Plotinus Redīvīvus - Honoring Kevin Corrigan

Plotinus actively engages with the notion of sacred space and mystical initiation (Enn. 1.6.7–9). He presents the individual soul as a self-sculpted statue in the temple of the One. He returns to the temple/statue imagery to explicate its ontological syntax: the One as the god inside the temple; Intellect as the first statue in the temple’s precinct; the intelligible as living temple, Soul as constructing images of gods in the sensible world; finally, the individual soul as a sculptor and a statue. The series of references presents the intelligible itself as a self-animated divine complex. For Plotinus, animation is the top-down process of emanation which results in self-animation. Because animation is embedded in the ontological fabric of the universe itself, theurgy and ritual animation of statues are, for Plotinus, ontologically superfluous.

In this paper I outline a number of ways Jewish philosophy, Neoplatonism, and Islamic scriptural exegesis (tafsīr) interact with each other in the writings of Abū l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī. Taking into account the wealth of mystical texts accessible to philosophers of his time period (12th cen. CE), I show how these texts attempt are used by him to model the intelligibility of the natural world. While some of the most famous cases include the Sefer Yeṣira and its commentary by Saʿadya Gaon, or the lettrism of al-Ḥallāj and other earlier Ṣūfī’s, there are lesser well known and still as deeply influential modelling techniques. Such techniques include the atomism of Ashʿarite kalām; the substance-theory of Plato and Aristotle, the eclecticism of Galen’s humoral theory, as well as the numerological theories of Evagrius and Ps.-Hippocrates’ Hebdomads. I argue that Abū l-Barakāt is a case of combinging these models to develop a theologically pregnant understanding of nature as the "Scroll of Existence".

n this paper, I wish to try to reconstruct the mystical scenes of intimacy in Plato’s erotic dialogues, taking cues from other mystical literature, including the Divan of the 13th century Persian poet, Rūmi, and the Enneads of Plotinus. I especially draw on Plotinus’ mystical interpretations of the Symposium’s erotic imagery, especially as we find them in Enneads I.6, III.5, VI.7, and VI.9. 

In his Mathnawī-i ma‘nāwī, Rūmī offers a view of the apparently inanimate—such as minerals, stones, and mountains—as rather being alive, in love, and in prayer. Far from being a sentimental projection onto the natural world, Rūmī offers a robust epistemology in which spiritual realization deepens intellectual perception. Those who know God are also those who truly know the world, thereby witnessing, for example, a tree’s prayers, a stone’s invocation, and the love of all cosmic beings for their Beloved. In other words, those who are spiritually realized are more capable to perceive nature in her true state, dispelling the illusion of inanimateness and unveiling an animate spiritual life of the “inanimate.” The condition for encountering nature as “thou” rather than “it” is the encounter with the Divine “Thou,” which necessitates a transformation of self for seeing the world as it really is. 

This paper addresses Thomas Traherne’s notorious theme of ‘want’ as it appears in the Centuries of Meditation - the desire and want of God for human beings and the symmetrical desire and want of human beings for God. For all its rhetorical and poetical flourish, Traherne’s meditations on want are shown to be rooted in the Platonic tradition of eros and have their precursor in Pseudo-Dionysius’ model of mutual yearning between God and humanity. This theme is examined through Traherne’s inheritance of the Neoplatonic structure of procession and return and the Thomistic metaphysics of efficient and final causality. Traherne ultimately urges towards configuring the divine-human relationship in terms of  reciprocity and reciprocal desire.