The Climax of Rome by Michael Grant

Author:Michael Grant [Grant, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Ancient Civilizations, Rome
ISBN: 9781780222769
Google: mXc1uk30FIYC
Amazon: B00RTY9IGM
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2011-12-29T16:00:00+00:00

So to this godlike man, who often raised himself in thought (according to the ways Plato teaches in the Symposium) to the First and Transcendent God, that God appeared who has neither shape nor any intelligible form, but is throned above intellect and all the intelligible. Four times while I was with him he attained that end, in an unspeakable actuality and not in potency only.55

And so there came to Plotinus this sudden instantaneous, unplanned, unexpected, unforeseeable, impersonal feeling of a presence.56 First he was drained empty of everything; and then, after a premonitory shock he was overrun by a blessed fullness – a joyous stupor. Yet his self was not possessed or replaced or obliterated, but seemed instead to have been awakened or reawakened to what it really was. For this is no dualist, Manichaean liberation from one world into another but a discovery or rediscovery, no Christian supernatural grace or redemption but a natural event. Indeed the power to become aware of the presence ‘belongs to all men-though few use it’,57 and the condition is only occasionally and momentarily achieved. It is not merely a deep absorption, a very high firm of contemplation, but an unmatchable ‘other kind of seeing, a being out of oneself, a simplifying, a self-surrender’.58 Plotinus appears to be the first to have used the term ecstasis, a being out of oneself, for this transformation. But the term could be misleading, for it might seem to deny the unitive effect of the experience, which Plotinus also called enosis, the momentary revelation of an eternal, potential Oneness.

He has risen beyond the abstract propositions of the philosophers to attain the heights about which they had hinted for so long. Out of eight hundred pages of his teachings, only twenty or thirty touch on this mystic theme. In these passages he tries again and again to find some form of words for what has happened to him. ‘There, in the solitude of self, one beholds simplicity and purity, the existent upon which all depends, towards which all look, by which reality is, life is, thought is. For the Good is the cause of life, of thought, of being.’

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