the world of generation and corruption. It becomes necessary to reform the theory of mind, in proceeding to its ‘de-physicalization’. Intellect is not hoc aliquid, it is not a ‘this something’. It is not an individual. By its intellectual movements, it separates itself from every kind of material individuality” (ibid).

“Averroes always speaks of the intellect that is found in us. He writes: intellectus existens in nobis habet duas actiones [“the intellect existing in us has two actions”]. He underlines that thinking or not depends on our decision. Averroes describes this active phase as a process of detachment, of undressing or denuding (denudare). When we think, our concrete experience consists very exactly in the combination of the actions of these two faculties: invenemus no agere per has duas virtutes intellectus. It is we who act, by the two intellectual virtues” (p. 49).

“In the Latin translation, Averroes designates the activity of the agent intellect as a creation. It is intellect that makes or produces the universal. If it is necessary to make it, it did not already exist before. The intellectual activity of denudare is a facere [a making or doing], it is a veritable creative act: Intellectus qui creat et generat intelligibilia [intellect that creates and generates intelligibles]. In showing in relief the creative character of intellect, Averroes goes further than Aristotle. The fact that one designated the activity of intellect in the Latin of the ‘Christian’ middle ages as a creare is quite remarkable…. Averroes explains the ‘creative’ force of our intellectual virtue thusly: in intellectual knowledge, we formulate judgments regarding innumerable particulars by means of a sole and unique common judgment; and in this way, by this knowledge of what is common, we can attain a certain form of infinity” (ibid).

Here I think of Kant’s insistence on the active role of the understanding, and of Husserl’s talk about putting existence in brackets. We see that Averroes insists on the generally active character of Aristotelian intellect, to the point where it becomes challenging to explain its receptive aspect. This is quite opposite to the unfortunate prejudice that Aristotelian intellect is passive in an unqualified way — simply receiving the given — expressed by Robert Pippin in his otherwise excellent work on Hegel. Flasch says Averroes concluded that neither Aristotle’s Categories nor concepts from the Physics are adequate to address the questions raised in the Metaphysics. This makes perfect sense, because much of the Metaphysics is devoted to developing new concepts. We saw this in detail with substance in relation to the Categories, and with potentiality and actuality in relation to the Physics.

I have been extremely curious what lies within the Latin text of Averroes’ Long Commentary on the Metaphysics, most of which has yet to be translated to any modern language. As I would have hoped, Flasch’s summary remarks suggest that Averroes sees efficient causality as basically irrelevant to first philosophy. But unexpectedly, he also says that Averroes rejects the metaphysical use — let alone centrality — of final causes. Where I would have expected or hoped for a development highlighting the unity of Aristole’s use of teleological explanation in both biology and first philosophy, Flasch reports that Averroes instead presents a notion of “substantial form” that is probably the source of that term’s leading role in Albert and Aquinas.

From Flasch’s remarks, it sounds like Averroes favored this option because he believed that first-philosophical reality must in general be purely and strictly eternal and necessary, even though he also says there is a special case in that the “material” intellect depends on humans living in time for its existence and its contents. A teleology-first point of view like Aubry sees in Aristotle is not compatible with this kind of pure and strict eternity. In reviving a form of Aristotelian teleology as a meta-interpretive framework in his Logic, Hegel finds it necessary to conclude that the eternity of first-philosophical reality is not pure and strict — that what we call eternity actually has a dependency on becoming, rather than being its immaculate origin. I am also reminded of Avicenna’s claim that the human soul has no pre-existence, and yet persists in eternity.

Albert the Great set the standard for Latin scholasticism, treating Averroes as generally the best commentator on Aristotle, but also eclectically making substantial use of Avicenna and Maimonides. I read elsewhere that up to the 16th century, Albert the Great’s commentaries on Aristotle were better regarded and more used in European universities than those of Aquinas. Albert has a very favorable view of Averroes overall. When he criticizes him, he does so in moderate and respectful terms. (Aquinas’ early remarks about Averroes are closer in tone to those of Albert. But in the 1260s and 1270s, there was a growing clamor among conservative Augustinians against Greek and Arabic philosophy in general. I think Aquinas, as a moderate and a diplomat within the Church, made a tactical or strategic decision to try to focus all that ire on Averroes and sacrifice him, so to speak, so that Aristotle could be made acceptable to the Church. And he was successful. As a result, Aristotle’s works were not all burned by the forces of darkness, or permanently banned from being taught, as they actually were during part of the 13th century.

Flasch insists on the radicality of Averroes’ claim that intellect is nothing before it thinks, that it is simply not a this-something like other things at all.

“But other problems remain. We say that universal forms exist in individual things potentially, in potentia. What does this mean? In reality what does the agent intellect do with the forms? Is it content to take off their clothes? Do these forms exist in reality if they are present potentially, in potentia? But in that case, intellect does not make or produce them, and even less could it create them. What exactly does ‘being in potentiality’ signify in the exact sense of Aristotelian ontology?” (p. 50).

“To be in potentiality is indeed to be real, but not actual. For, according to Aristotle as well as Averroes, actual being is the measure of being in potentiality. But from another perspective, Averroes requires the permanence of species, and indeed the eternity of the world, in order to guarantee the potential of our intellectual knowledge for objectivity. But why require the permanence of species, even in potentiality, if our intellect can create them? No one better recognized the difficulty of this problem than Averroes. He never ceases to groan and complain about the extreme difficulty of this inquiry. At stake in the analysis of intellectual knowledge is the encounter of the eternal and the corruptible, and indeed of the universal with the individual: how can a single action, directed by my will, result in these two components? Aristotle’s explanations on this point are insufficient, and the philosophical analysis is very difficult, valde difficilis et ambigua, Averroes confesses” (ibid).

