CHAPTER 4 Plotinus , Neo-Platonic and Christian Conception of Beauty

1 Plotinus : Beauty as Manifestation of the One

Aristotle thought of art as an imitation of nature and the work of art as a struc- tured whole. We can say that in the experience of art we can have a cognitive and emotional experience, and pleasure too, in a form and in a degree which we cannot have in our usual experience of the natural world. The work of art is a structured and ordered fictional world. The consequence is that beauty is the result of a well-ordered structure. On the contrary, in Plotinus ’s philosophy, beauty cannot be the result of a structure. Beauty cannot ensue from parts, but it becomes the symbol of unity and fullness of the perfect “One.” The philosophy of Plotinus (about 205–270 A.D.) harks back to the oldest tradition of beauty as brightness and lightness. Beauty is the brightness of Being, or better, of something which is beyond material reality and beyond Being itself: God or the One. Beauty is a quality of the One; it is the way by which the One presents itself in the material world. The One is the absolutely transcendent and unknowable God, which escapes all intellectual categories and descriptions. Below the One there is the realm of intelligence or the world of ideas or concepts (Platonic forms). Below the realm of intelligence there is the realm of immortal souls, and then the obscure material world (in which some souls are embodied), far away from the One and from its light. The One is the higher creative principle from which the lower level of real- ity receives its form. But creation is not the right word, because there is no intention in the One to create. The One emanates or overflows into the world of intelligence, like the light from the sun or like the smell of a flower, and the world of intelligence emanates or overflows into the realm of souls, and so on. Each lower realm of reality represents a fall and a decay from the higher, and the material body is the lowest level. The higher level of reality leaves an imprint in the lower one. Beauty is the impress or imprint of God and so it is nothing but the Being in what is not Being itself; beauty is beyond the principle of form; it is the brightness of the immaterial Being in the darkness of material reality; beauty comes from the

© koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004409231_004 26 chapter 4 upper level of reality and reveals the presence of the invisible God in the visi- ble world.

Shape is an impress from the unshaped; it is the unshaped that produces shape, not shape the unshaped; and Matter is needed for the producing; Matter, in the nature of things, is the furthest away, since of itself it has not even the lowest degree of shape. Thus lovableness does not belong to Matter but to that which draws upon Form: the Form upon Mat- ter comes by way of soul; soul is more nearly Form and therefore more lovable; Intellectual-Principle, nearer still, is even more to be loved: by these steps we are led to know that the primary nature of Beauty must be formless.1

Since all entities aspire to return to the condition of perfection and immaterial form of their transcendent origin, beauty becomes the guiding principle to the One. To understand and follow beauty means to understand the essence of the highest reality. Plotinus does not propose a philosophy of art but a metaphysics of beauty . Beauty is the manifestation of the unity of Being (the One). On one side, mate- rial reality is decaying and departing from the One. On the other, the experi- ence of beauty is a discovering of the origin of Being and a return to the full reality of the higher world. From such a perspective the beauty of a work of art is in direct relation to transcendent beauty, and the experience of art is an ascent to reality in its higher form. In our experience of a work of art, we go back to our transcendent origin and we recover our spiritual essence, because we recover the unity of the One before its dispersal into the material world.

2 Neo-Platonism : Beauty as Revelation of the Deep Reality of Things

Plotinus is the main representative of Neo-Platonism , a philosophical tradition which interpreted and developed certain esoteric aspects of Platonic thought. He was not a Christian but his Neo-Platonic philosophy, as well as Plato ’s phi- losophy, were adopted, adapted, and absorbed by Christian thought and have an enormous effect on Christian philosophy. Neo-Platonism has a great impor- tance in the Middle-Ages as well as in the Renaissance , and it comes back in Romantic philosophy and in contemporary thought. From the Neo-Platonic perspective, art produces beauty and so it becomes a way to get in touch with the Being itself, with God. The beauty of art cannot