AGAINST THE GNOSTIC SAVIOR
The makeup of the Soul and its relationship to creative activity and time is inextricable from matters of physics and practical philosophy.46 Most immediate is the issue of theodicy.47 Plotinus accuses his opponents of wishing the world to be not just an image of the intelligible but the intelligible itself;48 this is impossible, since the One must extend itself as far as possible, even, via the Soul, into an image of itself in the spatiotemporal realm.49 Thus, we live in the best possible world, an “image (εἰκών)” of reality without an evil origin, despite the “many unpleasant things in it.”50 Such Panglossian indifference to inequality and human suffering, emphasized by his opponents, has surprised scholars by its “pitilessness.”51 But, for Plotinus, one must not “despise (καταφρονεῖν) the universe” but look to the whole order of beings, and, in this greater order, there is the greater good.52 Later in the treatise, the same argument will be deployed to defend the traditional civic cult: despising the universe is tantamount to despising the gods in it, and that is just what makes someone bad (κακός).53
References to this “order in succession” (τάξις τῶν εφεξῆς),54 contrasted with the break in the cosmos described in the classic Gnostic myth of the fall of Sophia, litter the Enneads.55 As Plotinus notes in his discussion of matter, “of necessity, then, all things must exist forever in ordered dependence on one another,” and this includes the “unpleasantries.”56 More contested and central to the administration of the cosmos than the banal injustices of daily life are the stars, whose goodness Plotinus expends considerable energy defending.
While his opponents esteem themselves superior to the planetary deities, he proclaims that the celestial bodies are good gods, have virtue, and are irrefutable evidence of a beautiful divine order that is not to be feared but imitated.57 “They are essential to the completeness of the All and are important parts of the All,” Plotinus argues.58 What he means is that the stars order the cosmos; more specifically, while they do not determine our fates,59 they transmit providential care to the subintelligible: “Every soul is a child of That Father. And there are souls in (the heavenly bodies) too, and intelligent and good ones, much more closely in touch with the beings of the higher world than our souls are. How could this universe exist if it was cut off from that other world? How could the gods be in it? But we spoke of this before, too: our point is now that because they despise (καταφρονοῦντες) the kindred of those higher realities, also, they do not know the higher beings either but only talk as if they did.”60 Several arguments are embedded in this transitional passage. First, the heavenly beings ontologically link the subintelligible to the supramundane.61 Consequently, knowledge of the heavens is transmitted through them. Thus, by rejecting the stellar deities, the Gnostics have no knowledge of what lies beyond them.
Plotinus’s opposition to Gnostic violation of the cosmic hierarchy, both with respect to theodicy and the administration of providence, is directly incumbent on the issue of soteriology, to which he immediately turns: “Then, another point, what piety is there in denying that providence extends to this world and to anything and everything? And how are they consistent with themselves in this denial? For they say that God does care providentially for them, and them alone.”62 For Plotinus, this view is philosophically unpalatable because it violates the modulated hierarchy of beings: the Gnostics do not know their place. They exalt themselves, set themselves separately above Intellect, claim to be “sons of God”63—but on the contrary, providence extends not to separate parts (individual, special humans) but unified wholes (all of humanity).64 Second, this leads them to reject “the beings received from tradition (έκ πατέρων).”65 For Plotinus, Hellenic tradition emphasizes the unity of the cosmos with all of humanity;66 he wishes to defend the traditional, civic Greek cult, which is precluded by these exclusive claims to salvation.67 Third, such claims presume an incoherent psychology, making an unsupportable distinction between “true,” elect souls and false, “reflections” (εἴδωλα)” of souls, the non-elect.68 In contrast, Plotinian salvation is universally accessible to all those who imbibe Hellenic learning (παιδεία).69 As noted by Arthur Hilary Armstrong, Plotinus’s criticism may have particular Gnostics in mind, but it extends to “all those who make the characteristic claim of Abrahamic religion to be the elect, the people of God, with a particular and exclusive revelation from him which causes them to reject the traditional pieties.”70
Finally, Plotinus moves from physics to ethics. At first glance, it is tempting to differentiate the Gnostics of 2.9 [33] from (proto)-orthodox Christians on the basis of Plotinus’s accusations of moral libertinism and general lack of interest in ethical philosophy.71 However, his account of Gnostic libertinism is no more valid than the lurid descriptions, probably false, of a Clement or Epiphanius.72 Rather, his opponents’ rejection of the civic cult is tantamount in his mind to atheism. Together with the doctrine of elect soteriology (mutually exclusive with his view on providence), it thus merits a tarring with the brush of Epicureanism.73 Moreover, he says that they do not compose treatises on virtue. This indifference to ethical matters puts them out of order with the hierarchy yet again, this time not with the hierarchy of the cosmos but with a philosophical approach to it: virtue precedes and even reveals God, not the other way around.74
Much as the debate over the composition of the World-Soul and its demiurgic activity presumed a rejection of Gnostic temporality and narrative imagery, these arguments over theodicy, soteriology, and ethics presume that the Gnostics failed to ascertain the proper location of divinity, its transmission, and how people show evidence of interaction with it. Multiplying needless intermediary entities, the Gnostics reject the entities that are actually necessary for the dissemination of providence (the stars), asserting that they have a special access to God via theophanies that exist outside the proper order of the universe. The ramifications of this axiom of divine theophany extend to a criminal soteriology, empty ethics, and, ultimately, pedagogy antithetical to the philosophical enterprise and its Hellenic heritage.
AGAINST THE GNOSTIC TRADITION
The beginning and end of Ennead 2.9. [33] 6 is worthy of special attention, because Plotinus embeds his discussion of the Gnostic World-Soul in various criticisms of the relationship between the Gnostics and Hellenic philosophical tradition. Scholars generally agree he is concerned with maintaining the integrity of Hellenic pedagogy against oriental “alien balderdash.”75 However unfairly, Plotinus here attempts to characterize the Gnostics as thinkers who initiate, not teach, and for him, this is not philosophy, but dangerous authoritarianism.
At the beginning of the chapter, he deplores the introduction of the subintelligible aeons of the Sojourn, Repentance, and Aeonic Copies (discussed in extant passages of Zostrianos and the Untitled Treatise).76 These are “the terms of people inventing a new jargon to recommend their own school (εἰς σύστασιν τῆς ἰδίας αἱρέσεως). They contrive this meretricious language as if they had no connection with the ancient Hellenic school (τῆς ἀρχαίας Ἑλληνικῆς), though the Hellenes knew all this and knew it clearly, and spoke without delusive pomposity (ἀτύφως) of ascents (ἀναβἀσεις) from the cave and advancing gradually closer and closer to a truer vision (τὴν θέαν ἀληθέστεραν).”77 He continues: some of their ideas “have been taken from Plato but