It would be best to sum up the spirit of Gnosticism thus: extending over more than two centuries, it gathers up all the ideas that lingered about the period in order to form an outrageous Christianity, woven from Oriental religions and Greek mythology. But that this heresy was Christian we cannot doubt by a certain raucous resonance that runs through it. It is evil that obsessed the Gnostics. They are all pessimists regarding the world. It is with great ardor that they address a God whom they nevertheless make inaccessible. But Christianity draws from this emotion, incalculable in the face of the divinity, the idea of His omnipotence and of man’s nothingness. Gnosticism sees in knowledge a means of salvation. In that it is Greek, because it wants that which illuminates to restore at the same time. What it develops is a Greek theory of grace. Historically, Gnosticism reveals to Christianity the path not to follow. It is because of its excesses that Tertullian and Tatian check Christianity in its march toward the Mediterranean. It is, to a certain extent, because of Gnosticism that Christian thought will take from the Greeks only their formulas and their structures of thought—not their sentimental postulates, which are neither reducible to Evangelical thought nor capable of being juxtaposed to it—but without the slightest coherence.
Perhaps it is already clear that Christianity, introduced into the Greco-Roman world at the end of the first century, did not make any decisive development until the milieu of the third century. We understand as well the importance we have accorded to the Gnostic doctrines regarding the evolution we want to recount. Gnosticism shows us one of the GrecoChristian combinations that were possible. It marks an important stage, an experience we could not pass over in silence.
The excesses themselves make us better aware of the risk of being lost in details and nuances. Nevertheless, Christianity fought this undergrowth mercilessly. But it is harder to rid oneself of one’s false children than of one’s enemies. Moreover, through a remarkable sense of History, the Fathers seemed to understand which work was going to be jeopardized by similar excesses, however moving they often were: namely, the march of Christianity toward the role for which it had been destined. But let us leave Christian thought waiting at this turning point in its history. Parallel to these developments in Christian thought, Alexandrian metaphysics was crystalizing in this period in Neoplatonism, and the material that dogmatic Christianity will use is in the process of being developed. Thus is developing, in different directions, that second revelation, which was Augustinian doctrine.
Chapter Three
Mystic Reason
I. Plontinus’s Solution
Regarding our subject, a study of Plotinus is interesting in a double sense. For the first time, the problem upon which the fate of Christianity rests is clearly set out. Moreover, the Plotinian synthesis supplies Christian thought, not with a doctrine (as certain authors argue), but with a method and a way of seeing things. The Plotinian system actually stands out against a background of religious and mystical aspirations common to the whole period. It often adopts even the language of the mysteries.1 The desire for God is what animates Plotinus.2 But he is also a Greek, and very determined to remain so to the extent that he is content to be nothing more than Plato’s commentator.3In vain, however. His World Soul is Stoic. His Intelligible world comes from Aristotle. And his synthesis retains a completely personal tone. But it
remains true that he has a liking for rational explanations of things. And it is in this that his personal tragedy also reflects the drama of Christian metaphysics. He is concerned about the destiny of the soul;4 but following his master, he also wants destiny to be included in the intellectual forms.5 The conceptual material has not changed with Plotinus; it is just that emotion is busy with new investigations. The whole fragrance of the Plotinian landscape is this: a certain tragedy in this attempt to cast emotion in the logical forms of Greek idealism. From this, and from the point of view of style, comes this slowness, this advance by degrees, this apparent mastery that gives birth instead to a freely accepted shackle. From this also is derived the profound originality of Plotinus’s solution and the grandeur of his enterprise. For, to see clearly, Plotinus himself proposed to create, without the assistance of Faith and with the resources of Greek philosophy alone, what ten centuries of Christianity have succeeded in creating with great difficulty.
This explains a sort of shimmering in the thought of our author. To tell the truth, each Plotinian doctrine reveals a double aspect whose coincidence determines precisely a solution to the problem we have indicated above. This solution is the joining of the destiny of the soul and the rational knowledge of things. Here the solution is like it is in psychoanalysis: the diagnosis coincides with the treatment. To reveal is to know and to cure oneself, it is to restore one’s homeland. “The demonstrations [of the Good] themselves were a kind of leading up on our way.”6
It is through that device that we will take up the study of Plotinus. We will attempt to retrieve that double aspect at each point in his doctrine. But we notice already how much his solution depends on his conception of Reason. To know is to worship in accordance with Reason. Science is a form of contemplation and inner meditation, not a construction. Of
course, Plotinus’s rationalism is based on the intelligibility of the world— but with what endless flexibility. The principles or hypostases that underlie this intelligibility are valid only in a perpetual motion that leads them from cosmological explanation to the particular state of grace that each of them represents. In one sense they mark the order of a procession, in another sense they reveal the path of conversion. To a certain extent, Plotinian Reason is already the “heart” of Pascal. But this does not mean that we can equate it with Christian thought, because this conception of Reason, being based on contemplation, is inscribed in an æsthetic: as well as a form of religious thought, Plotinus’s philosophy is an artist’s point of view. If things are explained, it is because the things are beautiful. But Plotinus carries over into the intelligible world this extreme emotion that seizes the artist confronted with the beauty of the world. He admires the universe to the detriment of nature. “All that is here below comes from there [the intelligible world], and exists in greater beauty there.”7 It is not the appearance that Plotinus seeks but rather the inside of things, which is his lost paradise. Each thing here below is made a living reminder of this solitary homeland of the wise. This is why Plotinus describes intelligence in a sensual way.8 His Reason is alive, fleshed out, stirring like a mixture of water and light: “as if there was one quality which held and kept intact all the qualities in itself, of sweetness along with fragrance, and was at once the quality of wine and the characters of all tastes, the sights of colours and all the awareness of touch, and all that hearings hear, all tunes and every rhythm.”9 It is therefore with his sensitivity that Plotinus seizes the intelligible.
But this, which might make one believe in a point of contact between Christianity and Neoplatonism, appears to us, on the contrary, as one of insurmountable oppositions. To stake all on contemplation is only