“The more one reads the commentaries of Averroes, the more distant is the Arab thinker from a scholastic rigidity of Aristotelian orthodoxy. He continually evokes his doubts, and indicates problems in suspense. In a great number of doctrines, he goes well beyond Aristotle. He knows very well that intellectual activity is a personal action of a singular human. The knowledge of the universal is the highest achievement of the human, it is her perfection. One cannot displace or transfer the supreme perfection of the human outside of her, and as a consequence one cannot transfer her beatitude to another world. According to Averroes, it is necessary to think of the ultimate stage as a conjunctio or copulatio with a supra-temporal intelligence. Averroes shows himself very preoccupied with the subject of intellectual individuality, but he does not hesitate to formulate aporias…. Aristotle left a great number of questions without solutions, says Averroes, and this is ‘why I thought about writing about this subject what I think myself. If what seems right to me is not perfect, it can at least be the beginning of a perfecting. And in this case, I bid my brothers who read my work to write their objections. Perhaps in this way the truth can become manifest, if I have not found it'” (pp. 50-51).

“Averroes conceived intellectual knowledge as capable of augmentation and intensification. The human who thinks adapts herself little by little to the intellectual and universal world. She becomes what she knows…. Intellect must become my proper essential form…. [T]he human in a certain measure becomes all things in knowing them. All the things are nothing else than her knowledge…. Intellect is reality; it produces reality, not arbitrarily, not insofar as it is individual, but insofar as it receives the impression of the universal, the spirit of humanity” (p. 52).

“This divinized life is the beatitude of the human. According to Aristotle, the nous, the intellect, is in reality the human. Intellect is substantial activity and felicity. Eudaimonia [true happiness] cannot be added, it cannot be thrown over our shoulders like a cloak. The mind or spirit is beatitude by its proper activity…. It is not reserved for the life of the beyond; it begins with our terrestrial life, as our ascension and nobility…. [T]he intellectual life is the true nobility, it is the life of the noble human, as Meister Eckhart says” (p. 53).

This is also broadly similar to the ethical stance of Plotinus, who says that the goal of a human being is to live by her proper act of intellect, and in this way to become as like to the divine as is possible for a mortal.

Plotinus Against the Gnostics

Since publication of James Robertson’s The Nag Hammadi Library (1977), there has been a big upsurge of interest in the loose bundle of religious tendencies under the Roman Empire known retrospectively as “gnosticism”. These tended to emphasize extreme forms of transcendence, and to reject the classical notion of the inherent goodness of life in the finite world.

Hans Jonas’ 1958 classic The Gnostic Religion was an early sympathetic account that impressed me in my youth. Jonas gave a somewhat philosophical reading of general gnostic principles, emphasizing the claim that a direct personal experience of metaphysical realities could transform one’s being. I now think that true wisdom does not come from any immediate experience, although immediate experience may encapsulate wisdom already acquired. In light of Kant, I think the idea of direct experience of transcendent metaphysical realities is a category mistake.

Surviving gnostic texts nonetheless contain many bits of inherent interest to the historian of religions, illustrating results of a rather wild cross-cultural fusion between nonstandard Jewish, Christian, Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, and even Buddhist elements. Related themes found their way into Ismaili Shi’ism, Suhrawardian Illuminationist Sufism, Catharism, and Jewish Kabbalah. Particularly in the Shi’ite versions, there was at times an element of concern for social justice. This kind of formation, however, seems to be prone to developing an authoritarian or cult-like character, e.g., “I am better than you because I have the secret wisdom.”

Prior to the 19th century, gnosticism was known in the West almost exclusively from extremely hostile heresiological sources, which were often not far from the mentality that groups we don’t like eat babies for breakfast. There was an underground interest in gnosticism among occultists and Jungians, but only in the later 20th century did studies of it acquire broader intellectual respectability.

The pendulum has now perhaps swung too far in the opposite direction of rather uncritical enthusiasm. In this context, the independent critique of gnosticism by Plotinus is worth recalling.

The largest single treatise of Plotinus, the great founder of neoplatonism, the so-called Großschrift, was divided into four pieces by his student and editor Porphyry, who gave its conclusion the title “Against the Gnostics”. The three preceding parts, which expressed related views of Plotinus in more positive terms, were “Nature, Contemplation, and the One”, “On the Intellectual Beauty”, and “That the Intelligibles Are Not Outside the Intellect, and on the Good”.

Plotinus criticized the gnostics for making arrogant claims to possess otherwise hidden metaphysical knowledge; for their negative attitudes toward life in this world; and for their feverish multiplication of metaphysical principles. In my youth I had some sympathy for the “esoteric” view, and for general feelings of alienation from the existing world order. However, I have come to believe that the truest spirituality has a universal rather than esoteric character. Also, I have really always believed that nature and worldly being are good in themselves, and that social ills are due to us and not to unjust cosmic forces. I have come to think that Plotinus’ notions of the One, Intellect, and Soul are too strong, but still consider him a major figure. (See also The One?; Power of the One?; Neoplatonic Critique of Identity?; Subjectivity in Plotinus).

Hegel offers many enriching views of the broader matters addressed by Plotinus here.