On Ritual

[sdi]

Oh! I can't believe I missed this, it seems so obvious in hindsight.

In Porphurios's Life of Plotinos (§10), he writes that Plotinos's head student, Amelios, φιλοθύτου γεγονότος "grew ritualistic" and took to frequenting the temples on holy days and once invited his teacher along to the feasts of the gods. Plotinos answered him,

ἐκείνους δεῖ πρὸς ἐμὲ ἔρχεσθαι, οὐκ ἐμὲ πρὸς ἐκείνους.

It is necessary for them to come to me, not I to them.

(Translation mine.)

Amelios, Porphurios, and the rest of the students were apparently so flabbergasted by this that they couldn't bring themselves to ask what he meant.

Now, a lot of people have theories about this. Dodds (The Parmenides of Plato and the Origin of the Neoplatonic "One") figures Plotinos wasn't religious and was just trying to get Amelios to stop pestering him. Armstrong (footnote to his translation) figures that Plotinos considered that only daimons of the lower order go round the temples (as places of blood sacrifice) and thus were beneath him (intent, as he was, on the highest). Three years ago (almost to the day!) I myself made the similar case that Plotinos was after something greater than the mundane gods.

Looking at it again, I think it's much simpler than that (and think Plotinos was much humbler than Porphurios is making him out to be). Plotinos saw no point in going because the experience of divinity is a gift. There is no way a mortal can hope to chase and seize the god; the only way is for the god to look kindly on the mortal. So what would be the point in attending the sacrifices or observing the rituals? The best one can do is to patiently purify and prepare themselves in the hope the god chooses to illumine their efforts.

Comments

[sdi]

I came back to this line of Plotinos's when reading Dodds's essay; he quotes Plotinos in Greek, and I was pleased to discover I could read it without consulting a dictionary; but the Greek doesn't match, in my opinion, what either MacKenna ("It is for those Beings to come to me, not for me to go to them.") or Armstrong ("They ought to come to me, not I to them.") translate it as.

By the way, Dodds concludes his essay with a sentence too delightful not to reference:

If anyone doubts that Plotinus was a man of genius, let him study the efforts of Plotinus' nearest predecessors and followers. Let him soak for a while in the theosophical maunderings of Philo and the Hermetists, in the venomous fanaticism of Tertullian, in the tea-table transcendentalism of Plutarch, in the cultured commonplaces of Maximus, in the amiable pieties of Porphyry, in the really unspeakable spiritualistic drivellings of the de Mysteriis—let him do that, and if ever he gets his head above water again, he will see Plotinus in his true historical perspective as the one man who still knew how to think clearly in an age which was beginning to forget what thinking meant.

[thinking_turtle]

Maybe Plotinus means that when going to a temple or church, the God that comes to you is in part a creature of that church. Not necessarily a bad thing.

Another explanation is Plotinus' professional interests. Perhaps he is just competing with temples for student's contributions.

[sdi]

Good! It's always beneficial to try and find as many different explanations as you can, I think.

Your former suggestion is equivalent to Armstrong's: in Plotinos's schema, any such being would necessarily be a lower daimon, as pure souls and gods do not possess locality (Enneads VI iv "On the Integral Omnipresence of the Authentic-Existent").

The latter one seems unlikely to me, however: Plotinos's school operated by endowment (Life §§2, 9), and was apparently well-funded enough that Plotinos could run an orphanage in his spare time (Life §§9, 11). Like most of the Socratic philosophical tradition, he didn't seem to think very much of money.